Anastasia

Frances Welch's A Romanov Fantasy: Life at the Court of Anna Anderson tells the story of Anna Anderson, nee Franziska Schanzkowska, who claimed to be the murdered Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov. The story reminds one alternatively of Grey Gardens, the documentary (then remade movie and now play) of two Kennedy relations who lived in obscure, chaotic, yet strangely regal squalor for decades, and the Return of Martin Guerre (remade as Sommersby in America).

In fact, Anderson, like the protagonists of Grey Gardens (whose claim to blue blood was more verifiable), had over 40 cats at one point in her life, though they were all killed in an attempt to clean up her residence. The premise of Natalie Zemon Davis' history, The Return of Martin Guerre, is that pre-modern French society had no easy way to fix the identity of villagers. If the "real" Martin Guerre died in a foreign war, an imposter had a reasonable chance of taking his place because early modern French technology did not include photographs or even, by and large, mirrors.

The strange career of Anna Anderson, who lived into the 1980s, reveals that modern and postmodern technologies have not entirely erased identity confusion. For Anderson found new and sometimes very distinguished backers throughout her long life. For instance, at least one world famous anthropologist, and one expert in graphology, testified to the veracity of Anderson's claims. The fact that Ms. Anderson apparently knew no Russian whatsoever, was born five years apart from Anastasia, and began her Russian identity phase claiming to be a different Grand Duchess altogether, didn't unduly upset her supporters.

This book also resembles Woody Allen's masterpiece about historical identity, Zelig. In Zelig, a character loses his sense of self and, as a consequence, becomes a human chameleon, someone who can adapt himself to any social setting, as well as an international media sensation. Anna Anderson's life resembles that of Zelig's in many of its more sensational particulars. Anderson, only the most successful of dozens of other Romanov imposters, became a celebrity who, at various times in her life, was able to go hop-scotching from one European castle to the next. Movies, books, and plays cast her in the central role.

The fact that Anderson possessed few attractive personality traits--she was self-centered, rude, ungracious, paranoid, highly emotional, vindictive, mercurial, and intellectually limited--did not generally count against her. Indeed, her supporters found these characteristics to be entirely consistent with royalty, and especially with the young Anastasia, who was known to be a willful child. The Zelig aspects of Anderson's case extend to her somewhat strange relationship to the NAZI Party (Zelig eventually appeared at Nazi rallies despite his Jewish heritage), as well as her repeated interactions with other celebrities such as Rachmaninoff and, most interestingly, Rasputin's daughter, who had been living as a circus performer in Berlin.

A Romanov Fantasy deserves to be made into yet another movie on the life of Anna Anderson. The movie would have to explore the possibility of the transmigration of souls, of the possibly reincarnation of Anastasia as Anna Anderson. But of course the story makes sense even without supernatural explanations. As Frances Welch reminds us at the onset of her story, Anastasia was murdered in the most reprehensible way imaginable. She and her entire family, along with the father of one of Anna Anderson's most talented and admirable champions, were murdered in a chaotic and inefficient bloodbath.

The murder of the tsar, tsarina, and innocent tsarevich and four grand duchesses became the very symbol of communist depravity for large segments of the world. Although the tsar had been guilty of political incompetence, the utter destruction of his family was self-evidently inexcusable. And given the long history of tsar imposters, it was inevitable that at least some portion of the Russian diaspora--and indeed the world at large--would invent a survivor. As Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic reminds us in his book about Gothic literary conventions, crime leads to guilt and guilt is soon transmogrified into ghostly apparition. Anna Anderson was such an apparition. It hardly mattered whether or not she was aware of the fact that she was not, physically at least, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. One way or the other, Romanov ghosts would have found a vehicle to haunt the Western imagination.

Women in Exile

Thus far this blog hasn’t made use of oral history to map the history of the Revolution. Yet oral history helps to see how the Revolution as an abstract phenomenon manifested itself in the particular. In history, it’s the little things that sometimes matter more than the big things. Is it more important to know what happened to autocracy or is it more relevant to ask what happened to windjammers, snow-filled food storage well, oil lamps, dachas, public parks filled with attendant-operated “tricks and follies,” full-length dress school uniforms, French-speaking nannies, and German tutors? Another advantage of oral history is that it helps us to recover the voices of women, whose stories often unfold in the context of the private sphere as opposed to the more masculine public sphere. Although women haven’t produced a large percentage of the documentary evidence for large portions of history, their life experiences are no less important for that.

Memories of Revolution: Russian Women Remember isn’t an objective book and it’s not even about ordinary Russians. The ten women who sat for interviews with Frances Welch and Elena Snow were extraordinary. They were exiles, almost all White Russian exiles, and all grew up in considerable privilege before 1917. One was 98 at the time of the interviews. The stories are remarkable. Some of the exiles knew famous people and participated in public life on a political or artistic level. Leo Tolstoy helped to arrange the adoption of one, who remained in Tolstoyan circles throughout her life. She even painted one of the most famous pictures we have of the master. Another woman’s father served on the Tsar’s personal yacht and went to a school that was tied to the life of the Tsar’s court. She herself became a sculptor of note, soon tied by marriage to a revolutionary of some note.

The histories of these women—as told by the women themselves—shed light on a many facets of Russian history. We learn about how aristocratic and bourgeois families operated, in terms of dating rituals, entertainment, musical preferences, education, servant support, nourishment, and technology. Most poignantly, we see how the trauma of history works. As the book’s authors assert, many of these women see the pre-revolutionary period as an idyllic period, never to be repeated. 1917 came with a fury. Fathers and brothers and male cousins were often murdered or tortured or killed on the battlefield. Properties were confiscated. Many were put to work. Some came close to starvation. Many were jailed, their wives left to plead that as admirals they had at least treated their men with fraternal love and respect.

The book is most powerful in its understatement. As one women remembered, one year she was too young to participate in a school dance. She watched as the older girls danced with elite, uniformed cadets, and thought: “Oh well, next year I’ll be allowed to dance. But next year never came.” Another woman recalled her mother devoting specified days to writing letters for illiterate hired help. The letters often listed each and every member of the letter-sender’s village, including all of their patronymics. The story-teller recalls asking her mother why they had to write such monotonous letters all of the time. The mother explained that if the letter-sender neglected to mention the name of a single member of the peasant commune, he or she would be gravely insulted.

One woman remembers how the Bolshevik victory resulted in the wholesale sale of valuable private property on the black market to avoid the danger of outright confiscation. This woman, relocated to London, believed she had purchased some of Catherine the Great’s earrings and wore these earrings most of her life. One woman said she lost touch with her peasant nanny but then rediscovered her in Paris two decades later. The nanny immediately asked her how old she was, since she only knew her age in relationship to the woman she raised.

It’s remarkable really, to hear these women describe the way their lives were overturned. One minute their servants are preparing picnics for them, the next they are impoverished, landless, crowded, unemployed, and under suspicion. Some of the women remember hearing about the political events as they unfolded. They remember hearing when the First World War broke out, when Rasputin was murdered and they allegedly found his shoe in the Neva river, when the February Revolution occurred and people stood around talking on the streets about what should happen next, when the Bolsheviks disarmed troops who were loyal to the Provincial Government, when Bolshevik forces started hunting down opponents, etc.

One woman remembered seeing the tsar’s girls riding merrily in a troika before the Revolution, then seeing the tsar shoveling snow for exercise and being told that he was a prisoner in his own palace. The same woman remembers living next to Gorky who, she said, bothered the children by trying unsuccessfully to play with them. Most revealing, this woman also remembers that her aunt was sent away to the gulag where she survived owing to her talent as a painter. For two decades, the woman employed her talents to draw portraits of a man she must have hated—Stalin--for Communist officials.