Dear Sarah,
As someone who knows a great deal about OTMAA yourself, how important are the diaries as source material for insights into their psyches, do you think? I sometimes get the impression from young people that I know who are interested in their lives that they (the young people) are projecting onto them their own adolescent wishes/fears/interests/behaviors, whatever. Are the surviving letters better indications of their personalities than the diaries? I'm not saying that the diaries don't help, mind you. But if they were written as semi-public documents (and Alexandra's note to Nicholas seems to clinch the idea that she was reading them, no?), then I should think that they would be limited in terms of self-revelation.
Simon
In both cases I think the IF's direct self-revelation is limited, but there are distinct differences between the two breeds of documents.
Out of the Romanov diaries I've read in entirety so far (Olga 1913, Aleksei 1916, Aleksei 1918, Alexandra 1918) I'd have to say Olga's comes closest to conveying a sense of personality. Aleksei's and Alexandra's diaries are very perfunctory and rather terse -- especially Alexandra's. It's difficult to get any sense of "voice" from either of them. Although Olga tends to write longer entries than her mother or brother and actually devotes some space to what she thinks and feels, she does so only in fairly broad terms. The translator of Olga's 1913 diary, Marina Petrov has told me that "Her [Olga's] writing is very simple and contains no deep thoughts or exquisite language, it's rather business-like." I agree with her; in fact, I don't consider any of the Romanov diaries I've read to be particularly introspective. Any emotional language is basic: happy, sad, stupid, boring, fun, painful, etc. Of course you can usually infer state of mind from the overall tone of an entry (particularly when Olga is crushing on an officer, for example) but not with much of any nuance or subtlety. So the real advantage of the diaries, IMO, is the opportunity to glean details about the IF's daily life and routine. And brother, minutiae abounds in the IF's diaries. (Notations regarding weather, lessons, tennis matches, dinner guests, illnesses, outings, and so forth.) They really function more as daybooks or agendas than what we'd call journals nowadays. Incidentally, the excerpts I've read from Nicholas, Tatiana, and Maria's diaries so far have not contradicted my impressions of the diaries I've read in full.
The IF's letters, however, exude personality. In fact, Alexandra, who kept such a painfully tedious diary, comes across like a force of nature in her letters, discussing everything from her daughters' menstrual periods to her opinions of government policy. Her passions and attitudes are impossible to overlook, and her writing is plainly off the cuff, replete with mistakes and meandering trains of thought. The children's personalities also become considerably more vivid in their letters, though not on quite the same scale as their mother's. Overall, I find Anastasia and Tatiana's letters display the most character in terms of style and expression (again, what you'd call "voice" in fiction), while Olga's letters from captivity come off as more somber and mundane to me than her sisters' do. Most striking is the family's obvious affection for one another. In contrast to their diaries, the emotion they display in their letters has an intensity to it that can come off as gaudy or theatrical to modern readers.
That said, if someone told me I could have access to the IF's letters or diaries but
not both, it would be a difficult choice for me. Matter of face, this self-imposed dilemma intrigues me -- I'll have to think about that...
