A genius for living

Perhaps the only drawback to this highly enjoyable biography is the shadow of utter banality that it throws over one’s own life by comparison. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother and namesake, began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia and a playmate of the Tsarevich. She was brought up by her grandmother, a figure reminiscent of the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades who did not know how to dress herself. Her mother, meanwhile, astonished Petersburg society by becoming a surgeon, flying her own plane, and receiving not one but two Crosses of St George for her bravery as a doctor during the first world war; her father occasioned less surprise but no less scandal by marrying his gypsy mistress. Yet with hindsight Sofka’s extraordinary childhood seemed peaceful, even rather dull, cut short as it was by the Revolution. Zinovieff aptly quotes the Chinese curse, ‘May you be born in interesting times.’

In 1919, aged 11, Sofka and her grandmother boarded a British destroyer in Yalta and, in the company of the dowager empress, sailed out of Russia. They had sat out the worst of the Revolution in Yalta, but still faced the long grief of exile, what Nabokov called ‘the animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia’. Sofka’s brilliant, fearless mother was destroyed by the experience. Unable to practise medicine because neither the French nor the English would recognise her Russian qualifications, she worked as a taxi-driver and a secretary, became addicted to opium and committed suicide aged 57.