Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison

called it. Kubla Khan’s village. A miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! Sometimes, when I was too tired to think up a story, I recited Coleridge. As a token of his grandiosity, Peter the Great had given his wife Catherine a village for her own amusement. Like the panorama inside a sugar Easter egg, her utopia was circumscribed, and its limits allowed her to create perfection, or theclosest thing to it. St. Petersburg would have the ills of a city that existed in the real world, but Tsarskoe Selo, the arena in which her every wish was realized, would not. Her first desire was that a palace be built in her name, and so it was—a comparatively modest structure, compared to what it became. Catherine and Peter’s extravagance, united in their offspring, continued unalloyed through generations—perhaps it even intensified—the original stone building rebuilt and remodeled until it was quadruple the size of the one in which we were held. With rooms of amber and of malachite, of lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl, with gilded corridors and solid-gold sconces, it demanded a setting far grander than a Versailles, with its tedious vistas of topiary. A stately pleasure dome , decreed the Romanovs, more and more loudly as the centuries unfolded until, presto, so it was: a heaven made by human hands. Under a sky forbidden to cloud appeared concert halls and conservatories, stables—gorgeous stables, the likes of which I’d never seen or even imagined, with three tack rooms and hot and cold running water and polished brass hinges on every stable door—a pheasantry and hunting lodge, train and police stations, a slaughterhouse. Post office, cathedral, a parish school for girls, a block of shops, and a town hall. Two hospitals, a mountain named Parnassus, an obelisk and a Chinese village with a Chinese theater and an English garden. And a French garden. A lyceum, a pond and another pond and between them canals and a marble bridge. All of it as extravagant and fantastic as a poet’s pipe dream, and Catherine, like Kubla Khan, decreed that all of it be walled, and Tsar Peter decreed it be protected by his own guard of hussars, housed in barracks within the royal compound.
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
•  •  •
    A S ABOVE, SO BELOW . Once the heavens hear of a prophecy, they do their utmost to fulfill it. Planets align, constellations spin; if need be, the sun can hold its golden self on the horizon for an extra eleven minutes.
    The first to die were the tamed deer that roamed the tamed forest. It was over before we knew what had happened, a single volley of shots on the night Kornilov and his soldiers arrived at Tsarskoe Selo. Alyosha and I and our sisters ran to the window. The night was cloudless, the moon providing more than enough light for us to see how the snow-covered lawn was painted with the poplars’ long blue shadows, and we watched as the band of soldiers of the new guard tramped back through them, singing and cursing. There had been a blizzard the previous week, and as soon as the skies cleared, Olga and Tatiana did as they’d always done during the winter. They set out hay for the deer, just as the younger girls, Maria and Anastasia, who worried the songbirds might starve before spring, hung pinecones spread with suet from the limbs of the park trees. I can’t imagine what sport there can be in taking aim at a tame animal, but the soldiers had shot the deer nonetheless, all of them, leaving their bodies to bleed on the white snow.
    The Romanov children were as unnaturally stoic about this as they would continue to be about all the cruelties to which they’d be subjected. Varya gave a little bleat, then covered her mouth and looked to Tatiana, but none of the Romanovs flinched. All five stared expressionless at the slaughter. Faces immobile, they bore witness to the murder of their pets, animals so used to the kindness of humans that