Oddly it was Fyodor Tolstoy who became the most famous of the circumnavigators in their own lifetime. Despite – or perhaps because of – his boasting, his duelling, his gambling and his outrageous Gypsy wife, Tolstoy became a social lion.14 Society dubbed him Tolstoy Amerikanets – Tolstoy the American, though the closest he ever got to America was Hawaii – and he dined out on tall stories of his adventures in the South Seas for the rest of his life.15 This violent and charismatic man also served as the model for several fictional anti-heroes. Alexander Pushkin immortalized him as the duellist Zaretsky, friend of Evgeny Onegin:
‘Zaretsky, sometime king of brawls,
And hetman of the gaming halls.
Arch-rake, pothouse tribuna persona . . .’16
It is the fictional Zaretsky who eggs Vladimir Lensky on to challenge his friend Onegin to a pointless duel in which Lensky is killed. Tolstoy was also the model for the evildoer Repetilov in the diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboyedov’s 1825 play Woe from Wit: ‘Nocturnal Bandit and duellist . . . some kind of demon;/ With bloodshot eyes and burning face . . .’
Tolstoy’s famous nephew Lev, born in 1828, knew his crazy uncle as a child and in later life immortalized him as the hero of his 1856 short story ‘Two Hussars’. ‘A gambler, duellist and libertine – but a real Hussar!’ There is another, less flattering, portrait in War and Peace: the cruel and bloodthirsty duellist Dolokhov, who fights Pierre Bezukhov. Dolokhov shares the Amerikanets’s name and patronymic – Fyodor Ivanovich – as well as his ‘handsome, insolent eyes’.
Many of the other members of the expedition also prospered, if less spectacularly than Tolstoy. By 1820 no fewer than eight of the twenty-two men who had sat down at the Nadezhda’s company table had become generals, senators or admirals. A string of geographical features scattered around the world are named for them. Lisiansky holds the record: no fewer than eight islands, bays, rivers, peninsulas from Okhotsk to Alaska bear his name. Krusenstern (Cape Krusenstern in Alaska) became an admiral, as did Makar Ratmanov (Cape Ratmanov in the Kerguelen Islands, off South Africa). Fabian Gottlieb von Bellinghausen (the Bellinghausen Sea off Antarctica) discovered and mapped the Antarctic and also became an admiral. Moritz von Kotzebue was appointed to the Russian Senate as representative for Warsaw. His brother Otto (Kotzebue Sound, the city of Kotzebue, Alaska) stayed in the navy and led two round-the-world expeditions of his own. Hermann Karl von Friderici, cartographer and astronomer to Rezanov’s embassy, rose to be a general of infantry.
Second Lieutenant Pyotr Golovachev’s fate was a less happy one. After Rezanov’s departure for Kodiak, Golovachev became the target of the Great Cabin’s collective bullying. During his protracted feud with the captain Rezanov had on at least two occasions offered command of the Neva to Golovachev – and Golovachev, fatally for his reputation among his shipmates, had accepted.17 His attempted lese-majesty was not forgiven. Golovachev was cold-shouldered, taunted and ostracized by turns until he lost his mind.
‘Several times he said to the sailors, “All but one of us will arrive home well,”’18 noted Löwenstern as Golovachev became more depressed and fatalistic. At Canton, in a pathetic bid to regain popularity, he bought all his messmates expensive presents – tortoiseshell boxes and decorated gourds – and had their names engraved or embossed on them. But his mental state deteriorated steadily and, like Rezanov before him, he spent much of his time in his cabin writing denunciations of his shipmates. ‘Recognize! Captain, Espenberg, Horner, Tilesius and Romberg – that beginning in Kamchatka you have wished my death and promised me death in the Straits of Sunda.’19 On several occasions Golovachev announced that he was going to kill himself, dramatically forgiving his fellow officers for their transgressions and retiring to his cabin with loaded pistols. While the Nadezhda was docked at the island of St Helena in the mid-Atlantic he finally did it, shooting himself in the head while most of his fellow officers were on shore.
He left a sheaf of mad letters. To Krusenstern he wrote, ‘I will continue, still groaning, to bear your revenge and evil until the unfortunate moment when all is clear. Yours, Golovachev.’ To Ratmanov, ‘Tyrant of humanity! You owe me 29 rubles. Keep them . . . Farewell, you monster.’ To Tilesius, ‘You wrote against me and tried to blacken my character . . . You are at fault for my death.’20 Golovachev asked that a small portrait bust he had had made of himself in Canton be given to Rezanov – who, unbeknown to him, was already dead. He addressed a final, sealed, packet of letters to the Tsar with a request that he order them read aloud in front of the ship’s company. The dutiful Krusenstern – who had wept when he read the suicide’s denunciation of him – did so, though the Tsar wisely burned the letters unread and ordered all controversies with Rezanov to be forgotten.21
Fyodor Brinkin, who had been Krusenstern’s family doctor in their native Estonia, also killed himself – by poisoning in St Petersburg soon after his return from the voyage. It is not known what drove him to it.22 The artist Stepan Kurliantsev failed to interest the world in his genius, and died destitute in 1822; the Academy of Arts refused to buy his sketches from the voyage of discovery and they have been lost.23
Perhaps the strangest fate of any of Rezanov’s associates befell Khvostov and Davydov. The government exonerated them both after the debacle of the Hokkaido raids and their subsequent imprisonment in Okhotsk. Nonetheless, and perhaps understandably, neither returned to the Company’s service or to Russian America. In 1809 they bumped into John D’Wolf by chance on the street in St Petersburg. D’Wolf, now a successful Rhode Island shipowner, was in town to offload a cargo of American cloth. The delighted American immediately dragged his old shipmates to Langsdorff’s rooms for a convivial dinner. The four men drank heavily late into the night and parted with warm embraces and tears.24 They would never meet again, for on their way home Khvostov and Davydov fell in the Neva while trying to cross an open bridge and both drowned. Eyewitnesses reported that they had attempted to jump onto a passing barge from the Trinity Bridge, which then, as now, opened at night to allow shipping to pass. Their bodies were never recovered from the fast-flowing water.25
Derzhavin, who seems to have penned an ode for every twist of Rezanov’s strange story, wrote a poem ‘In Memory of Davydov and Khvostov’. It is perhaps a too-grand epitaph for men with such chequered careers, and certainly makes no mention of Khvostov’s drunken threats to bombard Sitka. But Derzhavin’s elegy is a measure of the reverence in which St Petersburg society held its mariners after the triumph of the expedition.
They, like the eagles’ chicks sent by Zeus to fly around the Earth
To know her dimensions, surprised the world . . .
You did not mount the chariot of happiness,
But Russians will not forget your travels’ great fame,
As the Cooks and Nelsons are not forgotten
And the mind of Newton, and the Age of Alexander.26
Rezanov left a more ambiguous legacy. The Tsar had clearly been offended by the hysterical tone of Rezanov’s angry letter from Kamchatka, and snubbed him by never writing again. Alexander also lavished praise for the success of the round-the-world voyage on Krusenstern when the Nadezhda returned to St Petersburg in August 1806. News of the Khvostov–Davydov raids on Hokkaido ordered by Rezanov further tarnished his memory. Derzhavin, ever loyal, stuck up for him: ‘Rezanov died from all the unpleasantness caused by his jealous subordinates,’ he wrote.
After news of Rezanov’s demise reached St Petersburg the Tsar magnanimously confirmed his son Pyotr as a royal page. Sadly, young Pyotr’s glittering start in life availed him little: he died of fever at the age of twelve. His younger sister Olga did better, marrying St Petersburg’s chief of police27 and inheriting the Okunev estates in Pskov, as well as a handsome chunk of the Russian American Company. But she died in childbirth, just as her mother Anna had died bearing her, at the age of twenty-six.28
With characteristic inefficiency, it was not until the 1830s that the Company got around to putting up
a monument to Rezanov in Krasnoyarsk. But when they did, it was, at a staggering 100,000 rubles, the most lavish gravestone the city had ever seen. Pre-Revolutionary photographs show it to have been a pompous, neoclassical affair, an urn on a large pedestal surrounded by stone wreaths and carved texts. The tomb, as well as the cathedral where it stood, was demolished in 1932 to make way for a new cultural centre for the city’s aircraft engineers. The city repented its philistinism in 2007 and erected a replica of the original monument, though Rezanov’s actual remains have been lost. Krasnoyarsk is a boom town today, one of the centres of Siberia’s giant oil and gas industry, and oil money paid for a large new plaza named for Rezanov as well as a handsome bronze statue on a porphyry plinth depicting him in full chamberlain’s uniform and sword. Rezanov visited the minor Company entrepôt of Krasnoyarsk only three times in his life, each time en route to somewhere else. Nonetheless it is here that Rezanov has his greatest physical monument, gazing masterfully over a vast sea of Siberian forest.
Conchita
It was Conchita Arguello who was the real victim of Rezanov’s untimely death, and of his ambition. She waited in full faith that he would return until 1808, when Russian otter hunters brought disturbing rumours that Rezanov had died on the road to St Petersburg. ‘When Don Luis Antonio eventually told [his sister] what he had heard, Concha laughed it off regardless of how she felt within, and no one suspected how this rumour affected her life,’ recalled Sister Vincentia. ‘She made herself believe that such a rumour would not and could not discourage her. She doubled and redoubled her prayers and hopes . . . knowing that in the final analysis the Great Comforter alone would take care of all of them – of Nikolai and of her.’29
But as the years passed, the realization that death had separated them must have grown into a grim certainly. Conchita followed her father from San Francisco to the much larger settlement of Santa Barbara when he was promoted to comandante there in 1807, and later to Monterrey when he became governor of Alta California after the death of Don José Arrillaga in July 1814. The next year, still with his unmarried daughter in tow, Don José Dario became governor of Baja California. By 1818 Conchita was at Loreto, Mexico, and she wrote to her brother Don Luis Antonio that she was being wooed by an American, one James Wilcox Smith, also known as Don Santiago, who had even agreed to convert to Catholicism. She refused him, despite, as she says, the knowledge that ‘I might have saved his soul’ by converting him.30
She told Sister Vincentia that ‘busybodies far and wide strongly urged her to marry, and the constant pressure was almost unbearable’. It was certainly highly unusual for a gentlewoman of her status and beauty to remain unmarried, yet Conchita chose to remain loyal to the memory of her dead fiancé. She confided to Vincentia that she ‘could have married several times. Without exception, the men who sought my hand were worthy and honourable. After much deliberation and prayer I concluded that I could not and would not be joined in marriage to one whom I did not love . . . I felt that a certain lasting loyalty was demanded of me by a Higher Power – a loyalty to Nikolai and myself!’
Don José Dario finally retired from government service in 1822, the same year his son Don Luis – who had entertained the Rezanov party when they first arrived – became Alta California’s first native-born governor. Conchita’s father took her with him into retirement in Guadalajara, where he died in 1828. After the death of her mother the following year, Concha returned to California and, donning the dark nun’s habit of the Third Lay Order of St Francis, busied herself caring for the sick, teaching scripture to the natives and performing other good works.31
The English traveller and merchant Sir George Simpson, governor-general of the Hudson’s Bay Company, met Conchita in 1842.32
Not withstanding the ungracefulness of her conventual costume and the ravages of an interval of time which had tripled her years we could still discover in her face and figure, in her manners and conversation the remains of those charms which had won for the youthful beauty Rezanov’s love and Langsdorff’s equally enthusiastic admiration . . . Though Dona María de Concepción apparently loved to dwell on the story of her blighted affections, yet, strange to say, she did not know now until we mentioned it to her the immediate cause of the Chancellor’s sudden death.33
Conchita asked Simpson to copy out the parts of Langsdorff’s book that pertained to her story.
When a Dominican convent was founded at Monterrey in 1851 Conchita joined as a novice, and on 13 April 1852 she took her perpetual vow as Sor María Dominga, becoming California’s first nun. The thirteen-year-old novice Vincentia Salgado became her pupil and protégée. Sister Vincentia recalled that Conchita was ‘far from being a moping, whining malcontent bemoaning her fate or indulging in self-pity. True, Concha carried about her an air of wistfulness, which was but the outward reflection of a heart that was wearied with life’s burdens and a soul that was well acquainted with grief.’ But at the same time Conchita was
at all times pleasant, joyous and exceptionally happy in her Convent life . . . Once, in my childlike innocence, I cautiously asked: ‘Sister, I heard that you could have been a great lady at the Russian Court!’ Concha was silent for a moment and then slowly and deliberately, in a very low, well-modulated voice, said: ‘Yes, Vinnie, today I am in a very beautiful Court making my way towards Heaven. I am a real Princess with Jesus as my Spouse and King. Nothing in this whole wide world could make me more content or more happy.34
The order moved to Benicia, on the northern shore of San Francisco Bay, in 1854, and Conchita died there on 23 December of that year.35 Her gravestone – as María Dominga Arguello – survives in the nuns’ graveyard. A rose bush grows next to it.
Conchita had been born a subject of His Most Catholic Majesty at a time when the non-native population of Alta California was less than 5,000. She died a citizen of the United States of America, after the state of California had been admitted to the Union in 1850, its population swollen to 300,000 and her home town of San Francisco transformed from a backwater of a dying empire into a boom town of a boisterous new republic.
The Legend of Rezanov and Conchita
Rezanov’s unlikely journey to literary immortality began with Francis Bret Harte, a writer of Western adventure stories and poems, who was the first to fictionalize the tragic love story of Rezanov and Conchita.36 Harte penned the poem ‘Conception de Arguello’ for the Atlantic Monthly in March 1872.37 Harte took the story – and the erroneous identification of Rezanov as a count – from George Simpson’s Narrative of a Voyage Around the world 1841–2 published in London and Philadelphia in 1847.
Till beside the brazen cannon the betrothed bade adieu,
And from sallyport and gateway north the Russian eagles flew.
Long beside the deep embrasures, where the brazen cannon are,
Did they wait the promised bridegroom and the answer of the Czar;
Day by day on wall and bastion beat the hollow, empty breeze,–
Day by day the sunlight glittered on the vacant, smiling seas:
Week by week the near hills whitened in their dusty leather cloaks,–
Week by week the far hills darkened from the fringing plain of oaks;
Till the rains came, and far breaking, on the fierce southwester toss’d,
Dashed the whole long coast with color, and then vanished, and were lost.
So each year the seasons shifted – wet and warm, and drear and dry,
Half a year of clouds and flowers, half a year of dust and sky.
Still it brought no ship nor message – brought no tidings, ill or meet,
For the statesmanlike Commander, for the daughter fair and sweet.
Yet she heard the varying message, voiceless to all ears beside:
‘He will come,’ the flowers whispered; ‘Come no more,’ the dry hills sighed.
Still she found him with the waters lifted by the morning breeze,–
Still she lost him with the folding of the great white-tented seas;
Until hollows chased the dimples from her cheeks of olive brown,
And at times a swift, shy moisture dragged the long sweet lashes down;
Or the small mouth curved and quivered as for some denied caress,
And the fair young brow was knitted in an infantine distress.
The poem ends with Simpson, visiting San Francisco, mentioning the death of Rezanov forty years before and asking after his Spanish fiancée – who is, unbeknown to him, in the banqueting hall.
‘Lives she yet?’ A deathlike silence fell on banquet, guests, and hall,
And a trembling figure rising fixed the awestruck gaze of all.
Two black eyes in darkened orbits gleamed beneath the nun’s white hood;
Black serge hid the wasted figure, bowed and stricken where it stood.
‘Lives she yet?’ Sir George repeated. All were hushed as Concha drew
Closer yet her nun’s attire. ‘Señor, pardon, she died, too!’
Such an epic love story could not escape the prolific pen of Gertrude Atherton, the grande dame of Californian writers. Atherton was born in San Francisco in 1857 and produced over sixty romantic novels before her death in 1948, mostly on American historical themes. She developed a special interest in the picturesque and romantic life of the Spanish colonial period. One of her best-known books was Before the Gringo Came, later reissued as The Splendid Idle Forties: Stories of Old California. Photographs of her in middle age show a formidable woman with towering hair, a monumentally corseted bust and a faraway look in her eyes.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 35
