Reading Anastasia and Her Sisters by Carolyn Meyer
Historical fiction about Anastasia Romanova and her sisters
In some ways, Anastasia Romanova is like any teenager anywhere, replete with crushes, squabbling sisters, working parents, the inability to cook, concerns about her weight. Then, of course, she is actually one of a very small set—one of the overprotected, sheltered daughters of a czar who is about to lose control of his country.
The Russian revolution was not kind to Anastasia Romanova and her family. Here, an image of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo credit: M. Ciavardini.
Carolyn Meyer’s historical fiction, Anastasia and Her Sisters, provides a good introduction to Russia’s ruling family and what they were up to just before the revolution. Being a princess seems like a great idea until one learns about what it actually involves—living in what amounts to high-end prisons, always pressured to behave appropriately, never able to socialize with whom one would really like to.
Anastasia and her sisters’ lives were very good—if highly sheltered—until they became very bad.
Anastasia Before and After the Revolution
Readers get a dose of what Anastasia Romanova’s life was like in her last few years as the fourth of five children—four daughters and one hemophiliac son—of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas, and his wife Alexandra. She had a mother who thought the czar ruled by divine right, a father who thought, very wrongly, that Russia would prevail in World War I, and an extended family that could convince neither of her parents about their wrongheadedness.
The Romanovs traveled fairly frequently to different palaces in the Russian empire. Here, the fountains at Peterhof in St. Petersburg, Russia. Anastasia Romanova was born at Peterhof on June 18, 1901. Photo credit: M. Ciavardini.
Anastasia and her sisters’ lives were very good—if highly sheltered—until they became very bad: imprisonment in palaces devolved to imprisonment in a series of houses in Siberia with guards who became abusive. Anastasia and her family were executed in 1918 as Russia’s revolutionaries embraced communism.
Eternal Anastasia
Why is Anastasia’s story so interesting? Because there were rumors for decades afterward that she had somehow survived the onslaught of bullets in the basement and escaped, because as the younger daughter, she may have been the most spirited one, because the Rolling Stones’ lyric “Anastasia screamed in pain” in Sympathy for the Devil kept her current.
Despite their plush surroundings, Anastasia Romanova and her family suffered a grim fate. Photo credit: M. Ciavardini.
Readers might enjoy ticking off the elements of Russian history they recall—the seasons in different palaces and on boats, the Fabergé eggs the czar gave to his family members, the hazy influence of the holy man cum scoundrel Grigory Rasputin, the efforts to keep Czarevich Alexei’s illness a secret, the failure of British royalty—relatives of Czarina Alexandra—to provide a safe haven for their deposed Russian cousins.
Ornate Russian Detail
Carolyn Meyer includes some interesting tidbits that readers of any age (her book is geared toward the 12-and-up set) might appreciate: that during the war, the Russian church banned Christmas trees as that tradition hailed from Germany, the country’s opponent in the mess that became World War I, that the quality of those Fabergé eggs bestowed by the czar became somewhat lesser as times became tougher, what became of Anastasia’s teenage crush, Gleb Botkin.
—Lori Tripoli
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Reading up on Russian history? You might like these posts:
- Remembering the Romanovs in Russia
- The End of the Romanov Dynasty
- Free Radical: The Lesson of Louise Bryant
- Looking for the Revolution in Russia
- What I Learned at Doctor Zhivago’s Revolution