Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [8]
But by that night he was draining the dipper again.
“Woke up and felt as if a squadron had spent the night in my mouth.” It was all as Davydov had devised: they drank “elbows” (filling a glass the length of a forearm and draining it at one draft), “the staircase” (setting glasses all the way up the stairs and emptying them one step at a time, ascending, but often falling down dead drunk before reaching the top), or “till the wolves” (stripping naked and jumping out in the savage frost, where an obliging barman carried out a tub of champagne for the gentlemen guardsmen, who sipped from the tub, howling all the while like wolves). People said this strange entertainment had been dreamed up personally by Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, who was famous for his remarkable, truly guardsmanly drinking.
“16 March 1892.… Have never seen such a profusion of gypsies. There were four choruses. We supped, like that time, with the ladies. Sojourned in vinous fumes until 6 in the morning.”
Amid these rather awful, noisy amusements Nicholas had the good sense to remain gentle, chaste, and lonely. There was the anticipation of love, ideal love.
“19 January 1890.… Don’t know how to explain it but a mood has come over me: neither sad nor happy. Almost over now, drank tea and read.”
Only she could break this loneliness.
A rather short young officer strides briskly with the crowd down Nevsky Avenue.
Meanwhile, the coach of Petersburg’s governor rolls down Nevsky as the governor searches the faces on the street.
Finally he spots the young officer, the carriage slows, and respectfully but firmly the governor transmits the father’s order to return to the palace.
Vera Leonidovna Yureneva:
“He adored walking.… There was a rumor that he had met a beautiful Jewess on a walk.… And a romance had sprung up. There was a lot of gossip about that in Petersburg. But his father acted as decisively as ever: the Jewess was sent away along with her entire household. Nicholas was in her home while all this was going on. ‘Only over my dead body,’ he declared to the governor. Matters did not go as far as dead bodies, however. He was an obedient son, and eventually he was broken and taken away to his father at Anichkov Palace, and the Jewess was never seen in the capital again.”
“ALIX H.”
That was how he referred to her then in his diary: Alix H.
I’m sitting in the archive. Before me is a stack of papers. All that remains from the life of Alix H.
They too have made a journey, and they bear the dust of the terrible Ipatiev house.
Endless letters from Nicholas, hundreds of letters. Her diaries—or, rather, what remains of them. Evidently she burned her diaries early in March of 1917, when the empire perished.
What survives are brief notes for the years 1917 and 1918, the last two years of her life.
Notebooks with excerpts from the works of theologians and philosophers, lines from favorite poems she had copied out: Maikov, Fet, Lermontov, Pushkin, Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (a well-known poet from the first part of the century who wrote under the pseudonym K.R.), a certain Bronitskaya, and again Pushkin, and again Fet, and again K.R.—her poets.
But here is one other particular notebook. It is also a collection of utterances, true from a somewhat unlikely philosopher who ruled over the mind and soul of the brilliantly educated Alix H.: the half-literate Russian peasant Grigory Rasputin.
The English Alix, the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Louis IV, was born in Darmstadt in May 1872.
Hills grown up in forest descended into the misty valley of the Rhine, places beloved of Goethe. Here lay Darmstadt, the tiny capital of a tiny German state, the grand duchy of Hesse. At the season of Alix’s birth the town would have been drowning in flowers, and in the palace museum hung a tender Madonna of Hans Holbein.
Alix’s father, Louis IV, sovereign of Hesse, was