Word: anastasia
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Allow me to add a few words to your Feb. 11 article "Anastasia", regarding the alleged fortune deposited in England by the late Czar Nicholas of Russia. In July 1917 Alexander Kerensky, the revolutionary Prime Minister, declared that "all rumors regarding the fortune of the Czar abroad is a baseless legend." Actually, what started this legend was the enormous sums in gold rubles deposited in England by the Russian Imperial government during the first World War to cover purchases for ammunition. This sum was frozen by the British government after the Communists seized power. These funds, of course, had nothing...
Lust for Life is still excellent and still at the Kenmore. Van Gogh gets exceptional color photography, and Kirk Douglas rarely gets in the way. Anastasia makes little out of a lovely thing, but Ingrid Bergman is superb. Helen Hayes and Yul Brynner wander in and out every now and then. At RKO Keith. The Great Man is dead. Long live his greatness? Jose Ferrer snoops around tensely, and says no. A tidy film. At the Beacon Hill. Baby Doll doesn't deserve all the publicity but contains three brilliant performances--by Eli Wallach, Karl Malden, and baby-blond newcomer...
...crawling back from the Bolshevik wastes after World War I, brought with them legends of the escape of one of the Russian royal family. In 1920 the half-dead body of an unidentified young woman was dragged from a Berlin canal. She claimed in semi-delirium that she was Anastasia. Two years passed before even the girl herself, closeted in a mental hospital, could piece together a coherent story of how, aided by two brothers named Tchaikovsky, she had been carried out of the cellar and across Russia into Rumania. No Tchaikovsky ever showed up to verify the tale, though...
Into the Courts. By 1941, after a score of years in and out of hospitals and sanatoriums, Anna Anderson, as the purported Anastasia called herself, brought suit against the House of Hesse for her legacy. Interrupted by war and Russian occupation, the suit dragged on. In 1950 Anna herself, a fuzzy-minded, aging woman surrounded by a court of solicitous refugees, was living in an old army shack on the edge of the Black Forest, as a poverty-stricken pensioner of Prince Friedrich Ernst von Sachsen-Altenburg...
Last week, after combing a mountain of evidence and weighing the testimony of four anthropologists who studied the conformations of Anna's ears, nose and cheeks in relationship to photographs of the teen-aged Anastasia, the 83rd Civil Chamber of the West Berlin District Court at last reached a decision. In an impressive dossier of official documents, it notified Anna's lawyers that in its opinion their client was not the Romanov Princess, and had no claim to any part of the late Czar's estate...