Valentine’s Day is this weekend, so an obvious discussion topic comes to mind: Historical romances. Which historical relationships, romantic, sexual or otherwise do you find most interesting? It can be a great tale of timeless love, or a powerful couple who couldn’t stand each other. Or perhaps they were forced together on a whim, like the subjects of our header.
In 1740, Russian Tsaritza Anna ordered her court fool Prince Mikhail Golitsyn to marry a woman of her choice. Golitsyn, a member of the nobility, had been appointed court jester after offending the sensibilities of his Empress by marrying a Catholic woman, and forced into demeaning jokes like sitting on a nest of eggs and clucking like a chicken. Anna relieved the Prince of this foul burden by ordering him to remarry Avdotia Buzheninova, an aged Kalmyk woman who reportedly had been one of the Tsaritza’s servants. She further commemorated the occasion by ordering the construction of a massive castle made entirely of ice, 66 feet tall by 165 feet long, along the Neva River near the Gulf of Finland. Inside the palace were furniture, doors, even playing cards and blankets carved meticulously from ice.
Anna turned the marriage of fool and peasant into a massive spectacle. Each province across Russia was ordered to send a representative to the wedding, dressed in regional finery with a massive menagerie of animals in tow. The betrothed followed ensconced in a gilded cage atop an elephant, dressed as clowns. The two had a ceremony in their frigid new home, then after a banquet retired to their icy bed quarters for lovemaking beneath a sheet of ice. Fortunately, Avdotia had traded her family jewels for a guard’s fur coat, and the two huddled beneath it for a night more likely spent fending off frost bite. This did not stop the proud, defiant (or perhaps chilled into submission) Golitsyn from returning to court the next day, boasting of their amorous adventures to the Tsaritza’s delight.
This bizarre incident has been interpreted alternately as a graphic demonstration of the Tsaritza’s absolute power, or a political maneuver designed to demonstrate for her court that Anna, who had been maneuvered onto the throne by her nobles amidst a chaotic time in Russian politics, had control over not only her subjects, but the powerful like Golitsyn, reduced to a freezing, clucking jester at her whim. Or maybe she was just a jerk. Either way, within a year Anna died of a kidney ailment, while Mikhail and Avdotia had two children before she died in 1742. The Prince remarried and was restored to a minor position at court, dying in 1775 after becoming a weird footnote in Russian history.