RIP Grand Duchess Leonida of Russia

[themanintheseersuckersuit]

Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna of Russia, who has died aged 95, was the last surviving member of the Romanov family to have been born before the Russian Revolution; as widow of Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, Tsarist pretender to the throne of Russia, she styled herself Her Imperial Highness.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... ussia.html

In 1931 the writer Maxim Gorky, who had been encouraged by the Bagrations in his early life, helped Leonida, then 17, and the rest of her family to escape to Spain.

Three years after settling in Western Europe, Leonida married a Jewish-American businessman, Sumner Moore Kirby, in a civil ceremony in Nice. He was a business partner of one of the FW Woolworth heirs and had been married twice before. They had one daughter, Helene, born in 1935, before they were divorced in 1937. Kirby died in hospital in Leau in 1945, having been deported by the Vichy government to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944, leaving Helene to inherit considerable wealth.

[jarnon]

The Grand Duchess was buried yesterday at the Pater and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. I visited there today. I'll post photos when I can.

[jarnon]

The Peter and Paul Cathedral:


I didn't get a photo of the Grand Duchess's tomb. But here's Peter the Great's tomb:


Czar Nicholas II and his family are buried here:

The plaques are for Olga, Tatiana, Nicholas, Alexandra, Maria and Anastasia.

Later, the tour bus drove down Millionaire Street (sorry the street sign isn't more legible):

[wintergreen48]

Jarnon, these are really cool pictures. I have not yet made it to Petersburg, so this is a nice fill-in.

The picture of Peter's tomb is interesting: the inscription at the bottom reads 'Peter I The Great,' and that has been on there for generations, even throughout the Soviet period: the commies liked Peter because he was an absolute ruler who demanded absolute loyalty and devotion to the State (he murdered his own son for his disloyalty), which fit in well with Soviet ideology.

But it is also cool because it is written in the old alphabet. The Russian version of Cyrillic used to have tons more letters than it does now, but Peter knocked out a bunch of them (which, by his time, were no longer pronounced-- things like the silent e in English, except that they were ALWAYS silent, or they involved a sound that most people could not even hear), but that still left Russian with a few more letters than needed, and the Soviets issued decrees to eliminate even more letters, one of which is that final 'yat' in the spelling of Peter's name. That actually became a big political issue, with the anti-Soviets insisting on retaining it, and the commies doing otherwise. But although the Soviets did remove it from modern use, they left it in the inscription on Peter's tomb.

Language, or the writing of it, is kind of funny. German continued to use that impenetrable black letter (gothic) type until the 20th Century (just try reading a book printed in Germany in the 1800's... if you don't have astigmatism before you read it, you will afterward) (I'm sure that this is how I developed astigmatism). People complain about the seeming arbitrariness of English spelling, but at least you can read the letters.

[jarnon]

Thanks for the explanation, Wintergreen. I noticed old-fashioned letters on Nicholas and Alexandra's plaques (even though they were buried in 1998). Nicholas's patronymic ends with ъ, and Alexandra's patronymic begins with Θ.

[wintergreen48]

Thanks for the explanation, Wintergreen. I noticed old-fashioned letters on Nicholas and Alexandra's plaques (even though they were buried in 1998). Nicholas's patronymic ends with ъ, and Alexandra's patronymic begins with Θ.

Nicky and Alex were canonized as martyrs by the (Russian Orthodox) Church, which still uses Old Church Slavonic in its liturgy (much as the Catholic Church continued to use Latin exclusively until the 1960's, and now occasionally uses it), and OCS still uses an older (but not the absolute oldest) form of its alphabet, which is why you will continue to see it in churches.

The letter ъ that you found that ends Nicky's patronymic is actually still a current Russian letter, but it is rarely used today. It's known as the 'hard sign,' and no longer has any pronunciation of its own, although it tells you something about the pronunciation of other letters. Before the commies took over, it was a very common letter: someone, I don't remember the guy's name, studied it and determined that, as the final letter of many words, it made up something like 3-4% of the text of Russian books and newspapers published during the 19th Century. The Soviets declared it to be a 'parasite' that wasted paper (it used to be a vowel, but it has not been pronounced for a long time, so there was no need for it, at least, not at the end of words), so they pretty much banned it, as an economic measure, going so far as to seize the font-type from printers who insisted on using it. Which led to a real problem because, although the 'hard sign' is not pronounced itself and has not had any meaning at all for many generations when it appears at the end of a word, when it is located within a word it signifies that a following 'soft' (palatalized) vowel is pronounced separately from the preceding consonant, and they needed to keep it for use in that situation (some words with different meanings are spelled identically-- but for the 'hard sign'-- and are supposed to be pronounced differently-- because of the 'hard sign'-- and confusion arises in the printed language when you do not use the 'hard sign' to signify which word you really mean. It is sort of like the umlaut in German, which does not have any pronunciation itself, but which changes the pronunciation of the vowel over which it appears). In modern Russian, you no longer see the ъ at the end of words, except as sort of a joking thing, where someone wants to make something seem to be 'old' (kind of like the practice in English of adding a final unnecessary letter 'e' to get something like 'Ye Olde Antique Shoppe').

And don't get me started on the mispronunciation of 'Ye Olde Antique Shoppe' (the 'Ye' is supposed to be pronounced 'thee,' not 'yee,' the 'Y' actually being the runic 'thorn').

Man, I love this language stuff.