The murder of Peter III is Catherine’s reign in a nutshell. Violence, trickery, the power of sex, the desire to dominate, cynicism! And, above all, drama! Mounted on horseback, dressed up as guards officers, Catherine and her young friend, Princess Dashkova, go prancing along at the head of the troop who are to be seduced—pure cloak-and-dagger stuff!
Could this coup d’état have turned out differently? With Peter rallying his faithful Holstein regiments, reminding them he is Peter the Great’s grandson and crushing the conspirators … No chance! He runs away, abdicates, begs the tsarina for mercy, and in the end gets himself murdered by her lovers.
In the first draft of his screenplay, Oleg had already noted this recurring theme of dominance and carnal appetite. In 1762 Peter III assassinated. In 1775 Pugachev, the fake Peter III, executed. In 1772 and 1793 Poland violated and in 1795 wiped out … Each time the same modus operandi: Catherine feeds the ardor of her men with a cocktail of sex and violence.
This outline had the advantage of being clear. On the other hand, his detailed research into the labyrinths of History was making Catherine’s life seem impenetrable, ambiguous.
“You’re trying to make too good a job of it,” Lessya would sigh, and, in one sense, she was right. One day Oleg recollected the German saying his father used to quote: “Zu gut—schlecht.” That was it, too good is bad. He continued to hope that from the murky confusion of the archives a shining light would burst forth—some thrilling truth that went beyond History itself!
In the meantime, the mystery grew deeper. Did Catherine order the murder? Or did her favorites deduce her secret wish? And who is to be believed? The historians who claim she was grief-stricken at the news of the murder or those who portray her as overjoyed? And how is one to judge the tone of the bulletin she issued? “On the seventh day of our accession to the throne we were advised that the former Tsar, Peter III, suffered another of his hemorrhoidal attacks … Aware of our Christian duty, we issued orders for him to be given the necessary medical attention. But, to our great sorrow, we learned that God’s will had put an end to his life …” Did she need the posthumous mockery of the obscene parallel between a “hemorrhoidal attack” and the bloodlust of the men falling upon the half-naked Peter?
In the crushing of the peasants’ revolt in 1774, there is this same mixture of physical violence and grotesque farce. The false tsar, Pugachev, is taken prisoner by his own staff officers: a body stripped naked, a bloodstained piece of goods, delivered to the tsarina to spare themselves from the gallows.
And Poniatowski? The lover who betrayed Catherine … She punishes him like an empress: the tsarina makes him king of Poland, then abolishes his kingdom. Symbolically she violates the proud Pole! They meet again only once in thirty years—in the Crimea. A brief interview, just to show him how happy she is to be at the head of a victorious army, in the arms of a young favorite. The Pole resumes his place in the battalion of the defeated: the cast-off lovers, the decapitated rebels, and the sultan of the Crimea, who is now an impotent vassal. Catherine plans new predatory expeditions! Constantinople, Persia, and, why not?, India.
At what moment do these political and carnal machinations grind to a halt? In July 1789? Catherine is accustomed to giving her favorites their notice. Handsome Mamonov breaks it off first. The tsarina is sixty, her rival is twenty, and even the great magician Potemkin can do nothing about it. The latter is to die in 1791 and in him Catherine will lose her alter ego, her damned soul, the incarnation of the Russia she loves and fears. “I am more than an emperor,” he says. “I am Potemkin!” He was the one who chose fresh lovers for her. All except the last of them, Zubov, a pretentious gigolo whose insignificance will show how her reign is in decline. The delicate mechanism that allied sex and the throne has a few last feeble maneuvers to go through.
“It’s all brilliantly clear!” Lessya would say. “A tsarina who holds a man’s prick in her fist, instead of a scepter. That’s the way the Polish cartoonists drew her, isn’t it? But take care. Don’t get bogged down in subtleties!”
As a film critic, she sensed the danger: too much detail ends up fragmenting the image of the main characters. Excellent advice. But Oleg, for his part, was experiencing the fever of a painter eager to add yet one more touch to a portrait that is already complete. And this was it: Peter III plays the violin. According to the historians, he was childish and coarse, yet he was a fine musician whose talent was sacrificed to the hullabaloo of military parades. Was he a violent drunkard, as Catherine told it in her Memoirs? Once deposed, Peter looks more like a lost teenager. On board a pathetic sloop among the ladies-in-waiting from his scattered court, he attempts to land at the fortress at Kronshtadt. Turned away by the garrison, he takes to the sea again—in the panic the anchor chain is cut (a neat detail for the film!). And he withdraws from the game of politics “like a child who has been packed off to bed,” as one general will observe. All around him the grown-ups are playing the game. They bribe the Imperial Guard, occupy the Winter Palace, install the tsarina on the throne. And one more detail: just before this violent coup takes place, Catherine gives birth to a son. The future Count Bobrinsky. The fact of her being in labor must be concealed from Peter. Knowing that the tsar adores watching conflagrations, one of Catherine’s valets sets fire to his own izba, thus attracting Peter and his courtiers to watch the spectacle …
“Stop adding in all these walk-on parts,” Lessya had advised him, already a little concerned. “The plot will get lost under them all!” But amid History’s intoxicating mass of detail every fragment seemed important. A man gallops to warn the tsar about the coup d’état: a certain Bressan, a subject of Monaco, the only one to remain faithful to him …
“What on earth’s the point of bringing him in?” Lessya asked in amazement. Oleg was quick to justify this gallant soul’s inclusion. And also that of this martyr: Ivan VI, who, as a young child, had come to the throne in 1740, before being imprisoned by the Empress Elizabeth. Twenty-two years later Catherine inherits the throne from this captive. In 1764, while she is on her journey through the Baltic provinces, an officer attempts to set him free. As the first shot is fired, the jailers cut Ivan’s throat. On the tsarina’s orders …
Lessya was still smiling as she listened to him: “Your pal Zhurbin was right. You’re going to end up writing a TV series …”
These warnings were becoming useless. Oleg was getting more and more lost in the twists and turns of a past whose secrets were now actually weaving the fabric of his own life. The game of power and sex? And when a favorite is dismissed, what fresh game is embarked on? Banished, Grigory Orlov plans his revenge: he is the one who stirs up the Pugachev revolt. At that time in Italy a certain Princess Tarakanova proclaims herself to be the daughter of the late Empress Elizabeth and therefore the true heir to the throne. Catherine fights on two fronts: with her armies against the rebels, through her spies against this pretender. Pugachev is executed in Moscow. Tarakanova is lured onto a Russian ship at Livorno. Aleksey Orlov, Grigory’s brother, deceives the lovers, promises her the Russian throne. Taken prisoner, she dies in St. Petersburg …
In his enthusiasm, Oleg really did feel capable of writing a series in three hundred episodes.
For example, at the height of the coup d’état Catherine encounters a young officer: they are both on horseback, the tsarina has lost her sword knot and this stranger—it is Potemkin—offers her his own … And this is better still! Peter III loves ice cream, and it is by promising him this dessert that his murderers lure him into the trap! And while the coup d’état is being hatched in St. Petersburg—Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile is being burned in Paris. In 1775 Pugachev is due to be quartered, then beheaded. Catherine gives orders for the procedure to be reversed, out of charity, people think. In fact, she wants to show herself to be more humane than Louis XV of France: Robert-François Damiens, who had stabbed the French king, had been savagely dismembered … And there is also this concurrence of events: July 1789, at the
very moment when the Bastille falls, the tsarina is in tears, for her lover Mamonov has jilted her.
“You’d better go shoot your film in India!” Lessya exclaimed. “I guess they’ll put up with this Mahabharata epic of yours over there …” She no longer held back from making fun of him.
Oleg’s screenplay now featured Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, d’Alembert (who corresponded with Catherine and her courtiers), Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa and Joseph II of Austria (military allies of the tsarina), Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour (Catherine loathed them), Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (she found them adorable), the sultan and his harem (an agent of Catherine’s managed to get inside it), the Casanova brothers, Cagliostro and the comte de Saint-Germain, Olivier Ormesson and Count Louis-Philippe de Ségur …
One day Oleg sensed condescension in Lessya’s comments, as if he were a child.
“You see, what I can’t figure out is how your screenplay is going to be in any way different from all those endless tomes you’ve been reading about Catherine …”
He protested vaguely, then fell silent. His script did, in fact, reiterate all the clichés: a tsarina both enlightened and despotic, a feminist in advance of her time and a nymphomaniac, a friend of the philosophers but hostile to the revolutionary fruits of their ideas …
“At best, you’ll just be filming what’s been told and retold over and over again. In a thousand historical novels,” Lessya added, with a yawn.
For some time now their relationship had become altered. “Ah, that summer of love,” Oleg said to himself. “That ray of light from the setting sun fading on the faces of the statues at the Winter Palace …” (and even this image came from a novel about Catherine II!). He puzzled over the reason for this waning: his work at the slaughterhouse, the job of section head Lessya now held at her magazine … Yes, they had less free time than before. But, above all, Lessya had hoped to see him acting out one of those two glamorous roles—either that of a dissident filmmaker or else a director who was one of the regime’s blue-eyed boys. While he just wanted to remain himself.
They had loved one another but made no promises, “a modern love affair,” he thought bitterly. During nights at the slaughterhouse he pictured his girlfriend dancing in someone else’s arms. Or sleeping in someone else’s arms?
One particular director’s name, that of Valentin Zyamtsev, often came up when Lessya was talking. A way for her to prepare Oleg for a breakup. Zyamtsev had the self-assurance of those tall, dark men who graciously allow women to fall in love with them. He was the one who had come out with that epithet: “Siberian peasant …”
Oleg had carried hundreds of carcasses while thinking about this new situation: himself and Lessya, the banal injustice of physical preferences, one face finding favor more than another, Zyamtsev and himself, a winner and a loser …
One mild, misty November evening Lessya came to see him, as in the old days. A belated echo of the affection they had once known … He went to make the coffee. While waiting for the water to boil he looked in at his friend, who was reading on the sofa, in the little room at the end of the corridor. They spent the night making love, talked for a long time. The charts on the wall still displayed the chronology of the reign, the list of favorites … They recalled their “history exams” with a smile, but did not dare repeat the game.
“What it would be interesting to film,” murmured Lessya, “is what Catherine was not …”
He was struck by this turn of phrase.
“You mean, imagine what her life might have been, if …”
“No. What her life really was like. An evening like this, the mist, the last mild weather before winter sets in … There must have been times in her life that allowed her to be herself. She wasn’t just a machine for signing decrees, writing to Voltaire, and devouring her lovers …”
Oleg made no reply. They had just hinted at the truth about a human being, this Catherine, of whom, for months now, he had only succeeded in capturing the gestures and actions. It even occurred to him that if they could only have found words with which to express this truth just touched upon, then their own lives—this love affair now ending—might have been reborn, wonderfully different.
Those words were not found, life resumed its course. Lessya came rarely, did not stay, and the comments she made about the screenplay served only to cover up the emptiness in their conversations … There is nothing more remote than a woman who is becoming involved in a new love affair. An extraterrestrial, a gentle, distracted monster, whose face, close up and already unrecognizable, is more attractive than ever, tormentingly and hopelessly so.
The rough work at the slaughterhouse put things in perspective: Lessya’s friend, Zyamtsev, had more to offer than a penniless provincial without living quarters worthy of the name, and to make matters worse, one struggling with a crazy project.
So it was that one day, choking back his shame, Oleg had got himself an invitation from the people who made up Lessya’s little artistic world. The celebration for a screenplay that had just been approved by the SCCA—the dictatorial State Committee for Cinematic Art … Oleg drank, forced himself to relax, tried to dance. In the crowd, animated by the music, an arm caught against his glasses … The next day his friend Zhurbin brought him the missing lens, which had been retrieved from under a table. On opening the door Oleg was confronted by a grotesque face: Zhurbin had managed to screw the lens into his left eye, like a monocle. He burst into song: “La donna è mobile …” His intention was praiseworthy, to tease his friend, to make him see the funny side of the situation. His voice broke off, so palpable was the anguish that crumpled Oleg’s face. As a born actor, Zhurbin found the right tone. “Aha! I hereby predict that you will make a great film. You’ve got the fury for it now!”
Prophetic voice, flashing eyes. Oleg smiled: little, red-haired, grimacing Zhurbin was like one of those court jesters—tsars’ fools—much prized at the St. Petersburg court.
“Fury” only served to sharpen his perception a little more: History is governed by an appetite for domination and sex.
There was no shortage of examples in Catherine’s life. There she goes, passing between two lines of handsome officers with a faint smile and a piercing gaze. An hour later one of these stallions is sent to her by Potemkin on some kind of apparent commission. The chosen one submits to examination by Dr. Rogerson (state of health) and Countess Bruce (sexual performance). Following which, he is installed in the palace and showered with titles, military ranks, and wealth.
Favoritism as an institution, sex as a form of government, orgasm as a factor in political life. Yes, the alcove that allows Catherine to conduct the business of the State without interrupting her amorous adventures.
The story in a nutshell, but historically accurate. In her early youth Catherine experiences surges of sensuality that she will speak of in her Memoirs: with a cushion squeezed between her thighs the little princess tosses and turns frenziedly, her face flushed, her eyes rolled upward. At the age of thirteen love at first sight throws her into the arms of an uncle, and it is only the desire to marry Peter, so as to ascend to the Russian throne, that puts an end to this passion.
There was also a scene that would have a powerful impact in the film, Oleg was sure of it. Peter and Catherine are living with the Empress Elizabeth in St. Petersburg. Sometimes a bigot, sometimes dissolute, Elizabeth indulges in orgies of unbridled debauchery. One evening, Peter, armed with a gimlet, makes holes in several partition walls between rooms in the palace. With one eye glued to these peepholes he comments on what he can see. Here the guards are having dinner. Next door the dressmakers are at work. And there … He splutters with excitement: “She’s so fat!” Catherine takes a look through the hole and freezes. Candlelight, the white bulk of a body—a woman being crushed by a man. It looks like a battle, a murder! Elizabeth, with her hair in disorder, is panting, uttering oaths … The man breaks free from her, exhausted. Another man hurls himself at the empress, embraces her bruta
lly … Peter pushes Catherine aside (“Let me, it’s my turn!”), and she begins walking blindly away with only one thought in her head: “Better far to die …”
Thirty years later, in the twilight of her reign, an obese old woman can be seen being serviced by two young men, the Zubov brothers. This woman is Catherine herself …
Between these two episodes—the whole of her life. Men who provide the interlude of desire, men who kill, men who die. Potemkin becomes infatuated with a serving maid, Catherine insists on her chief enforcer punishing the foolish girl. The zeal is excessive: the girl is immured alive. Catherine does not like her son Paul’s wife, the princess is too free-spirited. And in poor health—just one potion brings about her death. Poison? Now that’s an ugly word! And then there’s Mamonov, the betrayer, condemned to witness soldiers raping his young wife.
The film he now had in mind was targeted at an audience of just two: Lessya and Zyamtsev. Like all artists, Oleg was talking about himself. Catherine II or Julius Caesar, what difference does it make, if, through History, he could declare his love, portray the arrogance of the strong, the rarity of true affection?
It was easy for him to paint Catherine black, there was no shortage in her life of stinking tar that would stick: murders, rapes, debauchery, treachery … And he would have continued with this exercise in blackening her if, one day, a few steps away from the Winter Palace, he had not chanced upon Lessya and Zyamtsev, in a lovers’ embrace … He turned toward a shop window, pretending to be an anonymous passerby …
Back home he threw himself into his screenplay. Thrones, wars, tortures, soldiers impaled on bayonets, horses ripped open by a hail of bullets and those young males from among whom a woman chose herself a favorite …
A Woman Loved Page 4