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5 From Old Russia
- Indiana University Press
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5 From Old Russia Let us step aside one moment and peruse Manya’s world, her origins, and the culture that produced this young woman, who was to join her life with Friedman’s. One day in the early 1880s the Romanov court announced an imperial ball in St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. Overseeing a formidable expanse along the embankment by the Neva River, the palace could accommodate three thousand guests. Of the many celebrants who would attend that evening, fate would intervene in the life of one debutante, the alluring daughter of a hussar. Vera Schabelski knew little of court life, having been raised at Goptorovka , her family’s country home in the Voronezh province, south of Moscow. The dark fertile soil of Voronezh, its seemingly endless groves and fields, worked by seemingly contented peasants under expansive blue skies flecked with the occasional bun-shaped or curling white cloud, were all captured by Vera’s skilled hands on miniature canvases in oils. In the years before she attended the imperial ball, Vera would gambol with the other children of nobles and landed gentry in country masquerades, impersonating Moors and Tatars, as well as Sheherazade and other characters from folk tales. Their families draped them in costumes, detailed reproductions of mythic apparel, and had their photographs taken in their exotic dress. On the night of the ball, Vera and her parents left their St. Petersburg residence by coach; escorts in tricorne hats helped Vera and her portly mother, Baroness Lydia Schabelski, into their seats. When they arrived at the palace, her father, the hussar Baron Katon Pavlovich, followed them into the ballroom. 78 From Old Russia · 79 Vera would have danced four quadrilles before the mazurka, in which men alternated between clasping the hands of the circling ladies and slapping their own raised heels. The tsar’s extended family and their guests were of varied origins, which were apparent in Teutonic foreheads, Swedish complexions, and high Tatar cheekbones, and although the language in which they gossiped and discussed events in distant Europe was French, they seasoned it with Russian expressions. Princess Golitzin reigned as the court’s grande maitresse, securer of audiences with the empress, Arguseyed for lapses in etiquette. There came a sleek officer, admired as a nimble dancer, gallantly clad in a dark-green and silver dolman, tight raspberry breeches, and the low boots of a Grodno Hussar. Set above a Romanov nose and walrus moustache were eyes like an alert hound’s. This was the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich , son of Tsar Alexander II.1 He bowed to Vera, and examined the sixteen-year-old, dark-haired beauty, her slender neck encircled by four rows of pearls above a décolleté gown, a golden asp coiled about her wrist as she clasped his shoulder. Supper was given in the Hermitage dining room, graced with an imposing Rubens canvas. French wines and champagne accompanied a Parisian pâté, which was followed by medallions of veal and many other favorites, ending with the pastry chef’s creations. As Vera fell in love with Paul, her mother became alarmed. Perhaps she was recalling her own long-ago romance with the son of Alexander Pushkin. He had given her an heirloom emerald ring with Pushkin’s silhouette surrounded by diamonds, and she had hoped to marry him, but it had not come to be. Such disappointment was almost a family tradition, as Lydia’s mother, the Baroness Sophie Stael-Holstein, was said to have been something of a coquette. She was reputedly in love with Pushkin herself, and may have also encouraged the affections of Mikhail Zeidler, a lieutenant under her husband’s command.2 But whatever her feelings, Vera, the daughter of a mere hussar, could never wed the tsarevich’s brother. The tsar was assassinated in the spring of 1881, and Paul’s eldest brother, Alexander, took the throne. The German blood in his lineage did not prevent Alexander from developing into an extreme pan-Slavist, and his alienation from the French culture that dominated court life led him to curtail festive balls and dinners. He preferred seclusion, only opening the Winter Palace for obligatory functions. His paranoia grew after his [18.209.209.28] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:02 GMT) 80 · Ignaz Friedman father’s assassination: meals prepared at his retreat by a French chef (for pan-Slavism hadn’t compromised his dining) were under police surveillance . This tsar was a homely brute of great height...