http://www.sptimes.ru/archive/times/1046/news/n_14938.htmhttp://www.sptimes.ru/archive/times/1046/news/n_0_4622.htmSt. Petersburg Times - 2/22/05Diaries of Maria Fyodorovna Published
By Galina Stolyarova
STAFF WRITER
Cellist and philanthropist Mstislav Rostropovich launched a book of the previously unpublished diaries of Tsarina Maria Fyodorovna on Monday.
The musician purchased the original diaries, dating back to the years 1914 and 1923, which were discovered only a few years ago, and donated them to the publishing house Vagrius, which printed them.
"We [Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya] have left Russia, but we are closely following events in the country," Rostropovich said at the launch in the State Hermitage Museum. "We are returning as many precious memorabilia of the country's finest as we can. On my last trip here I brought 20 of [Pyotr] Tchaikovsky's letters, a [Nikolai] Gogol letter, a [Nikolai] Rimsky-Korsakov letter and four pages of [Nikolai] Karamzin's manuscripts and more."
Maria Fyodorovna, daughter of the Danish king, Christian IX, married Tsarevich Alexander, later Tsar Alexander III. Together they had six children, including Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II.
After her son abdicated in 1917, Maria Fyodorovna escaped to the Crimea with her daughter, and in 1919 they emigrated from there to England and later to Copenhagen.
The diaries were found in a house on the outskirts of London where the empress spent several years before moving to Denmark. The previous owner, who sold the diaries to Rostropovich in 2001, requested anonymity. "I was approached by the owner, who didn't want to go through the auction schemes or any public sale," Rostropovich said.
The newly published diaries reflect the most tragic, troubled and challenging part of the empress's life.
"After the [October] revolution, Russia was breaking apart but the empress didn't give up and never allowed her spirit be broken by the turbulent times and miseries she was going through," said Yulia Kudrina, the project's director and one of the book's translators.
The book offers precious - and previously unpublished - personal insights into events that shook the world.
In a letter from May 4, 1917, Maria Fyodorovna describes a humiliating scene of Bolsheviks searching her estate in Ai-Todor in Crimea. "Everything was so brutal and indecent: a marine officer broke into my room and woke me up at 5:30 a.m.," the empress wrote. "He placed a guard just by my bed and told me to get up ... I was bewildered. The officer sat at my desk and started perusing literally every single piece looking for compromising materials. And everything, even my Dutch children's gospel book, was thrown into a big sack and taken away."
It took several years to prepare the manuscript for publication.
"The diaries were written in minute handwriting, with many words smudges and many pages torn," Kudrina said. "We also had to do quite a lot of deciphering as a number of words were abbreviated."
Even in the last hours of her life, the tsarina refused to believe that the Bolsheviks had murdered her son and his family. She died in Denmark in 1928 and was buried in Copenhagen's Roskilde Cathedral, and is to be reburied next to her husband in the Peter and Paul Cathedral next year.
