Ruslan

by Barbara Scrupski

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Part Gone with the Wind, part Doctor Zhivago, and thoroughly captivating, Ruslan is the epic story of a destitute young countess in Tsarist Russia who tries every avenue to restore her fortunes.

In glittering St. Petersburg, we meet Countess Alexandra Korvin: beautiful and intelligent, but also unmarried and—thanks to her late spendthrift father—quite penniless. In her polarized society of aristocratic grandeur and crushing poverty, a woman's only option is to marry well.

Alexandra makes her way through St. Petersburg society, attending dazzling balls, lavish dinners, and operas in search of a spouse. She pursues the charming but unattainable politician Rybynsky and spurns the advances of Ulynov, a rakish army captain who falls desperately in love with her. Finally, craving freedom and rebelling against the confines of her life as a woman, she cuts off her hair and joins the army as a man—only to find the ultimate test of her feminine heart.

Rich with decadent trappings of Tsarist splendor and alive with the indomitable spirit of an unforgettable young woman, Ruslan is a novel to savor from first page to last.

Release date: December 18, 2007

Publisher: Crown

Print pages: 464

Sample

There is no food in Russia: wizened peasants, their faces as wrinkled as old apples and as red, kneel on the frozen ground and scrabble with their fingertips at projections, lumps and bumps that might conceal a beet, a carrot, a turnip white and sad as the sky above their heads. But whatever is found is not eaten, rather drunk in the form of clear and bitter alcohol distilled, it seems, from the winter air itself. It burns their throats like liquid ice but warms the stomach and spreads like sleep in their veins until they lie down and dream. They dream of beets as big as houses, edible dwellings whose walls drip sweetness. They dream of eggs as small as pearls, smoky in color, or luminous as fire--a load of treasure contained in the belly of a fish. They dream of snow that stays on the tongue and fills the mouth as sour white cream, and stones that, boiled and halved, reveal a magically edible flesh. They dream of mushrooms. While miles away in icy rooms with ceilings that merge with the sky, seated at snow-covered tables set with ice and silver, the slant-eyed ladies feed on diamonds brought from the luscious south (the Caucasus, Black Sea) and warm their tiny, cold feet against the muscular calves of imperial guards, then, lowering their lashes, dream of something else, of something more than that, for this is not enough (the slap of a stallion's balls against their upturned buttocks).

This is the Russia of the mind, half heard of, half remembered--the detritus of a culture, of a history exploded and drifting like ash across our consciousness, the decades of its greatest century jumbled together, out of their timely order, so that Pushkin (but isn't he dead?), strolling up one of the spectral boulevards in Russia's great white city of the north, nods to Chekhov coming down the other way, tips his hat. So. Imagine St. Petersburg in all its titanic splendor, its icy might. Imagine its windows, myriad rows of light isolated against the winter sky, and imagine that inside one of those windows is a girl who is almost a woman. We see the impoverished slimness of her arms, hear her grunts of effort as she stretches herself toward the whorls and clouds of frozen gold that drift across the ceiling just out of reach above her head and then drops her arms in despair. Dressed in faded black, she might be a servant of this great house, driven to madness by the disparity between its grandeur, its spaciousness and the narrow poverty of her own destiny (a garret room, a sixteen-hour day). Alone in this room, her eyes frozen in intent, she gazes up again at the intricate golden sky. A knife glints in her hand. She tests it against her finger and, finding it sharp, grunts with approval, pushes back her sleeves. What is she doing? Stop her! No!

And indeed, a servant comes rushing into the room to do just that, protesting, weeping, clinging to her skirts, for our young countess, teetering atop a giant ladder, forearms bare as a washerwoman's, is reaching up again about to peel the plated gold from yet another of the ceiling decorations of this once-great home. She has to. There is no food in this house. Praskovia, the house serf who is clinging to her skirts and pleading with her mistress not to further damage the splendor of the palace, has had nothing but black bread and weak tea without jam for days, a consequence of her mistress's careful economy, and if we look around the room, we see that it is empty. The furniture has all been sold.

Countess Alexandra Korvin's father, the old count, has died a year ago, leaving debts as massive as the family's fortunes once had been. For the past year, the year of her mourning, the countess has seen no one--has not attended one ball, one musicale, one tea, one dinner or Christmas party (not to mention has not been seen at the golden Maryinsky sitting in the family box, which has been sold). "What a lovely girl," whispered the rest of Petersburg society when they met at those balls, musicales, and teas, "so gracious, so serious, so willing to observe the proprieties and proper customs--unlike the rest of our youth. Unlike, say, the Bezinsky boy. When his father went, he bent over the bed, not to kiss him, but to assure himself that old Sasha--what a rake!--was really dead. Then he went straight to his club, ordered oysters and champagne, and danced for joy on the dining table among the crystal and the china, kicking it to the floor in crashes of exuberance. The scratches of his boots are still there." They imagined that Countess Alexandra Korvin had been resting in darkened rooms, overwhelmed by her sorrows, that the countess lived in a twilight world of memory and grief, and indeed, when she was seen walking by the Neva, pausing from time to time to regard its dark waters, her face was congested by thought, grim with concentration.

But she was thinking about money. She had not been resting in darkened rooms, but rather standing straight in their antiseptic morning light, arms folded, voice caustic, directing the servants to remove this chair, this table, to wrap this porcelain vase, that crystal box. Tradesmen and dealers came and went much later in the day, in the muffled blackness of the night, to shield the house's shame from prying eyes as they stripped it room by room.

"We still have that forest in Lithuania," the countess had stated firmly to Trenyakov the lawyer that Friday after her father's death. Sitting at the old carved desk in her simple black mourning outfit, she'd come into view only intermittently, a fragment of a face briefly visible between the cracks in the crumbling walls of paper that teetered on top of the desk, always on the verge of crashing to the floor. "The deed is here somewhere."

Trenyakov, a connoisseur of art, was thinking that she looked rather like a fragment of a Greek sculpture from the Archaic period, those pieces of her that he could see. Alexandra had to repeat her statement with greater force before Trenyakov started in his chair and automatically agreed.

"Oh, so we do have the forest in Lithuania, which means we must still have the hunting lodge in Mazuria with those ten thousand acres rich in game and fish."

No, not Archaic--her features were more refined. The elegance of her elongated eye was Etruscan in feeling. Or Minoan perhaps, reminiscent of the purity of its architecture with the perfect balance of the arched brow above, the superb carving of the entire bony socket a testament to a designer of the most refined tastes. Even this small piece of her was so perfectly turned and shaped, it revealed the harmony of the entire larger structure.

"And the shoe factory and the coal mines in the Ukraine. All those western holdings that he probably forgot about, forgot to sell. I know the deeds are here," she continued, confident, commanding. Trenyakov heard her ruffling through the papers, scrounging, digging, scratching like a starving yet industrious and hopeful mouse. He couldn't bear it.

"Countess"--he hung his head--"five years ago."

The countess, distracted as she scrounged among the papers, separated a stack from the larger pile and began to thumb through it. "Five years ago what?" she asked.

The lawyer began to explain. Five years before, the count had found himself in some difficulties, financial in nature, involving some rather aggressive creditors entirely without scruple, which he had requested his attorney to help him solve.

The countess understood at once. Her shoulders sagged, her mood deflated. And what had it all been spent on? She understood that too. For instance. A townhouse for a pretty singer, just the latest in a long succession of women whose townhouses could be found all over the city, opulently appointed and housing all manner of ballet girls, aspiring actresses, milliners, even impoverished daughters of the aristocracy, whose task it was to fill his empty bed and heart (he had lost the countess's young mother at her very birth), though none of them, while succeeding at the first, ever succeeded at the second even in the slightest. Or the expeditions round the world, from which he returned with trunks of treasure--golden masks of Aztec priests, stacks of Turkish tiles, Greek pots, Indian ankle bracelets beaten out of silver, even an actual Indian temple dancer, still living in the city on the count's largesse, still jingling and glittering through the dark Russian winter afternoons as far as the countess knew. And then there were the animals: a crate of fantastic birds, iridescent, cobalt-crested with golden throats and fire-tipped wings, who wilted and died upon meeting their first blast of arctic air; an infant elephant who had wandered--dejected, bewildered--through the inner coutryard for a month or two before contracting pneumonia and being shot, with many tears, by the count himself.

"And just how," the countess had to ask, though she really knew the answer, "were they resolved?"

Trenyakov was silent.

"The estates, the factories, the mines. Everything. Correct?"

"Your father was a most extraordinary man," he said finally.

Oh, a most extraordinary man. When he and her mother had returned from their wedding trip--three years of extravagance that took them to a mountain peak in the Himalayas and into a ferocious gale around the Cape of Good Hope--he had had the titanic marble staircase of the palace torn out and replaced with one of lapis lazuli, a color that reproduced with exactitude, he exclaimed to all who would listen, the opaque intensity of azure to be seen in the water off the shores of a certain island in the Cyclades at seven o'clock of a fine spring evening just as it is getting dark. The semiprecious staircase flowed from floor to floor as if the sea itself had been brought inside the house, and its fantastic richness of color commemorated as well, he said, the color of her mother's eyes as they had looked that one night as they had walked together on the sand and stared out at the reaching sea. He had promised his wife at that moment to make for her a road of the sea so they could walk right up to the moon, and this he had duly done, but then his young wife had died.

"All of it," said Trenyakov, "and there are debts."

A road to the moon! A hundred thousand souls--every serf they owned--it had cost, his road to the moon! And the land that went with the serfs; all their holdings, a small kingdom. Everything gone.

Trenyakov, a stubby man of middle age still living with his mother, watched the countess cover her face, watched the tears drip down between her fingers, and would have liked her to cry in his arms. But his hair was too thin, he reasoned, for this ever to come to pass.

"For every problem there is a solution, Countess," he said. It was something his mother was always saying. The money, he wanted to say, had been well spent, spent to walk upon the sea, he would have liked to whisper leaning over her, to smell her hair. But he was too fat. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

"For every problem there is a solution, Countess," he repeated.

"A road to the moon." She gripped her scalp with sharp fingernails, released it, and shook her head. "An elephant!"

Trenyakov felt that his whole life had been pointed toward this moment, when he could be of service to a beautiful woman. The taunts of his fellow schoolboys at his fatness and at the fact that his mother had been a serf and his education paid for by the indifferent master who had fathered him, the nights of study when his mind raced the setting sun in order to absorb the contents of a page before the lines of print melted in the dark, the stench of the tannery across from his rooms in Moscow, the distaste of the girls he'd tried to court and that time at his friend Yuri's afternoon tea and what he'd heard Yuri's sister say about him--all this did not matter. He would be of help to a beautiful woman.

First, he stressed, honor. If she wished to keep her palace, which was heavily mortgaged, she must honor her father's debts.

"But how? With what? With this?" She smashed the wall of papers, sent it flying. Trenyakov dropped out of his chair and fell to his knees.

"Sell what you have, your furniture, your art, your library," he said as he crawled along the floor retrieving the papers, encountering to his astonishment the tip of her shoe as it peeked from beneath her shadowy skirts and wanting to cradle this special treasure he had found in the palm of his hand, but contenting himself with merely sniffing deeply of its fragrant leather.

"I'll start with that staircase," said Alexandra, the shoe vanishing into the shadows as she rose to her feet. "I'd gladly take a hammer to it myself."

"Oh no, dear Countess, you must leave it be," said Trenyakov, rising now himself with reddened face and taking a handkerchief from his sleeve to mop his gleaming head. Heavily, he sat again, then popped up abruptly to hover by his chair until the countess settled him back into it again with an indifferent wave. "How will you get from floor to floor?"

The countess had to admit the question was a reasonable one. How would she get from floor to floor? By the servants' back staircase?

"Besides," continued Trenyakov, "you may someday wish to sell the palace, and then, without its famous staircase--"

"No," said Alexandra.

"But if you did--"

"Never! I will never sell the palace!" The countess threw herself down in a cracked old leather chair across the room. The dust spurted into the air and settled round her and over her, so that she herself looked as discarded, rejected, unsaleable as the chair would be found to be when she would later try to sell it too.

"If you marry well," said Trenyakov, twisting in his seat, "you won't have to sell the palace."

"Who would marry me now?"

Oh, anyone, he wanted to say, me. Instead, he proposed his plan. Strip the palace of its ornaments and furnishings in secret. No one need know what had happened. With the money she could not only pay her debts but finance a season in Petersburg's marital hunting ground, where she would be sure to find success and a restoration of her fortunes and good name.

"Absolutely not!" she had cried, jumping from her chair and beginning to pace the room. The disgrace of fortune hunting--why, she would be nothing better than a whore!