Random House Readers Circle: Where did you get the idea for this novel? Was it the character of Rasputin’s daughter that drew you to the story, or the period in history? Or something else?
Kathryn Harrison: My mother gave me Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra when I was eleven, perhaps as an experiment to see what I’d make of a book meant for adult readers. Because it was the first unambiguously grown-up book I’d ever read, it instantly acquired an exalted status that no other book would ever claim—not for me. So some of my lasting fascination with the end of the Romanov family rests in their having lived between the covers of the book that provided me a passport to a vast realm I’d assumed was out of my reach. It was as if the Romanovs had invited me into a palatial library of their own—endless shelves of books on all topics. For a girl often admonished to put down her book and go outside to play, that particular book was a door to paradise.
Without any eye toward using what I read for a book of my own, I reread Nicholas and Alexandra as an adult, as well as other books about the Romanovs and the Russian Revolution, and I read a handful of mostly dreadful biographies of Rasputin. In the epilogue to one of these, I discovered that Rasputin had summoned his two daughters from Siberia to live with him in St. Petersburg and attend school, as they could not at home. After the murder of her father and the abdication of the tsar, the elder of Rasputin’s daughters, Maria, escaped the Bolsheviks, became a cabaret dancer in Prague, landed in Paris with a tubercular husband who soon died, and eventually followed her love of entertaining to Ringling Bros. Circus, for which she worked as a lion tamer.
That Rasputin was a family man—of all things—that he had a wife and children, changed my perception of him. The added facet made him a more rather than less interesting character, a person it was possible to re-create in a different, unexpected mold. It normalized him, and made him approachable by a means other than his unsavory sexual habits and infamous supernatural abilities. As for the idea of being able to narrate the tragedy of the Romanovs from the point of view of a girl who became a lion tamer, that was irresistible.
RHRC: You write both contemporary and historical fiction. Your last historical novel, The Seal Wife, was published in 2002, ten years before Enchantments. How did it feel to return to historical fiction after all that time? You write in such a breadth of forms—fiction, historical fiction, memoir, biography, personal essays, and so on. Is there one you prefer above the others? Why?
KH: I don’t prefer any one form over another. Because they all present different challenges, I can take a break from the demands of one form to answer another’s. Fiction requires the invention of character and plot. Historical fiction requires a solid substrate of researched fact to credibly support the fiction. Nonfiction doesn’t allow invention; instead, it requires the ability to find and maintain a particular vantage from which to reveal a subject, and that vantage requires making critical judgments about what, and what not, to include in the narrative. It can be harder to pick among endless facts for the exactly right details to assemble into a coherent picture than to just invent that perfect detail. Neither is easy, so I like going from one to the other. After writing a novel, which takes a couple of years anyway, I’m tired of making things up. With nonfiction I don’t have to—the raw material exists, waiting to be shaped but not invented. Then, after navigating the limits of nonfiction—with plot and character and setting all fixed, predetermined—the freedom of fiction is intoxicating.
Most of my essays are written in response to a pressing need to understand something that’s transpired in my personal life, and as it’s an immediate need, an essay necessarily interrupts whatever longer work I’m involved in. It forces me to take a break from writing a book. It’s hard to separate from whatever I’ve been spending most of my waking hours on, and it’s probably good for whatever book it is to remove myself long enough to regain a little perspective, especially on the plot. For me, tracking the plot really is like trying to see a path through the woods. A little distance and elevation are required.
RHRC: There’s a necessary interplay between fact and fiction in any historical novel. How does Enchantments walk this line? What did you feel comfortable fictionalizing, and what did you feel had to remain fact?
KH: I try to heel as closely to history as I can and make only changes necessary to the fictional plot. I didn’t alter any of the Revolution’s broad historical strokes, I didn’t change a date or a name, or any of the political history of the last years of the Russian Empire. I didn’t invent any of the main cast of characters. That’s something I always try to avoid. Although I have had to kill off a few peripheral figures over the years, usually because they impeded the progress of the narrative in some way. This time I took the not insubstantial liberty of excising the real Maria Rasputin’s two daughters, for which I feel a little guilty. I’m afraid they got in the way. I needed Maria to be more independent than motherhood would allow.
Inevitably, I hear from a reader wanting my sources for something I’ve made up that he or she believes is real. In the case of Poison, several readers asked why they couldn’t find the Inquisition’s underground prisons in Madrid. One was quite peeved to learn I’d made them up. Apparently she’d argued with a Spanish tour guide who questioned the veracity of the report of elusive catacombs. It’s gratifying, and a great compliment, to be asked how long I’ve lived in Alaska, the setting for The Seal Wife, when I’ve never even visited. I love coming up with fictional details and scenes convincing enough that readers confuse them with history. In Enchantments, it’s the tsar’s meticulous destruction of the grove of poplars, entirely made up, that some readers have assumed was historically accurate and asked how I’d learned of it. I was pleased, as that scene in particular was conceived as a means of revealing what I understood as the tsar’s real personality. I try to be as faithful to the nature of a real historical figure as I can be, based on what information is available from history books and biographies. With respect to the Romanovs I was especially careful in how I represented the tsar and tsarina, for whom I will always have sympathy. Their need to protect a critically ill child whom they loved consumed their attention; the two will always remain victims of historical changes they barely perceived, and then victims of murder. Also, theirs was a stubborn love match in a world of political pairings called marriages, and I have a hard time not rooting for people who choose love over their careers.
For the narrator of Enchantments, for its point of view, I used a real historical woman, Maria Rasputin, as my eyes into the palace where the Romanovs were incarcerated, and onto the tsarevich Alexei, whose hemophilia gave him a central role in the undoing of his family. I needed her, too, as a witness to the normal, human aspects of the man who was her father, a notorious and greatly romanticized figure. Her own biography of her father—one of the dreadful ones, I’m afraid—defended him as a simple, holy, and misunderstood figure. It was hagiography—a daughter’s response to her father’s vilification and murder—but it did provide me what I needed to assemble both her character and an unfamiliar portrait of her father.
Maria’s sister, Varvara, is a blank slate as far as history books reveal, and I accepted that as an invitation to create a personality for her that would function as a foil for Maria’s. So little has been written about Alexei—nothing beyond his long-suffering patience when ill—that I had to invent his personality, and I couldn’t resist giving him a little solace before he was murdered. And what’s solace for an adolescent boy if not sexual initiation? In this story of the Romanovs Alexei’s sex life gets more attention than Rasputin’s. As a means of acknowledging that my Alexei and Maria are imagined, I replaced their given names with familiar diminutives, Masha and Alyosha, which I’ve never seen used to identify the real historical figures. A small thing; I’m sure it makes a difference to no one but me.
RHRC: Did you do a lot of research to get the details right? In reading about the period, did you discover a fact or detail that surprised you?
KH: I did do a lot of research. I have to reach a point of saturation—with respect to the characters, the place, the circumstances—before I’m comfortable enough to begin writing. In that sense the preparation for historical fiction is the same as that for biography; there’s no way to begin without a sure footing in the material.
That Rasputin’s daughter went on to become a lion tamer billed as the Daughter of the Mad Monk; that she was said to hypnotize wild animals with her father’s eyes; that her circus career came to an end in Peru, Indiana, where she was mauled by a bear and nearly died as a result; that she went on to become a riveter, like Rosie, during World War Two: almost anything I discovered about Maria was surprising. As for small discoveries, the most toothsome was my learning that a couple of Yusupov princesses, heirs to the fantastic wealth of the man who organized the assassination of Rasputin, escaped the Revolution with their lives but not their money and ended up in Paris working in a beauty salon as manicurists. Poetic justice—there isn’t much to be found in real life.
RHRC: How did this novel change or evolve from the first draft to the final manuscript?
KH: I was disappointed in the first draft, enough to realize that the next one had to be dramatically different. The writing was fine but the vision was off. Originally, the novel was conceived as a strictly realistic piece of fiction. I wanted to reveal the Romanovs in a way that history couldn’t—to get inside their heads and read their thoughts as the world they knew collapsed around them. But to the real-life drama of the Romanovs’ end, Rasputin added a sensational aspect, too sensational. His exciting and possibly sinister powers overwhelmed reality. Because he exists outside the bounds of what we collectively agree is reality, he makes conventional life flat and pale. The solution was to add more unreality, more fantastic elements—but that was a discovery, not an intellectual conclusion.
Between drafts, I was paging through a book of photographs of the Romanov family and read one sentence that transformed the novel, changed it from one kind of storytelling to another. In describing the childhood of the tsarina, a relative had noted that upon the death of Alexandra’s mother, when the girl was six, the future tsarina was plunged into such despair that “it was as if she were held captive by a dark cloud.” I stopped at that sentence, and reread it, imagining the life of a little girl with a literal cloud over her head, one that traveled with her and blotted out the sun and made everything dreary and sad. Suddenly—it wasn’t a decision so much as an unexpected, helpless leap—my Alexandra had a real cloud that followed her, and whose color changed according to her mood. I closed the picture book and began the second draft—a lot of slashing with a red pen. I’m not an efficient writer. I throw away three times as much as I keep, and I’ve redrafted a novel more than a dozen times. But in this case I didn’t care about the wasted effort—I was too excited by the idea that I could have a haunted bridge and a talking crow and whatever else I cared to use. I was free. Those are the best, most exciting moments of writing fiction, when you discover that freedom.
RHRC: Rasputin is a murky historical figure, alternately portrayed as predatory, sexually depraved, and corrupt, or as a charismatic religious figure and healer. In Enchantments, your portrayal of Rasputin is closer to the latter. Why?
KH: I was never much interested in him as a womanizer. Sexual depravity is pretty ubiquitous; examples abound. Genuine faith healing is not. I’ve always been fascinated by religion, especially in its more irrational and primitive aspects. I come from a doctrinally complex background—from the ages of two to ten, I was sent to Christian Science Sunday School by my elderly Jewish grandparents, who raised me for my single Catholic mother, who died of cancer after ricocheting through transcendental meditation and Buddhism to be born again as a TV evangelist-watching Baptist recently initiated into Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship.
The knowledge that my absent father was a minister, coupled with my Christian Science indoctrination, which was early enough and thorough enough to be indelible, made the nature of God a topic that preoccupied me. Christian Science was taught—to me, anyway—in a disorientingly cerebral fashion. Forget making salt-and-flour topographical maps of the Holy Land, or sticking felt nativities to a felt board. By the time I was five I was memorizing the “seven synonyms” for God—Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love—and struggling to understand how Spirit was different from Soul and how divine principle might be realized in mortal life. It was overwhelming; I thought about it too much. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t held hostage to questions of what God might be, if there was a god at all. Growing up, I had a few experiences that made it impossible for me to dismiss those questions as an adult.
So, given my history and interests, I was always more focused on Rasputin’s power to stop the tsarevich’s hemorrhages than in his sexual conduct, which seemed of a piece with his origins. After all, his wife accepted, with no apparent rancor, his having intercourse with other women—perhaps she accepted him for who he was. I unearthed information, not a lot, on Rasputin’s development as a starets, and a few allusions to the mystical experiences that set him on his path. Mysticism, miracles of faith, apparitions of the Virgin, the visions of Margery Kempe—they all claim space on my bookshelves, smack up against Jung, which seems appropriate.
In Rasputin I had a character who invited my playing with the properties of exalted states of consciousness, a spiritual life that presented itself as the inverse of his unsavory personal life. Characters who are split between opposing tendencies are always the most compelling. Sexual depravity and faith healing are made more interesting for being combined in one man. One without the other lacks energy, tension.
Rasputin himself was too far out of reach for me to consider using his point of view for the novel, but his daughter, an intimate observer, could lend me her eyes. I could imagine myself into his apartment if not into his head. Through her I could watch him and decide what I thought of him.
RHRC: Storytelling plays a central role in Enchantments. Can you talk a bit about its significance in the novel, and how you came to the idea of replacing Rasputin’s healing powers with the power of stories?
KH: The premise of the novel—that after the murder of Rasputin, Alexandra is desperate enough to convince herself that his daughter has inherited his power to heal and charges Maria to care for her son as her father had—made it necessary to give Maria some kind of agency. At first I didn’t know what that agency would be. Maria knows she can’t heal the boy, but she can’t avoid spending time with him, either. Thrown together under dire circumstances, the two become friends, and Maria grows to love Alexei, enough to want to distract him from his suffering. So she tells him stories; she recasts the world as he knows it, by means of magic.
Maria’s narrative heritage is the folktale—stories of Baba Yaga, for example, in which a house can walk on the legs of a chicken, in which anything can happen. Once she begins to tell Alexei stories, Maria discovers a transcendent power of her own. She becomes Alexei’s magic carpet; she can transport both of them, the storyteller and her audience; she can take them away from the palace in which they’re held under guard, awaiting their annihilation, and can send them anywhere she wants. In that respect, she is who I want to be.
As a writer I have to believe in the power and comfort of stories, in their invitation to step into worlds different from the one we find ourselves trapped in. Because we’re all trapped, existentially, each of us hemmed in by circumstances that limit us or cause us pain. We all need distraction.
RHRC: You’re working on a biography of Joan of Arc. In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, you said of this subject: “We don’t need narratives that rationalize human experience so much as those that enlarge it with the breath of mystery.” What a beautiful idea. How do you feel it is reflected in Enchantments, and in your work in general?
KH: If I want to be Maria, it’s because I think my responsibility as a writer is to transform the world, to make it look different than it did before. To make the familiar seem strange and the strange familiar. Novels aren’t textbooks. They have no obligation to explain anything, or to represent the world in any particular way. I write what I want to see: a world made new. Reimagined, reinvented—alive as it wasn’t before. As for Joan of Arc, she is such an astonishing subject, her life so improbable if not miraculous, that she does a lot of the work for me. In writing about her, the familiar is already strange, the challenge is in making that strangeness familiar, accessible.