Upon her religious conversion, she is renamed Catherine Alexeyevna and officially betrothed, with much fanfare, to the young grand duke. “The Winter Palace: A Novel of Catherine the Great” by Eva Stachniak (Bantam Books)Īlthough she is expected to function as little more than a pedigreed breeder, 14-year-old Princess Sophie turns out to be a quick study, learning Russian and the intricacies of the Orthodox faith as she prepares to convert from her native Lutheranism. Petersburg to serve as a bride for her nephew and heir, Grand Duke Peter Fyodorovich, an eccentric and sickly 15-year-old whose marriage will produce, she hopes, another Romanov successor. In 1744, she summons a minor German princess named Sophie to the court at St. Superstitious and impulsive, Elizabeth is nevertheless a powerful ruler, having inherited much of her father’s aptitude for government and his dedication to expanding Russia’s influence on the world stage. We’re introduced to Catherine’s fearsome predecessor, Empress Elizabeth, the youngest surviving daughter of Peter the Great. Except for the narrator, nearly all the main characters in “The Winter Palace” are imaginative re-creations of actual members of the Russian court from 1743 to 1764. Its timing is particularly good for ambitious readers who have already tackled Massie’s biography. What luck, then, for the chance to sink into Eva Stachniak’s luxuriant new novel about Catherine’s beginnings. Yet in historical fiction, there have been curiously few portraits of the long-reigning tsarina, with the exception of a few offerings that include a Romanov trilogy by British author Evelyn Anthony, published in the 1950s. She has also enjoyed strong representation on film, having been opulently portrayed by Marlene Dietrich and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Massie’s magnificently readable “Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman” (2011). Catherine the Great, the much-mythologized empress of 18th-century Russia, has long been a popular subject for biographers, starring most recently in Robert K.

The winter palace by eva stachniak