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THANK YOU Millicent Bennett, Dylan Brock, Nicole Bufanio, Janet Gibbs, Joan Gould, Julia Harrison, Courtney Hodell, Jynne Martin, Kate Medina, Sara Nelson, Kate Norris, Beth Pearson, Lindsey Schwoeri, and Amanda Urban—all of you, each of you, for your support, which extends beyond any single book.
When I first arrived in prerevolutionary Russia, my guide to that world was Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. It was an odd book for an eleven-year-old to fasten on; yet I reread it several times as a teenager. Massie, whose son suffered from hemophilia, gave the tsarevich’s illness center stage where other historians might not, and it was this particular narrative thread of the Romanov tragedy that caught the attention of a girl (and, later, a woman) who sought out stories of violent martyrdom, stigmata, vampires—anything that presented bleeding as a vehicle of transformation. Once I was introduced to Russia, there was much to hold that girl’s (that woman’s) attention, and I lingered, reading novels and history books.
Upon discovering, in middle age, that Grigory Rasputin had a daughter whose career as a lion tamer ended in 1935 in Peru, Indiana, where she was mauled by a black bear and nearly bled to death, my excitement didn’t fade but began, slowly, to eclipse other interests.
The Devil and his entourage, who appear in the chapter “Coronation,” will be familiar to readers of The Master and Margarita, a novel that no amount of rereading has diminished for me. As it is Mikhail Bulgakov’s characterization of devilish high jinks to which I turn as one of the few reliable remedies for a great number of existential complaints, I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the author of that inimitable work.