Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina - Softcover

Rounding, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250022193 ISBN 13: 9781250022196

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2013

Synopsis

Alix & Nicky tells the dramatic story of Emperor Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna, the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia-A penetrating and deeply personal study that gives profound psychological insight into their marriage and how it shaped the events that engulfed them.

There are few characters in history about whom opinion has been more divided than the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and his wife the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. On one hand, they are venerated as saints, innocent victims of Bolshevik assassins, and on the other they are impugned as the unwitting harbingers of revolution and imperial collapse, blamed for all the ills that befell the Russian people in the 20th century. Theirs was also a tragic love story; for whatever else can be said of them, there can be no doubt that Alix and Nicky adored one another. Soon after their engagement, Alix wrote in her fiancé's diary: "Ever true and ever loving, faithful, pure and strong as death"-words which met their fulfillment twenty-four years later in a blood-spattered cellar in Ekaterinburg.

Through the letters and diaries written by the couple and by those around them, Virginia Rounding presents an intimate, penetrating, and fresh portrayal of these two complex figures and of their passion-their love and their suffering. She explores the nature and possible causes of the Empress's ill health, and examines in depth the enigmatic triangular relationship between Nicky, Alix and their 'favourite,' Ania Vyrubova, protégée of the infamous Rasputin, extracting the meaning from words left unsaid, from hints and innuendoes..

The story of Alix and Nicky, of their four daughters known collectively as 'OTMA' and of their hemophiliac little boy Alexei, is endlessly fascinating, and Rounding makes these characters come alive, presenting them in all their human dimensions and expertly leading the reader into their vanished world.

About this title

From the Author

The analogy which comes most readily to mind when writing a new book about such apparently well-known yet still controversial figures is that of curating an exhibition of some already famous artist.  Just as the curator endeavurs to present a different view, through judicious, sometimes idiosyncratic, selection, juxtaposition, ordering, and even omission, so the biographer must select, consider, compare, and above all look with a fresh eye at what is already "known" as well as seeking out the previously "unknown".  In so doing, curator and biographer may respectively light upon something that previous exhibitions and books have missed, some detail or a new way of seeing that may alter earlier perceptions.  Through engaging closely with a number of texts, particularly diaries and letters - and sometimes looking at what is unsaid as much as what is said - I have aspired to come as close as possible to "penetrating the souls" of these two complex characters, while presenting the story of their "passion" (taken in both senses, of love and of suffering) in a way that I hope will pique the interest of both the Romanov expert and the general reader.  At the same time - and again bearing in mind the curating analogy - mine is only one way of seeing, of arranging the material to allow the characters to appear, of "telling the same story differently."  It may be almost as impossible to find the historical Nicholas and Alexandra as to find the historical Jesus, so much being dependent on the attitudes and beliefs of witnesses.  There may be as many Nickys and Alixes as there are theories about them, their images distorted by the parts they are assigned in other people's mythologies.  During their lifetime they were constantly surrounded by gossip, and sometimes it may seem that it has not yet died down.  They were in addition extremely private people, only really known to one another - and maybe too shy even for such private knowledge to be complete.  Nicky's own account of himself, in his diary, is designed to give little away; he was always restrained, rarely given to obvious self-expression (though at times his silence speaks volumes).  And, as if misleading gossip on the one hand and considerable reticence on the other did not present sufficient obstacles to knowledge, Nicholas and Alexandra have now vanished even further from our sight, into the reflective surface of an icon - where the image as instrument of devotion is meant always to point beyond itself, to be seen through rather than stared at, the portal to a different sort of knowledge.  As saints - if that is what they are, or might be - they have moved literally beyond our understanding.

About the Author

VIRGINIA ROUNDING is a translator and writer who lives in London. She studied Russian at the University of London. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Catherine the Great and Grandes Horizontales.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1250022193
• ISBN 13: 9781250022196
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400