Terrible Tsarinas

gave him the title of count of the Holy Empire; and he managed to

have himself designated a knight of St. Alexander and St. Alexis.

There was no honor or princely prerogative to which he did not

lay claim. Anyone in Russia who wanted to get ahead, in any en-

deavor whatsoever, had to go through him.

Courtiers have always regarded it as an honor and a privilege

to be admitted to the ruler’s private rooms. Now, stepping into

the Empress’s bedroom, visitors would find Her Majesty still in

her nightgown, with the inevitable Bühren lying at her side. Pro-

tocol required that the new arrival, even if he was a high-ranking

official, kiss the hand that the sovereign held out to him above the

bedcovers. To secure the good graces of her lover, as well, some

took the opportunity to kiss his hand with same respectful air.

And there were even some flatterers who extended the standards

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The Extravagant Anna

of etiquette to the point of kissing Her Majesty’s bare foot. And it

has been alleged that, deep in the recesses of the imperial apart-

ments, one Alexis Miliutin, a simple coal shoveler ( istopnik) who,

tending the stove in Anna Ivanovna’s room every morning, felt

compelled to devoutly brush the tsarina’s and her companion’s

feet with his lips. In reward for this daily homage, the istopnik was

given a nobleman’s title. However, to preserve a trace of his mod-

est origins, he was constrained use fireplace tools as the blazon on

his coat of arms.3

On Sundays, Anna Ivanovna’s six favorite clowns had orders

to line up outside the great dining room at the end of the dinner

that was attended by all the members of the court. When the Em-

press and her retinue walked out, on their way back to church,

the buffoons would squat side by side, imitating hens laying eggs

and making comical noises. To make things even funnier, they

had their faces smeared with coal and were ordered to rough-

house, and to scratch and fight until they drew blood. At the

sight of these capers, the inspirer of the game and her faithful fol-

lowers howled with laughter. And Her Majesty’s buffoons were

too well paid to complain.

The descendants of the great families, including Alexis Pet-

rovich Apraxin, Nikita Fyodorovich Volkonsky and even Mikhail

Alexeyevich Golitsyn joined in. The tone was set by the profes-

sional 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 liter-

ary event in a letter: “I had the pleasure of reading my verses be-

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Terrible Tsarinas

fore Her Imperial Majesty and, after the reading, I had the distin-

guished favor of receiving a gracious slap from Her Imperial Maj-

esty’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), Gor-

bushka (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 ex-

ample of her grandfather Peter the Great, she claimed that study-

ing the malformations of human beings helped her to understand

the structure and the operation of normal bodies and minds. Sur-

rounding 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 em-

press 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 speaking, 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 ex-

penses 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

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The Extravagant Anna

unusual at the very least. According to the tsarina’s instructions,

the Cabinet Minister, Artyom Volynsky, had a vast house hastily