The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander (English) Paperbac

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The haunting bestseller about the mysterious last days of the Romanovs as seen through the eyes of a young family servant. Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia, Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinating story of the final days of Nicholas and Alexandra as seen through the eyes of the Romanovs' young kitchen boy, Leonka.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient), directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters)Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia, Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinating story of the final days of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov as seen through the eyes of their young kitchen boy, Leonka. Now an ancient Russian immigrant, Leonka claims to be the last living witness to the Romanovs' brutal murders and sets down the dark secrets of his past with the imperial family. Does he hold the key to the many questions surrounding the family's murder? Historically vivid and compelling, The Kitchen Boy is also a touching portrait of a loving family that was in many ways similar, yet so different, from any other."Ingenious...Keeps readers guessing through the final pages."-USA Today

Author Biography

Robert Alexander has studied at Leningrad State University, worked for the U.S. government in the former U.S.S.R., and traveled extensively throughout Russia.

Review

"Ingenious...Keeps readers guessing through the final pages." —USA Today "A gripping and entirely believable description of the last days of the Romanovs...Thoroughly enjoyable, educational, and just a good old-fashioned page-turner." —Margaret George, author of Mary, Called Magdalene"This is a dream of a book... [Robert Alexander's] tough, stylish prose is the perfect medium for this fast-becoming myth of evil and innocence, of frailty and courage, of betrayal and redemption." —Judith Guest"Through the power of the author's imagination, we see not only the tragedy of the Emperor, but that of a human being, man, and father." —Ivan Artsyshevsky, The Romanov Family Association

Prizes

Short-listed for Iowa High School Book Award 2006

Review Quote

"Ingenious...Keeps readers guessing through the final pages."

Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide

INTRODUCTION The time: July 1918. The place: The town of Yekaterinburg, just on the Siberian side of the Ural Mountains. In the Ipatiev House, the former Tsar of Russia and his family live imprisoned by Bolshevik soldiers. As a loyalist army presses toward the town and the Romanovs pray for a rescue that will never come, their captors receive a stark authorization from Moscow: Nikolai, his wife, and their five children are all to be shot to death. This is the story, recounted in all its vivid and terrible drama, of Robert Alexander''s novel The Kitchen Boy . Although the general facts surrounding the captivity and murder of the Russian royal family have long been known, some key gaps in our knowledge have continued to raise curiosity and fuel speculation. When, in 1991, the secret mass grave of the Romanovs and four of their attendants was discovered, two bodies--those of the Tsarevich Alexei and his sister Grand Duchess Maria--were not found. Remaining unrecovered is a family suitcase packed with thirty-six pounds of priceless jewels. There was yet one other remarkable disappearance. Mere hours before the Romanovs and their servants were led to their deaths, the family''s kitchen boy, fourteen-year-old Leonka Sednyov, was ordered away from the Ipatiev House. He was never heard from again. Combining these mysteries with a meticulously researched body of facts, Robert Alexander has crafted a tale of intrigue, tragedy, and betrayal in which all appearances are utterly believable yet nothing is quite what it seems. The story is recounted by Misha Semyonov, a recent widower now in his nineties who fled to America during the tumult of the Russian Civil War. With death approaching, Misha wants to set the record straight for his granddaughter and for the world at large: he is none other than Leonka, the vanished kitchen boy. Eighty summers ago, he carried a series of secret messages between the ex-Tsar and a band of potential rescuers, and, on the night of July 16-17, 1918, he bore witness to the royal massacre. But Misha must face his own issues of guilt, truth, and deception. Although he has resolved to convey "a thousand truths" to his granddaughter, will he dare to disclose the ultimate, shattering facts of his own existence? Seen through the youthful, astonished eyes of Leonka but told by the cynical, misanthropic voice of Misha, the novel allows the reader to know a family that discovered greater nobility in its squalid exile than it had ever known in the gilded palaces of St. Petersburg. But The Kitchen Boy is about more than history--it is also a deep and moving meditation on the nature of evil and the power of forgiveness. ABOUT ROBERT ALEXANDER Robert Alexander is a pen name of R. D. Zimmerman. A graduate of Michigan State University, Mr. Alexander has also studied at Leningrad State University and has lived and traveled extensively in the former Soviet Union. In researching The Kitchen Boy , Mr. Alexander gained access to Russian archives and palaces that are closed to the general public. Under his own name, he has written numerous mystery novels, including Hostage , Outburst , and Innuendo: A Todd Mills Mystery . Robert Alexander currently makes his home in Minneapolis. AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT ALEXANDER Your book is the product of some extraordinary research. Was there any information that was particularly hard to find? If you could have just one missing document, what would it be? First of all, I should say that doing the research was perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of writing The Kitchen Boy . There''s just so much information out there--so many books, memoirs, biographies, archives, photographs, and newsreels--that it was a privilege to dive into such fascinating material and call it work. Ninety-five percent of what I sorted through was not difficult to find primarily because Nicholas and Alexandra were perhaps the most well documented royal couple in history. I say that because in addition to writing numerous letters and keeping daily diaries, their lives were captured by many of the newer technologies. For example, the entire Romanov family was crazy about photography, and the royal children each had their own wooden Kodak camera. Amazingly, they left behind 150,000 family snapshots, all carefully glued into albums--and that''s not even counting the official court photographs. You can see a handful of these photographs at my Web site, The only thing that was hard to find was information on the kitchen boy, Leonid Sednyov, who was removed from The House of Special Purpose just a few hours before the Romanovs were murdered. Several guards later testified that they saw Leonka, as the boy was known, across the alley in the guardhouse; they claimed he spent the night there and remembered seeing Leonka crying and curled up under a coat. The next morning he vanished, and it seems that no one made any serious attempt to find him. As the only survivor of the Romanovs'' captivity, he could supply us with so many answers (who wrote the secret rescue notes, how were the two suitcases of imperial jewels smuggled away, did the Romanovs really expect to be saved, and more). A reader recently wrote to me and said she''d heard that Leonka died of typhus in 1929, and that he''d left behind a short memoir. If such a memoir still exists, that''s the one document I wish I could have. Part of me believes, however, that if Leonka''s memoir were out there, it would have been published long ago. In your novel, your narrator says something surprising about cross-cultural perceptions. He says, "The truth is that Americans cannot possibly begin to understand the depth of the Russian soul." It seems to me that many of your readers will want to achieve just the kind of understanding that your narrator says they can''t have. Is Misha just being difficult, or do you believe that there really is a psychological profundity that only another Russian can recognize? What an excellent question. Yes, Misha is just being difficult, but in doing so he is, to me, being so very Russian; as I know them, Russians take remarkable--and remarkably smug--pride in the mysteries of their culture. I love Russians for their dramatic, emotional nature. They''re not afraid to love, not afraid to get hurt, not afraid to exaggerate or act impulsively. Much of that, of course, is due to the extraordinarily tragic times they''ve lived through, from wars to revolution to rapidly changing political systems. In other words, they have an outlook and value of life that has, by and large, been shaped by tragedy. A small example of this is that many Russians spend money as quickly as they get it, and I believe that''s due not only to the Soviet era where self-dependency was not encouraged but also, more recently, to hyperinflation and devaluation. I have a one hundred ruble note that in 1990 was worth $165 but today is worth maybe two cents (to me it''s priceless as a bookmark), so obviously Russians have learned the hard way that there''s no point in saving. I should add that Russians and Americans always seem to get along very well on a one-to-one basis, and that, I think, is because we are both from great, expansive countries that are the most multicultural in the world. At the same time, however, there are many fundamental differences between us that continue to amaze me. One of the great mistakes we make is that we try to understand Russians in the context of European culture, when in truth Russian culture and society is historically more Asian than it is European. I''ve heard many Russians say that their country is not an Occidental one but Oriental, from which, they insist, they received mysticism, fatalism, and turmoil. One of the fascinating qualities of Misha as a character is that he wants to be both known and unknown; he desires to be secretive, but he also wants to talk and talk. What are your thoughts about Misha''s simultaneous love and dread of communicating? So who doesn''t want to tell a secret, particularly one that''s been burning in your heart for decades? Actually, only very few people want or even succeed in taking a secret to the grave; most feel a need to confess as a way of lightening their souls, as a way of preparation for the hereafter. And yet Misha''s situation is actually quite different. Yes, he revels in finally revealing to his granddaughter so much of what he witnessed in The House of Special Purprose, and he is painfully delighted to relate what he knew about the Romanovs. But ultimately Misha is quite devious. He knows Kate will discover the items that are hidden in the house, he knows that if he didn''t tell Kate anything she would have more questions than answers, questions that quite possibly would lead her to the ultimate truth. And that scares him, not only because he doesn''t want his granddaughter to come to hate him, but, more importantly, because he''s determined to protect her. So in reality Misha''s so-called confession is actually his attempt at creating a penultimate truth, or more specifically, his attempt at creating a false truth that will be forever believed. Simply, his reason for telling Kate his version of the story is a very determined and planned attempt at controlling the future from his grave. Even when a historical novelist makes it very clear, as you have done, that he has written a piece of fiction, readers may still turn to the book in hopes of finding some form of truth. You have written a book in which truth and falsehood richly intertwine. Is there anything you would like to tell us about the problem of "truth," either for a historian or for a novelist? Facts alone are not the only way to discover truth. In

Excerpt from Book

"My name is Mikhail Semyonov. I live in Lake Forest village, Illinois state, the United States of America. I am ninety-four years old. I was born in Russia before the revolution. I was born in Tula province and my name then was not Mikhail or even Misha, as I am known here in America. No, my real name-the one given to me at birth-was Leonid Sednyov, and I was known as Leonka. Please forgive my years of lies, but now I tell you the truth. What I wish to confess is that I was the kitchen boy in the Ipatiev House where the Tsar and Tsaritsa, Nikolai and Aleksandra, were imprisoned. This was in Siberia. And...and the night they were executed I was sent away. They sent me away, but I snuck back, and that night, the moonless night of July 16-17, 1918, I saw the Tsar and his family come down the back twenty-three steps of the Ipatiev House, I saw them go into that cellar room...and I saw them shot. Trust me, believe me, when I say this: I am the last living witness and I alone know what really happened that awful night...just as I alone know where the bodies of the two missing children are to be found. You see, I took care of them with my own hands." Misha took a deep breath, tried to push himself on, but couldn''t. Panicking, he hit the stop button on his tape recorder, and just sat there on the flagstone terrace of his home, his eyes fixed straight ahead on the curling waters of Lake Michigan. Despite his determination, he''d faltered, been unable to proceed. Over the many years since the Russian Revolution, Misha had come to realize that on a single night in 1918 he had witnessed far too much for an entire lifetime, particularly in the tortured silence he had so sternly observed in the ensuing decades. But such was his punishment. He was an old man, certain that this long life and clear memory were the torture he deserved. Yes, there was a God, for if there were not he would have been spared this suffering. Instead he kept on living. And remembering. True, he had gained some wisdom, for over the course of all this time he had come to look at that night as the start of everything horrible that had since befallen his poor Rossiya. As he looked back from these United States and through the distance of the decades, it was all so clear. A great curse was unleashed that night, inundating every corner of his vast homeland. If his comrades could commit such an act, was it any wonder that Stalin could kill upward of twenty million of his own people? No, of course not. On a hot night in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg the individual had become expendable. Misha was a tall man who walked with the slightest of limps, but over the last fifteen years, of course, he had grown smaller and his gait more halting as his body had settled and lost muscle mass. He''d always been trim, and it was this leanness that had undoubtedly contributed to his longevity and his lack of major illness. His hair, which he had always combed straight back in an elegant manner, had been snow white for more than thirty years, and while it had receded only slightly, it had definitely thinned. His face was narrow and long, his nose simply narrow, while his upper lip was straight and noticeably, almost oddly, small. Since his fifties, the tone of his skin had gone from robust to ruddy to its present parchment color, skin that now hung loosely from his sharp cheekbones. Always a dapper dresser, he wore lightweight gray wool pants and a yellow cashmere sweater over a pressed and starched blue shirt from Brooks Brothers. Seated in a wrought iron chair on the raised terrace behind his grand, twenty-room house, he stared out over the bluff and at the lake, himself the very image of old Chicago money. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth, for when he''d arrived in the United States in 1920 he''d had but a rucksack, one suitcase, and the clothes he was wearing. And while everyone believed that he''d made his millions on the stock market down at the Chicago Board of Trade, that too was a lie, albeit one that he had carefully cultivated. Staring out at Lake Michigan, Misha was transfixed by the flashes of light upon the blue water, flashes that sparkled like diamonds. He''d been tormented his entire life because of that night more than eighty years ago, a night which until now he''d never spoken of to anyone except May, his beloved wife. But now he must, now he had no choice. May was already two weeks in the grave, and he was determined to follow her as soon as possible. Before he left this world, however, he had certain obligations, namely, to reveal a kind of truth to their only heir, their lovely granddaughter, Kate. May, who''d also fled Russia after the revolution, fully understood the delicacy of the matter, and even though she''d helped Misha decide just how it might be done, he''d put it off. Now, however, the time had come, he could wait no more: he must give the young woman not simply a way to understand, but a reason to fulfill a pledge he had made so long ago. No, he thought, he had to give her more than a reason. He had to set her on a mission, his mission, otherwise he feared she might flounder in confusion, even despair, and perhaps thereby stumble upon...upon...No, thought Misha, he couldn''t let that happen. He raised his wrist and checked his thick, gold watch, which these days hung so loosely on his thin wrist. It was teatime. And if May were still alive, he would be joining her upstairs. Their maid would bring up a pot of tea, Misha and May would each have exactly two cups, a biscuit or two, and May, who''d been bedridden for the past three years, would reminisce about Russia, as she had done so frequently in her last years, chatting about this and that, but...but...well, she was gone. All that was over. And now Misha needed to take care of this as soon as possible. Clutching the tape recorder in one of his thin hands, with the other he grabbed the arm of the wrought iron chair and pulled himself forward. With no small amount of effort, he pushed himself to his feet. And then he simply stood there, swaying like a flag in a gentle breeze. Once he''d gained his balance, he started across the flagstones, one hesitant step at a time. At the house, he pulled open one of the French doors, lifted up his foot, focused all his attention on the effort, then stepped into the grand central hallway, a gallery of sorts, that ran from the front to the back of the house. The living room lay immediately to his right, and he carefully made his way into this grand room with its dark-beamed ceiling and matching woodwork. At the far end stood the focal point, the large, stone fireplace amputated from some French ch'teau, while a palace-sized Oriental carpet in deep reds and blues ran from one end to the other. As he moved slowly through the room, Misha wondered what his granddaughter was going to do with it all, these antiques, the oil paintings, the Tiffany sterling and Steuben crystal bric-a-brac that May and he had collected over the decades. Perhaps she and her husband would keep everything, perhaps they would sell it all. He didn''t much care, these common things didn''t matter. However, the numerous Faberg

Details ISBN0142003816 Author Robert Alexander Short Title KITCHEN BOY Pages 240 Language English ISBN-10 0142003816 ISBN-13 9780142003817 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 2004 Audience Age 14-18 Residence Madison, WI, US Birth 1949 Imprint Penguin USA Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States Affiliation Brock University Canada Subtitle A Novel of the Last Tsar DOI 10.1604/9780142003817 Series A Romanov Novel Series Number 1 US Release Date 2004-01-27 UK Release Date 2004-01-27 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Publication Date 2004-01-27 Audience General NZ Release Date 2004-01-26 AU Release Date 2004-01-26 We've got this

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