Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina - Tapa dura

"You would need a heart of stone not to be moved by reading the story of how the Romanovs met their deaths in 1917... a new and distinctive portrait of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Empress Alexandra... In this solidly researched book, Rounding has brought a fascinatingly fresh slant to familiar material... her central story of a couple too dotty about each other to live in the real world emerges in all its tragic strangeness... Particularly moving is her account of Alix and Nicky s final days in captivity... Rounding points out that the word passion means suffering as well as sexual excitement. It would be hard to think of any royal couple in history who embody this subtle double meaning more poignantly" --Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

There are few characters in history about whom opinion has been more divided than the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and his wife the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. On one hand, they are venerated as saints, innocent victims of Bolshevik assassins, and on the other they are impugned as the unwitting harbingers of revolution and imperial collapse, blamed for all the ills that befell the Russian people in the 20th century. Theirs was also a tragic love story; for whatever else can be said of them, there can be no doubt that Alix and Nicky adored one another. Soon after their engagement, Alix wrote in her fiance's diary: "Ever true and ever loving, faithful, pure and strong as death" - words which met their fulfilment twenty-four years later in a blood-spattered cellar in Ekaterinburg. Through the letters and diaries written by the couple and by those around them, Virginia Rounding presents an intimate, penetrating, and fresh portrayal of these two complex figures and of their passion - their love and their suffering. She explores the nature and possible causes of the Empress's ill health, and examines in depth the enigmatic triangular relationship between Nicky, Alix and their 'favourite,' Ania Vyrubova, protegee of the infamous Rasputin, extracting the meaning from words left unsaid, from hints and innuendoes. The story of Alix and Nicky, of their four daughters known collectively as 'OTMA' and of their haemophiliac little boy Alexei, is endlessly fascinating, and Rounding makes these characters come alive, presenting them in all their human dimensions and expertly leading the reader into their vanished world.