After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

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So well known was he in Paris as a hard drinker and gastronome that Vladimir was nicknamed “Le Grand Duc Bon Vivant” and you could find filet de sole Grand Duke Vladimir on most menus there. Aside from Grand Dukes Vladimir and Alexis, Grand Duke Mikhail (Mikhailovich)§ visited regularly with his wife, the Countess Torby; Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich came in 1900 and demanded guards be posted throughout the hotel for his protection. The scintillating story of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought refuge in interwar Paris.

But during the reign of the authoritarian and straitlaced Alexander III, who came to the throne after his father’s assassination in 1881, reaction set in.At his famous cabaret in Montmartre, the singer Aristide Bruant would yell out “Here come the Cossacks” whenever the Russians descended for an evening’s carousing. Arriving in Paris, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives who could sew worked for the fashion houses, their unique Russian style serving as inspiration for designers like Coco Chanel. Events in Russia in 1905 caused both Grand Duke Paul and Countess von Hohenfelsen a great deal of anxiety.

It was an opportune time, for Russophilia still ruled in the city in the wake of the Franco-Russian alliance. Alexis’s comfortable life in Paris went some way in consoling him for the loss of the love of his life—Zina, Countess Beauharnais, who was married to his first cousin and friend, the Duke of Leuchtenberg—and with whom Alexis had conducted an unhappy ménage royal à trois. Petersburg he served from 1876 to his death as president of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy and enjoyed an extremely influential position in the art world. One of the greatest skills a historian can possess is to make readers feel as if they have stepped back in time to witness the characters, places, and events they describe.There, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives found work in the fashion houses, where their unique Russian style inspired designers such as Coco Chanel. When Zina died of throat cancer, Alexis comforted himself for his loss with a string of actresses and dancers; on one occasion, he arrived at the legendary Moulin Rouge with his suite, surrounded by police protection agents, demanding whether any of the dancing girls could dance the “ russkaya” (presumably he meant the Cossack dance the lezginka).

Most Russians have resigned themselves to this state of affairs at great costs leading to the well known Russian ability to suffer despite great accomplishments in art, literature, music, math and science. Overall there was a great deal of adversity, a lot of sadness and some inspiring examples of resilience. Petersburg and Paris and aware of German intrigues to try to force Russia into an alliance against Britain. It's not my habit to review books for what they're not and so i will just say, this wasnt quite the book i was expecting or hoping for. Initially, the couple lived in a grand apartment at 11 avenue d’Iéna, a lovely tree-lined avenue in the 16th arrondissement, where their daughters Irina and Nataliya were born in 1903 and 1905 and where they held their first salons and receptions.President Fauré accompanied Nicholas and Alexandra on a whistle-stop tour of the Paris Opera, the Louvre, and Notre Dame, the mint, and the Sèvres factory. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Turgenev lived for many years in an apartment in the same building as Viardot and her husband on the rue de Douai, till his death in 1883. The scandal of her adultery had found its fiercest critic in Nicholas’s highly moral wife Alexandra, who insisted that the countess should not be welcomed back at the Russian court for several more years. World War II closed down the old emigre life, and the Russian community was targeted by the Gestapo, as thousands of Russians were arrested and sent to the camps.

It regularly staged brilliant gatherings in its private reception rooms in honor of the visits Grand Duke Vladimir made with his wife. Her love of all things Victorian springs from her childhood growing up near the River Medway where Charles Dickens lived and worked. Entertaining and, at times, heart-wrenching … Rappaport, a prolific historian and highly regarded Romanov expert, unveils a Paris in which Russians had long played a prominent role. But she was already married—to a captain in the Horse Guards—and had three surviving children by him. Such had been their predilection, since the 1860s, for visiting under cover of darkness all that the Parisian underworld of eroticism, not to say vice, had to offer that the concept of La Tournée des Grands Ducs (The Grand Dukes’ Tour) had become a feature of the off-the-map Paris tourist trail.He was a most imposing if not frightening figure, as was his worldly and equally formidable German-born wife, Maria Pavlovna (originally, Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin). La Balletta had, they complained, “cost the Russian people more than the Battle of Tsushima”—a naval debacle that had forced Alexis’s resignation.