Royal Dancing Bears

...An important consideration is that he never doubted himself...

...It is, in fact, the first history of the entire dynasty to appear in English, and the events involved are themselves fascinating...

...In 1967, Robert K. Massie catered to this adolescent taste with a sentimental, biased account of the tragedy of Nicholas and Alexandra, and now John Bergamini has reaped what Massie has sown with The Tragic Dynasty: A History of the Romanovs...

...As this bibliography would suggest, Bergamini hardly discusses historical background...

...Although from the 16th century onward, the argument continues, most historians have claimed that Dmitri was too "vulgar" to be the Tsar's son, "Actually his vulgarity could be the lordly familiarity of someone completely sure of himself, coupled with the natural lack of snobbishness that one would expect of a border-crosser and a refugee among the humble...

...the return of Mary Stuart from France to Scotland was to "the initial astonishment and subsequent delight of all, except the unromantic John Knox...

...Bergamini writes: "While it seems probable that the Tsarevitch Dmitri did kill himself accidentally at Uglich in 1591, it is possible that he was saved in all the confusion and spirited away by an uncle, perhaps given to Bogdan Otrepiev to bring up as his own son, and so forth...

...When one examines the bibliography of The Tragic Dynasty, however, he is less surprised by this parade of Russian war horses...

...The inaccuracy of witnesses and the sensationalism of the public are hardly matters to confound or humble the rational, except to remind them of the unreliability of human sense...

...It might be more profitable to examine the question of why the Varangian spirit survived so long...

...In the first place, he is writing for a generally uninformed audience that may require an explanation of Russian patronyms, or which at best knows Russian history only through the arts, literature and movies...

...It is hard to respect a historical study, albeit an admittedly popular one, which omits documents in the original source language, and depends entirely on the personal reminiscences of exiles and commercially oriented biographies, Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra included...

...But it is difficult to keep this subject matter from degenerating into sensationalism, and Bergamini certainly has not tried...

...All the books are either in English or French, and a number of them are memoirs of White Russians, such as the notorious Prince Youssoupoff, Count Paul Vassili and the Grand Duchess Marie...

...After detailing the excessive crimes of early tsars, Bergamini treats recent ones more gently, in particular those of the weak and unfortunate Nicholas II...

...Above all, it is time to call for an end to this kind of presentation, which treats human beings as monsters and history as a form of entertainment...

...For every Texan who saw Lee Harvey Oswald where he was not supposed to be," Bergamini declares, "there is a Russian aristocrat whose grandfather had special knowledge of the death of Alexander I. Such things fascinate the historians, confound them, and humble them...

...The utter lack of historical sense evinced by Bergamini is summed up in his comparison of the rumors surrounding the death of Alexander I (who was believed by some not to have died but to have retired to a monastery) to the rumors surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy...

...The view that individuals influence the course of history to any great degree is presently unfashionable, but even its advocates try to prove their case, rather than assuming, for instance, that Peter I and Catherine II single-handedly dragged their country closer to European civilization...

...Finally, the author presents a vignette of his own mother in Paris, encountering her Russian butler in a neighboring box at the Opera in full court regalia: "He ceremoniously presented himself at the interval to kiss her hand...

...Earlier, the author writes evasively: "Nicholas allowed himself many ethnic prejudices"-a pronounced understatement when one remembers the horror with which the rest of the world regarded Russia's treatment of its Jews in his reign...

...Bergamini postulates some theories of his own, to be sure...

...The author also indulges himself in speculations on his subjects' thoughts, and in character analysis from portraits...

...Did he dream of returning Russia to the Kremlin...

...Even Anna Anderson's / Am Anastasia is listed...

...Very probably . . . ." The more serious-minded historian, lacking Bergamini's insight, relies on factual evidence rather than mystic intuition for his observations, even if this deprives his works of a novel-istic dimension...

...1600-13), when a series of men, each claiming to be Dmitri, a younger son of Ivan who had died in 1591 under mysterious circumstances, fought the boy-ars for the throne...

...Again one can only protest that wild speculation is not, or should not be, the job of the historian...

...One is that the false Dmitri who overthrew Boris Godunov's son Fedor and made himself tsar, really was Ivan's son...

...The most despicable thing about The Tragic Dynasty is that Bergamini is not offering a particular view of the Romanovs, but simply exploiting them as a troupe of performing freaks whose behavior is bound to entertain the vulgar...

...So far I have concentrated on The Tragic Dynasty's novelistic qualities, but the book's style is so appalling and its situations are so melodramatic and simplistic that even as fiction its value would be slight...

...By including the earliest Romanov tsaritsa, Bergamini manages to smuggle in the demonic Ivan (An-astasia was the first of his seven wives, and the only one he appears to have loved), as well as their sim-pleminded son Fedor I (last of the Rurik line), the "Usurper" Boris Godunov, and an account of the Time of Troubles (c...

...Did he dream of peace...

...After this, the early Romanovs come as something of an anticlimax, until we reach the likes of Peter the Great, the Empress Elizabeth, and Catherine II (whose husband may have been the last true Romanov, since there is some question as to the legitimacy of her son...

...Reviewed by PHOEBE PETTTNGELL There comes a time in adolescence when we discover Russia, either through reading Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, hearing Boris Godunov, or perhaps through seeing the Bolshoi Ballet or Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nev-sky...

...Did he dream of letting the Navy sink...

...The book will be lavish entertainment reading for some...

...Anything is possible, of course, but it is up to the discriminating historian to decide which possibilities seem worth consideration...

...and he resumed serving Ma-dame's breakfast the next morning without comment...

...Subsequently, we learn about the medieval hero Prince Igor through Aleksandr Borodin's opera of the same name (but not the epic Song of Igor's Campaign), Alexander Nevsky through Eisenstein, Peter the Great's romance with his second wife (later Catherine I) through the Soviet movie Peter I, Napoleon's 1812 Russian expedition through Tchaikovsky-and so forth...

...One would have to answer such questions as to how the epileptic child became a healthy young man, or why he did not make his claim sooner, and what he did in the years between Uglich and his appearance in Poland around 1600...

...He mentions the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in a third of a paragraph, without referring to the Tsar's own anti-Semitism, which certainly did nothing to discourage this massacre...

...Young boyars in Peter the Great's time "come to realize where the action was...

...The Red staircase is the scene of "many of the bloodiest dramas in the Kremlin...

...The Tragic Dynasty is beautifully illustrated with Russian chestnuts, including Ilya Repin's melodramatic painting of Ivan IV's remorse after killing his son Tsarevitch Ivan, Basil Surikov's picture of Stenka Razin, Lord of the Volga, photographs of the Romanov crown jewels and the magnificent gardens of Peterhof, the happy family portraits of Alexander II, his wife and descendants, and the almost too perfect beauty of the last tsar and tsaritsa and their children...

...After describing Ivan the Terrible's filicide in terms of the Repin painting, Bergamini says of Boris God-unov's death, "It is unlikely that Boris rolled down the steps from his throne, as most operatic bassos do, or somersaulted down them, as Siepi used to do so gracefully...

...For some, such exotic culture can become obsessive, the victim's imagination getting caught up in a world of mad tsars, onion towers, golden icons, and sleighs on the Neva...

...What evidence prompts this strange idea...

...Bergamini displays neither sympathy nor hatred for his dancing bears-only a showman's proprietary interest...

...In a reference to a famous Alec Guinness movie, Bergamini refers to "Norman 'coronets' mingled and bred with Saxon 'kind hearts' to produce Englishmen," an explanation that combines revolting coyness with moronic oversimplification...

...Surely we do not need to be told again that Russia was a splendid but semibarbarian country by European standards, or that madness in its tsars was so common as to be almost a built-in feature of the office...

...Certainly this "possibility" should be based on more data than explanations of bearing and manner...

...Examining a painting of the son of Peter I, the murdered Tsarevitch Alexis, Bergamini muses: "His large brown eyes have a faraway look and are slightly askance, suggesting moodiness, frustration, even a touch of madness...

...On the other hand, Bergamini touches on the Old Believers without mentioning Modest Moussorgsky's magnificent opera on the subject, Khovan-china, presumably because his readers have never heard of it...

...The representatives of the people are at least as interesting: Stenka Razin, the great 17th-century Cossack rebel, Emilian Pugachev, leader of the 1773-75 serf rebellion, and the notorious Rasputin, to name only three...

...The chronicle runs from the marriage of Ivan the Terrible to Anas-tasia Romanov, through the coronation in 1613 of her grandnephew Michael, the first Romanov tsar, to the present family living in the United States and Europe, and the false pretenders who still appear from time to time...

...Massie's book was, at least, openly partisan...