And both had other partners.Click on a plot link to find similar books! Plot & Themes Ethnic/Relig. They still loved each other, but at a distance. 'He went off to the South, conquered the whole of the Black Sea coast for Russia. they stopped living together,' Massie explains. They started to fight and their relationship broke apart. Many of their letters are included in the book - 'they're almost burning the page,' he says.īut it didn't last. 'Their romance, their relationship, was extraordinarily passionate,' Massie says. and he had this ability to imitate people.' At Catherine's request, he did an impressive imitation of her - Russian spoken with a German accent - and she burst into laughter. He was very interested in theology music. We went to Russia and I learned the Russian language to some degree, and I wanted to keep going.' I started going down to the New York Public Library on my lunch hour and reading what I could find. 'I knew a little, not much, about the most famous hemophiliac, the son of Nicholas II, the last czar. We didn't know where this had come from we knew nothing about this. 'My first child, my son Bob Jr., was born with hemophilia. 'But he had no romantic or sexual interest in her at all.'įor the nearly two decades before she became empress, Catherine endured a miserable marriage her husband didn't pay attention to her, and she was under constant pressure from the empress to produce a child. A volatile feudal tsar with a taste for barbaric torture a progressive and enlightened reformer of. on two outsize czars: the 900-page Peter the Great, winner of the Pulitzer in 1981. Massie unfolds the extraordinary story of Peter the Great. 'He was glad to see her, because she was German and he was German,' Massie says. Massie, author of Catherine the Great, died Dec. Peter played with little toy soldiers all the time - and wasn't particularly interested in his wife. 'He was childish into his late adolescence, and he was strange throughout his life.' 'Peter was a very strange man, to put it mildly,' Massie says. Her nephew, who became Peter III, was raised in Germany, so Elizabeth reached out to his distant cousin - young, German Catherine - to be Peter's wife, Massie explains. Empress Elizabeth - daughter of Peter the Great - couldn't have children. 'That is what makes this such a great story,' Massie tells NPR's Scott Simon.

So how does a German teenager become the empress of Russia? Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Catherine The Great Subtitle Portrait Of A Woman Author Robert K.

Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie