Loch Raven Review - 2006 Summer - Christopher T. George

Christopher T. George is co-editor of Loch Raven Review. George was born in Liverpool, England in 1948 and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland, near Johns Hopkins University, with his wife Donna and two cats. Chris works full-time as a medical editor in Washington, DC. He has been writing and publishing poetry since he attended Loyola College, Baltimore, and studied with Sister Maura Eichner at the College of Notre Dame, as well as with poets Elliot Coleman and Marion Buchman. His poems have appeared in numerous publications in the United States and Great Britain. He is also a published historian and a lyricist for a new musical, Jack-The Musical, about Jack the Ripper. George also is the Editor of Desert Moon Review and an editor at Writer’s Block Poetry Workshop.

Summer 2006 Table of Contents - Vol. II, No. 2
Poetry Translations Fiction Book Notes & Reviews

Christopher T. George Robert Alexander, The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar, Viking, ISBN 0-670-03178-X, 229 pages, 2003, $23.95. The oft-told story of the last days of the Tsarist Royal family is here retold in entertaining and taut fashion by an American novelist with an intimate knowledge of Russian history and manners. Robert Alexander is the pen name of businessman Robert Zimmerman, who has studied and worked in Russia for some thirty years, most recently as a partner in a company that operates Barabu, a chain of espresso-wine bars with locations in St Petersburg. He employs the conceit of telling the story from the vantage point of little Leonka, the kitchen boy in the infamous Ipatiev House, known as “The House of Special Purpose,” in Yekaterinburg. It was in the cellar of the notorious Siberian mansion that the Romanovs were brutally shot by Bolsheviks on the night of July 16, 1917 as a White Russian army approached with the intent of freeing them. Alexander describes in intimate fashion – or as intimate as a servant could – the demeaning final days of Tsar Nikolai and his consort Aleksandra, their four daughters and son Aleksei – the hemophiliac son and heir of Russia’s last Romanov emperor. As a boy of about the same age as the young prince, Leonka wheels Aleksei round the mansion in his invalid chair in a game of “troika” and has knowledge of the little hoard of childish mementoes that the boy keeps hidden by his bed. He also knows about the fortune of precious jewels that the Empress and the Grand Duchesses sew into their garments under the subterfuge of “arranging medicines.” It was this literal armor of fabulous jewels that made the daughters particularly hard to kill when the Reds firing squad tried to exterminate the family after they had been lured down to the cellar on the pretense that a photographic portrait was to be taken. In the days leading up to the fateful night, Alexander suspensefully describes the family’s involvement in a supposed plot by White officers to free them. I say “supposed” because it appears that the “plot” was a Red trick to lure the family into complicity in the escape attempt and provide an excuse for their murder. The Tsar requests Leonka’s help in smuggling notes in his pants to a local convent to send on to the officers. It is the boy also who, although banished from the house on the night of slaughter, follows on foot the slow-moving lorry loaded with the butchered bodies of the Royals, their physician, Dr Botkin, and a female servant. In following the bloody wagon, he sees two bodies fall off the back of the truck onto the muddy track through the Siberian forest. The narrative thus explains the fact that when the remains of the Russian Royal family were recovered, two bodies were missing – the bodies of heir Aleksei and one of the Grand Duchesses, probably the second youngest, Maria (or perhaps the youngest daughter, Anastasia, who “survived” the massacre if one believes the story of the pretender Anna Anderson, portrayed by Ingrid Bergman in the 1956 film Anastasia). The fascinating story of the investigation into the remains of the Romanovs is well covered in Robert K. Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (Random House, 1995). Massie of course earlier wrote Nicholas and Alexandra (Atheneum, 1967) made into a 1971 feature film of the same name with Michael Jayston as Tsar Nicholas II and Janet Suzman as his beloved “Alix.” Everything that author Alexander writes in The Kitchen Boy is consistent with the portrayal of the Royal family in Massie’s books, except for his speculative narrative about the kitchen boy’s role in the supposed plot to free the Romanovs and what happened to those two missing bodies, for which he provides an interesting and perhaps partly plausible explanation. Translations of the wording of the notes sent to the Romanovs during the alleged White officers’ attempt to free them are reproduced in indented type – the majority of the notes, written in French, are now in the Russian archives. The twist in the tale is that what we hear from the kitchen boy “Leonka” – now an ailing old man living in Chicago, and fabulously wealthy after smuggling some of the Romanov treasures out of Russia – is not the straight scoop we are led to believe. The narrator was in “The House of Special Purpose” and did have knowledge of the events he describes, but he keeps mum about his true story even when making a tape recording for his granddaughter, Kate, supposedly telling her what happened. It remains for Kate to travel to modern-day St. Petersburg to find out the entire truth of what occurred and of her grandfather’s role in the tragedy. This mystery and the overall telling of the story make for a beguiling and entertaining romance. © Christopher T. George

Poetry Translations Fiction Book Notes & Reviews