Eton’s mother, Vera, descends from two of the oldest names in Russia, both of which met, by chance of marriage, in her own parents — and neither name was supposed to survive the century.
Her father’s line runs back to Prince Sergei Volkonsky, one of the young aristocrat-officers who rose against the tsar in the Decembrist revolt of December 1825: a few hours of confusion on a Petersburg square that ended in gunfire, then in exile. The leaders were hanged; the rest, stripped of title and fortune, were sent to Siberia for decades. Volkonsky served his sentence in the mines near Irkutsk, where his wife’s decision to follow him into exile became one of the era’s most famous stories of devotion, retold for generations afterward. Family legend traces a second, quieter branch from the same years in Siberia, acknowledged within the family, raised with the name and the manner, but holding no formal claim to the estate or the title. When the October Revolution came and the recognized branch fled abroad, this one had nothing on paper worth fleeing with and nowhere waiting for them if they had. They stayed, and the name stayed with them. Which is how Prof. Mikhail Alexandrovich Volkonsky, Eton’s grandfather, came to be both an aristocrat by every visible measure and, improbably, a trusted man of Soviet science.
Her mother’s line carries the name Rezanov, tied to Nikolai Rezanov, the real explorer and diplomat behind the Russian-American Company’s push into Alaska and California, whose brief, unconsummated romance with a young woman in San Francisco became one of Russian legend’s great tragedies, retold two centuries later as the rock opera Juno and Avos. It’s a strange thing for a Soviet physicist’s household to carry: a piece of old imperial Russia’s reach toward America, generations before his own grandson would fall for one.
Nobody in the family has ever needed the paperwork to believe whose they are.
As for Eton’s father, he is a separate story. Readers of the novel will understand why he doesn’t feature here.
(Prof. Volkonsky’s family connections described in the novel are the author’s invention. Prince Sergei Volkonsky’s documented descendants are a matter of historical record that doesn’t include the branch described here. Nikolai Rezanov’s two real children leave no traceable descendants in the historical record at all. Both branches are built around real historical figures and events, but the family link connecting them to Eton is fiction.)
Images on this page have been created with the help of AI.