Helen Rappaport > Quotes

“Life is also meaningful without being married’, she had once told her mother, and marrying merely for the sake of it was, in her view, ‘one of the greatest mistakes a woman can make”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“History may have condemned him many times over for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt, the most exemplary of royal fathers.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“Show kindness to all, be gentle and loving, then all will love you”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“Father asks me to tell all who have remained loyal to him and those over who they might have influence, that they should not advenge him, for he has forgiven everyone and prays for them all; that they should not themselves seek revenge; that they should remember that the evil there is now is in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil that will conquer evil – only love.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“Happy voices, smiling faces, golden memories of a summer afternoon, of a world that could still laugh and talk of war as something far away.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“After all, in this life we do not know what lies before us.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“I cannot bear to think what will become of me without you – you who are my one and all, who make up all my life’,”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“Many years later he insisted, ‘They knew it was the end when I was with them’; that evening, though the words remained resolutely unspoken, everyone had a clear sense of what might lie ahead.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“It was clear to anyone who encountered the tsar and his daughters in the Alexander Park how much pride he had in his girls. ‘He was happy that people admired them. It was as though his kind blue eyes were saying to them: “Look what wonderful daughters I have.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“I cannot bear to think what will become of me without you – you who are my one and all, who make up all my life”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“St Petersburg society looked upon Grand Duchess Vladimir as the real Empress of Russia, for Alexandra now hardly ever emerged from her retirement at Tsarskoe Selo.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“So anxious was the tsar to keep the Balkan states faithful to Russia, it was asserted, that he intended ‘to utilize his four daughters, who are not to marry four Russian Grand Dukes, nor even four unorthodox Princes of Europe’. No, the four grand duchesses of Russia, so the rumour went, were to become ‘Queens of the Balkans’, with Olga a bride for Prince George of Serbia; Tatiana for Prince George of Greece; Maria for Prince Carol of Romania and Anastasia set for Prince Boris of Bulgaria – although other press reports had gone so far as to claim that Boris was in fact about to be betrothed to Olga.29”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“It’s hard thinking about where they are taking us. While you’re on the way there you think less of what lies ahead, but your heart is heavy when you start to think about how far you are from your family and if and when you might see them again. I haven’t seen my sister once in five months.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“crammed from floor to ceiling with religious images, crucifixes and ‘pathetic, cheap little tin ikons’.8 On every shelf and table top in her private sitting room the tsaritsa had set out yet more knick-knacks and photographs of her children and her darling Nicky. Personal possessions were few and surprisingly trivial – useful domestic items such as a gold thimble, sewing materials and embroidery scissors, as well as cheap toys and trinkets – ‘a china bird and a pincushion”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“For her, and for other loyal retainers and friends left behind, the memory of those four lovely sisters in happier times, of their many kindnesses, of their shared joys and sorrows – the ‘laughing faces under the brims of their big flower-trimmed hats’ – would continue to linger during the long, deadening years of communism.22 As, too, would the memory of their vivacious brother who daily challenged his life-threatening disability and refused to be cowed by it. And always, hovering in the background, a woman whose abiding virtue – and one that, perversely, destroyed them all in the end – was a fatal excess of mother love.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“I now have to choose between son and husband. But I have made my decision and I have to be strong. I must leave my boy and share my life – or my death – with my husband.17”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“Having benefited from happy days, should I not share with them the bad days?”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“the October Revolution of 1917 brought seismic changes to the city. In November, the ‘agitators’ arrived and with the support of local railway workers staged a Bolshevik coup d’état. This was swiftly followed by industrial and financial crisis as the city fell into debt and bankruptcy. Then followed arrests, shootings, confiscations and fear.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

“It was another six years, however – and only after considerable and protracted legal wrangling – before the Russian Prosecutor General’s office finally saw fit to rehabilitate Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Romanova, their parents and brother, as ‘victims of political repressions’.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“(T)here was no missing the enormous irony of the fact that from Russia--"a country where her poems were needed, like bread, she had ended up in a country where nobody needed her or anyone else's poems. Even Russian people in emigration ceased to need them," Tsvetaeva said, "And that made Russian poets miserable.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“She ought to try eating raw ham in bed in the morning before breakfast. It really does help against nausea ”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“had royal brides ever had freedom of choice?”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“On 6 January 1839 the Gazette de France made the momentous announcement of Louis Daguerre’s discovery of a photographic process,”
― Helen Rappaport, Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry

“The tsar twice went to visit Stolypin again, but on both occasions Stolypin’s wife Olga, blaming him for the attack, refused to allow Nicholas to see him.45 On 5 September Stolypin died of sepsis and Olga Stolypina declined to accept the tsar’s condolences. With martial law declared in Kiev and 30,000 troops on alert, fears spread of an anti-Jewish pogrom in retaliation, prompting many of the Jewish residents to flee the city.”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“(B)ut behind it all-- nothing: just vodka and the void. (Coco Chanel)”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“You need only to add balalaikas, sonorous songs of the Volga, a disorderly dance and there you have it--the Russian emigration.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“Now that you are a big girl, you must always be more careful and not show those feelings’, Alexandra reiterated. ‘One must not let others see what one feels inside.’15”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“When the soul is dead and the body is the only concern, there's not much to get excited about...the only thing alive for me now is our literature.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“What no one then, of course, knew was that as female children of the tsaritsa, one or all of the sisters might be carriers of that terrible defective gene – a hidden time bomb that had already begun to reverberate across the royal families of Europe. Alexandra’s elder sister Irene – who like her was a carrier and who had married her first cousin, Prince Henry of Prussia – had already given birth to two haemophiliac sons. The youngest, four-year-old Heinrich, had died – ‘of the terrible illness of the English family’, as Xenia described it – just five months before Alexey was born. In Russia they called it the bolezn gessenskikh – ‘the Hesse disease’; others called it ‘the Curse of the Coburgs’.66 But one thing was certain; in the early 1900s, the life expectancy of a haemophiliac child was only about thirteen years.67”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

“for the youngest Romanov daughter was a force of nature to whose presence it was impossible to remain indifferent. Even”
― Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra