I believe my maternal grandparents, Olga and Paul Woronoff, never saw the revolution coming, and they certainly didn’t think the turmoil, violence and bloodshed would last. Coming closely on the heels of World War I, it must have been a time of such uncertainty but even so, in their minds,
If you have ever wondered why I wanted to update my grandmother’s memoir, this post will explain all. When my father died in 2012 I inherited many documents, letters and photographs which were relevant to both sides of my family. For a couple of years they languished in boxes in
The first time my grandmother, Countess Olga Kleinmichel, saw Empress Alexandra the Empress wasn’t smiling. In fact, according to my grandmother’s memoir in which she describes the celebration of Grand Duchess Olga’s sixteenth birthday, Empress Alexandra “wore an expression of weariness and sadness which ‘society’ took for coldness and haughtiness.”
I’m always interested in reading about my grandparents and my latest purchase doesn’t disappoint. George Hawkins, who has translated the diaries and letters of members of the last Imperial Family of Russia, has translated the 1914 diary of Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna, second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and the
My latest search is for the graves of my maternal great grandmother and three of her daughters, my great aunts. My maternal great grandmother, Catherine Jakowzoff (Yakovtsov), died in France where she and her second husband, Vassily Jakowzoff, had fled to from the chaos of Soviet controlled Russia. They had
“Wot’s in a name? she sez. An’ then she sighs, An’ clasps ‘er little ‘ands, an’ rolls ‘er eyes. A rose, she sez, be any other name Would smell the same.” Those are the first lines of the poem, The Play, taken from The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, written