So that other thing that happened during the Russian Revolution....

Enchantments - Kathryn Harrison (Random House, 2012)


I knew I had read a book by Harrison before, except it turns out I had things all sorts of confused, and the book I knew I had read (Envy) wasn't the book I thought it was. Oops. Anyway, here's what I said about that novel: in progress, and completed. And this answers all the confusion I had about how the same author was responsible for books with such different fingerprints.

But I digress, which is what I do. Enchantments is mostly set in the months following the February Revolution and the tsar's abdication. Masha is the son of the recently murdered Rasputin; in the wake of his death, she and her sister move in with the Romanov's, quite possibly the least awesome place in Russia that they could have been.

Except..... the tsarina thinks Masha has some of her father's healing power, so she spends most of her time with the hemophiliac tsarevich. And in this weird purgatory, young love blossoms. It's a strange, mostly innocent love between teenagers - Alyosha is just barely 14 - but made poignant by the fact that they are just sitting around waiting to die or to be saved. (A state Alyosha has experienced for pretty much his whole life.)

Masha and Alyosha fall in love amidst stories, woven by Masha to pass the time and occupy the prince. She creates a future world, retells stories of her father's past and of his parents' love story, visits scenes from her home, from Petersburg, from wherever. And when they are inevitably separated, the royal family sent East and finally executed, the novel continues with moments from Masha's life in the years to come (during which a young boy continues to hold her heart and stay 14 forever) and through Alyosha's journal from the months before his death.

At the end of the novel, a time when I was feeling particularly melancholy and sad to leave Harrison's world, there are acknowledgments, less that two pages. It explained a little, but left open several historical questions. And reminded me that while I've read broadly about this era - history, literature, etc - I haven't spent much time with the doomed royal family, or the exiled Whites who managed to eke out existences in Germany, France, America. It's enough to drive this girl back to the history books....