Depression/Melancholy/Nervous breakdown during WWI

[matushka]

And what about the Bittner's memories? Where can we read them entirely?

Elisabeth and Janet, I was impressed with your previous analyses of Olga's behaviour and his reasons. Impressed also because every of the reason you gave, every of your observations could find a confirmation in this Chebotareva's diary we are talking about. Some examples:
- she was seriously emotionnaly disturbed. All along the diary: "Olga has again a tragical face" "Olga was especially sad today" "Poor Olga" "Olga stay strong with difficulty" and so on.
- an unexpressed "rivality" with her sister Tatiana: this dialog, I already quoted. TN: "why did you not ask to Mama this morning?" ON: "Why did you not ask? You are considered as the cleverest in the family, aren't you?" The entire diary is something as, I would say", a celebration of Tatiana's qualities. Tatiana is a wonderful nurse, Tatiana is so poetic, Tatianochka is so sweet and so on. About Olga... Valentina Ivanovna liked her very much, but, without this enthousiasism. Possibly ON felt that.
- Olga realized something of the political situation.
After Rasputin's murder, she said (according to Chebotareva) "Perhaps was it necessary to kill him, but not in such a savage way. And what about the family, nothing to say. I am ashamed to think they are our relatives".
- The problem of love, of possibles and impossibles mariages. Valentina C. speak about her tender (but not really serious) feelings for Chakh-Bagov, how sad she was when he went to the army, how happy when he came back. An other episode. At the beginning of 1917, the Rumanian family came to Russia. "Olga was especially sad last days. [I asked] "Are the visitors responsible for that?" "Oh no, there is at the moment no danger, we are in war".

And so on. I would like to suggest an other nuance thanks to another document, the shorts memories of the officer Pavlov, who was in the lazaret in 1916-17. He speaks about Olga and Tatiana, discribes them. For him, Olga was a personnification of feminity, of tenderness, kindness. He knew that when he had problems, darks ideas, questions, he could ask or relate her all he wanted. Tatiana, on the contrary, was a wonderful sister, with a masculine and energic character, but, he wrote, when he was sad, his first movement was to adress to ON, not to TN.
Two last remarks. In the Chebotareva's diary there are also 2 or 3 funny stories about Nicolas helping his daughters in their jokes, perhaps will Sarushka or Georgy translate it one day...?
And, about Volkonsky, the man who did not smile to Olga at the comittee. I read the excellent report of Count Shulenburg about his work with Alexandra Feodorovna (he was part in charge for her charity work before and at time of war). He knew Volkonsky, and write that, on his opinion, it was only Olga's error: perhaps Volkonsky did not see her, or had this days difficulties or was ill. V. Volkonsky, he wrote, was a good servant of Her Majesty, and he can't believe he was rude with Olga Nikolaevna. Well, it is only his opinion...

[Georgiy]

Matushka - where can we find Pavlov's memoirs?

[hikaru]

In internet, I suppose
I think that I have read them in the net.

[Elisabeth]

Matushka, thank you so much for sharing with us those excerpts from Chebotareva's diary. I am especially grateful because I do not own a copy of this diary and have no idea how to get one. Has it only been published in Russia? Is it a separate book or part of a larger work?

For anyone who has been here longer than the rest of us, or who is especially observant, perhaps you remember a discussion in an earlier thread about Olga smashing a small table... mention of this incident was originally made in (I think) one of the daughters' letters to her father at the front. I wish I could remember more details... of course if it was Anastasia who wrote about it to her father the whole thing could have been just a joke!

[Janet_W.]

Elisabeth, I think Olga deliberately broke the table by sitting on it--does that ring a bell with anyone? My memory is a little hazy on this matter, but if I recall it was one of "those episodes" which seemed outwardly funny to those who were there but to us is evidence of yet another "acting out" espisode.

Anyway, I thank you so much, Matushka, for more translations. The dialogue between Tatiana and Olga is so typical of sisters! We know they got along quite well, of course, but everyone has their arguments now and then--or, at the very least, their peevish episodes.

I do echo Georgiy re: the desire to know more about Pavlov's memoirs. And Elisabeth, can you tell us about your Bittner source(s)?

As for Volkonsky's supposed rudeness to Olga . . . well, who knows? He may have been having a bad day, she may have been having a bad day, or maybe they both were out of sorts at the time! Human nature never really changes, and it's strangely reassuring to know that almost one hundred years ago people in high places also could "wake up on the wrong side of the bed" and be guilty of irritable, quirky behavior!  

[Sarushka]

In the Chebotareva's diary there are also 2 or 3 funny stories about Nicolas helping his daughters in their jokes, perhaps will Sarushka or Georgy translate it one day...?

If you give me the page numbers, I will do my best!

[Elisabeth]

 Elisabeth, can you tell us about your Bittner source(s)?

Sure. Klavdia Bitner's impressions of OTMAA are contained in the complete, unabridged Sokolov report. I only have photocopied pages in Russian! But they make for very interesting reading.

[Janet_W.]

Ah, mystery solved . . . thank you, Elisabeth! Now all   I need to do is find an English translation of that complete report. (Why didn't they offer Russian as well as Spanish, French and German at my middle school and high school?!   )

[matushka]

Thanks Elisabeth!
Georgy, you can find the Pavlov's report about his time at the lazaret in
- first, this book I told you about, Skorbny Angel, a russian book about Alexandra Feodorovna with an incredible quantity of interesting documents.
- second: the sostavitel' of this book published Pavlov's memories in the internet at the following URL: http://www.pravaya.ru/govern/391/2311

Elisabeth, the Chebotareva's diary was published in an american magazin in russian language, Novy Jurnal. I post the exact reference at the little Chebotareva's thread (section for servants, friends and retainers). Larges extracts of the diary were published by Sergei Fomin in the same Skorbny angel. I do not know is there any other publication.

Sarushka, the stories I was talking about are at pages 222 and especially 234.

[Elisabeth]

Thanks so much, Matushka! I am pretty sure our university library will have a copy.

[Romanov_fan]

Georgiy, from A. A. Mossolov's At the Court of the Last Tsar, which is posted at this website (that's why I was able to retrieve the quote so easily!):

"Olga, in 1912, was already seventeen, but she still had the ways of a 'flapper'. "

It seems on some threads that people think that Marie or Anastasia would have made better flappers, and here is someone who would saying that she was one, although it may not carry all the meanings of that term.

[Janet_W.]

In reconciling Mossolov's statement with what we have recently discussed--although those episodes occurred after her 17th birthday--I'm thinking Mossolov was saying that Olga, despite having turned seventeen, still demonstrated a free-spirited,  headstrong, hoydenish sort of personality . . . especially in  contrast to her sister Tatiana, who as we know tended to conduct herself with greater decorum.

[Romanov_fan]

Yes, he was using the more old fashioned, correct sense of the term, rather than to mean flapper, like a flapper would have been in the '20s or something.

[Janet_W.]

Mossolov's book was published at a time when readers were very famililar with what a modern flapper happened to be. However, his work had been translated, and so that might complicate what he meant to get across.

At any rate, here's an excerpt from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which might help to clarify matters as to what sort of flapper Olga was compared.



'The term flapper in the 1920s, referred to a "new breed" of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered "decent" behavior. The flappers were seen as brash in their time for wearing makeup, drinking hard liquor and smoking.

Origins

Flappers had their origins in the popular contempt for prohibition. With legal saloons and cabarets closed, back alley speakeasies became prolific and popular. This discrepancy between the law abiding religion-based temperance movement and the actual ubiquitous consumption of alcohol led to widespread disdain for authority. Flapper independence may have its origins in the Gibson girls of the 1890s. Although that pre-war look does not resemble the flapper identity, their independence and feminism may have led to the flapper wise-cracking tenacity thirty years later. The term flapper first appears in Britain, based on a perceived similarity to young birds vainly trying to leave the nest. While many in the United States assumed at the time that the term "flapper" derived from a fashion of wearing galoshes unbuckled so that they flapped as the wearer walked, the term was already documented as in use in the United Kingdom as early as 1912. From the 1900s into the 1920s flapper was a term for any impetuous teenaged girl, often including women under 30. Only in the 1920s did the term take on the meaning of the flapper generation style and attitudes, while people continued to use the word to mean immature. A related but alternative usage in the late twenties was a press catch word which refered to adult women voters and how they might vote differently than men their age. While the term flapper had multiple usages, flappers as a social group were well defined from other 1920s fads.'

[Romanov_fan]

Thanks for that info! I don't think Mossolov meant to imply that she was shortened her skirts, or drank hard alcohol, but she might have smoked... She may not have been given the opportunity to act  like the flappers-but she had the attitude, or something close?