author
Eugenia Smith
1899–1997
Best remembered for a startling claim to the Romanov story, this émigré writer published a memoir in 1963 presenting herself as Grand Duchess Anastasia. Her life sits at the uneasy crossroads of autobiography, performance, and one of the 20th century’s most enduring royal mysteries.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born Eugenia Drabek Smetisko on January 25, 1899, in Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, she later emigrated to the United States and became known as Eugenia Smith. She spent much of her adult life in Chicago and was also described in contemporary accounts as a painter and designer as well as a writer.
She is chiefly remembered for Anastasia: The Autobiography of H.I.H. the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna of Russia (1963). In that book and in public appearances around it, she claimed to be the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, a story that drew attention because so many rumors had long surrounded the fate of the Romanov family.
That claim was widely disputed, and she is generally treated by historians as one of several Anastasia pretenders rather than as a surviving Romanov. Even so, her book remains part of the strange afterlife of the Anastasia legend, reflecting how powerfully the Romanov story continued to capture readers long after the empire itself had vanished.