From the first Thaw to the end 245

telephone, first terrorist bomb delivered by post to a civilian target, and the earliest imports of American gadgets – Remington typewriters and exercise trikes. But the Russian reader is probably most struck by the mass of familiar literaryreminiscences with moralvalencesreversed.Tsaristepaulettes, theTable of Ranks, imperial wars, and the Third Section (secret police) were all symbolic markers hostile to the great nineteenth-century writers from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Here they appear unambiguously as forces for good. From the perspective of a patriotic civil servant like Fandorin, these old myths take on new life. The Winter Queen, for example, is framed by Karamzin’s “Poor Liza.” Our new Erast meets his lovely seventeen-year-old Elizaveta while investigating the novel’s first mysterious suicide. When the two are being married in the final chapter (preparations for which reproduce Levin’s wedding-day bumblings and delays from Anna Karenina), the bride whispers to her bridegroom: “Poor Liza has decided not to drown herself and to get married instead” (p. 235). By the end of the day she has been blown up by a terrorist bomb. Inside these two bookended poles of the resolutely death-dealing “Poor Liza” plot, Erast confronts a multitude of other nineteenth-century literary “quotations.” He stumbles upon a portrait of a wondrous beauty (“A. B.”) lifted directly from the Nastasya Filippovna of Dostoevsky’s Idiot (p. 18), and later turns up at a soire´e run by the same enchantress, with the same cruel games and cash bids for her favors. One adorer, Count Ippolit Zurov, is a survivor from the Romantic era of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol: he presides over a gambling scandal involving a Jack (rather than a Queen) of Spades, then passes through a Pechorin moment en route to a Nozdryov phase (the compulsive swapper and gambler from Gogol’s Dead Souls). Zurov resurfaces in the London slums as pure Rogozhin, Nastasya Filippovna’s jealous suitor, and true to his Dostoevskian prototype eventually carries off his A. B. (or perhaps shoots her). The multipurpose Romantic hero Zurov saves the life of Fandorin, who has been tricked by a buffoonish double agent named Porfiry, subjected to graveyard apparitions out of Gogol’s Ukrainian horror tales, and almost drowned and blown up on the banks of the Thames. But this new, upright and unsentimentalist Erast is not beholden to any of the classic Russian literary heroes who surround him, threaten him, or pluck him from certain death. They are part of his adventure plot, but he is not obligated by theirs. He has one goal: to serve the Russian Empire with honor by following his own counsel and by sticking with a case until it is solved. His superiors – even those who turn out to be double agents, and whom he must then annihilate – immediately sense his integrity. “Speak up!” his chief insists during one of their early talks. “I recognize no difference in rank where work is concerned!” (p. 79). We might say that theplot of The Winter Queen turns on a utopian vision – or more accurately, a conspiracy – that is the


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