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.
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.
“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.
To his contemporaries, Ruysch was best known for his still lifes and dioramas, which used skeletons and anatomical tissue to illustrate the baroque topoi of vanitas mundi and memento mori. They didn’t last as well as the embalmed subjects—none have survived to the present day—but catalogues describe skeletons weeping into handkerchiefs made of brain tissue, with worms made of intestines encircling their legs. Geological backdrops were made of gall- and kidney stones; trees and bushes, of wax-injected blood vessels. In one diorama, a child’s skeleton, using a bow made of a dried artery to play on a violin made from an osteomyelitic sequestrum, was surmounted by the Latin legend: “Ah fate, ah bitter fate!”
Peter, however, was less interested in the dioramas than in Ruysch’s advances in teratology: the study of monsters. Inspired by Ruysch’s work, Peter issued several ukases prohibiting the killing of deformed children and animals; “all monsters,” dead or alive, were to be sent to his collection, with the idea of simultaneously promoting the study of biological form and combating the popular belief that birth defects were caused by the devil. Treasures began to pour in: a two-mouthed sheep from Vyborg, an eight-legged lamb from Tobolsk, “strange dog-faced mice,” infants with missing and extra limbs, Siamese twins, a baby with “eyes under its nose and hands under its neck.”
For Peter, the teratological cabinet represented a redemption of Russia’s backwardness, darkness, and malformation. Preserved in jars using the latest European techniques, deformities were transformed into data, enlisted in the great humanist project of the arts and sciences. The glimmer of a similar intention seemed to hover over the House of Ice, with its transparency, its juxtaposition of ethnicities and monstrosities, of Russian imperialism and Germanic science—but the meaning was dimmer, murkier, obscured by the material excesses of the allegory itself.
As the ice palace was “benightmared” by the Kunstkamera, so was Anna’s ethnographic bridal parade a dreamlike distortion of the famous parade staged by Peter after the battle of Poltava. In Peter’s parade, Russian soldiers bearing trophies from the Swedish campaign marched alongside a whole typology of captured Swedes: officers, halberdiers, bodyguards, artillerymen, members of the royal household (“the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the Master of Horses and his assistants, the royal pharmacy attended by doctors and surgeons, the king’s cabinet, the king’s ‘secret secretary,’ and the king’s entire kitchen, complete with chefs”). Also present was a weird, jesterlike character called Wimeni, a gift to Peter from the king of Poland. Wimeni claimed—spuriously, it turned out—to be a French nobleman, whose fits of temporary insanity were attributable to a long internment in the Bastille. Dubbed by Peter “King of Samoyeds,” Wimeni participated in the parade from a supine position on a sled drawn by reindeer, attended by twenty fur-clad Samoyed tribesmen on twenty more sleds.
Despite its bizarre excesses, Peter’s parade had a clear symbolic meaning: to manifest the total conquest of Sweden. The “King of Samoyeds” was easily decipherable as a parodic replacement for King Charles XIII, who had fled to Ottoman Moldavia. A similar logic of replacement accounted for the roles played by Charles’s secretary, pharmacist, and chefs. Peter was using the “problem of the person” to his advantage: the person might have escaped, but everything that constituted him was on display.
When Anna restaged the parade, everything became confused. Her parade was supposed to somehow commemorate the Treaty of Belgrade, but the Ottomans were replaced by Kvasnik and Buzheninova who had, in their capacity as an apostate and a Kalmyk, only a very tenuous connection to the Turkic menace. Anna also had a “King of Samoyeds”: after Wimeni’s death, that title had passed to the Portuguese jester D’Acosta, who appeared in the bridal procession wearing an authentic Samoyed costume from the Academy of Sciences.
By 2006, who could say what was being resurrected, and why? Watching news footage of the opening festivities, my attention was drawn to a middle-aged woman in a silver gown and tiara, wandering inexplicably among the bridal couples and fashion models (there was a runway show for fur coats). Leading a gorgeous Samoyed dog on a leash, she looked as utterly lost as the meaning of the King of Samoyeds.
The most elaborate literary treatment of Anna Ioannovna’s ice palace occurs in “The Task,” by the eighteenth-century British poet William Cowper. Cowper, best remembered as the author of the hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” was literally driven mad in 1763 by his anxiety over the entrance examination for a Clerkship of Journals in the House of Lords. After three suicide attempts, he wound up in an asylum where he began writing poetry. His most famous poem from this period is called “Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion.” “The Task” was commissioned in 1783 by Cowper’s friend the Lady Austen, who, presumably trying to steer him to more neutral topics, asked him to write a blank-verse poem about “this sofa.” Cowper complied “and, having much leisure . . . brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended . . . a Volume!”
As Thomas Mann’s short story about Davos became The Magic Mountain, so did Cowper’s trifle about the sofa expand from its comic Virgilian incipit—“I sing the sofa”—into a six-canto book-length poem, taking the evolution of the sofa and the concept of leisure as a point of departure for musings on country walks, London, newspapers, gardening, thieves, laborers, domestic life, animals, and retirement. (Could the same book be writen in reverse: an anatomy of types of activity and leisure, which gradually turns into a meditation upon the sofa? Did Proust already write it?) The dominant themes in this poem are the superiority of retirement to action, and of nature to artifice. The ice palace, introduced by means of an unfavorable comparison to a frozen waterfall on the Ouse, turns out to represent the transitory nature of human achievements—an ephemeral dollhouse for miniature skeletons, a vanitas mundi in the style of Ruysch.
The strange thing about Cowper’s description of the ice palace, a structure whose fundamental existence he deplores, is the beauty of the language:
Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ . . . no forest fell
When thou wouldst build; no quarry sent its stores
To enrich thy walls: but thou didst hew the floods,
And make thy marble of the glassy wave.
In such a palace Aristæus found
Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale
Of his lost bees to her maternal ear:
In such a palace Poetry might place
The armory of Winter; where his troops,
The gloomy clouds, find weapons, arrowy sleet,
Skin-piercing volley, blossom-bruising hail,
And snow, that often blinds the traveler’s course,
And wraps him in an unexpected tomb.
Silently as a dream the fabric rose . . .
What is such a beautiful description of an ice palace doing in a poem that denounces ice palaces in favor of frozen waterfalls? Why does Cowper turn the poem against itself, canceling out some of its loveliest lines?
I first became attentive to this kind of literary move in graduate school, when I began to recognize it in many of my favorite novels. I learned that it has a long history in the conversion narrative, going all the way back to St. Augustine. In the first half of his Confessions, Augustine recounts the adventures of his youth: competing in rhetoric contests, going to the theater, pursuing his desire “to love and be loved.” In the second half, he not only denounces these adventures as hollow and vain—he also denounces narrative itself, shifting in the last four books to the non-narrative mode of biblical exegesis, interspersed with philosophical musings on the nature of memory and time.
What is the relationship between the two halves of the Confessions? You could call it a contradiction, but I prefer to think of it as a balance—a kind of credit and debit. Augustine racks up a debit by writing the almost protonovelistic story of a frivolous young man in Carthage—then balances it in the last four books, which are the exact opposite of the protonovelistic story of a frivolous young man in Carthage.
Cowper, likewise, racks up a debit with his lyric-aesthetic description of the ice palace—but earns the corresponding credit by claiming that frozen waterfalls are more beautiful, and that really poets should only write sermons.* (The fifth and final book of “The Task” actually is a sermon, on the nature of the Christian life.)
A similar mechanism may be observed in certain novels. Tolstoy writes a marvelous, gripping, seven-book-long novel about an adulterous romance—then throws Anna under a train and writes book 8, in which Vronsky leaves for Serbia to fight the Turks (the novel is absorbed into history) and Levin returns to his estate to find God (the novel is absorbed into spiritual meditation). Analogously, Thomas Mann spends a thousand pages in the decadent hothouse of the Magic Mountain—then balances his account when Castorp, woken from his spiritual stupor by World War I, leaves the sanatorium to serve on the front. Facing a likely death in the trenches, Castorp falls to his knees, “face and hands raised toward a heaven darkened by sulfurous fumes, but no longer the grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight.”
“The grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight”: isn’t that just what the jesters saw above them when they lay on the bed of ice? Anna’s palace is the monstrous crystallization of the anxiety that made authors from Cowper to Tolstoy to Mann cancel out their most captivating pages: the anxiety of literature, that most solitary and time-consuming of arts, as irremediably vain, useless, and immoral. The ice palace is like the first half of a conversion narrative, with no second half. Anna herself resembles one of Thomas Mann’s “problem children”—the scion of a vitiated dynasty, corrupted by puppet shows, sensual love, and dimly grasped notions of zoology—and she never grows up. Spellbound in her Magic Mountain, she never recovers. She dies up there, attended by jesters and medics.
The negative fantasy of literature embodied by the House of Ice reaches its most terrible pitch in the fate of the court poet and classicist Vasily Trediakovsky: one of the most famous personages from Anna Ioannovna’s reign.
The day before the wedding, Anna’s cabinet minister commissioned Trediakovsky to write a matrimonial ode to be read at the ethnographic procession. Before Trediakovsky had time to complete the work, the minister summoned the poet to his chambers and, for reasons lost to posterity, beat him unconscious with a stick. Thrown in jail for the night, Trediakovsky finished his ode anyway, and even read it in person at the wedding the next day, wearing an Italian carnival mask to hide his injuries. Despite this tremendous display of professionalism, in which all writers may take pride, he was returned to his cell afterward and subjected to another near-fatal beating. Reaching home the next day, more dead than alive, his first act was to draw up a will, bequeathing his library to the Academy of Sciences.
Had Trediakovsky died of his injuries, he would have become a tragic figure. Instead, he lived another twenty-five years, a subject of constant mockery. His very propensity for receiving physical abuse became a popular comic premise; as Pushkin himself put it, “It often happened that Trediakovsky got beaten up.” Lazhechnikov’s Trediakovsky brags about an audience during which Anna Ioannovna “deigned to rise from her seat, came up to me, and from her generous hand granted me the most benevolent box on the ear.”
Trediakovsky was said to have written exactly one hundred books, each boring enough to induce seizures. “On the song ‘Farewell, My Dear,’ I composed a critique in twelve volumes in folio,” remarks a character based on Trediakovsky in a 1750 comedy. Trediakovsky plus the ice palace: could there be any more vivid illustration of the pathos of graphomania? “It was considered extremely funny that Trediakovsky had to translate thirteen volumes of Rollin’s Histoire ancienne and three volumes of his Histoire romaine twice, because the first translation was consumed in the fire that occurred in his house in 1747,” observes the scholar Irina Reyfman, who wrote an entire book about the mania for making fun of Trediakovsky. Trediakovsky was also famous for his hatred of his almost equally boring rival, the scholar and versifier Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov was incorrectly credited with some of Trediakovsky’s literary accomplishments, including the development of the Russian hexameter. Reyfman’s thesis is that, in the “creation-myth” of Russian letters, Lomonosov played the role of the founder-hero, while Trediakovsky played that hero’s “foolish twin” or “dumb demonic double.”
In retrospect, however, the beating of Trediakovsky acquired a tragic and prophetic cast. To quote the twentieth-century poet Khodasevich: “On that ‘masquerade’ night, when Volynsky beat Trediakovsky, began the history of Russian literature . . . the history of the destruction of Russian writers.” The Russian state has always oppressed its writers: Tsar Nikolai I was Pushkin’s personal censor. In 1940 Stalin, notwithstanding his busy schedule, signed Babel’s death sentence with his own hand.
The brutalization of writers was no longer funny. Meanwhile, as Foucault has observed, the institution of authorship is largely dependent on the author’s liability to state punishment. It’s true that Russia subjected its writers to an unusual degree of state control; consequently, it’s also true that nowhere in the world has literature been taken more seriously. Mayakovsky wasn’t really joking in 1925 when he compared poetry to industrial production:
I want the Gosplan to sweat in debate,
assigning me goals a year ahead,
and for Stalin to deliver his Politburo
reports about the production of verse
as he would about pig iron and the smelting of steel.
“. . . in the Union of Republics the understanding of verse
now tops the prewar norm . . .”
Mayakovsky could never have retired to the country to write poetry about raising cucumbers. He could never have identified virtue with the sofa. He needed literature to be a form of action or work, just like fighting in a war or building a railroad. And once he started to worry that his own poems were merely aesthetic, the mere products of leisure, it wasn’t the kind of problem that could be solved simply by writing a poem about the uselessness of poetry. “I’d rather compose romances for you,” he wrote, early in 1930, “But I have subdued myself, setting my heel / on the throat of my own song.” This poem, “At the Top of My Voice,” was unfinished when Mayakovsky shot himself that April.
The reconstruction of the House of Ice was slated for destruction on a Friday, but since the cold weather was holding up, the organizers announced they would leave it standing over the weekend. On Sunday morning, I decided to stop by one last time, to take photographs. But when I turned the corner on Nevsky Prospekt, all that remained was a pile of broken ice. A small crowd had gathered, and I heard echoes of a raven like sound. “Zrya! Zrya!” they were saying: “What a waste!”
A small bearded man in a long overcoat and a fur hat stood next to me, shaking his head.
“When did they tear it down?” I asked him.
“Who knows? Late at night, when nobody saw. What a waste. What a shame.”
“It was a historical reconstruction, right?” I asked, hoping at least to ascertain the contours of the ice palace in his cultural imagination.
“Of course,” the bearded man said. “It was all historical. It was all made from plans, from original documents. There was an empress, you see. I’m not an expert—I forget her name. Alexandra Fyodorovna, something like that. She built the palace.”
“Why?”
“Well, for a joke! For fun! Tsars had to enjoy themselves, too. And what a beauty it was.” He sighed. “There were thousands of people here, such a line, you couldn’t get close. They had cannons that shot real cannonballs, and it was all made out of ice. I saw it on television. It’s just shameful what they’ve done. A shame.”
“They deceived us,” said a woman nearby. She had Asian features, wore a snow-white ski suit, and spoke very precisely. “They promised that they would leave the palace standing until tonight. I bring my daughter to Palace Square for her art class every Sunday morning—we came an hour early, just to see it one last time. It’s hurtful, even.” Her daughter, about seven years old and missing several teeth, had joined some children who were clambering on the ice boulders, resembling, in their padded snowsuits, tiny astronauts. I remembered Krafft’s Description. He had written that, for its beauty and rareness, the ice palace was “well worthy of being transported to Saturn and of taking its place there, as among the stars.”
The next day, I met Gromov and Mikheyeva for the last time in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Europe. They strode through the metal detector with the dynamism of a figure-skating duo. I asked why they hadn’t left the palace standing through the weekend. They exchanged glances. “It’s complicated,” Gromov said.
“We tried to reach you,” Mikheyeva said. “We didn’t know until the last minute.”
When I told her about the disappointed citizens I had seen, Mikheyeva averted her eyes. “We didn’t go there the entire day. We knew everyone would be angry at us, so we went to Vyborg.”
“Why didn’t you just leave it up?” I asked.
“Well, you know, an ice palace is so beautiful at first. Then the sun shines, and it melts, slowly, slowly—it’s depressing. We wanted to end on a positive note.”
Leaving the hotel, I stopped by the Palace Square to take another look at the heap of ice, but it had already vanished.
_____________
* Dostoevsky, who called St. Petersburg “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world,” chose it as the setting for Crime and Punishment. In Andrei Bely’s modernist novel Petersburg, a terrorist has to kill his own father using a time bomb concealed in an anthropomorphic sardine can known as Pepp Peppovich Pepp. In Gogol’s most famous Petersburg tale, “The Overcoat,” a gang of thugs steals the overcoat belonging to a miserable clerk; the clerk falls into a fever, dies, and himself becomes a ghostly thug, roaming the city and stealing overcoats.
* In fact, St. Patrick was born in Kilpatrick, Scotland, in the year 387. His father belonged to a high-ranking Roman family, and his mother was a relative of St. Martin of Tours. Patrick was kidnapped in his sixteenth year by Irish marauders, who sold him into slavery to a chieftain and druidical high priest in present-day County Antrim.
* An analogous balance of art and sermon also characterizes Ruysch’s dioramas. The decadent miniature landscapes, made of human lung tissue and kidney stones, are redeemed by their subjugation to self-canceling sermons about the vanity of human endeavor. Pointing at their own impermanence, the dioramas simultaneously condemn and justify themselves.