Soldiering on With the Czar’s Lost Regiment : SEARCHING FOR THE EMPEROR <i> by Roberto Pazzi, translated by M. J. Fitzgerald (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95; 196 pp.) </i>

In a house seized from a merchant in the town of Ekaterinburg, Czar Nicholas II and his family live as prisoners, awaiting their fate at the hands of the revolutionary government.

Thousands of miles away, the men of the czar’s crack regiment, the Preobrazhenskii, struggle through a Siberian winter on the rumor that their master may be in the town of Tobolsk.

Two islands of the past, like the concentric rings that spread across a pond long after the plunge of a stone. Roberto Pazzi, an Italian poet, has written a kind of ghost story; but the ghosts are those of history, which never quite departs. The dust on my window sill 12 inches away--who knows?--may have first lifted from a cannonball crater at Chickahominy.

“Searching for the Emperor” is a lovely, troubling meditation on power and purpose, and on their passing; and on the contrast between naked human beings and the roles they play when dressed in their historical regalia.

It is winter. Russia has pulled out of the war, and the Soviet authorities are struggling to consolidate their power over a vast empire in which communications are poor or nonexistent and in which White armies are still fighting.

Prince Ypsilanti’s regiment is in the Caucasus and in the most inadmissible of situations for an army; out of touch with the general staff. The latter no longer exists, of course, but Ypsilanti, a feudal nobleman, has no way of knowing it.

“Could one keep an entire regiment in midair like this, with no orders?” he asks himself. And although it is no season for marching, he leads his 2,000 men north. After a year of appalling hardship--half the men are lost--they reach a town that is on the telegraph line, only to find it is out of order.

Rumors of civil strife reach the town, so remote that Tatar traders used to make out their wills before journeying there. The czar is perhaps in Tobolsk. Ypsilanti has no illusions; he berates one of his officers for allowing his men to show cheerfulness. But an army requires a purpose; it must act in order to exist.

And so, the regiment sets out for Tobolsk. It is a vast distance away, across a land so empty that the only marking on the army’s map is the “S” in Siberia.

The futile, punishing march is rendered in a series of spare, hallucinatory incidents. A soldier goes mad and wanders off. “No longer a poor mad man; he was perhaps his entire regiment,” the colonel reflects. “All Russia must at that moment be lost and naked as the soldier who had refused to go on holding a rifle.” Many of the remaining troops do, in fact, disappear into the forests of the taiga.

The regiment’s narrative is intercut with an account of Nicholas at Ekaterinburg, where he was taken after his first--lavish--detention at Tobolsk.

It is a delicate, moving portrait that Pazzi gives us. His Nicholas knows that he and his family will die; he has resigned himself to it. In contrast with the czarina, who torments him with complaints and schemes, he has settled in to examine his own history.

His meditations are tattered and sporadic. He is not intelligent, but he possesses a certain radiance. He recalls his distrust of Rasputin, the ambitious monk who gained power at court before being murdered by a group of nobles. Perhaps Rasputin’s energy would have served better than his own passiveness, the czar reflects; but he had his own half-religious role to play, as “Little Father” to his people; and he is proud of not relinquishing it.

He recalls his bullying, deceitful cousin, the German Kaiser. Even after secretly signing orders to attack Russia, the Kaiser was on the phone, temporizing.

Nicholas reflects that “his father had been right in his belief that a king could not use a telephone without compromising his regality because that infernal instrument abetted the duplicity of the worst class of actors like Cousin Wilhelm.”

In a phrase, it is there: The whiff of elegance, even nobility, of a time long gone; and the evident demonstration of why it was long gone.

As the end approaches--Ypsilanti’s rescuers are straggling on in the wrong direction--the members of the czar’s family enter a mid-realm between life and death. There are premonitions and auguries.

Nicholas recalls a prediction made by a dancer who was his mistress. A regiment, she had said, would await his orders, “but the orders will not come. It’s invincible but it’s without you. No one can set it free from its loyalty to you, and you know nothing. And no one can warn you that it waits for you.”

They are haunting words. History has sundered the tree’s crown from its trunk, and both are doomed. The regiment finally reaches Tobolsk. It is reduced to 50 tattered men; its colonel has shot himself in sight of his fruitless destination.

And the house at Ekaterinburg fills with ghostly voices, in particular the voice of the czarevich, Nicholas’ son. He is doomed, in any case, because he has hemophilia; in his last days, he receives the melancholy gift of second sight.

Pazzi’s novella, at times virtually a prose poem, has its weak moments. A scene of the regiment’s deserters living in the forest under the instruction of a Mongol tracker is overweighted in its lyrical symbolism. Similarly, a final scene in which the dead men of the regiment take the form of birds and attack the Red Guards at Ekaterinburg is too forced and breathlessly magical to convey any real magic.

The magic comes in the quieter moments; in the fading moves of regiment and czar, each of them severed from history, falling, and lingering with us.