Pilgrim Princess: A Life of Princess Zinaida Volkonsky (Carroll & Graf)

Charming, intelligent, and abundantly talented, the beautiful Princess Zinaida Alexandrovna Volkonsky embodied the romantic spirit of an age that her fascinating life epitomized. At the Russian imperial court of Alexander I in the early 1800s, the young Zinaida captured the heart of the czar himself before her marriage to his aide-de-camp Prince Volkonsky took her across Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. Afterward, at the peace celebrations, she won wide praise in London and Paris, Vienna and Verona, for her musical performances, while in Moscow her literary salon prompted Alexander Pushkin to dub her the "Queen of the Muses and of Beauty." Following Zinaida across continents, this superbly researched biography also maps the spiritual journey of the princess, who eventually traveled to Rome, there to embrace more fully the Roman Catholic faith she had adopted. There, too, she welcomed artists like Stendhal, Rossini, Donizetti, Sir Walter Scott, and Nikolai Gogol at her salon, though ultimately she took Franciscan vows of poverty and dedicated the last decade of her life to the poor, who gathered in crowds to mourn the death in 1862 of the woman they knew simply as la beata.