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.”