Tsaritsa Quotes

Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.

crammed from floor to ceiling with religious images, crucifixes and ‘pathetic, cheap little tin ikons’.8 On every shelf and table top in her private sitting room the tsaritsa had set out yet more knick-knacks and photographs of her children and her darling Nicky. Personal possessions were few and surprisingly trivial – useful domestic items such as a gold thimble, sewing materials and embroidery scissors, as well as cheap toys and trinkets – ‘a china bird and a pincushion

У меня в Москве — купола горят! У меня в Москве — колокола звонят! И гробницы в ряд у меня стоят, — В них царицы спят, и цари. И не знаешь ты, что зарёй в Кремле Легче дышится — чем на всей земле! И не знаешь ты, что зарёй в Кремле Я молюсь тебе — до зари! И проходишь ты над своей Невой О ту пору, как над рекой-Москвой Я стою с опущенной головой, И слипаются фонари. Всей бессонницей я тебя люблю, Всей бессонницей я тебе внемлю — О ту пору, как по всему Кремлю Просыпаются звонари… Но моя река — да с твоей рекой, Но моя рука — да с твоей рукой Не сойдутся, Радость моя, доколь Не догонит заря — зари. 7 мая 1916 At home in Moscow - where the domes are burning, at home in Moscow - in the sound of bells, where I live the tombs - in their rows are standing and in them Tsaritsas - are asleep and tsars. And you don't know how - at dawn the Kremlin is the easiest place to - breathe in the whole wide earth and you don't know when - dawn reaches the Kremlin I pray to you until - the next day comes and I go with you - by your river Neva even while beside - the Moscow river I am standing here - with my head lowered and the line of street lights - sticks fast together. With my insomnia - I love you wholly. With my insomnia - I listen for you, just at the hour throughout - the Kremlin, men who ring the bells - begin to waken, Still my river - and your river still my hand - and your hand will never join, or not until one dawn catches up another dawning.

What no one then, of course, knew was that as female children of the tsaritsa, one or all of the sisters might be carriers of that terrible defective gene – a hidden time bomb that had already begun to reverberate across the royal families of Europe. Alexandra’s elder sister Irene – who like her was a carrier and who had married her first cousin, Prince Henry of Prussia – had already given birth to two haemophiliac sons. The youngest, four-year-old Heinrich, had died – ‘of the terrible illness of the English family’, as Xenia described it – just five months before Alexey was born. In Russia they called it the bolezn gessenskikh – ‘the Hesse disease’; others called it ‘the Curse of the Coburgs’.66 But one thing was certain; in the early 1900s, the life expectancy of a haemophiliac child was only about thirteen years.67

For very long periods I am really patient, and then out breaks my bad temper. It is not so difficult to bear great trials, but these little buzzing mosquitos are so trying.

and they did not at all like the prospect of a new tsaritsa actually younger than some of them.

At court, the new Tsaritsa quickly became an agent of change.

Alexis’ delight in his new Tsaritsa increased even more when, in the fall of 1671, he learned that she was pregnant

The Tsaritsa Natalya, therefore, was saddened but resigned when her foster father

On February 4, 1694, after an illness of only two days, his mother, the Tsaritsa Natalya, died at forty-two.

she might have made a model tsaritsa for a conventional Muscovite tsar.

To Portsmouth the Russians sent Sergey Witte, generally regarded as their ablest political leader and a staunch opponent of the war, who had been the tsar’s minister of finance. It was a curious choice, in that Witte was detested by both the tsar and the tsaritsa, but it proved to be a brilliant one for Russia. Another Russian of German origin, he was considered by the imperial court to be vulgar, cynical, arrogant, boastful, and totally lacking in the modern-day quality of charisma. But on arrival in the United States he set out shamelessly to woo American public opinion, ostentatiously flattering Roosevelt.