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« on: August 08, 2010, 07:40:24 AM »
I enjoyed this book, because it was a first hand rather than just a biographer's account, although the Vorres biography also offers a lot of Olga's perspective, too. Royal memoirs of that time were not supposed to be tell alls, at least in the way we expect memoirs to be today. So I don't see the style of this memoir that Alixz refers to as a reflection of Olga A herself, but rather of a reflection of the times, much as the last poster says. Olga A's memoirs here are not that much diffferent than the style of other royal memoirs, although the memoirs of both Marie P, daughter of Grand Duke Paul, and the memoirs of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch, were more colorful than Olga's. Okga was more revealing of her true opinions, thoughts, and feelings about her past/ people in it, when she talked to Vorres than she is here.. but that's not surprising. The thing that stood out most about this book to me was her account of her escape out of Russia after the Revolution and all that she had to go through, along with her family.
What was interesting to me was how much she mentions intuition in this part of the book, as she describes how she and her family had to make choices about where to go next after the Revolution had happened. It seems she relied a lot on inutuition during this difficult oart of her life story. That made me wonder about Nicholas II and his immediate family, and how much they relied on intuition during their last days. They, unlike Olga, could not use intuition to decide where to go next- they were imprisoned. But, I wonder, and wondered more after reading this book, just how much intuition told them about what would theor final fate.I liked this book, and think it's useful to read along with the Vorres book. This book's shortcomings, (like where Olga A seems to pass over or gloss over things and focus on the positive, without mentioning aspects of the truth that were negative), seem to be in line with other royal memoirs of tha time.
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