In H. Azar's book Maria and Anastasia: Letters, Diaries, Postcards there is a letter sent from Maria in Ekaterinburg to Anastasia in Tobolsk dated 15/28 April 1918. It starts like this:
"Ekaterinburg, 28 April. Christ is risen! I send you my greetings for the Feast of Light, my sweet Anastasia. We arrived here by car after the train. We had breakfast at 4.30 in the cafeteria. Only unpacked our things in the evening, because the luggage was searched, even the "medicine" and the "candy" ..."
Obviously the date is wrong, since they arrived in Ekaterinburg -and in the Ipatief- on April 30 (NS). The correct date should then be -judging from the content of the letter- May 1st. I don't think it could be from the 2nd, because Maria sent a postcard to Anastasia on that day (also included in Azar's book).
So, can anyone help me on this? Do we know about the correct date for sure? And BTW, what does she mean by "in the cafeteria"? Should it be "from the cafeteria"?
I also wanted to ask about Alexandra's first letter to Tobolsk. Again in Azar's book Tatiana Romanov...Diaries and Letters there is a short paragraph from a letter Alexandra sent to Olga on April 18/May 1:
"...Your old mother is always with you in her thoughts, my dear Olga. The three of us are constantly talking about you and wonder what all of you are doing..."
My question is: Is this the letter that Greg King refers to in FOTR (p.135) as follows: "The next day, the children finally had a letter from Ekaterinburg. Dictated by Alexandra and written by Anna Demidova, it noted that their belongings had all been searched, even their “medicines,” a code word to indicate the family’s jewels." -quoting Bulygin and Kerensky, 232.
Finally, do we have this letter in English, apart from Azar's short paragraph from it?
Thanks.
I have not yet seen the book, but allow me to make some observations anyway:
The original of this letter is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. We have a photocopy of it, which I am looking at right now.
The date is written: "18/1 го Апр. 1918 г." -- which translates as "18th / 1st of [May] April, year 1918". The 18 is at the upper end of the slash mark, and the 1 is at the bottom on the other side, which is a common way of double-dating letters in both Old and New Style. The month May is understood, since the main date, as far as the author is concerned, is the Old Style, i.e., in April.
It says that they ate out of a "common pot", i.e., the food was brought to them in one vessel; they did not eat in the cafeteria.
And, as has been explained elsewhere on this forum, in those days "zavtrak" did not mean "breakfast", as it does now, but it refers to lunch, a meal usually taken around 1 PM.
When considering the letters written between Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg, bear in mind that not all of these letters have survived, and not all of them reached their destination -- the Bolsheviks held on to some of them. Thus, several letters of those in Princess Eugenie of Greece's possession have been seen by us, but not by their intended recipients at the time of writing.
For example: of the 22 letters which Empress Alexandra mentions having sent to Tobolsk, 15 are known, and 7 have gone missing.
So, when replying to each other, the members of the Imperial Family had not always seen the letter which the other party was referring to.
Some letters also span several days and were only sent upon completion.
All of this adds a bit of confusion to translating these letters.
