Love, betrayal, and a flood that never happened: the greatest deception in Tretyakov Gallery history

Princess Tarakanova (1864), by Konstantin Flavitsky, moved Russia to tears—and angered Alexander II. Inspired by real events, it falsifies the ending.

In the early 1770s, a mysterious woman in Italy claimed to be Empress Elizabeth Petrovna’s daughter and rightful heir to Russia’s throne. Catherine II sent Count Orlov to stop her. He won her affection, staged a sham wedding, then lured her aboard a Russian ship in Livorno. She was secretly taken to St. Petersburg and imprisoned.

Flavitsky depicts her dying in the 1777 flood, water filling her cell as rats climb over her bed. But the scene is invented: she died of tuberculosis in December 1775, taking the secret of her identity to the grave.

For drama, Flavitsky rewrote history, turning myth into an indictment of authority’s cruelty. Can great art justify a lie?

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