The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (25 page)

“I drank half of it, and then I put the rest there, in case
I needed it later,” I explained. We were dissolved in laughter when a knock sounded at the door: it was the tiny man with the Dr. Seuss beard, holding two prepackaged ice cream cones. “Two young women, traveling alone,” he said. “I thought somebody should congratulate you on Women’s Day.”

“He’s definitely Jewish,” Luba said, after he left. The ice cream, notwithstanding its appearance of having spent the last twenty-five years driving around Russia in a truck, was surprisingly delicious.

The ice palace had no clear purpose, but many unclear purposes. It was a torture device, a science experiment, an ethnographic museum, a work of art. It was a suspended disaster, a flood momentarily checked, a haunted house, a distorted fairy tale, with its transparent coffin, parodic prince, and dwarfs. The ice palace represents the prison house of marriage, the vanity of human endeavor, the dialectic of empire and subject. Laden with endless meanings, like an object in a dream, the House of Ice appears in poems about dreams. It is believed to have inspired the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Thomas Moore, the nineteenth-century satirist, wrote of a dream ball in the House of Ice, hosted by Tsar Alexander I and attended by the entire Holy Alliance. When the castle and its occupants start to melt, “some word, like ‘Constitution’—long / Congealed in frosty silence,” drips from the tongue of Prussia’s king.

As for the reconstruction, it generated an even more diverse and frenetic field of responses. I exchanged several e-mails with the editor in chief of
Orthodox St. Petersburg
, who viewed the event as a sinister rehabilitation of the tradition of “jesters’ weddings”: a “conscious mockery of the Holy
Mystery of matrimony” devised by “the Protestant Peter I.” (Peter wasn’t actually a Protestant, but Slavophiles sometimes call him one as an insult.) The editor particularly objected to the wedding celebrations scheduled for Valentine’s Day—a day “commemorating a Catholic saint”—and to the coincidence of the scheduled opening day, February 6, with the name day of St. Xenia of Petersburg.

“Why is St. Patrick’s Day so widely celebrated in Moscow,” he demanded, “when nobody in Scotland knows a thing about Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg?” The next day, I received a follow-up e-mail: “St. Patrick was by birth Irish, not Scottish. I beg your pardon.”
^*

Believed to have been born in 1730, Xenia was widowed at twenty-six, went mad from grief, gave all her belongings to the poor, dressed in her husband’s clothes, forgot her own name, called herself Andrei Fyodorovich after her husband, and became known as a “holy fool” and a clairvoyant. From a public relations perspective, Anna Ioannovna couldn’t have come up against a worse saint: of two young widows, one renounces worldly things and becomes the patron saint of marriage, while the other entertains all Europe with her extravagant matrimonial farces.

The next morning, Luba and I spent some time in the palace, interviewing visitors. A middle-aged woman called Tamara Malinovskaya, wearing the largest fur coat I have ever seen, told us it was her fourth visit. “I can’t tear myself away,” she said, gazing around with wide, startled-looking eyes.

“Does it make you think of Lazhechnikov?”

“Hmm . . . of course one has read Lazhechnikov, and found it very interesting,” Malinovskaya said thoughtfully. “But I can’t honestly say I think about it very often.”

We also met a
blokadnik
(a survivor of the 1941 Leningrad Blockade) called Valery Dunayev, unseasonably dressed in a light beige jacket, with a huge camera around his neck.

“I’m an amateur photographer,” he said, leaning toward us, releasing a wave of vodka fumes. It was his second visit to the palace. He had already developed the pictures from his first visit, which he invited us to look at in his apartment.

“Um, you’re very kind,” I said. “Does being here make you think of Lazhechnikov?”

Dunayev tipped his head backward, then reached out to steady himself against an end table made of ice. “It makes me think of many things, many things . . .”

In the next days, we rushed around Petersburg, pursuing two sets of contacts: historians and social scientists, acquaintances of Grisha Freidin, and people over seventy-five years old, acquaintances of Luba, who is very popular with the older generations.

One thing members of both these groups had in common was that they had nothing to say about the House of Ice. Not one of them had been inside: the academics because they weren’t interested, and the old people because they were afraid of falling down. “I saw it for thirty seconds,” a professor of political theory told us. “I passed it in a taxi.” He knew of the ice palace primarily from
Word and Deed
, a 1970s pulp novel about the reign of Anna Ioannovna. (
Word and Deed
characterizes the petroleum-spewing elephant fountain as “the world’s first oil pipeline,” and Anna’s cabinet minister as a cruel man but a visionary, “the
first
researcher” of Caucasian petroleum.)

“Why should I read Lazhechnikov?” the political scientist
asked. “He’s a second-rate novelist. Do you read secondrate political theorists? Have you read James Harrington? No? He was the main republican of the English Revolution!”

A sociology professor, who had passed by the House of Ice while jogging, informed us that absolutely nobody went inside except tourists and children. We mentioned that we had been inside and had seen many adult Petersburgers. He was unimpressed. “They were already
there
,” he observed. “Your sampling group was too specific.”

Even Evgeny Anisimov, the world’s foremost scholar of Anna Ioannovna, hadn’t been to the palace: the idea “somehow wasn’t interesting,” because the ice hadn’t been dyed to produce the original trompe l’oeil effect: “It was immediately apparent that it was a house of ice, and not a deception.”

At the Hermitage, an art historian told us it wasn’t worth visiting the palace because it was too small. Six meters had been big in 1740, but now there was a different proportional standard. “My colleague in Moscow called me and said, ‘How could you
not
go?’ And I just said: ‘What am I—a dwarf?’ ”

Luba had gotten us a second interview in the Hermitage, with a septuagenarian restorer of eighteenth-century clocks: his workshop overlooked the ice palace, so he had witnessed its entire construction. Every surface in the workshop was crammed with small and medium-size clocks in varying stages of disassembly. Grandfather clocks lined the walls, doors ajar, like recently evacuated coffins. On peg boards hung clock keys of every size and shape, and round white clock faces with surprised expressions.

“Of course I watched them build it, of course,” said the clockmaker, gazing out the window with startlingly clear blue eyes. “It was bitter cold, but those young guys worked all day long. For the first two weeks there were lines over a kilometer—like an ant colony! Now the ice is cloudy, but
before the first snow, it was perfectly transparent. When the sun set, it sparkled, sparkled . . .” But he was reluctant to venture any claims regarding the cultural significance of the reconstruction. “Read Lazhechnikov,” he kept saying. “He explains everything. They did everything just the way he describes.” When pressed, he admitted there was one difference between the original and the replica: the roof. “They reinforced it with wood and plastic, so it wouldn’t fall on our heads. But what of it—roofs fall everywhere, we’re used to it.” He proceeded to show us a partially dismantled musical clock that had once belonged to Catherine the Great, and even took us on a private tour of the eighteenth-century wing of the Hermitage. Never had I dreamed that the world contained so many snuffboxes, dinner services, military orders, portable liturgical sets, and officers’ uniforms. Luba, an eighteenth-centuryist, viewed these artifacts with interest, but I soon felt the full weight of historical boredom on my soul. When I left the museum, she was gazing with a kind of rapt criticalness at the upholstery of an armchair embroidered in 1790 by pupils from the Smolny School for Aristocratic Young Ladies.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on a walking tour of Petersburg bookstores, gauging Lazhechnikov’s current status in the cultural imagination by the iron law of the marketplace. Of the first eight bookstores I visited, zero carried
The House of Ice
. I found myself in a “bookstore-café” in a poorly lit basement, where a disaffected-looking young woman sold me a cup of unusually vile coffee. The only other patrons were a group of ravers with bloodshot eyes, sitting at a linoleum table. They didn’t seem to be enjoying their coffee any more than I was. A dark corridor, its floor lined with cardboard, led to three bookshops: used, new, and jurisprudence-related. The used-book shop was the only establishment I
visited all day whose proprietor remembered ever having carried Lazhechnikov. “Long, long ago,” he said elegiacally, gazing in the distance, as if about to recite a saga.

That evening, Luba and I took a bus to an outlying residential neighborhood to visit the eighty-four-year-old literary translator Mira Abramovna Shereshevskaya.

Shereshevskaya, who had prepared an entire dinner, with egg salad, black bread, and
rassolnik
(a soup made with pickles and brine), was outraged to hear about all the professors who hadn’t been inside the ice palace. “Such a beautiful thing, in their own backyards!” she said. “I would have loved to see it. But you know, with my hip, I don’t leave the house anymore.”

The conversation turned to Henry James—Shereshevskaya had been among his first Russian translators. When I mentioned my fondness for
The Portrait of a Lady
, she pulled a green leather volume from a shelf: her own translation. Politely I opened the book. Suddenly there it was, that first golden afternoon when Isabel arrives at the manor house and captures everyone’s heart, including the tiny dog’s.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “It’s exactly right.”

“Do you really think so?” She smiled, almost childishly pleased. “I would give you a copy, but it’s my only one. This, however, is my present for you.” She handed me a Soviet children’s edition of Lazhechnikov’s
House of Ice
, with elephants on the cover. To my relief it was unabridged and all my favorite parts were still there, including the insinuated dwarf sex, and the Gypsy woman who throws molten metal on her own face so she won’t be recognized as the mother of the beautiful princess.

Shereshevskaya died of cancer in the fall of 2007, a year
and a half after our meeting. Suddenly it seemed that they were all drifting away, the women of the prewar generation. My grandmother in Ankara died earlier that same year. Nathalie Babel, having correctly surmised that Pirozhkova would outlive her, had passed in 2005. Women of another century, they disappeared, like the Queen of Spades, taking with them all the things that only they could tell us.

To this day, nobody really knows precisely why Anna’s ministers decided to hold the jesters’ wedding in an ice palace. Lazhechnikov imagined a scene in which Biron’s henchmen torture a Ukrainian informer by pouring water on his head during a severe frost: the resulting “human ice statue,” catching Anna Ioannovna’s eye, gives her the idea for the wedding décor. Another possibility is that Buzheninova’s naïve complaint to Anna—“Without a husband, my life is like a hard frost”—inspired the ironic staging of marriage itself literally within a hard frost.

Luba suggested that we might uncover the missing link in the Kunstkamera: Peter’s chamber of curiosities, most famous as the home of Frederik Ruysch’s anatomical collection, which the tsar purchased from the Dutch scientist in 1717. In addition to ethnographic materials and war trophies, the Kunstkamera had once also contained “living exhibits,” including a dwarf called Foma, whose hands and feet resembled the claws of a crab, as well as a hermaphroditic blacksmith called Yakov. Anna Ioannovna had spent hours in the Kunstkamera, contemplating the life-size wax replica of her uncle, as well as the stuffed corpses of Peter’s favorite dog and the horse he had ridden at Poltava. Upstairs, in the astronomical observatory, Krafft used to amuse her by setting things on fire with a burning lens of German manufacture.
If each monstrous spectacle staged by Anna was actually the grotesque doubling of an only slightly less monstrous spectacle staged by Peter the Great, perhaps Kunstkamera was the primal scene of the House of Ice.

In the Kunstkamera, Luba and I were immediately struck by the skeleton of Peter’s favorite giant and bodyguard, Nikolai Bourgeois. Peter, himself a tall man, loved giants. Having noticed Bourgeois at a fair in Calais, he paid a handsome sum to the giant’s mother—who was, oddly, a dwarf—to release her son into his service. The employment contract stipulated that, upon the death of Bourgeois, his body would belong to the tsar. When the day came, the giant was skinned in the name of science. The skin subsequently burned in a fire and, though the skeleton survived, the skull mysteriously vanished. (The one there now is a replacement.) But Luba and I saw his cantaloupe-size heart, the original, sitting in a glass case.

The technique of preserving hearts was introduced to the Russian Academy by Ruysch, whose anatomic subjects are the gem of Peter’s collection. One jar contains a child’s severed forearm: rosy, doll-like, and draped in a white tasseled sleeve, the fringe suspended in the still fluid like some kind of anemone. Another jar displays a child’s severed head, its pale, detailed face set in a tortoiselike expression of wisdom and repose, even as the back of the skull has been removed to reveal the delicately traced mass of the brain. Two semifused Siamese fetuses float over the brilliant red drapery of their own placenta; on the lid of their jar is a still life composed of dried corals and sea horses.