Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  The final part of the return journey was completed by water from Borovichy on 11 June. One of the large galleys manned by the 674 sailors under Vice Admiral Pushchin’s command was devoted entirely to the preparation of lunch, another was responsible for dinner. Catherine shared her craft with Yermolov and her favourite ladies-in-waiting, Anna Protasova and Maria Perekusikhina.20 As Ségur later recalled, Lake Ilmen, a ‘sort of calm and limpid sea’ south of Novgorod, ‘was covered with a number of boats of all sizes, adorned with painted sails, and garlands of flowers’:

  The numerous bodies of boatmen, peasants and peasant girls who were on board of them, strove with each other to approach our splendid flotilla, and made the air resound with their musical instruments and loud shouts, and at the close of day, with their melodious but rather plaintive songs.21

  Catherine’s company was more raucous. As always, she had taken plenty of work with her, chivvying Prince Vyazemsky about a series of unresolved criminal cases in St Petersburg province. In the evenings, however, she and her entourage relaxed by compiling a fantastic story about the revolution that had failed to materialise in Moscow. No wonder ‘Prince Potëmkin died of laughing throughout the journey’.22

  Though the wide range of personal and public funds used to subsidise the empress’s travels makes it impossible to determine their total costs, the following accounts, issued by the Court administration, give some estimate of the types of expenditure involved:

  Rewards: 30,368 r.

  Fees for horses at staging posts between Tsarskoye Selo and Moscow and back to Borovichy 81,535 r. 6k.

  To the Court Office for various duties connected with the journey 12,000 r.

  For construction of vessels here and at Borovichy 5,060 r. 12.5k.

  For boatmen and workmen on the boats during the cruise and other necessities 18,335 r.

  For repairing the road and bridges to Moscow 2,000 r.

  For schools, almshouses and hospitals in Moscow, Novgorod and Tver provinces 27,900 r.

  For the building of homes for the homeless, in Novgorod, 6,000 and in Klin, 2,000 8,000 r.

  For things used on the journey 36,305 r.

  Total: 231,493 r 18.5k.23

  Back at Peterhof for the twenty-third anniversary of her coup, Catherine boasted to Grimm about the comparative etymological dictionary on which she had been working since the death of Lanskoy: ‘It is perhaps the most useful thing that has ever been done for all languages and every dictionary, and namely for the Russian language, of which the Russian Academy has undertaken to produce a dictionary, and for which, if the truth be told, it totally lacked the requisite knowledge.’24 Requests for information were sent across Europe, and also to both South and North America. Invited to contribute lists of Native American words by the marquis de Lafayette, George Washington replied in May 1786 that he would do his best to help Catherine, ‘but she must have a little patience—the Indian tribes on the Ohio are numerous, dispersed & distant from those who are most likely to do the business properly’.25 She forged ahead regardless. Linguarum totius orbis, vocabularia comparativa was published in 1787 with a title page in Russian and Latin. Since the empress’s contribution depended more on enthusiasm than expertise, the scholarly value of the work owed most to Peter Simon Pallas, the leader of the Academy of Sciences’ expeditions to the steppes. However, her own patriotic instincts were reflected in a determination to detect Slavonic influences in many of the world’s languages.26

  Unlike her etymological dictionary, another of Catherine’s projects in the summer of 1785 was still incomplete in 1796 when her son decided to dismantle it. By that time, she had spent at least 823,389 roubles on the monumental neoclassical Pella Palace, designed by Ivan Starov overlooking a bend in the River Neva to the east of St Petersburg. Here, opposite Potëmkin’s estate at Ostrovki, she could watch the barges from Vyshny Volochëk gliding silently towards the capital and indulge her passion for garden design. ‘It’s a beautiful situation,’ she had told Grimm in April, ‘with a variety of views and it will be good to enhance it all with an English park.’ Having commissioned three white marble columns for her garden when she returned from Moscow, she confided the ‘fantasy that took hold of me three days ago, when I had a sort of fever for these three columns that I wish to see executed in all their grandeur and beauty’.27

  * * *

  Only one false note had been struck on the visit to Moscow, and it was possibly a significant one. Although she reacted favourably to most of the new buildings there, Catherine angrily rejected the interiors at suburban Tsaritsyno, declaring the palace uninhabitable as it stood.28 Bazhenov, who had kept her secretaries in close touch with his plans since being commissioned in 1776, had evidently failed to prepare the empress for the results.29 She was not the only critic of his stunning neo-Gothic extravaganza. An English visitor in 1792, who found the buildings at Tsaritsyno ‘crowded together in such manner, that one could fancy it the object of the architect to shut out as much as possible the beauties of the situation’, noted that the external embellishments were ‘stuck all over in such profusion that we compared the ground on which they were stuck to a larded chicken’.30 Yet perhaps there was a more ideological reason for the empress’s irritation. Though she did not say so, it has often been supposed that she was offended above all by the Masonic symbolism of Bazhenov’s designs.

  Catherine had certainly lost patience with Freemasonry by the time of her visit to the old capital. Unable to distinguish between philanthropic Rosicrucians devoted to the inner life and the revolutionary mysticism of the ‘illuminati’ and Saint Martin, she was excluded from the movement by her sex and suspicious of it as a Prussian-dominated espionage network with the potential to ensnare her son. (Though it seems doubtful that Paul ever belonged to a Masonic lodge, it emerged in 1792 that Bazhenov himself had delivered a parcel of mystical and devotional literature to the grand duke on behalf of the publisher Nikolay Novikov.)31 Having been nauseated by the visit to St Petersburg in 1779 of Count Cagliostro—the Sicilian charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo, who was a pseudo-alchemist rather than a Freemason—Catherine condemned Freemasonry to Grimm as ‘one of the greatest extravagances ever in fashion among the human species’.32 Cagliostro was resurrected in the guise of Kalifalkzherston, a character who embezzles gold from gullible victims in Catherine’s play The Deceiver, one of three anti-Masonic dramas dating from 1785–6 that she claimed proved a ‘prodigious success’ with her audience.33

  Governor General Bruce had been expressing anxiety about unregulated publishing for more than a year by December 1785, when the empress ordered him to investigate some of the books published by Novikov’s Moscow university press so that she could be sure that they contained no Masonic ‘ravings’. In March 1786, warning Bezborodko that he faced ‘complete ruin’ from the sequestration of his stock, Novikov implored Catherine’s secretary to intervene on his behalf. Shortly afterwards, she banned only six Masonic texts, including the Rosicrucian New Chrysomander and the Chemical Psalter, a pseudo-Paracelsus. Sent to test the publisher’s faith, the sympathetic Archbishop Platon could find no contradiction between his Freemasonry and his Christian beliefs. Nevertheless, the empress’s suspicions continued to be fuelled by her confessor, Father Ioann Pamfilov, in cahoots with one of Platon’s most influential enemies, Archpriest Peter Alekseyev of the Archangel Cathedral in Moscow. Although no further systematic censorship was imposed, Bruce and these clerics led her to worry that her 1783 edict permitting private publishers had generated not only the sorts of ‘useful’ book she was keen to propagate, but also a lot of dangerous and potentially subversive nonsense. Though she was pleased to learn that Dr Zimmerman admired her final anti-Masonic drama, The Shaman of Siberia, ‘because I like that play very much’, she feared that it was likely to ‘correct no one: absurdities are tenacious and these particular absurdities have become fashionable. The majority of German princes think it good form to bow their heads to all these illusionists’.34

  While Nov
ikov’s books were impounded, Catherine continued her own voracious reading. Necker’s Compte rendu reminded her that Louis XVI’s finances were ‘in general, completely disgusting’.35 The long-awaited arrival of Diderot’s library and manuscripts in the autumn of 1785 unnerved her more. Nothing had prepared her for the shock of finding his critical ‘Observations’ on her Nakaz, which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Directing his treatise as much against Montesquieu as against the empress, Diderot had been able to see ‘only a formal difference’ between despotism and pure monarchy: ‘It is the spirit of pure monarchy which has dictated the Instruction of Catherine II. Pure monarchy remains as it is or reverts to despotism, according to the character of the monarch. It is therefore a bad sort of government.’ His verdict on serfdom was equally uncompromising: ‘There is only one way to avoid the abuses of serfdom and prevent its dangers: and that is to abolish serfdom and rule only over free men.’36 ‘This essay,’ the empress retorted, ‘is utter drizzle in which one finds neither an understanding of things, nor prudence, nor foresight.’ Observing that ‘criticism is easy, but art is difficult’, she insisted to Grimm that her Nakaz had been ‘not only good, but even excellent, and well adapted to circumstances’ because ‘everyone benefits from the principles established by this Instruction’.37

  * * *

  The benefits of Quarenghi’s Hermitage theatre were destined to be enjoyed by a much narrower circle. When the space above the stables in the courtyard of the Small Hermitage proved too small for the purpose, it was decided to build on the river on the site of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace. ‘I shall not need the theatre this winter,’ Catherine commented in response to the plans the architect sent her in 1784. ‘Therefore you may quietly proceed with the drying and painting, since it won’t be used until the winter of 1785, that is, you have a full 14–15 months ahead of you.’38

  Meanwhile, Quarenghi had plenty of other projects to occupy his time. He had written without exaggeration in 1783 that he had ‘so much work’ that he scarcely had ‘time to eat and sleep’. Two years later, he sent another Italian correspondent a staggering list of commissions which were soon to transform not only the urban landscape in St Petersburg, but also many provincial towns and estates:

  …three pavilions in the new garden at Peterhof…; the Stock Market; a large building for the State bank; a very large two-storey block of shops for the fair in Irkutsk; a church with a hospital attached for their imperial highnesses at Pavlovsk; a building…to accommodate the copies of Raphael’s loggias;…a façade for the colleges and church in Polotsk; the façade for the governor’s residence in Smolensk; a palace and stables for General Zavadovsky in Ukraine; the Hermitage theatre…on the model of the ancients; the façade of the new imperial palace in Moscow…; a marble gallery for the palace of Her Imperial Majesty, which I have begun and which I must bring to order and re-do, and which, when finished, may be considered the richest gallery in the whole of the North; the façade of the College of Foreign Affairs; shops for silversmiths…;…. five churches;…a large group of buildings and a stock-exchange for the fair at Kursk; a house belonging to the late General Lanskoy in the town of St Sophia; a building for public shops, the press and professors’ apartments at the Academy of Sciences; a manege, stables, a great staircase and many internal decorations at the late General Lanskoy’s palace [at Velë in Polotsk province]; and equally the reconstruction of the whole of this aforementioned palace and three large gates in marble and bronze for the big square; two iron and bronze bridges for her imperial majesty’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo; the renovation and enlargement of the governor’s residence at Voronezh, and also the archbishop’s palace, the seminary and its bell-tower, houses for the choristers, the provincial administration, and many other renovations and façades for a lot of public buildings in the town; a pavilion with a large hall for music, two rooms and an open temple, dedicated to the goddess Ceres, with a ruin nearby in the ancient style in the aforementioned garden. All these buildings are part complete, part in the process of being finished.39

  Amidst this flurry of activity, Quarenghi pressed ahead with his theatre, modelled on the Palladian theatre at Vicenza, itself inspired by classical Rome. It opened on schedule on 22 November 1785 with a performance of Ablesimov’s ever-popular comic opera Miller-Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker at which Cobenzl was the guest of honour.40 Some months later, the architect proclaimed that he had tried to give his semicircular auditorium ‘an ancient appearance, while making it simultaneously correspond to contemporary requirements…All the seats are equivalent, and each may sit wherever he judges best’.41 It was here amidst the pink marble columns that a select audience celebrated the empress’s fifty-seventh birthday in 1786 with the first two performances of Fevei, an opera for which she herself had written the libretto.42 As the French émigré Prince Esterhazy later observed, Vasily Pashkevich’s music was entirely based on ‘ancient local chants’:

  The production was magnificent. The action takes place in Russia in ancient times. All the costumes were made with the greatest luxury from Turkish fabrics, exactly as they wore then. There was an embassy of Kalmyks, singing and dancing in the Tatar manner, and Kamchadals, dressed in national costume, who likewise perform the dances of central Asia. The ballet with which the opera ends was performed by Picquet, Madame Rosa, and other good dancers. Represented in it are all the different peoples who populate the empire, each in its own national dress. I never saw a more magnificent or more varied spectacle: there were more than five hundred people on stage! However, there were fewer than fifty of us in the audience: so uncompromising is the empress with regard to access to her Hermitage.43

  Nervous about the quality of her theatrical compositions, Catherine recruited her secretary, Alexander Khrapovitsky, to work through the night to correct her grammar and spelling. In 1789, she asked Lev Naryshkin to shorten her comedy The Misunderstanding, complaining that it had been the cause of ‘more labour than laughter’.44 By then, she had turned her hand to innovative historical dramas inspired by Shakespeare. Ryurik, written in August 1786 but never performed, was an allegory intended to glorify the benefits of a benevolent foreign ruler. Its sequel was Catherine’s libretto for The Beginning of Oleg’s Reign, an operatic pageant celebrating the union of Greek and Russian cultures, published in 1787 and eventually premiered in a lavish production in the autumn of 1790 to commemorate her empire’s victories in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–91.45

  * * *

  Contemporary imperial developments were indeed as fantastic as any opera plot. In October 1786 Potëmkin requested more money to fund his insatiable ambitions in the South. Not content with plans for a university at Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine), he envisaged a cathedral grand enough to rival St Peter’s in Rome and ‘dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Lord as a sign that your labours have transfigured this land from a barren steppe into an abundant garden, and the abode of beasts into a favourable refuge for immigrants from all countries’.46 Catherine had already trumpeted his claims to Dr Zimmerman:

  ‘In the Tauride the main thing must probably be agriculture, and also silkworms, and after that plantations of mulberry-trees. We could manufacture cloth there, though the wool is not of the best quality, and it would be good to make cheese too (NB hardly any cheese is made in the whole of Russia). A further key objective in the Tauride might be gardens, and especially botanical gardens.’47

  It remained only to see this paradise for herself in the company of her handsome new favourite. The twenty-six-year-old guards officer Alexander Dmitryev-Mamonov, nicknamed ‘Redcoat’ by the empress, had been installed by Potëmkin in July. Describing this latest paragon to Grimm in December, she praised his heart, his honesty and his intelligence: ‘in a word, he is as sound in his inner self as his dextrous, strong and brilliant exterior’.48 Though the same optimistic tone could always be heard at the start of each new relationship, this time there was a grain of truth in the hyperbole. Mamonov shared many
of Catherine’s interests and delighted a select audience at the Hermitage Theatre in 1788 with his comedy L’Insouciant, written in mock tribute to Lev Naryshkin.49

  As the empress cleared her desk at the Winter Palace on New Year’s Day 1787, a range of scandals was brewing among her closest circle. Bezborodko had fallen for an attractive dancer and set her up in a house next to his own, depositing 10,000 roubles in her name at the foundling home.50 More menacingly, Prince Frederick of Württemberg had returned to Germany, having abandoned his long-suffering wife, Zelmira (Princess Auguste of Brunswick), the sister-in-law of Maria Fëdorovna. ‘The Prince of Württemberg’s thrashings have finally forced his wife to withdraw to my apartments because she was actually in danger for her life,’ the empress reported to Potëmkin. As her secretary noted with typical understatement, ‘various consequences transpired which took up a lot of time’. Despite the empress’s support for Zelmira, the dispute remained unresolved at the princess’s death in September 1788.51 For the moment, all Catherine could do was to try to put such troubles behind her as she left for Tsarskoye Selo on 2 January to prepare for the greatest journey of her life.

  It had been long enough in the planning. Four years earlier, Zavadovsky had told Field Marshal Rumyantsev of the empress’s secret intention to travel via Smolensk and Kiev for a meeting with Joseph II at Kherson.52 Orders went out in September 1784 that all the dams on the Dnieper and its tributaries be cleared to allow ‘navigation from their very sources’ in the following spring. Court officials were urged to do everything possible to economise and limit the number of horses required.53 Later that autumn, however, the renewed threat of plague in the South threw the whole project into doubt—in the aftermath of Lanskoy’s death, the Vorontsovs were not the only ones opposed to the idea of exposing Catherine to unnecessary risk—and by the time she returned from Moscow in summer 1785 it had already been decided to postpone her great venture until January 1787.54