• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ekaterina Schneider would become the court reader in the imperial palace and in 1917 would voluntarily go into exile with her former pupil. In 1918, a thousand kilometers from Petersburg, en route to the disposal pits, they would kill the old court reader.

These were their happiest days, after their betrothal. Poetic love à la Goethe: he and Alix riding in a charabanc to gather flowers in the countryside.

Easter. On Good Friday singers from Petersburg revealed to the German-English princess all the triumphant goodness of the Orthodox service. With the singers came a courier from Petersburg, bringing presents, letters from the tsar and tsaritsa, and a medal—for Alix.

“20 April.… Went with Alix to the station and there said goodbye to her. How empty it feels now to go home.… So, we will have to spend a month and a half apart. Wandered alone to familiar places now dear to me and gathered her favorite flowers, which sent in a letter this evening….

“21 April. Had breakfast.… By my place stood my old picture of Alix surrounded by familiar pink flowers.”

Alix went to Windsor to see Queen Victoria. A month and a half later, the Polar Star approached the English shore. This was Nicholas’s favorite yacht, and it would become the favorite of Alix and their children. The white yacht entered the Thames.

“We spent entire days together, rode on the boat, had picnics on shore—a true idyll.… But then we had to go to Windsor. Although cannot complain—her grandmother was very kind and permitted us to go out without chaperones.… Admit I never expected that from her.”

All this time she was writing her favorite sayings in his diary: “They live through happiness and want together—& from their first kiss to their last breath sing to each other only of love.” “Ever faithful & loving, devoted & pure, & strong, like death.”

This word death, written in her hand, appeared in his diary.

“21 July. A sad day of parting, separation after more than a month of heavenly bliss. Received a letter from Alix on the Polar Star. Quite tired and sad.”

Parting, they agreed to write one another. A tale out of the Brothers Grimm: a yacht, a castle, a princess, and a tsarevich.

The echo of this tale was preserved in the washroom—fouled by the guard and covered with obscene drawings—of their last home in Ekaterinburg. After their deaths in 1918, a little book was found in that washroom, behind the pipes. In it was a code and the inscription “For my own beloved Nicky to put to good use when he is far away from his spitzbube. From his loving Alice Osborne, July 1894.”

This was the code book for their correspondence (she adored secrets), which “loving Alice” had given to him during their days of happiness in Osborne, the queen’s home on the Isle of Wight. “Nicky and Alice make a fine couple.” Separated, they wrote each other letters almost every day.

These delicate sheets with small crowns—their letters. He wrote her from the castle at Spala, in Poland, where the Polish kings had had an ancient hunting lodge and where the Russian tsar loved to hunt. He wrote to her from the imperial train taking him to Livadia, where his father lay dying. Hundreds of his letters. And hundreds of her replies. Endless incantations of love.

Early in October, in Darmstadt, Alix received a telegram calling her urgently to the Crimea: Alexander was dying. In Berlin, her Uncle Willy saw her off at the station. He knew the firm but charming Alix’s unforgiving nature and dear Nicky’s softness. He had no doubt who would lead in this union, and he believed she would not forget her little homeland and her Uncle Willy. But Uncle Willy did not know the Hessian princess very well.

“Your people have become my people, and your God has become my God.” This was the lesson of the beautiful Hessian princesses who had departed for distant lands in the past.

The emperor is dying.

The eminent Dr. Zakharin walks slowly into the dying man’s bedroom. The doctor is short-winded and cannot take more than a few steps without sitting down. That is why chairs