The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (23 page)

_____________

*
In languages with vowel harmony, every word typically contains either “back vowels” (in Turkish,
a, i, o, u
) or “front vowels” (
e, i, ö, ü
), but not both. There are multiple forms of every declension and verb tense to match the different kinds of vowels.

*
What Is to Be Done?
and
Who Is to Blame?
were influential nineteenth-century political novels by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Alexander Herzen.

*
The
ghazal
is a short lyric form of Persian origin, consisting of rhymed couplets, usually on the subject of romantic love and religious mysticism.

In 1703, Peter the Great decided to build a new imperial capital. As the location, he chose a semi-inhabited morass on the Gulf of Finland, which not only was ruled by his enemy the king of Sweden, but was frozen solid five months of the year and subject to flooding the rest of the time. Over seven hundred thousand serfs, soldiers, convicts, and Swedish prisoners were conscripted to clear the forests, level the hills, dig canals, drain the wetlands, and drive sixteen-foot-long oaken piles into the ground. For want of shovels, the workers dug up dirt with their bare hands and carried it away in their shirts. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation, cholera, and fatigue. “I doubt one could find a battle in military history that led to the death of more soldiers than the number of laborers who died in Petersburg,” wrote the historian Klyuchevsky, who characterized the city as “a big cemetery.”

This cemetery, which eventually became one of the world’s most beautiful cities, is presided over by the Bronze Horseman: a monument of Peter the Great astride a rearing steed, apparently about to leap off a cliff into the Neva. The monument, cast by Falconet in 1782 on the orders of Catherine the Great, was immortalized by Alexander Pushkin in “The Bronze Horseman”: a poem dramatizing the great flood of
1824 as the revenge of the elements against the tsar. When Pushkin’s hero, a poor clerk called Evgeny, curses the “fatal will” of him who caused a city to spring up from the sea, the Bronze Horseman leaps off his pedestal and pursues him through the streets, driving him mad.

Falconet’s monument and Pushkin’s poem are the two linchpins of the so-called myth of St. Petersburg. Like all myths, the myth of St. Petersburg is a selective construction. Here is something you won’t find in it. In the winter of 1740, Peter the Great’s niece, Anna Ioannovna, commissioned a sculpture bigger, stranger, and more immediately menacing than the Bronze Horseman: a massive ice palace, built for the wedding of two court jesters who were forced to spend their nuptial night inside. Just as Catherine’s Bronze Horseman catalyzed a celebrated poem by Pushkin, so did Anna’s monument inspire a literary production of its own:
The House of Ice
, a cloak-and-dagger romance by Pushkin’s contemporary Ivan Lazhechnikov, in which the ice palace serves as the hub of a vast political conspiracy linking a network of historical and fictional personages, including a diminutive black secretary who periodically reads aloud from his translation of Machiavelli.

I first found out about Lazhechnikov’s
House of Ice
from my classmate Luba, who read it while researching her dissertation, and instantly became convinced that she and I had to bring this work—which had apparently never been published in English—to the American people. Recalling our earlier experiences cotranslating some particularly abstruse and belligerent essays on film by Kasimir Malevich, I said something to the effect that translation jobs always made me want to jump out a window.

“But this would be nothing like last time,” said Luba,
who had already identified a grant we could apply for. “You’ll really like Lazhechnikov. The main character has a black secretary who follows him everywhere.”

“Is the book
narrated
by the black secretary?” I asked warily. I was working at that time on a typology of “narrating sidekicks,” and was interested in squires, valets, and secretaries.

“Well, maybe not exactly
narrated
by him . . .”

Early in 2006, a strange sequence of events made me realize that
The House of Ice
was after all a part of my destiny. On February 6, Luba went to UC Berkeley to give a job talk about the historical romances of Pushkin and Lazhechnikov. (She got the job.) On February 8, a life-size replica of the 1740 House of Ice was unveiled in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square, directly across from the Hermitage. It was almost as if Luba’s attention to Lazhechnikov’s out-of-print classic had generated some kind of etheric projection. Of course, the ice palace wasn’t really an etheric projection; its construction had required five hundred tons of ice and $150,000, underwritten by a city-wide initiative called White Days (designed to boost tourism in the winter off-season). For three hundred euros, you could get married in the House of Ice, and for three thousand euros you could spend your whole wedding night there, just like those unfortunate jesters.

Luba and I had to get close to it—to touch it with our own hands. I decided to pitch the story to
The New Yorker
, which had recently published my first piece of journalism: a profile of a former Thai kickboxing champion who now ran a gym in San Francisco.
The New Yorker
conceded that it might be nice to have a “Postcard from St. Petersburg” about the ice palace—but only so long as I was “already going to be in Petersburg anyway.” Unversed as I was in the ways of print journalism, it took me ten minutes to figure out what they
really meant: they didn’t want to pay travel expenses. For neither the first nor last time in my academic career, Grisha Freidin saved the day. He helped me round up two thousand dollars in departmental funds, in exchange for which I was to write a report about the role of Lazhechnikov in the Russian cultural imagination, and also take some photographs of a house in Petersburg where Maxim Gorky had once lived. (Having copied the address wrong, I ended up taking pictures of a neighboring Yolki-Palki: one of a chain of affordable nineteenth-century-themed taverns. Finding it odd that the Russians had turned Gorky’s house into a Yolki-Palki, I remember going inside afterward to eat a
pirozhok
and contemplate the vagaries of history.)

“We really appreciate your undertaking this assignment on your own steam,” my editor told me on the phone. “Just remember, we don’t want a travel piece. What we want is a postcard, a snapshot, with lots of wonderful details. Do you know what I mean? Like if you can get an interview with whoever made the doorknobs—little things like that.”

“Interview whoever made the doorknobs,” I repeated, jotting it in my notebook.

“Doorknobs are just an example. Another really wonderful thing would be if you can spend a night
inside
the ice palace. You know: ‘Three a.m. I hear a dog barking.’ Do you think it’s a possibility that they would let you spend a night there?”

“Well . . . I think you can rent it as a honeymoon suite for three thousand euros, but first you have to get married there.”

“Uh-huh.” I heard my editor pause to drink something. “Well, see if you can get them to let you stay there without getting married, for a few hundred euros.”

I was interested to learn that, although the magazine
wouldn’t reimburse me for a normal hotel, they were willing to spend up to four hundred euros for me to spend a night in an ice palace, listening to the dogs bark.

I got to Petersburg one day before Luba, who saw me off with repeated warnings to stay clear of skinheads. Petersburg has a reputation for hate crimes, and she said the two of us, with our prominent noses, would have to try to keep a “low profile.”

Copious, fine-grained snow gusted and swirled through the night skies, rattling against the windows of the taxi. I had made an online reservation, which proved to occupy one floor in an amazingly cheap hostel on the Liteyny Prospekt, a narrow, dark building. In the entrance hall, behind an apparently soundproof window, a tiny wispy-bearded old man, resembling a Dr. Seuss character, was staring intently at a very old radio. When I knocked tentatively on the glass he hurried outside, greeted me in halting but very correct English, and insisted on carrying my suitcase up the four flights of stone stairs to the hostel rooms. Behind an enormous purple upholstered door, which the old man unlocked with a huge skeleton key, lay an irregularly shaped area with sofas, armchairs, and a blaring television set. Sprawled on two of the sofas, five deeply Slavic-looking men with thick necks and shaved heads were eating tinned meat from gigantic tins and drinking beer from even more gigantic cans. Because of the way the room was arranged, the old man and I had to walk between their sofa and the television to get to the hallway. The shiny-headed Slavs, who had been laughing loudly at something, fell silent and followed us with their eyes.

Luba is going to kill me, I thought.

“Pilots, you know,” the little old man whispered, setting down my suitcase at the end of a dark passage. “We get a lot of them. Nice boys.” He demonstrated three times how to lock and unlock the door. “It doesn’t hurt to lock your door at night and leave the key in the lock.”

The room was painted pale green, and contained two collapsible steel cots, a wardrobe, a table, and two chairs. A chandelier hung from the ceiling—not from the center of the ceiling, but almost in a corner, like a sleeping bat. (“Was it my heart—a bird—that was caught in your locks that unfortunate night,” as the immortal Navoi wrote, “or was it bats of some kind?”) Outside the bay window, sodium lights turned everything a dull pink: the street, the steps, the eddying snow. Here and there, lone Russians in shapeless fur coats and hats rushed along the sidewalks, eyes fixed on the ground.

I thought about trying to go to bed, but I wanted to shower first, and couldn’t work up my nerve to go to the communal bathrooms, which were a few feet away from the pilots and their television. I put my coat back on and headed out for a walk.

“Good evening,” I said to the pilots on the way out.

“Good evening,” one of them replied.

An eviscerating wind blew in from the canals. Humanoid statues glared down from every alcove and pediment; atlantes and caryatids rolled their eyes under every portico. Petersburg is a scary place. In literature, it often figures as the scene of a murder.
^*
Furthermore, the tap water is supposed to cause
giardiasis. Bearing this in mind, I stopped at a grocery store to buy bottled water and, taking a pointer from the pilots, a five-hundred-milliliter can of Baltika. In front of me in line were two men with unshaven, alcohol-ravaged faces. They were both buying boxes of chocolate decorated with roses and music notes.

“And a teddy bear,” one of them growled at the clerk, who languidly handed him a huge, sad-looking gray plush bear. Only then did I notice the cardboard decorations and realize it was the night before International Women’s Day. The two men paid for their chocolate boxes and stuffed them in their jackets. The one who had bought the bear shoved it under his arm. The last thing I saw as they went into the snow was the head of the sad-looking gray bear sticking out of the man’s armpit.

When I got back to the hostel, the airmen were nowhere to be seen. I took a shower. Warm at last, I spent the rest of the evening sitting on my cot, sipping the icy beer and reading
Anna Ioannovna
: Evgeny Anisimov’s definitive biography of the empress who decided to marry her jesters in a house made of ice.

Today, Russians remember Empress Anna primarily for her love of jesters, dwarfs, and Germans, all of whom enter into her biography at an early point. In 1710, when Anna was seventeen, her uncle Peter the Great arranged her marriage to Duke Friedrich Wilhelm, the German ruler of the small duchy of Courland: a strategic alliance, intended to bolster Russia’s support of Courland against its big neighbors, Prussia and Poland. At the wedding banquet, the tsar cut open two pies with his dagger. A splendidly dressed dwarf jumped out of each pie and together they danced a minuet on the
table. The next day, Peter treated his guests to a second wedding: that of his favorite dwarf, attended by forty-two other dwarfs from all corners of the empire. Some foreign guests saw a certain symmetry in the double wedding, one between two miniature people, the other between two pawns in the great game of European politics.

On the way back to Courland, the teenage duke died, of alcohol poisoning. On his last night in Petersburg, he had engaged—rashly, one feels—in a drinking contest with Peter the Great. To the dismay of both Anna and her in-laws, Peter forbade the young widow from returning to Russia, lest her departure disturb the European balance of power. In more than three hundred letters addressed to her family, Anna repeatedly expressed her wish to remarry but, for political reasons, her uncle kept rejecting all her suitors.

Peter died in 1725. His death was followed, five years later, by that of his last direct male descendant, fourteen-year-old Peter II. To her surprise, thirty-seven-year-old Anna found herself empress. She returned to Russia that February, accompanied by her lover of long standing, Duke Ernst Johann Biron. On the eve of their arrival, it is said, the aurora borealis dyed the Moscow skies blood-red; a great bloody sphere, as large and luminous as the moon, appeared to sink slowly into the horizon.

The new empress—“seven-foot, 280-pound Anna,” in the words of one courtier—was not a reassuring presence. “When she walked among the cavaliers, she was a head taller than all of them,” the courtier reported, “and was extraordinarily fat.” She dined nearly every day with Biron, his hunchbacked young wife, Benigna Gotlieb von Trotha-Treyden, and the Birons’ three children, the youngest of whom was rumored to actually be Anna’s son. Little was known about Biron, of whom another courtier wrote in her memoirs: “He was nothing but
a shoemaker—he made a pair of boots for my uncle.” Anna’s reign is now known as
Bironovshchina
: the era of Biron.