Atherton met Oscar Wilde on a visit to London and disliked him thoroughly. She wrote that he symbolized ‘the decadence, the loss of virility that must follow over-civilization’. In Rezanov she imagined she had found Wilde’s opposite: as she wrote in her novel Rezanov (1906), he ‘was by far the finest specimen of a man the Californians had ever beheld . . . with an air of highest breeding and repose, he looked both a man of the great world and an intolerant leader of men’. Conchita was, as one might anticipate, drawn as the symbolic flower of innocent Spanish beauty. ‘Concha’s cheeks were as pink as the Castilian roses that grew before the kitchen door and were quivering at the moment under the impassioned caroling of a choir of larks. Her black eyes were full of dancing lights, like the imprisoned flecks of sun under the rose bush.’ Atherton decorously made her heroine sixteen, rather than the fifteen years and two months Conchita actually was when she became engaged to Rezanov.
The novel can only be described as fascinatingly bad. The epic first sentence is irresistible, a stylistic and informational tour de force which gallops on for an entire paragraph.
As the little ship that had three times raced with death sailed past the majestic headlands and into the straits of San Francisco on that brilliant April morning of 1806, Rezanov forgot the bitter humiliations, the mental and physical torments the deprivations and dangers of the last three years; forgot those harrowing months in the harbour of Nagasaki when the Russian bear had caged his tail in the presence of eyes aslant; his dismay at Kamchatka when he had been forced to send home another to vindicate his failure, and to remain in the Tsar’s incontiguous and barbarous northeastern possessions as representative of His Imperial Majesty, and plenipotentiary of the company his own genius had created; forgot the year of loneliness and hardship – and peril in whose jaws the bravest are impotent; forgot even his pitiable crew, diseased when he left Sitka, who had filled the Juno with their groans and laments; and the bells of youth, long still, rang in his soul once more.38
It was in Russia that Rezanov got his most serious literary treatment. Andrei Voznesensky was a protégé of Boris Pasternak and one of the young poets whose edgy work tested the limits of Khruschev’s post-Stalin thaw.39 In 197040 he penned an epic poem on the Rezanov story, whimsically entitled ‘Avos! A description, in sentimental documents, verse and prayers of the glorious misfortunes of Kamerheer Nikolai Rezanov’.* ‘Avos!’ is an odd period piece, sentimental and postmodern at the same time. Voznesensky mixes quotes from Rezanov’s and Baranov’s actual dispatches with metaphysics and musings on everlasting love. ‘When we at last give up the ghost,/ And become at last stars, or manure,/ Poets will write their lyrics about our story . . .’
In the poem Rezanov makes passionate love to Conchita – ‘two body-crosses entwined in the night’ – and the poor girl ends up pregnant. But, historical liberties aside, ‘Avos!’ is a rather moving work, a poignant paean from a late Soviet generation which was tightly penned in, physically and intellectually, to a Russian ancestor, who was free to travel and conquer foreign worlds. ‘Forgive us, we were born too soon,’ Voznesensky’s Rezanov says. ‘Wishing for the impossible,/ The best of us quit halfway,/ We are the children of half travelled roads,/ Our name is “Halfway”/ Forgive us.’41 The poet puts the words in the mouth of a nineteenth-century aristocrat, but the sentiment is the authentic lament of 1970s Soviet dissidents for being born too soon to see change in their homeland.
In 1978 rock composer Alexei Rybnikov and theatrical producer Mark Zakharov teamed up to adapt ‘Avos!’ into a rock opera inspired by Jesus Christ Superstar. Everything about Junona i Avos was politically daring, from the glorification of a tsarist aristocrat on an imperialist mission to Rybnikov’s use of Church liturgy. Vladimir Vasiliyev, later director of the Bolshoi Ballet and the premier dancer of his generation, arranged the choreography.42
The show premiered in July 1981. Moscow audiences had never seen anything like it – ‘decadent’ Western hard rock mixed with Russian Orthodox chants, Russia’s imperial flag raised on stage, a chorus of ‘Hallelujah’ and a message of cross-cultural love and harmony. ‘O you inhabitants of the twentieth century, your century is drawing to its close, is it not time to answer why peoples cannot live in agreement?’ asks a guitar-strumming narrator. ‘Agreement’ – soglasiye in Russian – had the added frisson of being a buzzword often used by Western leaders urging détente with Russia. ‘The Russian Empire is a prison,’ sings a chorus of the Juno’s sailors, prophetically. ‘Abroad is foreign to us, but we are bored with home,/ Our generation has been unformed, we slouch towards truth alone.’
It is hard to overstate just how extraordinary an impression the rock opera made on me when I first saw it in 1986. Everything else in late-Soviet Moscow operated in a weird dimension of frozen time, from the dip-pens and blotters in the post offices to men’s square-cut 1950s suits and womens’ flowery housecoats. And then there was Junona I Avos. I hated it, actually, since as a bookish and bespectacled young chap I didn’t like pop music much and found the production loud and shocking. But it was undoubtedly radically modern. The perspex stage sloped, the costumes randomly mixed 1806 with 1986, and members of the backstage crew joined the actors on stage to sing the final chorus.
But the rest of the audience exploded with enthusiasm. Soviet audiences were always more emotional than their Western counterparts, but this was beyond anything I had ever seen. The standing ovation continued for fifteen minutes, and half the auditorium appeared to have brought flowers for the stars Nikolai Karachensov, who played Rezanov, and Elena Shagina as Conchita.43 Small wonder that when the record finally came out on the state Melodiya label the album sold ten million copies.*
Thanks to Voznesensky and Rybnikov, Nikolai Rezanov and Conchita Arguello are famous in Russia: they have entered the pantheon of the great tragic couples of its modern literature. Rezanov has become, to his millions of admirers, a romantic hero torn between love and duty. Conchita is the woman who sacrificed her life to the love of a man, waiting for him long after all others would have given up.*
Silent suffering, enforced separation, impossible dreams, love torn apart by the currents of the world – these are themes which resonate deep in the Russian psyche. Whatever the personal shortcomings of Rezanov the man, however ephemeral his imperial legacy, he has at least bequeathed this to his homeland: an ideal of epic failure, a glorious dream of love and empire which was wrecked on the shores of cruel circumstance.
Footnotes
* The occupiers’ impatience with Parisian waiters gave rise to the term bistro, from the Russian ‘Bistro!’ – ‘Fast!’
* The Constantinople-born son of an Austrian diplomat and a Levantine Italian.
* It took its title from the Avos, the single-masted sloop that Baranov was building in Sitka in the winter of 1805–6 and which Davydov later sailed on his ill-fated raid on Japan.
* Amazingly the original Zakharov production is still going, making it the second-longest-running stage show in history. The Fantasticks, an off-Broadway romantic comedy, holds the record with a 42-year run between 1960 and 2002, but Junona I Avos is set to take the crown in 2023.
* ‘Wait’, as the great Second World War poet Konstantin Simonov put it, ‘when yesterdays are past and others are forgot …/ Wait, when those with whom you wait doubt if I’m alive;/ Wait, when from that far-off place, letters don’t arrive./ Wait until the end!’
Notes
Prologue
1 M. V. Lomonosov, tr. by the author, Pyotr Veliky in M. V. Lomonosov, Izbranniye Proizvedeniya, Biblioteka Poeta, Leningrad 1986, p. 280.
2 Norbert R. Adami, Eine schwierige Nachbarschaft: Die Geschichte der russisch-japanischen Beziehungen (A Difficult Neighbourhood: the history of Russo-Japanese Relations), vol. 1, Munich 1990, pp. 83–91, quoted in Victoria Moessner, ‘The First Russian Ambassador to Japan Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov (1764–1807) as portrayed in contemporary German language sources’, unpublished article, 2007.
3 Georg He
inrich von Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World during the years 1803–1807, Henry Colburn, London 1813 (facsimile edition Da Capo Press, New York 1968), vol. 2, p. 158.
4 Ibid., p. 163.
5 Ibid., p. 176.
6 Ibid., p. 175.
7 Only one portrait of Rezanov survives, painted in the summer of 1803 between him receiving the Order of St Anne first class from Emperor Alexander I and his departure on the round-the-world voyage. For much of the nineteenth century the portrait hung in pride of place in the boardroom of the Russian American Company on the Moika Canal in St Petersburg. It is in now in the collection of the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Rezanov’s death mask and some sketches made of him after his death in Krasnoyarsk would give us a better idea of what Rezanov really looked like, but alas they are lost.
8 Langsdorff to Krusenstern, Tobolsk, 20 December 1807, Archive of the Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Fond 31, 1, 11.
9 Langsdorff to Horner, Tobolsk, 7 February 1808, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Horner-Nachlass, Ms.M.5,60. Quoted in Moessner, ‘The First Russian Ambassador to Japan’.
10 Ralph H. Vigil, ‘The Hispanic Heritage and the Borderlands’, Journal of San Diego History, vol. 19, no. 3 (summer 1973).
11 Langsdorff, Voyages, p. 180.
12 Ibid., p. 160.
13 Ibid., p. 161.
Introduction
1 Andrei Voznesensky, ‘Avos!’, Selected Poems of Andrei Voznesensky, Random House, New York 2000.
2 Gwenn A. Miller, Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 2010, p. 89.
3 Like the British Captain George Vancouver, who had surveyed the Pacific coast of America a few years before.
4 Nikolai Rezanov, The Rezanov Voyage to Nueva California in 1806,Thomas Russell, San Francisco 1926, p. 39.
5 Ibid., p. 46.
6 Ibid., p. 45.
1. Man and Nature
1 Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great, Profile Books, London 2009, p. 42.
2 Ibid., p. 14.
3 Ibid., p. 42.
4 Letter to Frau Bielke, Ibid., p. 211.
5 Ibid., p. 43.
6 Ibid., p. 258.
7 ‘Transport du piédestal de la statue de Pierre le Grand’, La Nature Magazine, second semester 1882.
8 See Engraving by A. K. Melnikov of the 1782 drawing by A. P. Davydov Opening of the Monument to Peter the Great on Senate Square, St Petersburg, State Hermitage St Petersburg.
9 Dixon, Catherine the Great, p.225.
10 Anna Reid, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, Walker Books, New York 2002, p.16.
11 Leonid Sverdlov, ‘Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov (1764 –1807): Khudozhestvenny Obraz I Istorichaskaya Lichnost’, Moskovsky Zhurnal, no. 8 (257), Moscow 2012.
12 George Vernadsky, The Mongols and Russia, Yale University Press, 1953, pp. 385–90.
13 Douglas D. C. Chambers, ‘Evelyn, John (1620–1706)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
14 Hugh Chisholm (ed.) ‘Münnich, Burkhard Christoph’, Encyclopædia Britannica, Cambridge University Press, 1911.
15 Franz A. J. Szabo, The Seven Years’ War in Europe 1756–1763, Longman, 2007, p. 2.
16 Igor Nikiforovich Yermolaev, ‘Pskovsky Chinovnik Nikolai Rezanov i ego “Yunona i Avos”’, Pskovsaya Provintsiya, Pskov April 2004.
2. The Final Frontier
1 Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 646.
2 Prince A. Lobanov-Rostovsky, Russia and Asia, Macmillan, New York 1933, pp. 33–8.
3 Reid, Shaman’s Coat, p. 26.
4 Ibid., p. 16.
5 G. Patrick March, Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific, Praeger, New York 1996, p. 20.
6 Lobanov-Rostovsky, Russia and Asia, pp. 33–8.
7 Raymond H. Fisher, The Russian Fur trade 1550 –1700, University of California Press, Berkeley 1943, pp. 29 –33.
8 Quoted in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others, London 1625, reprinted J. MacLehose and sons 1905–7, vol. 4, p. 215.
9 Vernadsky, Mongols and Russia pp. 385–90.
10 James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1910, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 42.
11 Reid, Shaman’s Coat, p. 64.
12 Mikhail Khodarkovsky, ‘Russia’s Orient – Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects’, The Russian Orient: Imperial Strategies and Oriental Encounters, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1997, p. 11.
13 Basil Dmitryshkin, E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan, Russia’s Conquest of Siberia 1558–1700, Oregon Historical Society, Portland 1985, vol. 1, p. 198.
14 Miller, Kodiak Kreol, p. 13.
15 Ibid., p. 19.
16 March, Eastern Destiny, p. 27.
17 Fisher, Russian Fur Trade, p. 3.
18 Lydia T. Black, Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867, University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks 2004, p. 20.
19 Admittedly mostly a plaintive plea for back wages – ‘I beat my head upon the floor, most merciful sovereign . . . I have starved and frozen for your Majesty’s greater glory’ – rather than news of ground-breaking exploration.
20 Reid, Shaman’s Coat, p. 28.
21 Or at any rate in the pocket of the Pacific partially protected by the Kamchatka peninsula, the Kurile Islands and Japan now known as the Sea of Okhotsk.
22 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 30.
23 Stepan Krasheninnikov, tr. James Grieve, The History of Kamtschatka and the Karilski Islands with the Countries Adjacent, Gloucester 1764 (facsimile edition Quadrangle Books, Chicago 1962), p. 247.
24 Elton Engstrom and Allan Engstrom, Alexander Baranov – A Pacific Empire, Juneau 2004, p. 4.
25 See Allan Engstrom, Yakobi Island, the lost village of Apostolovo and the fate of the Chirikov expedition, Allan Engstrom, Juneau 2007.
26 A 1991 Russian–Danish expedition which exhumed Bering’s remains analysed teeth and bones and concluded that he did not die from scurvy. Based on analyses made in Moscow and on Steller’s original report, heart failure was the likely cause of Bering’s death.
27 Orcutt William Frost (ed.), Bering: The Russian Discovery of America, Yale University Press, New Haven 2003.
28 Their docile nature and high nutritional value proved their undoing – Steller’s sea cows had been hunted to extinction by the 1780s.
29 Black, Russians in Alaska, p. 182.
30 Ibid., p. 187.
31 Reid, Shaman’s Coat, p. 13.
32 Colin Thubron, In Siberia, Harper Perennial, London 2000, p. 114.
33 Ibid., p. 168.
34 Reid, Shaman’s Coat, p. 41.
35 Thubron, In Siberia, p. 161.
3. The Court
1 For those who were not serfs, who were essentially slaves who remained the personal property of their masters. America’s founding fathers also saw no paradox between their Enlightenment enthusiasms and the ownership of slaves: President Thomas Jefferson had seven children with his slave Sally Hemmings, who was also his wife’s half-sister.
2 Sverdlov, ‘Rezanov: Obraz I Lichnost’.
3 See www.imha.ru.
4 Quoted in Dixon, Catherine the Great, p. 87.
5 Yermolaev, ‘Pskovsky Chinovnik Rezanov’.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Sverdlov, ‘Rezanov: Obraz I Lichnost’.
9 Again the Pushkin thread surfaces: Chernyshev’s niece Natalya Petrovna Galitzine, better known at the Russian court as Princesse Moustache, was romanticized by Pushkin under the name of the Queen of Spades in his eponymous story from 1834.
10 Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, Random House, New York 2011, p. 276.
11 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, Harvard, 1997, p. 98.
12 Dixon, Catherine the Great, p. 169.
13 As Pushkin put it, ‘Russian revolts are cruel and pointless.’
14 Massie, Catherine the Great, p. 430.
15 Dixon, Catherine the Great, p. 194.
16 Massie, Catherine the Great, p. 527.
17 Leonid Parfenov, The Russian Empire, NTV Television, 2003, episode 4.
18 Potemkin brought his military and organizational genius to bear on the affairs of the empire. His great design was to retake Constantinople for Christendom and the creation of a new Orthodox empire on the Black Sea, a dream he dubbed his Greek Project. Potemkin conquered and annexed swathes of southern Russia for the crown, and founded the great cities of Kherson and Sevastopol. In the summer of 1787 he arranged a triumphant tour of the new territories for Catherine, who was accompanied for part of her progress by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, traveling incognito. Potemkin constructed new roads and ordered livestock moved from outlying areas so that these signs of prosperity could be visible from the Empress’s carriage – the origin of the slander of ‘Potemkin’s villages’. An all-female regiment of sharpshooting Amazons was assembled as part of the entertainments, as well as firework displays featuring 20,000 rockets and a hillside display of 50,000 burning pots spelling the royal initials.
19 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner, Vintage, London 2005, p. 349.
20 20 August 1795, quoted in Ibid., p. 414.
21 Catherine to Vyazemsky, January 1764. He served until 1792. Quoted in Dixon, Catherine the Great, p. 134.
22 Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance, Picador 2003, p. 3.
23 Sebag Montefiore, Potemkin, p. 425.
24 Dixon, Catherine the Great, p. 132.
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 36