Every girl from childhood wants to become a princess in order to wear beautiful dresses and feel the admiring glances of others. But is the daily life of the royals so carefree? The Russian empresses were united by the fact that they were Germans, and the fact that none of them was happy... Neither little Fike, who became Catherine the Great, nor her daughter-in-law, Maria Feodorovna, whose intrigues can be compared only with the intrigues of Catherine de Medici, neither Elizaveta Alekseevna, the muse of the greatest poet of Russia, nor Alexandra Fedorovna, the adored wife of the “iron” Emperor Nicholas I. There was no grief that would have passed Maria Alexandrovna... What did they think about, what worried them, what made up their day? The diaries and memoirs of German princesses at the Russian court included in the book provide a comprehensive answer to the question: what is it like to be a princess?