the winter palace a novel of catherine the great

Sometimes, Varvara must seek information, but other times all she has to do is sit still and listen. In her new role, the drafty Winter Palace is her ally – its floors and ceilings are full of cracks, its walls are backed by secret cupboards and pocked with spy holes. Her job is to be as invisibly ubiquitous as possible, and to report everything she hears, word for word, back to him. He is amazed to discover that a mere common girl can speak several languages and can also read. As she is exploring them, the chancellor, Count Bestuzhev, happens upon her. Under this sort of pressure, the fact that Varvara's awkward stitching must always be ripped out is bad business.īut the palace, full of abandoned rooms, provides an escape in one of the rooms, Varvara finds a box of books. Elizabeth is not easy to please – ladies-in-waiting bring her dolls dressed in possible outfits and she chooses among them (or rejects them all). She incurs the wrath of the wardrobe mistress, whose job is to supply Empress Elizabeth with a new gown every single day. Varvara's future at first looks unpromising. In the course of the novel, one building, the Winter Palace of Peter the Great, a drafty, Flemish-inspired two-storey residence, is replaced by a much grander and more opulent rococo structure, but Stachniak's protagonist, Varvara, the daughter of a Polish bookbinder who is orphaned in her early teens and enters the court as a working girl, understands that the Winter Palace is in fact a world unto itself, from which the rest of Russia is only dimly visible. The Winter Palace is a setting, a character and a symbol, and Stachniak lays out in riveting detail how life is lived there by all sorts of characters who are in thrall to the empresses, from the lowest seamstress to the most powerful courtesan. Petersburg, Russia, before she asks us to ponder Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, and her predecessor, Elizabeth. It isn't incidental that award-winning Toronto novelist Eva Stachniak asks us to ponder the Winter Palace, in St.

The winter palace a novel of catherine the great