Empress of the Night steeped in themes of mortality
Even an empress who rules over millions of subjects and the unfathomably vast dominion that was — and is — Russia, is prey to the humbling affront of corporeal decline.
In his mischievously provocative novel HHhH, a fictionalized account of the Second World War assassination of high- ranking Nazi henchman Reinhard Heydrich, author Laurent Binet frequently pauses the action to ponder openly about the validity of historical invention.
“I just hope that, however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story, you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind,” muses Binet’s conflicted narrator at the beginning of the story.
The existence, for instance, of Josef Gabcik, one of the two Czech paratroopers enlisted to assassinate Heydrich, is indisputable. But Binet’s authorial stand- in agonizes over whether he has artistic licence to portray Gabcik “lying in his little room — shutters closed, window open — listening to the creak of the tram … that stops outside the Botanical Gardens.”
And yet, for all its metafictional conceit — and, make no mistake, HHhH does make the reader think long and hard about the legitimacy of embellishing the lives of historical figures by putting words into their mouths or adding details that have no verifiable basis in fact — the novel spins an absorbing account of what happened on those tension- fraught days in Prague in 1942.
At the end of the day, Binet reminds us that historical fiction’s first duty is to fiction, not history. It can’t really be any other way.
Historical fiction, on a somewhat less exalted level than HHhH, is a solid staple of the publishing business — a circumstance unlikely to diminish with the warranted acclaim and popularity achieved by Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s exceptional resurrection of the life of Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, and its equally successful sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.
Eva Stachniak’s Empress of the Night is her second novel about Russian ruler Catherine the Great. Not, strictly speaking, a sequel to The Winter Palace, which charted the life of an upwardly mobile Polish woman who served as one of Catherine’s attendants, Empress of the Night offers a parallel narrative told from Catherine’s perspective, as the extraordinary Russian monarch looks back on life from her deathbed.
The novel, based on Catherine’s memoirs, probes its protagonist’s struggle to assert her place in a world dominated by men.
It is also steeped in themes of mortality, and the reality that all lives, no matter how exalted, are governed by elements that are “utterly and brutally banal.”
Even an empress who rules over millions of subjects and the unfathomably vast dominion that was — and is — Russia, is prey to the humbling affront of corporeal decline. Even an empress sometimes soils the bed.
Catherine, arriving in Russia as a minor German duchess betrothed to the heir of the Romanov line, survived several setbacks to become one of the greatest rulers in Russian history.
Her hold on the popular imagination today is largely owed to a reputedly voracious sexual appetite that, according to implausibly apocryphal legend, caused her to meet her end on the underside of a horse.
Stachniak, a Polish- born writer who moved to Canada in 1981, gives us Catherine’s lifelong parade of lovers, whose difference in age from her grew steadily greater with time, but she also emphasizes Catherine’s stature as a progressive Enlightenment figure who opposed capital punishment and the use of torture to extract confessions, among other forwardthinking notions.
The Winter Palace was a relatively conventional novel enlivened by political machination and intrigue.
Readers of that bestseller might initially be daunted by the less straightforward narrative approach in Empress of the Night, which emerges through a series of vignettes that shift back and forth in time.
A consistent strength of both books is Stachniak’s unfailing attention to detail, whether describing the pain of childbirth or the manner of a courtier’s behaviour and appearance.