War and Revolution
At the outbreak of World War I, Prince Gabriel had to be separated from his mistress. He and four of his brothers joined the active Russian army in the military effort, fighting in advance operations. His brother Prince Oleg was killed in action at the beginning of the war. The following year Gabriel's father died of a heart attack. Evacuated to Petrograd in the fall of 1914, he joined the military academy, graduating at the age of twenty-nine with the rank of colonel. His affair with Nesteroskaya continued openly and was discussed publicly. The two lived together for a long time, and in 1916 Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, seeing the sincerity of their feelings, decided to help them get married even though it was considered a misalliance.
After the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in the February Revolution of 1917, Prince Gabriel asked his mother for permission to marry Antonina Nesteroskaya, but she did not give him her consent. He decided to disobey, and on 9 April 1917 at three o'clock pm in a little church, they married. A morganatic union would have never been allowed under the reign of Nicholas II and Gabriel kept his marriage secret from both his mother and his uncle Dimitri Constantinovich, who only later learned of the wedding.
Gabriel had asked his cousin Prince Alexander of Leuchtenberg, who himself intended to marry morganatically, to find a priest to bless the wedding secretly. At the wedding ceremony, only Lydia Tchistiakova (Antonina's sister) and a couple of their friends were present. Gabriel Constantinovich had told his secret to his brother Ivan a few days before, but his elder brother did not want to attend the ceremony because of their mother. However, he promised to keep the secret. On his way to the church, Prince Gabriel saw his brothers Konstantine and George who were walking on Morskaïa Street. They had just met Antonina in wedding dress in another car. Only later, the two brothers realized what had happened. Once married, Prince Gabriel went to see his mother who, although she was very upset, at the end gave him her blessing. From then on Prince Gabriel moved into Nesteroskaya's apartment where for a time, the couple lived quietly.
Prince Gabriel tried to keep a low profile in Petrograd during the spring 1917. Fearing a vengeful mob, Antonina telephoned to warn him, and dispatched a car and driver to collect him from the Military Academy and spirit him to the relative safety of her house.
Read more about this topic: Prince Gabriel Constantinovich Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the words war and, war and/or revolution:
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man ... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)