Terrible tsarinas

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An Autocrat at Work and Play in front of a group of stunned courtiers, and signaled to the orchestra to go on with the dance. At the end of the piece, somebody whispered in her ear that Mrs. Lopukhin had fainted with shame. Shrugging, the tsarina muttered, “She only got what she deserved, the imbecile!” And immediately after taking this little revenge, she returned to her usual serene mood, as if it had been some other person who had been so upset just a moment before.

Similarly, during a trip through the countryside Aksakov, one of her last buffoons, thought it would be funny to show her a porcupine in his hat - he had just captured it, alive; Elizabeth shrieked with horror, fled to her tent, and gave orders for the insolent entertainer to be tortured to death for the crime of “having frightened Her Majesty.”1 These disproportionate reprisals were counterbalanced by sudden exercises of religious devotion; she could be easily enraged or spontaneously repentant. She would take it upon herself to make pilgrimages, on foot, to various holy places, testing the limits of her strength. She would stand for hours on end during church services, and she observed fasts scrupulously, to the point of sometimes fainting after leaving the table without having eaten anything. The following day she would suffer from indigestion while trying to make up for lost time. Her conduct was excessive and unpredictable. She enjoyed surprising others and being surprised, herself (only, not with porcupines). She was chaotic, odd, and only half-civilized. She scorned fixed schedules, was as quick to punish as to forget, fraternized with those of humble station and sneered at the great. She had a habit of dropping in at the kitchen to enjoy the smells of the simmering dishes. She would laugh or shout unexpectedly, and gave those who knew her well the impression of being an old-fashioned housewife whose taste for French frills had not stifled her healthy Slavic rusticity.

In Peter the Great’s day, the courtiers had had to suffer