Some extracts on Olga Feodorovna from "The White Crow", a book on GD Nikolay Mikhailovich,her son, a historian
" She was quite intelligent and something of a bluestocking. Her letters to her son Niki frequently attest to this bent, and she may have been the guiding force that directed her eldest son into a life of a scholar. "Don`t forget to send the new books", she wrote to him in the late sumer of 1888, " Also, if it exists, a small edition of Moliere".
She was "the iron will of the family, the stern disciplinarian, a typical German matriarch, while her husband seems to have shown what little parental compassion and tenderness the children received".
"Her motherly instincts were virtually non-existent".
"She was sharp-tongued, very critical of others, and a rather neurotic hypochondriac, who complined endlessly about her health. She dominated her family, and one gathers that she henpecked her rather mild-mannered husband. She was not warn to her children and was quite frank in her appraisal of them. She could be rather cruelly unkind, as she was to her son Mikhail,whom she repeatedly told was stupid... Her younger son Alexander remembered as he was departing ror a three-year naval cruise she directed an ensign on his ship `to take care of the boy`.Alexander was surprised and touched ... but noted that his mother ...showed him very little love when as a child he needed it most."
While her husband treated his children equally, probably showing his favoritism to his only daughter Anastasia, GD Olga Feodorovna "was openly partial". "Niki was unquestionably her favorite child, the one on whom she would bestow whatver maternal affection she was able to show, and her favoritism was known even outside the family".
