It sometimes seems that those people chosen to be subjects for biographies are drawn from a strictly limited cast. Every few years, another book about Tolstoy, Dickens or some other great literary figure comes along to make library shelves groan further. At a recent talk given for a new biography of George Orwell, I asked the author why he had felt a need to add to the pile, given the plethora of perfectly good existing ones. ‘Because OUP commissioned me,’ was the answer. I didn’t buy the book.
So how refreshing that Miranda Seymour should choose an absolute unknown to write about, whose life was genuinely interesting and surprising. Vera Gedroits was ‘a towering, sweet-faced, lesbian princess’ in Russia around the time of the revolution, who responded to the turbulence with considerable elán and bravery.
Inevitably, Vera fell foul of the Stalinist purges and she and her lover were seized at gunpoint at night
Born in 1870 and half Lithuanian, she spent a childhood entranced by stories of previous aristocratic Russian women who had cut their hair short, dressed as Cossacks and fought against Napoleon. After a marriage of convenience, aged 24, to a fellow radical, she studied surgery in Switzerland (while sleeping with her landlady’s daughter) and went to a military hospital in the Far East to help Russia in its war against Japan in 1905. Her subsequent fame brought her to the attention of the court and she was summoned to Tsarskoe Selo, where Tsarina Alexandra encouraged her to pass on her nursing skills to her daughters.
