Four Sisters: Helen Rappaport on Synergies & Gaps Between Fiction & Nonfiction

As readers of HNR will know, a good historical novel can do a number of things. For example, it will provide clarity and shape to a period of history which might otherwise appear chaotic or confusing. Most importantly, however, it will provoke an emotional response from the readers, helping them to truly understand the people peeping out at us from the historical record.

Helen Rappaport, historian and author, agrees that writing historical fiction has helped her now that she has returned to nonfiction with Four Sisters, her biographical account of the lives of the last Tsar of Russia’s daughters: “Writing Dark Hearts of Chicago was a fascinating and challenging experience, and I learned a lot from it about narrative and structure, which has certainly informed the way I write history. I love writing history as story — not making it up, I hasten to add, but giving the narrative pace and impetus and cross-cutting scenes in perhaps a novelistic way.

“I wanted, with a passion, to tell the story of those four lovely, much photographed but historically neglected sisters,” she continues. “I was haunted by the story and the girls, in particular, had been constantly in my head since I visited Ekaterinburg… [it] left an indelible impression on my mind and my creative imagination.”

Rappaport draws the reader into the lives of Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (often known by the collective sobriquet ‘OTMA’). Indeed, this is a story with as much dramatic interest and emotion as any novel. To date, the stories of the sisters’ lives have been largely untold, the focus of historians primarily on their parents and brother, the girls coming into the story seemingly only to add pathos to the accounts of the family’s group murder in a cellar in Siberia in 1918.

This meticulously-researched biography does much to redress the balance, vividly illuminating their shared experiences: their sheltered upbringings, their suppressed, yet passionate love affairs, and their work as nurses and fund-raisers during the First World War, followed by their harrowing executions. What comes through is Rappaport’s interest in each of the girls as individuals. She says: “I have, at some point…had great affection for all of the sisters in turn, for one reason or another. I loved Olga for her sensitivity and vulnerability; Maria for her softness and kindness and care of others; and Tatiana for her devotion and stoicism during the war years. Anastasia of course could be a very seductive personality at times; at others I found her irritating and too egocentric…I can’t honestly say I have a real, clear favourite. Though Tatiana, of all of them, remains for me the most compelling and enigmatic.”

Despite the strides forward made in understanding the girls, it is clear that Rappaport remains frustrated by the limitations of her sources:”We don’t honestly know what they really thought about the people in their entourage and inner circle, and I found that frustrating. Their mother trained them always to be guarded in their letters and personal comments — even their diaries are very restrained and largely unrevealing. I wish I knew what the girls really thought about the men they met — especially those for whom they seemed to have a soft spot or indeed loved… And did they ever really quarrel and fall out with each other? How aware were they of their desperate situation at the end? I sense that Olga anticipated something terrible happening; but what of the others?”

When I ask, however, Rappaport denies wanting to go one step further and to write the story of the sisters as a novel:

“I was never ever tempted to look at my history subjects in novel form because, for me, real people and real lives are always so much more compelling. The truth is, indeed, always stranger than fiction.”

Despite the gaps in our knowledge (and they are the sort of gaps that could only be filled from a novelist’s imagination, or from the people themselves), this is a story that compels and fascinates, without the need for further elaboration. The stories of these girls’ lives really do stand by themselves.

About the contributor: CHARLOTTE WIGHTWICK is a reviewer for the HNS. The ‘beautifully crafted opening’ to Charlotte’s first historical novel, The Lady with an Ermine, won the 2014 Faber Academy’s creative writing competition. She’s currently writing the rest of it.

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Published in Historical Novels Review  |  Issue 69, August 2014