Alexander descended from a
long line of Poles who had played a prominent part in the history of their country. At the last partition of Poland in 1795, they passed over to the service of the Russian Empire. Rzewuski's grandfather was in the personal suite of four Tsars, and his father, General Adam Rzewuski, born in
Ukraine, was military Governor of the
Caucasus region at the time of Alexander's birth there in 1893. Alexander's mother Katarzyna Lubarski-Fluki was a Russian from the
Saint Petersburg aristocracy. He was baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church and spent his childhood partly in the Caucasus (with forays into
Azerbaijan and
Chechnya) and partly in Ukraine, where a series of French and English governesses educated him and his sisters at home. As an adolescent of 14, he was sent north, far from the mountains of the
Caucasus, to school in Saint Petersburg at the Imperial Alexander Lycée. Schooling completed, he passed on to the university there. As an undergraduate, he was profoundly, if imperceptibly, affected by the philosophy lectures. A cast of mind which was to stay with him until his student days as a
Dominican, was introduced. Rzewuski served during the war as an officer in command of organising fleets of ambulances for the wounded.
October Revolution, artwork and conversion During the
October Revolution, at a family council it was decided that Alexander and his relatives all should flee to the Italy, where they had members of their wider family. Three weeks later, after criss-crossing through Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria, they were all ensconced in the Palazzo Caetani in Rome. However, Alexander was starting his painting career and for this Paris promised greater opportunity than Rome. He moved there and worked as an artist between 1920 and 1926, winning a reputation as a portrait painter and illustrator; His first assignment was to Albertinum at
Fribourg in Switzerland as spiritual director to the 200 international seminarians, sent here by their bishops from around the world to study under the Dominicans. Rzewuski was extremely unimpressed with their lack of intellectual passion and their professional ambition to become important in the clerical field of Church politics. He suffered here for 13 years, but he did make some friends, among them the theologian
Charles Journet and
Liane de Pougy, and frequently sought some refreshment at the Charterhouse of Valsainte. He always considered solitude to be his true calling, and had friends among the
Carthusians. When World War II ended, he returned to France to become novice-master for six years in Saint Maximin,
Toulouse, followed by four years on the Ste Baume, a bare mountain overlooking the Mediterranean, and a place of pilgrimage in honour of
Mary Magdalene. At last some measure of solitude was his in this place of retirement. The final decades of his life were passed at the vicariate of Prouilhe as well as caring for the contemplative Dominican nuns at
Prouilhe, and in other parts of the world before his death in 1983. ==Publications==