I would say that a good majority of my generation has seen the movie Anastasia (now also a Broadway musical). Contrary to popular belief, Anastasia is not a Disney movie though it has that same whimsical feel and catchy musical numbers that those Disney classics have. We all know the story, Anya is an orphan with amnesia. She stumbles upon Dimitri and Vladimir who pass her off as the missing Romanov daughter, Anastasia. Except, SURPRISE, she actually is Anastasia. Also, John Cusack plays Dimitri and John Cusack is attractive in anything he does including animated movies.

"But Emma," you scream, "this is a book blog! Why are you telling us about this amazing movie?"

Worry not readers! I will tell you.

In the last month Anastasia Romanov has become a bit of an obsession of mine. It's smaller than my obsession with the Tudor wives, but it's still an obsession. What can I say, I love a royal family. Over the course of this month I have read two books regarding Anastasia and her ill-fated family. Or I guess, more specifically, Anna Anderson and the Romanov family.


The first book was called Princesses Behaving Badly. It was a collection of short biographies about various bad-ass (and some crazy) princesses throughout history. There were women who knocked men aside in order to get to the throne, women who led armies to victory, and women who suffered from debilitating mental illnesses and were locked away from the public eye because of it.

One of these women was Anna Anderson, the supposed long lost Anastasia Romanov. From 1920 until her death in the '80s, Anna Anderson fought tooth and nail in the longest court hearing in German history to be recognized as the lost Romanov daughter. It wasn't until after her death that DNA testing was done and it was proven that Anna was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker who had disappeared back in the '20s. Anna captivated the world because she never once wavered from her story. She knew details about the Romanov family that many felt no one but the Romanovs would know and apparently even had a passing resemblance to the murdered Grand Duchess.

Enter I Was Anastasia.


Reading both of these books within the same month was completely by chance. This book was on my radar long before Princesses was and I happened to catch a glimpse of the cover as I was perusing my local library. Looking back now, I wonder if anything would have been different about my read-through if I had read this book first before I read the non-fiction. Sure, I knew the general idea of Anastasia thanks to the movie, but I honestly hadn't given the Romanovs much thought before then.

I Was Anastasia was a great read because of Lawhorn's storytelling. In the novel we follow both Anna and Anastasia. Not until the very, very end do we really find out if we are reading from the point of view of the same character or if we are reading from two different character's perspectives. Another interesting detail is that Anastasia Romanov's story - told in snippits from around 1915 to her family's brutal murder in 1917 - is told chronologically. The reader follows Anastasia and her family as their story gets bleaker and bleaker until the bitter end. Anna Anderson's story is told from end to beginning. We open in the 1960s where Anna and her husband Jack are told for the final time that the courts do not believe her claim that she is Anastasia and from there we travel backwards all the way to what drove her to jump of the bridge in 1920.

I mean I read this book in one 24 hour period. I stayed up until midnight because I would finish a chapter told in Anastasia's point of view and, even though I knew the actual real life history, I just had to know. Was Anna the lost duchess?

You know the drill here by now folks. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Long story short, no. Anna was not Anastasia. Was this really a spoiler since I told you about the actual history before I told you about this story? Eh, maybe. Semantics.

Long story long, still no, but there is so much more to unpack here. We spend an entire book watching two women (or maybe one?!) being mentally and physically tortured by various people. Anastasia and her family are terribly treated by their Bolshevik captors. At one point Anastasia and two of her sisters are left behind with their hemophiliac brother, Alexei, as he recovers from an injury and, on the train ride to be reunited with their parents, Anastasia's sisters are raped by soldiers and at least one of their dogs tossed out of the moving train's window. I want to believe that both of those events didn't happen, but unfortunately I don't think there's much hope for a happy ending.


On the other side, we spend 60 years of Anna Anderson's life watching her try and try and try to be recognized as the missing Grand Duchess and to get what is "rightfully" hers (money left behind by Anastasia's father with strict instructions that only his children should receive it). She is ridiculed, betrayed, and even thrown in a couple of insane asylums, but she never once backs down on her claim. At the end of the novel it is clear why, because she had believed her story for too long. She couldn't back down after all that time fighting. Also, according to Anna herself in the last chapter, after everything we learned, we all secretly wanted her to be Anastasia. We wanted this poor girl to survive and to live another day. We wanted her to run away with the guard she fell in love with. We wanted her to escape with her dog, Jimmy. We wanted a happy ending even though we knew that there was no possible way.

Ok, I'll stop spoiling things now.

Final thoughts: Like I said in the beginning the tragedy of the Romanovs stuck with me and has almost become an obsession. I think I have read almost every single Romanov Wikipedia page (which, side note: I know that we were all told in school not to use Wikipedia because it wasn't reliable, but, like, chill, ok?) and I think the most striking thing about the various pages I've read are the accompanying photographs. There are several that make me catch my breath: a picture of young Anastasia sitting in a chair in 1904, her formal portrait taken two years later in 1906, a picture of Anastasia and her brother hugging in a deck chair. These are all pictures that, aside from the clothing, look like they could have been taken this morning.


However, the one picture that strikes me the most is a picture taken around 1917. The family could already be in lockdown and the minutes already ticking away until they are brought down into that basement and shot, yet Anastasia and her sister Maria are still able to strike a pose, making faces that many teenagers still make when a camera is pointed in their general direction.

I think that's why Anastasia and Anna have captured my attention and held it so firmly in their grasp. I know that these women were actual real people, but something about their stories made them so much more real to me. Why was the entire Romanov family held responsible for a few bad choices made by their father? Why did such a large number of Russian citizens call for blood when the Emperor had already abdicated the throne for him and his son? I know that revolutions are required to make change, but did an entire family and their loyal servants deserved to be shot, stabbed, and beaten before they were thrown down a mine shaft and left to die?

Read more of my reviews on my book blog: https://eherrman322.wixsite.com/theliterarysomething