Their marriage had been kept secret: stories in which a landowner fell in love with his serf were not uncommon and were not condemned—but the wedding was a completely different matter. To ordinary people, it seemed strange that the union of the richest man in the Russian Empire, Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev, and his home-theater actress—no matter how clever, educated, and talented Praskovya Ivanovna Zhemchugova was—could exist at all. Yet what can’t happen in life…