At the great Tsar’s funeral, Catherine claimed the throne by her display of sheer mourning and despair. How may one woman have so many tears – or maybe we just do not meet any decent women anymore? Tsar Peter had loved her. But had she loved him truly, so much that her tears at his wake could be trusted? He was too terrible. Only a few moons earlier Wilhelm Mons had been beheaded and there was no doubt as to the nature of his true crime. All that was forgotten at the Tsar’s funeral: her ladies-in-waiting, their faces thickly veiled, tried to hold her back, but she threw herself to the ground, clawing at the two coffins and howling like a wounded beast.
It took her weeks to let Feofan Prokopovich close the dead Tsar’s coffin at all. He lay in state surrounded by the signs of his greatness. Then, just five weeks after his death, the little Tsarevna Natalya died suddenly, at the age of only seven years. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes. The young lady-in-waiting Alice Kramer fell victim to Natalya’s death; her mind clouded and she took her leave. The court gossiped for days about the princely pension the Tsarina paid her. What had the true nature of her services to the Tsar and Tsarina been?
On the tenth day of March 1725, both young Princess Natalya and her father, Peter I of Russia, were buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in his glorious city of St Petersburg. Tens of thousands of soldiers of all regiments gathered at dawn on the ice of the Neva; thirty-two hundred noble horses were tethered around them, chewing on their silver bridles. Twelve officers carried Peter’s coffin and eight general majors held up the canopy of green velvet with its golden tassels, shielding the coffin from the snow. Peter’s closest friends and the high dignitaries of the Empire held a piece of the coffin cover each, the snowflakes mingling with their tears.
Once the funeral was over, everyday life resumed. The Tsarina broke the Court mourning period to marry her daughter Anna Petrovna to the Duke of Holstein in a most splendid wedding. Tsarevna Elizabeth is still unmarried, and she does everything possible to spoil her reputation. She is a beauty – parbleu! I have never seen such cleavage, not even in Versailles – her only faults lie in her behaviour and her nature. Unfortunately, I am too old and not a guard, so she doesn’t look at me. I was right to dissuade my king from marrying this princess. Her morals would have surprised even Versailles.
Menshikov says the Tsarina’s lungs are swollen. Yet barely two weeks ago, at the first signs of the ottepel, I rode with her and could hardly keep up as she chased through the woods. At a river, she made us dismount. We fell behind as she walked down to its shores and slipped out of her shoes. We watched her picking up pebbles and talking to herself. She felt the cold of the water, wading into it with bare feet, before she turned to us, frowned and asked: ‘Do you hear the horses on the road? What could these men possibly want?’ I turned, yet there was nothing to be seen.
She is still a fine woman, with very graceful movements, a bright, clear mind and always in the best of moods. No wonder the people love her: the Tsarina has never forgotten where she came from, but I believe she is bored without the Tsar. In the mornings she is known to dip five warm pretzels into a heady, hot Burgundy, to boost her spirits. On the first day of April she had the fire bells rung and watched the people rush into the streets in their nightshirts, though there was neither fire nor flood. To make up for her prank, the Tsarina served vodka to all and no one was allowed to go to bed before noon, just as if Tsar Peter were still alive. God, how I feared and hated his feasts; sometimes the eagle cup is part of my nightmares. Many times I have prayed that His Majesty King Louis should call me back to Paris. Why did I ever learn Russian?
Lights wander restlessly behind the Winter Palace’s windows. Menshikov, who knows so well how to sow and harvest, may call on us at any time.
Horsemen gallop out of the palace’s gates. The Tsarina has not waged wars, she has not plundered and has razed neither cities nor countries. These last were two good years in Russia; we lived happily and created new happiness. Blumentrost, the quack, teaches at the Academy of Sciences now, and the St Petersburg Gymnasium is open to gifted children from all over Russia. Last year Vitus Bering carried on with his travels. Only the Tsarina herself never learnt how to read or to write. ‘An old mule does not turn into a horse, Campredon,’ she said to me.
The carriage of the count Skawronski enters the Winter Palace: are they really and truly the Tsarina’s lost family? Everybody wants to belong, and even a Tsarina should not die alone. After twelve pregnancies, only one daughter and a supposed brother hold her hand in her very last hour. Her pain comes in waves, so it is said, and sometimes so violently as to strangle her.
After my supper
The month of May brings the first brighter nights to St Petersburg, their darkness turning milky, a sight that never fails to enchant me. The city is awake, the palace lit up. If I am to report to Paris later tonight that the Tsarina has passed away, we will again have a Tsar Peter, Petrushka, the young son of poor, haunted Alexey. When I looked for sealing wax in the drawer, I found an old leaflet I had forgotten about: ‘One could forever and ever praise the merits of the dead Tsar Peter, the greatness, the uniqueness, the wisdom of his rule. But his work brought pain to all the people who came close to him. He disturbed peace, prosperity, the strength of his empire. He violated the dignity, rights, and well-being of his subjects. He meddled insultingly in all matters: from religion to the family to the holy church. Can one love such a despot? No, never. Such a ruler is nothing but hateful.’
There is a knock on the door. It must be the Court’s messenger: a Tsarina does not die as a woman, but as a ruler; even if she was always much more a woman than a ruler. I ready myself to leave. Have I ever before spotted the silky sliver of blue haze setting the Neva apart from its shore at dusk? Tonight, the fireflies dance for her alone. Duty calls me, but before I go, I read through the leaflet again.
Can one love such a despot? No. But a man who also happens to be Tsar –?
The Tsarina had made her choice.
Acknowledgements
I first discovered Marta / Catherine I aged thirteen when reading Leo Sievers’ fabulous book Germans and Russians, which charted the millennial history of these two countries and their peoples. That was it for me: writing about Marta’s incredible destiny was an all-encompassing endeavour. I was never able to thank Lindsey Hughes, Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, for her outstanding oeuvre Russia in the Age of Peter the Great – it was my bible while writing Tsarina. Nothing would have happened without Jonny Geller and the amazing Alice Lutyens at Curtis Brown, agents par excellence and best guiding spirits, who took on the gamble that Tsarina was. The day you first answered my query letter, a heron settled in my garden – the most auspicious of signs! Thank you, too, to the elegant and capable Deborah Schneider of Gelfman Schneider / ICM Partners, Literary Scout Daniela Schlingmann – a fine, feisty woman of the first hour – and the whole fabulous Foreign Rights Team at Curtis Brown for spreading the word further. Hats off to my first international publishers and editors such as Faiza Khan at Bloomsbury, Charlie Spicer at St. Martin’s Press, Francesca Cristoffanini from Planeta DeAgostini as well as Dr Nora Haller and Tilo Eckhardt at Heyne PRH. You are the magical core ‘Team Tsarina’, and always happy to welcome others to your ranks. Special thanks to Charlotte Collins, who first translated the Prologue, as well as chapters 1–8, from the original German manuscript. It gave me a brilliant base to work with and the courage to write on, as words are a moveable feast and like clay.
A brief word for the sake of historical accuracy: the beginnings of Marta’s life are shrouded in mystery. She emerges from the mist of time when she took a position as a maid with Ernst Glück. While Field Marshall Sheremetev captured her at the siege of Marienburg, his persona in the manuscript is later blended with Peter’s crony Fedor Matveev Apraxin. It was Apraxin who took the Baltic girl Alice Kramer in. Likewise, Alice Kramer was called Anna, as were Rasia Menshikova and Alexandra Tolstoya. Other than that,
I took very few liberties with happenings and timelines: the Petrine era is incredibly well documented. Also, Marta’s tale could only have been invented by life itself.
A Note on the Author
Ellen Alpsten was born and raised in the Kenyan highlands, before attending Instituts d’études politiques de Paris. Whilst studying for her Msc in PPE she won the Grande École short story competition with her novella Meeting Mr. Gandhi and was encouraged to continue writing. Upon graduating, she worked as a producer and presenter for Bloomberg TV in London. She contributes to international publications such as Vogue, Standpoint and Condé Nast Traveller. Tsarina is her first novel. She lives in London with her husband and three children.
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First published in Great Britain 2020
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