The Last Grand Duchess
When The Last Grand Duchess opens in March 1917, we are witness to the collapse of a world: the privileged existence of the Romanov czarist family, and, more specifically, that of their oldest daughter, Olga. Word comes that the beleaguered Nicholas II has abdicated, leaving his family, closeted in the palace at Tsarskoe Selo, to an uncertain fate. As this narrative follows Olga and her family to their inevitable end, it alternates with another storyline beginning in February 1913, taking the reader through the events leading up to Russia’s disastrous entry into the Great War and through the terrible toll exacted by the war itself. Somehow, we are allowed to hope that Olga—attending teas at her aunt’s house, volunteering as a nurse, enduring efforts to match her with a suitably royal partner, and falling in love—might find some happiness along the way.
I loved this novel, chiefly because of its deft characterizations. There’s Olga herself: socially awkward yet sometimes imperious, fiercely loyal to her family but increasingly becoming aware of her parents’ flaws. There’s her open-minded aunt, whose attempts to provide her isolated nieces with a semblance of social life leads to Olga’s first romance. There are Olga’s patients, whose brutal experiences at the front help to shape Olga’s growing realization of the hardships faced by her father’s subjects. There’s the obscenely wealthy couple Felix and Irina Yusupov, somewhat abashed by Felix’s failure to join his friend Dmitri at the front, boasting that they have turned their palace into a military hospital: “Of course, we removed all the valuables, but just think of the cultural education they’ll receive, convalescing in a home as grand as this.” And finally, there is Olga’s high-strung mother, Alexandra, gobbling crystals of Veronal while utterly incompetently trying to run the country in her passive husband’s absence. Even the most flawed characters have their redeeming points: there’s not a cardboard villain to be found.
Superbly written and researched, this is a novel that I will be reading again.
