Introduction

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Part love story, part history, this novel is a tour de force [told] in language that soars and sears.”—More
 
St. Petersburg, 1917. After Rasputin’s body is pulled from the icy waters of the Neva River, his eighteen-year-old daughter, Masha, is sent to live at the imperial palace with Tsar Nikolay and his family. Desperately hoping that Masha has inherited Rasputin’s healing powers, Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to her son, the headstrong prince Alyosha, who suffers from hemophilia. Soon after Masha arrives at the palace, the tsar is forced to abdicate, and the Bolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest. As Russia descends into civil war, Masha and Alyosha find solace in each other’s company. To escape the confinement of the palace, and to distract the prince from the pain she cannot heal, Masha tells him stories—some embellished and others entirely imagined—about Nikolay and Alexandra’s courtship, Rasputin’s exploits, and their wild and wonderful country, now on the brink of an irrevocable transformation. In the worlds of their imagination, the weak become strong, legend becomes fact, and a future that will never come to pass feels close at hand.
 
Praise for Enchantments

“A sumptuous, atmospheric account of the last days of the Romanovs from the perspective of Rasputin’s daughter, [told] with the sensuous, transporting prose that is Kathryn Harrison’s trademark.”—Jennifer Egan
 
“[A] splendid and surprising book . . . Harrison has given us something enduring.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[Harrison delivers] this oft-told moment with shocking freshness. . . . Masha re-invents our ideas of Rasputin, and the world of Nicholas and Alexandra is imbued with a glow whose fierceness is governed by the imminence of its loss.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“A mesmerizing novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“Bewitching . . . Harrison sets historic facts like jewels in this intricately fashioned work of exalted empathy and imagination, a literary Fabergé egg. . . . [A] dazzling return to historical fiction.”—Booklist (starred review)

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Editorial Review

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A Letter from the Author
When I was eleven, my mother gave me Robert K. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra. It was the first “grownup” book I read, and I loved it. But without having studied European history I focused on the individuals involved in the Russian Revolution rather than the sweeping social changes that precipitated it. Earlier in my childhood, a car accident had left me fascinated by blood--an eager reader of vampire stories, accounts of Catholic martyrdoms, novels with consumptive heroines hemorrhaging through their chapters--and I understood the rise of the Bolsheviks in terms of the hidden tragedy of the Romanovs: the sole heir to the empire was a boy whose life was always in danger, a hemophiliac who could, a hundred years ago, have died as the result of a nosebleed or a bump on the knee.

Into this engrossing scenario stepped the infamous and sinister Grigory Rasputin, the sole person with the power to stop Prince Alexei from bleeding to death. At eleven and struggling, as I would for many more years, with the disappearance of my father when I was a baby, I found the idea of a dark, mysterious priest whose presence granted life and whose absence left a child vulnerable to annihilation irresistible. For me, the prince’s disease--and the faith healer who could control it--was the key to the Romanovs’ ruin. Their execution in a basement in Siberia seemed a redundancy; after Rasputin was assassinated I knew they were doomed.

I reread Nicholas and Alexandra in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story. Rasputin in particular continued to haunt me, and when I discovered his elder daughter had escaped Russia and eventually became a successful lion-tamer, I was drawn back into what had been familiar territory. Too, my understanding of the collapse of the Russian Empire changed once I learned Rasputin had had children of his own, the eldest of whom toured the United States as the “Daughter of the Mad Monk Whose Feats in Europe Astonished the World.” Not only was I was seduced by the story all over again, now I had a way of entering the Romanov’s world: through a passionate young woman who loved a father whose flaws she accepted, and who had her own vantage from which to view the Romanovs and the Revolution.

Of course, once I’d followed my heroine into the Alexander Palace, it was only a matter of time before she fell in love. Though Masha couldn’t fulfill the tsarina’s hope that the daughter of Rasputin could do as her father had done and protect Alexei from injury, she could provide him the solace of her company. Finding magic and romance in the least likely of places, Masha transforms the prince’s bleak vision of the world crumbling around him. Their time together is short--only a few months--but her gift for story-telling transports the two of them to an imagined realm of endless possibility, a world in which they live out the fairytale endings the real world cannot promise.

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