Author was narrator of Russian history
PULITZER WINNER WROTE GRIPPING BIOGRAPHIES
Robert K. Massie, a Pulitzer Prize- winning biographer who wrote gripping, tautly narrated and immensely popular books on giants of Russian history, died on Monday at his home in Irvington, N.Y. He was 90.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Deborah Karl.
In monumental biographies of Peter the Great ( 16721725), Catherine the Great ( 1729- 96) and Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra, who were assassinated with their five children and others in 1918, Massie captivated audiences with detailed accounts that read to many like engrossing novels.
One was even grist for Hollywood: Nicholas and Alexandra was adapted into a film of the same title in 1971.
“He understands plot — fate — as a function of character,” the novelist Kathryn Harrison wrote of Massie in reviewing Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman in The New York Times Book Review. “The narrative perspective he establishes and maintains … convinces a reader he’s not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes.”
Massie reached beyond strict biography. He wrote a book addressing the puzzles that arose after the skeletons of Nicholas and Alexandra, the last royal rulers of Russia, were discovered, along with those of family members, in Siberia in the 1990s.
He also produced two naval histories of the First World War that bristled with drama.
Massie said his literary odyssey was set in motion by research he did at the New York Public Library during lunch breaks from his job as a young journalist. It was purely personal research at first: He wanted to know more about the bleeding disease of hemophilia and how he and his wife at the time, Suzanne Massie, who became a noted Russian scholar, could help their hemophiliac son, Bob.
During his research he became fascinated with perhaps the most famous childhood case of hemophilia, that of Alexei, a son of Nicholas and Alexandra. It was to help Alexei that Alexandra had summoned Grigory Rasputin, the notorious faith- healing monk who gained influence over the imperial court.
Public disdain of Rasputin contributed to the Russian people’s turn against the monarchy, helping pave the way for the revolution of 1917.
Massie wound up writing an article on hemophilia for The Saturday Evening Post, where he had taken a job in 1962. He wrote an accompanying article about Alexei and his parents, but The Post did not print it. He found himself unable to abandon the family drama of the Romanovs, as the Russian dynasty was known, and he eventually quit his job to pursue it full time.
A decade later, Nicholas and Alexandra was published to acclaim. Though nearly 1,000 pages long, it sold more than 4.5 million copies and is regarded as one of the most popular historical studies ever published.
In Massie’s account, Nicholas comes across not as stupid, weak or bloodthirsty, as he had been portrayed, but as a worried parent.
In reading up on Russian history, Massie became fascinated by Peter the Great, who had dragged feudal Russia toward modernity and turned a swamp into one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, naming it after himself.
But by his account Massie could not find a biography that captured Peter. So he resolved to write one. Peter the Great: His Life and World, enlivened with anecdotes about Peter’s love for his mistress, Catherine, won the 1981 Pulitzer for biography.
Deciding that he “had done enough about Russia,” Massie turned next to naval history, which had captivated him when he was a U.S. Navy nuclear targeting officer in the early 1950s. The resulting book, published in 1991, was Dreadnought, a 1,000- page history that explores the naval rivalry between Britain and Germany as a means of examining Europe’s drift toward the First World War. ( The title refers to the battleship of that era, intended to render all other naval vessels obsolete.)
Some criticized Dreadnought as lacking disclosures from original materials — a regular criticism of Massie’s reliance on secondary sources — but others praised his dramatic description of a grand failure in crisis management.
Massie had hoped to follow up with a study of how the great powers actually used their massive battleships in the war, but he was dragged back to things Russian. People from around the world kept calling to ask his opinion on the bones of the royal family that had been found in Siberia. He happily obliged, until Karl, his literary agent and second wife, asked, “Why are you telling all these people this?”
The answer was The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, which described the medical intrigue, political manoeuvering and courtroom dramas involved in identifying the bones. For example, Massie told how DNA evidence had disproved the claim of a woman living in Virginia to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Nicholas’ youngest daughter.
Robert Kinloch Massie III was born in Versailles, Ky., on Jan. 5, 1929. His father, Robert Jr., was an educator and his mother, Molly Kimball, was a progressive activist. He grew up in Versailles and in Nashville, Tenn.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies at Yale and another degree in the field at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before serving in the navy. In addition to working at The Saturday Evening Post, he had stints as a journalist at Collier’s and Newsweek. He taught briefly at Princeton and Tulane and was president of the Authors Guild.
His marriage to Suzanne Rohrbach in 1954 ended in divorce in 1990. Massie married Deborah Karl in 1992. In addition to her, he is survived by four daughters, two sons, seven grandchildren and a great-grandson.
Massie’s love of books was visceral. In an essay for The New York Times Book Review in 2012, he told of moving his many books from his office to a nearby spot so he could visit them as “friends.” He said he showed the same respect to books in libraries.
“I like to make sure they are alive and well,” he wrote. “If they have collected dust, I take out the small towel I carry in my briefcase and wipe them off.”
HE UNDERSTANDS PLOT — FATE — AS A FUNCTION OF CHARACTER. THE E NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE HE ESTABLISHES … CONVINCES A READER HE’S NOT SO MUCH LOOKING AT CATHERINE THE GREAT AS HE IS OUT OF HER EYES. — NOVELIST KATHRYN HARRISON ON MASSIE’S WORK