The Last Tsar's Dragons

A Snarky Note

This is a work of fantasy fiction surrounded with—and drowned in—history. Much of it is true.

Not the dragons, of course, but then you already knew that. Or else you took it for a metaphor for the Red Russians, as opposed to the White Russians, many of whom were prescient enough to have already headed for America and elsewhere. If that all sounds kind of Wonderlandish—well, so does the whole Russian Revolution.

A couple of the characters are made up, but not the tsar’s family, Leon Trotsky, or Rasputin or his death. (Except for the dragons, of course.)

Adam and his old band—Boiled in Lead—used to play a rousing version of the European pop disco Boney M’s “Rah, Rah Rasputin.” And Jane minored in Russian Literature and Religion at Smith College. Plus Jane’s grandparents on both sides were from Russian “states”—Ukraine and Latvia. So in some ways, this was a story bound to happen.

The only main character we made up is the nameless functionary, the bureaucrat. And if you are sharp-eyed, you will have noticed that he is the only character in first person. And possibly the author of this novella. That’s because when all the leaders die, the functionaries, the bureaucrats, go on. Without them, things—well—stop functioning. They are the ones who decide what to keep and what to burn in the histories. Or they write the histories, much of which is made up. It’s our small joke.

The brutal deaths of the entire Romanov family were not of course cleanly and quickly done by dragons. They were shot, bayoneted, and finally, one of the girls trying to crawl away was bludgeoned. The Russians were nothing if not thorough. Then the tsar and his family were buried in secret while the newly formed government spent years insisting the Romanovs were merely in exile. Repeat as often as necessary: there were no actual dragons.

We had written a bunch of short stories together before writing “The Last Tsar’s Dragon.” Those stories were published in a variety of anthologies. We’d also written a young adult graphic novel trilogy, and four or five middle grade novels, so we had our mother-son partnership down pat. No real arguments but a lot of “forceful conversations” along the way.

Then an invitation to a dragon anthology came to Jane in the mail. She thought she was done writing dragon stories. There was her There Be Dragons collection; the young adult Pit Dragon Chronicles (in four volumes); an Arthurian middle grade novel, The Dragon’s Boy; a graphic novel, The Last Dragon; lots of dragon poems; and a few dragon picture books. In fact, she was about to say no to the anthology, when two lines popped into her head. “The dragons were harrowing the provinces again. They did that whenever the tsar was upset with the Jews.”

Now Jane had already published two novels about the Holocaust (The Devil’s Arithmetic and Briar Rose) and was about to start on a third (Mapping the Bones). Plus she’d written a book of poems about her father’s family’s immigration in the early 1900s from Ukraine because the tsar’s dragons—the Cossacks—had indeed been harrowing the Jews (Ekaterinoslav). So Jane guessed there was maybe one last dragon story in her. But not to write alone.

She sent Adam the two lines that she had thought of and told him about the anthology invitation, saying: “Want to play?” And the dragon game was afoot.

That story was finished in about four months and accepted and printed in The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Ace, 2009. But once it was published, both Jane and Adam began to think it was a bigger story, tried to interest someone in a novel version, decided after a couple of rejections that a novella was a better idea. And by that time, Jane was starting a wonderful new publishing relationship with Tachyon, which—surprise!—had a novella program.

Then the hard work really began!

The original short story had been 13,000 words. The novella needed to be closer to 30–35,000. Conversations between the two of us began. And after the first complete novella draft (25,000 words) was done, we burrowed into the history and horror and the astonishing and bloody success that the revolution had been.

A success if you and your family lived through it, that is. Not all of our main characters do make it to the end, though except for Rasputin and the Romanovs and their bloody deaths, we only hint at the others in the novella. Bornstein (Trotsky) made it through the revolutionary years and about twenty years beyond, though he was first exiled from Russia and then escaped to Mexico, where one of Stalin’s lackeys (whom he mistook for a friend) took him out with an ice pick to the head.

Along the way, we learned a lot about haemophilia, the mad monk, the uxorious but-not-particularly-smart last tsar, his unsung wife who really did do a lot for the poor in Russia, though she’d always been considered a foreign interloper who was called called “German Alix” by the courtiers.

Jane felt bad for the murders of the Romanovs, though she always believed that Rasputin got what he deserved. Adam puts it a bit differently: “I feel bad for the children but am pretty solid on my preferred fate for dictators.”

The dragons? Mostly, we made them up!