by Will Durant
Who composed this moving music for Russia’s choirs? Mostly obscure monks, unknelled and unknown. Two stand out in the eighteenth century. Sozonovich Berezovsky was a Ukrainian lad whose voice seemed designed for the adoration of God. Catherine II sent him to Italy at state expense to get the best musical education; he lived for years at Bologna, and under Padre Martini he learned the art of composition. Returning to Russia, he wrote religious music that combined Russian intensity with Italian elegance. His efforts to reform the singing of the choirs met with orthodox resistance; he fell into morbid melancholy, and killed himself at the age of thirty-two (1777).16 Still more famous was Dmitri Bortniansky. When only seven years old he was admitted to the Court Church Choir; the Empress Elizabeth commissioned Galuppi to tutor him; when Galuppi returned to Italy Catherine II sent Dmitri with him to Venice; thence he passed to Padre Martini, and then to Rome and Naples, where he composed music in the Italian style. In 1779 he returned to Russia; he was soon appointed director of the Court Church Choir, and he kept this post till his death (1825). For the choir he composed a Greek Mass, and settings in four and eight parts for forty-five Psalms. It was due especially to his training that the choir reached the excellence which made it one of the wonders of the musical world. In 1901 St. Petersburg celebrated with pomp the 150th anniversary of his birth.
French influence dominated Russian art, but the leading figure was an Italian, Francesco (or Bartolomeo) Rastrelli. His father, Carlo, had been called to Russia by Peter the Great (1715), and had cast in bronze an equestrian statue of Peter, and a full-length figure of the Empress Anna Ivanovna. The son inherited the Louis Quinze Style that Carlo had brought from France; he added to it some inspiration from the baroque masterpieces of Balthasar Neumann and Fischer von Erlach in Germany and Austria; and he adapted these influences so harmoniously with Russian needs and styles that he became the architectural favorite of Czarina Elizabeth. Almost every Russian building of artistic note from 1741 to 1765 was designed by him or his aides. On the left bank of the Neva he raised (1732-54) the Winter Palace, which was burned down in 1837 but was conjecturally restored on the original plan: a monstrous mass of windows and columns in three layers, topped by statues and battlements. More to Elizabeth’s taste was the Palace of Tsarskoe Selo (i.e., the Czar’s village), on a hill fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg. At its left he built a church; in the interior of the palace a ceremonial stairway led to a Grande Galerie which was illuminated by immense windows during the day and by fifty-six chandeliers at night; at the farther end were the throne room and the apartments of the Empress. A Chinese Room paid the usual homage of the eighteenth century to Chinese art; an Amber Room was paneled with plaques of amber, given to Peter the Great by Frederick William I in exchange for fifty-five tall grenadiers; and a picture gallery housed some of the imperial collections. The interior was mostly in rococo decoration, which an English traveler described as a “mixture of barbarism and magnificence.”17 Catherine II, who was chaste if only in her taste, had the golden ornaments of the façade removed.
Literature developed more slowly than art. The paucity of readers gave it little encouragement, censorship by Church and state cramped expression, and the Russian language had not yet refined itself, in grammar or vocabulary, into a literary vehicle. And yet, even before the accession of Elizabeth (1742), three writers left their names on the face of history. Vasili Tatishchev was a man of action and thought, a traveler and historian, a diplomat and philosopher, loving Russia but opening his mind eagerly to economic and intellectual developments in the West. He was one of several promising youths whom Peter sent abroad for intellectual insemination. He came back with dangerous ideas: he had read, directly or in summaries, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Grotius, and Bayle; his Orthodox faith had withered, and he supported religion only as an aide to government.18 He served Peter in dangerous campaigns, became governor of Astrakhan, and was accused of peculation.19 In his wanderings he gathered a store of geographical, ethnological, and historical data, which he used in a History of Russia. The book offended the clergy; no one dared print it till the early and liberal years of Catherine II’s reign (1768–74).
Prince Antioch Cantemir continued the revolt against theology. Son of a Moldavian hospodar (governor), he was brought to Russia in his third year, learned to speak six languages, served in embassies to London and Paris, met Montesquieu and Maupertuis, and, returning, wrote satires of those “Pan-Slavic” patriots who opposed the contamination of Russian life with Western ideas. Here is a bit of his poem “To My Mind”:
Immature mind, fruit of recent studies, be quiet, urge not the pen into my hands. … Many easy paths lead in our days to honors; the least acceptable is the one the nine barefoot sisters [the Muses] have laid out. … You have to toil and moil there, and while you labor people avoid you as a pestilence, rail at you, loathe you. … “Who pores over books becomes an atheist”; thus Crito grumbles, his rosary in his hands, … and bids me see how dangerous is the seed of learning that is cast among us: our children, … to the horror of the Church, have begun to read the Bible; they discuss all, want to know the cause of all, and put little faith in the clergy; … they place no candles before the images, they observe no feasts. . . .
O Mind, I advise you to be dumber than a dumpling. … Complain not of your obscurity.... If gracious Wisdom has taught you anything, … explain it not to others.20
Kantemir offended further by translating Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. The book was denounced as Copernican, heretical, blasphemous, but Kantemir foiled his persecutors by dying at thirty-six (1744). Not till 1762 did his satires find a publisher.
Under Czarina Elizabeth Russian literature began to assert itself as something more than an echo of the French. Mikhail Lomonosov felt rather the German influence; having studied at Marburg and Freiburg, he married a Fräulein, and brought with her to St. Petersburg a heavy load of science. He became the lion of the Academy, adept in everything, even in drinking.21 He refused to specialize; he became a metallurgist, geologist, chemist, electrician, astronomer, economist, geographer, historian, philologist, orator; Pushkin called him “the first Russian university.”22 Amid all this he was a poet.
His chief rival for the applause of the intelligentsia was Alexis Sumarokov, who published a volume of odes by himself and by Lomonosov to display the latter’s inferiority. [The difference was negligible.] The real distinction of Sumarokov was his establishment of a Russian national theater (1756). For it he wrote plays echoing those of Racine and Voltaire. Elizabeth compelled the courtiers to attend; but as they paid no admission, Sumarokov complained that his salary of five thousand rubles per year did not suffice to keep both his theater and himself alive. “What was once seen at Athens, what is now to be seen in Paris, is also seen in Russia, by my care.... In Germany a crowd of poets has not produced what I have succeeded in doing by my own efforts.”23 In 1760 he tired of his labors and moved to Moscow, but there his flair for quarreling soon left him moneyless. He appealed to Catherine II to send him abroad at state expense, and assured her: “If Europe were described by such a pen as mine, an outlay of 300,000 rubles would seem small.”24 Catherine bore with him till he died of drink (1777).
Let us enliven our pages with the romance of a princess. Natalia Borisovna Dolgorukaya was the daughter of Count and Field Marshal Boris Cheremetyev, comrade in arms of Peter the Great. At the age of fifteen (1729), “radiantly beautiful,” and “one of the greatest heiresses in Russia,”25 she was betrothed to Vasili Lukich Dolgoruki, the prime favorite of Czar Peter II. Before they could be married Peter died, and his successor banished Vasili to Siberia. Natalia insisted on marrying him and following him into exile. She lived with him for eight years in Tobolsk, and bore him two children. In 1739 he was put to death. After three more years of exile she was allowed to return to European Russia. Having completed the education of her children, she entered a convent at Kiev. There, at the request of her son Mikhail, she composed her M
emoirs (1768), which her poet grandson, Prince Ivan Mikhailovich Dolgoruki, published in 1810. Three Russian poets have celebrated her memory, and Russia, honors her as the type of the many Russian women who ennobled revolution with their heroism and constancy.
All in all, Russian civilization was a mixture of unavoidable discipline and callous exploitation, of piety and violence, of prayer and profanity, of music and vulgarity, of fidelity and cruelty, of servile obsequiousness and indomitable bravery. These people could not develop the virtues of peace because they had to fight, through long winters and long winter nights, a bitter war against the arctic winds that crossed unhindered over their frozen plains. They had never known the Renaissance or the Reformation, and so—except in their artificial capital—they were still imprisoned in medieval swaddling clothes. They comforted themselves with pride of race and surety of faith: not yet a territorial nationalism, but a fierce conviction that while the West was damning itself with science, wealth, paganism, and unbelief, “Holy Russia” remained loyal to the Christianity of the patriarchs, was more endeared to Christ, and would someday rule and redeem the world.
III. RUSSIAN POLITICS: 1725-41
Between Peter the Great and Elizaveta Petrovna Russian history is a dreary and confusing record of intrigue and palace revolutions; here, if anywhere, we may with a good conscience save space and time. Nevertheless, some elements of the mélange must be noted if we are to understand the position, character, and conduct of Catherine the Great.
The natural heir to the throne in 1725 was Piotr Alexeevich, the ten-year-old boy of Peter’s slain son Alexis. But Peter’s widow, who could neither read nor write, persuaded the palace guard (by paying their long-overdue wages) that he had designated her as his successor; and with their support she proclaimed herself (February 27, 1725) Catherine I, Empress of All the Russias. This lesser Catherine then took to drink and adultery, achieved stupor every evening, retired regularly by 5 A.M., and left the government to her former lover Prince Alexander Danilovich Menshikov and a Supreme Council. Count Andrei Ostermann, of German birth, took charge of foreign affairs and directed Russia into friendship with Germany and Austria and hostility to France. Following the plans of Peter I, Catherine married her daughter Anna Petrovna to Karl Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp; the couple went to live in Kiel, where Anna bore the future Peter III. Catherine herself, exhausted with pleasure, died May 6, 1727, having nominated as her heir that same Piotr Alexeevich whose throne she had usurped.
Peter II was still only twelve; Menshikov continued to govern, and used his power to feather his nest. A group of nobles, led by the brothers Ivan and Vasili Lukich Dolgoruki, overthrew Menshikov and banished him to Siberia, where he died in 1729. A year later Peter II was carried off by smallpox, and the male branch of the Romanov dynasty ended. It was this contretemps that allowed Russia to be ruled for sixty-six years by three women who rivaled or exceeded, in executive capacity and political results, most contemporary kings, and outpaced all of them but Louis XV in sexual promiscuity.
The first of these czarinas was Anna Ivanovna, the thirty-five-year-old daughter of Ivan Alexeevich, the feeble-minded brother of Peter the Great. The Council chose her because she had acquired a protective reputation for humility and obedience. Dominated by the Dolgorukis and the Golitsyns, the Council drew up “Conditions” which they sent to Anna, then in Kurland, as prerequisite to her confirmation as empress. She signed (January 28, 1730). But neither the army nor the clergy wished to replace autocracy with oligarchy. A delegation of the palace guard went out to meet Anna, and petitioned her to take absolute power. Emboldened by their arms, she tore up the “Conditions” in the presence of the court.
Distrusting the Russian nobles, Anna brought in from Kurland the Germans who had pleased her there. Ernst von Bühren, or Biron, who had been her lover, became the head of her government; Ostermann was restored to foreign affairs; Count Christoff von Münnich reorganized the army; Löwenwolde, Korff, and Keyserling helped to give the new regime some German efficiency. Taxes were collected with careful rigor; education was extended and improved; an instructed civil service was prepared. With similar effectiveness the new administration imprisoned, banished, or executed the Dolgorukis and the Golitsyns.
Satisfied with two lovers (Biron and Löwenwolde), Anna lived a relatively regular life, rose at eight, gave three hours to government, and smiled approval as her Germans expanded Russian power. An army under Münnich invaded Poland, deposed the French-oriented Stanislas Leszczyński, enthroned the Saxon Augustus III, and took the first step toward binding Poland to Russia. France countered by urging Turkey to attack Russia; the Sultan demurred, being busy on his Persian front; Russia thought it a good time to declare war against Turkey; so began (1735) sixty years of conflict for control of the Black Sea. Anna’s diplomats explained that the Turks, or their dependents in South Russia, held the outlets of the five great rivers-Dniester, Bug, Dnieper, Don, Kuban—which were the main channels of south-bound Russian commerce; that the semibarbarous Moslem tribes inhabiting the lower basins of these streams were a standing threat to the Christians of Russia; that the northern shores of the Black Sea were a natural and necessary part of Russia; and that a great and growing nation like Russia should no longer be blocked from free access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. This remained the theme song of Russia through the remainder of the century, and beyond.
The first objective was the Crimea, the almost-island that stood as a Turkish stronghold on the northern front of the Black Sea. To take that peninsula was the goal of Münnich’s campaign in 1736. His chief foes were space and disease. He had to cross 330 miles of wilderness in which not one town could provide food or medicine for his 57,000 troops; eighty thousand wagons had to accompany them in a long line subject at any point and moment to attack by Tatar tribes. With brilliant generalship Münnich in twenty-nine days took Perekop, Koslov, and Bakhchisarai (the Crimean capital); but in that month dysentery and other ailments spread such misery and mutiny among his men that he had to abandon his conquests and retreat into the Ukraine. Meanwhile another of Anna’s generals took Azov, which controlled the mouth of the Don.
Münnich marched south again in April, 1737, with seventy thousand men, and captured Ochakov, near the mouth of the Bug. In June Austria joined in attacking the Turks, but its campaign so miscarried that it signed a separate peace; and Russia, suddenly left to face the full Turkish army, and expecting war with Sweden, signed (September 18, 1739) a peace that restored to the Turks almost all that had been won in three campaigns. This treaty was celebrated in St. Petersburg as a splendid triumph, which had cost only a hundred thousand lives.
Anna survived the war by a year. Shortly before her death (October 17, 1740) she named as heir to the throne the eight-week-old Ivan VI, son of her German-born niece Anna Leopoldovna and Prince Anton Ulrich of Brunswick, Biron to be regent till Ivan reached seventeen. But Münnich and Ostermann had now had enough of Biron; they joined with Ulrich and Leopoldovna to send him to Siberia (November 9, 1740). Anna Leopoldovna became regent, with Münnich as “first minister.” Fearing the total domination of Russia by Teutons, the French and Swedish ambassadors aroused and financed a revolt of the Russian nobles. They chose as their secret candidate for the throne Elizaveta Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I.
Elizabeth, as we shall call her, was thirty-two years old, but was at the height of her beauty, courage, and vivacity. She loved athletics and violent exercise, but also she was fond of amorous delight, and entertained a succession of gallants. She had little education, wrote Russian with difficulty, spoke French well. She seems to have had no thought of gracing the throne until Anna Leopoldovna and Ostermann set her aside in favor of foreigners. When the Regent ordered the St. Petersburg regiments to Finland, and the soldiers grumbled at facing a winter war, Elizabeth seized the opportunity; she put on military garb, went to the barracks at 2 A.M. December 6, 1741, and appealed to the soldiers to support her. At the head
of a regiment she sledged over the snow to the Winter Palace, awakened the Regent, and sent both her and the baby Czar to prison. When the city awoke it found that it had a new ruler, a thoroughly Russian Empress, a daughter of the great Peter. Russia and France rejoiced.
IV. ELIZABETH PETROVNA: 1741-62
It is difficult to make her out through the mists of time and prejudice. Catherine II, meeting her in 1744, was “struck by her beauty and the majesty of her bearing.... In spite of being very stout, she was not in the least disfigured by her size, nor embarrassed in her movements, … though she wore an immense hoop when she dressed up.”26 She was privately skeptical to the verge of atheism;27 publicly she was zealously orthodox. A French observer noted her “pronounced taste for liquor,”28 but we must remember that Russia is cold and vodka warms. She refused marriage, fearing that it would divide her power and multiply disputes; some say that she secretly married Alexis Razumovsky; if so, he was merely primus inter pares. She was vain, loved finery, had fifteen thousand dresses, heaps of stockings, 2,500 pairs of shoes;29 some of these she used as missiles in argument. She could upbraid her servants and courtiers in the language of a sergeant. She sanctioned some cruel punishments, but she was basically kind.30 She abolished the death penalty except for treason (1744); torture was allowed only in the gravest trials; flogging remained, but Elizabeth felt that some way had to be found to discourage the criminals who made the highways and city streets unsafe at night. She was both restless and indolent. She had a keen natural intelligence, and gave her country as good a government as the condition of Russian education, morals, manners, and economy allowed.