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IMPERIAL LEGEND: THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF TSAR ALEXANDER I Three Book Reviews by Patrick Killough [07-23-2002] [NOTE: following a growing
habit, when someone asks me
to review a book, as did David Morgan, publisher of the Asheville
TRIBUNE
for his cousin Alexis's book, I first did two "first impression"
reviews
for amazon.com and barnes&noble.com. TPK]
(a) For AMAZON.COM Why should an American reader care about Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825)? If you are of Polish descent, you might want to know more about why Alexander gave a constitution and some autonomy to Poland in 1818. If history is your thing, you have little choice but to notice the man whose generals and whose frozen land drove Napoleon Bonaparte out of Moscow and back across the Niemen river, ultimately to Waterloo. Members of the Russian Orthodox religion will want to know about a man who (in another identity) became a canonized saint. A saint? A tsar a saint? It is a stretch, but there is a long tradition ("the Legend") that a Tsar was driven by guilt to run away from his responsibilities. According to the Legend, Alexander I felt guilt for complicity in his father's 1801 assassination which had made him the Autocrat of all the Russias, He did not die in 1825. Nor did he abdicate. He just "disappeared." Perhaps he fled to Palestine on the yacht of a British aristocrat. Perhaps he reappeared in Siberia eleven years later as one Feodor Kuzmich. Perhaps the Tsar lived on in the new identity until 1864 when he died in the odor of sanctity. But not precisely orthodox sanctity. For Kuzmich was not known to attend liturgies or to make his confessions of sin. Alexis Troubetzkoy's IMPERIAL LEGEND:THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF TSAR ALEXANDER I is a good read. Written with the smoothness of a lullaby, the book introduces important aspects of 19th century Russian history and tells the story of two men: Alexander Romanov and Feodor Kuzmich. It is clear that generations of Russians and some international scholars think that there is impressive evidence that the two men were one. But what of those eleven years between the official death of the Tsar near the Caucasus and the appearance of the mysterious Kuzmich in Siberia? Troubetzkoy might want to make those missing years the subject of a follow-on book. The book has attractive
photographs or portraits of the
principals
IMPERIAL LEGEND amply rewards a leisurely read. -OOO-
(2) FOR BARNES AND NOBLE
Who is Feodor Kuzmich? And why should we care? According to Alexis S. Troubetzkoy, Kuzmich, who died in 1864 and is a canonized saint of the Russian Orthodox church, might well be Tsar Alexander I, who officially died in November 1825. We should care because if Alexander neither died in 1825 nor abdicated as tsar, then the next two Romanovs who succeeded him (Nicholas I and Alexander II) were illegitimate and all ordinances issued from 1825 to 1864 were therefore null and void. Troubetzkoy's history, IMPERIAL LEGEND: THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF TSAR ALEXANDER I, makes clear that Russians from 1825 until today have debated the Alexander-Kuzmich identity. The legend, the myth, lives and is not without plausibility. The historical record contains many contradictions, much like the record of the mysterious death of President Clinton's aide and boyhood friend Vince Foster. Alexander is portrayed as complicit in the 1801 murder of his father, Tsar Paul I, and torn by remorse and guilt the rest of his life. The legend has Alexander simulating his own death and the Imperial family exercising a massive cover up. All this allows Alexander to flee by ship to Palestine. Alexander, or at least the saintly Feodor Kuzmich, surfaces eleven years later in Siberia and lives the remainder of his life around Tomsk. Some credible witnesses of the later life of Kuzmich believed that he was the missing Tsar. Various commissions and even Leo Tolstoy later investigated the events. There are tantalizing bits of evidence supporting the Legend. IMPERIAL LEGEND is niche writing at its best. It is as pleasant to float along atop Toubetzkoy's soothing prose as to sip vintage Scotch. The author gives more than one reason inspiring him to cover ground so often researched. His most action-oriented reason occurs at page 245: that his book "will generate sufficiently strong interest in the Legend to precipitate an examination of Alexander I's tomb." Whose remains, if anyone's, lie in the imperial vault? DNA will tell. -OOO- 07-18-2002 ====== (C) For Asheville TRIBUNE
Did Tsar Alexander I (born 1777) really die in 1825? Or did he merely pretend to and instead have himself smuggled off to Palestine in the yacht of an English nobleman? According to many Russians and some scholars, the evidence is strong that not only did the Tsar live on but that he returned in 1836 to Russian Siberia disguised as one Feodor Kuzmich. There he lived on as a kind of wandering Tolstoyan mystic until his holy death in 1864, followed in 1984 by formal canonization as a saint of the Russian Orthodox church. Alexis S. Troubetzkoy keeps a wary scholarly distance from often murky facts related in his book IMPERIAL LEGEND: THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF TSAR ALEXANDER I . Troubetzkoy says that one reason he wrote the book was to build public support for exhumation of the corpse of Alexander I from its tomb in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul in Saint. Petersburg. DNA testing would then settle one way or another the persistent claims that the Tsar, who was 48 in 1825, really lived on as Feodor Kuzmich and lies buried in a village near Tomsk, Siberia. The Church Father
Tertullian said of Christianity:
“Credo
quia absurdum est.” “I believe because it is unthinkable.” Put
another
way, since I can not think it, I can only grasp for it through faith.
Now
the legendary Alexander-Kuzmich connection or identity is absurd on the
face of it. The Romanov successors of Alexander I would have had to
pull
off a huge cover up. Legally, their decrees between 1825 and 1864 would also have been null and void. Why? Because the real emperor, God’s anointed, had neither abdicated nor died in 1825. And what of the 11 years between the death of Alexander and the first sighting of him as Kuzmich? Improbabilities notwithstanding, the fact is that thousands passionately believe this prima facie absurdity and millions more are romantically predisposed to believe it. Author Alexis Troubetzkoy remarkably both keeps his intellectual detachment and sympathetically helps us understand why so many make so large a leap to believe in and embrace what is widely called simply “the Legend.” Why does a fine writer and researcher like Troubetzkoy take precisely this fairylike legend seriously enough to devote many months gestating an immensely enjoyable, highly readable account, even defense, of how that legend came to be? Troubetzkoy takes the
legend seriously because a beloved
mentor of his childhood told him the story and gave the evidence. That
mentor was Professor Nicholas Arseniev (1888-1977). During summers In
the
Troubetzkoy family’s “wilderness retreat in the Laurentian Mountains”
Arseniev
tutored the young Alexis Troubetzkoy in Russian history. Study of
Napoleon,
who was defeated by Tsar Alexander I’s armies and the Russian winter,
led
Arseniev into “the Legend.” “Arseniev went on to weave one thread after
another of intriguing detail into an intricate tapestry of the Legend’s
manifold aspects.” (Author’s Note, p. ix) John Henry Cardinal Newman, a 19th Century Platonist, more than once compared weak human knowledge to people who see only the back side of a carpet or tapestry. The rough knots, the absence of patterns are nonetheless totally linked to the great reality on the other side of the tapestry. Paradoxically, we often look at the side the tapestry’s creator did not intend us to see. We see, as it were, the scaffolding, not the painting. Plato said much the same in his metaphor of the Cave where chained humans watch shadows cast from behind them. The bare narrative of Alexis who was also Feodor is the obverse of the Legend--the back side of the tapestry. What really counts is what we do not at once see, the other side, a morality tale of guilt, repentance and personal redemption. Alexander Romanov became Tsar in 1801 (the year of Cardinal Newman’s birth) after courtiers assassinated his father, Paul I. He knew in advance what the conspirators planned and did nothing to prevent it. Troubetzkoy makes the case that Alexander always admitted his guilt to himself but never found a way to come to terms with the sin which had put him on the throne. God did not give him a redeemed conscience--at least while he was on the throne. The Tsar tried on one religious fashion after another but found no peace. He found no joy in a monarch’s detailed obligations and chores. So finally Alexander did what he had long hinted. He gave up power in as cowardly a way as he had first assumed it. He pretended to die. He then cut and ran. This was easily the most serious, sustained planning of his Imperial life. Then after nearly four decades of wandering, meditating and inspiring veneration in those who knew the mysterious Feodor Kuzmich, Alexander had finally done enough to please God and to merit canonization as a Siberian saint. Alexander’s real life was the obverse of the tapestry. The reality of the tapestry was heaven's mercy piercing through to earth. The Imperial Legend, that is, has in it elements of King David’s murder of Uriah the Hittite to possess the widowed Bathsheba. The Legend also reminds of Cain and Abel and the Prodigal Son. The Legend of Tsar Alexander and the holy Feodor is the story of the weak but redeemed Mexican “whisky priest” in Graham Green’s THE POWER AND THE GLORY. Indeed, Troubetzkoy’s Legend calls out impossibly for a fictionalized retelling by Graham Greene. The English novelist was a great believer in the heresy that for most people the road to holiness requires sinning as a precondition to its first step. The Legend lives because it is rich in irony, symbolism and its strong hint of what lies on the other side of the tapestry. Alexis S. Troubetzkoy is a
master story teller. His prose
is understated. His piety toward his early tutor is convincing. The
author
of IMPERIAL LEGEND has also selected for us a striking gallery of
portraits.
His sources lend more probability than we might have imagined to the
Legend.
This book is for students of Napoleon, of Russia, of the art of
biography,
of religion and of the quest for holiness.
===============
-OOO- 07-23-2002. Revisited
12/04/2009. |