Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy
Douglas Smith
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(Bibliothèque de Westmount)
Using three generations of the aristocratic Sheremetev family of St. Petersburg and the Golitsyns of Moscow, Smith shows that the nobility in Russia was Russia; its downfall was “the end of a long and deservedly proud tradition that created much of what we still think of today as quintessentially Russian, from the grand palaces of St. Petersburg to the country estates surrounding Moscow, from the poetry of Pushkin to the novels of Tolstoy and the music of Rachmaninov.”
Critique du Wall Street Journal
How the Noble Have Fallen
In the wake of the 1917 revolution, Russia’s once-cosseted nobility suffered just as everyone else did.
The Guardian ( journal de gauche)
Photograph: Alamy
It’s hard to pity a privileged elite… until you read this fluent account of what befell the Russian aristocracy under the Bolsheviks.