I’m about halfway through Peter Kurth’s Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra, a book that combines lavish photographs with details about the daily lives of the last imperial Romanov family.

I highly recommend this book for Romanov aficionados, with one suggestion: If you can find a copy of the hardcover (it’s out of print), get that. I have the paperback, and it’s a tad unwieldy: ~225 pages in an oversize, coffee-table format. This means it isn’t well suited for the bus or the bathtub, two places where I do a good bit of reading.

That very minor quibble aside, Tsar is packed with information, many quotes, and a wealth of detail, all of which will prove invaluable for me as a fiction writer hoping to recreate as realistically as possible St. Petersburg society during the final days of the empire.

I was going to wait to plug the book until after I’d finished it, but then I ran across this gem–the translation of a letter from Rasputin to Alexandra on the outbreak of World War I (pages 118 and 121). And it’s so perfect I may use it as an epigraph for the novel in progress:

Again I say a terrible storm cloud hangs over Russia. Disaster, grief, murky darkness and no light. A whole ocean of tears, there is no counting them, and so much blood…. Russia is drowning in blood. The disaster is great, the misery infinite.

He was right, you know. Was he prescient or just more observant than many around him?