Visits to the Imperial Court

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Olga Ilyin (Lita) recounts her experiences as a young girl being brought up frugally in the midst of family plenty. After her mother died, she was cared for by her father’s sister, the idealistic Aunt Katya. Aunt Anna, her mother’s sister, a career lady-in-waiting at the Russian Imperial Court in St. Petersburg, loved to invite Lita for longish summer visits. To Lita, the court was a brilliant, elegant, delightful world. Yet even she felt this world to be somehow flawed, even unreal. The flaw was incarnated in the demonic Gregory Rasputin, whom Olga encountered several times. Her description of Rasputin and his behavior is a small but no doubt valuable contribution to history; but in this novelized memoir, Rasputin also becomes an essential symbolic element in the author’s story of her own spiritual crisis, as World War I casts its heavy shadow, and as the Expulsion from Paradise nears.