The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (24 page)

Above all things, Anna loved to be entertained. As empress, she had her mother’s aging friends tracked down and brought to court, because they had impressed her by their volubility when she was a child. For those no longer living, or too old to travel, she demanded replacements. “Send me someone who looks like Tatiana Novokreshchenova,” Anna instructed her chamberlain. “She should be about forty years old, and should be talkative, like Novokreshchenova was.” One courtier wrote of her first meeting with Anna, “She seized me by the shoulder so hard that I was in pain . . . and asked: ‘How fat am I? Am I as fat as Avdotya Ivanovna?’ ” The terrified courtier replied, “It is impossible to compare Your Majesty with her, she is twice as fat.” Pleased with this answer, Anna ordered her new friend, “Speak!” and made her talk for several hours.

In her pursuit of conversation, Anna did not limit herself to the human species. She issued the following order in 1739: “It has come to our knowledge that in the window of the Petrovsky tavern in Moscow sits a starling which speaks so well that all passers-by stop to listen . . . immediately send me a starling of this sort.”

Different birds afforded Anna different forms of entertainment: in two months at her summer estate Peterhof, she shot sixty-eight wild ducks from her window. Unlike other Russian rulers, she rarely used borzois or falcons, and was relatively uninterested by the strategy and tactics of the hunt, but she did love to shoot. Often, an army of beaters would drive all the animals from the Peterhof forest into a clearing, where Anna would drive up in a special carriage called the Jagdwagen, and take them out one by one. Her cartridge cases were kept coated with lard, to expedite reloading. The
fauna population of the Petersburg governorate being unable to replenish itself fast enough to meet her needs, Anna issued ukases to her military staff all over the empire, who kept her supplied with Siberian wolves and Ukrainian boars. Scholars have diagnosed her with an “Amazon complex.”

If there was one thing Anna loved more than conversation and hunting, it was jesters. She had inherited two jesters from Peter I, including Jan D’Acosta, a Portuguese Marrano theologian and financier who spoke ten languages, and with whom the emperor had debated the relative merits of the Old and New Testaments. Anna also exercised much conscientiousness in the recruitment of new jesters and “fools,” once rejecting a proposed candidate with a note: “He isn’t a fool.” When considering the appointment of a certain Prince Nikita Volkonsky, Anna ordered her chamberlain to present a full report on “the life of Volkonsky” detailing, among other things, how many shirts Volkonsky owned, what kind of dogs he kept, and whether he ate cabbage stalks.

The most spectacular jester-related “entertainments” in Anna’s court all involved marriage. When the jester Balakirev publicly complained that his wife wouldn’t sleep with him, Anna had the Holy Synod issue a special decree for the “reinstatement of previous conjugal relations.” The jester Pietro “Pedrillo” Mira—a Neapolitan violinist who, having arrived in Petersburg with a theater troupe, quarreled with his Kapellmeister and ended up a jester—was famous for having a wife as ugly as a goat; the joke escalated to the point that he received visitors in bed together with a ribbon-decked goat, beside a bassinet containing a baby goat.

The winter of 1740 was the coldest in decades. Thermometers shattered, brandy froze indoors, birds dropped from the sky like stones. One of Anna’s servants, a middle-aged, hunchbacked Kalmyk woman known as Buzheninova, after
the dish
buzhenina
(cold roast pork), confided to Anna: “Without a husband, my life is like a hard frost.” The empress decided to arrange a marriage between Buzheninova and Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, a real prince who had been convicted of apostasy for marrying an Italian commoner and converting to Catholicism. Anna, having heard rumors of his “unusual stupidity,” commuted his sentence and dubbed him Prince Kvasnik, the imperial cupbearer of kvass. (She also dissolved his marriage and confiscated his son; the young Italian wife disappeared some years later in the Secret Chancellery.) Kvasnik’s other official duties included sitting on a nest of eggs in a reception room while clucking like a chicken.

Anna’s charismatic cabinet minister, Artemy Volynsky—the protagonist of Lazhechnikov’s novel—decided to make this wedding the culminating point of a mass holiday, which would simultaneously honor Anna’s name day, the anniversary of her accession to the throne, Shrovetide week, and the ratification of the Treaty of Belgrade between Russia and the Ottomans. The wedding of a Kalmyk and a Catholic convert, representing Russia’s “total victory over all infidels,” was to take place in a magnificent, specially constructed ice palace.

On the day of the festivities, the bride and groom made their entrance in an iron cage on the back of a real elephant, followed by a three-hundred-person “ethnographic parade” of bridal couples from all over the empire. As Lazhechnikov describes it, the procession was led by Ostyaks riding on deer, “followed by Novgorodians on a pair of goats, Ukrainians on bulls, Petersburg Finns on donkeys, a Tatar with his Tataress, mounted on well-fed pigs, to demonstrate the conquering of both nature and custom. Then there were redhaired Finns on miniature horses, Kamchadals riding dogs, Kalmyks on camels, Belorussians with hair matted as thick as felt, Komi who in honorableness could rival the Germans,
[and] Jaroslavians, who attained the highest place in this human exhibition with their stature, their beauty, and the elegance of their finery.”

Kvasnik and Buzheninova were transferred from their cage to the House of Ice, where armed sentries forced them to remain until morning. The newlyweds spent hours running around and dancing, trying to stay warm. (In Lazhechnikov’s account, they also turned somersaults, beat each other, banged on the walls, begged the guards to release them, cursed their fate, and broke everything that could be broken.) They were found the next morning on the ice bed, close to death. Anna provoked much laughter among the courtiers by inquiring into the “sweetness” of the wedding night.

Because of the great job he did with the festival, the cabinet minister briefly remained in the empress’s good graces—until his valet turned over some compromising papers to his rival, Biron. The minister was convicted of treason. That June, an executioner cut off first his tongue, then his hand, and lastly his head. In September, Anna began complaining of abdominal pains. She died in October, probably of kidney failure. In November, the Biron family was banished to Siberia. The House of Ice—elephant, pocket watches, and all—had melted in late March; only some large pieces of the walls were salvaged to use for refrigeration in the Imperial Palace.

As for Kvasnik and Buzheninova, they continued to live together as husband and wife, and even had two sons. I was happy that things had ended relatively well for them. My last waking thought consisted of a dim sense of identification with these two jesters, whose experiences in the court of Anna Ioannovna reminded me in certain ways of my own experiences working for
The New Yorker
.

•   •   •

The New York Public Library has an original edition of Georg Wolfgang Krafft’s 1741
Description et représentation exacte de la maison de glace
, complete with drawings and architectural plans. Krafft, a German-born physicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, engineered some of the palace’s technical components, including several cannons made of ice—loaded with real gunpowder, they fired ice cannonballs a distance of sixty paces—and a giant hollow ice elephant, mounted by an ice soldier in Persian dress. The elephant’s trunk, connected by pipes to the Admiralty Canal, spouted water twenty-four feet in the air. At night the water was replaced by flaming oil. The elephant could trumpet in a highly realistic fashion, thanks to a man sitting inside, blowing into a trumpet.

The six-meter-tall building, designed by the Italian-trained architect and city planner Peter Eropkin, was erected directly on the frozen Neva. Blocks of ice were “cemented” with water, immediately fusing together, so that the finished structure appeared to have been cut from a single piece of transparent bluish stone. With the exception of a few real playing cards frozen to an ice table, everything in the palace was made of ice, some of it dyed to resemble other materials. The bedroom was equipped with a dressing table, “mirror,” canopy bed, pillows, blankets, slippers, and nightcaps. On shelves and tables stood cups, saucers, plates, cutlery, wineglasses, figurines, and even transparent pocket watches and table clocks, with dyed cogs and gears. At night, ice candles in ice candlesticks and ice logs in an ice fireplace were doused with oil and illuminated. They flared briefly, but didn’t melt. Next to the palace, a tiny log cabin made of ice housed a working Russian
banya
, where Buzheninova and Kvasnik took a prenuptial steam bath.

From Krafft’s description, I already had a good idea of
what the ice palace would look like. Nonetheless, the real thing looked simultaneously larger and smaller than I had expected, and there was something comical about the visual fact of its existence, sitting so matter-of-factly on the embankment, with its balustrade and pilastered façade. Dense, baroque, translucent, it resembled the ghost of a municipal building.

Krafft’s ice elephant had been replicated, but it didn’t contain a trumpeter or flaming gasoline. Instead, determined-looking children were clambering up a staircase built into its back, sitting approximately where the Persian soldier used to sit, and coasting down the trunk, which had been converted into a slide.

The organizers’ offices were in a trailer in the back. Photocopies of Krafft’s engravings were taped to the wall. The heater was broken, and everyone was wearing heavy coats. One of the directors, Valery Gromov, took me on a tour of the palace. I was proud of myself for remembering to ask who had made the doorknobs. Gromov stared at me. “What doorknobs?” he asked.

All the interior walls and furnishings were either transparent or, where the surface of the ice had melted and refrozen, a milky blue. The only exceptions were, in the first room, three playing cards and a copy of the St. Petersburg phone book, encased in ice. (The publisher was a corporate sponsor.) The contents of the second room, Gromov explained, had been “improvised on a matrimonial theme,” since Krafft hadn’t provided a drawing. A cupid stood in the window—perhaps an allusion to the 1740 parade, which included a page dressed as a “weeping cupid,” grieved by the unsightliness of the bridal pair. What appeared to be a Renaissance marble angel had been sculpted from snow, as had two albatross-size songbirds perched atop two hearts. In the corner hulked a massive snow wedding cake, and staring impassively at the
cake was a life-size, bluish Anna Ioannovna, shimmering on her throne like some kind of hologram.

In a third room was the cataclysmic bed, its canopy resembling a frozen waterfall. A pair of ice slippers lay on an ice cushion on the floor. I sat briefly on the bed. It was, as expected, hard and cold. “Can this be Hymen’s altar?” Lazhechnikov had demanded rhetorically, of its prototype. “Wherever they sat, whatever they touched—everything was made from ice.”

Gromov said that he took a very critical view of Lazhechnikov. “His book is a work of art, and ours is a work of history. All these things really happened. Only not with dwarfs; with real people.” He was alluding to a popular misconception that Kvasnik and Buzheninova were themselves dwarfs: the ice palace has gone down in history as a kind of dollhouse for Amazon Anna’s human toys.

From the bedchamber we passed to the bathhouse. Two teenagers were sliding around, grabbing at the walls. “The floor turned out somehow slippery,” Gromov observed, as one teenager, clutching the doorjamb, managed to haul himself outside.

At a nearby café afterward, we met Gromov’s partner, Svetlana Mikheyeva, who was wearing a cardigan with a pink fur collar, and who immediately ordered two glasses of cognac. She and I drank to International Women’s Day. Gromov only drank bright red multivitamin tea, of which Mikheyeva had ordered two large pots. Over a serious lunch, also ordered by Mikheyeva, the two directors told me about their dream to reestablish Petersburg as “the birthplace of ice sculpture.”

Gromov, a former army management official, and Mikheyeva, a former doctor and health care manager, had conceived of this dream during an international management
training program in Tokyo in 1999, where they ended up stuck in a broken elevator with the chairman of the Association of Russian Snow, Ice, and Sand Sculptors. When I asked Mikheyeva what had motivated her career change from medicine to ice sculpture, she said it wasn’t such a big jump: “Ice is a natural material, it has a natural relationship to human health. So does sand.” She talked about the new trend in cryosaunas, and about Chinese sand therapy: “The whole body is covered in sand, which combines heat, massage, and magnetism. We also do a lot of work with sand. In the winter, ice; in the summer, sand.” The previous June, the two main sculptors of the House of Ice had built a six-meter sand Gulliver in Komarovo.

When I asked whether I could spend a night in the House of Ice, they informed me that, in the absence of any consumer interest, the wedding-night package had been canceled, and the palace wasn’t equipped for overnight stays.

“Could I do it anyway?” I asked doubtfully.

“Elif, you would freeze,” Mikheyeva said. “This is not California.”

Luba arrived that evening. We were so excited! “There are some people who look like skinheads,” I told her, “but they’re actually pilots.” Luba was more interested by the hostel staff, which included, in addition to the tiny old man with the wispy beard, a solidly built middle-aged man with only one arm.

“The older one speaks really good English,” Luba mused. “I think he might be Jewish. But the one-armed one I don’t think is Jewish . . . Elishka, there is a very large beer can outside our window.” After a moment’s perplexity, I recognized this can as last night’s Baltika.