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house—it’s a little houseling,” she said. “The real palace is next door: the Winter Palace.” Back in Palace Square, I paused in front of the slide. Determined-looking children climbed the staircase built into the elephant’s back, sat approximately where the Persian soldier used to sit, and slid down. Could there be a better mascot than this elephant for the persistence and mutability of cultural memory?

Why hold the jesters’ wedding in a House of Ice? Nobody really knows. Lazhechnikov imagined a scene in which Biron’s henchmen torture a Ukrainian informer by pouring water on his head during a severe frost. The resulting “human ice statue” catches the eye of Anna Ioannovna, who announces, “This gives me the idea of building a palace out of ice.” Foucault would have been pleased: the palace in its very conception was a punishment.

In fact, the ice palace had no clear purpose, and thus many unclear purposes. It was a torture device, a science experiment, an ethnographic museum, a work of art. It was a haunted house, a fairy tale—Snow White in her glass coffin, surrounded by dwarfs. It was a suspended disaster, a flood waiting to happen—like the Petersburg of Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman.” The ice palace represents the prison house of marriage, the vanity of human endeavor, the dialectic of empire and subject. As Gregory Freidin, a professor of Russian literature at Stanford, put it, “The House of Ice is to Russia what the refrigerator is to the Eskimos—only more so. It’s an objectification of their objective condition.”

Hopelessly overdetermined, like an object in a dream, the House of Ice appears in poems about dreams. It is believed to have inspired the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Thomas Moore, the nineteenth- century poet-satirist, wrote of a dream ball in the House of Ice, hosted by Tsar Alexander I and attended by the entire Holy Alliance. ‘When the castle and its occupants start to melt, “some word, like ‘Constitution’—long / Congealed in frosty silence,” drips from the tongue of Prussia’s king. Luba Golburt, a litera ry historian, has compared the House of Ice to Pompeii: a petrified historic al tableau, “unfrozen” by nineteenth- century Romantics.

One scholar I spoke to compared today’s political climate to that of Anna loannovna’s reign, in its “tyranny of ‘ent ertainments.’” I later asked Evgeny Anisimov, Anna Ioannovna’s biographer, how the reconstruction reflected the current Russian state of affairs. Anisimov, though reluctant to compare the present day to Anna’s reign, conceded that “the House of Ice could hardly have been built under Yeltsin—either the ice would have been stolen or the funding… “He also pointed out that, for the first time, Petersburg has a female governor, Valentina Matviyenko. “In city holidays now, we see more empresses than emperors—this isn’t coincidental,” he said.

Nor is it coincidental that the palace was built during the Presidency of Vladimir Putin, a Petersburg native. A photograph of Putin appears on the Ice Studio’s Web site, with a quotation from a 2002 speech about “employing culture to form a Russian national image.” During Petersburg’s tercentenary, in 2003, Putin spent nearly a million dollars on airplanes to disperse the rain clouds that imperilled this national image. It was a nature- defying gesture worthy of Peter the Great. In a Pushkinian denouement, rain poured down undeterred—notably, just when Putin was receiving international heads of state at the Bronze Horseman.

Once the “imperial idea” was back, the ice palace materialized almost as a matter of course. The tercentenary concluded with a summit of the European Union in the former palace of the Romanov grand dukes; its renovation cost the equivalent of three hundred million dollars, and entailed levelling nearly sixty pensioners’ gardening sheds. Ducal palace or gardening shed? House of ice or frozen apartment? These are not rhetorical questions. In one Web forum, a Petersburg resident complained that the money spent on the ice palace was enough to buy “two apartments for two young families.” Another replied, “Two apartments would bring happiness to only two families, but the ice palace brings happiness to tens, even hundreds, of thousands of people, especially to our children.”

Anna’s ice palace, with its poor human-rights record, might seem an odd source of delight for children. But replacing miserable jesters with happy children is one way to master history. In Vladimir Mayakovsky’s futuristic play “The Bedbug,” a cryogenized bourgeois is defrosted by an Institute for Human Resurrection, and put in the zoo. Drinking vodka and smoking, the bourgeois is an appalling spectacle; but mankind has a responsibility to transform “the horrors of a bygone age” into a “gay and edifying entertainment.” In just such a way, the Ice Studio transformed the House of Ice. No jesters

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