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almost certainly The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus. Alexandra Romanov was a converted Orthodox Christian, in the Russian Church, and the Romanovs were deeply pious. The Ladder (of St. Climacus) is a foundational text in Orthodoxy—dated to the sixth or seventh century, it details the ascetic steps to theosis, or divinization in God. this is a little tragically ironic since the last Romanovs, including her, were designated martyrs and more recently, saints of the Orthodox Church, so she has in some way already passed the threshold.

Do you know anything about the books read by the Romanov family? According to the Romanov family website by Helen Azar (I think?), Alexandra for example owned a book titled The Ladder - but I can’t seem to find any more information on it?

I couldn't find anything on The Ladder. Of course, it's hard to know exactly what they all read but there are a few books mentioned in some texts and those found at Ipatiev House (I left off some religious texts)

Madame Chrysanteme by Pierre Loti

The Narratives of a Hunter by Turgenyev

Anna Kareninia by Tolstoy

Greenmantle by John Buchan

War and Peace by Tolstoy

On Paris by Avenarius

Reflections by Popov

My Opining Kingdom

The Country of Dwarves

Takes of Shakespeare

The Fables of La Fontaine

Anthology of Childhood by Frederick Bataille

The Role and the Ring

The Eaglet by Roatland

The Princess and the Goblin

France and all it's Epoques

Of Patience in Suffering

The Life and Miracles of St Simon the Just of Verkoutsk

The Wider Life

Audacious Life by Tcharski

History of Peter the Great by Tchistiakov with blue green cover

The King Mambo by Paul du Chulus

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man

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“One is not able to comfort every grief; there is grief which ends only after the exhaustion of the heart, in a long oblivion or the distractions of current everyday cares.” —Andrei Platonov, “The Potudan River.”

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"[The novelist's touch] consists, I should say, in a failure to realize the complexities of the ordinary human mind; it selects for literary purposes two or three facets of a man or woman, generally the most spectacular, and therefore useful ingredients of their character and disregards all the others. Whatever fails to fit in with these specially chosen traits is eliminated—must be eliminated, for otherwise the description would not hold water. Such and such are the data: everything incompatible with those data has to go by the board. It follows that the novelist's touch argues, often logically, from a wrong premise: it takes what it likes and leaves the rest. The facets may be correct as far as they go but there are too few of them: what the author says may be true and yet by no means the truth. That is the novelist's touch. It falsifies life." — Norman Douglas, open letter to D. H. Lawrence

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"The novelist, we are beginning to see, has a very mixed lot of ingredients to handle. There is the story, with its time-sequence of "and then ... and then ..."; there are ninepins about whom he might tell the story, and tell a rattling good one, but no, he prefers to tell his story about human beings; he takes over the life by values as well as the life in time. The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They "run away," they "get out of hand": they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay." — E. M. Forster, "Aspects of a Novel" 66—67

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Christian Love in Kierkegaard & Dostoevsky