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    Visits to the Imperial Court
    Visits to the Imperial Court
    Visits to the Imperial Court
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Visits to the Imperial Court

    By Olga Ilyin

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    Olga Ilyin (Lita) recounts her experiences as a young girl being brought up frugally in the midst of family plenty. After her mother died, she was cared for by her fathers sister, the idealistic Aunt Katya. Aunt Anna, her mothers sister, a career lady-in-waiting at the Russian Imperial Court in St. Petersburg, loved to invite Lita for longish summer visits. To Lita, the court was a brilliant, elegant, delightful world. Yet even she felt this world to be somehow flawed, even unreal.
    The flaw was incarnated in the demonic Gregory Rasputin, whom Olga encountered several times. Her description of Rasputin and his behavior is a small but no doubt valuable contribution to history; but in this novelized memoir, Rasputin also becomes an essential symbolic element in the authors story of her own spiritual crisis, as World War I casts its heavy shadow, and as the Expulsion from Paradise nears.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateFeb 18, 2014
    ISBN9781491856970
    Visits to the Imperial Court
    Author

    Olga Ilyin

    Olga Ilyin, (nicknamed Lita, née Boratynski), grew up in pre-revolutionary Russia in a liberal-minded, talented family. She had a serious gift for poetry, which in Russia is a popular fine art to this day. She was tutored in the sciences and liberal arts, and spoke French as fluently as Russian. Her studies at the University of Kazan were interrupted by WWI and the Revolution. This idyllic phase of her life ended when as a volunteer nurse she tended wounded soldiers. In 1917, she married Kiril Ilyin, a cavalry officer. A year later, as the civil war began, Kiril volunteered for service with the anti-communist “Whites.” Their son, Boris, was born just as the Reds stormed their previously freed city of Kazan, and nine days later, Olga and her child became homeless refugees. After a harrowing four years of separation, the three were miraculously reunited outside the USSR and in 1923 were able to come to America. There, a second son was born, just as the Great Depression began and Kiril was diagnosed with terminal tuberculosis. Miraculously he survived. Meanwhile, to support the family, Olga started a dress salon and turned her talents to designing clothing. Although her poetic gift had disappeared during all the stress she had experienced, she successfully turned to writing autobiographical novels. She died in 1991, leaving some unpublished memoires, including Visits to the Imperial Court.

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      Book preview

      Visits to the Imperial Court - Olga Ilyin

      AuthorHouse™ LLC

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.authorhouse.com

      Phone: 1-800-839-8640

      © 2014 Olga Ilyin. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

      Published by AuthorHouse 02/14/2014

      ISBN: 978-1-4918-5699-4 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4918-5698-7 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4918-5697-0 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901272

      Book cover design by Ilyin Studios.

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Epilogue

      Chapter 1

      T he problem arose for my aunts with the matter of the mended sleeve on one of my dresses. Aunt Anna, my late mother’s sister, said to my father’s sister Aunt Katya with a smile of sweet apology, You must forgive me, Katya, but I think that it would be best not to take that blue dress of Lita’s to St. Petersburg when she comes to visit me in August. I noticed that it has a small patch on the elbow. Even more gently, but also more firmly than before, Aunt Anna said, However, this problem is very easy to solve, because a very nice French store with dresses for little girls has just opened in Petersburg, and there we can get a few things for her."

      Both my aunts were sitting in the drawing room of our Sinniy Bor country house, by the windows which opened on the broad veranda; both could see me sitting there outside, close to the windows, with a volume of Milton’s Paradise Lost on my lap, looking at Gustav Dore’s illustrations. But as I was not supposed to interrupt the conversation of older people, they behaved as if I was not there at all.

      This was in early summer of 1906. Aunt Anna sat there arrow-like, her delicate profile slightly tilted. Against the green and lavender curtains of the drawing room her gossamer black dress outlined the free set of her shoulders, the slimness of her waist. Aunt Katya, close to her in her dull but cool-looking gray linen was bending over some embroidery. Both still wore semi-mourning for my mother although Mother had died over two years before.

      You see, Anna, Aunt Katya’s tone became especially warm and penetrating, and now she dropped her embroidery on her lap. Why should a little girl have so many dresses? Why spend money on superfluities when this money could sustain some needy person for perhaps as long as several months? Besides, no one in both our families believes in spoiling children by making them accustomed to luxury.

      In this case, however, this is not luxury, but rather a responsibility, Aunt Anna said firmly and gently.

      I know. As long as she will be staying with you she should be dressed according to court etiquette. Still, there is something that goes against my grain in making certain expenditures and gestures to please the Grand Dukes, which we, as a matter of principle, would not make for ourselves.

      I was gazing for the hundredth time at Dore’s illustration in which a wrathful God was in the process of chasing a crestfallen, naked Adam and a resentful Eve out of his Paradise, but at the same time there lurked before me the vision of myself in a gossamer, frilly dress with a pale pink satin bow in my hair, an outfit I had seen worn by a girl my age at a name’s-day party. However, it was clear to me that I would never have such a dress, probably, and that Aunt Anna would be the loser in this sweet-sounding controversy.

      I sensed that both aunts were almost evenly matched in willpower and persistence, although in certain ways Aunt Anna was the stronger of the two; still there were reasons in our family why Aunt Katya’s judgments would outweigh Aunt Anna’s: it was according to my mother’s own wish that after her death it be Aunt Katya and not her own sister, Aunt Anna, who should come to live with us, to assume the care of my two brothers and me and run my father’s household. As to Aunt Anna, she had been at court since her early youth, as a lady-in-waiting to the Tsar’s aunt, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, and had been coming to stay with our family in Sinniy Bor only for brief spans in summer. The two styles of living were quite different.

      I knew that the court life of Aunt Anna was indeed full of social functions, balls, dinners, and sumptuous receptions at which she had to be present. Still her chief duties included all the benevolent work of the Grand Duchess, who was patroness of various hospitals, orphanages and schools, as were most highly-placed ladies in society. Much of this work really lay on Aunt Anna’s shoulders.

      Both aunts were unmarried. Aunt Katya simply had never met the man she could marry. It was different with Aunt Anna. Several times I had overheard the older people wonder why a woman so beautiful—blue eyes, dark-haired and graceful, moreover a finished singer with a melting contralto voice—had never found anyone whom she would choose to marry. Once someone said that her real calling was monastic life, and that it was characteristic of her to have taken to the rigorous discipline of the court in the same spirit as she would have taken monastic vows. I also heard that she, now in her late thirties, had always kept her admirers at arms’ length, and cut them off short at the slightest expression of their feelings.

      Her father, whom she idolized, had died of a massive heart attack when he discovered, during a trip abroad, that his trusted business manager had failed him in the most dismal way, and that the whole edifice of his shipping business had collapsed in one stroke. At the time, my mother was fourteen, Aunt Anna sixteen. Their older brother Paul had recently graduated from the Corps of Pages to join one of the most brilliant regiments of the Guard and had married a girl to whom the family referred as very smart but very worldly. Since his marriage, Aunt Anna’s relationship with him had become strained; she felt she had lost him too. The latest shock, the death of my mother whom she adored, and then recently the loss of her own mother, would have left no hope of any personal joys for Aunt Anna if she had not automatically transferred her devotion from my mother to me. Serene as she appeared, loved dearly by the Oldenburgs, admired in court circles, Aunt Anna, I felt, was profoundly sad and lonely. So it seemed to me that Aunt Katya, who was always sorry for the suffering and ready to run to their help, ought not to interfere with Aunt Anna’s wishes. She should try to please her, I thought. And I would have my new dresses.

      However, this was their business, not mine.

      You see, Katya, Aunt Anna was saying, before, when Lita came to Petersburg and stayed with my mother in her house, it was a different matter. Now she will have to stay with me at the Palace and have lunch and dinner with the grown-ups, and the Grand Duchess really wants her to, since she knows how brief my times are together with Lita. This means changing for dinner daily. As you told me, she will have seven or eight dresses with her, altogether. But to wear the same thing even two days in succession is not… customary. Even for a little girl. As you know, both our luncheons and dinners are elaborate affairs with a great variety of illustrious guests present: members of the Imperial Family, foreign dignitaries, at times the Emperor and Empress. And for me… Aunt Anna paused, looking for the right word, "for me it’s important that Lita’s appearance create the best impression, on the Emperor and Empress especially.

      In the way she had leaned on the word important, I felt the force of her love for me. For me, who did not entirely belong to her; and I wished with my whole heart that everything be done the way Aunt Anna wanted it. I also was amazed by her supposition that I might make any sort of impression on the Emperor and Empress. It was for the Tsars to produce an impression on their subjects, not vice versa; and moreover, it had never occurred to me

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