After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport

Author:Helen Rappaport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

The émigré waiters learned how to seduce customers with tales of their fallen glory, turning on their ex-military charm and swashbuckle, even more so if in their former lives they had been admirals, counts, or princes, and had once seen the tsar! The tourists lapped it up. In the clubs of Paris nothing could be more evocative of Russia than the performances of the hugely popular singer Alexander Vertinsky, who, having left in the evacuation to Constantinople, had toured in eastern Europe and Germany before working in the Montmartre cabarets, especially the Kazbek. You could also find Count Mikhail Tolstoy, a son of the famous writer, playing piano and singing Russian folk songs in a trio with Madame Nina Spiridovich (wife of General Alexander Spiridovich, the former chief of the emperor’s guard) and Prince Alexey Obolensky (who had escaped Russia “with only his Stradivarius violin and a string of pearls”).43 Since all three had been tutored in music as children, it had seemed only logical to Count Mikhail that this would be the best way to support their families:

My situation, like that of my two friends, is a mystery to nobody. I have been ruined since 1919, when I left Russia. I have seven children in school in France. I love music, so why shouldn’t I attempt to live by it? The memory of my father forbids me writing—so I’m going to sing and play the piano.44

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