Catherine the Great
Page 21
Baldasare Galuppi, who had first attracted the Russian Court’s attention in the late 1750s, arrived in St Petersburg, after protracted negotiations with the Venetians, in September 1765. Although Catherine immediately commissioned his Dido Abandoned for her name day celebrations in November, the production had to be held over until the following February. Since the opera had been premiered in Modena as early as 1741, the problem lay not with the composer’s creativity, but rather in the scale of the production. No fewer than seventy-two boys from the Guards regiments were brought in as extras and Galuppi insisted on additional rehearsals with his new orchestra, berating them in his native dialect until standards improved. On her name day, the empress had to be satisfied with a cantata, ‘Virtue emancipated’, which was so successful that it was repeated on 26 November with three encores. ‘The music is extremely good, massive and pleasant,’ commented Semën Poroshin. ‘If you listen to it carefully, the heart is rapt with admiration.’ Still more delighted with Galuppi’s opera when it was finally ready, Catherine gave its composer a diamond-encrusted snuff box and 1000 roubles, accompanied by a characteristically skittish note saying that Dido had bequeathed this present to him in her will.89
If these were all developments typical of a Baroque Court, the carousel staged in 1766 was even more of a throwback to Louis XIV’s Versailles.90 This medieval tournament had originally been planned for the summer of 1765, when Catherine visited Elizabeth’s old wooden winter palace to inspect the costumes and took part in a full-scale rehearsal.91 In the event, inclement weather caused it to be postponed until the following year. To raise echoes of the Olympic games in ancient Greece, the medallion struck to commemorate the occasion was engraved with the slogan ‘From the banks of the Alfei to the banks of the Neva’, and its designers drove home the classical allusions by depicting a cylindrical structure on the model of the Roman coliseum.92 Rinaldi’s wooden amphitheatre in Palace Square, which Catherine inspected several times during the course of its construction, was actually in the form of a rectangle, 200 yards by 180, in which the empress and her son sat facing each other in boxes on the eastern and western sides. Thomas Newberry, a British instructor in navigation at the Cadet Corps, described the performance on 11 July to the merchant Robert Dingley:
There were six Rows of Seats on each side, the lowest of which was eight feet from the Ground. All round the Square, there was a path of about 5 yards in breadth and the rest was inclos’d in a handsome manner breast high, and turn’d into the form of an Oval, in the Centre of which sat the Famous old Count Munich, who with his officers, was to judge of the performances and distribute the Prizes. The Knights, Sir, were sixteen, and the Ladies eight, beside an innumerable train of Squires, who carried their Shields &c. They were divided into four Parties call’d Quadrills, and supposed to be of four different Nations, namely the Roman, the Sclavonian, the Turkish, and the Indian, and were all properly and most magnificently Cloath’d in the Habits of the several Countrys.
The knights and their ladies jousted not against each other, but against ‘Beasts only, who appeared in the formidable shape of Bears, Lyons, Tygers and Dragons’, and afterwards they were all invited to a masquerade, honoured with Catherine’s presence. ‘Your humble Servant was in a Black Domino, without a Mask, because my views and wishes, Sir, were only to be seen, and taken notice of by Her Majesty.’93
‘Our carousel was extremely good,’ a delighted empress reported after the first performance, though critics later grumbled that the Russian knights ‘displayed more magnificence than gallantry, and greater strength than dexterity’, so that the tourneys ‘were beheld with disapprobation, as frivolous and expensive’.94 It was true that representational monarchy never came cheap. Its costs rose steeply in the early years of Catherine’s reign. The bill for fourteen Turkish costumes for the masquerade in honour of Paul’s tenth birthday came to 1950 roubles—half the annual salary of the Court Kapellmeister, and almost twice as much as Father Platon (Lëvshin) was paid as tutor in divinity to the grand duke. The annual budget for the Imperial theatres, re-organised under Yelagin’s direction in 1766, was set at 138,410 roubles, including pensions and a small theatrical school. But this was never enough to support nine Italian opera singers, a thirty-two-piece orchestra, a ballet company of forty-two and both French and Russian theatre troupes.95 Formally speaking, the Court’s basic operations were still sustained by the same annual grant of 260,000 roubles decreed by Empress Anna in 1733, with a further 6765 roubles 73 and a quarter kopecks for the servants’ salaries.96 Yet this was merely a fiction. By one generally accepted estimate, all told the Court consumed 9.5 per cent of the total state budget in 1763. Six years later, the proportion had risen to 12 per cent and expenditure had almost doubled in absolute terms from 1.64 million roubles to 3 million.97
* * *
Within two years of his accession to the Habsburg throne in 1765, Joseph II had reduced the number of religious services attended annually by his Court from seventy-eight to thirty-two. Ten more had gone by 1774. As a leading Viennese official noted, the emperor’s decision to abolish the Maundy Thursday ritual of washing the feet in 1767 created ‘an exceptional sensation’.98 In St Petersburg, such a move would have been inconceivable. Catherine may have worn her own religion lightly, but she had come to the throne as a defender of Orthodoxy. The number of religious rituals in the Russian Court calendar went up rather than down during her reign as her Court remained knee-deep in holy water.
The very first entry in the Court journals after the coup is from 1 August 1762, when the empress followed an elaborate clerical procession from the chapel at the Summer Palace to the blessing of the waters on the Moika canal at the beginning of the Dormition Fast.99 A similar ceremony was repeated three times in the 1760s, Catherine sheltering from the rain in 1764 in a specially constructed gallery. That was the year in which the Court clergy first staged an icon procession at mid-Pentecost, the moveable feast halfway between Easter and Trinity Sunday. On 30 August 1762, the empress made a point of processing on foot for more than two miles from the Kazan Church to worship at the relics of St Alexander Nevsky—a severe test of patience for one so sceptical. In later years, she either drove to the Anichkov Palace and processed from there or bypassed the annual icon procession altogether. Not until 1772 was she once again persuaded to complete the full route on foot. It was a similar story at Epiphany. Catherine followed the icons to the Jordan in both 1764 and 1765, while Zakhar Chernyshëv showed the watching Paul a plan of the layout of the 8900 soldiers on parade. After that, she was ill for several days and never again ventured out after being deterred by a severe frost in 1766, when the parade was cancelled and only a single company from each regiment braved the cold to present their standards to be dipped.100 For the remainder of her reign, Catherine was content to watch the blessing of the waters from the windows of the Winter Palace.
The palace’s great chapel had been consecrated on Easter Saturday, 1762, the day that Peter III moved in. Two weeks after her return from Moscow in 1763, Catherine had it re-consecrated in the name of the icon ‘not made by human hands’ (a version of this celebrated image, made seventy years earlier by F. F. Ukhtomsky and studded with gold and diamonds, was placed by the altar). Rastrelli had originally intended the chapel to extend to the full height of the palace, but eventually opted to place it on the first floor at the same level as the other staterooms so that, exceptionally for a sacred space, there were kitchens and laundries beneath, not to mention the bathhouse where Catherine later spent time with Potëmkin. The chapel remained a ‘very lofty and spacious room’, lined by ‘gilt Ionic pillars’ and decorated with icons which one visiting Protestant found ‘glaring and ill-executed’, but which are now reckoned among the finest examples of collaboration between Russian and Italian artists in the eighteenth century. Much of the plate was taken from the Moscow Armoury to represent a clear line of succession from Catherine’s Muscovite ‘ancestors’, and the chapel also housed treasured relic
s, including a cross incorporating a fragment of the Life-Giving Cross of Our Lord, an image of the Filermskaya Mother of God, said to be the work of St Luke, and part of the right hand of John the Baptist.101 In the depth of winter, Paul kept warm by listening to the service from an adjoining room while his mother regularly took her place behind the railing in front of the altar. Here she could listen to her choir, more than fifty strong by the late 1760s, perform works influenced by the Italian style by Western-educated composers such as Maxim Berezovsky. Daily services were accompanied by traditional chants and the occasional motet, but in the empress’s presence, on Sundays and lesser feast days, there was always an ornate mass, and the twelve great feasts in the Orthodox calendar were celebrated with a full-scale cantata.102
Not that Catherine’s worship was confined to her palaces. On Thursday 17 October 1762, she and her entourage made the traditional post-coronation pilgrimage to the Trinity St Sergius monastery. Advised of her visit in August, the monks had lost no time in smartening the place up and preparing gorgeous new vestments. The suite where the empress was to stay was also rejuvenated. Proclaimed on her arrival as a ‘second Helen’ in piety and ‘the image of Judith of Israel’ in courage, Catherine was shown the library and took particular pleasure from debates between the pupils of the seminary, organised by its twenty-four-year-old rector, Archimandrite Platon.103 Father Platon made another favourable impression with a sermon on ‘the uses of piety’ when the empress returned to the monastery in the following May, on the first leg of her pilgrimage to Rostov.104 Following the pattern set by Elizabeth, she proceeded in crab-like fashion, covering up to seven miles on foot during the day, and then partially retracing her steps by carriage to spend the night at a favourite staging post. As far as the Trinity monastery, the route was dotted with imperial villages, each of which had its own small wooden ‘palace’. At Taininskoye, where the exquisite seventeenth-century church still stands in the shadow of a huge electric power station, a new log cabin had been built alongside the palace to house her suite.105 She made good progress, completing the journey in eleven days. However, as so often on Catherine’s travels, the elements were against her: driving wind and rain turned the roads to mud, ‘depriving us of the pleasure we might have taken from the journey in better times’.106 Pereyaslavl, where she arrived on 21 May, offered ‘foul weather and boredom in equal measure’. She stayed with a government official, whose house was ‘very large, good, and full of cockroaches’. The empress insisted, against the Church’s better wishes, that monasteries should serve some useful purpose by caring not only for the sick, but also for the insane. Less certain about the use of monasteries as gaols, she was appalled to discover a monastic prisoner who had been held captive at Pereyaslavl for fifteen years: ‘Find out about him!’ she ordered.107 Peasants had flocked to Rostov in the hope of glimpsing their sovereign and being cured by the saint’s relics. ‘Yesterday there was another miracle,’ reported the sceptical empress. ‘A woman was healed and Bishop [Dimitry] Sechënov wants to seal the casket, so that the relics cannot be stolen; however, in order that the common people shouldn’t think that the relics had been hidden from me, I requested that they be left out for some time longer.’108
Father Platon followed Catherine to St Petersburg at the beginning of August 1763. On Sunday 10 August, the empress travelled to the Trinity hermitage, where she had received representatives of the deposed Peter III on the day after her coup, to hear him preach at the consecration of the Baroque cathedral, begun seven years earlier to a design by Trezzini and completed under the supervision of the ubiquitous Rastrelli.109 Given rooms in Elizabeth’s temporary wooden palace, Platon was to deliver more than thirty sermons to Catherine and her Court over the next two years. In addition to his annual salary of 1000 roubles, he received a further 300 for subsistence, and was supplied not only with firewood and candles, but also with beer, more than a litre of vodka each week and a bottle of Rhine wine every day. Although Panin worried that this ‘clear-headed’ monk might be corrupted by his new surroundings, he remained alert to the dangers of ambition and extravagance. Several of his Lenten sermons touched on the temptations faced by hedonistic courtiers, and on 10 October 1764 he ‘spoke with considerable vehemence against those who ruin themselves by squandering their wealth on frivolous and unnecessary things and, consequently, are unable to be of any help to the poor’. ‘Father Platon was in a bad mood today,’ Catherine remarked afterwards, ‘but he spoke extremely well.’110 Always impressed by the young monk’s eloquence, she had been moved to tears by his sermon on the tsarevich’s tenth birthday on 20 September. Many in the congregation also wept at the end, when ‘the preacher spoke of her Majesty’s patience in bearing her labours for the use and safety of the fatherland, on the success of his Highness in the sciences which he was taught, and the resultant hope for Russia’.111 Catherine had herself attended Paul’s first lesson with Platon on 29 August 1763, the Feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist. Two years later, she stood at her son’s side as he faced a carefully rehearsed oral examination on matters of basic dogma in the presence of a large number of courtiers. ‘Her Majesty deigned to listen with the greatest attention,’ Poroshin recorded. ‘The examination lasted for three quarters of an hour. After it was completed, Reverend Father Platon addressed her Majesty in a brief speech. The Sovereign lady deigned to thank him for teaching the Grand Duke, about whom she said: “I thought he would be shy, but not all; he answered very well.”’112
* * *
Since religious ritual remained central to the life of every eighteenth-century monarchy, one of the paradoxical effects of Russia’s cultural Westernisation was to reinforce its role at the Court of St Petersburg. For many of Catherine’s courtiers, there was nothing offensive about that. ‘If I am not much mistaken,’ remarked the prescient William Richardson, ‘there are among them a greater number who affect indifference or disbelief in religious matters, than who really disbelieve. Perhaps, in times of sickness, disgrace, and low-spirits, they have more faith in St Nicholas, than in Voltaire.’113
It was different for Catherine herself: her cast of mind was wholly secular, and one reason why Father Platon felt the need to emphasise the difference between (true) spiritual enlightenment and (mere) secular learning was that he knew he was swimming against the prevailing intellectual tide.114 The empress had lionised Voltaire since reading him in the 1740s and made attempts to cultivate him as soon as she came to the throne. As she insisted from the start, they both had much to gain from the correspondence that began in the autumn of 1763 and continued until Voltaire’s death fifteen years later. While her association with him promised to enhance his status as a writer, ‘Our lady of St Petersburg’, as Voltaire later christened her, realised in turn that his approval could only enhance her reputation in Enlightened circles in Europe.115 If her letters gave her the chance to show off—‘Her conversation is brilliant’, Macartney remarked in 1766, ‘perhaps too brilliant for she loves to shine’—then they also gave her the chance to model her prose on one of the greatest stylists of her age. Frederick the Great declared that he liked ‘to maintain correspondences with superior minds, with people who are completely cerebral, as if they had no bodies; this is the human elite’.116 Catherine took a similar view, self-consciously representing herself as a writer with much to learn. She struck the same tone in her correspondence with Jean d’Alembert, the joint editor of the Encyclopédie, whom she attempted in vain to lure to Russia. ‘I have long owed a letter to Monsieur d’Alembert,’ the empress wrote to Mme Geoffrin, ‘and I beg you Madame to tell him that I shall shortly send him a notebook…I hope he will be pleased even though it is from the pen of a novice.’117
Realising the philosophes’ difficulties with the French censorship, Catherine tried to help them (and embarrass Louis XV) by offering to print the final volumes of the Encyclopédie in Riga even before her coronation. That invitation was refused, but it was impossible for its second impoverished editor, Denis Di
derot, to turn down the empress’s subsequent offer to purchase his library for 15,000 livres and pay him to look after it for her. The completion of the deal apparently sent him into a state of stupor. Catherine was just as pleased. ‘I would never have believed that the purchase of a library would bring me so many compliments,’ she wrote disarmingly to Voltaire. ‘Everyone is paying me them for buying Monsieur Diderot’s. But admit, you to whom humanity owes a debt for the help you have given to innocence and virtue in the persons of the Calas family, that it would have been cruel and unjust to separate a scholar from his books.’118
Catherine realised very early on in their correspondence that it would be ‘very difficult’ to reduce Voltaire’s sparkling shafts of wisdom to a practical programme of reform. Philosophes who disagreed among themselves never offered a blueprint for government.119 Nevertheless, the Enlightenment was an important influence on Catherine’s legislation right from the start. Motivated primarily by the need for money, her secularisation of the monasteries was greeted with acclaim by philosophes who condemned the contemplative life as useless. Celibate monks and nuns were an obvious liability in a world which believed, quite wrongly, that the population had declined since classical times. Sharing the widespread perception that Russia was under-populated, Catherine sent the colonists recruited by the College of Guardianship to a huge new province of New Russia, stretching from the Polish border in the west to the Don Cossack territory in the east. Appointing Count Peter Rumyantsev as its Governor General in November 1764, the empress gave him characteristically explicit instructions in the sort of rational administration she expected: