Russian Emigrants Quotes

“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

“His wife, "who only demanded of life that it should amuse her".”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“Paul and Olga enjoyed a gilded exile with their two daughters, in a home created together that was "worthy of a Pompadour or a Du Barry.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“The first thing he noticed with fascination was the shape of Lenin's "amazing skull"; filled to bursting with erudition and ideas, it "made one think not of anatomy but of architecture.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“(Maria Pavlovna)'s "Russian life was over." She and her kind had, she sadly admitted, "outlived our epoch and were doomed." "Everything disappears into the past, everything which is good everything which is bright and the only thing that's left is the terrible reality.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“(T)hey talked as only Russians can. Not listening to each otehr, repeating the self-same argument over and over again, excelling in pantomime and reaching the uppermost heights of drama.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“Their boat was covered in snow and looked unreal, like a "construction of crystal and sugar, with stalactites of ice hanging from every protrusion.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“The Bolsheviks are coming, like Atilla, like clouds of locusts. They are destroying everything in their path. (Vera Muromtseva)”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“We lived side by side with life but were afraid of meeting it. (Maria Pavlovna)”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“(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

“Que faire?' became proverbial among the émigré community in Paris, because it encapsulated their sense of hopelessness and the Russian fatalistic attitude toward life.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“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

“(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

“Anecdotes are funny when you tell them," said Teffi. "But when you live through them it's a tragedy. And my life is one big joke-- in other words, a tragedy.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“And like Lot's wife, I am frozen. I have turned into a pillar of salt forever, and I shall forever go on looking, seeing my own land slip softly, slowly away from me.”
― Helen Rappaport