"Broad Russian Nature"

THE ROMANOVS--William Gerhardi--Putnam ($5).

William Gerhardi, a polyglot Englishman who was born in Russia, has written novels, short stories, a play, a critical biography of Chekhov. He is perhaps most widely known for his novel The Polyglots. Last week he added to his list a long (484-page), glittering, malicious, at times staggeringly funny history of the Romanov dynasty. Subtitled Evocation of the Past as a Mirror for the Present, it is a profuse record of peculiarly dizzy people in a peculiarly dizzy part of the world.

When the Romanovs 'came to the throne 300 years ago they were "provincial nobodies." They managed, in their time, to produce three colossal figures (Alexander I, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great), one kind man (Alexander II, who freed the serfs, was killed by a bomb). The rest were monsters, comic grotesques, mental cases, or blank nonentities: calf-eyed Mihail, who died of melancholia; Elizabeth, the hard-drinking, nominally virgin queen whose beer-barrel figure enabled her to pass off her pregnancies as "indigestion"; infantile, impotent Peter III and insane Paul, "as ugly and misshapen as an abortion," both hideously murdered; Nicholas II's hard, huge, colorless papa; Nicholas himself, "the most pitiful in Russian History," a densely obstinate little man who developed, under the indignities of his jailers, an almost heavenly meekness. Romanovia:

>In Catherine the Great's palace was the "mechanical" wonder of the age: laden banquet tables which, on command, rose or sank through the floor. They were manipulated by "a forest of human hands" whose owners stood waist-deep in the habitually flooded basement. Frequently the ropes broke, the tables dropped, the operators were crushed to death.

> Peter the Great "was only great in driving force . . . probably the greatest beast who ever wore a crown." When his wife took a lover Peter had his head chopped off and placed in her bedroom preserved in alcohol. He also "developed a taste for whipping young girls in their teens." Gerhardi thinks him far less responsible than history has made him for "hacking out a window into Europe"; gives evidence of his cowardice in battle, his lack of military talent.

>Catherine II also was less Great than advertised, more liberal in word than in deed: The peasants "sank to the lowest level of slavery during her so-called enlightened reign." "She was a fairly clever woman . . . such a one as, given the means, might make a success as a London hostess."

>One-eyed, gifted Prince Potemkin, best-beloved among Catherine's shoals of lovers, "looked not unlike Charlie Chaplin." He got away and took a rest from passion whenever he could. Tableau of "the broad Russian nature": Potemkin, at the battlefront, in his underground palace, amusing himself, between attacks of acute melancholia, with concubines, an orchestra, guitars.

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