Spring Martlet 2017

Pictured: Eric Hamilton, second from left.
The most famous image of Felix
as aristocratic sybarite shows him
wearing the garb of a feudal boyar
bedecked with genuine fur and
gemstones in which he took a
London ball by storm.
frequently and so extravagantly for walking
the few yards from his rooms to collect his
latest social invitations from his pigeon-hole
that the lure of working in his immediate
vicinity threatened to paralyze the smoothrunning
of the College. In this vein, the
most famous image of Felix as aristocratic
sybarite shows him wearing the garb of a
feudal boyar bedecked with genuine fur and
gemstones in which he took a London ball
by storm. But despite external appearances,
the young man who moved into VI.1 in
October 1909 was in a damaged and
vulnerable frame of mind.
Felix had left his parents still reeling from
the death only a year before of his elder
brother Nikolai in a particularly grotesque
and hopeless duel. Felix’s mother would
never regain her health and composure,
while he himself came to Univ not least to
find escape from his feelings of guilt and
inadequacy. In this he had considerable
success as his letters home record. 1 Felix is
at pains to avert any suspicions of idleness
or fecklessness, and even sends his mother
an hour-by-hour weekly timetable, including
the names of his various tutors and teachers.
The academic side of his week is dominated
by English and French literature, with a little
philosophy thrown in, but it also includes
Chapel at 8 each morning, dinner in Hall
and, more surprisingly, rowing from 2 to 4.30
on six afternoons a week. Felix praises the
bracing vigour of this routine, but is not long
in switching to golf. The highlight of academic
life at Oxford for him is how it fosters
independence: ‘There is no spoonfeeding,
and everything has to be achieved by your
own unaided efforts.’ His mother shares his
hopes and enthusiasm: ‘If you do learn to
work independently then that will be the
greatest benefit Oxford can bring.’ As for
Felix’s busy social life, what seems to have
bolstered his morale above all was not his
exploits as a social lion, but his encounter
with more immediate forms of friendship
amidst the rough and tumble of college life.
He evidently felt that in his own College
he was for the first time genuinely liked
by a wide variety of coevals: ‘It’s like living
a second life,’ he writes, ‘and I am sure it
will give me strength and moral clarity to
face the future.’ He even finds struggling or
unhappy fellow-students turning to him for
counselling, though here his mother is on
her guard. All too familiar with the louche
bohemian reputation and cross-dressing
pranks of his youth in St Petersburg, she is
uneasy about her son’s tendency to attract
the emotionally disturbed, and socially
unconventional, worries constantly about
the company he keeps and occasionally
criticizes his taste in décor as insufficiently
‘manly’. Of course, a student’s letters to his
mother are hardly the most dependable
reflection of college life, but there does seem
to have been from the first a genuine mutual
enthusiasm – Felix liked Oxford as much as
Oxford liked him, and his first year living at
Univ anchors that experience.
In VI.1 of an evening he claims to have been
ever ready to respond to a knock on his
barred ground-floor window and sprint up
16 THE MARTLET | SPRING 2017
1. Extensive excerpts of the correspondence are assembled in a biographical compilation: Elizaveta Krasnykh, Knyaz’ Feliks
Yusupov: «Za vse blagodaryu…» (Moscow: Indrik, 2012).