by Simon Dixon
It would be wrong to paint a picture of unrelieved misery. Over the winter of 1746–7, she and Peter enjoyed living in the ‘very comfortable’ Winter Palace apartments occupied by Empress Anna in the 1730s and were thrilled by the twice-weekly productions in the large theatre opposite the Kazan Church. ‘In a word, that winter was one of the happiest and best arranged that I have spent in my life. We did nothing but laugh and romp about all day long.’5 Yet the pleasure was shattered in March 1747 by news from Zerbst of the death of Prince Christian August. Catherine had her first taste of the Romanovs’ dynastic pretensions when her grieving was cut short by the instruction that ‘it was not fitting for a grand duchess to mourn any longer for a father who was not a king’.6 More misery was to follow when Andrey Chernyshëv was packed off to Orenburg with his cousins Zathar and Ivan at the end of May. So persistent were the whispers of an attraction between him and Catherine that even her confessor was prevailed upon to ask her about it. Although she continued to write to Andrey in exile, smuggling letters out with the help of her faithful ‘oracle’, the valet Timofey Yevreinov, her friend’s departure left Catherine feeling lonelier than ever. As if to emphasise her sense of isolation, she had to undergo the indignity of a visit from the empress herself. It was the first time they had been alone together and Elizabeth took the opportunity to express her disappointment in no uncertain terms, accusing the eighteen-year-old of unfaithfulness, a charge she vehemently denied.7
Over the following autumn, the Choglokovs sought to limit the potential for temptation by restricting access to Peter and Catherine so severely that it seemed they were virtually under house arrest. Yet such crude attempts to drive the young couple into each other’s arms merely succeeded in feeding their mutual resentments. Far from producing the universally desired heir, Catherine and her husband already seemed to be leading separate lives. During the pilgrimage to the Trinity monastery while the Court was in Moscow in summer 1749, they rarely met except at table and in bed—and ‘he came there after I had fallen asleep and went out before I woke up’.8
Seeking solace in private reading, Catherine was often to be found with her head in a book. Shortly before the Court returned to St Petersburg at the end of 1744, Count Henning Adolf Gyllenborg, a Swedish nobleman whom she had first met in Hamburg, had flatteringly suggested that she might draft an autobiographical ‘character-sketch of a fifteen-year-old philosophe’. As models, he recommended Plutarch’s Lives, which she tracked down only later, and the life of Cicero, of which she apparently read no more than a couple of pages in German translation. Neither did she finish Montesquieu’s short treatise On the Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Roman Republic (1734): ‘it made me yawn’.9 Even for one so self-consciously ‘studious’, such works were too demanding. Voltaire’s fiction, which she discovered in 1746, was more immediately attractive. Two years later, she had graduated to Brantôme’s lubricious memoirs of the sixteenth-century French Court and Péréfixe’s life of its most celebrated monarch, Henri IV, who was to remain one of her lifelong heroes. Soon more difficult books came within her range. Before tackling Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), the greatest work of political philosophy of the age on which she would later base her own Instruction to the Legislative Commission, she started in 1751 to read Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, a fundamental work of the early Enlightenment. ‘Every six months I finished a volume, and from this, one can imagine in what solitude I spent my life.’10
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Withdrawal was only one of Catherine’s strategies for survival. In public she embarked on a concerted campaign to please Elizabeth and her Court, though it was by no means simple to retain the approval of such a volatile monarch. It was particularly fruitless to try to share her developing literary interests with an empress who had inherited her father’s volcanic temper with none of his intellectual curiosity. Although the library at St Petersburg’s Summer Palace contained almost 600 volumes in French, including classic works by Bayle, Michel Montaigne and Hugo Grotius, Elizabeth had them removed to the Academy of Sciences in 1745, when diplomatic relations between St Petersburg and Versailles were damaged by the disgrace of the French ambassador, the Marquis de Chétardie, and their return five years later seems unlikely to have been connected with her personal tastes in reading.11 Indeed, as Catherine soon discovered, ‘there was a whole raft of subjects that she did not like at all. So, for example, one must not speak of the king of Prussia, nor of Voltaire, illness, the dead, beautiful women, French manners or the sciences; all these subjects displeased her.’12
There is no need to accept this verdict on Elizabeth’s philistinism at face value. Monarchs are famously difficult to talk to—‘I would rather let people interpret my silence than my words,’ remarked the taciturn Louis XVI13—and Catherine was understandably cautious about offending the woman whose permission was required every time she wanted to set foot outside the palace. Though there seems little reason to credit the empress with bookish interests, her attitude to death, mocked by Catherine as fearful superstition, was by no means incompatible with rational Enlightened thinking. Nauseated by the smell of corpses on her way to the suburban palace at Yekaterinhof, she ordered more earth to be piled on the graves she could see from her carriage and insisted that future burials be carried out further from the centre of St Petersburg. Still more drastic steps were taken in advance of the Court’s visit to Moscow in 1749, when not only were burials banned at churches between the Kremlin and the Golovin Palace, but existing graves were razed to the ground, the tombstones being donated for new church buildings.14 These were measures which owed something to a growing concern with public hygiene. Meanwhile, Elizabeth had done everything in her power to limit the ‘great and useless expense’ that her leading subjects insisted on lavishing on their funerals.15 Whereas Russian nobles continued to regard an elaborate funeral as the ultimate status symbol, their monarch’s attitude was more in tune with changing sentiments in Western Europe, where ‘grief was becoming more introverted and intense, more private, separated from the formal observances of the corporate hierarchical society’.16
Elusive though it remained, privacy was highly prized by Elizabeth, who had a metal grille put up around her box at the opera house in St Petersburg. One of the best-known episodes in Catherine’s memoirs describes the empress’s splenetic outburst on discovering that Peter had drilled holes through a door so that he could spy on her meals with Aleksey Razumovsky.17 It was this incident which prompted the reorganisation of the Young Court in 1746. Usually interpreted as evidence of her husband’s incurable infantilism (or, at any rate, of Catherine’s anxiety to highlight it), it tells us just as much about the empress’s yearning to escape the relentless public eye at a Court where the monarch was permanently on display.
Hunting offers another revealing example. Had they known that Louis XV and his entourage had shot more than 1700 partridges on the plain of Saint-Denis on a single day in September 1738, readers of the St Petersburg News might have been less impressed to learn that in the six weeks between 10 July and 26 August 1740, Empress Anna had bagged a total of 488 items: 9 stags, each with between 14 and 24 antlers, 16 wild goats, 4 wild boar, a wolf, 374 hares, 68 wild duck and 16 large seabirds.18 Nevertheless, lists of such achievements were routinely published since success in the field was understood everywhere in Europe as a sign of imperial prowess and international prestige. In September 1751, Elizabeth staged an extravagant hunt at Krasnoye Selo for the Austrian ambassador, who was given one of the best horses from the imperial stables and led by grooms wearing costumes designed expressly for the event at a cost of 20,000 roubles. This hunt took place in the full glare of publicity. Yet when the official press drew attention to the empress’s personal passion for hawking later that autumn, she promptly banned all articles referring to the imperial family without her prior approval.19
Elizabeth had grown up at the hunting lodge at Tsarskoye Selo and consistently sought to preserve it
as a private space. Though it was later to become Catherine’s favourite summer residence, she and Peter were invited there a mere eight times before 1762. Only in 1748 were they in residence with the empress herself, to celebrate Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s first reconstruction of the palace, and even then Elizabeth often dined alone.20 For the most part, she preferred private jaunts with Razumovsky and her friends, during which she could most readily resume her father’s role as ‘the leader of revelry’.21 For one such bacchanalian expedition, the cellarer at Monplaisir brought out 11 half-flasks of ‘Her Majesty’s sweet wine’ (Hungarian Tokay), 21 bottles of her favourite English beer, 12 bottles of fortified wine, 1 bottle of the ‘new sweet wine’, 17 bottles of Burgundy, 16 bottles of champagne, 53 bottles of Rhine wine, 6 flasks of Gdansk vodka, 2 flasks of aniseed-flavour vodka, half a flask of lemon vodka and 2 phials of mustard.22
While the governors of the Young Court held Peter and Catherine to a clockwork routine, Elizabeth’s life was famously irregular. Visitors to Russia in the 1730s had recognised in the attractive young tsarevna a free spirit ill-suited to the constraints of formal ritual. ‘She dances better than anyone I have ever seen,’ one acknowledged, ‘but hates the ceremony of a court.’23 Even after her accession, she shunned formal society, preferring the earthier company of her far from blue-blooded relatives, the Hendrikovs and the Skavronskys (Maria Choglokova’s family). Surrounded by the guards who had brought her to the throne, Elizabeth gave special licence to the new Life Company (her personal bodyguard), the majority of them peasants by origin, who ‘committed all imaginable disorders’ in the early months of the reign as ‘the new noble lieutenants ran through all the dirtiest public-houses, got drunk, and wallowed in the streets. They entered into the houses of the greatest noblemen, demanding money with threats, and took away, without ceremony, whatever they liked.’24 It was a pardonable exaggeration on the part of the Austrian ambassador. Fourteen men were discharged following disorders at Elizabeth’s coronation, and the regimental archives from her reign are peppered with the records of fights, broken windows, and a rich variety of derelictions of duty caused by severe inebriation. One wretched drunk was so hungover that he turned out on guard in his slippers.25
Hawking and hunting with hounds were pleasures generally reserved for the period between lunch and dinner; grouse shooting, in autumn and winter, lasted from five or six in the morning until midday. These, however, were almost the only fixed points in Elizabeth’s daily regime. Mealtimes were unstable (and often the occasion for the empress to dictate haphazard personal edicts); theatrical performances regularly began late and continued into the small hours so that, until the empress condescended to provide carriages for her musicians late in her reign, they could be seen lumbering through the streets with their bulky instruments in the middle of the night.26 It was entirely characteristic for Elizabeth to finish the carnival season in 1748 ‘with a magnificent bal masqué and a supper of a hundred and fifty covers in the opera house, which she honoured with her presence, till three o’clock in the morning’.27 On less formal occasions, she might retire to bed only as dawn was breaking. Such irregular habits have long been ascribed to Elizabeth’s fear of assassination.28 Yet although the anxieties of a usurper are not to be underestimated, it seems more plausible to interpret her erratic daily timetable as an extreme example of the ‘nocturnalisation’ of Court life—a move traceable in most European Courts in the century after 1650 away from a dawn-to-dusk regimen towards one in which mealtimes, balls and masquerades moved ever further into the night, when fireworks and Baroque theatrical spectacles acquired even greater powers of illusion under cover of darkness.29
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The roots of Russia’s Baroque Court culture stretched back into seventeenth-century Muscovy, when its image-makers lacked for nothing in intellectual sophistication.30 Manners were not always so refined. By the time of Catherine’s arrival, barely a generation had passed since Peter the Great first introduced women to Russian public society by obliging them in 1718 to attend his ‘assemblies’—gatherings inspired by his visit to Paris at which both sexes were obliged to dance, smoke and play cards. Since these were all habits formerly condemned as ‘foreign devilishness’, the tsar found that the best way of encouraging guests to participate was to post armed guards at the door. If his new forms of sociability were largely alien to the Muscovite elite, then so was the Western dress he imposed in 1702. Decades later, hooped skirts and corsets (the English style laced down the front, the French down the back, rather tighter, to emphasise the waist) still seemed uncomfortable and unwieldy to noblewomen who hankered after the looser garments of a bygone age. Even those who were keen to adapt to new ways of doing things had precious few sources of instruction. First published in 1717, The Honourable Mirror of Youth, or a guide to social conduct, an advice book for both sexes based on Erasmus and other Western authorities, remained the only work of its kind in Russia until the mid-1730s and was still being reprinted in 1767, five years into Catherine’s own reign.31
Peter’s efforts to create a refined European society were disrupted by the Court’s return to Moscow under his teenage grandson. Even when Anna brought the Court back to St Petersburg in 1732, visitors could expect to find as many rough edges there as in any of the smaller German Courts. ‘The richest coat would be sometimes worn together with the vilest uncombed wig,’ noted Manstein, the condescending Austrian ambassador, ‘or you might see a beautiful piece of stuff spoiled by some botcher of a tailor.’32 Even Manstein nevertheless had to acknowledge that ‘at length, every thing grew to be well regulated’ so that by the end of the 1730s St Petersburg could boast many of the attributes of a recognisable Court society.33 Anna held regular reception days—kurtagy was the Russian word, taken from the German Courtag; the English called them drawing rooms—where the atmosphere was relatively informal. ‘Our drawing-room is more like an assembly,’ the English envoy’s wife observed. ‘There is a circle in form, for about half an hour, then the czarina and the princesses make their party at cards.’34 By the mid-1740s, when Catherine arrived in Russia, the main ladies’ costume at such gatherings was the shlafrok (from the German Schlafrock), which resembled English informal morning dress. For more formal occasions, there was the samara, a loose dress with a pleated back, not unlike the French contouche, worn over a corset and a decorated underskirt and supported by a hooped panier.35
‘The Empress is a great lover of English stuffs,’ reported the British ambassador in the year of Catherine’s wedding, ‘particularly white and other light colours with large flowers of gold and silver.’36 Europe was not the only source of such gorgeous fabrics. Although they never showed much profit, the cumbersome, state-controlled caravans to Peking, sanctioned by the Treaty of Kyakhta in 1727, remained a crucial link in the palace’s supply chain. Anna’s Court had bought a third of the goods from the 1738 caravan and funds confiscated from her disgraced favourite, Ernst Bühren, helped Elizabeth to take her pick from the next in 1743. Yards of her favourite white velvet headed the list of Chinese silks purchased at auction, where the empress also invested in green, yellow, crimson and scarlet satins, woven with silver and gold thread, a multiplicity of damasks, muslin, gauze and coloured brocades, and some 4117 wire-mounted paper flowers.37 Diplomats, appalled by Elizabeth’s dilatory attitude to business, were irritated to find that she thought nothing of making a trip from one of her summer palaces expressly to examine silks on the market in St Petersburg.38 Yet there was nothing casual about such visits to an empress who, in common with her fellow European sovereigns, used dress as a political instrument to inculcate loyalty, satisfy vanity and impress the world at large.39
Although Elizabeth prided herself on driving a hard bargain, the sums she allocated to her own wardrobe were effectively limitless. The young cavalier assigned to supervise alterations to her furs in 1759 claimed that some 70,000 roubles were spent in less than nine months—more than twice Catherine’s total annual allowance of 30,000 roubles and
only marginally less than the (grossly inadequate) budget for rebuilding the palace at Tsarskoye Selo in 1744.40 Manstein calculated that a courtier in the 1730s who ‘did not lay out above two or three thousand roubles, or from four to six hundred pounds a year in his dress, made no great figure’.41 Catherine’s expenses were far higher. Though she had to be careful not to outdo a capricious monarch—not long after her arrival in Russia, Elizabeth ordered all her ladies to shave their heads, a fate Catherine escaped only because she was recovering from pleurisy—the grand duchess’s wardrobe was expected to range far beyond the standard repertoire. Like the empress, she usually changed costume three times at a public masquerade, and when an outfit attracted praise, it was never worn again because she made it ‘a rule that if it had once made a big impact, it could only make a lesser one the second time’. Though indebtedness was a crucial marker of nobility in a culture defined by conspicuous consumption, the grand duchess’s need for money would ultimately leave her vulnerable to bribes from foreign Courts. At first, it was Elizabeth who saved her from embarrassment. By the end of Catherine’s first year in Russia, only a gift from the empress could prevent her arrears from exceeding 2000 roubles, and her debts kept on mounting thanks to expenditure on jewellery and gambling.42
