Adventure classics -- A mad monk and a lost boy, found

Nicholas and Alexandra

by Robert K. Massie

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In the middle of the twentieth century, historian Robert K. Massie and his wife learned their son had hemophilia. In those days before support groups and the Internet, Massie struggled to learn how other parents of children with this terrible disease functioned. He ended with a lifetime fascination for the most famous hemophiliac of all time, Alexis Romanov, heir and only son of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia.

More than a single family’s tragedy, it is the story, Massie wrote in the introduction to his 1967 biography, Nicholas and Alexandra, of a distraught mother who, “in an effort to deal with the agonies hemophilia inflicted on her son. . . turned to Gregory Rasputin, the remarkable Siberian mystagogue. Thereafter, Rasputin’s presence near the throne--his influence on the Empress and, through her, on the government of Russia--brought about or at least helped to speed the fall of the dynasty.”

Massie follows fellow historian Barbara Tuchman’s dictum about how to maintain suspense when everyone knows the story’s ending by writing as if in the time of the events. He saves the rest of the story for an epilogue, leaving readers to marvel at the romance of the love match between Nicholas and Alexandra, the minor German princess so ill suited to become empress even without her fatal heritage of the gene for hemophilia.

Massie’s original readers and viewers of the 1971 movie based on his book mourned the death of a woman so rich, wealthy, forlorn and lovely. (Dancer/choreographer George Balanchine, who met Alexandra when he was twelve, would describe her as “beautiful, beautiful--like Grace Kelly.”)

Massie lays the heaviest blame for the fall of the Romanov dynasty on Gregory Rasputin, the self-proclaimed monk who led a life of debauchery while duping Alexandra with the hope of curing her desperately ill son. Given his personal circumstances, Massie is the most sympathetic of biographers toward Alexandra. But his research may leave readers in the twentieth-first century wondering, as I did, whether a woman so willfully ignorant, so stubbornly narrow minded and so manipulative of her weaker willed husband wasn’t the next thing to evil.

She schemed to destroy politician after reformer after general of any competence whose only crime was refusing to placate Rasputin. Even after Rasputin’s assassination, after the Russian revolution of 1917, and after Nicholas’s abdication, Alexandra continued to place faith in the rescue of herself and her family on another con artist, solely because of his family connection with Rasputin.

Alexandra’s hoped-for champion, however, took the money and ran, leaving her and her family to face a firing squad in the Siberian town of Ekaterinburg.

When Massie finished his book, he believed, like the rest of the world, that the killers had destroyed the bodies of Alexandra, Nicholas, their thirteen-year-old son and four daughters, leaving nothing except a few pitiful mementoes when a monarchist White Russian army captured Ekaterinburg a few days later. And there the story ended for decades.

In 1995, Massie would publish a sequel, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. Thanks to the work of a Russian geologist turned amateur historian, and to the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the world learned that skeletons found near the site of the Romanovs’ murder had been identified as those of Nicholas, Alexandra, their servants, and three of their five children. In 2009, bone fragments in still another grave were identified as the remains of the long-missing Romanov son Alexis and his remaining sister. The missing had been found at last.

But the story hasn’t ended yet. For more about the continuing controversy over the Romanov heritage, see “Russian Investigative Committee doesn’t doubt authenticity of Romanov remains,” at
www.pravmir.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics opens a February of animal adventures with Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague.)

Adventure classics -- A love affair, with war & ice

Dr. Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

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If you ever think of visiting, much less living in Texas, you should know that summers here last nine months, and it’s pretty darn hot the rest of the year. When my family moved to a small East Texas town, the Cold War was at its height but everything else was hot, hot, hot. Air conditioning was rare, and one of the few places that had it was the local movie theater (yes, we still had one at that time). Imagine the awe we felt at the sight of the ice palace love scene in the movie version of Dr. Zhivago.

After reading the novel years later, I felt momentary disappointment at realizing Boris Pasternak hadn’t envisioned the scene of Yuri and Lara’s love as quite so ice encrusted. But as film maker David Lean’s statement of the era’s climactic and political chill, it was a visual metaphor worthy of a poet whose prose was his masterpiece.

Although Pasternak spent most of his literary life as a poet and translator, in I Remember: Sketches for an Autobiography, he writes, “I would never lift a finger to bring back from oblivion three fourths of what I have written. . . my chief and most important work, the only one I am not ashamed of and for which I can answer with the utmost confidence (is) Dr. Zhivago.”

Even though, at 200 minutes running time, Lean had to sacrifice swathes of Zhivago’s epic sweep and dozens of characters, I’ll attempt an even briefer summary.

Orphaned in childhood, Yuri Zhivago is raised by wealthy family friends Alexander and Anna Gromeko. Lara is the daughter of a widowed Frenchwoman living in Russia. She is forced early into a sexual relationship with Komarovsky, who was also the lawyer of Yuri’s dead father, may have been complicit in the father's suicide.

Yuri marries the Gromekos’ daughter Tonia; Lara marries working class boy next door Pasha Antipov. During the First World War, Pasha volunteers and is missing in action; Lara enlists as a nurse to search for him. Yuri is drafted, and serves as a doctor in the same hospitals where Lara is a nurse, and where they fall in love. Lara’s husband, who was believed dead, was actually captured. When he is released from his POW camp, he assumes the name Strelnikov and, without contacting Lara, participates on the Bolshevik side during the Russian Civil War.

The resulting personal and political tragedies became Pasternak’s allegory both for his own life and the life of his country.

As a rule I’m wary of novels written by poets. But Pasternak captured both the sweep of a world-changing era and the individuality of the people in his story, studding it with gems such as the final meeting between Yuri and Strelnikov, who find, despite their political differences and personal jealousy, a strange sympathy.

Now in political disrepute and under sentence of death, Strelnikov arrives at the country estate of Yuri and Lara’s idyll, to find Lara fled. After a long talk, Yuri allows him to spend the night, suffers strange dreams, and finds his guest gone the next morning.

“A few yards from the door, Strelnikov lay across the path with his head in a snowdrift. . . Drops of spurting blood that had mixed with the snow formed red beads that looked like rowanberries.”

Pasternak’s works, including Dr. Zhivago and English translations of his poetry, are readily available on Amazon. Free versions of the movie are available through several online sources.

(Next Wednesday, in a month of historical fiction, Adventure classics turns from political epic to family saga, in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits.)