Life
Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna was born in Saint Petersburg, capital city of the Russian Empire. The arrival of a second daughter was happy news to her father, Tsarevich Paul Petrovich, who had lost his first wife Wilhelmina Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt in childbirth, eight years before. She was also said to be very beautiful so her grandmother, the Empress Catherine, named her after Helen of Troy.
As a girl, Elena was educated privately at home, her first years' education being supervised by her paternal grandmother, the formidable Catherine II of Russia. As any other royal of her time, the Grand Duchess' education was focused mainly on art, literature and music. Her real purpose in life, eventually, would be to marry well and provide her husband-to-be with children. Out of all her siblings, Elena was closest to her older sister Alexandra, whose life was shaped practically the same as was Elena's.
Read more about this topic: Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Parenting is not logical. If it were, we would never have to read a book, never need a family therapist, and never feel the urge to call a close friend late at night for support after a particularly trying bedtime scene. . . . We have moments of logic, but life is run by a much larger force. Life is filled with disagreement, opposition, illusion, irrational thinking, miracle, meaning, surprise, and wonder.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.”
—William Cobbett (17621835)
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doingto do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)