Terrible Tsarinas: Five Russian Women in Power by Henri Troyat Page A

making comical noises. To make things even funnier, they had their faces smeared with coal and were ordered to roughhouse, and to scratch and fight until they drew blood. At the sight of these capers, the inspirer of the game and her faithful followers howled with laughter. And Her Majesty’s buffoons were too well paid to complain.
    The descendants of the great families, including Alexis Petrovich Apraxin, Nikita Fyodorovich Volkonsky and even Mikhail Alexeyevich Golitsyn joined in. The tone was set by the professional jester, Balakirev, but whenever he was slow to come up with new tricks, the Empress would have him beaten to revive his inspiration. Then there was the violonist Peter Mira Pedrillo, who would scratch at his squeaky fiddle while prancing around like a monkey; and D’Acosta, the Jewish Portuguese polyglot who would egg on his accomplices by whipping them. The poor poet Trediakovsky, having composed an erotic and burlesque poem, was invited to read it before Her Majesty. He describes this literary event in a letter: “I had the pleasure of reading my verses before Her Imperial Majesty and, after the reading, I had the distinguished favor of receiving a gracious slap from Her Imperial Majesty’s own hand.”4 However, the mainstays of the comic troop around Balakirev were the freaks and dwarves of both genders; they were known by their nicknames: Beznozhka (the woman with no legs), Gorbushka (the hunchback). The tsarina’s fascination with physical hideousness and mental aberration was, she maintained, her way of showing interest in the mysteries of nature. Following the example of her grandfather Peter the Great, she claimed that studying the malformations of human beings helped her to understand the structure and the operation of normal bodies and minds. Surrounding herself with monsters was just another way of serving science. Moreover, according to Anna Ivanovna, the spectacle of other people’s misfortunes would reinforce everyone’s desire to look after his health.
    Among the gallery of human monstrosities of which the empress was so proud, one of her favorites was a stunted old Kalmyk woman who was so ugly that even the priests were afraid of her. No one could make funnier faces. One day the Kalmyk exclaimed, as a joke, that she would like to marry. In a flash of inspiration, the tsarina thought of a wonderful trick. While all the members of the small troop of court buffoons were experts at clowning around, not all of them were, strictly s peaking, deformed - for instance, the old nobleman, Mikhail Alexeyevich Golitsyn, who held a sinecure as “imperial jester.” He had been a widower for a few years. Suddenly he was informed that Her Majesty had found a new wife for him and that, in her extreme kindness, she was ready to take care of all the arrangements and to cover all the expenses of the wedding. The Empress was famous as an “indefatigable matchmaker,” so that no further explanation was needed. However, the preparations for this union looked to be unusual at the very least. According to the tsarina’s instructions, the Cabinet Minister, Artyom Volynsky, had a vast house hastily built on the Neva embankment between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty, out of blocks of ice that were welded together by dribbling water in between them. The house was 60 feet long, over 20 feet wide, and 30 feet high, and was topped by a gallery with colonnade and statues. A staircase with a balustrade led to a vestibule, behind which the apartment reserved for the couple was located. It held a room furnished with a great white bed, whose curtains, pillows and mattress were carved of ice. To the side was a bathroom, also cut from ice, as evidence of Her Majesty’s concern for the intimate necessities on behalf of her “protégés.” Further on was a dining room, of similarly polar aspect but richly furnished in formal china and tableware, ready to welcome the guests for a superb and shivery and feast. In