Vladimir Pavlovich Paley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley | |
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| Born | January 9, 1897 Saint Petersburg, Russia |
| Died | July 18, 1918 Alapaevsk, Russia |
| Parents | Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia and Olga Valerianovna Paley |
His Serene Highness Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley (Владимир Павлович Палей) (January 9, 1897–July 18, 1918) was a Russian poet.
Prince Vladimir was born Vladimir Pavlovich Romanov in Saint Petersburg, Russia. His parents were Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia, the youngest child of Emperor Alexander II and his father's former mistress, Olga Valerianovna Paley. In 1902, Grand Duke Paul, who been previously married to Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark and two children by her, wed Olga morganatically. In 1904, Olga was created Countess von Hohenfelsen by Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria, making Vladimir Count Vladimir von Hohenfelsen. In 1915 Olga was created Her Serene Highness Princess Paley by Nicholas II, making Vladimir a Prince.
Prince Vladimir had two elder half-siblings of his father's previous equal marriage to Alexandra Georgievna of Greece, née HRH Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark: Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia and Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia. He had two full sisters, both of whom were styled Her Serene Highness Princess Paley: Irina Pavlovna and Natalia Pavlovna.
He spent his childhood in Paris and later graduated from the Corps de Pages, an aristocratic military school in Saint Petersburg. He fought with the Russian army in the First World War and was decorated as a war hero with the Order of Saint Anne.
Since he was a teenager, Vladimir Paley showed remarkable talent as a poet. He published two volumes of poetry (1916 and 1918) and wrote several plays and essays, as well as a magnificent French translation of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovitch's play The King of the Jews.
In the summer of 1917 he and his family were placed for a short while under house arrest by the Provisional Government, because of a poem he wrote about Aleksandr Kerensky. In March 1918 he was arrested by the Bolsheviks and sent to exile in Vyatka and later Ekaterinburg and Alapaevsk. He was brutally murdered in a mineshaft near Alapaevsk, together with his cousins HH Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia, HH Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia, HH Prince Igor Konstantinovich of Russia, and other relatives. Their bodies were recovered and buried months later in an Orthodox cemetery in Beijing, China, which was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
A biography of Prince Vladimir Paley by Andrey Baranovsky was published in 1997 in Russian, and another (A Poet Among The Romanovs) by Jorge F. Saenz in 2004, in both Russian and English.
