Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

Sources
Little information exists on the history of Georgia during the past hundred years and virtually
none covering the events during the Soviet Period between 1921 and 1989. I have made extensive use
of Ronald G. Suny's The Making of the Georgian Nation, Tauris, London 1991 and of an as yet
unpublished manuscript by George Tarkhan-Mouravi, 70 Years of Soviet Georgia, Tbilisi, 1997, which
G. T.-M. made kindly available to me.
The best general source on Alexandra's Georgia is Karl Baedeker, Russia, Handbook for
Travellers, Leipzig 1914, reprinted by Random House, New York, 1971. To this day this trusted, old
guide has no rival. Another, purely visual source is the collection of Dmitri Ermakov's historical
photographs in the Tbilisi Museum of Fine Arts. Unfortunately they remain unpublished.
As sources for the cultural history of the last fifteen years of Emperor Nicholas II's reign I used,
because of their colorful, subjective immediacy, the idiosyncratic memoires of Graf Witte (Sergey Yu.
Witte, The Memoires of Count Witte, M.E. Sharpe, 1997), and the fascinating diaries of Maurice
Paleologue, the French ambassador to the imperial throne in St. Petersburg, in a German edition:
Maurice Paleologue, Am Zarenhof während des Weltkrieges, 2 vols., Bruckmann, München, 1927. An
engrossing description of the cultural life of St. Petersburg is Solomon Volkov's St. Petersburg, A
Cultural History, Free Press/Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997. Stunning photographs of the period in
question are to be found in Brian Moynahan's, The Russian Century, A Photographic History of
Russia's 100 Years, Random House, New York, 1994.
Vassili Kandinsky's work and life in Munich is documented by a superbly illustrated catalogue of
an exhibition at the Lenbachhaus in Munich: Helmut Friedel, Wassily Kandinsky, Das bunte Leben im
Lenbachhaus, Katalog 1996, Dumont, Köln 1995. Kandinsky's "On the Spiritual in Art" exists in a
faximile reprint obtainable from the Lenbachhaus, Munich: Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der
Kunst, München, 1973.
I trusted Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's biography by Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky, New
York, 1980 imore than H.P.B's officially authorized "autobiography." An extensive survey of the
influence of Theosophy on modern painting is given in another exhibition catalogue: Maurice Tuchman,
(ed.), The Spiritual in Art, Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Abbeville, New York 1986.
For further reading on the subject of synesthesia I recommend the concise article by Richard E.
Cytowic in PSYCHE, 2(10), July 1995 .
For a further understanding of the relationship between the Eleusian Mysteries and Orthodox
Easter see Carl Kerenyi, Eleusis, Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, Bollingen Series LXV,
Princeton U. Press, 1967/91.
The connections between physicists, media, and healers have been investigated in a series of
provocative experiments by Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist, Penguin-
Arkana, New York, 1966/1995. The extensive research on shamanism in pre-Revolution Russia has
been reviewed by Marie A. Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, A study in Social anthropology, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1914. For more recent research on shamanism I relied on the classical monograph by
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy, Bollingen Series LXXVI, Princeton U.
Press, 1974.
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