In Bread of Exile, two opposing worlds jostle and succeed each other: the world of privilege and power of imperial Russia, struggling to survive Communist persecution and military attack; and a life of dispossession and exile.Dimitri Obolensky's family belonged to the upper echelons of the Russian aristocracy. This collection of unpublished memoirs, diaries and notebooks by six different family members spans more than one hundred years. Russia's turbulent history is made vividly real through the intimate recollections of those who suffered the dramatic consequences of the Russian Revolution and lived the rest of their lives as emigres.
His great-aunt describes the shock of the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, and her walks and games with Alexander III. In her youth, his grandmother was a childhood love of the heir to the throne, the future Tsar Nicholas II. After his military service, his father was elected marshal of the nobility in a rural district, whose governor refused him permission to enlist in 1914. In 1920 he moved to England where, equipped by the British, he joined General Yudenich's White Army, which narrowly failed to capture Petrograd.
His mother was eleven years old when her father, the City Governor of Moscow, was assassinated by a terrorist. In her diary, she recounts how she escaped with her baby son from Bolshevik Russia in March 1919.
His stepfather had his hopes of an academic career dashed by war and revolution. The extracts from his wartime diary cover the crucial months of fighting in the Crimea in 1920, until the final evacuation of the whole White Army from Sevastopol.
Dimitri Obolensky's own "pilgrimage into the past" covers the principalepisodes of his life: his infancy in the Crimea and childhood in Nice, his time at an English preparatory school, his studies in Paris, and his experiences teaching at Cambridge and Oxford.
