I started reading The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore yesterday afternoon and it is, as every single reviewer assured me, wonderful. But, like all things Romanov-related, it is also rather overwhelming:
The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambitions, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughters; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménages à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty.
The sheer level of violence is extraordinary and the drama of the dynasty is completely absorbing. I fell into the book for a few hours and emerged able to think of nothing else but the blood-thirsty early Romanovs and their supporters.
With impalements by the dozen fresh in my mind, I decided something a little – a lot – gentler was needed before bed. I wanted something that was all the things the Romanovs were not: peaceful, good-humoured and non-homicidal. But I wasn’t quite ready to leave Russia so I turned to that most comforting of authors, Eva Ibbotson, and her first adult novel, A Countess Below Stairs. Its fairy-tale like beginning was the perfect antidote:
In the fabled, glittering world that was St. Petersburg before the First World War there lived, in an ice-blue palace overlooking the river Neva, a family on whom the gods seemed to have lavished their gifts with an almost comical abundance.
It was back to The Romanovs this morning but, I suspect, it will be back to Ibbotson tonight. A perfect balance.
The Captive Reader 
‘That most comforting of authors’ – thank you for this perfect description of Eva Ibbotson, an author I am always turning to when I need to be reminded of the good in human beings. I love the way she went on writing her upbeat, funny and heart-warming books right up until her death in 2010; always with that strong sense of justice, where good is rewarded and wickedness is dealt with. They come as healing to the mind when so much modern children and teenage fiction is of a dystopian bleakness. And all those wonderfully eccentric characters! Just what’s needed after the bloodthirsty excesses of the Romanovs …
Her books are so lovely. I’m having a delightful time rereading this and remembering how much I adore Anna and Rupert and the scores of excellent supporting characters.
This is such a coincidence!!! Our elder son and his fiancée were married on Saturday in Torquay and the hotel in which the wedding and the reception took place was once the holiday home of the Romanovs, in Torquay, Devon! How coincidental is that?
PS I now have my own blog, at long last. http://www.margaretpowling.com
Very coincidental! I hope none of the guests were inspired to read about the Romanovs when there – not exactly the stuff to get you into a wedding-appropriate mood.
Thanks for sharing your blog link! I look forward to following you.
I am about to read THE SECRET WIFE by Gill Paul.A dual time narrative set in the Romanov era and modern day.Has romance and a little mystery.
Sounds interesting! There is certainly no shortage of Romanov-inspired reading out there. I still have Helen Rappaport’s The Romanov Sisters on my TBR list. I’ve started it before and it is excellent so I look forward to finishing it one day.