Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, daughter of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia (1895–1918)

This is an edited volume of translated diaries of Grand duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia (1895 – 1918). The diaries cover the years 1914 until 1917.

If a reader has read the wonderful Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport, then here is some of her source material and it is absorbing. Here is Olga Nikolaevna unimpressed by Carol of Romania, beginning a grownup life, and worrying about her brother Alexei Nikolaevich, the last Tsesarevich and her mother Empress Alexandra. There are intriguing glimpses of her father coming back and forth from the front, the Empress trying to run the country, arguments between the older generations of the imperial family and the terrible murder of Rasputin as the Revolution rushes towards them.

With the explosion of the First World War, Grand Duchess Olga began to nurse wounded soldiers, and, amidst the damaged bodies, she developed crushes on several of the soldiers she was nursing. Like many royalties (including all her siblings) she adores soldiers and the army. Understandably, she was furious when Austria declared war on Russia, so much so that this reader dropped her copy of this book and disturbed her cat.

There is a slight mystery in that she stopped writing her diary when the Tsar abdicated. This contrasts with her mother, the Empress Alexandra who continued to write her diary to within days of the whole family’s assassination. With the untidy end to Grand Duchess Olga’s diary the editor utilises other sources to tell as much as is possible of her heroine’s final months.

These include her father’s Tsar Nicholas II’s diary. It is a welcome conjoining of sources and often surprising. Despite his abdication, the toll of the First World War and the stress of close confinement (with all its fears but also pettiness) the Tsar records how well he slept. Touchingly he read Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and a sequel while imprisoned. Extracts from the memoirs of Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova (1884 – 1964), the lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra, and Princess Vera Ignatievna Gedroits (1870 – 1932) are included. The latter was a Russian doctor who worked with the Romanov nurses. Their responses are important to note and to this story.

The ending is inevitable, but its retelling is no less distressing and regrettable. Told through the surviving wartime diaries of Grand Duchess Olga this is a valuable record of one intelligent and sensitive young woman witnessing the catastrophic destruction of her family and her country. Thank you, Helen Azar and Westholme Publishing.… (plus d'informations)

Being a sadly bungled mishmash of diaries, correspondence, and memoirs of various people issued under the misnomer of the diary of Czar Nicholas' oldest daughter. The compiler's most disastrous mistake was to omit the diary's first decade, beginning it only in the war years, and the diary is frequently interrupted by excerpts from other people's diaries, letters, and reminiscences, most egregiously by the family's last year being narrated by the diary of the Czar himself. Olga's diary contributions are largely banal, and in any case read more like an appointment book than what we think of as a diary. These documents would be a good baseline for a biography, and one wishes that the compiler had gone that direction with this material. .… (plus d'informations)