El caballero de San Petersburgo

Author: Mayra Montero
- Fiction
- Tusquets Editores
- ISBN: 9786074215366
- Release Date: 04-22-2014
-Reviewed by: Eduardo de Lamadrid

El caballero de San Petersburgo is based on real but little known events and persons, and is set in the Europe of the Ancien Regime and in the America of the Independence Movements at the end of the 18th century. It narrates the story of Antonia de Salis, a 17 year old Creole woman who loses her mother in a shipwreck during a voyage from Havana to Jamaica for her brother's wedding. To alleviate her sadness, her father sends her to Russia to reside with her cousin Teresa and her husband, Alexander Ivanovich Viazemski, Russian prince and governor of Cherson.

The social position of her cousin allows Antonia to meet a person who will fascinate her, Lt. Colonel Francisco de Miranda, just arrived from Venezuela, and the protagonist of the novel. Miranda, a politician, soldier, womanizer, fetishist, humanist and diplomat, is considered one of the inspirations for colonial independence. Miranda wins the admiration of all who surround him thanks to his charisma, his verbal dexterity and his capacity to enrapture women. Antonia falls under his spell and follows him to St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, Miranda is pursued by a Spanish diplomat, Pedro de Macanaz, who is suspicious of the Lt. Colonel's intentions and believes this an opportunity to render a service to the Spanish Crown that might land him a transfer to sunnier climes. His obsession with hunting down Miranda will lead him to follow his prey at each point of the Venezuelan's mysterious journey.

Miranda seeks the protection and alliance of Gregory Potemkin, prince of the old Russian province of Taurida, including the once again notorious Crimea, and former lover of Catherine the Great. Since Potemkin has always looked for his own interests, this relationship raises more eyebrows in Madrid. Empowered by the Crown, Macanaz sets out to find proofs of Miranda's disloyalty, finally resulting in the latter's capture and delivery to the Spanish. If this social-political context is one pillar of the plot, then love constitutes the other.

The love between Antonia and Francisco moves in a cut and thrust manner that does not satisfy the girl very much, a circumstance that Macanaz will use against Miranda. Through an intermediary, Macanaz asks Antonia to join the enterprise that will put the supposedly false Lt. Colonel in prison, and in that way gratify her by now spiteful heart. Yet the heart of a woman is a very complicated thing...   This is the plot line of a novel which combines passions, deceptions, intrigues, treachery and vengeance, plus the costumes and customs of the Russian court with a journey through history and Russian lands.

The third person narrator guides us between the past, where we are informed of Antonia's origins, and the present. The novel is divided into two alternating narrative lines, one that relates the story of Antonia de Salis and another that relates the story of Pedro de Macanaz, and is structured into three parts that correspond to three different locations and periods (Cherson, 1786; St. Petersburg, 1787; and Cadiz, 1816). The chapters are unnumbered and each one is introduced by an aphorism of the Swiss writer, philosopher and theologian, Johann Kasper Lavater, who we find out in the end, has dedicated a book to Miranda.

Mayra Montero's prose is characterized by the beauty and density of her descriptions, as well as by fluidity and elegance, especially in scenes that depict forbidden loves and encounters between lovers. She presents situations with a dazzling, almost cinematographic clarity, so it is never difficult for the reader to enter a particular place and moment, including the intense heat of the Caribbean and the frigid cold of Russian cities.

The lexical richness that Montero employs deserves special mention. To achieve further verisimilitude, the author makes use of terms and expressions proper to the age of which she writes. This might send one to the dictionary and thus break up the rhythm of the reading, but will not deter an educated reader who takes pleasure in learning.

 

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