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.