
The life and times of Lydia Yavorska,
Princess Bariatinsky
A new book by John & Jeannette Simpson
FROM THE
AUTHORS
We live in Shoreham-by-Sea, and have been attending
the beautiful Saxon/Norman church of St Nicolas’ Old Shoreham for many
years. We are both PCC members and John is Treasurer to the PCC. In the
churchyard is a most unusual monument, the grave of a Russian Princess,
and we, like many others, were intrigued by it. We manage the church
website, and a couple of years ago we resolved to find out something
about 'our' Princess so that we could add a couple of paragraphs to the
website. We started to research the life of Lydia Yavorska, Princess
Bariatinsky (1871-1921) and very quickly realised it was a fascinating
story.
We offered an audio-visual presentation about Lydia in September 2013 -
it sold out immediately and we had to run it again in November. Although
the presentation ran to an hour and a half, we were only able to include
a fraction of the material we had found, so we decided that such a
dramatic story deserved a book. Since then we have been continuing our
research and recently visited St Petersburg, where Lydia had some of her
greatest successes. Although our knowledge of Russian is fairly basic,
we received tremendous support from our guide, Elena Parfënova -
CLICK HERE for Elena's website.
We also experienced great kindness
and willingness to help from the staff of all the archives and
museums we visited.
We have very recently uncovered new material relating to periods in the
life of the Princess about which little was previously known. In pursuit
of this we have visited Pallanza, Italy, and Tallinn, Estonia , and have
been receiving additional details and photographs from Elena in St Petersburg.
We have created a map with locations relevant to the Princess. It is a
work in progress but you can see
the latest version HERE.
The book
is A4 format and runs to 350 pages. It is extensively illustrated (650
pictures), many from the considerable
amount of memorabilia related to the Princess which we have amassed – photographs, postcards,
press cuttings, books, theatre programmes, autographs – sourced from all over
the world, and a lot of new material from our research trips.
We gave an updated version of the presentation on several
occasions in autumn
2015, and most recently on 10 September 2016, to coincide with the 95th anniversary of Lydia's death.
Our Princess rests far from her native land, with no family to look
after the grave. The book has the dual aim of ensuring that the grave
is properly maintained and that Lydia's contribution to the English and
Russian stage is not forgotten.
John & Jeannette Simpson
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