The Enigmatic Monarch

“Here in the Russian Court,” writes Varvara, the narrator of The Winter Palace, “life is a game and every player is cheating.” She speaks with experience. Varvara arrives at the palace as an orphan of Polish and Catholic descent, a friendless foreigner in a Russian Orthodox world. Relying entirely on her wits, she manages to secure a position as a “maid of the bed chamber” to the Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne. She does this by promising to become the spy of the Russian empress Elizabeth, tasked to reveal the alliances, betrayals and love affairs of all who live in the Winter Palace. Varvara is thus the perfect guide for our tour of the maze-like corridors of court life in 18th-century Russia.

The Winter Palace is the first of a planned two historical novels by Eva Stachniak on the life of the Russian empress Catherine the Great. This initial volume tells the story of Catherine’s early life in Russia, from the moment she arrives in St. Petersburg in 1744 as Princess Sophia of Anhalt- Zerbst, a thin, pale girl from a tiny German principality. She is summoned to audition for the role of wife to Grand Duke Peter, a young German boy adopted as heir to the throne by the childless Elizabeth. The story follows Sophia through Varvara’s eyes, as the princess converts to the Orthodox faith and is renamed Catherine, marries Peter and eventually overthrows him to become empress in her own right in 1762.

The true story of Catherine’s early life provides plenty of raw material for a spellbinding novel. Plucked from a life of provincial quiet, the 14-year- old Sophia was thrust into a world of unimagined opulence and luxury. When she first appeared at court in one of her three modest dresses, Sophia was greeted by the Empress Elizabeth in one of her 15,000 resplendent outfits: a dress of silver thread and gold braid, encrusted with diamonds. It was a fitting introduction to the glitter of court life: the lavish banquets laden with delicacies, the gifts of jewellery and costly fabrics bestowed on friends and lovers, the masquerade balls where women dressed as men to reveal their shapely legs, and the card games that could cost tens of thousands of rubles.

But extravagance masked a dangerous game of politics at court. The Russian noble families who surrounded the Empress Elizabeth measured their lineage in centuries, and for centuries they had carefully plotted and negotiated for power. No gift, party or card game was innocent to these courtiers: a jewelled necklace was a plea for a political favour, an invitation to a banquet was a request to join a faction at court. The Winter Palace captures this: soon after her arrival at court, Catherine is beset by tradesmen plying costly objects to lavish on friends and enemies: perfume, snuff boxes, fabrics, jewels. “Her new friends were expecting tokens of her affection,” Varvara explains.

Words and gestures are also political currency. Letters are intercepted, peepholes drilled in the palace walls. As court spy, Varvara carefully observes furtive glances, flushed cheeks and scraps of paper hidden in double-bottomed drawers. Even tears are the stuff of politics. Well timed, they can express humility in the presence of a powerful patron or they can disarm a potential rival. Varvara sees the Empress Elizabeth drop a single tear at the sight of Princess Sophia’s portrait, sent by her eager family. It is a sign that Sophia had gained her favour and will be invited to court.

Stachniak’s novel beautifully reconstructs life at the 18th-century Russian court. The Winter Palace contains lush descriptions of the ordinary and the extraordinary, allowing us to experience things foreign to our modern sensibilities: the drafty palace rooms and their smell of melted candle wax; the potions, bloodletting and sweat stains of a sickbed; the layers of female dress—petticoats, hoop skirts, stomacher (an embroidered triangular front revealed by the fabric of a woman’s dress). Psychologically, we inhabit another place and time: where superstitions and omens compete with passionate religiosity for human souls; where idle soldiers yearn for the thrill of battle; where rats and dirt live among gilded furniture and costly tapestries. Compared to modern times, death is ever present. Smallpox and cholera kill without warning. A common cold can be fatal. The novel touchingly describes how the Empress Elizabeth grieves the death of Catherine’s baby daughter Anna, whom she had adopted as her own granddaughter. As the childless Elizabeth lies on her own deathbed (at the age of 53), she surrounds herself with Anna’s clothes and toys, telling Varvara “God’s will is sometimes so hard to bear.” Varvara understands— she had just become a widow at the age of 30.

Unfortunately, The Winter Palace allows Catherine to remain an enigma. The greatness of Catherine has been a puzzle for historians for centuries. As empress, she was a consummate politician and powerful ruler, but also a champion of the reformism of the French Enlightenment. She tried (and failed) to reform the Russian legal system. She successfully transformed the Russian administration and introduced the principle of individual rights in Russia (if only for certain classes). She encouraged the development of Russian literature and culture, corresponded with French philosophers, collected famous art works, and wrote plays and essays. Having come to power in the corrupt, Byzantine Russian court, she professed to dream of rational government, the development of art and culture, and the education of all. Were her enlightened gestures merely for show? Did it matter more that she spoke against Russian serfdom or that she gave serfs to her favourites? That she encouraged those around her to speak their minds, or that she imprisoned and exiled those who went too far?

In trying to understand the complexities of Catherine and her reign, historians have chiefly stumbled over the obstacles Catherine herself placed in their way. Even the magisterial Catherine the Great, by Robert Massie, relies too heavily on Catherine’s own memoirs, whose presentation of events often reads like a continuation of court politics on paper. Enemies are drawn as caricatures, protestations of innocence and ignorance abound, and tears flow abundantly to disarm potentially suspicious future readers. (Tears flow so abundantly that some historians, such as John Alexander, diagnosed depressive tendencies.) A novel of Catherine’s early life could have gone beyond existing sources to provide us an interpretation of what made Catherine tick.

The Winter Palace does not even fully use the potential found in the memoirs themselves, ignoring some of the most interesting moments: how Catherine engineered scenes at court to disarm enemy factions and gain powerful allies, how she won over attendants sent to spy on her by plying them with wine and losing to them at cards. In the novel, Catherine falls helplessly in love, but was she really helpless? Her lovers all had their political uses: some fathered the children and heirs to the throne she could not have with the impotent Peter, others, such as Grigory Orlov, proved formidable allies: all five Orlov brothers were members of the Imperial Guards who brought Catherine to power in 1762.

The Winter Palace also reveals little about Catherine’s intellect. A voracious reader, Catherine delved into French Enlightenment philosophy, including Voltaire and Montesquieu (she called Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws her “prayer book”). Did this young woman, immersed in power struggles at court, really dream of bringing political and cultural reform to Russia? How did she reconcile the cunning that allowed her to survive the Winter Palace with the ideals she imbibed through reading and reflection? Perhaps in Stachniak’s next novel, we will get more of the mind of Catherine and precisely what made her “great.”