On Ice Palaces and Little Things Like That

Quirks Revisited

We’re addicted to quirkiness.

Especially in our non-fiction writing.

I wrote about this in October, when the world was slightly more charming and slightly less quirky. The context was an article, ‘Elephants in the Room: The Future of Quirk Historicism,’ by Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart.

Worth reading in full, even if you’re not interested in the evolving critical approaches of musicologists.

It makes the argument that —

In the wake of this suspicion of close reading, many musicologists became collectors of curiosities, assembling and scrutinizing disparate objects, events, and documents in order to understand how past communities of listeners and practitioners used music, why they created and cared about the kinds of music they did.

And my expansion of this is that all writers are now likely to be collectors of curiosities, because this is what the significant detail is, and this is what show, don’t tell encourages.

If you’re going to use a part to show the whole — the domestic decor to give us the epoch, or a character’s single gesture to give the reader their entire personality — then that thing, whatever it is, better be striking, memorable, quirky.

I was asserting this as a writer, and as a university lecturer who teaches narrative non-fiction, but also out of a suspicion that it’s what editors are after.

It’s what editors see as your qualification for the job: quirk-sense.

Whilst reading Elif Batuman’s brilliant The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), I came across the evidence I’d lacked.

When we join her, Batuman has just pitched a story about a historically accurate reconstruction of an 18th century Ice Palace in the centre of St. Petersburg to an editor at The New Yorker.

Photo c/o CBSNews.

And she gets commissioned to write it up, as long as she pays her own travel there and back.

“We really appreciate your undertaking this assignment on your own steam,” my editor told me on the phone. “Just remember, we don’t want a travel piece. What we want is a postcard, a snapshot, with lots of wonderful details. Do you know what I mean? Like if you can get an interview with whoever made the doorknobs — little things like that.”

“Interview whoever made the doorknobs,” I repeated, jotting it down in my notebook.

“Doorknobs are just an example…”

Perhaps, if you’re a non-fiction writer, this is worth having above your desk on a 3”x5” card —

“Doorknobs are just an example…”

The example I always give students are fingernails. If you describe a character’s fingernails, you’ve usually told the reader enough about them.

Elif Batuman’s writing is, itself, a great example of a writer using quirks (literary oddities) to get at something bigger (Russia).

But her chapter on ‘The House of Ice’ is, most of all, about the quest for quirks.

The original Ice Palace was built on the orders of Anna Ioannovna, Empress of Russia after Peter the Great.

Above all things, Anna loved to be entertained…

Here’s a perfect example of a quirk detail —

In her pursuit of conversation, Anna did not limit herself to the human species. She issued the following order in 1739: “It has come to our knowledge that in the window of the Petrovsky tavern in Moscow sits a starling which speaks so well that all passers-by stop to listen… immediately send me a starling of this sort.”

But Anna provides Elif Batuman with dozens of such quickfire nuggets of quirk—

If there was one thing Anna loved more than conversation and hunting, it was jesters… The jester Pietro “Pedrillo” Mira — a Neapolitan violinist who, having arrived in Petersburg with a theater troupe, quarrelled with his Kapellmeister and ended up a jester — was famous for having a wife as ugly as a goat; the joke escalated to the point that he received visitors in bed together with a ribbon-decked goat, beside a bassinet containing a baby goat.

Anna’s Ice Palace of 1740 was constructed to celebrate the wedding of Buzheninova, ‘One of Anna’s servants, a middle-aged hunchbacked Kalmyk woman’ and ‘Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, a real prince who had been convicted of apostasy for marrying an Italian commoner and converting to Catholicism’.

After the wedding and the parade —

[Golitsyn] and Buzheninova were transferred… to the House of Ice, where armed sentries forced them to remain until morning. The newlyweds spent hours running around and dancing, trying to stay warm. (In [one fictional] account, they also turned somersaults, beat each other, banged on the walls, begged the guards to release them, cursed their fate, and broke everything that could be broken.) They were found the next morning on the ice bed, close to death. Anna provoked must laughter among the courtiers by inquiring into the “sweetness” of the wedding night.

Oh those 18th century lulz!

Elif Batuman describes visiting the recreated Ice Palace, and failing to get permission to stay in it overnight (as her New Yorker editor wanted her to).

And what of the little things like that?

One of the directors, Valery Gromov, took me on a tour of the palace. I was proud of myself for remembering to ask who had made the doorknobs. Gromov stared at me. “What doorknobs?” he asked.