person
"Princess" Tarakanova
Princess Tarakanova
also: княжна Тараканова, Elizabeth Tarakanova
A pretender to the Russian throne under Catherine the Great, lured back to Russia and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where legend holds she died in a flooded cell (d. 1775); the subject of Konstantin Flavitsky's famous 1864 painting.
Reading notes
- The Commotion §18 княжна Тараканова
'Princess' Tarakanova (d. 1775), a pretender to the Russian throne under Catherine the Great, lured to Russia and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where she reportedly died in a flooded cell -- the subject of a famous 1864 Konstantin Flavitsky painting showing rats and rising water. Mashenka's imagination reaches for this legendary image of aristocratic ruin and a cold, vermin-infested cell as the worst fate she can conceive of.
- A Trivial Incident §37 Princess Tarakanova
A framed reproduction or engraving of Konstantin Flavitsky's 1864 painting "Princess Tarakanova," depicting the legendary pretender drowning in her flooded Peter-and-Paul-Fortress cell as rats climb to escape the rising water -- a fixture of many nineteenth-century Russian drawing rooms, here doing double work as an emblem of the house's own airless, arrested stillness.