"...the House of Ice appears in poems about dreams. It is believed to have inspired the 'sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice' in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan.' Thomas Moore the nineteenth century poet-satirist, wrote of a dream ball in the House of Ice, hosted by Tsar Alexander I and attended by the entire Holy Alliance. When the castle and its occupants start to melt, 'some word,' like 'Constitution'--long/Congealed in frosty silence,' drips from the tongue of Prussia's king." (The Ice Renaissance, The New Yorker)
In St. Petersburg a recreation of Empress Anna's ice palace described above was recently built and then destroyed before it could even melt. The directors Valery Gromov and Svetlana Mikheyeva planned to charge honeymooners four thousand dollars to spend their first night of connubial bliss snug in the carved ice bed within the frozen palace.
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