Elizabeth Antonova Kraevsky paints a panoramic picture of the revolutionary struggle that terminated with Russia's enslavement by Bolshevik communism. She accomplishes the extraordinary feat of filtering this period through the sensibilities of a beautiful and intelligent young girl who achieves a triumphant maturity during these tumultuous and frightening times in which her very existence was often in danger. The book is at once a vast epic drama and the very personal story of a girl reared in great privilege and shaped by life-threatening events, but who ultimately found salvation in her faith and in a great love that crossed continents. Elizabeth spent her Russian years in the beautiful area that stretched along the Black Sea from Yalta to Odessa. Her father was born into the nobility but renounced his hereditary estates to become a renowned physician who offered his services to the aristocracy and serfs in equal measure. Her exquisitely lovely mother often devoted herself to tutoring the children of the oppressed peasants who had no opportunity for education in Czarist Russia. Elizabeth's youth and adolescence were a gorgeous dream of luxury, indulgence, and unadulterated happiness. Elizabeth vividly resurrects a vanished era that will never actually return. Using a combination of narrative and lengthy quotes from her diaries, she enables us to enter the heart and mind of and see with her eyes her gilded youth of great houses, wonderful schools and companions, the schoolgirl crushes and adolescent infatuations, the balls and parties, the luxuriant journeys to other parts of Europe, the clothes, jewels, and furnishings of that bedazzled time. And suddenly, precisely at the time, she would begin to think of the rest of her life, of marriage or possibly a career, it was over. The beautiful dream became an ugly nightmare. Dr. Kraevsky and his family were living in Odessa when the revolution broke out.