#nicholas II imagine | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nicklloydnow · 2 months

Text

The Death of the Empire by Y. P. Karpenko

“Nicholas the Last

Charles I and Louis XVI were publicly executed after open trials. Nicholas II was secretly shot in a provincial basement along with his immediate family (and four members of his staff). It was a small room and it contained eleven victims and eleven killers. They were supposed to concentrate on one victim each, but the killers were soon firing at random. Those still alive when the gunsmoke cleared were disposed of by bayonet or further shots to the head. The bodies were transported by truck to a disused goldmine; sulfuric acid was poured on their faces before burial elsewhere—to make the Romanovs harder to identify.

In his "Introduction, 1971," as we have seen, Edmund Wilson was forced to give ground on the question of Lenin's amiability and benevolence (his words). It may seem sadistic to go on quoting him, but Wilson was distinguished and representative and by no means the worst offender (he is by now allowing that he "had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars"). Toward the end of the piece, however, Wilson is still trying to account for Lenin's bad manners. Were they attributable, perhaps, to the poor breeding of Lenin's father? "Lenin himself, although his mother came from a somewhat superior stratum, and though Lenin distinguished himself as a scholar, had always rude and rather vulgar traits." Wilson regretfully adds:

. . . I have found that it was not true, as I had been led to suppose—this matter was hushed up in the Soviet Union—that Lenin knew nothing about and had not approved the execution of the royal family. Trotsky—and, one imagines, also Lenin—were both extremely cold-blooded about this. . . .

He then quotes, without comment, Trotsky's page-long rationalization of the murders. Indeed, Wilson writes as if regicide—and bad manners—were Lenin's only blemishes; and maybe he was "led to believe" that there were no others. It is a bizarre emphasis. The clouds of ignorance part, revealing the solar fire of archaic snobbery.

Trotsky had half a point when he said (elsewhere) that the Romanov children paid the price for the monarchical principle of succession. This would certainly apply to the Tsarevich, Alexis; but the four girls could expect no such inheritance—and neither could the doctor, the valet, the maid, the cook, or the dog. Wilson quotes Trotsky's Diary in Exile (1935):

The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only to frighten, horrify and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin. In the intellectual circles of the Party there probably were misgivings and shakings of heads. But the masses of workers and soldiers had not a minute's doubt. They would not have understood and would not have accepted any other decision. This Lenin sensed well.

But Trotsky is lying. The masses of workers and soldiers were not told of the "decision" to execute the entire family; for almost a decade they were told, instead, that the Tsarina and her children were in "a place of security." Nor was it proclaimed, as an additional morale-stiffener, that the Cheka had simultaneously murdered Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Feodorovna, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Prince Ivan Konstantinovich, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, Prince Igor Konstantinovich and Count Vladimir Paley. This group was recreationally tortured, ante mortem. Grand Duke Sergei was dead on arrival, but the rest were thrown alive into the mine shaft where their bodies were eventually found.

The murder of the Romanovs seems to me fractionally less odious than, say, the murder of a Cossack family of equivalent size. The Tsar, at least, was guilty of real crimes (the encouragement of pogroms, for example). His end provoked, among the masses, little comment and no protest. The murder of the Tsarina and the five children was clearly seen by the Bolsheviks as a political deficit. It was therefore an irrational act, an expression of anger and hatred, though you can imagine how it was parlayed into an assertion of Bolshevik mercilessness, of "stopping at nothing." The ancillary killings sent no message to the Red Army or to the Party rump (except as a rumor). It sent a message to the Politburo, and the message said: we will have to win now, because we at last deserve anything they care to do to us if we fail. The Romanovs were murdered in mid-July 1918. By this time the regime had lost much of its pre-October support, and was responding with hysterical insecurity—that is, with violence. On September 3 and 5 came the decrees legitimizing the Red Terror.

There are several accounts, written or deposed, by the guards, executioners and inhumers of the Romanovs. One of the inhumers said that he could "die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress's ——." Imagining this, we arrive at a representative image of the gnarled hand of October. One executioner wrote (and he is quoted here for the dullness of his moral tone):

I know all about it. The shooting was all over the place. I know that . . . Medvedev took aim at Nicholas. He just shot at Nicholas . . . Anyway, it was just another sentence that had to be carried out, we looked on it as just another chore. . . . Of course, you start to think about its historical importance. . . . In fact, the whole thing was badly organized. Take Alexei, it took a lot of bullets before he died. He was a tough kid.

Yes, an imposing enemy: a thirteen-year-old hemophiliac. The Tsarevich outlived Nicholas II (resonantly and deservedly known also as Nicholas the Last). In those final seconds, then, the child was Alexander IV. Or Alexander the Last—but undeservedly.” - Martin Amis, ‘Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million’ (2002) [p. 53 - 57]

#amis #martin amis #koba #stalin #lenin #trotsky #bolsheviks #communism #russia #tsar #nicholas #romanov #edmund wilson

8 notes · View notes

jewish-culture-is · 9 months

Note

Jewish culture is getting to see your great grandfather’s US citizenship papers and imagining him renouncing loyalty to Tzar Nicholas II with utter delight.

(I’d put Ashkenazi but Russia was huge and there were probably Sephardi in the area near Turkey).

#jewish culture is #judaism #jewish #jumblr #soo true anon

23 notes · View notes

loiladadiani · 1 year

Text

Brothers and Rivals

I have seen many photos of Alexander III and his brother Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, together, but they were usually younger than here.

The brothers had strong, "loud" personalities. Sacha could control Vladimir when necessary. Nicholas II never could. Alexander III trusted his brother with many important positions. But always carefully watched him and his wife, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the Elder (who liked to stir up intrigues and was friendly with the Keiser.) After Alexander emerged from the train wreck in which he was involved with his family, one of the first things he did was to muse, out loud, about how disappointed Vladimir would be since they had all survived and he would not be inheriting the throne.

I know that Alexander III's dearest brother was Nicholas (Nixa) his eldest brother and closest friend. But I have always felt Vladimir and Sacha were closer than history has led us to believe. I certainly can imagine them having a good shouting match.

#Russian history #Romanov dynasty #Alexander III #Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich #Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna the Elder

24 notes · View notes

revjohno · 1 year

Text

RWRB: The Movie

Even before RWRB started climbing the bestseller lists back in 2019, the word was out: this one is going to be big! So Hollywood studios immediately began clamoring for movie rights, which Amazon Prime won in a sealed-bid auction. We fans then filled the internet with suggested cast lists—I was going to say, “none of which even came close to naming the actors eventually chosen, especially the principal leads.” But then a friend reminded me that he had actually suggested Rachel Hilson as Nora from the start, and (don’t read this next bit, Nick and Taylor), “I also had some great suggestions for Alex and Henry, which would have been perfect if they had gone for younger actors closer to the ages the novel specifies.” I sit corrected.

Meanwhile, we settled in to wait for an announcement that the movie was starting production, with a fervor unmatched by even the most rabid fans of the Left Behind series looking for the Second Coming. And we waited … and we waited … and we waited. First-time director Matthew Lopez, a Tony award-winning playwright who also wrote most of the script, seemed to be taking his sweet old time casting the film (though I suspect that once Nicholas Galitzine threw his hat into the ring to play Henry, no one else was even considered). And there matters sat. It didn’t take quite as long to start filming as Jesus has taken to return, but at times, it sure felt like it.

Then, with a rustling of angels’ wings and a blast from golden trumpets, the announcement came: the film had been completely cast and shooting was about to begin! Aside from the two leads, Matthew gave few particulars about who was playing whom, and almost no candid shots of scenes being filmed showed up on the web. There was a bit of flack when Rachel Hilson was announced as Nora, because of the book’s only Jewish character becoming Black. And when Queen Elizabeth II happened to die three weeks after principal shooting ended, people began speculating about the possibility of Matthew being psychic, since he had chosen to replace the novel’s Queen Mary with King James III. Obviously, it didn’t take Madame Cleo to predict that a 96-year-old lady might not survive much longer and that a male monarch would occupy the throne by the time of the movie’s premiere. But in the midst of all the mystery surrounding the film, we needed to talk about something.

Then shortly after shooting wrapped, Nicholas Galitzine was asked how faithful the movie was going to be to the novel. Somewhat nervously, I imagine (he later confessed in an interview with GQ that he never actually finished reading it, so no doubt he was a bit hazy about details), he cautioned us not to expect a carbon copy of the novel, but instead to treat the two as “entirely separate.” He then added, “I just hope that people will think of this as a fun movie.”

Sorry, Nick. RWRB is not a fun movie. Yes, like the novel, it is funny in spots (and Matthew’s script, which I felt actually improved on some of CMQ’s lines, is also remarkably faithful to the original in its general outline and inclusion of certain iconic scenes—far more than most movie adaptations). But the film is mainly concerned with serious issues, and aside from occasional lapses into preachiness, it treats these issues with sincerity, tenderness, and genuine feeling. And this is in no small part due to the performance of Nicholas Galitzine himself.

I find Nick Galitzine to be one of the most amazingly attractive human beings I have ever seen. It’s not just because of his handsome face; my admiration springs from his obvious innate decency, his endearingly goofy sense of humor, and his undeniable talent. There was no need for him to admit that he never finished the book—it’s not like we could have checked—but when asked, he told the truth, because he is an honest man. When the writer from GQ whispered that some other diners at the restaurant where they were meeting were getting irritated because Nick was being too noisy, he immediately got up on his crutches (he had chipped a bone in his ankle in an accident on the set of his latest project, Mary and George) and tottered over to apologize, an all-too rare example of consideration and good manners in this post-Trump world. When teased about his habit of calling everyone “mate” and hailing them as if they were long-lost BFF’s, Nick replied with a laugh, “Everyone is my friend—I’m just very excited to see them! I’m very enthusiastic!” I’m sure that truer words were never spoken.

Though Henry was easy to cast, the hunt for Alex took rather longer, because Matthew was searching for someone who demonstrated just the right chemistry with Nick. Then a thirty-year-old actor named Taylor Zakhar Perez put himself forward (too old, I would have thought, to play the 21-year-ol Alex; plus, at 6’2”, he was actually two inches taller than Nick, and CMQ had made a major plot point out of Henry’s superior height). But when Nick and Taylor first met, Matthew was called away for a few minutes, and he came back to find them talking nineteen to the dozen like they were old friends. At that moment, Matthew knew he had found his Alex. The possible objections were easily dealt with (Alex is no longer a college senior, but instead is now in law school, so he could easily be in his mid-twenties; and clever camera angles make Nick look taller. The script also creates a running joke out of Alex continually insisting that Henry cannot possibly be 6’2” as his fact sheet claims; and when they’re standing side-by side, Henry accuses Alex of wearing lifts. Alex’s look of confused dismay makes us actually wonder). They are perfectly matched, and the result is screen magic.

I found Taylor to be a complete revelation. His last movie had been a quickly-forgotten (luckily for him) bomb called One Up, in which Taylor’s lines were mostly restricted to comments like, “No, girls can’t join our team! Girls can never compete with men in the field of …” (wait for it) “competitive gaming!” Huh? We’re not talking about professional wrestling or weight-lifting—we’re talking about computer games. Moreover, countless studies have shown that women’s reflexes are quicker than men’s, their brains are proportionately larger, and that men’s only real superiority is upper body strength. I thought that such ignorant sexism as Taylor’s character in One Up conveys was a thing of the past, but in a world where women can lose the right to control their own bodies at the stroke of a pen, maybe not.

Though Taylor has never before played so major a part (that I’m aware of), he acquits himself admirably here. From the moment Alex tries to persuade Nora to ditch the reception and “go do touristy things,” the role of Alex is obviously in just the right hands. As it turns out, Nora might have done well to accept Alex’s suggestion, because he gets drunk at the reception and manages to create an international incident. And I must say, I very much enjoyed Henry and Alex’s interaction at the reception. Not only was I finally able to visualize the exact sequence of events leading to the disaster with the cake; I loved Henry’s fury at Alex’s dismissal of the proper use of titles (more about this below). It may make Henry look like a snobbish prig (which is certainly how Alex sees him), but Henry doesn’t care what Alex thinks. It also shows just how far Alex can goad him. For a royal, displaying such fury is even worse than making a scene, because royals are supposed to smother their feelings and appear cool, calm, and collected, no matter how trying the circumstances. Alex may be the first person who has ever been so lippy with Henry, and he really gets under Henry’s skin by doing so. (Which he will later do in a much more literal manner ….)

Which leads me to the BIG question we all wondered about: did Nick and Taylor’s offscreen friendship translate into SIZZLING sex onscreen? Well—no. And that’s fine by me. Any time I want to watch porn, there are any number of sites I could visit (or—ahem—so they tell me). Instead, these sex scenes give us poetry—aching, tender, romantic, and beautiful, allowing us the chance to peek into the depth of the characters’ intimacy, something made possible only by the actors’ consummate artistry. (Sorry—I couldn’t resist that one.)

Their first sexual interaction happens at the New Year’s Eve party, where they spend the entire evening talking and laughing together in a way that completely excludes everyone else. But then while everyone is sharing kisses at midnight (and several beautiful women make a beeline for Alex), Alex notices the (unkissed) Henry staring at him, heartbreak writ large on his face. Henry grabs a magnum of champagne and disappears, so Alex tracks him into the frozen Rose Garden. Critics have commented that this scene is detectably CGI, but come on, people—the movie was filmed during the summer, and it’s not like they were going to fly cast and crew to South America for a true wintry landscape. Besides, the actors’ talent made them look cold, which more than met the needs of the scene.

The ensuing kiss is straight out of CMQ, and I thought Alex’s reaction to Henry’s grab-and-smooch is particularly good. At first he seems startled (though not shocked), but then he plainly starts getting into it. It is Henry who breaks away, with a look of shock and terror as he realizes what he has just done. Without a single word, Nick is able to show us exactly what Henry must be thinking: Oh, my God! I let the mask slip—again! How does this bloke always make me do exactly what I was brought up not to do—expose myself by showing my real feelings? Christ! I need to get out of here!

Now it’s up to Taylor to show Alex’s reaction to the incident. In the movie, he seems not to feel much more than mild surprise, and a vague curiosity about whether Henry might be gay. But in the book, Alex goes into full-on gay crisis mode because of his body’s immediate reaction, and he develops even more of an all-consuming obsession with Henry. CMQ devotes twenty pages to this issue, one which all LGBT’s must eventually face (and twenty pages is actually getting off easy—in my case, accepting my bisexuality took decades). But since the movie’s Alex readily acknowledges his male lovers, enjoying Henry’s kiss isn’t an issue for him at all. The only complication he now faces is coming out to his parents, though I’m sure they figured out that their son was bisexual long ago.

Then comes the White House dinner and the Red Room scene, after which Alex orders Henry to “come to my room at midnight, where I am going to do very bad things to you.” My aforementioned friend (the one with the cast list) points out that Henry unbuttons Alex’s shirt and begins kissing down his chest and stomach, and Alex leans back with a look of gratified pleasure, but then at the end of the scene, Henry is still fully dressed. (Didn’t Alex reciprocate?) Henry then invites Alex to a polo match back in the UK, at which we see the guys kissing and Alex pushing Henry onto his back and reaching down to remove Henry’s belt, and … that’s as graphic as it gets. Matthew rightly protested the movie’s “R” rating, since aside from a couple of f-bombs and a brief shot of Taylor’s bare backside, that’s it. An “R” rating? I suspect that it’s studio nervousness about a potential homophobic reaction, and if the execs are that squeamish, why did they buy the movie rights in the first place?

The final sex scene is extremely well done. Henry begins by telling Alex that he wants to make love to him, to which Alex uncomfortably replies, “Make love? Who says that anymore?” Well, maybe Henry didn’t want to scare you off, Alex, by using the same words as he does in the book: “Please—I need you to fuck me.” But obviously, Alex intuits that this is exactly what Henry wants, because Alex says nervously, “Um—I’ve never—” to which Henry smiles and says, “Don’t worry—I went to an English boys’ boarding school,” which is a far more likely scenario for Henry to have been initiated into gay sex than a virginal 17-year-old Henry being seduced by one of his older brother’s friends.

The two lovers gaze at each other, and then they gently, almost reverently, begin to touch. It made me think of times at night when my wife and I are in bed, and I look at her asleep on the next pillow, and I touch her in exactly this way. My heart feels like it will burst, and wonder floods me as I realize that this woman, whom I have loved for all these years, actually loves me back. Can the human heart ever experience anything more wonderful than such a realization? The same knowledge shines out of the men’s eyes in this scene—I love him, and he loves me. Then the touching becomes more intense, and as the scene progresses, without a single word or sound, Nick conveys the exact moment when Taylor seemingly enters him, and precisely when the pain of initial penetration tips over into pleasure. I’ll say it again: this guy is amazing. Ever since I first started watching Nick’s movies, I have said that he can communicate more in ten seconds of silence than other actors can manage in a two-page monologue, and that is exactly what he does here. (And he still has no acting awards? I mean, really?)

Alex acknowledges to himself that making love is exactly what he has been doing with Henry all along, but by trying to share this realization he only succeeds in scaring Henry off. Henry begins deflecting every time Alex brings up their future together, a future which Henry believes to be impossible. Alex tells him, “I want to see you at a barbecue stand with sauce smeared all over your mouth, so I can lick it off,” to which Henry replies, “Don’t they have napkins in Texas?” Alex begins talking about spending time together after the election, when “we can be naked all day, and walk down the street holding hands” (presumably after they’ve put some clothes on). I loved watching Taylor’s face as he nervously suggests their eventually going public, and tries to make his declaration of love. And (as always), Nick perfectly conveys Henry’s troubled emotions, as Henry cuts Alex off by jumping into the lake. The fear on Henry’s face as he submerges himself in the water is a perfect visual metaphor for the doubts and terrors in which he is drowning.

And make no mistake—these fears are well-grounded, and very real. Henry was born into a world where nothing matters more than hierarchy and the strict rules which govern it—thus his insistence that Alex address him correctly as “Your Royal Highness” rather than “Your Majesty,” a title reserved the monarch alone. Priggish? Pretentious? Maybe—but take away the outward forms which maintain this artificial world, and who is Henry? And if Henry insists on being himself and steps outside the royal system, the punishment will be both immediate and severe.

Prince Harry and his wife were still newlyweds expecting their first baby while CMQ was writing the novel. No one could have predicted that the devil’s bargain between the Palace and the media (which always demands a villainous royal to skewer before they publish praise about a more important one) would lead to the vicious unpopularity Meghan Markle currently suffers. The written abuse heaped upon her (greatly assisted by social media) became so severe that she firmly believes it led directly to the loss of their second child. So they felt they had to flee the country if they were going to save their marriage and their family.

But as Prince Harry describes in his memoir, Spare, they soon discovered that for doing so, within twenty-four hours of their arrival in this hemisphere, his funds were cut off and they were officially evicted from both their royal residences. The very next morning, his security detail was taken away, leaving them homeless and unprotected in a world of crazy stalkers (from whom Meghan had been receiving death threats) and intrusive paparazzi. Harry also found that a private security firm would cost him roughly six million dollars a year, which would soon eat up every penny his mother had left him. Fortunately for Harry and Meghan, friends stepped into the breach to help them, but except for a very few, his family has turned on him with silent fury and stony faces ever since. Even Prince Andrew, convicted of molesting an underage female and who must register as a sex offender anywhere he goes for the rest of his life, got more generous treatment than this. All Harry did was put his love for his wife and children above royal duty, but for doing so he has been cast into the outer darkness. And for the sin of claiming his own right to fall in love with a brown-skinned American, Henry knows he would suffer the same fate.

But RWRB is a fairy tale, so of course everything works out fine in the end. The election which Alex’s forced outing has put into doubt ends with Ellen’s victory due to a strategy devised by Alex himself. Despite intense pressure from the royal family, Henry insists on staying with Alex and acknowledging their true feelings for each other, and the entire world rallies around them. It is a triumph for love and tolerance over “the stifling suffocation of heteronormative conformity.” (I wish I didn’t have to put that line into quotation marks, but no one who knows me would ever believe that I had come up with such an erudite and well-turned phrase on my own.)

I enjoyed the film immensely. I thought the actors were top-drawer, as was Matthew’s adaptation and direction. So what didn’t I like? The watering-down of the certain characters for one, but above all, the elimination of others, especially Alex’s sister June. Please bear with me, though, because I think I have a glimmer of understanding as to why Matthew might have done this. And with his love for the book, I am sure that he did not arrive at his decisions lightly.

Let’s start with the character of Nora. In the book, she is someone “with a computer for a brain” who adopts the online persona of “a depressed lesbian poet who meets a hot yoga instructor in a speakeasy and is now marketing her own line of hand thrown fruit bowls.” But in the film, she becomes little more than a walk-on, and her brilliant, prickly presence gets watered down into a warm and loving sister surrogate (necessary since June got axed—why include June when Nora can function for both?). Now that Nora is Alex’s supportive older sister, obviously there’s no hint of their past relationship from the book, in which “they just had to fuck to get it out of the way.” And without June, there’s also no need for a lesbian subplot. In the process, almost all of Nora’s spunkiness gets lost, and once the reception scene and the discussion with Alex about Henry’s New Year’s Eve kiss are over, she has nothing much to do but smile from the sidelines as she pairs up with Pez (who is also reduced to almost nothing—Henry’s incredibly wealthy, highly amusing and sexually ambiguous best friend barely has two lines). By reducing these characters, the movie loses the interest they both bring (Nora in particular).

This sort of character reduction is not limited to Nora and Pez. Many remaining characters get sanitized as well, if not entirely deleted. The abrasive Zahra who threatens to “staple Alex’s dick to his leg if it’ll keep it in his pants” morphs into a wisecracker who serves the essential function of calling Alex to account and dealing out the discipline he so obviously requires, but who always remains a friend. She thereby becomes much more likable—I loved the original character, but I used to wonder how someone so rude could have made it so far in politics—but in the process she becomes much more bland, and we lose most of her salty, prickly humor.

The salty-tongued Ellen, who sometimes uses her children as props and who ruthlessly cuts Alex loose when he threatens to become a campaign liability, gentles down into mere exasperated bossiness when dealing with her only child, and in the process becomes a fairly minor character. She shows none of the grit and determination that would have led her from her mother’s bar all the way to the White House. She is also still married to Alex’s father, Oscar Diaz, who has morphed from an important California senator into an undistinguished Congressman whose speeches everyone (but Alex) ignores. With Oscar and Ellen still together, the character of June loses one more necessary function: supporting and protecting Alex in the wake of their parents’ divorce, as well as her habit of challenging him for the behavior she believes may be fallout from Alex’s still-conflicting loyalties to his warring parents. But in the movie, the only hint of conflict between Mom and Dad is Oscar asking his son not to tell his mother that Oscar has been smoking out on the Truman Balcony.

And then there’s Rafael Luna. His abrasive, mentoring character gets deleted entirely, and his seeming betrayal (which causes Alex such agonized soul-searching) gets replaced with actual betrayal by a shifty investigative reporter. Luna goes undercover to expose a sexual predator and to prevent such a person from entering the White House (if only there had been this sort of double agent on the Trump campaign!). But in the movie, the guys get outed because a reporter named Miguel, a former lover of Alex’s, becomes jealous when Henry and Alex go off together at the DNC. I loved the cameo by Joy Reid (as I also loved the cameos by Rachel Maddow—and Matthew, while you were at it, why didn’t you also get Steve Kornacki?) as she pushes the reporter to explain why he had done such an underhanded thing. With all the hypocrisy and smug sanctimoniousness typical of his breed, the reporter gives a BS answer about “the public’s right, and need, to know such things about the people they elect,” which Joy immediately challenges by pointing out that (a) Alex has not been elected to anything, and (b) he has a perfect right to keep his private life just that—private.

So why did Matthew make all these changes? I think it may be for one simple reason: anyone adapting a novel for the screen must first identify the elements that made the original so popular, and, since we’re talking Hollywood, those which are also the most marketable. Every word must somehow advance the main storyline, and all subplots that distract from it must be ruthlessly eliminated. Multiple characters get condensed into one who can represent them all. There has to be a conflict engineered by the villain of the piece, but the elaborate undercover plot organized by the Richards campaign would have taken too much screen time. So it gets replaced by one which might be summarized in ten words: “Hell hath no fury like that of a lover scorned.” Of course, in a romcom, the screenplay must finally lead to a happy ending, and here we get two: in England, the lovers wave to an adoring public from the Buckingham Palace balcony; and in the US, Ellen finds out that she’s been reelected even as she and Zahra are composing her concession speech. Then Ellen, Oscar, Alex, and Henry wave at adoring supporters cheering Ellen’s victory.

RWRB the novel is only marginally a romcom; it is really a coming-of-age story, its message one of self-acceptance through self-awareness. This is what makes it so wildly popular among the YA audience at whom it is aimed, since adolescence is the time when the struggle to know and acknowledge who we really are is the most difficult. Just before the election, Nora tells Alex that he has no reason to be afraid of people’s reactions to his bisexuality; all he has to do to cement his popularity is to “Be Alex.” It’s good advice for all of us: difficult though it often is, our only real path to a full and productive life is by knowing and accepting ourselves as we are. And as a wise woman once told me, being yourself is a lot easier than being anyone else.

But self-acceptance is a particularly thorny issue for LGBT’s, even if our mothers are liberal Democrats like Ellen Claremont and our fathers are “patron saints of unisex bathrooms” like Oscar Diaz. As members of the culture into which we are born, from our very first awareness we know that there is something different about us. Something which our society teaches us is loathsome and contemptible, and which will inevitably lead to our eternal damnation. This is a pretty tough concept to handle, and we’re forced to confront it even before we enter preschool. But it’s not an issue the movie chooses to address: instead, it focuses on almost exclusively the developing romance between the two principals. This shoves the film’s entire weight onto Nick and Taylor, but fortunately these young men both have broad shoulders, and their talent is more than able to carry it. That talent also keeps us rooting for their characters’ happy ending, and if some characters and most of the subplots get cut, well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

So. Do I love the book RWRB? Of course I do—and how I wish it had been around when I was struggling with my issues as a young bisexual man in the 1970’s, since it would have saved me years of shame and pointless suffering. I would then have been much more ready for my own happy ending when Bobbie eventually entered my life. And do I love the movie RWRB? I totally do—I’m always up for a romance, and that is what Matthew, Nick, and Taylor have given us. In some ways, I actually prefer the movie (even though I know that saying this may lead to the RWRB police showing up at my doorstep to confiscate my “History, Huh?” T-shirt). You see, there’s one big problem with publishing a book with such a current, up-to-the-minute feel and format: it quickly becomes about as glossy and stylish as last year’s slang, and so when the Commemorative Edition came out in 2022, I found it curiously dated (the best part, for me, was its illustrations by Venessa Kelley). I think the movie will age a lot better, because with only minor alterations, it could be adjusted to almost any era—it’s not tied nearly so closely as is the book to the Gen Z / Millennial generation.

But to love both book and film, one has to accept the essential correctness of Nick’s original analysis: they are two separate entities, or, if you will, two sides of the same coin. One side is self-awareness and self-acceptance eventually leading to true love, and the other is true love which can only be enjoyed by reconciling societal expectations with personal integrity. So I find the book and the movie equally wonderful, just different. And I treasure them both.

#rwrb zine #vkelleyart gallery #nicholas galitzine #taylor zakhar perez #rwrb cast #red white and royal blue movie #matthew lopez #alex claremont diaz #henry fox mountchristen windsor

20 notes · View notes

otmaaromanovas · 1 year

Text

124 years ago on this day, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna was born at Peterhof Palace to Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna

107 years ago, Maria sent out telegrams to her favourite officers and family friends, inviting them to have a birthday breakfast with her . She received this reply from Anatoly Mordvinov, who affectionately referred to the Grand Duchesses as his ‘tormentors’: “I have just now been sent your lovely telegram, and you cannot imagine, my beloved "tormentor", how sincerely and heartily pleased I was with your dear attention, and at the same time terribly upset that I could not use your sweet invitation and come to breakfast at 13 o'clock, on the 15th of June [old style]. Believe me, it was a very, very big deprivation for me, all the more difficult, that I have not seen all of you so long, and for me, the last time was not enough! … Thank you heartily therefore, once again, for your kind remembrance, for your sweet invitation and for not having forgotten me yet! My warmest heartfelt greetings to all of you and 1000000000000000 most sincere wishes. Be healthy, joyful, happy, and have all your heart desires…”

Pyotr Vasilievich Petrov, beloved tutor, wrote to her in 1913: “Dear Maria Nikolaevna. For the eleventh time, beginning in 1903, it is my happiness and heartfelt pleasure to congratulate you on your birthday and wish you health, prosperity in everything and constant happiness in the future…”

Happy birthday Maria Nikolaevna!

Sources:

Correspondence of the Russian Grand Duchesses: Letters of the Daughters of the Last Tsar by George Hawkins

#Maria Nikolaevna #Maria Romanov #birthdays #my own

48 notes · View notes

foreverinthepagesofhistory · 1 year

Note

Do you have any favourite period dramas or films?

Hello anon! Yes I have a lot of favorites because period dramas are really the only tv shows I like! I will list my top 5 favs and why I like them so much!

Outlander: it is a period drama that starts out in the 1940s but then the main character Claire travels back in time to the Scottish Highlands in the 1740s and meets her soulmate Jamie. I love this so much because it is just so perfect. The perfect costumes, the perfect love story, and just the overall perfect vibe. I really recommend it! You can watch this on Netflix and Starz or Amazon Prime!

A Small Light: this follows the story of Anne Frank and one of her helpers Miep Gies (the main character.) It is set in the 1940s during WWII in Amsterdam and gives us the true untold story of Miep Gies. I really love this because it is just so captivating and interesting. It gives the characters so much depth and it is so quirky. It also gives a a real view of what a persons life was like during the holocaust. You can find it on Disney + and Hulu!

3. Romanovs: An Imperial Family: this is what I would say the most historically accurate film ever made about the Romanov Family. It covers the events of Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication in March 1917 to the execution of NAOTMAA in July 1918. It is a Russian film so it is in Russian but you can find it on YouTube with English subtitles! I really recommend this because all of its settings and almost all of the information is accurate. I can point out only a few faults but besides that, it is a really good representation of the vibe of the Romanov family.

4. The Wonder: this is a period drama starring Florence Pugh who plays a young English nurse who travels to Ireland to investigate a case of a girl named Anna who supposedly hasn’t eaten food for months. It is very creepy and disturbing to some people but I like it very much. It take place in the late 1800s and has superb costumes and settings. I really recommend it for people who just want to watch a creepy movie that takes place in the past rather than something that involves real events. You can watch it on Netflix!

5. Jojo Rabbit: this is more of a comedic period drama about a boy named Jojo who is growing up in Nazi Germany during WWII. He loves Hitler and imagines him as his best friend. It also shows how people close to him are resisting the Nazis and how Jojo changes his views about them. It sprinkles loads of comedy throughout the film and is very emotional too. You can watch it on Netflix!

I have many more favorites but I do not want to bombard you with them lol! Thank you for asking!

#answered ask #period drama #outlander #a small light #romanovs: an imperial family #the wonder #jojo rabbit

21 notes · View notes

adini-nikolaevna · 1 year

Note

Hello🤗 I want to ask you something. Nicholas's sons were busy cheating on their precious wives. What did Grand Duke Micheal and Queen Olga of Württemberg, whom I always loved and found honorable among the brothers, say about their brothers cheating and creating various scandals? Were they not giving any warning to their brothers?

Hello! Your are correct in that at least three of Nicholas I's four sons cheated on their wives. I don't believe Mikhail Nikolaevich had a mistress, but I could be mistaken (@ladysophy might be able to give you more information there), and I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine he didn't care too much about the extramarital activities of his brothers. At the time, it was the pretty much the norm for men, particularly those of rank, to keep a mistress--Nicholas I had one, and his sons Alexander, Konstantin, and Nicholas definitely did--and Alexander III and Nicholas II were the only Romanov emperors who DIDN'T cheat on their wives. Again, that's just the way it was, and women were expected to be "dignified" and look the other way. Olga of Wurttemberg was certainly one such woman. She claimed that her father's mistress, Varvara Nelidova, was just a "friend," and she was well aware of what Alexander II was doing with Ekaterina Dolgorukova, but she believed that the emperor could do whatever he wanted--even though she was close to Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Olga had to contend with her own husband's affairs--Karl I of Wurttemberg was gay, and he had relationships outside of his marriage, most notably with an American by the name of Charles Woodcock--but she looked the other way and bore it with grace like the queen that she was. Hope this helps!

#answered

11 notes · View notes

schismusic · 24 days

Text

Psychohistory and the eternal people: Russian Ark and my grandpa's demise

[Disclaimer: for obvious reasons, this post deals in heavy subject matters regarding family death, natural disasters, and (worst of all) potential spoilers for Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark. Reader's discretion is advised.]

So, remember when in the Ferrari post I said:

"We were at my grandparents' for Christmas and as we drove through the town my father looked out of the car's window and saw an obituary with his last name on it. I didn't quite catch who exactly it was and how they were related to us - and rest assured they most likely were, it's an Abruzzo thing. As most of my family's deaths, as discussed on my Godflesh post, were on my mother's side, to see my father's last name on a mortuary announcement was a bit of a surprise, in that as you probably can imagine it's also my last name. It's a new experience which, in total frankness, I don't exactly hope to replicate soon."

…anyways, July 17th, 2024 I get a phone call around 7:15pm. Grandpa is dead. Not like we didn't know, right — I hadn't been sleeping for days just so I could be awake when the phone call hit. Kidney collapse usually takes between twenty-four and forty-eight hours to get your ass. Grandpa took five days. Could have been three but the pacemaker did its job, unfortunately (not being able to contain any sort of discharge liquid is, how could I say?, immensely painful and irreversible). I had been living alone for the past three days, surviving on an empty fridge and anything canned I could find in my parents' house, working on my bachelor's thesis. Sometimes I'd watch a movie or something. So I'm reading this book on digital cinema — photonumerical, rather, as in it's still shot irl by an actual camcorder and not computer-generated — and of course Sokurov's Russian Ark gets namedropped in there. It's only one hour and a half anyways, so whatever, I watch it while eating lunch, i.e. canned tuna and perhaps salad from some kind of fucking plastic package.

Russian Ark takes every available opportunity to destroy flatness and depth, mixing them up into indistinction. Since the camera is constantly moving, zoom-ins and zoom-outs lose the exact sense of dimension. Objects, people and locales in the frame get squished, morphed, moved, and this is especially evident in Sokurov's frequent closeups on paintings. Usually never shot head-on, generally favouring an angled view of their surface, moving closer or further, left or right, up or down, slowly zooming in or our, paintings suffer the same effect as the three-dimensional objects of the movie, and therefore become one with them, achieving a manner of three-dimensionality and motion. Custine's impassioned reading of a Flemish painted interior (a Rembrandt, if memory serves) underlines all these moving elements, or elements that should be moving:

"Rags… a dog… eternal people…"

And it's these eternal people who "live and go on living… you'll outlive them all". It's these eternal people who gain motion in this medium, as opposed to all the non-eternal people who remain for all intents and purposes confined within the ark itself. History is a trap and art is perennially tasked to find a way to escape it, whether it realizes or not. A psychological (psychic?) reading of history, not too far away from psychogeographical practices, could be on display here: and while it may be much easier to be psychologically influenced by, say, the way a place looks rather than the mythologized recollection of a historical figure, as it stands a lot of people still romanticize and/or fantasize about Julius Caesar or general Armando Diaz or Dante Alighieri. Why not Catherine the Great or Peter the Great or Nicholas II's children then?

Russian Ark is not a particularly accurate historical movie. It's certainly very concerned with aesthetic matters first and foremost — as in, it mostly cares for its scenes to stick the emotional landing regardless of who is being portrayed, most of the time: does Sokurov really expect me to get emotional for the Romanovs? — and its whirlwind nature makes it especially hard to know what the fuck is going on if you don't know much about Russian history itself, mostly because the movie often flatout refuses to make itself clear. But this last thing is no issue to me. This should come as no surprise to anyone who can remember what my all-time favourite movies are. Miami Vice (2006) straight up hates you, the viewer, and dumps kilos upon kilos of technobabble and contrived dialogue on your ass only to hit you later with incredible aerial shots of a motorboat — I'm sorry, I do mean a go-fast boat — crossing the sea, where two people are passionately looking at each other and all of a sudden the movie finds its punctum, its center of interest. INLAND EMPIRE needs no introduction, mostly because I wouldn't know where to start giving one to it. The Warriors is a Walter Hill movie and as such it hates talking. Una giornata particolare rests on quite specific knowledge of practices against political dissidents in fascist Italy, but also loves to make references that would be impossible to catch if you don't know anything about contemporary Italy either (my favourite is when it reminds its audience that Giovanni Agnelli was a senator under Mussolini, wherein in the current day the Agnelli family basically own half of this country's industrial strength, and change). Mark Fisher still said it best: "[…] as Deleuze says in The Logic of Sense, why, if superficiality is defined as lack of depth, is depth not defined as lack of surface?".

Right before the funeral, my mother remarked that my sister looks a lot like my grandpa in some ways. Of course, my sister wasn't exactly amused by that comment, considering she's a sixteen-year-old girl and he was an eightyfive-year-old man with five sons of his own, so my mom decided to delve deeper into that mentioning exact points of comparison (my favourite was the nose, notoriously massive for every person in my father's family) and then went on to say "oh, but look, Grandpa used to be quite handsome when he was younger!". As a Star Trek enjoyer, it was hard not to mention that "handsome is what you call old women" while throwing your drink on Captain Picard's lapel.

Russian Ark celebrates a place (the Winter Palace, in Saint Petersburg) just as much as it celebrates the hundreds of years of human beings within it. Aleksandr Sokurov, I'm willing to bet, did not personally know everyone who ever lived there; the same operation directed by you and set in a generic apartment building in your area would probably yield more personal results. Russia's history is turned into a recombining mishmash by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but if you think about it anyone has cataclysmic events that force us to reconsider and recatalogue, leaving us with a jumbled, freely-associated mess of data, events, information. This mess allows for new connections to be born. Associations previously thought inadequate, inappropriate or simply impossible are now the first thing that springs to mind. Details are lost to time, then found at the next cataclysm, traded for others. Alain Resnais called memory an "evident necessity", which automatically entails that the processes of memorization (which includes forgetting, distancing effects, etc.) are themselves inevitable, if painful. Why deny it?, he rightfully asks.

My mate F.'s house was declared unsafe to inhabit after the August 2016 earthquake. It stood empty for about a year or two, then got demolished in (I think) 2019. For a really long time, all you could see were bits and pieces of the original tiling in the kitchen, the ascending line of paint that followed the stairs, the master bedroom's wallpaper. Pressed two-dimensionally against otherwise whitewashed walls, they projected outward their original full form, yearned for it to me. All of their history, or at least all of the history I had made experience of, sort of manifested itself, unfolded at random, reminded me of an offhand comment I'd heard once, or of that one time that F.'s grandfather had made it abundantly clear that I should avoid Psychology uni. The guy had been a Marxist-Leninist militant in the '50s and '60s, so I can at least justify his distaste.

After the pandemic, it took them about three years to actually get the work on the house started. When I came to visit Grandpa in the hospital, last June, I took the time to pass by and saw that it actually had been structured. They're changing the layout of the whole house, thank God, because the original structure always struck me as surprisingly inefficient and contrived. When the house is back up, I know it will not be the same thing, because the places themselves where the memories had been will no longer be there. But there will be an echo of aunt L. stuck in the new living room's ceiling, a past version of F.'s parents calling at us to get ready for dinner from across an empty expanse where there used to be a wall, or a door, F.'s dad's PlayStation One hooked up to a TV right in the middle of what used to be a tiled floor.

The process of historicization isn't that far off, anyway. Mythologizing practices are inherent in historiography, both folk and academic. This one scholar specializing in Carnival rites of Northern Italy went near Brescia once, in the mid-1900s, and asked a middle-aged farmer about traditional Carnival rites currently in practice at the time. The farmer described the current rites, then added that "after the Council of Trent, Carnival has become much worse". Quite flabbergasted, as there was no chance in hell that the woman had received education about an ecclesiastic event that took place in 1545, the scholar asked the lady if she knew when the Council of Trent had happened, and her reply was: "It must have been when my grandmother was alive or when my mother was young, because I wasn't born yet". Russian Ark takes the next logical step: everything happens all the time. No strong narratives means you make up your own, for better or worse. We all live in a yellow submarine, or more precisely in Noah's Ark, and every one of our arks is shaped slightly differently. Mine looks like a mountainside two-floor house that's painted white, where a lot of people come for big dinner parties just about every weekend of August, where my grandpa is sitting on a plastic chair, lighting a cigarette, silently watching around, smiling at the beauty and bustle of life. How does that one Fellini line go, from the end of 8½? "È una festa, la vita…"

#schismusic #cinema #russian ark #aleksandr sokurov #schism writing #long form content #mourning

3 notes · View notes