The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

You see, my love. As you've always said, after the rain-" Sun." After the darkness-" Light." And after the illness-" Health." Exactly," said the Tsar. "We mustn't give up faith.

On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him.

Oh, as the tragedies of Shakespeare have revealed, the fall of kings is but fodder for the riches entertainments.

Forgive me. It's true. I wander. I wander in my heart and my thoughts. Such is the curse of any emigrant, to abandon one's home and never find another, to always flounder in a sea of remorse.

It amazes me still to this day how quickly the empire fell to pieces. One day the people are kissing the ground upon which the Tsar’s shadow has fallen, the next they are hacking apart his body. Nikolai merely put down his scepter and walked away, and literally overnight a three-hundred-year old dynasty evaporated — poof, gone! — with no one lifting a finger to save it. Ironic that the Soviet Union collapsed just as easily, which proves it was no better, that the cure, kommunizm, was in fact far worse than the disease itself. Now, I can only hope, those days are over, and just maybe that’s true. After all, it took nearly one hundred years for the insanity to fade from France after their revolution.

Nikolai did not want to be rescued from that special house and restored to the brilliancy of the Romanov throne, of this I am absolutely certain. If so many of his people felt locked in the chains of poverty, then he felt entrapped by the riches of the dynasty, which is to say that peasant and Tsar alike were liberated by the revolution.

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.

while our Empress was cold on the outside, she was at the same time wildly passionate on the inside, and in this way very, very Russian.

Although we suffer horribly still there is peace in our souls