To the Hermitage

by Malcolm Bradbury

  HE

  Eighty and sick with jealousy. It’s wonderful.

  SHE

  So if one day you leave me, you will go and visit him? And tell him that even though his Catou thinks so well of you, it doesn’t mean I love him any less?

  HE

  Unfortunately Geneva is nowhere near Paris.

  SHE

  I think now he’s an old man he fears you’re taking his place.

  HE

  Yes, Your Majesty? And exactly what place is that?

  SHE

  I have no idea what he thinks about me, though he’s known for a lusty man. But I shall write at once and say he’s foolish to feel jealous, since thus far you’ve not given him even the slightest occasion—

  HE

  And assure him that as long as I’m in your court I shall strive to do everything he would desire to do himself, if only he could be here.

  SHE

  But you do admire Monsieur Voltaire?

  HE

  Admire him, I adore him. The greatest man in the world. He has genius, merit, nobility, urbanity, sexual charm—

  SHE

  Then what could make him so jealous, I wonder?

  HE

  My dear lady, sometimes I imagine the entire world must be envious of me. Here I enjoy your company, three hours a day. I think your thoughts with you, dream your dreams with you—

  SHE

  You’re like Voltaire, monsieur, you’re flattering me. It’s all I get, flattery. Never an honest opinion, a proper judgement, a truthful feeling—

  HE

  Naturally everyone flatters the woman who is Russia, the most important woman in the world. They’ll pretend to anything. Say her witches are virgins, her hags are princesses, even her cabbages are fit to eat—

  SHE

  They are fit to eat.

  HE

  Where I, my lady, am an honest man and speak only the sober truth. Why shouldn’t I? I sit with you every day, I hear the wisdom of your thoughts, the sharpness of your wit. I take in the seriousness of your countenance, the purity of your soul. I sit across the table looking at your face. I gently touch your hand—

  SHE

  It happens to be my leg, sir. So you refuse to flatter me?

  HE

  I do indeed.

  SHE

  Then I hope you like the watch I gave you. Even though it came from Monsieur Voltaire.

  HE

  I like it the better, knowing that what once belonged to Voltaire now belongs to me.

  SHE

  And what does the watch say, sir? Doesn’t it tell you it’s time to go?

  HE

  It speaks Swiss, dear lady, well-known as an obscure language. I think it advises me to stay—

  SHE

  No, my dear friend, because I have the Swedish ambassador arriving. But bring it with you in the future and we shall listen to it again. You will send me another paper? Something I can read in my bed tonight?

  HE

  Indeed, dear lady.

  HE rises, kisses her hand.

  END OF DAY SIXTEEN

  TWENTY-FIVE (NOW)

  GALINA’S TALE

  ‘Mes amis, thank you for listening to me while we made our little tour. But I know you are not like these other people, you have not come to be tourists. I know you are proper pilgrims, come all the way across the Baltic Sea to follow in the path of our great philosopher, the one in Russia we call Dionysius Didro. I understand some of you are interested in one thing and some another; I am sure the Hermitage can please all of you. When Bo telephoned me from his office and asked my help to arrange his little journey, I realized your tour would really have to start just here, and for an excellent reason. Where you are standing now, as you know, is in the Small Hermitage, just one little part of the great Winter Palace. And you are here because a long time ago, in the winter of 1773, when these buildings were new and most of them did not exist yet, our dear Philosopher used to come by these halls and passages to share his ideas with the grand tzarina in the private apartments down the corridor.

  ‘Can you imagine it? Because, please remember, nothing you see is quite as it was then, and yet Didro is everywhere. At that time this was a private palace, the palace of a great tzarina, made open to the people only when a tzar or a tzarina said so. Once these rooms went from public to private, from state to household, and the better the court knew or respected you the deeper you went. Today anyone can go anywhere, without bother, unless you touch the objects and set off the alarms. Once everything in the building was arranged quite differently, as the palace of a tzarina, her workplace and her home. Then one winter night in 1837, when one of our worst tzars, Nicholas First, was in the royal box at the opera, a great fire started in the buildings, and they burned for three days. Everything inside had to be carried out there, into the snows of Palace Square. The windows blew out, the chandeliers fell, but most of the objects were saved at a cost in human lives. After this, the Hermitage was rebuilt, the plan was altered, many things were changed. Again after 1917, when the tzars had been assassinated, the rooms were taken over by the people and the commissars, and the collections moved. Nothing is the same, yet perhaps nothing at all we see would be here at all, if there hadn’t been that old friendship between the Empress and the Philosopher. Da?

  ‘So, mes amis, that is one reason why I brought you here and ask you to look around. But there is another. As I told you already on the bus, I am a librarian. If you have a mind, a curiosity, an imagination, a librarian is a good thing to be. But I started work when I was a young girl and it was the very end of the war. In Leningrad this was, if you remember, a terrible time. The Germans had been driven away at last, but the city was left with many ruins. The Germans are called civilized but they were also barbarians. They occupied the Summer Palace, Tzarskoye Selo, and stripped it of almost everything, signing their names in the ruins so we could hate them. Whatever they couldn’t take as plunder they were happy to burn or flatten or destroy. Every night they bombed the city with their guns: the Winter Palace, the Tauride, the Duma, all the factories and apartments. If they couldn’t take Leningrad they would just eliminate it. So when it was all over, we were like Dostoyevsky’s underground men. We lived under the floorboards, in the cellars, starving and struggling to keep alive.

  ‘Even so, we tried to re-create the city as it had been, and bring its culture back to life again. Because Leningrad was always Russia’s culture city, the writers’ city, the place they wrote of most often and knew best. Pushkin and Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Then Bely and Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and Brodsky, Bitov, they all wrote of Petersburg-Leningrad. This doesn’t mean they always loved the city. Often it depressed them, defeated them, sent them to despair. It persecuted them, starved them, exiled them, left them in pain with no money and no hope. So it was the city with the darkest fears, the oldest dreams, the biggest terrors, the strangest illusions – a place of fictions and deceptions, where nothing seemed exactly real and everything was shaped by stories, books, illusions and dreams.

  ‘Even in the bad times, I was like all Russian children, I was taught to love Pushkin and to remember the books. Maybe it mattered to me more than ever, because in that time there was nowhere to go but disappear into the books. You remember what the Underground Man of Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells us? “It’s better in books, that’s where life makes more sense.” For me it was better in books, so I read very many. Not just Russian books, from my mother I spoke other languages, French and German. When they began to put back the city and try to bring it to life again, to put back the things there before, I went to work in the public library. And because my French was so good I was asked to look after the special collection, the famous library of the Enlightenment, the collection of Voltaire-Didro, which I think is why you are here.’

  ‘Some of us,’ says Bo. ‘But go on, Galina, it’s fascinating . . .’

  ‘Well, maybe you can remember just how those libraries came here to Russia? As
you can see from this place, Catherine just acquired everything she could think of that would make her Russia seem powerful or civilized, part of the new world of Europe. What she wanted she asked for, and what she asked for she got. But from the moment they crowned her in the Kremlin, she knew what she would like most, to be a philosophical empress. She called for support from the philosophes, les lumières, and told them Russia would now become the land of freedom, where they could hold on to any ideas they liked. They could bring their philosophical speculations. The censor would not interfere, the church would not be allowed to oppress them. Like everyone in Europe, she had come to love the great Voltaire. She corresponded with him her whole life, sending the first letter within a month of her crowning. She wrote it with a pseudonym, pretending it came from one of her courtiers who wished him to know how the Empress admired him so. At first Voltaire didn’t trust her, but she never stopped. She sent him admiring letters, great delegations, wonderful gifts. She knew some of his works were banned in France and he lived as an exile, so she offered to print everything in Russia.’

  ‘Diderot’s Encyclopedia too,’ says Bo.

  ‘The Empress had many charms. After a time Voltaire was quite seduced. Soon he was writing her admiring letters and poems, some of them here on display, I will show you. They never met; I think she made sure of that. She knew the illusion was better than the reality. I think he would like to come, but she warned him he might be unhappy. In the end he offered to come after he was dead, a perfect arrangement: the grave of the world’s greatest philosopher here at the court of the world’s greatest empress. “I would rather end my days in a greater empire,” he had written in a letter which she kept very carefully. Voltaire died, you know, in May 1778. So she ordered a court mourning, and distributed hundreds of copies of his works. By this time Melchior Grimm was her agent all over Europe, and she told him to go to Ferney and buy up the library, and all the letters he could acquire.

  ‘At this time she had bought already the library of Didro, but he was alive and allowed to keep it in his apartment. Voltaire’s library was bigger; it was three times bigger. He could afford everything; he was a rich man, while Didro was really most of his life a poor hack. Voltaire lived like a king in his own palace near Geneva, Didro had a small apartment in Paris. Voltaire had published hundreds of books, more than almost anyone ever; Didro preferred talking, and could never remember where all his papers and writings were. Grimm talked to Madame Denis, who was Voltaire’s niece and also his mistress, and a very greedy woman. He bought the library, at a very high price – 135,000 livres, maybe ten times what was paid for Didro’s. He tried to buy the papers, but most of them had already been sold to the publisher Panckoucke, who had had the idea that he would purchase all the great philosophical papers – Rousseau’s in Neuchâtel, Buffon’s – and publish them in Paris. But in the end he gave so much money to all the writers’ widows and nieces he had to sell Voltaire’s papers on to someone else, Beaumarchais.’

  ‘Of Figaro?’ asks Birgitta Lindhorst.

  ‘Da, that’s right. But Grimm was also told to get hold of something else; he was supposed to buy Voltaire’s body too. Then she meant to build a complete copy of Ferney, here at Tzarskoye Selo, and place Voltaire’s own tomb in the middle of the grounds. Unfortunately for Catherine, at the very end of his life Voltaire decided to make a visit to Paris, where he had his famous apotheosis at the theatre, when all Paris hailed him as a great man. He died just after, and his body had to be smuggled upright out of Paris in a carriage at night, because the church wanted to throw him into the lime-pits as a wicked atheist. In the end, maybe you remember, he was buried outside Paris in a disused chapel, and later brought back to the Pantheon. So Voltaire never came here, and the new Ferney was never built. But you can see it if you like to; the plans are all here, in the Hermitage.

  ‘But something was built, in these corridors here, near where we are, in a gallery overlooking the waters of the Neva. Catherine made a beautiful library. Voltaire’s secretary came all the way from Ferney, bringing his books, and they were arranged in the same order as they had been in his own house. In an alcove at one end of the library, Catherine placed a seated statue of Voltaire, the famous one that had been commissioned from Houdon. Before the library was built, she had kept it here in the Hermitage next to the Apollo Belvedere. She said it was important that Voltaire looked out only on equals. At the other end of the library, there was another statue, done by Marie-Anne Collot. She was Falconet’s assistant, and she married his son. She finished off the face of the bronze horseman, and many people thought she was the better sculptor. The other bust was Didro, who died six years after. So his books too came, his papers also, and they went into the same library. So right here, overlooking the Neva, was created the library of Enlightenment, the libraire des lumières.’

  ‘And now are we going to see it?’ asks Sven Sonnenberg, who is tightly holding Agnes Falkman’s hand.

  ‘Ah no, mon ami, not quite. Because nothing in this world is that simple. Nothing is where you think it is, and if it was once it has often gone. Times change, and everything happens. All that is solid melts into air. Only a little time after the library was finished the world turned upside down. The Revolution and Terror came to France. By now Catherine was getting old and frightened. She felt sure the revolution would spread to Russia. It didn’t, of course, not then, it would take more than another century. But now she thought the philosophers were dangerous. She told Grimm it was necessary to identify the culprits who had caused this evil. She banned French clothes, French books, and sent all the French who supported the Revolution home from Russia. And she turned against Voltaire. When his body was taken from the chapel at Sellières, and delivered by Beaumarchais in a great parade to the Pantheon, she locked up the library. She sent the Houdon statue up to the attics and forbade anyone to look at it again. And not too long after this she died herself, here on her privy at the Hermitage—’

  ‘But the library—’ says Anders Manders.

  ‘What happened to it? Well, in Tzarist times, it was nearly always the rule a good tzar was followed by a very bad one. Catherine was succeeded by her son, the Archduke Paul, who made such a bad tzar he was murdered four years after by his own courtiers. Paul hated his mother and the philosophes. What was surprising was he didn’t destroy the whole library. But when his son Alexander succeeded, he began as a great reformer, and opened up the library and restored the Voltaire statue. That was until the armies of Napoleon invaded Russia. Now the French were Russia’s enemy, so the library was closed once more. Alexander was succeeded by his brother, Tzar Nicholas, not a good tzar. He began by firing on the Decembrists, and he ran a reign of terror. It was bad for all the writers. Pushkin was driven into exile, Dostoyevsky was put in front of a firing squad at the Peter and Paul Fortress, and pardoned at the last minute. Nicholas especially hated Voltaire. Maybe you remember what he said when he saw the Houdon statue? “Destroy that grinning old monkey.”’

  ‘Was it destroyed?’ asks Agnes Falkman.

  ‘Non, non, ma cherie. It was just at the very beginning of its great adventures. Someone hid it, in the library, the one place Nicholas never went. Then came the fire, and everything was moved again. The next tzar, Alexander the Second, the liberator of Finland, the man who freed the serfs, decided to use the library for other things, because the collection of paintings and objets was now so big. He was the one who decided the library should move. It would have to go to the fine Petersburg Public Library, the place where I work now, the Saltykov-Shchedrin. He decided the Philosopher would have to go too, so they put the statue on runners and off he rode, right down the Nevsky Prospekt. Now maybe you remember what happened to Alexander? He was assassinated, by some anarchists who worked from a little cake shop, also on the Nevsky Prospekt. His successor was another Alexander, and he acquired another great library, the library of Didro’s good friend, Dmitry Golitsyn, who had been ambassador in Paris and the Hague. He thought it was
best if those books too went to the Saltykov-Shchedrin. But he asked one present in return. He wanted the statue of Voltaire. Out into Nevsky Prospekt the philosopher went again. Off he rolled on his runners, all the way to the Hermitage.

  ‘There he stayed for a long while, and then it was 1917. The Tzar had created the Provisional Government and was trying to lead his own armies, the Germans were advancing on the city. It was like the age of Napoleon all over again, and the government decided it must once more protect the Hermitage treasures. In his marble armchair the philosopher set off once more, this time even further along Nevsky Prospekt to the Moscow railway station. He took the train to Moscow and spent the rest of the war in the Kremlin. By the time he returned to the Hermitage, everything was different. This building had been taken, now it belonged to the people, and the city was no longer Petersburg, or Petrograd, it was Leningrad. In 1941 the Germans were back again. Naturally Voltaire realized he had better go to the station yet again. He sat opposite Rastrelli’s famous waxwork of Peter the Great in the very last train to leave Leningrad before the siege started. If you wonder where he spent the war, it was in Sverdlovsk, which used to be Yekaterinburg, and which is where the Tzar and his family were murdered. By the way, a famous party official came from there later on; his name was Boris Yeltsin.’

  ‘So where is the statue now?’ asks Sven Sonnenberg, looking a little confused.

  ‘It’s here, you can see it if you like. Except I thought you really came here for Didro.’

  ‘Well, that is perfectly true,’ says Bo.

  ‘And of course his story was not the same at all. Voltaire and Didro were very different people. Voltaire was sharp and cunning, always guarding his fame, protecting his ideas, thinking about his editions. Didro was kind, and open, a noisy man. He liked to talk first and write after. What he wrote he changed, so in the end he had no idea which version of his writing was correct, or the one he liked best. Didro outlived the others. He survived Voltaire by six years, Rousseau by the same, and they were six very important years. He lived almost to the end of the age of reason. When his life was near the end, he recalled his promise to the Tzarina. He hired three copyists, and asked them to copy out all his papers, so there would be copies in France and others in Russia. The only problem was there were so many drafts the copyists found themselves copying different versions of the same book.’