I have such a tender regard for Princess Nina Chavchavadze and for her husband, Prince Paul Chavchavadze.
I was in correspondence with the Princess for a short time but I lost my correspondence when I lent it to the NYC firm of Speller & Sons Pub.s who never returned my letters. I can still see Princess Nina's delft-blue stationary.
The way we began to correspond started when I found a "society post-card" of her, her sister and Mother, the Grand Duchess George sitting in a corner of their St. Petersburg palace among a picture collection of Royalty in the NYC Public Library. Having grown up with so many "society post cards" of my mother's family members I knew the value of such things as priceless momentos. My mother would often pour over the society post cards of her grand mother and great grand mother and point out some elegant detail of their gowns or some wonderful information about the setting, so I knew how important they were to the appreciation and preservation of a family history.
That fact, combined with the injustice of the revolution and the torn and fragmented lives it left in it wake, made me determined to get that postcard to Princess Nina. I knew that she was living in South Wellfleet, Mass. So as I sat there in the NYC Public Library with that postcard in my hand, it took all of my courage to carefully hide the postcard in my coat pocket and walk out of the library. When I got home I mailed the postcard to Princess Nina. I remember feeling that at last some some sense of justice had been done, however I never expected to hear from the Princess. I was so thrilled when Princess Nina sent me the most gracious reply. She said that in all of the chaos of the revolution and the fact that her mother and she and her sister had spent the war years in England, she ended up having no photograph of their palace in St. Petersburg and not only that but the photograph on the postcard was taken in her mother's favorite drawing room! I felt such a sense of joy and would gladly have done my time in prison for breaking the law. My theft started the short history of our correspondence. The Princess told me so many intimate details of her parents unscathed relationship witht the Emperor and Empress and their family.
Alas, as I have said, I lent my correspondence to the NYC publisher, Speller & Sons, and have never been able to retrieve it. But that loss is so insignificant when one remembers the loss the Princess and her family sustained.
I have always felt from my correspondence with the Princess that there was the most genuine sense of goodness and simplicity in Princess Nina character and that this was something that was shared by her husband. I have a few of his books and he seems to have a wonderful sense of humor. To me, Princess Nina had a lovely sense of refinement and gentleness and a equally wonderful sense of simplicity and grace.
Anyway that is the impression I received whilst reading her letters. Just to say, I believe that Princess Nina's husband passed rather recently. Griff
