Lastly, Aleksandra is best friends with Sasha Uzdaleva, the young woman Father Gapon took from the orphanage four years ago. He brought her to live with him when she was twelve years old. To this day, Sasha (now sixteen) is his companion, his concubine. He has recommended that she not see Aleksandra, afraid that, with her connection to Narishkina, word would get out about his private life in the tsarina’s court.

“How could you have so much to talk about with Aleksandra, Sasha? She’s such an uninteresting woman.”

“Women’s things. That’s what she and I talk about.”

But whenever Aleksandra has a day off—which isn’t often, since Anya Karenina relies on her for everything—she visits Sasha, who, although closely watched, manages to find ways to escape. Gapon knows about every meeting his lover, Sasha, has (Gapon learned a lot when he worked for Sergei Zubatov, the former chief of the Okhrana).

Gapon also wants to keep an eye on Aleksandra, but from a distance, since someone might photograph them together, and if the Princess Elizaveta Narishkina suspected that Father Gapon was getting her Aleksandra mixed up with the members of the assembly, it would cause a commotion in circles whose reach would set off an avalanche he’s not prepared to face.

16. Clementine, in Pursuit of the Night

16. Clementine, in Pursuit of the Night

Clementine leaves her brief meeting with Father Gapon wild with rage. Where should she go? She makes a spur-of-the-moment decision, and the minutes fly as she walks to the anarchists’ lair. She hadn’t planned on stopping by; she has no desire to see the agents of her failure. Which one is the imbecile who built the bomb that didn’t destroy the tram and its rails? But after her encounter with Father Gapon, she desperately needs their company.

The group of her accomplices is small, nothing like the multitudes that follow Father Gapon: they reject all authority, they despise ceremony, they don’t believe in any god or leader (Clementine included), and to all of this, there’s an intense fanaticism and burning irreverence that borders on the obscene.

They call themselves Stenka Razin, in honor of the Cossack hero who led a group of bandits, insurgents, and fugitives—“Fear the wrath of my vengeance!”—who took on the tsar, the Persians, and the Kalmykian Tartars and was faithful only to the River Volga and his mother Russia.

It was a matter of some debate to find a name for the group, because they can never agree on anything. Someone proposed the name Samson Group, but Clementine objected: why would they name themselves after a man who’d had his eyes gouged out when he knocked down the pillars of the Philistines’ temple, burying himself in the rubble?

“His ‘I die with the Philistines!’ is the act of a blind man.”