Analysis

 The literary text I have decided to analyze is a book written by Sarah Miller by the title of The Lost Crown. It’s a work of historical fiction that tells the story of Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Romanov living during the Russian Revolution as the displaced royal family and their eventual execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Sarah Miller has obviously done a lot of research, both historical and what makes a reader feel attachment to the story and to the characters, and it shows in her novel. One only has to quickly flip through the book to see this. The last pages include comparisons between the four young women as characters in a novel and the four young women as the people they really were. More flipping shows a smattering of Russian terms and phrases that are covered in a dictionary in the back of the book.

                One of the first things noticed is that Miller gives each of her characters a unique and distinct personality. The book is sectioned into chapters, each chapter being the point of view of one of the grand duchesses. There is no label on the page to tell you who is narrating, but once you’ve read through each young woman’s chapters once or twice, you don’t need them. Olga is thoughtful and moody, as she is often saying things like, “Since Otets Grigori’s murder, I’ve hardly known how to feel.” (Miller, 83) Tatiana is responsible with a firm since of duty, even if it causes her to be a bit bossy, as this quotation shows, “…the blinds are drawn down, and no one is allowed to look out. Nevertheless, Anastasia peeks out. ‘Get away from there!’ I tell her.” (Miller, 153) Maria is a romantic optimist who only wants to flirt with soldiers and think of names for her future children, and Anastasia is a daring tomboy. As these girls have been dead for going on 100 years, we only have secondary sources documenting their personalities. Sarah Miller has worked wonders creating characters as accurate as possible from sources that often aren’t even in English. Although we as readers know the ending to the Romanov story, for everyone has heard the rumors of Anastasia’s survival, you still can’t help but feel a little uplifted and hopeful when the characters try to give one another hope and cheer each other up when they are kept as prisoners and enemies of the revolution. As the dutiful Tatiana tells her sister, “We never know what the Lord has in store for us. Think of Auntie Ella. When that Red terrorist blew up Uncle Sergei, she founded her own convent…with God all things are possible.” (Miller, 287) As the novel draws to a close and you know the narrators are nearing their deaths, the author tends to close each girl’s last chapter with a statement in the type of attitude you’d expect each girl to possess. Olga is glad to be with her family in the last moments of her life, Tatiana believes with enough faith and observance of duty things will turn out differently, Maria still wants children and a husband even after seeing how much her mother suffered taking care of her dying son, and Anastasia wants to be remembered by history as more than just a clownish tomboy.

                Another very important detail the author has written into her book is the fact that the Romanov family went from privileges most can only dream of to living on a small budget under the orders of revolutionaries in a very short period of time. Such a quick change would be jarring to anyone, but especially to teenagers who have never lived any other way, especially experiencing living on a yacht in the summer and in a different palace with every change of season, as stated in Maria’s chapter, “Since sailing from our summer house in Peterhof, my sisters and I have spent all day on the sunny decks of our dear yacht Standart…” (Miller, 2) This is quite a change from later in the book, when the family realized they now live under orders. “Citizen Romanov, you and your son will remove the epaulets from your uniforms immediately if you know what’s good for you!” (Miller, 214) The reader can almost feel the tense environment along with the family. One thing many readers might be able to understand is living with a sick family member. Sarah Miller also incorporates that into her novel, which is a tricky endeavor, since many people might already know what that’s like. The heir to the throne and youngest Romanov child, Aleksei has a disease called hemophilia, which can lead to extreme pain and bleeding to death from small injuries. Miller is very good at describing the scene of a worried family around a sick child. One of the brutal paragraphs says, “A cough from Aleksei makes us all jump, and Dr. Derevenko swears. Beside me, Olga begins to sway…a pile of bright bloody rags is heaped on the floor…I squeeze my eyes shut, press my folded hands to my chin, and pray harder.” (Miller, 67)

                On the topic of brutality, another thing included in the novel is the fact that the empress and her two eldest daughters trained to become WWI Red Cross nurses. WWI began in 1914, the same year the novel begins. As one of the characters described her hospital work, “No matter how the shattered bones and pulpy flesh turns my stomach, what we see isn’t real war…at the front lines, there are tent hospitals full of mud and panic, where the men arrive brightly bloodied and screaming.” (Miller, 25)

                 The Lost Crown is a good book for someone interested into getting into Russian history, it’s a good book for wanting to gain some insight into the lives of the last Imperial Family of Russia, and it’s a good book if you want to read about how any four young women might react and cope with their world falling down around them.

Works cited:

Miller, Sarah Elizabeth. The Lost Crown. New York: Atheneum for Young Readers, 2011.