Nicholas and Alexandra: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Modern Library (Hardcover))

Product Description

From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Robert K. Massie—also available are Peter the Great and The RomanovsIn this commanding book, Robert K. Massie, prize-winning author of Catherine the Great, sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of Imperial Russia to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble.   The Modern Library of the World’s Best Books   Nicholas and Alexandra   “A magnificent and intimate picture . . . Not only the main characters but a whole era become alive and comprehensible.”—Harper’s   Peter the Great Winner of the Pulitzer Prize   “Enthralling . . . as fascinating as any novel and more so than most.”—The New York Times Book Review   The Romanovs   “Riveting . . . unfolds like a detective story.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Review

“A larger-than-life drama.”
—Saturday Review

“A moving, rich book . . . [This] revealing, densely documented account of the last Romanovs focuses not on the great events . . . but on the royal family and their evil nemesis. . . . The tale is so bizarre, no melodrama is equal to it.”
—Newsweek

“A wonderfully rich tapestry, the colors fresh and clear, every strand sewn in with a sure hand. Mr. Massie describes those strange and terrible years with sympathy and understanding. . . . They come vividly before our eyes.”
—The New York Times
 
“An all-too-human picture . . . Both Nicholas and Alexandra with all their failings come truly alive, as does their almost storybook romance.”
—Newsday
 
“A magnificent and intimate picture . . . Not only the main characters but a whole era become alive and comprehensible.”
—Harper’s

About the Author

Robert K. Massie was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and studied American history at Yale and European history at Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He was president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991. His books include
Nicholas and Alexandra, Peter the Great: His Life and World (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for biography)
, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter,
Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea, and
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

9780679645610|excerpt

Massie / NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

1894: Imperial Russia

From the Baltic city of St. Petersburg, built on a river marsh in a far northern corner of the empire, the Tsar ruled Russia. So immense were the Tsar’s dominions that, as night began to fall along their western borders, day already was breaking on their Pacific coast. Between these distant frontiers lay a continent, one sixth of the land surface of the globe. Through the depth of Russia’s winters, millions of tall pine trees stood silent under heavy snows. In the summer, clusters of white-­trunked birch trees rustled their silvery leaves in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Rivers, wide and flat, flowed peacefully through the grassy plains of European Russia toward a limitless southern horizon. Eastward, in Siberia, even mightier rivers rolled north to the Arctic, sweeping through forests where no human had ever been, and across desolate marshes of frozen tundra.

Here and there, thinly scattered across the broad land, lived the one hundred and thirty million subjects of the Tsar: not only Slavs but Baits, Jews, Germans, Georgians, Armenians, Uzbeks and Tartars. Some were clustered in provincial cities and towns, dominated by onion-­shaped church domes rising above the white-­walled houses. Many more lived in straggling villages of unpainte