Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
ALAN NAFZGER’s Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer – Pecan Street Press
Lubbock ● Austin ● Fort Worth
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2011 Alan Nafzger
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ISBN: 9781072041610
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
By Alan Nafzger
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer FADE IN:
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
BEGIN MAIN TITLES
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
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EXT. Sparrow Hills – OLD MUSCOVY (Summer 1669) – DAY
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
We see seventeenth century Moscow from a vantage point known as the Sparrow Hills. We see a rich and beautiful city. Hundreds of golden domes topped by a forest of golden crosses rose above the treetops. There are so many that at the moment when the sun touches all this gold, the blaze of light reflects into the camera.
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
1.2 EXT. Moscow Kremlin – DAY
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
The white-walled churches beneath these domes were scattered through a city as large as London. At the center, on a modest hill, stands the white citadel of the Kremlin with its three magnificent cathedrals, its mighty bell tower, its gorgeous palaces, chapels and hundreds of houses.
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
1.3 EXT. Moscow COMMERCIAL DISTRICT – RED SQUARE – DAY
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
We see the bustling life of a busy commercial city. The market is crowded with jostling humanity. Tradespeople, artisans, idlers and ragged holy men walked beside laborers, peasants, black-robed priests and soldiers.
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
The streets were made of wood and attempt to provide footing. Often, they failed.
St. Basil’s Cathedral (1561) is new. beggars clustered and make pitiful sounds for alms.
Peter the Great: Vampire Slayer
We see the high Kremlin walls. It is a brawling, open-air marketplace, with logs laid down to cover the mud, with lines of log houses and small chapels built against the Kremlin wall. We see rows and rows of shops and stalls, some wood, some covered by tent-like canvas.
Merchants are standing in front of stalls shouting to customers. They are selling velvet and brocade, silk, bronze, brass and copper goods, iron wares, tooled leather, pottery, innumerable objects made of wood, pirozhki (small meat pies) and tons of melons, apples, pears, cherries, plums, carrots, cucumbers, onions and garlic. There are many garlic venders.
Tailors and street jewelers. Barbers. Less ambitious merchants sell old clothes, rags, used furniture and junk.
We see a carts struggling to make it through the crowd. The people part for a fat-bellied, bearded boyar on horseback. At a street corner, musicians, jugglers, acrobats and animal handlers with bears and dogs performed tricks.
In front of a tavern, we see a naked men who has sold every stitch of clothing for a drink. He joins other men, naked and clothed alike, lay in rows in the mud, drunk.
Down the hill, nearer the Moscow River, animals are sold, and live fish from tanks.
Soldiers and other workers are building mysterious stacks of wood. Soon there will be bonfires.
On the riverbank women are bent over the water washing clothes.
END MAIN TITLES
A BUYER picks up a piece of silk.
BUYER
Where did this come from?
Merchant
Only God and the tsar know.
The first sign of dusk seems to be the swallows, who begin to soar over the Kremlin. The more successful notice.
We see other merchants and clients glance at the setting sun. The merchants appear rushed to complete their sale. The clients simply walk away. Suddenly iron triangle bells signal 20 different alarms. The alarms seem to be a function of government and sound at a certain time before sundown.
With the alarm, all activity comes to a halt. The shops close and the streets empty. Actually, there is a panic. Men rush, women run.
Several women at the river in haste collide with each other, slip in the mud and topple into the mud and river. Fear; they are terrified about being out in the dark.
Strangely many vendors lock themselves up in the shops, leaving good outside. Other vendor’s carts have doubled as tables and the goods can quickly be race off. There are collisions but no one stops to argue. The clear goal is to leave.
That morning, it must have taken hours to assemble but the market is now deserted in less than a minute.
Once the market is desolate and dark, we see a sole VAMPIRE walking. He is joined by SECOND and still a THIRD. More vampires gather. They stop walking and look at the Kremlin war. They look ominously and lustfully over the walls.
VAMPIRE LEADER
It is high up to God; it is a very long way up to the tsar.
The second and third vampires laugh and they all mockingly chuckle together.
- INT. Terem Palace DINNING ROOM – EVENING
From the dimly lit, incense-scented Kremlin rooms and chapels, Tsar Alexis rules.
Tsar Alexis II eats alone at a high table surrounded by boyars who dine at lower tables. He is served only by special boyars, who tasted his food and sipped his wine. The meal is gargantuan. But Alexis doesn’t touch most of the dishes. Instead, he sends them as presents to various tables to show his favor.
There is a woman’s cry from another room in the palace. It could be childbirth. The boyars and Alexis looks up from their meal and then return to it.
2.1 INT. Terem Palace BIRTHING ROOM – EVENING
We see Alexis’ MAN waiting outside the room for the news he will deliver.
We enter the birthing room through a doorway decorated for the event with a gilded panel bearing the date “1669”, and the intertwined initials of Maria Miloslavskaya along with those of her husband Alexis Mikhailovich.
There is a large ornate bed where Tsaritsa Maria Miloslavskaya, later will give birth. A midwife is generously equipped with a new gown of black velvet, and a cradle is prepared. There are many LADIES in waiting observing.
2.2 INT/EXT. Terem Palace EXIT – NIGHT
There is hesitation at the door of the palace. Alexis, surrounded with soldiers, doesn’t go outside until they receive the all clear. There is more security then one would expect. Then they move with deliberate haste toward the Cathedral of the Annunciation.
- Cathedral of the Annunciation – NIGHT
Alexis is in the church for vespers. He brings his favorite boyars, and seems to be consulting them on affairs of state during the religious service.
Alexis
They will come tonight. What is the state of security?
Boyar #1
There are 100 soldiers protecting the Tsaritsa. Fifth more are in reserve, tonight.
Alexis
What about the celebrations?
Boyar #2
All in order.
Alexis
I’ve been entrusted with the future of all the Russias and I feel uneasy.
Boyar #1
What are your concerns? The Tsaritsa?
Of course.
Alexis
Pray for Russia.
Boyar #2
God bless her.
Boyar #3
God bless the Tsar.
Alexis
To the west and the south, Russia is ringed by enemies who struggle to keep us – a giant – landlocked and isolated.
(pause)
Sweden is the reigning mistress of the Baltic, stands guard across this sea road to the West.
Boyar #1
We are still dealing with the old Mongol conquerors and vassals of the Ottoman sultan.
Boyar #2
They continue to raid and plunder the Russian and Ukrainian villages. Several stockades have been stormed they have have lead the entire population off into slavery.
Boyar #3
It is embarrassing that Russians are such a contribution to the Ottoman slave markets.
Boyar #4
But there was nothing so far that anyone can do.
Alexis
Catholic Poland, the ancient enemy of Orthodox Russia.
Boyar #1
You have reconquered Smolensk from Poland.
Boyar #2
This Russian fortress town lays a mere 150 miles from Moscow.
Alexis
Too near.
All the boyars nod in agreement.
Alexis
The shining prize of Kiev, mother of all Russian cities and the birthplace of Russian Christianity, is in the hands of vampiric heretics.
(pause)
Sacred Kiev and the bread basket of Europe are the lands of the our mortal enemies.
Boyar #5
What will you do?
Alexis moves to the front of the church, interrupting the service. The boyars and priests seem fuddled. It doesn’t seem to be part of the ritual. Alexis turns to the boyars.
ALEXIS
I’m going to pray for a son sound in mind and body.
Alexis leaves the boyars and steps forward drops to his knees in front of the alter to pray.
3 INT. Terem Palace PARLOR – NIGHT
Alexis’ long wait for the birth is spent with his family intimate friends playing backgammon then chess. Later, Alexis listens to a daughter read stories from a book of church history.
There seems to be one last scream of pain from the birthing room.
3.1 INT. Terem Palace BIRTHING ROOM – NIGHT
After a long and difficult labor, the baby is safely delivered with a fine caul (birth membrane) over her face. The midwife is elated.
It is a girl.
She looks the infant over carefully.
She is perfectly formed.
One LADY looks curiously at another LADY.
LADY
It’s considered a sign of good fortune.
The other lady nods that she understands.
Peter the Great (Russian: Пётр Вели́кий, tr. Pyotr Velíkiy, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr vʲɪˈlʲikʲɪj]), Peter I (Russian: Пётр Первый, tr. Pyotr Pyervyy, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ˈpʲɛrvɨj]) or Pyotr Alekséyevich (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ]; 9 June [O.S. 30 May] 1672 – 8 February [O.S. 28 January] 1725)[b] ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 7 May [O.S. 27 April] 1682 until his death in 1725, jointly ruling before 1696 with his elder half-brother, Ivan V.
Through a number of successful wars, he captured ports at Azov and the Baltic Sea, laying the groundwork for the Imperial Russian Navy, ending uncontested Swedish supremacy in the Baltic and beginning the Tsardom’s expansion into a much larger empire that became a major European power. He led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernised and based on the Enlightenment.[1] Peter’s reforms had a lasting impact on Russia, and many institutions of the Russian government trace their origins to his reign. He adopted the title of Emperor in place of the old title of Tsar in 1721, and founded and developed the city of Saint Petersburg, which remained the capital of Russia until 1917.
However, the formation of local elites domestically was not his main priority, and the first Russian university was founded only a year before his death, in 1724. The second one was founded 30 years after his death, during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth.
Peter’s legacy has always been a major concern of Russian intellectuals. Riasanovsky points to a “paradoxical dichotomy” in the black and white images such as God/Antichrist, educator/ignoramus, architect of Russia’s greatness/destroyer of national culture, father of his country/scourge of the common man. Voltaire’s 1759 biography gave 18th-century Russians a man of the Enlightenment, while Alexander Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” poem of 1833 gave a powerful romantic image of a creator-god.[47][48][49] Slavophiles in mid-19th century deplored Peter’s westernization of Russia. Western writers and political analysts recounted “The Testimony” or secret will of Peter the Great. It supposedly revealed his grand evil plot for Russia to control the world via conquest of Constantinople, Afghanistan and India. It was a forgery made in Paris at Napoleon’s command when he started his invasion of Russia in 1812. Nevertheless it is still quoted in foreign policy circles.[50] The Communists executed the last Romanoffs, and their historians such as Mikhail Pokrovsky presented strongly negative views of the entire dynasty. Stalin however admired how Peter strengthened the state, and wartime, diplomacy, industry, higher education, and government administration. Stalin wrote in 1928, “when Peter the Great, who had to deal with more developed countries in the West, feverishly built works in factories for supplying the army and strengthening the country’s defenses, this was an original attempt to leap out of the framework of backwardness.”[51] As a result Soviet historiography emphasizes both the positive achievement and the negative factor of oppressing the common people.[52]
After the fall of Communism in 1991, scholars and the general public in Russia and the West gave fresh attention to Peter and his role in Russian history. His reign is now seen as the decisive formative event in the Russian imperial past. Many new ideas have merged, such as whether he strengthened the autocratic state or whether the tsarist regime was not statist enough given its small bureaucracy.[53] Modernization models have become contested ground.[54] Historian Ia. Vodarsky said in 1993 that Peter, “did not lead the country on the path of accelerated economic, political and social development, did not force it to ‘achieve a leap’ through several stages…. On the contrary, these actions to the greatest degree put a brake on Russia’s progress and created conditions for holding it back for one and a half centuries!” [55] The autocratic powers that Stalin admired appeared as a liability to Evgeny Anisimov, who complained that Peter was, “the creator of the administrative command system and the true ancestor of Stalin.”[56]
While the cultural turn in historiography has downplayed diplomatic, economic and constitutional issues, new cultural roles have been found for Peter, for example in architecture and dress. James Cracraft argues:
The Petrine revolution in Russia—subsuming in this phrase the many military, naval, governmental, educational, architectural, linguistic, and other internal reforms enacted by Peter’s regime to promote Russia’s rise as a major European power—was essentially a cultural revolution, one that profoundly impacted both the basic constitution of the Russian Empire and, perforce, its subsequent development.[57]