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.