THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 7, 1994 TAG: 9410070036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
Compelling genetic evidence demolishing the late Anna Anderson Manahan's claim that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, won't persuade anyone determined to believe otherwise.
Indeed, the scientific findings announced this week have not weakened the certainty of some who knew Mrs. Manahan well that she was Anastasia, sole survivor of the Russian royal family slaughtered by Bolsheviks in 1918.
Something there is in many human beings - perhaps all - that yearns to believe Elvis lives, Bigfoot wanders the forests of the Northwest and a monster lurks in Loch Ness. . . . Demand for fantasies is endless - witness the success of supermarket tabloids and their TV equivalent. People who scoff at tales of flying saucers and abductions by space aliens should be careful, however; breathes there anyone who hasn't been gulled by falsehoods, especially ones appearing in respectable garb, as many ``studies'' do?
Sorting truth from fiction in this hurdy-gurdy life is often impossible and frequently difficult.
Anna Anderson Manahan's masquerade, in which she persisted until her dying day, is the stuff of books and plays and movies, if not also of poetry, and an infinity of magazine, press and TV interviews and commentary. Is because neither this nor anyone else's word about her saga will be the last. Was she a liar or crazy or both? That's fodder enough to keep scribes and filmmakers and archivists scrambling from now to Kingdom Come.
Mrs. Manahan lived her last years in Charlottesville as the wife of a University of Virginia professor who believed her to be who she said she was, not Franzisca Schanzkowska, a working-class girl of Polish-German descent, to whom the genetic tests point.
She had been identified as Franzisca Schanzkowska soon after she stepped into the limelight as Anastasia. She had emerged from a mental asylum in Germany to which she had been confined after attempting suicide in Berlin. Her patrons, exiled Russian aristocrats, had accepted her as a link to a glorious past.
That she presented herself to the world as Anastasia and was widely accepted as such was a romantic story in a turbulent age. That her story was a lie does not diminish - indeed, in some ways, enhances - its appeal. But lie it was. by CNB