Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, by Sergei Zaryanko, 1853

The Grand Duke turned twenty-two in the year this portrait was painted.

Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia (8 August 1831, Tsarskoye Selo – 25 April 1891, Alupka), third son and sixth child of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia and Alexandra Feodorovna. (He is sometimes referred to as Nicholas Nikolaievich the Elder, as his son carried the same name.) Like most of the Romanov men, he had a career in the army, and as a Field Marshal he commanded the Russian army of the Danube in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878, though with no distinction. His brother, Alexander II, nonetheless continued to promote his military career, naming him Commander of the St. Petersburg military region. Eventually he received the ranks of Field Marshal-General, Inspector General of Cavalry, and Inspector General of the Russian engineering forces. He also served on the State Council.

Tall and strong, neither handsome nor very intelligent, he had an unsavory reputation on account of his gross "financial irregularities" - debt, bribery, embezzling, etc. - and his rampant womanizing. He married Alexandra of Oldenburg in 1856 and they had two sons. But soon enough he began a relationship with a ballet dancer, Catherine Chislova, with whom he would have five children and set up a very public second family. His wife finally left him in 1881, though she refused him a divorce.

That same year, his brother Tsar Alexander II was assassinated and his successor, Alexander III, had little use for his disreputable "Uncle Nizi", and he was deprived of all influence. In 1882, as consequence of his escalating debt - he had already mortgaged the magnificent Nikolaevsky Palace - he was put under financial supervision. Denied a divorce, the Grand Duke hoped to outlive his wife and marry his mistress. But his wife would outlive him by nine years, and Chislova unexpectedly died in 1889, at the age of forty-three. After her death, his health rapidly declined; he had been suffering from oral cancer which now spread to his brain, causing increasingly erratic behavior. After one particularly embarrassing incident, during a ballet performance, when he attacked a male dancer he believed to be a woman, he was declared insane. He was put under locked confinement and taken to Alupka in the Crimea, where he died the next year. After his death, his palace in St. Petersburg was immediately sold to help settle his massive debts.

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For other posts related to Sergei Konstantinovich Zaryanko.

Alexandra Petrovna - from Grand Duchess to nun

Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna (2 June 1838, St. Petersburg – 25 April 1900, Kiev), born Duchess Alexandra Frederika Wilhelmina of Oldenburg, was the eldest of the eight children of Duke Peter Georgievich of Oldenburg and his wife Princess Therese of Nassau-Weilburg. The Oldenburg family was closely related to the Romanovs; Duke Peter, a scholar and philanthropist, was a grandchild of Paul I. Alexandra grew up in a happy home and was well educated, showing an early interest in medicine and the problems of the poor.

Portrait by Carl Timoleon von Neff (1804-1877), circa 1850s.

At Peterhof, on 6 February 1856, she married Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, Senior (1831-1891), and together they had two sons, Grand Dukes Nicholas Nikolayevich, Junior (1856-1929), and Peter Nikolayevich (1864-1931). The marriage was not a happy one as the couple had little in common. Alexandra was religious and serious-minded, and her great interest was caring for the health of the poor. Her husband financed a hospital for her in St.Petersburg where the poor could cared for without charge, and she eventually founded a training school for nurses.

In the meantime, her husband, a well known gourmand, sportsman, and womanizer, began a relationship with a ballet dancer. She bore the Grand Duke five children, essentially creating a second family. He mismanaged and squandered his fortune - in 1882 he had to be put under a kind of financial guardianship - and his magnificent palace had to be sold after his death.

His wife had left him for good in 1881, moving to Kiev. But she refused to grant him a divorce. She remained close to her sons, who had sided with her in the family's dissolution. Alexandra became a nun in 1889, taking the name "Sister Anastasia". She founded a monastery in Kiev, a convent for nursing nuns with its own hospitals, asylums, and dispensary to provide free treatment for the poor. She died of stomach cancer in 1900, at the age of sixty-one. She was buried in the monastery graveyard in a plain coffin, wearing her nun's habit.

"Sister Anastasia" near the end of her life.