Terrible tsarinas

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Terrible Tsarinas

Footnotes 1. Memoires du prince Dolgoruky, cited by K. Waliszewski, L’Heritage de Pierre le Grand.

2. Details and comments reported in L’Avenement d’Anna Ire, by Korsakov; citations quoted in Waliszewski, op. cit.

V

Married at the age of 17 to Duke Frederick William (who had developed a reputation as a quarrelsome and drunken prince), 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 Buhren, a petty nobleman from Westphalia. A man of little education but unlimited ambition, Buhren 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 guidance as readily as his caresses; and he relieved her of all her worries and provided all the pleasure she could wish for. Although his real name was Buhren, 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«75»

Terrible Tsarinas men, but that did not stop him from pretending to a very honorable heritage; he claimed to be related to the noble French family, de Biron.

Anna Ivanovna took him at his word. Moreover, she was s o 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 mistress, Buhren adored luxury but was none too scrupulous when it came to moral or bodily purity. A woman of horse sense and robust health, Anna was not offended by anything and even appreciated Buhren’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 abundant brown hair and lit up by eyes of a sharp blue, whose boldness disarmed people before she even spoke. She was mad for brilliantly-colored dresses trimmed with gilt thread and embroidery; 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 kennels with all the satisfaction of a miser inventorying his treasure - but she was full of contradictions. While she adored animals, she also took a sadistic pleasure in killing them and even torturing them. Soon after accepting the crown and being installed 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