Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses

Many years ago I read Robert K Massie's "Nicholas and Alexandra", which I continue to re-read. Since then I have read many books on the Romanovs and also on European royal families contemporaneous with them. This is the first book I have encountered that is in any way comparable to that first reading experience: poignant, down-to-earth and full of accurate detail, of an ordinary family in extraordinary circumstances. Nicholas and Alexandra have been much criticised for their failures in public life. Their political survival was however not only virtually impossible because of factors over which they had no control, but their private lives were also made terrible by the chronic illness of their beloved son. Historians are often keen to sit in judgement on the last Tsar, but the Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Spanish Bourbons, who lost their thrones at about the same time and arguably with fewer pressures on them - and in addition held on to their lives - are rarely subjected to such searing criticism.This book sets out to debunk the image of the four perfect daughters - but in fact, the four girls emerge in their depth and complexity as even more attractive to modern sensibilities. Reflective Olga, elegant Tatiana, warm-hearted Maria and quirky Anastasia, with their pretty clothes, their wild teenage crushes, their hobbies and their often comically uncertain academic progress are recognisable and accessible characters, - in fact, like our own children. They remind us that the Russian Revolution was about people as well as politics. They have become representatives of the destruction, along with the bad, of much that was good and innocent, which is probably why the restored Russian Church now venerates them as martyrs.Helen Rappaport combines thorough research with an unsentimental humanity that presents the girls as real people: appealing, flawed, unbearably sad. A definitive biography and a well-told story.

This is an extremely well researched attempt to separate out the lives and roles of the four doomed Romanov sisters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia from the familiar and often told narrative of the last two decades of Tsarism in Russia, and to give them distinctive identities. The author also attempted this in her previous book Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs, which recounted in day by day detail the last two weeks of the family's imprisonment in the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg before Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, the four daughters and son and heir Alexei, plus the doctor and three servants were murdered. She succeeds in this attempt as far as is reasonably possible, though the sisters' own depiction of themselves as a collective "OTMA" (from the initials of their names) doesn't help. Nevertheless, she says, "The anodyne public image of four sweet little girls in white embroidered cambric with blue bows in their hair thus gave little or no indication of the four very different personalities developing behind the closed doors of the Alexander Palace". Isolated from ordinary Russian life, but within a very loving family, their upbringing was of course privileged by the standards of ordinary Russians, but nevertheless more redolent of a bourgeois English upbringing than an aristocratic Russian one. They also somehow managed to develop a sensitivity towards outsiders shown most clearly in Olga and Tatiana's nursing work during the First World War, until the first March Revolution of 1917 brought about their father's abdication and the family's house arrest in the Winter Palace, prior to exile first in Tobolsk in Siberia, then in Ekaterinburg in the Urals. While I understand the author's desire not to overlap with her previous book on the family's last days, this does mean that the book's main narrative ends rather abruptly, with a short concluding chapter covering the fate of other characters. The book contained a number of pictures I hadn't seen before and an extensive bibliography. An impressive work.

Excelente producto.

Very detailed. In the end I had an impression to know the four sisters personally. I definitely will buy another one book of the author.

A must have book about four sisters who lived in the wrong time.

Libro commovente e appassionato, che fa rivivere le quattro sorelle come mai prima. Ho letto diverse biografie sugli ultimi zar, ma le ultime quattro granduchesse Olga Tatiana Maria e Anastasia restavano sempre sullo sfondo, descritte come un blocco unico. In 'Four sisters' invece, gli viene finalmente resa giustizia; tramite estratti, lettere e diari si ricostruiscono le personalità di qeuste quattro ragazze dal tragico destino. Il tristemente noto epilogo viene solo accennato, come se l'autrice preferisca concentrarsi sulla loro vita anziché la loro morte. Lettura consigliatissima per gli appassionati.

Probably should be called “four sisters and one brother” or a family, but this tells the insider story of the end of an era of elegance and innocence. Now the Tsarist state was far from innocent and at times quite repressive bit it’s last chief executive Nicholas II, often derided as both weak and indecisive on the one hand and reactionary and nationalistic on the other, comes across as most humane, almost ahead of his time in terms of how we loved and brought up his children and loved and respected his wife - not an easy person to understand, although I hope history will be kinder to her for she meant well and her insistence on keeping her children away from the corrupt St. Petersburg society is what makes them eventually so special. Even Rasputin does not tarnish them. Their innocence and fragility in the face of cruelty is what eventually makes this into a quite wonderful story.The two youngest, Álexei and Anastasia never reached adulthood while the middle sister Marie only reached 19. The two most formed of the children were therefore the older two of Olga and Tatiana. While they were inseparable as sisters they were also quite different. Olga, intelligent and poetic comes to life in her words. Tatiana, strong and practical, in her deeds. In the end it is the image of Tatiana trudging in the mud, carrying too many suitcases from the train station as the guards jeer, that stirs the heart. And Olga, perhaps the person that comes most alive in these pages, the eldest who stoically accepts the loss of her position, first to her little brother and then to her younger sister, who articulates the family’s plight best.