Chapter 1 : Interlude
Memory, Konstantin Knyazev would come to understand, is a quite incredible and confounding thing. Memories come unheeded into the mind when one least expects them and least desires to acknowledge the past. Memories cannot be controlled and can seldom be made sense of. They float around in the air, much like carcinogenic free-radicals, and attempt to penetrate the mind of the unsuspecting.
To a non-linear thinker, memories open windows to the past, and offer unique perspectives on things which could not have been understood at the time. However, to a man such as Konstantin, the prospect of having his carefully constructed understanding of his life deconstructed by hindsight was unappealing to the extreme. Russians have a strange proclivity for nostalgia, and similarly they have a strange proclivity towards forming an identity based upon fundamentally contradictory concepts. Konstantin was no different.
At once a wizard and a celebrated scientist he used the muggle practice of skepticism and scientific exploration to supplement his fundamental desire to believe. Furthermore, well beyond believing, he knew. Magic is real. It is a substantiated fact. However, the divide between muggle curiosity and wizard-kind's contentment with simply knowing this to be true, he was wholly unsatisfied with just accepting that magic was real.
If Konstantin were to venture a guess, and it would have been a well-educated one as well, he would posit that magic, like all things, conforms to the laws of physics and nature to the same degree that an apple falling out of a tree does. Simply because magic seems to work around and bend the laws of physics makes it no less a slave to physical laws which exist but which were never elaborated on by wizards. They simply didn't care about science, and furthermore—they were never well educated enough in mathematics to form authentic proofs to describe magic's behavior. The understanding by most of wizard-kind that magic is an endless frontier of possibilities was quite false, and Konstantin, as any good skeptic would, was decidedly interested in proving the exact place in which that frontier ends.
This ambition and inclination towards contrariness had been a hallmark of Konstantin's youth, and moreover, it was a celebrated familial trait. He was not dissimilar to his father, or his father's father, or the entire Knyazev line. Konstantin's own father was one of the most verbal opponents of Communism the Russian wizard's community had ever known. Of course, it wasn't as if they didn't have anything to stand to gain from this. The Knyazev family owned about eight hundred souls. Three hundred of which were original Knyazev property, and five hundred of which were acquired in the 1940s when Evgenii Knyazev married the beautiful Ekaterina Yusupova. And although Communism was a subject of healthy debate in Wizarding Russia, it wasn't taken seriously.
Russian wizards and witches had effectively hidden themselves away from the repressive Soviet regimes. They were not well acquainted with the reality of Communism, nor were they in any way shape or form a part of it. There had been, in effect, a shadow court in Russian nobility since the time of Peter the Great. At this point Russian wizards and witches formed their own government and noble class which were almost exactly parallel to the muggle one. Noble muggle families and noble wizard families were linked inextricably, and oftentimes there were two definitive branches- one muggle and one wizard, to each family who composed a part of the Russian court. The Yusupov family was no exception, having both a muggle and wizard branch.
When a child was found to have magic, they would be sent to live with their distant relatives who also had magic. In that sense, pure bloodedness was not a requirement to be a part of high society, rather quintessential Russian nobility was. The serfs owned by these nobles could be muggle or wizard, and could be pure-blooded or muggleborn, and it made no difference, because they were still peasants. The only realm in which pure-blooded xenophobia began to arise in was the bourgeoisie. Those Russian wizards who were free from serfdom, and oftentimes made themselves wealthy by business and trade, the merchant class, were the ones who rose to try and challenge wizards and witches of "weaker blood." This kind of mania was a product of hundreds of years of trying to rise above the peasantry but never once being allowed into the proper noble circles. In this way, pureblooded merchants and the petty bourgeoisie convinced themselves of their own superiority.
The consequences of this racism were not consistent with the consequences the rest of the wizarding world faced. Generally speaking the bourgeoisie were considered greedy and peasants and nobles alike distrusted them instinctually. Those who were peasants or serfs and deferred to a royal family took pride in their position, and often regarded the bourgeoisie pure-bloods as putting on airs. Since the revolution, the wizarding noble class had released all of its muggle serfs to join the proletariat, thinking that, through exposure, the new communist regime could take down the wizarding nobility as thoroughly as it did the Romanov family.
This foresight paid off, ultimately, and the wizard world was left in relative peace. To many, it represented a time capsule of 18th and 19th century Russian life.
To a man like Konstantin, however, the tantalizing allure of a second Russia was too intriguing to pass up. As a Knyazev he was afforded the unique ability to educate himself as much as he pleased, never once needing to consider the cost. And as the only son of a family which had a history almost as old as Russia itself, he was denied nothing. Evgenii Knyazev, who remained the patriarch of the clan, gifted his wayward son with two hundred souls to populate his own estate with on his 17th birthday, and Konstantin's doting mother, Ekaterina, excitedly passed on one of the Yusupov family properties, an old and historic one which once housed part of the muggle Yusupov family.
Between both Evgenii and Ekaterina there were as many as ten similar estates, all hiding in the Russian countryside and protected with wards and ancient steppe magic to protect against the encroaching Soviet development. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ensuing crime which followed, the wards had never been relaxed. The estates were still profitable, however, but in their advancing age, Evgenii and Ekaterina decided to govern their properties from afar, preferring instead to live in the Yusupov palace in the heart of St. Petersburg.
Konstantin had distinct memories of this causing problems, as the muggles had been aware of the palace well before the Revolution, and the fact that it virtually disappeared off of the street had been cause for commotion. For all intents and purposes, directly after the assassination of the Romanov family the house simply vanished.