After their father abdicated, they left the grand palaces, but in exile they remained cooped up inside houses, reading and going for walks in gardens. For aside from a stint Tatiana and Olga spent working as nurses during World War I, the sisters remained segregated from the worst excesses of Russian reality almost until the very end of their lives. A striking feature of the book is how relatively sheltered the sisters’ lives remained even after the Russian Revolution. It’s as if 100 years from now an author were to collate contemporary news reports about Prince William, Kate Middleton and their son into an epic tome viewing early 21st century history from the point of view of regal domesticity.īut it’s not all pointless. There is a lot more of this in the book, a great accumulation of it. We also learn that on a trip to England in 1910, Olga and Tatiana bought some postcards and also “treated themselves to some perfume from Beken & Son’s pharmacy.” Maria and Anastasia, however - gasp - wore their hair down. We see, almost for the first time, their journey from a childhood of enormous privilege, throughout which they led a very sheltered and largely simple life, to young womanhood - their first romantic crushes, their hopes and dreams, the difficulty of coping with a mother who was a chronic invalid and a haemophiliac brother, and, latterly, the trauma of the revolution and its terrible consequences.Ĭompellingly readable, meticulously researched and deeply moving, Four Sisters gives these young women a voice, and allows their story to resonate for readers almost a century after their death.How unscintillating are the details Rappaport includes? We learn that at a ball given on her 16th birthday, Olga wore her hair up, as did her sister Tatiana.

Drawing on their own letters and diaries, she paints a vivid picture of their lives in the dying days of the Romanov dynasty. In Four Sisters acclaimed biographer Helen Rappaport offers readers the most authoritative account yet of the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. Their crime: to be the daughters of the last Tsar and Tsaritsa of All the Russias. In Four Sisters acclaimed biographer Helen Rappaport offers readers the most authoritative account yet of the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. Together with their parents and their thirteen-year-old brother, they were all brutally murdered. The eldest was twenty-two, the youngest only seventeen.

Click here to purchase from Rakuten Kobo On 17 July 1918, four young women walked down into the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg.

The romanov 4 sisters