Product Details
Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life

Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life
By Sofka Zinovieff

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Product Description

Discovering an old Russian diary written when Princess Sophy Dolgorouky was a young woman trapped in Nazi-occupied Paris, the author digs deeper into her grandmother's life by traveling to her birthplace of St. Petersburg, and then to the Crimea, where she fled after the 1917 Revolution. She uncovers hidden M15 files, and then returns to the Nazi camp where her grandmother was interned, worked with the French Resistance, discovered Communism, and showed great bravery in defending the rights of the Jewish prisoners. Even more outrageous in its day than her conversion from princess to communist was Sofka's private life. She not only believed in sexual freedom, but often placed love, literature, and adventure before her children. Much more than the story of a princess in exile, Sofka's story is of someone whose existence was dislocated by revolution, yet who believed in revolution as a way of making the world a better place.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1212649 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-02
  • Original language: English
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 368 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review
"a piercing portrait of an extraordinary woman who was both a Russian princess and a communist." Telegraph "... a life of eccentricity and excess; of loss and exile; of courage, and of cruelty that reverberated down the generations. Red Princess is a small memorial to all the lives dislodged by the shifting sands of modern history." Guardian "...anyone reading about her sizzling charm, guts and literary gifts can't help thinking it would have been fun to know her." The Economist 'Sofka Zinovieff deserves a place on the shelves up there with Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor, justly famous for their books on Greece' Vogue

About the Author
Sofka Zinovieff was born in England and is of Russian extraction. She studied anthropology at Cambridge; then, after spells living in Russia and Italy, she settled with her family in Greece, an experience which she described in her first, highly acclaimed book, Eurydice Street (Granta, 2003), which has been translated into three languages.