merely overindulgence in delectable pickled mushrooms. 
The German author Weber was incapable of understand- 
ing the Russian appetite for mushrooms and credits the 
Tsarina Dowager with an excess of pious zeal! The 
French mycologist Paulet, with a clear French text be- 
fore him, was incapable of distinguishing toxic mush- 
rooms from an excessive indulgence in good mushrooms! 
A long succession of other writers, undoubtedly myco- 
phobes at heart, have accepted Paulet’s account without 
verification, on the mycophobe’s rule-of-thumb that 
nothing bad said about mushrooms can be undeserved. 
But the imbroglio does not end here. The German 
edition, as we said before, first appeared in 1721 in 
Frankfort. In it Weber had attributed the death from 
mushrooms, not to the widow of Tsar Aleksei, but to 
the widow of Ivan V, and this account survived in the 
later German editions. But the widow of Ivan V was 
still alive when Weber’s book appeared: she died in 
1723, not 1715! Quite properly, the English and French 
translations happily avoided killing off the living T'sarina 
Dowager, but substituted another by guesswork. As for 
the widow of the Tsar Aleksei, the mother of Peter the 
Great, a personage in her own right known to historians 
as Natalija Kyrilovna Naryshkina, she died in 1694, not 
1715. Weber was confused. There remains another possi- 
bility suggested by Vasil’kov: The Tsarina Dowager 
Marfa Matveevna Apraksina, widow of Fédor III Alek- 
seevich, who in fact died on December 31, 1715, but 
whom Weber never mentions. 
A famous surfeit of lampreys once brought about the 
death of an English sovereign. It would be singularly 
fitting, given the Russian addiction to mushrooms, that 
a surfeit of mushrooms should have precipitated the end 
of an exalted personage in the Russian Imperial house- 
hold. On the likelihood that Weber had a specific death 
[ 113 ] 
