Enchantments
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- € 5,49
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- € 5,49
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From one of the most admired literary voices of our time, a magical, riveting story of doomed love, set at the fall of Russia's last Tsar.
St. Petersburg, 1917: as the New Year dawns, a diver pulls the murdered body of Rasputin, the Mad Monk, from the icy waters of the Neva River. Hours later, his daughters are taken to the Tsar's palace, where the Tsarina makes a shocking request: would Masha, 18, take on her father's role as healer at the sickbed of the Tsarevitch Alyosha? Shaken, Masha agrees to do what she can for the young prince, haunted as she is by questions about her father's powers and her future in a country accelerating toward political apocalypse.
Two months later, the Bolshevik Revolution forces the Tsar to abdicate, and the whole royal family is placed under arrest in the Alexander Palace. Trapped together in increasingly harsh living conditions, Masha and Alyosha find themselves taking increasing solace in one another's company. The two teenagers, with radically different experiences of Russia, of Rasputin, and of Alyosha's parents' unlucky reign, create a private realm of magic and of love, as Masha introduces the young Tsarevitch to a wild and beautiful land he will never live to rule.
An unusual love story, stitched delicately into the rich tapestry of Russian history, Enchantments brings to life the final days of Rasputin and the Romanovs. It is a breathtaking tour-de-force by one of our most acclaimed writers.
Reviews
"A sumptuous, atmospheric account of the last days of the Romanovs from the perspective of Rasputin’s daughter, Enchantments animates a kaleidoscopic breadth of historical detail with the sensuous, transporting prose that is Kathryn Harrison’s trademark." JENNIFER EGAN, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad
“Ask yourself who, in all the world, would be the best novelist to imagine being Rasputin’s daughter. Kathryn Harrison makes the answer obvious. Her Enchantments is a stupendous work of historical imagination.” PETER CAREY
‘Marvellously evocative … The stories that Masha spins out for the bed-bound tsarevich flow out effortlessly in her plain, clear voice, making many of them indeed enchanting’ Guardian
About the author
KATHRYN HARRISON has written the novels Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife, and Envy. Her autobiographical work includes The Kiss, Seeking Rapture, The Road to Santiago, and The Mother
Knot. She has also written a biography, St. Therese of Lisieux, and, most recently, a book of true crime, While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family.
She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their three children.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When the rascally Grigory Rasputin is murdered during the final days of czarist Russia, his two daughters are left in the care of the doomed royal family. In this disappointing novel, Harrison (The Kiss) imagines the interior life of the eldest girl, Masha, 18 at the time of her father's death, as she grows close to the young Alexei Nikolaevich, the famously hemophiliac son of the deposed czar. The "Mad Monk" Rasputin, with his women and his alleged healing powers, must be one of history's most intriguing characters, so it's hard to go wrong in his company. Unfortunately, despite such riveting material, the book's language remains flat, the experiences and emotions of its characters never quite coming to life. Undeniably well researched, some details are truly fascinating: the Romanov girls sewing jewels into their undergarments and the amount of gasoline (150 gallons) used to burn corpses in an abandoned mine shaft. Seminal aspects of Masha's later life, however, feel weakly sketched. Some interesting texture is achieved through the pacing and the later discovery of Alexei's journal, but as often as not, the configuration leaves the novel feeling at once predictable and scattered.
