Helen Azar

Being a sadly bungled mishmash of diaries, correspondence, and memoirs of various people issued under the misnomer of the diary of Czar Nicholas' oldest daughter. The compiler's most disastrous mistake was to omit the diary's first decade, beginning it only in the war years, and the diary is frequently interrupted by excerpts from other people's diaries, letters, and reminiscences, most egregiously by the family's last year being narrated by the diary of the Czar himself. Olga's diary contributions are largely banal, and in any case read more like an appointment book than what we think of as a diary. These documents would be a good baseline for a biography, and one wishes that the compiler had gone that direction with this material. .… (altro)