The Age of Ice: A Novel
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Authors: J. M. Sidorova
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In Corpore Vili,
or The Early Phenomena (1740–69)
Intervita:
A Pause Between Lives (1812–14)
Nor All Your Tears (1814 to 1850s)
Lost in Translation, or
Vesna Svyashennaya, Le Sacre du Printemps,
The Rite of Spring (1906–14)
Anamorphosis Abscondita
: Things Seem Closer Than They Are (1914–2003)
To Mom and Geoff
In memory of Dad
Prince Alexander M. Velitzyn | The book’s narrator and hero. Son of Mikhail “The Clown” Velitzyn and Avdotia, née Buzheninova, who conceive Alexander when imprisoned together in Empress Anna Ioannovna’s Ice Palace in 1740. Serves his military duty with the Preobrazhensky Leib Guard’s grenadiers. |
Prince Andrei M. Velitzyn | Alexander’s twin brother. A war veteran by thirty, he trades frontline for garrison after the birth of his son, and moves his family to Orenburg in south-central Russia. |
Princess Anna F. Velitzyn, née Khitrovo | Andrei’s wife, mother of Andrei Junior. |
Prince Andrei Velitzyn Jr. | Son of Anna and Andrei Velitzyn. He follows in his uncle’s steps and joins the Leib Guard. Famed for his courage in the Battle of Austerlitz. |
Varvara Redrikov, Princess Velitzyn | Wife of Andrei Junior, from an aristocratic background, though less wealthy than the Velitzyn clan. |
Prince Mikhail Velitzyn | Son of Andrei Junior by Varvara Redrikov. |
Paul Svetogorov, “Paulie” | Closest friend of Alexander in the Preobrazhensky regiment of the Leib Guard. |
Countess Marie Tolstoy, | Onetime fiancée of Alexander Velitzyn. |
Matryona | Serfwoman who lives near the Velitzyn estate. She later opens a brothel in St. Petersburg. |
Savva | Son of Matryona. As an adult, he becomes a famous couturier. |
Cyril | Indomitable valet of Alexander, then his butler. |
Ivan Kuznetzov | Student of astronomy, whom Alexander first encounters on the road to Orenburg. Later, in St. Petersburg, he studies at the academy and tutors Andrei Junior. |
Baroness Mimi d’Anglairs | St. Petersburg socialite, friend of Anna’s. |
Commodore Loginov | Official of the Russian Admiralty. He organizes the expedition to the Arctic. |
Joseph Billings | Englishman by birth, a captain of the British navy, who served under Captain Cook. He leads the Russian-British Arctic expedition to find the passage from the Bering Strait west over the Eurasian continent. |
Gavril Sarychev | Captain of the Russian navy, Billings’s second-in-command. |
Martin Sawyer | Expedition’s English‒Russian interpreter, secretary, and ethnographer. Born to a British merchant family in the Russian city of Archangel, he is bilingual. |
Michael Robeck | Expedition’s surgeon. Prior to the expedition he served in the British navy and then in India. |
Carl Merck | Naturalist and physician. Born to the Merck family of Darmstadt, he travels to Russia to see the world, then becomes a member of the expedition. |
Richard Hall, Christian Bering | Officers of the expedition. |
Allegretti, Lehman | Surgeon and surgeon’s assistant on the expedition. |
Batahov, Bronnikov, Bakov, Voronin | Members of the expedition. |
Feodor | Cossack commander at the Upper Kolyma Fort in Siberia, he runs it as his personal fiefdom. |
Ouchapin | Feodor’s sixteen-year-old Yakuti wife. |
Nikolai Darkin | Chukchi by birth, raised as a Cossack. Recruited as an interpreter for the expedition. |
Nadezhda (Nadya) | Wife of Carl Merck. Born in Irkutsk in Siberia, she is half Yakuti, half Russian. |
Evelyn Woodrow | Wife and business partner, then widow of one of the wealthiest British merchants in St. Petersburg. Befriends, then marries Sawyer. |
Ossip Vassilian | Persian resident in Paris and Oriental rug store owner. |
Najar Alibek | Nephew of the Persian ambassador to France, he travels in Europe as a young man; later he is influential at the shah’s court in Tehran. |
Victor Goutte | Russian agent in Persia and Afghanistan. |
Iqbal Ali | Medicine man in Herat, a city near Afghanistan’s border with Persia. |
Eldred Pottinger | Lieutenant of the Bombay artillery regiment, British resident in Herat who leads effort to secure its defenses during the Persian-led siege. |
Khalil (Khalo) Khan | Pottinger’s errand runner, later assassin. |
Count Simonich | Head of the Russian mission to Herat. |
Dr. Josias Euler | Physician in service of the shah of Herat. |
Princess Elizabeth Goretsky; Pfaltzgravine von Welleren in marriage | Free-spirited daughter of a powerful Russian bureaucrat, she encounters Alexander on his 1913 trip to Russia. |
Robert G. Wallace | Russian correspondent of |
Anna Cazaux, née von Welleren | Daughter of Elizabeth and Alexander, teacher, then feminist author. |
Pierre Cazaux | Anna’s husband. Prisoner of WWII, then teacher in postwar France. |
Mikhail Sudarev | Official of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade and Alexander’s chaperone in Irkutsk. |
It is, I believe, a very just observation that men’s ambition is, generally, proportioned to their capacity. Providence seldom sends any into the world with an inclination to attempt great things, who have not abilities, likewise, to perform them.
—Samuel Johnson, “Herman Boerhaave”
I
was born of cold copulation, white-fleshed and waxy like a crust of fat on beef broth left outside in winter. I was born of seed that would have seized with frost if spilled on the newlyweds’ bed. I was born on the twenty-seventh of September because in the month of January my parents had been sealed in a wedding chamber made of ice.
The year was 1740. The place—St. Petersburg, Russia. My country, corseted, wigged, and powdered on top but still darkly savage at heart, was panting and retching after the marathon Peter the Great had forced her to run. My would-be father, Prince Mikhail Velitzyn, scion of a family ancient and stately, had been transformed into a court jester. He had been forced to wear red-and-white-striped stockings and pretend to be a hen—to brood an imaginary clutch in Empress Anna Ioannovna’s menagerie of dwarfs, cripples, freaks, and victims. This was his punishment for an alleged affair with a Catholic noblewoman.
I’ve never met that woman. She may have never existed. The one whose existence is certain was Avdotia Buzheninova, a jester by birthright and a humpback, whose act was to writhe in a mockery of yearning, to clutch her breast and wail that she was lusting for a husband. The empress loved the gag, they say—so much so that it inflamed her head with an idea of a jester wedding.
That winter was brutal, and generous with precipitation, thus permissive of all manner of arctic entertainment: making snowmen and leaving men out in the snow, sharpening blades of axes and ice skates, freezing little birds and little maids in flight. By January, upon the empress’s whimsical orders, a palace was erected out of ice blocks—the purest crystal blue, ripped out of the Neva River’s winter hide and chiseled to diamond perfection by the empress’s slave architects. Inside the palace was a wedding chamber, a canopy bed on a dais, with heavy drapes half drawn, cascading to the floor—all made of ice.
The wedding opened with festivals and masquerades. Dwarfs trumpeted
and freaks paraded. A procession followed, and at its head strode the empress herself, dressed as the Queen of Sheba. She danced, quaking her regal fat, perspiring in her sleeveless gown. She led my parents to the wedding chamber, gave them the blessing, and locked them up for the night.
Idle tongues used to say it was for fear of being left forever inside the frosty chamber that my parents fulfilled their connubial duty. But what do they know of ice, those idle tongues? No one but an abused prince and his slave bride know how fingers, skin taut with cold, nail beds bruise-blue, climb into warm recesses of the flesh, hiding from frostbite. How sweat and tears freeze and join with ice, becoming part of the curtain, part of the bed. How flesh shivers, giving its seed up as the last drop of oil for the dying fire in a night that is as long as winter. How dawn glows through the walls of ice, and lights up the cavern, and finds them fused together, clinging to the residual warmth of each other’s blood.