Summary
A porcelain-skinned Russian aristocrat—Princess Triloff—glides through the smoke of a Petrograd inferno, clutching only a Fabergé locket and a Turgenev paperback, while red banners howl outside like wolves of history. She lands on Manhattan’s concrete tundra, trades her sable for a thrift-store boa, and reinvents herself as the city’s most clandestine arts patron, slipping roubles-turned-dollars beneath the doors of poets who dine on varnish and absinthe. One such debtor is Owen Carey, a threadbare bard whose stanzas smell of turpentine and coal dust; unknown to him, every ink-stained page is bankrolled by the exile princess who signs her cheques with a Cyrillic squiggle he cannot read. Fortune pirouettes: Owen’s Uncle Krakerfeller—an oil-slick Midas—expires mid-cigar, bequeathing a mountain of securities that crushes the poet under their weight. In a carnival of masks, Owen swaps identities with his ragged roommate Frank Manners, assuming the name of the deceased plutocrat while Frank inherits the poet’s hollow pockets and hollower stomach. At a Catskills resort turned Art-Nouveau aquarium of gossip, Owen—now incognito as the millionaire—meets Triloff, who is wearing last season’s Paris chiffon and the weary gaze of someone who has already read tomorrow’s headlines. She, believing Frank the penniless troubadour to be the true genius, commissions sonnets from him; Owen, smitten and mortified, watches his own verses recited back to him by a proxy. Revelation arrives like a thrown brick: the princess unmasks the real poet, love detonates, but a second will—inked by a vengeful cousin—evaporates the inheritance. Owen, terror-struck by the gulf between her former imperial wealth and his restored pauperdom, vanishes into a Lower-East garret where wallpaper peels like diseased mica. Triloff follows, finds him burning pages for warmth, and confesses that the Bolsheviks have swallowed her estates whole. Two paupers embrace amid the smoke of burnt sonnets, richer in destitution than they ever were in splendour.
Synopsis
Princess Triloff, an emigrée from Czarist Russia, escapes to America where she becomes a patron of the arts. She falls in love with the verses of impoverished poet Owen Carey and becomes his anonymous benefactor. When Owen inherits a fortune from his rich Uncle Krakerfeller, he assumes his uncle's identity and confers his own upon an impoverished friend, Frank Manners. At a resort, Owen meets the princess and falls in love with her, but is chagrined to discover that she is enamored with Manners. The princess finally discovers Owen's real identity and the two fall in love. However, when a later will rescinds Owen's inheritance, he becomes intimidated by the princess's wealth and skulks away to his garret. The princess follows him and they are happily reunited in poverty when she discovers that her fortune has been confiscated in the revolution.
