quite different. Pushkin wrote, "A tragedy without love attracted my imagination. But apart from love entering a great deal into the character of my adventurer, I made Dmitri fall in love with Marina to make the strange character of the latter stand out better. It is barely outlined in Karamzin. But certainly, she was an odd and pretty woman. She had only one passion and that was ambition, but with such a degree of energy, or fury, that it is difficult to imagine it. Look how having sampled royalty, drunk on a dream, she prostitutes herself to one adventurer after another -- shares now the disgusting bed of a Jew, now the tent of a Cossack, always ready to give herself to whoever can show her a faint hope of a throne which no longer exists. Look at her brave war, poverty, shame, at the same time negotiating with the King of Poland like one crowned head to another, and then end her most stormy and most extraordinary existence so miserably. I have only one scene for her, but I will return to her if God lets me live long enough. She upsets me like a violent emotion. She is horribly Polish, as Mme. Lubomirska's cousin said." In Mussorgsky's opera, however, Marina Mniszech's ambitious manipulation of her future husband is shown to be instigated by a Jesuit priest Ercole Rangoni, who eventually threatens her with hellfire unless she seduces the Pretender. Then Rangoni informs False Dmitry about Marina coming to the garden and secretly being in love with him [with False Dmitry]. The Pretender confesses his feelings but the proud Marina rejects the love of a 'daring vagabond', and promises to share his feelings only after he becomes a Tsar to make her a Tsaritsa of all Russias. "The Witch" legend When Marina's three-year-old son, Tsarevich Ivan Dmitriyevich, was publicly hanged, Marina – according to the Russian ambassador to the Polish royal court – “died of longing for her own fate”. According to other sources, she either was hanged or was drowned. A popular legend has it that Mnishek, a powerful witch, put a curse on the Romanov dynasty because of the execution of her son by the new Tsar Mikhail and his father, Patriarch Filaret of Moscow. The boy's body had been left hanging near the Serpukhov Gate for months. Marina said: "Damn you! In the Ipatiev's [Monastery] you