A UNIQUE Book From The Rooms Of The Grand Duchesses At The Alexander Palace

A children’s book given to Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna by her parents – Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and Tsar Nicholas II, as a birthday gift in 1903.

“Mein Eestes Marchenbuch,”(text in German) is a book of fairy tales with colorful illustrations published in Stuttgart, Germany.

The fly-leaf is inscribed by Empress Alexandra in pencil in English and Russian:

“For darling Olga from Papa and Mama. 3rd of November 1903 Skernovitzi”

Grand Duchess Olga, the first child of Nicholas and Alexandra was born on November 3, 1895. She was turning 8 in 1903.

Skernovitzi was the Tzar’s “hunting lodge in Poland where the family went during the gaming season.”

The book was purchased from the Soviet government in the early 1930s by an American businessman Armand Hammer, who acquired almost all of the personal belongings of the tsarist family at the Alexander Palace of Tsarskoye Selo (Tsar’s Village) outside St Petersburg. The Alexander Palace was the main residence of the last Tsar.

The book comes with an original parchment receipt from the Hammer Galleries in New York dated October 29, 1935.

There is also a Soviet museum label of the period with the following abbreviated inscription:

“Alexander palace museum, children’s half, classroom of the young Duchesses, (inventory) Nr 1015”

Interestingly, in his receipt, Armand Hammer is describing this museum label as “label of the present government”.

Besides that label, which is still in the book, Hammer obviously had some other paperwork from the Tsarskoe Selo museum with annotations on the items he was buying. Apparently, those papers were in Russian, and the Hammer Galleries sometimes made mistakes in translating them. In the Hammer receipt, the date is translated as “3 of October 1903”. The correct translation would be “3 of November 1903”.

size 7 5/8 x 10 1/8 in. (19,3 x 25,1 cm), 60 pages, cardboard covers