Enchantments
Kathryn Harrison, 2012
Random House
334 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400063475
Summary
From Kathryn Harrison, one of America’s most admired literary voices, comes a gorgeously written, enthralling novel set in the final days of Russia’s Romanov Empire.
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—including the headstrong Prince Alyosha. Desperately hoping that Masha has inherited Rasputin’s miraculous healing powers, Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to Aloysha, who suffers from hemophilia, a blood disease that keeps the boy confined to his sickbed, lest a simple scrape or bump prove fatal.
Two months after Masha arrives at the palace, the tsar is forced to abdicate, and Bolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest. As Russia descends into civil war, Masha and Alyosha grieve the loss of their former lives, finding solace in each other’s company. To escape the confinement of the palace, they tell stories—some embellished and some entirely imagined—about Nikolay and Alexandra’s courtship, Rasputin’s many exploits, and the wild and wonderful country 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.
Mesmerizing, haunting, and told in Kathryn Harrison’s signature crystalline prose, Enchantments is a love story about two people who come together as everything around them is falling apart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1961
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford Unveristy, Iowa
Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Kathryn Harrison was raised in Los Angeles by her maternal grandparents. She graduated from Stanford University in 1982 with a B.A. in English and Art History and received an MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 1987. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist and book editor Collin Harrison, whom she met in 1985, when the two of them were enrolled in the Writers' Workshop. They have three children, born in 1990, 1992 and 2000. The bestselling author famously documented a disturbing triangulation that developed involving her young mother, her father and herself in the memoir The Kiss, which described her father's seduction of the author when she was twenty and their incestuous involvement, which persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss.
While much of her body of work documents her tortured relationship with her mother, who died in 1985—the essays collected in Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Life, a second memoir, The Mother Knot, as well as The Kiss—she has also written extensively of her maternal grandparents, both in her personal essays and, in fictionalized form, in her novels. Her grandmother, a Sassoon, was raised in Shanghai, where she lived until 1920, her experiences there inspiring Harrison's historical novel, The Binding Chair. The Seal Wife, set in Alaska during the First World War, draws on the early life of her British grandfather, who spent his youth trapping fur in the Northwest Territories and laying track into Anchorage for the Alaska Railroad.
Harrison has published six novels, three memoirs, a travelogue, a biography, and a book of true crime. She frequently publishes reviews in The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, and at Salon.com, Nerve.Com and elsewhere. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
This splendid and surprising book circles through time and around stories both real and imagined, lending a tender perspective to familiar historical events as experienced by two central characters—Rasputin's daughter Maria, known as Masha, and Alyosha, the hemophiliac Romanov heir—whose physical and emotional suffering acutely remind us of the human lives behind the legends.
Susann Cokal - New York Times Book Review
A mesmerizing novel.
O, The Oprah Magazine
A surreal tale fueled by a legendarily randy real-life healer and his lion-taming daughter.... A scrupulously researched retelling of the fiery end of Russia.... Most of all, Enchantments is about the irreducible mysteries of human motivation.
Elle
Part love story, part history, this novel is a tour de force.... Told in language that soars and sears.
More
Kathryn Harrison triumphantly returns to her historical fiction roots with Enchantments, the sweeping (and wholly imagined) story of love between two unlikely allies.... Harrison takes a particular moment in time and brings it to stunning life.... Re-imagining history—and a love story—in a completely new way.
Bookpage
Harrison's novels always chart heated, dangerously emotional territory, and this one sounds no different—with the added benefit of being set during the Russian Revolution, as riveting a time as one can imagine. After Rasputin is killed, the Romanovs take responsibility for his daughters—and ask 18-year-old Masha to assume her father's job of tending to ailing tsarevitch Alyosha. The two become close, and their very different perspectives give historic scope to a country in turmoil. This should appeal to a wide range of readers—there's history and passion, told in a literary voice. Book club gold.
Library Journal
(Starred review) After the body of the revered and loathed mystic Rasputin is pulled from the ice-covered Neva River in Saint Petersburg, on New Year’s Day, 1917, his two daughters are taken in by the Romanovs. The czarina is hoping that Masha will be able to ease the suffering of their hemophiliac son, Alyosha, as her father did.... Harrison sets historic facts like jewels in this intricately fashioned work of exalted empathy and imagination, a literary Faberge egg. A best-selling author of great literary finesse, Harrison will attract fans and new readers while on a national tour with this bewitching historical novel about the infamous demise of a legendary dynasty
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Enchantments opens in 1917 St. Petersburg, with the body of “Mad Monk” Grigory Rasputin being pulled from the Neva River—a factually accurate event. But Harrison writes from the perspective of Rasputin’s daughter, Masha, weaving fact and fiction together throughout the novel. Discuss the ways in which Harrison plays with fact and fiction in Enchantments, and to what effect.
2. During one of their first meetings, Masha and Alyosha talk about how his mother worries endlessly about his health. Alyosha tells Masha that Tsarina Alexandra believes in “the grace of God” while he believes in history. (page 24) How does the tsarina’s faith in God influence her? How does Alyosha’s faith in history influence him?
3. Masha and Alyosha create a fantasy world while under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo. Of all the stories they tell each other and the histories they share, what passages stand out to you? Why?
4. Masha and Varya have a complicated relationship in Enchantments. Varya tells little white lies to protect herself, while Masha believes in the power of truth. Masha tells Varya, “There are ways other than lying to protect oneself,” and Varya says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And neither do you.” (page 34) Discuss how truth and lies play into the novel. Does Masha have a point? Does Varya?
5. Harrison’s novel emphasizes the power of storytelling—through Rasputin and Masha’s relationship before his death, Masha and Alyosha’s interactions, and Alyosha’s later relations with Katya. Why do you think sharing stories—both real and imagined—hold so much power?
6. Masha struggles with Alyosha’s accident throughout the novel, wondering if he meant to hurt himself to distract his parents—and others at Tsarskoe Selo—from their plight. Alyosha tells Masha he didn’t mean to hurt himself, but she has trouble believing him. What do you think really happened?
7. As Masha and Alyosha tell their own versions of their family histories, they imagine how things might have turned out differently had their ancestors made different choices—if they had married other people, or made alternate political decisions, etc. How does the concept of fate unfold in the novel? What about the power of choice?
8. The devil and his entourage of demons, the Virgin, the Holy Spirit, a host of saints, and 630 Jesuses all appear in Enchantments. Discuss these religious apparitions and what they mean to and for the characters.
9. Alyosha and Masha are drawn to each other despite Alyosha’s condition, their age difference, and their unique predicament. Yet when they first kiss, Masha is so worried about hurting Alyosha that she can’t allow herself to enter the moment. Alyosha says, “It’s the only thing that does matter, whether or not you liked it.” Masha says, “There are other things to think about.” (page 155) What does Masha mean? How does her perspective affect their relationship?
10. According to the novel (and some historical reports), Rasputin’s death was widely predicted. Of her father and his unfortunate death, Masha reflects: “Once he’d met a man, he couldn’t imagine that man as a murderer, much less his murderer.” (page 201) Discuss this quote—in the context of both Rasputin’s death and more generally in the novel.
11. Masha and Alyosha’s relationship is cut short when she and her sister are abruptly set free from Tsarskoe Selo. Masha’s life takes many interesting turns after she leaves Alyosha: she gets married and is then widowed, moves from Paris to Vienna to America, joins the circus and is herself gravely injured. Discuss Masha’s life after the Romanovs. What did you find most surprising? Engaging?
12. Masha is afraid her father’s legacy will prevent her from getting her working papers in Paris, but in fact the Rasputin name helps her. She reflects: “The sole thing of value I possessed was my father’s history [and] his name.” (page 272) Is this true? If so, in what ways?
13. At the end of the novel, Masha dreams she is with the Romanov girls again. They are grown women, very much alive, and they want to show her a Faberge egg she has seen before. “But I know what’s inside,” Masha says. “I don’t need to see it again.” The girls all laugh and Tatiana says, “Of course you don’t know what’s inside! You can’t know. No one can. It’s never the same twice.” (pages 309–10) Discuss the meaning of this conversation in the context of the novel.
(Questions issued by publisher.)