1797–1801 Reign of Czar Paul I. He is murdered in March 1801.
1794 March: Alexander returns home. September: marries Anna, adopts Andrei Junior.
1796 Alexander opens his icery.
1798 Dr. Merck kills a man in a cryopreservation experiment. Suffers a stroke.
1799 Napoléon becomes Consul, then First Consul.
1801 Andrei Junior marries Varvara Redrikov.
1804 Napoléon proclaimed Emperor.
Anna dies.
1805 December 2: Battle of Austerlitz between the allied Austria and Russia against Napoléon.
Andrei Velitzyn leads the 2nd squadron of the Life Guards Horse regiment into battle and captures the eagle standard of the French Fourth Line Infantry regiment—the only trophy that allies won at Austerlitz. Andrei dies during the retreat through the Sachan ponds.
1807 Russia enters a coalition with France against Britain—the Continental blockade, aka Blocus.
1808 First publication of Goethe’s Faust.
Martin Sawyer leaves Russia.
1811 The Comet of 1812 is first sighted in Viviers, France.
1812 June: Napoléon invades Russia. September: burns Moscow. October‒December: retreats. The crossing of the Berezina River in December delivers a final blow to Napoléon’s army.
Alexander leaves home. He is adopted by the Chernigovsky Regiment as it chases the dwindling army of Napoléon across Russia.
1813–17 Persian Crown Prince Abbas Mirza in Tabriz employs British officers to modernize and train his army.
1814 April: Allies (Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria) enter Paris. Napoléon abdicates.
Alexander in Paris.
1814 July: Mary Goodwin (Shelley, in marriage) and Percy Bysshe Shelley travel through France.
Mary meets Alexander at Ossip Vassilian’s.
1815 March: Napoléon leaves Elba and lands in France, his “Hundred Days” end at Waterloo on June 18.
Alexander is taken to Persia and becomes a slave to Najar Alibek.
1817 Russian diplomatic mission to Tehran, led by General Yermoloff.
Alexander performs spying and eavesdropping duties on the British and Russians for Najar and Mirza.
1825 Persia is defeated by Russia. Britain refuses to help despite an Anglo-Persian treaty.
1829 A mob in Tehran dismembers the Russian envoy Griboedov.
1835 Alexander flees after the death of Najar Alibek and travels east.
1837 Persians under the new shah mount an attack on Afghan city-fortress Herat. British lieutenant Eldred Pottinger tries to defend Herat.
1838 A Russian military contingent under Count Simonich joins Persian shah in his camp. Colonel Stoddard arrives from Tehran with a British ultimatum to Persia. Russians leave and Persian army lifts the siege.
Alexander asks Pottinger for asylum.
1838–42 First Anglo-Afghan War.
1839 Alexander is taken to Calcutta.
1843 Pottinger dies in Hong Kong.
1854 Alexander leaves India for Singapore.
1900 Average annual temperatures begin to rise.
1905 Peking‒Paris auto rally.
1906 World fair in Milan.
1907 Anglo-Russian entente cordiale signed.
1912 Ballets Russes perform Stravinsky’s Petroushka in Covent Garden.
1912–15 Russian Silver Age intellectuals meet at the Stray Dog pub. Poet Anna Akhmatova is a regular.
1913 A British business delegation visits Russia.
Alexander meets Princess Elizabeth Goretsky. December: Elizabeth marries Pfaltzgraff von Welleren.
1914–18 World War I.
1914 August: Anna and Marie von Welleren are born.
1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
1926 Soviet government proposes to found a Soviet-Jewish Republic in Russian Far East (Birobidzhan).
1927, approximate: Joseph Stalin consolidates power in Communist Russia.
1933 Adolf Hitler is granted dictatorial powers. First Nazi concentration camps. Boycott of the Jews.
1935 Twenty-one German-Jewish doctors, refugees in France, emigrate to Birobidzhan; fourteen are arrested by NKVD.
Marie von Welleren marries Mark Fromm and follows him to Birobidzhan. Both are arrested.
1936–38 Show trials orchestrated by Stalin’s NKVD against “enemies of the state.”
1939–45 World War II.
1953–64 De-Stalinization of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev.
1961 Alexander visits Pierre and Anna Cazaux.
1968 Student uprisings in France.
Anna leaves Pierre, travels to New York with a young American.
1969 Rolling Stones tour the U.S.
Alexander meets Anna in New York.
1971 Anna publishes her autobiographical novel My Life Without a Twin.
1973 Oil crisis.
Alexander travels to USSR in hopes of visiting Birobidzhan.
2003 Deadly summer heat wave in Europe.
Anna dies.
2007 Northwest Passage now free of ice in summer. Arctic ice sheet is melting.
Alexander leaves for the Arctic.
A Few Notes on Language
As a multilingual narrative that touches on four centuries, this novel is as much about languages—how they can both unite and separate us—as anything else. Several real languages and their chimeras make appearances in the book, and pidgins of speech and thought go beyond the lingua franca that Prince Alex used to speak with his British friends.
For clarity, I’ve expressed distances in English miles throughout, except when they are referred to in dialogue. I sometimes used the now obsolete Russian unit versta, which is close to one kilometer. Prince Alex uses versta as a singular and Anglicizes it to versts as plural. The same is true for any Russian word he uses in plural: e.g., kibitkas. When using Russian last names, he applies masculine endings if he also mentions the family and emphasizes belonging to it: not Marie Tolstaya but Tolstoy; the same for Anna Velitzyn. Stand-alone female characters, typically minor ones, are given a last name with a feminine ending, e.g., Princess Dashkova. The Russian words spelled in Cyrillic letters are intentional, as are manners of address intended to convey a cultural flavor by being closer to the Russian original: Your Nobleship instead of Your Lordship.
The Yakuti, Aleut, and Chukchi words used in the novel are real, though their English spelling may not fully convey the way they should be pronounced.
Persian and Afghan names do not follow the Western first/last model. Words such as Khan can be either a name or an address (i.e., Mister), and the words Khwaja (Khoja), “master”; Mirza (Meerza), “man of letters, of learning”; or Sirdar (Sardar), “chief” are honorific titles. It is customary to use these and other titles (even without a name) when addressing people, strangers and friends alike. The English spelling of these words is an approximation, which has evolved over the last two hundred years (e.g., Saheb to Sahib).
Similarly, even English terms and place names have changed over time. For example, Unalaska used to be spelled Oonalaska, and today’s diplomat used to be a diplomatist. Cities have been named and renamed over the centuries. Wilna/Vilna became Vilnius, Calcutta became Kolkata, and St. Petersburg had brief tenures as Petrograd and Leningrad before returning to its original name. Prince Alex typically refers to cities by their contemporaneous names.
Acknowledgments
I am tremendously grateful to the people without whose hard work, enthusiasm, and patience this book may never have seen the light of day: Seth Fishman, my agent, and Paul Whitlatch, my editor at Scribner. They are superheroes as far as I am concerned; changing lives is just one of their powers. I am incredibly lucky to have these two on my side.
I am grateful to Sophie Vershbow, my publicist; Anne Cherry, my copyeditor; and Katie Rizzo, my production editor for expertly leading me and the novel to the finish line (or the start line—depending on how you look at it).
Geoff, my partner, deserves special, beam
ing-smile thanks for his all-out support, for being both my most cherished fan and promoter, and the mischievous gremlin who typed irreverent, Russian-inspired words into the manuscript whenever I left it unattended.
Big thanks are due to friends, colleagues, and mentors who believed in me, took my project seriously from its very humble beginnings, and nudged me forward with critical bits of support and advice. Ted Kosmatka, Nancy Kress, Patrick LoBrutto, Rudy Rucker—thank you. Many others helped me through various stages in the manuscript’s life: members of my writing group Horrific Miscue, the Clarion West workshop and its organizers, the wonderful community of speculative fiction writers and fans in Seattle, Washington.
I am thankful to Dr. Hasok Chang for his enthusiastic help with the late eighteenth-century physics of heat and cold, Dr. Stephan Pellenz and Andrea Gentry for advice on German and French languages, and Dr. Gholamali Jafari for help with Farsi and a virtual tour of the Tehran bazaar. I am indebted to my friends Drs. Maria and Ilya Tchoumakov for hosting me in France and introducing me to Paris and Melun. Without Dr. Cecilia Bitz, I would not know by how much one needs to change the meeting temperature of the Arctic ice.
The Age of Ice is a work of historical fiction, and in writing it, I attempted to reproduce several true historical events as accurately as possible. I consulted numerous original and secondary, relevant and seemingly irrelevant, English and Russian sources. The most important source materials—and I am lucky to have found them—were three separate independent accounts of Joseph Billings’s Arctic expedition written by its members: Englishman Martin Sauer, German Carl Merck, and Russian Gavrila Sarychev. Talk about a well-rounded perspective!
The names, places, and dates associated with the siege of Orenburg are based on Alexander Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev’s Rebellion (in Russian) and accompanying notes. Chilling details of Napoléon’s army’s demise were inspired by Achilles Rose’s account Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia Anno 1812, Medico-Historical and the memoirs of an eyewitness Russian officer, Feodor Glinka.
The events surrounding the siege of Herat and the role of Eldred Pottinger, a historical figure, were informed by the definitive History of the War in Afghanistan by John William Kaye, Pottinger’s own correspondence with the British authorities, Lady Florentia Sale’s diary of captivity in Afghanistan (A Journal of the First Afghan War), Ivan Blaramberg’s memoir of the Russian mission to Herat (in Russian), and other sources.
Anna Akhmatova’s poems mentioned in the novel were written in 1910–1911 and first published in Russian in 1912. The quoted poems are my own original translations.
Should you, dear reader, find any unintentional factual errors, I apologize and beg leniency: after all, Prince Alex’s memory is hardly perfect, and this book is fortunately—or sadly—just a work of fiction.
© STEPHANIE SKEFFINGTON
J.M. SIDOROVA was born in Moscow, when it was the capital of the USSR, to the family of an official of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. She attended Moscow State University and the graduate school of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1990 and works as a research professor at the University of Washington, where she studies aging and carcinogenesis.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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