Terrible tsarinas

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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 apartments, 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 modest 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 Empress 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 roughhouse, and to scratch and fight until they drew blood. At the sight of these capers, the inspirer of the game and her faithful followers howled with laughter. And Her Majesty’s buffoons were too well paid to complain.

The descendants of the great families, including Alexis Petrovich Apraxin, Nikita Fyodorovich Volkonsky and even Mikhail Alexeyevich Golitsyn joined in. The tone was set by the professional 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 literary event in a letter: “I had the pleasure of reading my verses be«81»

Terrible Tsarinas fore Her Imperial Majesty and, after the reading, I had the distinguished favor of receiving a gracious slap from Her Imperial Majesty’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), Gorbushka (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 example of her grandfather Peter the Great, she claimed that studying the malformations of human beings helped her to understand the structure and the operation of normal bodies and minds. Surrounding 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 empress 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 s peaking, 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 expenses 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