June 24, 2005

Letters from Nicky to Sunny. Or, if you want to be stuffy about it, from Tsar Nicholas II to his wife Alexandra, written between September 1914 and March 1917. With historical notes.

Some may find these touching; he clearly is madly in love with his wife and needs to be in constant contact with her. Others will see in them an appalling self-absorption and indifference to anything outside the family circle. I myself fall in the latter camp. Here's the full text of what he wrote her just before signing the deed of abdication: "2 March, 1917. Arrived here at dinner-time. Hope that everybody's health is better and that we shall soon see each other. Close embrace. NICKY." (Via Plep.)

posted by languagehat 19 years ago
  • I don't care what anyone else says (or doesn't say) -- great post, languagehat!
  • This is a great post. Do we know what language the original letters were written in? I seem to remember that French was the language spoken in most royal courts, but am ignorant as to what intimate language was spoken between family members.
  • What's "snooglepuss" in Russian?
  • Excellent post cheers
  • Squid -- I seem to remember something that Nick and Alex wrote to each other in English, that that was the one language they had in common. But I leave it to languagehat to correct me. What I DO know, though, is that the czar didn't have a secretary, and that he would prepare all his own letters and envelopes himself. Running a state the size of Russia, no wonder things ended up so badly for him.
  • Do we know what language the original letters were written in? Good question, and I had meant to check on this but somehow forgot to. Like the Capt., I had the idea they wrote in English, but wasn't sure. For what it's worth, the Library Journal review here says "Nicholas... kept his diary in Russian and wrote to his wife in English." And I did a "search inside the book" on Massie's biography and found on p. 66: "He spoke Russian to his children and wrote in Russian to his mother; only to the Empress Alexandra, whose Russian was awkward, did he speak and write in English." So I guess that answers that. You'd think the website would make that clear, wouldn't you?
  • Really great post, cheers.
  • Snooglepuss-ski.
  • Snooglepuss-ovich?
  • Where do these come from? Where are the original letters? Who transcribed them?
  • Ah, Squid, my leetle snooglepuss-ovich.
  • Where do these come from? From the introduction:
    The letters of the Tsar and Tsarina were preserved by the Bolshevik government after the Revolution. In the first years after the Communist victory there was a lot of interest in these letters and journalists eagerly printed excerpts from these letters. The letters in this online edition come from "The Letters of the Tsar to the Tsaritsa, 1914-1917", published in 1929 by John Lane, The Bodley Head, LTD. I have left the original notes from the original publication, with two deletions due to the bad quality of my reprint edition which made these two passages unreadable.
    There's a (doubtless expensive) modern edition; the 1929 edition can be yours for a hundred quid.
  • This train has no sisters, only men. Alas, if only Nicky had not added those last two words! When I was very small I used to think the family was called Roam Enoughs.
  • I find your lack of cross referencing with James Joyce's letters disturbing... M.L.C.