I wonder if there have been any updates on the planned publication?
Thanks
Thank you very much for your continued interest in our project.
As I explained earlier in a message in the “Missing in Action” thread elsewhere on the AP Forum,
http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php?topic=17353.msg522142#msg522142the move from Boston to rural New York State proved to be more complicated, and the process of getting settled here took more time, than we had anticipated,
but we have now taken up the
Letters from Captivity again in earnest.
(I would like to think that — had circumstances allowed us to remain in Boston, we should have had the book published by now, but — as God wills… Sorry if we raised everyone’s hopes, but no one is more disappointed at the delay than we ourselves, I assure you.)
After finally collating all the letters that we have managed to find over the years, we arrived at a total of 460. They have now been put in their proper chronological order and the translations fully proofread. Much of the front and back material has also been composed. We are selecting what illustrations to include — mostly of passages from the letters themselves — since the members of this Forum have already scoured the whole earth for every known photograph of the Imperial family, and nothing, so it seems, has remained undiscovered! ☺
At present, the most tedious task, but one of the most important, is making certain that all the cross-reference numbers in the many footnotes match one another.
We feel that perhaps the greatest value of our proposed publication is that the texts of all of these letters — many of which have already appeared elsewhere, in one form or another — will be presented in their entirety, under one cover, and in a translation based upon the original documents. And, as might be expected, the contents of one letter often elucidate passages which are obscure in another letter.
To date, the longest letter in the collection is one written by Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (of course) to A. A. Vyrubova (naturally)! The translation is six pages long, typed single-space, and we have furnished it with fifty explanatory footnotes!
We will keep the Forum members posted on the progress of the book.
But for now, we need to get back to work…
Inok Nikolai
