The White Night of St. Petersburg
By Prince Michael of Greece
Atlantic Monthly, 335 pages, $33.50
What an odd little book Prince Michael of Greece has given us in The White Night of St. Petersburg, a novel that ought to have been built like a great Russian epic, but unfortunately reads like a Harlequin Romance. The prince's story of a long-forgotten scandal in Russia's imperial Romanov family should be purely fascinating; instead, it's confusing -- disjointed, prudish and impossibly banal.
Taking just the title: Prince Michael's book was written and first published in French as La Nuit Blanche de Saint-Pétersbourg. In the original, the word blanche in nuit blanche carries a double meaning -- "white," in the literal sense, and "sleepless" in the colloquial. The distinction is entirely lost in translation. It's true that the sun never sets on St. Petersburg in the high summer months, and that the nights there are called "white" on that account. But if you're looking for a book to keep you awake until the wee hours of the morning, this isn't the one:
"Fanny saw that he was magnificently built," Prince Michael writes, with "wide shoulders, a willowy figure, a slim waist. A blending of strength and grace. She was attracted by his large, muscular hands, hands that she wanted to feel on her body. . . . [But]it was his mouth that drove Fanny wild with desire. Rather large, with red lips whose curve cast a spell over her, a smile now caressing, now ardent. She wanted to cry out to him: 'Kiss me, and to feel your lips on mine, I would gladly die at once.' " And further: "Without answering, her lover led her to the bathroom. . . . This time the eroticism was spiced with an exquisite apprehension, for the true master of the palace, the grand duke Constantine, could suddenly materialize at any instant. This thought, this fear, made Nicholas and Fanny all the more passionate. A tiger and a tigress wild with sensuality, intoxicated with amorous pleasure, they grappled with each other for long hours, then remained exhausted on the rug with the bold floral pattern."
A short synopsis might help here, since Prince Michael's novel is evidently based on a true story. The Fanny he refers to is Fanny Lear, the nom de guerre et de chambre of a Philadelphia adventuress named Harriet Blackford, whose recollections of her travels through Russia and other parts of Europe were published in Brussels in 1875 as Le Roman d'Une Américaine en Russie. Fanny was indiscreet enough to reveal her love affair with a Russian grand duke, Nicholas Konstantinovitch, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, whose name, Prince Michael assures us, was later stricken from the rolls of the Imperial family, "as if he had never existed."
Why? Because Nicholas, chafing at the bit at his rather distant position in line to the Russian throne, and temperamentally possessed by what were then called "liberal sympathies," allowed himself to be seduced more than physically by the "ravishingly beautiful" Fanny and her sinister, swarthy, Rasputin-like partner-in-arms, "a young Adonis" called Savine, who quickly joined the imperial bed, à trois, as it were, and wrecked the whole thing for everybody.
"All unknowing" -- at least in this version -- Grand Duke Nicholas was drawn into a plot to finance the coming revolution by stealing diamond jewellery and other imperial trinkets from the Russian empress and his own mother, the beautiful but chilly Grand Duchess Alexandra, with whom he already enjoyed what might be called a love-hate relationship. A bauble here, an icon there -- it adds up: There was never so much Fabergé lying around the Romanov palaces that a few missing pieces wouldn't be noticed.
In any case, it proved to be Nicholas's undoing. Guilty or not, he assumed full responsibility for the petty thefts in order to rescue the "strikingly beautiful," "incredibly beautiful," "devastatingly beautiful" Fanny, who went on to write her book while he, Nicholas, was banished to "the farthest reaches of the tsar's empire" -- as it happened, to Tashkent -- where he found a wife or two and plenty of other mistresses and lived out his days until just after the Revolution of 1917.
Okay; fine. As I said, it should have been a great tale. Prince Michael of Greece is himself a Romanov descendant, a grandson of Nicholas's sister, Olga, who has written other romantic novels far better and more compelling than this -- Sultana, The Empress of Farewells, etc.-- and who insists that the story of Nicholas and Fanny came to him by accident when he was in Russia in 1998 for the ceremonial interment of the bones of the last tsar and his family. Here, he met the surviving grandchild of Grand Duke Nicholas, Natalya Androssov Iskander Romanov ("Talya"), known in her dingy Moscow neighbourhood as "the Czarina of the suburbs," who spilled the whole story to him over pâtés, "bottles of wine" and "a cherry brandy of her own making," but who died, for better or worse, before this book appeared.
I'm leaving out a lot of detail, including a rather staggering list of historical errors Prince Michael has included. Maybe it's all the translator's fault: If you can mix up "white nights" and "sleepless" ones, you might have a hard time finding different words for "ravishingly beautiful."
Peter Kurth is the author of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson and Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra.