For Peter, the teratological cabinet represented a redemption of Russia’s backwardness, darkness, and malformation. Preserved in jars using the latest European techniques, deformities were transformed into data, enlisted in the great humanist project of the arts and sciences. The glimmer of a similar intention seemed to hover over the House of Ice, with its transparency, its juxtaposition of ethnicities and monstrosities, of Russian imperialism and Germanic science—but the meaning was dimmer, murkier, obscured by the material excesses of the allegory itself.
As the ice palace was “benightmared” by the Kunstkamera, so was Anna’s ethnographic bridal parade a dreamlike distortion of the famous parade staged by Peter after the battle of Poltava. In Peter’s parade, Russian soldiers bearing trophies from the Swedish campaign marched alongside a whole typology of captured Swedes: officers, halberdiers, bodyguards, artillerymen, members of the royal household (“the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the Master of Horses and his assistants, the royal pharmacy attended by doctors and surgeons, the king’s cabinet, the king’s ‘secret secretary,’ and the king’s entire kitchen, complete with chefs”). Also present was a weird, jesterlike character called Wimeni, a gift to Peter from the king of Poland. Wimeni claimed—spuriously, it turned out—to be a French nobleman, whose fits of temporary insanity were attributable to a long internment in the Bastille. Dubbed by Peter “King of Samoyeds,” Wimeni participated in the parade from a supine position on a sled drawn by reindeer, attended by twenty fur-clad Samoyed tribesmen on twenty more sleds.
Despite its bizarre excesses, Peter’s parade had a clear symbolic meaning: to manifest the total conquest of Sweden. The “King of Samoyeds” was easily decipherable as a parodic replacement for King Charles XIII, who had fled to Ottoman Moldavia. A similar logic of replacement accounted for the roles played by Charles’s secretary, pharmacist, and chefs. Peter was using the “problem of the person” to his advantage: the person might have escaped, but everything that constituted him was on display.
When Anna restaged the parade, everything became confused. Her parade was supposed to somehow commemorate the Treaty of Belgrade, but the Ottomans were replaced by Kvasnik and Buzheninova who had, in their capacity as an apostate and a Kalmyk, only a very tenuous connection to the Turkic menace. Anna also had a “King of Samoyeds”: after Wimeni’s death, that title had passed to the Portuguese jester D’Acosta, who appeared in the bridal procession wearing an authentic Samoyed costume from the Academy of Sciences.
By 2006, who could say what was being resurrected, and why? Watching news footage of the opening festivities, my attention was drawn to a middle-aged woman in a silver gown and tiara, wandering inexplicably among the bridal couples and fashion models (there was a runway show for fur coats). Leading a gorgeous Samoyed dog on a leash, she looked as utterly lost as the meaning of the King of Samoyeds.
The most elaborate literary treatment of Anna Ioannovna’s ice palace occurs in “The Task,” by the eighteenth-century British poet William Cowper. Cowper, best remembered as the author of the hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” was literally driven mad in 1763 by his anxiety over the entrance examination for a Clerkship of Journals in the House of Lords. After three suicide attempts, he wound up in an asylum where he began writing poetry. His most famous poem from this period is called “Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion.” “The Task” was commissioned in 1783 by Cowper’s friend the Lady Austen, who, presumably trying to steer him to more neutral topics, asked him to write a blank-verse poem about “this sofa.” Cowper complied “and, having much leisure . . . brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended . . . a Volume!”
As Thomas Mann’s short story about Davos became The Magic Mountain, so did Cowper’s trifle about the sofa expand from its comic Virgilian incipit—“I sing the sofa”—into a six-canto book-length poem, taking the evolution of the sofa and the concept of leisure as a point of departure for musings on country walks, London, newspapers, gardening, thieves, laborers, domestic life, animals, and retirement. (Could the same book be writen in reverse: an anatomy of types of activity and leisure, which gradually turns into a meditation upon the sofa? Did Proust already write it?) The dominant themes in this poem are the superiority of retirement to action, and of nature to artifice. The ice palace, introduced by means of an unfavorable comparison to a frozen waterfall on the Ouse, turns out to represent the transitory nature of human achievements—an ephemeral dollhouse for miniature skeletons, a vanitas mundi in the style of Ruysch.
The strange thing about Cowper’s description of the ice palace, a structure whose fundamental existence he deplores, is the beauty of the language:
Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ . . . no forest fell
When thou wouldst build; no quarry sent its stores
To enrich thy walls: but thou didst hew the floods,
And make thy marble of the glassy wave.
In such a palace Aristæus found
Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale
Of his lost bees to her maternal ear:
In such a palace Poetry might place
The armory of Winter; where his troops,
The gloomy clouds, find weapons, arrowy sleet,
Skin-piercing volley, blossom-bruising hail,
And snow, that often blinds the traveler’s course,
And wraps him in an unexpected tomb.
Silently as a dream the fabric rose . . .
What is such a beautiful description of an ice palace doing in a poem that denounces ice palaces in favor of frozen waterfalls? Why does Cowper turn the poem against itself, canceling out some of its loveliest lines?
I first became attentive to this kind of literary move in graduate school, when I began to recognize it in many of my favorite novels. I learned that it has a long history in the conversion narrative, going all the way back to St. Augustine. In the first half of his Confessions, Augustine recounts the adventures of his youth: competing in rhetoric contests, going to the theater, pursuing his desire “to love and be loved.” In the second half, he not only denounces these adventures as hollow and vain—he also denounces narrative itself, shifting in the last four books to the non-narrative mode of biblical exegesis, interspersed with philosophical musings on the nature of memory and time.
What is the relationship between the two halves of the Confessions? You could call it a contradiction, but I prefer to think of it as a balance—a kind of credit and debit. Augustine racks up a debit by writing the almost protonovelistic story of a frivolous young man in Carthage—then balances it in the last four books, which are the exact opposite of the protonovelistic story of a frivolous young man in Carthage.
Cowper, likewise, racks up a debit with his lyric-aesthetic description of the ice palace—but earns the corresponding credit by claiming that frozen waterfalls are more beautiful, and that really poets should only write sermons.* (The fifth and final book of “The Task” actually is a sermon, on the nature of the Christian life.)