The Captive Reader

I went into After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport, an accessible history of the Russians who found their way to Paris both during the early years of the 20th Century and after the revolution, feeling well primed.  Far too many viewings of Anastasia as a child (I really, really loved Ingrid Bergman) had long-ago established Paris in my mind as the home of exiled Russians living a surreal mix of poverty and fantasy, dispossessed of their country and heritage but clinging to it nonetheless in a world where White Russian generals now ran nightclubs and, perhaps, a lost princess lived on the streets.  Rappaport reintroduced me to that world – for it did exist – but also to the glittering era that came before and the harsher realities that followed, not quite suitable for 1950s celluloid.

Rappaport begins during the Belle Epoque, when France was already drawing Russians westward.  It drew some who were not welcome in the Tsar’s Russia but Rappaport focuses predominantly in those early years on the grand dukes and counts, the princesses and even the Dowager Empress who flocked to the city of light to enjoy its many pleasures.  They lived happily and lavishly, using their great wealth to acquire mansions, art, automobiles, and – for many Grand Dukes – charming feminine company.  Naturally, Russian artists followed the money, with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes taking the city by storm and Stravinsky shocking it with The Rite of Spring.  It was a glittering era funded by unimaginable wealth, allowing the privileged to bounced between the Riviera and Paris.  But Paris was a city of pleasure and escape rather than home and with the start of the First World War the bulk of the Russian community returned to their palaces and estates in the east.  Some of them would never make it out again.

Those who survived the revolution and escaped to France returned in very different circumstances.  They used what skills they had to survive: rich young men who once owned fleets of cars now drove others about.  Aristocratic women who counted needlework as one of their few accomplishments found use for it in the fashion capital of the world.  And children who had had the best music tutors in the country grew up to be adults who made music not for pleasure at private gatherings but for money as entertainers.  This included Count Mikhail Tolstoy, the son of the author, who formed a Russian folk music trio with a general’s wife and a prince.  He explained:

My situation, like that of my two friends, is a mystery to nobody.  I have been ruined since 1919, when I left Russia.  I have seven children in school in France.  I love music, so why shouldn’t I attempt to live by it?  The memory of my father forbids me writing so I’m going to sing and play the piano.

Fascinatingly, Rappaport not only reports on these odd new occupations but contextualizes them for us.  The deadening suburban factory jobs – poorly paid and offering little hope of advancement – offer a way to put food on the table but not much else.  Fashion work is clearly more prestigious but precarious, particularly for those who attempted to set up their own fashion houses.  The pinnacle of achievement seems to have been the taxi driver.  With enough money to purchase a car and complete the licensing requirements, taxi drivers were usually already better off than the majority of emigrants and the independence of their profession gave them better control over their earnings.  It wasn’t a foolproof path to a bright future but it was better than what most of the Russian community was facing.

Despite Russia’s pre-existing ties to France, it was not a story of successful emigration.  People eked out an existence, with generally menial, poorly-paid work, that left them exhausted and hopeless.  Leading writers lost both the world they wrote about and the audience they wrote for, now too poor to buy novels and poetry.  Paris was not the land of opportunity and soon energetic refugees began looking across the Atlantic for (another) fresh start.

But those without such dynamism stayed, plodding on, until some realised they could take no more and chose either to return to Russia or end it all.  There is a particularly poignant story of a count who could not go on.  Formerly a diplomat, fluent in six languages, he found himself adrift in Paris.  His one attachment was to his old French governess, who he visited devotedly, but with her death that one last reason to survive disappeared.  He killed himself in a city park.

And then there were the dreamers and schemers, the fantasists who sought to correct the past by presenting fake Anastasias or attempting to establish a new Romanov Tsar to continue the glorious traditions.  But there would be no continuing.

I am a detail-oriented person so I adore the specificity of Rappaport’s books.  She clearly has expert knowledge – and superb research skills – of several eras and focuses intensely on periods or details which other historians might simply address in a single chapter.  Her earlier books about the Romanovs focus on the short lives of the princesses (Four Sisters), the family’s last days (Ekaterinburg), and the failure of royal cousins and foreign governments to rescue them from their tragic fate (The Race to Save the Romanovs) and each one is absolutely fascinating.  Her account of Queen Victoria’s cult of mourning after Prince Albert’s death (A Magnificent Obsession) concentrates on a defining but brief period of a long life and is superb.  And she does the same thing here, choosing to focus on a very specific refugee population and their experiences, creating a deep sense of place and, by contrasting the pre- and post-revolution experiences, an immense sense of what was lost.