Publishers Weekly
12/13/2021
Historian Rappaport (The Race to Save the Romanovs) delivers a glossy portrait of Russian artists and nobles who flocked to Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on French tabloids and countesses’ diaries, Rappaport details scandalous affairs, sumptuous parties, extravagant shopping trips, and “rollicking night out” at Maxim’s restaurant, where a Russian grand duke once presented his mistress, a high-class prostitute, with a pearl necklace worth 20 million francs served on a plate of oysters. She also describes how Russian performers, composers, and artists shocked and “entranced” Parisian audiences with their avant-garde ballets, and how Russian writers and poets overwhelmed the cafes of Montparnasse, causing local police to worry that revolution might spread to France. After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Russian noblewomen found work as designers, seamstresses, and models in the fashion industry. (“The couture houses loved the willowy, fine-boned Russian women,” Rappaport notes.) Meanwhile, Russian men found jobs as taxi drivers or factory workers and crowded Paris’s Russian cabarets at night. Full of colorful anecdotes and sharp character sketches, this breezy account of life in exile entertains. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"Excellent." —Forbes
“Vivid and harrowing.” –Air Mail
“Entertaining and, at times, heart-wrenching...Rappaport, a prolific historian and highly regarded Romanov expert, unveils a Paris in which Russians had long played a prominent role.” –Wall Street Journal
“Traces the Russian encounter with Paris from the city’s glittering years as an expat playground before World War I to the grimmer reality of life in exile after the Bolshevik seizure of power.” –New York Times Book Review
“An engaging group biography...Rappaport is a mistress of the telling detail.” —Washington Post
"Harrowing, inspiring and illuminating." —Miranda Seymour, The Literary Review (UK)
“Well-researched, readable and poignant.” –The Times (UK)
“Vividly evocative and vigorously researched, After the Romanovs offers a bounty of biographies as Rappaport eloquently explores the fraught lives of the uprooted with a welcome blend of candor and compassion.” –Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star
“Rappaport presents masterful portraits of these refugees… Rappaport not only crafts a lovingly detailed picture of the City of Light, she also fills its parks and cafés and boulevards with an amazing cast of characters.” –Christian Science Monitor
“Rappaport's engaging prose and prodigious research makes After the Romanovs a touching and enlightening experience.” –Shelf Awareness
“The depth of the research is impressive, and the scope of the book is ambitious. Rappaport successfully traces those first Belle Époque artists and royals, those who were forced to flee with nothing during the revolution, and their experiences through World War I and beyond.”—Bookreporter.com
“Full of colorful anecdotes and sharp character sketches, this breezy account of life in exile entertains.” –Publishers Weekly
“Thorough and extremely well-researched.” –Booklist
“Throughout, [Helen Rappaport], a consummate historian, displays her deep research into the era, the city, and its denizens. A culturally vibrant account of Russians uprooted to Paris during a tumultuous time.” –Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
02/04/2022
In this latest work, journalist Rappaport (The Race To Save the Romanovs) chronicles the experiences of refugees fleeing the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Paris was a second home for many members of the czar's court before the Revolution; with their lives in peril, it became a natural destination for Russian monarchists, Rappaport writes. They were followed by artists, writers, and counterrevolutionaries who feared the Communist Party's regime. Life as a refugee in Paris was very different than life as a wealthy visiting aristocrat, Rappaport reveals: the difficult transition required often-wealthy counterrevolutionaries to earn their own money and deal with loss of homeland and social status. Military generals became taxi drivers, princesses used embroidery skills to open ateliers, and those Russians with no titles or jewelry to live off often starved or subsisted on coffee. All the while, the counterrevolutionaries' hope persisted that the Soviet Union would crumble and they could resume their previous lives in the land they pined for, Rappaport writes. Memoirs and literature deftly round out her historical reporting to create a vivid picture of the wrenching life change that thousands of Russians underwent. VERDICT This narrative nonfiction will appeal to those interested in Russian history, especially the Russian Revolution, and to readers of historical fiction by authors like Ken Follett or Marie Benedict.—Laurie Unger Skinner
Kirkus Reviews
2021-12-07
The bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters returns with the story of the Russian aristocrats who made Paris their home after fleeing the Bolshevik coup.
Early on, Rappaport, an expert on imperial Russian history, notes how “the Russian discovery of the French capital…goes back to the time of…Peter the Great, who made a visit to Paris in 1717 and fell in love with Versailles.” This affinity for Paris reached its apex during the Belle Époque, when the excesses of Russian aristocrats became notorious around town. “The French press,” writes the author, “regularly titillated readers with stories of the vices and eccentricities of the grand dukes.” The events in Russia from 1905 onward caused increasing anxiety for the aristocracy and fear for safety of the extended Romanov family. At the same time, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company was storming Paris with its shocking modernist music and dance, and other artists—e.g., poet Ilya Ehrenburg and painters Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine—were “electrified,” as Ehrenburg put it, by the abundant culture of Paris. The author delineates the plight of both the Russian elite, who had to abandon their great wealth in land and palaces while pining for a restoration of the monarchy, and the truly impoverished immigrants who drove taxis, took up needlework in Chanel’s fashion house—“twenty-seven fashion houses were established in Paris by Russian emigres between 1922 and 1935”—or toiled at dozens of other low-paying jobs. At the time, the new arrivals were often characterized as quarrelsome or prone to dissent. As in her previous histories, Rappaport drives her lively narrative with minibiographies of notable characters, including Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin and noted humorist Teffi. Many of these artists’ lives were stunted well into the 1930s by enforced dispossession and poverty. Throughout, the author, a consummate historian, displays her deep research into the era, the city, and its denizens.
A culturally vibrant account of Russians uprooted to Paris during a tumultuous time.
