The intimate details of a royal love affair were exposed yesterday when seven erotically charged letters between Tsar Alexander II and his mistress went on sale in Germany. “I am expecting to make love three times tomorrow,” writes Ekaterina Dolgorukaya in a letter to the Tsar dated 1871.

She goes on to describe, in remarkably free terms, how she was preparing to sleep with the Russian emperor. “I want to drink your juices,” she says, slipping a Russian phrase into a letter written largely in French.

Alexander — known as “the Liberator” because of his decision to emancipate the Russian serfs — was married to Princess Marie of Hesse, who bore him six sons and two daughters. Having met Ekaterina “Katya” Dolgorukaya — descended from a noble Muscovite family — as a schoolgirl, he decided to install her as a mistress in 1866. She was then 19, he was 48 and already an avid collector of erotica. Katya was given an apartment in the Winter Palace of St Petersburg, a secret staircase connecting her rooms with those of the Tsar.

The letters from Alexander make plain that he was besotted with Katya. Most of their correspondence is stored in the Moscow State Archives but the seven letters being auctioned by Venator and Hanstein of Cologne are owned by a French aristocrat. The guide price was €13,000- €19,000 (£8,800-£12,900) for each letter. They will not change history’s view of the Tsar but they do give an extraordinary snap-shot of 19th-century royal morality.

“My angel, my treasure, my idol,” writes the Tsar on February 14, 1869, looking forward to a rendezvous that evening. The next day, he is at his desk again: “I am waiting for the moment that I can find myself again in your arms and press myself against your heart.” That moment, it seems, came the same evening because by February 16 the Tsar is declaring himself to be “full of the delight of love-making”.

Some biographers have described Alexander II as a philanderer but the letters paint a more nuanced picture of a highly sexed leader who was also a great romantic. Germans have long accepted this version, influenced by a 1959 film, The Magnificent Sinner (or Katia), starring Curt Jörgens and Romy Schneider — an attempt to depict the relationship as a modern love story.

The letters are replete with codewords. “Bingerle” is a euphemism for love-making coined by Katya. Their love-nest in the palace is referred to as the “nid”. The French word j ouissance is their code for sexual climax, and it crops up again and again in the correspondence. “I have no need to explain [my love],” writes the Tsar, on his headed notepaper, “because you saw and heard for yourself how our love-making gave to me, and to you, the delight of jouissance.”

Katya, who calls the Tsar “my little cuckoo”, talks openly about his male anatomy and even a brief erection problem but reassures him: “We will sleep together like the cats and it will be sweet and full of joy.”

Alexander fathered three illegitimate children with Katja. After the Tsarina died in 1880 he married her and fathered another child.

Alexander II is regarded as the most liberal of the 19th-century Russian emperors, freeing the serfs and easing censorship. The revolutionary group Narodnaya Volva tried to blow up the royal train in 1879, set off explosives in a banqueting hall in the Winter Palace and finally succeeded in killing Alexander in his coach in 1881.

Katya left Russia soon after his assassination. She died in France in 1922.

From the heart

French novelist Gustav Flaubert to his wife, Louise Colet, 1846
“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die”

Lenin to his mistress and communist activist, Inessa Armand, January 22,917
“Dear Friend, Things have gone badly for the Lefts here, because Nobs and Platten have become frightened of a war against Grimm, who furiously attacked the referendum!! Sad!! All possible greetings. Yours, Lenin P.S. Trotsky has sent in a silly letter. We shall neither print it nor reply to him”

Rupert Brooke, poet, to Noel Oliver, 17, the object of his unrequited affection, 1911
“You are so beautiful and wonderful that I daren't write to you . . . And kinder than God. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice — you”

Source: theromantic.com, Marx.org

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