Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Later that week they would use her tiny diamond ring to etch their names side by side onto a window at Alexander Palace at Peterhof, and when he asked his mother for a token to give her, his mother handed him a twelve-carat diamond brooch. This is Russia—for the imperial family, that was a token. He presented the brooch to Alix—a child giving a gift to a child. At a children’s party the next day, she gave the brooch back to him. She was English and German and very proper, and she felt she had not behaved correctly in accepting it. He did not see Alix again until 1889, when she came at seventeen once more to visit her sister in Petersburg. Alix would not age well, but at seventeen she was a beauty—the cinched waist, bracelets at her right wrist, her face more European, almost English, save for that long German nose with its extra daub of flesh at the end that in later years would make a hook. I understood why Niki desired her so in 1889, though the court itself was not so taken with her. At public appearances she stood breathless and unsmiling, her face covered with blotches. Devoid of charm, cold eyes, holds herself as if she’d swallowed a yardstick , the court said of her. His parents liked her no better. That year Niki pasted her picture into his diary and silently determined to marry her.

How do I know this? Because he would read to me on occasion from his diaries, from the entries about me and from the ones about her, to flatter me, at first—to caution me, later. He kept a diary for thirty-six years, his first one begun at fourteen when the empress gave him a book of souvenirs. The edges of that first book’s pages were gilt, the binding made of inlaid wood. Only that was good enough for the heir, though later he wrote in plain lined journals, the pages numbered by hand in the upper right corner in advance and pasted up with pictures and mementos. In this first book he recorded the murder of his grandfather on the street alongside the Ekaterininsky Canal. After this, his father became tsar, moved the family to Gatchina outside Petersburg, surrounded the palace park with sentries. Alexander III had crushed the revolutionaries, or so he thought. The young terrorists from the People’s Will who had assassinated Alexander II—after seven unsuccessful attempts!—had been hanged, signs that read tsar killer pinned to their chests, and their bodies had dangled from their nooses for hours so all could see, and after their hanging, Alexander III rescinded almost every one of his father’s liberal ukazy , the Great Reforms that freed the serfs, loosened censorship, reformed schools, allowed local self-government, the ones he thought had led, so inadmissibly, to his father’s assassination. The revolutionaries who wanted to rid the country of Alexander II were afraid his reforms and his proposed constitution would satisfy the people so much that there would be no revolution, no abolition of the throne. Alexander III meant to ensure there would be neither reform nor revolution. He was a tsar of the old school, the father who ruled by the whip. He thought he was preventing a revolution, though he actually induced one, but he never lived to see this or the murder of his brother, his cousins, his sons, his nephews, his grandchildren. No, the revolutionaries never disappeared, no matter how Alexander III squeezed them. Why, he even hanged Lenin’s older brother in 1887 for plotting to kill him as he made one of those processionals from the Winter Palace to the cathedral with a phalanx of royalty, the smaller parade called the Maly Vykhod, and the larger the Bolshoi Vykhod, with which the Romanovs reminded the court and Petersburg at large of their power. Yes, to be a tsar was to be the preordained victim of a regicide—killed eventually by revolutionaries, by your guards, by your own family. Perhaps Niki had a premonition of this. On the inside front cover of his very first journal, in his angular hand, Niki wrote out the lyrics to an old folk song, one where the ancient gnarled hag uses a comb on the hair of a young dead man who sprawls in her lap. Youth and Death. Yes, in his first notebook he recorded the murder of his grandfather, and his last notebook, the fifty-first, from 1918, was only half filled, the numbers floating in the corners of the empty pages.

Later, in Paris, after the revolution, when his journals were published, I read all the entries, glossing for the private matters of his heart. I know. Of all the great events recorded in those books, the coronation, two wars, the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Bloody Sunday, I was seeking only mention of me. Some of those earlier entries, I had, of course, already seen. It was a Russian custom for the bridegroom to share his diaries with his bride on the eve of their wedding, to reveal to her his life previous and whatever attachments and liaisons it contained. Tolstoy did this with his wife, Sonya, and Niki did this with Alix, who began to write in the pages, who wrote on their wedding night, At last united, bound for life . And so, there was some significance, yes, to the fact that Niki shared his journals with me? He did not give them to me, I did not take a pen and write in them for all of posterity to see, but he read to me from them. At my first appearance, in 1890, he read me just a few notes: Gossiped at her window with little Kschessinska or I like Kschessinska II very much , but later in 1892 he read, It is over three years I have loved Alix H. and I constantly cherish the thought that God might let me marry her one day… But ever since camp in 1890 I have loved Little K passionately .

She was the someday. I was the here and now and perhaps beyond. But it was not until 1893, when Alix refused Niki’s first proposal of marriage, that I truly triumphed. In his journal of that year, Niki recorded the tale of his failed endeavor and included in his entry a few lines from Alix’s letter in which she proclaimed it a sin to change the belief in which I have been brought up and which I love . To marry the heir to the Russian throne she must convert to the Russian Orthodox Church and this she would not do—though I would have done so in the snap of a finger. Where do I sign? To whom do I bow? What statue do I kiss? But Alix was a Lutheran, the entire religion a reaction against the Roman Catholic Church with its spectacle, its idols, its fancy vestments, and its insistence on the necessity of a priest’s intercession to reach God. Alix could speak to God on her own in her own plain church, danke schön , in which she had just two years ago been confirmed, that sacrament as important to her as the one of marriage. How could she now, suddenly, renounce this? But she could not be Lutheran and be the future empress of Russia—the emperor stood as head of the Orthodox Church and any heir to the throne must be born of an Orthodox mother. The calendar of the Russian court year was ruled by Orthodox observances. It was impossible for the empress to be Lutheran. So Niki’s parents, who didn’t much like Alix anyway and who had been withholding their permission for the match, were pleased by Alix’s refusal to convert, although their pleasure could not approach mine, and they began suggesting instead this alliance and that, perhaps to Princess Hélène of France or to Princess Margaret of Prussia. But all this was to be considered eventually, and eventually is a long day’s ride from immediately. For now, at least, the long-haired phantom of Alix that had stood sentry over Nicholas at my bedroom window receded, whisked into the distance, and, in despair at her disappearance, Nicholas bedded the little Polish princess instead of the German one. That happened January 25, 1893. I could tell you the hour.

I cannot, of course, describe to you what it was like to make love to the tsarevich because such things are private. But his naked body impressed even the Bolsheviks who dragged it from the cold water of the mine shaft twelve miles from Ekaterinburg the day after his murder. Before they chopped him up and burned him, they marveled at how fit he was, his cheeks so red from the icy water that he looked alive. That January night with me he was alive, his body whole and warm beneath my fingers and my mouth, his limbs all stitched to their proper places, after which he recorded in his diary, Flew to my MK… am still under her spell—the pen is shaking in my hand . He was not a Pushkin, not a Lermontov, I grant you, but he was the tsarevich, and so he did not have to be.