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OVER THE COURSE of his eighty-three years Dimitri Obolensky accumulated an intimidating range of titles, which posed potentially awkward choices for anybody who had to introduce him socially, or to address a letter to him. Prince Dimitri Obolensky, Professor Dimitri Obolensky, Sir Dimitri Obolensky-here in one man was the full Shakespearean paradigm for greatness: born a Russian prince, he achieved his Oxford chair, and eventually had a knighthood thrust upon him. Happily, though each of these distinctions was important to him, and though he was sensitive to the decorum of each when the occasion demanded, for most people most of the time he was content to be plain Dimitri (he was, however, quite fussy about that first "i," which he added to his name shortly after arriving at Oxford-strictly an incorrect transliteration from normal Russian, but reminiscent of the Greek and Church Slavonic forms).
Prince Dimitri Obolensky's blood was the bluest of the blue. The Romanov tsars were mere upstarts by comparison, for he could trace his lineage to the ancient princely house of Chernigov and thence, via St. Vladimir of Kiev, right back to the famed Riurik himself, the Viking progenitor of the dynasty of the Rus in the ninth century (though he was a sober enough scholar to know that Riurik may not actually have existed). Dimitri took an unostentatious pride in his aristocratic background, never mistaking it for a badge of personal merit, yet well aware of how it had affected his fate. Displacing him at the beginning, intriguing him towards the end, it framed his life.
Had Dimitri not been born a Russian aristocrat in revolutionary times, he would probably not have become an English academic. He left Russia on 9 April 1919, shortly after his first birthday (he was bom in Petrograd on 1 April 1918). The previous autumn his family had fled south from Moscow, via Kiev, to the Crimea, which was still under the control of the "White" army of General Denikin. He initially stayed at one of the family homes, the 150-room palace at Alupka, near Yalta, with his great-grandmother Elizaveta Vorontsova-Dashkova, whose husband Ilarion had been viceroy of the Caucasus. Elizaveta's daughter Sandra, Dimitri's maternal grandmother, had been given away in marriage by Alexander III...