Mariamna Davydoff, the Russian lady who wrote and illustrated this unique memoir, was born in 1871. It was after she emigrated from Russia to France in 1919 that she set down her detailed recollections and painted the accompanying watercolors. She did this mainly to enlighten one of her granddaughters about the family's life in the last decades of Tsarist Russia.
The result is a firsthand account of a way of life that we've known mainly through...