AFTER THE ROMANOVS

The bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters returns with the story of the Russian aristocrats who made Paris their home after fleeing the Bolshevik coup.

Early on, Rappaport, an expert on imperial Russian history, notes how “the Russian discovery of the French capital…goes back to the time of…Peter the Great, who made a visit to Paris in 1717 and fell in love with Versailles.” This affinity for Paris reached its apex during the Belle Époque, when the excesses of Russian aristocrats became notorious around town. “The French press,” writes the author, “regularly titillated readers with stories of the vices and eccentricities of the grand dukes.” The events in Russia from 1905 onward caused increasing anxiety for the aristocracy and fear for safety of the extended Romanov family. At the same time, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company was storming Paris with its shocking modernist music and dance, and other artists—e.g., poet Ilya Ehrenburg and painters Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine—were “electrified,” as Ehrenburg put it, by the abundant culture of Paris. The author delineates the plight of both the Russian elite, who had to abandon their great wealth in land and palaces while pining for a restoration of the monarchy, and the truly impoverished immigrants who drove taxis, took up needlework in Chanel’s fashion house—“twenty-seven fashion houses were established in Paris by Russian emigres between 1922 and 1935”—or toiled at dozens of other low-paying jobs. At the time, the new arrivals were often characterized as quarrelsome or prone to dissent. As in her previous histories, Rappaport drives her lively narrative with minibiographies of notable characters, including Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin and noted humorist Teffi. Many of these artists’ lives were stunted well into the 1930s by enforced dispossession and poverty. Throughout, the author, a consummate historian, displays her deep research into the era, the city, and its denizens.

A culturally vibrant account of Russians uprooted to Paris during a tumultuous time.