Our Notes & References

Very rare publication from a small city in the Urals: Grand Duke Aleksei Nikolaevich’s copy, with a dedication page specially printed and presented in a typical binding from Nicholas’ library. We could compare it with the NYPL’s copy, which appeared to be Gd. Duchess Anastasia’s copy, in the exact same binding and with a dedication leaf for her. We also handled another publication with almost the same binding, which also had Nicholas II’s blue monogram bookplate.

The content is also of interest, as it is an anti-revolutionary and monarchist appeal by a monk of the Black Hundreds, who was faithful to the Romanovs to the bitter end.

Georgii Mikhailovich Kuznetsov (1873-1959) was a Russian monk under the name of Serafim, author, monarchist and member of the Union of the Russian People, the most important among the Black-Hundreds. After the 1905 landmark year, Serafim wrote the anti-revolutionary article “An Appeal to Strengthen Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland” (1906), which was widely distributed throughout Russia and caught the attention of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna: in 1910 Serafim was given an audience with Emperor Nicholas II at Tsarskoye Selo.

Serafim’s life and fate was then inextricably caught up with those of the imperial family. In 1918 he is said to have personally travelled to Alapaievsk to recover the body of the Empress’ older sister, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna. Thereafter in 1920 he fled Russia with the remnants of Admiral Kolchak’s forces, personally accompanying the body to China, then to the Holy Land, and was crucial in saving it from desecration by the Bolsheviks (see Marchenko). Serafim remained in Jerusalem, building a cell on the Mount of Olives, where he died in 1959, never having returned to Russia.

This book was written to mark the 300 year anniversary of Romanov rule in 1913: in the main it is a history of Hermogenes, Patriarch of Moscow (1530-1612), who is remembered for his resistance to the Poles during the Time of Troubles and for his subsequent martyrdom — in so doing he is said to have “preserved the continuity of royal power from the Rurikids to the Romanovs” (Gromova). His is the titular ‘triumph of duty’ and a suggestion that the Romanov power was pre-destined and sanctioned by God. Quite a choice of subject, given the events looming just over the horizon.

Rare, with no copies passing through the market in recent decades, including in Russia. Only two copies traced in WorldCat (Stanford and Anastasia’s copy in NYPL), and one each in the National Library (St. Petersburg) and the State Library (Moscow).

Provenance

(typical hand-written Bolshevik label to upper corner of upper fly-leaf); “Printed in Russia” (ink stamp to bottom of same fly-leaf); Avenir Nizoff (émigré, pianist, who lived in Edmonton, Canada, in the second half of the 20^th century, and gathered a large, wide-ranging library of Russian works, especially covering art, history and literature, including a number of imperial copies).

Bibliography

Fomin, Sergei. 2005. Alapaevskie Mucheniki: Ubity i Zabyty; Gromova, Anna Vital’evna. 2013. ‘Velikie Proslavleniia v Tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II’. Russkaia Istoriia 3; Marchenko, Aleksei Nikolaevich. 2015. ‘Otnoshenie Igumena Serafima (Kyznetsova) k Obnovlencheskomu Raskolu Po Materialam Perepiski Iz Ierusalima s Tikhonovskim Dukhovenstvom Permskoi Eparkhii 1927-1931 Gg.’ Vestnik Pravoslavnogo Sviato-Tikhonovskogo Gumanitarnogo Universiteta., no. 2 (63): 99–107.