The rest of the story.
The winter beginning December 1739 was the coldest that anybody in Russia could ever remember.
And so it was that the Russian Academy of Sciences embarked upon a program of experiment
relating to ice.
Anything and everything to do with ice, such was the abundance of ice during that frigid
season that the scientists felt compelled to make the most of it.
So it turned out did the Empress Anna Ivanovna, born at the whimsical suggestion of one
of her courtyards, the supreme ruler of all Russia commanded the construction of a palace,
a full-size palace made entirely of ice.
Now the courtyair had conceived this as an amusement at least, as a challenge to the country's
artisans and builders and scientists, but the Empress had something else in mind.
And that is the rest of the story.
Absolutely everything that one could hope to see in a palace made of stone could be found
in the Empress Anna's ice palace.
Now bear in mind that no other materials were used in the construction or in the appointments,
everything, the walls, the stairs, the baroque ballastrades were ice, the cornices and the
columns, everything was made of ice, even the windowpains, even the decorative figurines and the
furniture.
There were four poster beds and chairs and tables and chandeliers, even a clock and a commode,
all made of ice, and on the card table in the drawing room a complete deck of
blaying cards made entirely of ice.
The sculpture throughout the ice palace was magnificent to behold, statues of course,
but on the icy grounds of the palace were ice flowers and ice trees complete with ice
birds perched delicately on their ice branches in the courtyards to a great cannon made of ice and
ice only, which nonetheless fired real charges and a pair of ice dolphins which breathed the
flames of ignited netha and a life-size ice elephant that could squirt water out of its trunk
in a stream 250 feet high and yet as marvelous as this architectural and artistic marvel was
its main function as the Empress Anna was to reveal shortly after the New Year 1740 its
primary purpose was to serve as the setting for the most grotesque practical joke in all Russian
history.
Before among her courtyards was the prince Michael Doritzen, an honored field marshal, a distinguished
educator, a statesman, but nonetheless he scorned the decadent empress, so scorned in fact
was she that she ordered the prince to marry somebody else, she ordered him to marry the
ugliest woman in the land and further decreed that the hapless couple should be stripped
of their clothing and then sealed up in the ice palace for their wedding night.
Now Russian history is old history for that matter it bounds with accounts of unconscionable cruelty,
but from this day forward you will neither forgive nor forget the mad monarch who conceived and
carried out the most monstrous marriage ceremony of all time and yet to the Empress's astonishment,
you know those newly wedged whom she had sought to entomb instead emerged from their cold
elegant grave the following morning, alive, even well, more miraculously still in love.
For sometimes the poets tell us arose blooms in the abyss as it did in that bitter Russian winter
two and a half centuries ago when a tiny spark burst into a blaze that warmed two souls in a palace
of ice and now you know the rest of the story.