by Simon Dixon
The one loss for which nothing had prepared her was the death of Lanskoy himself. In her mind, at least, everything seemed set fair for a long and happy future. Plunged into ‘the most acute grief’ by her bereavement, she made one of her frankest admissions to Grimm:
I thought I myself would die as a result of the irreparable loss I sustained, just eight days ago, of my best friend. I hoped that he would be my support in my old age: he applied himself, he profited, he acquired all my tastes. This was a young man whom I brought up myself, who was grateful, sweet and honest. He shared my troubles when I had them and rejoiced in my happiness. In a word, I have the misfortune to tell you, sobbing as I am, that General Lanskoy is no more.136
Not yet twenty-six, Lanskoy died of what was probably diphtheria on Tuesday 25 June 1784. The tragedy rapidly became the stuff of legend. Following a raucous dinner in 1792 at which the guests cracked crude jokes about the empress’s insatiable sexual appetite, John Parkinson, an Oxford don conducting a young English nobleman on the Grand Tour, wrote a ‘Note on Lanskoy’ that gives a fine sense of the fecundity of the Petersburg rumour-mill in the last years of Catherine’s life:
It is certain that after his death his legs dropped off. The stench was also insufferable. The boy who gave him his coffee disappeared or died I believe the day after. All these circumstances lead [one] to suppose that he was poisoned. The Empress was inconsolable for his loss. No person but her faithful valet de chambre was suffered to approach her. Grief and the loss of sleep occasioned some spots to appear on her breasts which led her to fancy that she had caught the putrid fever of which they made her believe that L[anskoy] died. For four months afterwards, she kept herself shut up at Peterhoff. Her first reappearance was on occasion of the Polish Deputies; which gave Nariskin occasion to say ‘A plague on these Polish Deputies, I have not sat down to one of these murderous dinners before for an age.’137
Apparently inspired by Quarenghi, and demonstrably inaccurate in almost every respect, such a tissue of invention tells us little about the events of summer 1784. Yet, along with Princess Dashkova’s claim that Lanskoy’s ‘stomach burst open’ after his death, it has helped to prompt some impossibly romanticised accounts of the favourite’s demise.138 His corpse, it is alleged, was left to rot in the heat of the summer because Catherine could not bear to see it buried for more than a month.139 The truth is more prosaic, but none the less touching for that.
The favourite’s lifeless body was taken from the palace at Tsarskoye Selo to the house Quarenghi had designed for him in Sofia. From there it was borne ‘with due honour’ to Cameron’s new cathedral on the morning of Thursday 27 June and immediately interred in the neighbouring cemetery following a funeral service conducted by Metropolitan Gavriil.140 Bezborodko’s attempts not to trouble the empress with the details were thwarted by typically persistent questioning which, as he pointed out, ‘only made her grief the greater’. Catherine did not attend, having been confined to her apartments since Sunday. She, too, had developed alarming symptoms—a sore throat and a high fever—which prompted Dr Rogerson to draw two cups of ‘extremely inflamed’ blood on the day of the funeral. By then, he decided, she was out of danger. Prescribing salt to relieve the indigestion that had prevented her from sleeping, he confidently predicted a full recovery.141 In physical terms, he was right. Emotionally, however, Catherine took longer to recuperate. She shunned most visitors. Sasha’s mother, who arrived in response to the empress’s letter of condolence in the hope of securing her family’s favour, was deflected onto a lady-in-waiting.142 Though Catherine could hardly refuse to receive Paul and his wife on Paul’s name day, the audience was brief and the subdued celebrations went ahead without her. Servants were confined to their everyday livery and the customary salute, music and toasts were all cancelled as a mark of respect.143
Soon the wider implications of the crisis were on everyone’s lips. Princess Dashkova would scarcely mourn the favourite, observed her younger sister: ‘They hated one another.’144 Personalities were scarcely the point, countered Alexander Vorontsov. Even those who had no connection with Lanskoy must regret his passing when they learned of its impact on Catherine: ‘The preservation of the empress is too interesting to us all.’145 Riding to the rescue from Kremenchug, Potëmkin arrived at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July, having covered 760 miles in barely a week. He and Fëdor Orlov went straight to comfort their bereaved sovereign. On the following Sunday, they were joined briefly by Bruce, Osterman, Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshëv and Lev Naryshkin. Catherine was persuaded to ride out in her carriage with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Maria Perekusikhina, but not even such close friends could draw her out of her self-imposed seclusion. She continued to dine alone, seeing few apart from Bezborodko, Potëmkin, Orlov and her confessor. Though she received further brief visits from Paul and Maria Fëdorovna, she avoided the traditional rituals during the Dormition Fast. By 18 August, she felt well enough to write a jocular letter to the Prince de Ligne, explaining (without mentioning Lanskoy) that she had immersed herself in work on her universal etymological dictionary. Anticipating Ligne’s next visit to Russia, she teased him about his son’s abortive flight in the Montgolfier balloon that tore open in mid-air on 19 January:
If you arrive here by balloon, my Prince, I shall reconcile myself to this fine invention, which I have banned for fear of increasing the danger of fire among the wooden buildings of which we have too many in our territories. The crash of the balloon at Lyon has not caused this new method of travel to be believed in here.146
Yet it was one thing to joke to a friend, another to face her Court. While the feast of St Alexander Nevsky on 30 August brought a welcome opportunity to see her elder grandson, the annual celebrations, transferred from the monastery to Tsarskoye Selo, were conducted in her absence. To deepen her misery, a courier arrived from Moscow next day to announce the death of Zakhar Chernyshëv. At the time of their dalliance in 1751, Catherine had been unable to imagine paradise without her dashing cavalier; now he had got there before her. 147
Having initially intended to remain in the country until 10 September, she returned to town five days early, travelling in a simple two-seater with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Anna Protasova, and sleeping in the Hermitage. The rooms she had occupied with Lanskoy carried too many memories, and it was not until the following spring that she returned to her usual Winter Palace apartments. Looking back, Catherine remembered the summer of 1784 as a perpetual series of battles to recover her equilibrium: ‘one to be fought, one to be won, one to be lost.’148 Only on 8 September did she finally summon the courage to appear in public on the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. After mass, she endured a lengthy hand-kissing ceremony before retiring to the Hermitage for lunch with Potëmkin, a handful of friends, and Prince Repnin, who had come to request her permission to take his sick daughter abroad.149 ‘In truth,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm, ‘it was such a big effort that on returning to my bedroom, I felt so exhausted that anyone else would have fainted, something which has never happened to me in my life.’ ‘If you want to know my true state,’ she continued a fortnight later:
I will tell you that for three months from yesterday I have been inconsolable over the irreparable loss I have sustained, that the sole improvement is that I have got used to human faces again, that otherwise my heart still bleeds just as it did at that first moment, that I do my duty and try to do it well, but that my grief is extreme, and such as I have never felt in my life, and it is now three months that I have been in this cruel situation, suffering like the damned.150
Count Cobenzl was more interested in the political consequences of such ‘immoderate grief’. Mercifully for a supporter of the Austrian alliance, they had proved to be minimal. For all Catherine’s emotional turbulence, the direction of her government had remained firm:
There has been not a single sort of discord within the Court. On the contrary, I believe that there have been few epochs where there has been so much unity and so lit
tle jealousy between the people to whom the management of affairs is entrusted. There is no question of a new favourite, and many people are beginning to believe that there won’t be one. If the health of the Empress is not altered by this change, it will certainly do more good than harm.151
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Zenith
1785–1790
In the event, the interval between favourites, though longer than usual, proved to be only temporary. During the celebrations surrounding Catherine’s fifty-sixth birthday on Easter Monday 1785, a new shooting star emerged. Introduced to the empress by Potëmkin, the thirty-one-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Yermolov was first mentioned in the Court journal on 22 April. His presence among the five guests at lunch on the following day suggests that the relationship may have begun during Lent, a time of greater privacy than any other for the empress.1 Although Potëmkin dubbed him the ‘white negro’ on account of his unusually flat nose, it was Yermolov’s flat-footedness in politics that led to his rapid downfall. Drawn into business in April 1786 by his appointment to a commission to restructure the assignat bank, he struggled, as his friend Bezborodko had predicted, to cope with machinations at Court. After being inveigled into an intrigue against Potëmkin that may have been inspired by Zavadovsky and Alexander Vorontsov, Yermolov was dismissed in July with the now customary redundancy package—the Polish Order of the White Eagle, 4300 serfs in Belorussia, 130,000 roubles in cash and a silver dinner service—and sent abroad. In the following year, he embarrassed Semën Vorontsov, Catherine’s ambassador in London, by demanding to be presented to George III. ‘The king has always found it ridiculous that in Russia one can be promoted from sergeant to major general in the space of two years without serving at all.’2
By comparison with Yermolov’s extended ‘retirement’ (he died in Vienna at the age of eighty in 1834), the empress’s infatuation was brief indeed. While it lasted, however, it served its purpose, as Cobenzl noted, by staving off melancholy and stimulating her natural joie de vivre. During the long months of misery after Lanskoy’s death, she had been consoled by a treatise sent to her by the Court physician at Hanover, Dr Johann Zimmerman. Solitude considered with respect to its influence on the mind and the heart was eventually published in Russian translation in 1791. For the moment, Catherine acknowledged the support of the new favourite and her other faithful friends: ‘My inner self has regained its calm and serenity.’3 Restored to health and happiness, she had launched into a new bout of ‘legislomania’, capping a decade of fundamental domestic reform by promulgating the Charter to the Nobility and the Charter to the Towns on her birthday, 21 April 1785.
Though Catherine had no intention of inflating the pretensions of the nobility as a whole—it was part of the compact by which her empire was governed that nobles should abdicate corporate political ambitions in return for virtually unlimited social and economic control over their serfs—she wanted to boost the nobles’ esprit de corps in order to convert them into a civilised instrument for the transmission of her Enlightened policies. Whereas most European sovereigns were anxious to limit noble status, Catherine was keen to enhance it in the interests of her empire. Far from being a concession to noble pressure, the Charter of 1785 represented a consolidation and development of Peter III’s ‘emancipation’ manifesto of 1762. Corporate rights granted to the noble estate as a whole—including the right to attend provincial assemblies and elect a provincial marshal—were linked to the assumption that individuals would continue to serve voluntarily in the provinces: those who failed to serve could play no part in the assemblies. The charter confirmed nobles’ property rights and personal security (they could not be flogged; they were permitted to petition the empress direct; they could be tried only by their peers; and they could be deprived of their nobility only by decision of the Senate, confirmed by Catherine herself). The legislation also attempted to regulate membership of the noble estate by making provincial assemblies responsible for registering six different groups of nobles, defined for the first time according to the antiquity and origins of their titles.4
The Charter to the Towns similarly divided the merchantry and urban-dwellers into six categories, defined according to wealth and occupation. As part of the hierarchical social order Catherine strove to create, they too were given rights of personal security and property (to a lesser degree than the nobles) and the institutional modernisation begun in the Provincial Reform of 1775 was capped by the creation of an even more elaborate system of urban government, based on a representative town council (duma). Although the empress contemplated an equally rational approach to social engineering in a draft charter to the state peasantry, this was never published, perhaps because of its unsettling implications for the serfs. Symmetrical in form, obsessively detailed in content, and increasingly prescriptive as they descended the social scale, the charters stand as a monument to Catherine’s confidence in the reforming power of legislation.5 Although some of that confidence was misplaced, since it took too little notice of prevailing social realities, there was no doubt about her commitment to the development of a vigorous urban economy. On Saturday 24 May 1785, she set out from Tsarskoye Selo without escort in a small suite of twenty carriages to inspect the progress that had been made in the decade since the Provincial Reform.
* * *
Passing through the staging posts immortalised five years later in Alexander Radishchev’s sentimentalist Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, Catherine had no eyes for the rural misery he was soon to depict. Her immediate purpose was to inspect the newly enlarged locks at Vyshny Volochëk, the pivot of the system of inland waterways built by forced labour under Peter the Great which carried 216,000 tons of freight a year to St Petersburg by the 1750s. Soon after arriving in the little town, she looked on as some thirty barges passed through its new stone locks, loaded with grain and iron.6
The empress had originally planned to be away for no longer than a month.7 But while she was at Vyshny, Count Bruce persuaded her to divert briefly to Moscow in order to quell rumours of potential unrest. Although the road between the two capitals was probably the only one in Russia smooth enough to attempt at short notice, only the most entertaining of company could have persuaded her to face such a punishing schedule with equanimity (in the following year she approved a comprehensive programme of improvements to the road, scheduled for completion in 1790 at a total cost of 4 million roubles).8 Her sixteen-strong entourage included not only Potëmkin and Lev Naryshkin, but also three ‘very easy-going, very clever, NB. very jolly’ travelling companions in Cobenzl, Alleyne Fitzherbert and Count Ségur, the ‘pocket ministers’ who took turns to share her six-seater with Yermolov. They relieved the tedium by playing word games devised by Ségur, who seemed particularly ‘pleased to be with us and is as jolly as a chaffinch’.9 ‘The journey is doing me a lot of good,’ Catherine reported to her grandsons’ governor from Torzhok.10
Seen through such rose-tinted spectacles, even the old capital seemed to have something to recommend it. She told Paul and Maria Fëdorovna that General Bauer’s aqueduct at Rostokino, built in imitation of Roman models to channel water into the city from the springs at Mytishchi and completed only in 1803, was already ‘the best building in Moscow: it seems as light as a feather’.11 If the city itself was ‘far better than it used to be’, as Catherine was prepared to acknowledge on the return journey, then so were the villages on the main Petersburg road, rebuilt in stone as a consequence of the Provincial Reform.12 While the ancient settlements along the route had sunk into decline—‘No place,’ Coxe admitted in 1778, ‘ever filled me with more melancholy ideas of fallen grandeur than the town of Novgorod’—the new and recently restored towns showed signs of genuine vigour. Enlivened by a ‘rising spirit of commerce’, Tver itself promised to be ‘no inconsiderable ornament to the most opulent and civilized country’.13 Although such rapid improvements could hardly have been achieved without the active involvement of merchants who shared the Charter to the Towns’ aspira
tions towards a prosperous civic society protected by law, Catherine took legitimate pride in having inspired them under the energetic direction of Tver’s Protestant governor, Yakov Sievers.14 ‘I am told that this is a consequence of the arrangements I put in place and which have been followed to the letter for ten years: and seeing all that, I say that I am well pleased.’15
Although the main aim of her travels was to publicise the benefits of modern technology and administration, the rituals that punctuated the journey spoke of the resilience of an older cultural world. To celebrate their recently granted charters, nobles and townsmen flocked to pay homage to their sovereign. The merchants of Torzhok presented her with leather bags and slippers, embroidered with golden thread, which she promptly sent back to St Petersburg as a gift for Constantine and Alexander.16 As befitted an expedition resembling a medieval monarch’s progress, the tone of the proceedings remained overwhelmingly religious. Catherine attended cathedral services at every major calling point, kissing the holy relics in several more churches along the way and permitting a succession of bishops, abbots and abbesses, themselves attended by countless clergy, monks and nuns, to kiss her hand.17 Yet even the religious aspect of the journey was given a distinctive new colouring. After dining in Moscow with Archbishop Platon and his brother, Alexander, archpriest of the Dormition Cathedral, the empress made a parting gesture towards toleration by receiving a delegation of registered Old Believers at the Petrovsky Palace on 5 June.18 Four days later, on the feast of the Holy Spirit, she laid the foundation stone for Prince Nikolay Lvov’s monumental neoclassical cathedral at the Torzhok monastery of Boris and Gleb. (The Scottish stonemason Adam Menelaws had left Tsarskoye Selo a week ahead of her to begin work there.)19
