From Czar's Palace to Taxi Stand

"After the Romanovs

By Helen Rappaport

St. Martin's, 317 pages, $29.99

'Paris is full of Russians," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1922 soon after arriving in the French capital. "They are drifting along . . . in a childish sort of hopefulness that things will somehow be all right, which is quite charming when you first encounter it and rather maddening after a few months."

The city was indeed full of Russians at the time, tens of thousands who had fled first the violence of the revolution and civil war and then the repression of the new Soviet state. Although often assumed to be nothing but a collection of dispossessed aristocrats, the pitiful jetsam of a sunken world, these "White Russians," as they came to be known, drew from a wide cross-section of society and represented a broad range of political beliefs. What they all shared, as Helen Rappaport writes in her entertaining and, at times, heart-wrenching book "After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris From the Belle Epoque Through Revolution and War," was a fierce hatred of the Bolsheviks and longing for home.

Ms. Rappaport, a prolific historian and highly regarded Romanov expert, unveils a Paris in which Russians had long played a prominent role. In the years before World War I, members of the Romanov family, together with their aristocratic kinsmen, had made the city their playground, where they abandoned themselves to what one contemporary described as "reckless extravagance." But it wasn't just moneyed bad behavior that the Russians brought with them: there had been art too. "The name Sergey Diaghilev," Ms. Rappaport reminds us, "has become synonymous with Paris in the 1900s." His Ballets Russes conquered the city, creating a fad for all things Russian. Many of the great names of Russian art and culture could be found there -- Igor Stravinsky, Feodor Chaliapin, Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Akhmatova and Marc Chagall.

Diaghilev had been drawn to Paris for the greater freedom it offered him as an artist. It was for the same promise of freedom that a squat, balding man with a bulging forehead and intense manner could be spotted reading in the Bibliotheque Nationale or playing chess at the Cafe du Lion. Lenin had escaped Russia to plot revolution and ended up living in Paris for over three years, the longest time he spent in any Western European city. He was not alone. Russia's revolutionaries had turned Paris into their headquarters. They were all there -- Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Bundists -- arguing, scheming and waiting.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, rich Russians returned home, followed three years later by the revolutionaries. The revolution's first targets, the czarist elite, soon found themselves on the run for their lives. These "former people" formed the initial wave of emigrants to wash up on the banks of the Seine. They arrived with nothing more than they could carry, most of them certain that wealth in the form of jewels would keep them afloat until the Bolsheviks collapsed, which, they presumed, would be any day. Yet even before the last diamond brooch had been hawked, it had become clear that they would not be going back any time soon and were now facing that most horrendous of fates: finding work.

The women (perhaps not surprisingly) coped much better than the men. Many, like Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, knew needlework. She bought herself, on credit, a Singer sewing machine and got busy. Coco Chanel was an early patron and buyer of the grand duchess's embroidery, and before long Maria launched her own clothing line, Kitmir. Other woman followed her example: by the mid-30s Russian emigrees had established 27 fashion houses.

The men struggled to find their place. The impoverished aristocrats struck Chanel as "diminished, almost emasculated by their poverty in exile." Behind their still- elegant appearance one could make out "nothing -- just vodka and the void." Old grandees succumbed to "drastic proletarianization" and took jobs as waiters, porters, freight handlers and laborers. About 5,000 Russians found employment at the Renault car factory at Billancourt.

Driving a taxi, however, was the preferred job for most men given the autonomy and independence it afforded. Their numbers grew so large they even started their own Russian-language newspaper, Russkii shofer (Russian Driver). One of drivers was the writer Gaito Gazdanov, who drove all night so he could work on his novels and stories during the day.

Ms. Rappaport's treatment of the various writers who ended up in Paris is one of her book's many strengths. She writes with sensitivity of Gazdanov, Nina Berberova, Teffi, and especially Ivan Bunin, one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1933 and the voice for "Russia Abroad." Few of these names are remembered, and even fewer, unfortunately, are still read, but "After the Romanovs" brings them marvelously back to life.

The old divisions of the homeland -- social, economic, political -- didn't fade. The emigres' shared loss and common hardship did not bring them together. The Romanovs fought over who was now the rightful head of the family; politicians argued over what was to be done about Soviet Russia; writers quarreled about nearly everything. Suffering rarely ennobles the spirit.

Berberova wrote of the "concentrated but airless space in which we lived." The sense of longing for the past was overwhelming. Ms. Rappaport comments on how most in the Russian colony were dogged by a "vein of nostalgia, a deep, fatalistic yearning for the world that they had lost." The frenzied attempt to re-create this bygone world with Russian-themed restaurants, cabarets and clubs, with Russian-language newspapers, journals and books, with Russian Orthodox churches, with Russian cemeteries could never fill that hole. In the end, every emigre had to ask themselves the question that Berberova once put to her fellow writer Zinaida Gippius: "What is dearer to you: Russia without freedom or freedom without Russia?" They, and most others, chose freedom. Some, however, like the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, chose Russia.

She left France for the Soviet Union in 1939. Two months after her arrival, her daughter was arrested by the secret police. Shortly after that, they arrested and shot her husband. In 1941, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. "Can one return to a / House which has been razed?" one of her poems had asked.

It's one of the sad ironies of Russian history that the country's so-called proklyatye voprosy -- accursed questions -- never get answered. Once again, many Russians are asking themselves the exact question Berberova posed a century ago.

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Mr. Smith's books include "Rasputin" and "The Russian Job."" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: From Czar's Palace to Taxi Stand
Smith, Douglas. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 19 Feb 2022: C.11.