In Nadjezhda’s living room there is a wooden box that is artfully inlaid with a troika, a Russian sleigh with horses. From it emerge photographs that are over 100 years old. One of the young women in the photographs wears a precious headdress decorated with gemstones and an equally richly decorated necklace. She is the sister of Nadjezhda’s great-grandmother: “Her name was Nadjezhda Nabokov. She wears a boyar suit. It is very heavy because of the gemstones. She could hardly walk in it, she really had to practice in it to be able to move gracefully. She wore it for the costume ball at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in 1903. She also danced there with the Tsar.”
Nadjezda’s frivolous tsarinas are an ode to her Russian ancestors
