Warning: The scene I am about to describe contains material of a fictional nature; some readers, especially professional historians, may find it disturbing.

One day in the first half of the 20th century, when Stalin was in dreary flower and Gorbachev just a boy pitching hay on his father's collective farm, a class of Russian children took a trip to the countryside near Moscow. They came to see the famous Sheremetev estate at Kuskovo, where Count Nicholas had once made the gardens and waterways glitter with torches for the Empress Catherine. Unlike so many of the great houses of Russia, Kuskovo hadn't been ripped down to make way for some cataclysmic piece of Soviet architecture. It remained as a museum for the people of the Revolution, and on this day the people's children would see it for themselves.

They followed their teacher through the fir trees and across the lawns, past the ruins of the outdoor theater, around the rambling seventy-acre garden and the Italian-style theater built by Nicholas after a tour of Europe. Before they could enter the Big House, they were taken for an obligatory visit to the Old Quarter. Here were no palaces or gardens. Here the Sheremetev serfs had once lived and worked. A thousand serfs on this one vast estate! 100,000 on the count's lands all over Russia!

"Look," said the teacher, "and see for yourselves how the workers lived, compared to their masters. They had no palaces, no theaters. By the honest labor of their hands, they made their lazy master wealthy. Somewhere in this quarter lived a poor blacksmith, Ivan Kovalyov, who had his daughter Praskovia stolen from him and taken to the palace when she was only eight. There she was forced with the other serfs to sing in Count Nicholas' fashionable opera—to sing like a canary in a cage. When she grew up, Praskovia became the bride of this decadent man, who always took what he wanted without producing anything. Only by her devotion to her people did she rise above her situation and become a heroine for every Russian."

The children accepted the story. They abhorred the lascivious Count Nicholas, who stole little Praskovia from her serf family and caged her like a songbird. However, when they entered the palace, their conviction wavered. Even in its reduced state, the scale and beauty of the house stunned them. Oh to be a decadent imperialist—or even a slave!—in a place like this. One romantically inclined child studied the portraits on the walls. Here, she saw a beautiful young woman in a blue-feathered helmet. This was Praskovia, painted in her costume for Gretry's The Marriage of the Samnites. After that triumphant performance, the Empress Catherine sent her a diamond ring in appreciation. In another portrait, an older, thinner Praskovia gazed peacefully upon the world that had made her a countess. Beside her breast hung a miniature portrait of the master who had become her lover.

The girl struggled to remember the story as she'd heard it from her teacher: that Praskovia was a captive in this house, a victim of a Bluebeard husband. She couldn't help thinking of an old song she'd heard about a count riding home from a hunt, meeting a pretty servant girl as she led the cows home, and falling in love with her. "The churchbells are calling, our sweet Parasha is to be married to the master."

If it's easier to be a lazy aristocrat than a hard-working serf, then it's also easier to be a lazy storyteller than a scholarly biographer, who has to append the words "possibly" and "may have" to nearly every interesting description of human behavior. I can dream of Soviet children wandering through Praskovia's house, but in his biography of Praskovia, The Pearl, Douglas Smith only hints at such a scene. Under the Soviets, he says, Praskovia became a quasi-socialist heroine, her life "crudely politicized" for the edification of schoolchildren, a version of her story even appearing on state TV. This 20th-century Praskovia stood in contrast to the romantic version that had swept over Russia on the wings of a 19th-century ballad. That song, originating with the serfs at Kuskovo, had Nicholas say to Praskovia (with the cows bearing witness), "Tho' born a peasant, tomorrow you're to become a lady."  The girl may not have been thrilled about marrying the count, but she didn't question his politics.

A novelist might prefer the romantic image of Praskovia to the revolutionary one, but Smith sets both of these aside. His quest is for the real woman behind the socialist tracts, the tavern songs, the sentimental wall-hangings. Who was Praskovia? Where should we search for her? She left none of the tokens so dear to historians and biographers: no letters, diaries, love notes, grocery lists. Her literary output consisted of her name in her own handwriting at the bottom of a marriage certificate, which incidentally had been worked up to prove that she descended from Polish nobility. Nicholas had the novelist's temperament, as opposed to the historian's; anyway, this false pedigree was his attempt to head off the ostracism sure to come when the nobility got word of his marriage to a former serf. Did Praskovia feel any misgivings as she wrote "daughter of Ivan," beside her name, knowing perfectly well that Ivan Kovalyov still lived on her husband's land?

There's no way of knowing. In fact, nearly everything we do know about Praskovia comes from her husband's account—which isn't such a bad thing, since he was, after all, Russian. In several intensely emotional passages, including a letter to their son, Nicholas draws a vivid picture of the woman he loved (in his words) "as much as my own life." After her death, he wanted Praskovia to be remembered as a woman who was "virtuous, imbued with honor, and endowed with intelligence … which is why during her life she was respected by honest people, loved by our household, and blessed by the poor." He insisted that she was a sanctifying influence in his own life, which had been all debauchery till the time he came to love her. "Steadfast, sincere, tender love," he wrote, "drove from my heart shameful love, for which I am grateful."

Nicholas' words are worth something, but of course they simplify the story, and say at least as much about his dishonor as his wife's honor. He had met Praskovia when he was a budding impresario in his twenties, searching his father's estate at Kuskovo for serf boys and girls to put on the stage (in 18th-century Russia, most performances were command performances). When Nicholas found Praskovia, then working as a house servant, he knew he'd found a jewel, a pretty girl with an extraordinary singing talent and stage presence. He gave her the stage name "The Pearl" and put her to work along with his other slave-actors, learning to read and write, dance, speak French, and generally behave like an aristocrat. On the master's stage, Praskovia became a noblewoman, and it was one step from the master's stage to his bed.

The story might have ended there, but it didn't. Was it Praskovia's art that carried her so deeply into Nicholas' affections? Was it her character, her loyalty, her inspiring Christian faith that made him willing to throw so much aside for her sake? Smith's account is limited, as he points out, by the privacy that necessarily exists between lovers. Whatever passed between Nicholas and Praskovia will never be known in detail. But if we trust Nicholas' assurance that Praskovia was a woman of unusual religious conviction, we can surmise that she may have felt guilty about the illicit relationship and that she may have longed for marriage and motherhood. She may have felt that God wanted to punish her for being Nicholas' lover. Possibly, even probably, this grieved Nicholas.

In any case, in her thirty-second year, Praskovia became very sick and nearly died. Nicholas watched in helpless agony as she suffered. When Praskovia came through her illness, he wrote, "her sense of gratitude for the Almighty's munificence impressed on her grateful heart these lines of Scripture which she often repeated: 'The Lord hath punished me severely, but he hath not given me over to death.'"

And what about him? Did he also feel chastened? Was it guilt, gratitude, love, or a furious mixture of all three that led Count Sheremetev to defy every social convention and make this woman, so long his lover, his wife before God?

Nicholas and Praskovia married in 1801. They had only a little while left together. After giving birth to a son in 1803, Praskovia became very weak, fell gradually into a coma, and finally died. A grieving Nicholas closed up her bedroom and turned it into a shrine, a sanctuary. "May it serve as a holy memorial to her virtues," he wrote to his son. He ordered that nothing in it should be changed. The living, breathing woman had taken her hopes and passion to the grave. In the place of flesh and blood stood the image of a saint, to be followed by other images: the 19th-century romantic and the 20th-century revolutionary.

It is ironic, as Smith points out, that "one of the greatest voices in Russia was denied the voice to tell her story." Without that voice, even in the work of an accomplished historian and fine writer, Praskovia remains a quiet and ghostly figure, like a face flickering on an early film. Still, The Pearl is a fascinating and moving story, even if it's mainly a story about the transformation of Count Sheremetev. Whatever his blindnesses and shortcomings, Nicholas was light years ahead of his time. "His personal journey of moral transformation," says Smith, "was one that Russian society as a whole had to undertake before serfdom could be ended … . [H]is life issued a challenge to society that declared the common humanity in all people, nobles and serfs alike."

Betty Smartt Carter is a novelist and Latin teacher living in Alabama.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.