The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

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SINCE THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ALL OF Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky’s male ancestors on his father’s side had been physicians. The name of the first of them, Avdei Fedorovich, appears in a letter written in 1698 by Peter the Great to the city of Utrecht to a certain Professor Ruysch whose lectures on anatomy the Russian emperor had attended incognito as Piotr Mikhailov the year before. In his letter the young emperor requests that the professor take on as his student the son of an apothecary’s assistant, Avdei Kukotsky. How the surname Kukotsky originated cannot be established with certainty, but according to family legend, the ancestral Avdei had come from the area in Moscow known as “Kukui” where Peter I had built the German Quarter.

Since that time the Kukotsky surname has appeared repeatedly in decrees of state honors; it also can be found in the enrollment records of schools established in Russia following the Decree of 1714. By entering government service upon graduation from these new schools, the “low-born” gained entry to the nobility. After the Table of Ranks was introduced, the Kukotskys’ meritorious service earned them membership in the “superior senior nobility with all privileges and advantages.” A Kukotsky figures among the students of Dr. Johann Erasmus of Strasbourg, the first Western doctor in Russia to teach, among other medical disciplines, “the midwyf’s art.”

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