Terrible Tsarinas

Anna Ivanovna had retired with her husband to Annenhof, in

Courland (today’s Lithuania, more or less). A few months after

leaving Russia, she found herself widowed. She then moved to

Mitau, where she lived in dereliction and embarrassment. During

these years when the whole world seemed to have forgotten her

very existence, she had a constant companion in Ernst Johann

Bühren, a petty nobleman from Westphalia. A man of little edu-

cation but unlimited ambition, Bühren replaced her first lover,

Peter Bestuzhev. He proved to be very effective at the day’s work,

in the office, and at night, in Anna’s bed. She accepted his guid-

ance as readily as his caresses; and he relieved her of all her wor-

ries and provided all the pleasure she could wish for. Although

his real name was Bühren, and although his family and friends had

Russianized it to Biren, he preferred a “Frenchified” version —

Biron. He was a grandson of one of Jacques de Courland’s stable-

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Terrible Tsarinas

men, but that did not stop him from pretending to a very honor-

able heritage; he claimed to be related to the noble French family,

de Biron.

Anna Ivanovna took him at his word. Moreover, she was so

attached to him that she discovered hundreds of similarities in the

way they both approached life; this harmony of tastes went as far

as the details of their intimate behavior. Like his imperial mis-

tress, Bühren adored luxury but was none too scrupulous when it

came to moral or bodily purity. A woman of horse sense and ro-

bust health, Anna was not offended by anything and even appreci-

ated Bühren’s odor of sweat and cattle sheds, and the Teutonic

roughness of his language. At the table as in bed, she preferred

substantial satisfactions and strong scents. She liked to eat, she

liked to drink, she liked to laugh. A very large woman with a

well-rounded belly and an ample bust, her body, weighed down

with fat, was topped by a bloated, puffy face crowned by abun-

dant brown hair and lit up by eyes of a sharp blue, whose bold-

ness disarmed people before she even spoke. She was mad for

brilliantly-colored dresses trimmed with gilt thread and embroi-

dery; and she had little use for the aromatic toilette waters in use

at the court. Among her entourage, it was said that she insisted

on cleansing her skin with melted butter.

She took pride in having as many horses as there are days in

the year. Every morning, she would inspect her stables and ken-

nels with all the satisfaction of a miser inventorying his treas-

ure — but she was full of contradictions. While she adored ani-

mals, she also took a sadistic pleasure in killing them and even

torturing them. Soon after accepting the crown and being in-

stalled in St. Petersburg, she ordered that loaded rifles be kept in

every room of the Winter Palace. Sometimes she would be struck

by an irresistible impulse — cracking open a window, she would

snap up her weapon and shoot a bird out of the sky. As the salons

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The Extravagant Anna

shook with the explosion and filled with gun-smoke, she would

call her startled ladies in waiting and order them to do the same,

under penalty of being dismissed.

She also enjoyed Dutch humming-tops and she would have

her representative in Amsterdam buy bundles of the special string

out of which the whips were made for spinning the tops. She ex-

hibited the same passion for silks and trinkets, which she would

order from France. She was fond of performances of any kind.

Everything that flatters the spirit, everything that tickles the

senses, was charming to her.

On the other hand, she did not see any need to cultivate

learning by reading books or listening to the discourses of alleged

specialists. Greedy and lazy, she went along according to her in-

stincts and utilized the briefest leisure moments to take naps.

Having drowsed for an hour or so, she would call in Bühren, negli-

gently sign whatever papers he put before her and, having thus

fulfilled her imperial obligations, she would open the door and

hail the young ladies of honor who sat in the next room sewing

embroideries.

“Nu, dyevki, poïti! [OK, girls, give us a song!],” she would cry.

Her docile followers would strike up the choir, singing some

popular refrain, and she would listen to them with a happy smile,

nodding her head. This interlude would go on as long as the sing-

ers were able to more or less keep up a pretense of following the

tune. If one of them, overcome by fatigue, lowered her voice or hit

a wrong note, Anna Ivanovna would correct her with a resound-

ing roar. Often, she would call storytellers to her bedside, and

have them entertain her with the tales she had enjoyed in her

childhood, always the same ones; or she would call in a monk who

was good at explaining the truths of religion. Another obsession

which she flattered herself with having inherited from Peter the

Great was her passion for grotesque exhibitions and natural mon-

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Terrible Tsarinas