Apologies to anyone who has continued to follow my blog and noticed a prolonged absence of posts! It has been a busy few months for me both at work and in my personal life. To return to form, -ish, I will write some brief comments on Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs. Unlike a conventional history of one of the great powers of Europe, Montefiore writes almost like a gossip columnist. Interspersed with bureaucratic missives and detailed accounts of political debates are recountings of interior design choices of tsars’ mistresses or a note on the color of a soldier’s eyes. It takes what could be a dry-as-dust chronicle of some six hundred-odd years of history and enlivens it as though watching a very long, meticulously researched miniseries on a finer cable network.
The actual history is very intriguing, as prior to this book most of my knowledge of Russia has been either its Soviet and present incarnations, or very limited exposure through literature, music, visual arts, and some notional popular accounts of individual Romanov rulers. Montefiore’s real gift is his use of personal letters, diaries, and other records to humanize these otherwise inscrutable autocrats and their complex and hidebound Empire. It is like learning all of the details of the helm of the ship and its officers in the aftermath of a mutiny of passengers and staff. The Romanovs, it could be said, were ordinary people, too.
Dictionopolis 