Exclusive interview with author Helen Rappaport and a review of her biography of the daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra
Rating: 3 Stars
“I felt such an empathy with the girls,” says The Romanov Sisters author Helen Rappaport. “As a mother of daughters myself, they haunted me. I wanted to tell their story, to bring them to the foreground for once, and give them back their identities as four very different young women, who were not an anonymous collective, as they are so often portrayed.”
The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra sheds new light on the lives of Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Romanov. Their lives revolve around their parents and their brother Alexei, the heir. Rappaport uses photos previously unseen, unpublished letters, diaries and archival sources to bring the girls to life. Unfortunately, there’s little interaction with the notoriously charismatic Rasputin.
“I have been thinking about the four Romanov sisters since I walked the city of Ekaterinburg in Western Siberia when researching my previous book The Last Days of the Romanovs,” says Rappaport. Rappaport did exhaustive research over a very wide range of published, online, archival and private sources. She focused on contemporary accounts, the newspapers and magazines of the day. She looked for material in foreign language sources: not only Russian, but French, German, Danish and Swedish.
“I found much more material than I had expected to,” says Rappaport. “The best surprises were being contacted by people with a connection in some way to the story, and in discovering the cache of Anastasia letters, written during 1917-18, that had recently been donated to the Hoover Institution in California.”
She searched many archival catalogs online. Other material was sent as scans or photocopies, either by her researcher at Hoover or by libraries including the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia. She also oconsulted archives in Oxford, Nottingham, Leeds, and the Royal Archives at Windsor.
Rappaport is the historical adviser and appears in the two-part BBC2 documentary Russia’s Lost Princesses due to air in the UK soon and may broadcast in the U.S. The Romanov Sisters has not yet been optioned for film or television.
This is Rappaport’s 11th book. She’s won a U.S. library award, RUSA, for Women Social Reformers.
Charlie Spicer, Rappaport’s U.S. editor at St Martin’s Press, told me: “When I read the finished a draft of The Romanov Sisters, what Helen Rappaport had done was take these four young women, usually background scenery to the story of the Russian imperial family, and bring them alive on the page as living, breathing, people, with their own joys and sorrows and loves and heartbreaks, and finally their own courage in the face of doom. …During the production of the book, Helen discovered not only new letters and diaries, but photographs that have never before been seen that make these four beautiful, tragic grand duchesses seem so contemporary, so real to a reader in the early 21st century.”
Rappaport was born in Bromley and now lives in West Dorset. Her next book will also be set in Russia. Her website is: www.helenrappaport.com
The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra by Helen Rappaport
Hardback, 512 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; First Edition edition (June 3, 2014), Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-1250020208 $ 27.99. Kindle, File Size: 2223 KB, Print Length: 513 pages, Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1250020204, Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (June 3, 2014), Sold by: Macmillan, Language: English, ASIN: B00H6EOMDO $12.74
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