‘How very confusing,’ says Lars Person.
‘It was just the beginning of many more confusions. When she heard her friend Didro was dying, Catherine arranged for him to move to a more comfortable apartment. And she sent Grimm to make sure she got not only his books but his papers. “Take care nothing goes astray,” she said. “Not even the least scrap.” He died in the summer of 1784. The next year his daughter, Madame de Vandeul, sent his library to the Hermitage. With it came all his papers, in thirty-two volumes and packets. The Tzarina had them put under triple key, because they revealed many details of his interesting relationship with her—’
‘They were lovers?’ asks Birgitta Lindhorst.
‘Were they? Do you know? But there were also the other copies. One set was kept by Melchior Grimm. Some more copies went to the young philosopher Naigeon, who later published them. The daughter kept the originals for herself. And everyone assumed the moment had come for his papers to be put in order, his works sorted, and everything published, given to Posterity, exactly as he wished. Except now came the Storming of the Bastille, then the Revolution, then the Terror. Reason had turned into revolution, light had turned into torches. So was Didro a revolutionary spirit or not? Was he a founder of the new order, or its enemy? Didro was such a clever butterfly no one was sure, and they never can be. Of course, he said, he supported the American Revolution, and he spoke of wanting to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest. But it was obvious he didn’t believe in terror and violence, he believed in sense and reason.
‘So some of his works were released, but many others were hidden. The daughter stored most of the originals away and they weren’t found again for a hundred years. By then they had already started to rot. Of course there were still the copies. The ones that belonged to Grimm, for instance. But in the revolution Grimm was in great trouble too. He’d been the friend of every king, prince and tyrant right across Europe. He’d arranged to marry most of them, so he was the inventor of all the dynasties now in trouble. He took the messages of Catherine the Great to the hands of Marie Antoinette. No wonder he thought it was time to pack up his things and take the coach off to Gotha in Germany, taking with him all the letters he’d had from Catherine – her letters to the Grimmalians, she called them. We know he took some of Didro’s papers too, because some appeared in Gotha. But which? What about Rameau’s Nephew, for instance?’
‘Oh, your book,’ says Birgitta Lindhorst, turning to me.
‘What we know is that many papers were left behind in Paris. Then Grimm’s fine apartment was raided by the Jacobins, and the precious things were taken. His papers were given away to various people who just asked for them. Some were by Didro. Some disappeared and have never been found, some were copied or published. Et voilà, mon pauvre Didro. His papers were scattered everywhere, all over Europe, in a time of trouble and chaos. It looked as though Posterity would never hear of him again. But then strange things started to happen. In Jacobin Paris, various manuscripts appeared in print, mostly from Naigeon. But some were probably the papers taken from Grimm, and others were false copies or forgeries not by Didro at all. Then other editions and texts appeared, in London, in Leipzig, in Geneva. Grimm published some things from Gotha. Then in 1807 he died too, and his papers were scattered further.
‘So what about the Hermitage set of papers? Well, as I told you, because of the Revolution, everything here now had to be locked up and shut away. And here too strange things began to happen. Maybe you know how it is in libraries. People enter and exit. Scholars are not always honest people. Even with closed doors and triple-locked cabinets, soldiers in the corridors, guards at the gates, things disappear. What is there one day is not there another. The rooms were entered, books and papers removed. One of the chief rogues was the rector of Petersburg university, who took away a good many manuscripts, including D’Alembert’s Dream, and sold them abroad for a profit.
‘Soon it was Didro here, Didro there, Didro everywhere. All over Europe, in a number of languages, works under his name began to appear that no one had even heard of before. In Weimar, Schiller translated some of Jacques the Fatalist, and somehow got hold of a manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew. He gave it to Goethe, who translated it into German and published an edition of it in Liepzig. A French translation was made from this, and falsely described as the original edition. But how did Schiller get hold of the book? We can’t really be sure, because after Goethe had finished translating it, the manuscript disappeared. He might have got it from Grimm, of course, or maybe from Petersburg. Many people thought he had an original manuscript stolen from the Hermitage. Later another original manuscript was found, this time in Paris. You can find it in the Morgan library in New York.
‘So, right through the nineteenth century, new works by Didro kept appearing. So did new versions of the works that were published already. Nobody knew which were the true originals or the false copies, no one seemed sure where they came from or how they got there. No one was quite sure if a work was complete, or this version more authentic than that one. New letters kept emerging, it always happens, and the notes he made for the Tzarina. Still these things keep on appearing. We might find a whole new book any day. And because they came out in so many ways in so many countries at so many different times in history, there could never be any one Didro. He was a writer with many faces – not only a thinker and a philosopher, but a trickster, a tease, a very modern writer. He was no longer just a maker of fat encyclopedias. He was a dreamer, a fantasist, a liar, a maker of the strangest stories.
‘This was not all. Here in Petersburg we created even more confusion. When the library was moved from the Hermitage in the middle of the last century, the papers went also. Because Didro was here and talked to the Tzarina, some of his writings belonged in the state papers, and went to Moscow. Others were moved about and confused, and got into other collections. During the Bolshevik Revolution and the Stalin years, many treasures were stolen from all the old imperial buildings and sold here and there. And of course there was much more confusion in the time of the Nazi siege, when the shells fell every night over Nevsky Prospekt.
‘So, of course, when I first started work in the library, after 1946, everything I found was in chaos. The great collections, the libraries of Voltaire, Didro, Golitsyn, where were they? Only when I started to search through the confusion of the library, go to the cellars and attics, did I start to find the books again. Voltaire’s books from Ferney, which were bound in morocco and had his insignia. Books with handwriting by Didro inside. Papers of this, papers of that . . . more and more, gathered from here and there, locked drawers or closed cupboards. So I hope now you can understand me – Galina. You can see the work of my life, to make again the Library of the Enlightenment, to find what it was and restore it. That is what I do, and I am still looking. Nothing is done yet—’
‘Really, you keep on finding new papers?’ I ask, excited and entranced.
‘Will we be able to see?’
‘Perhaps, sometime, tomorrow if you like, or another day,’ says Galina, looking far from enthusiastic.
‘And which of them do you really prefer?’ asks Agnes Falkman. ‘Voltaire or Diderot?’
‘Prefer, mon ami? If only we didn’t have to prefer. They were two great writers, two very amusing men. They both loved reason, they both admired the new Mother Russia. They each loved the other – sometimes. They each loved the Tzarina. Both of them were as jealous as tigers. If one of them wrote an ode to her, the other had to write a lyric. If one advised her to grow cabbages, the other said please plant beans. Didro or Voltaire, Voltaire or Didro, I truly do not know. But I can tell you this. Voltaire is always French, as the French like to see themselves: clarity, wit and reason. Didro is not a French writer, he is British and German and Russian too. In Paris they call him Denis Diderot; here we have our own name for him – Dionysius Didro. He made the journey to Russia, he learned the mystery of our city. He looked in its mirror, he invented the d
ouble. He influenced Pushkin, who influenced Gogol, who influenced everyone. In him we can find all our other writers. Yes, monsieur, it’s just like those dolls you carry.’
Galina is pointing at me. I look again at my little stack of dolls.
Meantime, like any tourists with any guide in any museum, a fair number of our pilgrims are growing openly bored.
‘You have talked too long, can’t we do something?’ demands Birgitta Lindhorst, imperially. ‘Why don’t you show us the statue of Voltaire?’
‘Your guide and servant,’ says Galina. ‘Follow me please. I hold up my umbrella. Pardon, pardon. Excusez-moi.’
And off, at formidable speed, she takes us through the surging mass of tourists, through the great halls and marble galleries of the Hermitage – where, as they’ll tell you, you can find something of everything from every single part of the globe.
TWENTY-SIX (THEN)
OUR MAN CAN BE SEEN coming to court almost every day now. And, thanks to his black philosophical suit and his sharp distinctive stride, he seems to have grown familiar to everyone in the city. The beggars, street vendors, hussars all know him: he’s the Empress’s Philosopher, commonplace as the Empress’s English greyhounds, who also take long dawdling walks down the streets. How much time has passed now? Five weeks at the very least. Five weeks since he got here, settled into his chill room at the Narishkin Palace, began the way of life that’s now become his one and only way of life. Over that time, cold clear freezing autumn has switched to black murderous winter, a kind of winter that no man from the south of Europe, however great his perception, could ever imagine in advance. Ice in huge blocks, massive brutal lumps, rattles and bangs its way down the ever more savage Neva: shattering pilings, crashing into brand-new embankments. Parts of the river and all the canals of the city are already frozen completely. Traders shout and bargain at wooden stalls on the ice. Sausage-makers function, fires burn, toboggans and sleighs slither on the crust over deep water. The Fontanka and the Moyka, the two city canals he bridges every day, are black-frozen hard as stone.
His curiosity with what lies round him grows and grows – though it’s not yet taken him out of the city into larger Russia beyond. Beyond the Hermitage lies Big Peter’s Summer Garden, where it has become his habit to walk. Ever since he came, he’s gone most days to think a thought or two. Here, as everywhere, ice and snow now hold sway. The garden is made of statues, long white promenades standing each side of the pathways, apart and solitary, yet all seeming to address each other. Now they’ve been boxed in for their own protection. His favourite, the Cupid and Psyche (love caught in its perfect moment as it becomes revelation, illumination), has gone behind a prison of wooden shutters, to save naked innocence from the cold. Queen Christina of Sweden – a lady with a wicked smile, whose effigy interests him, she who once exchanged thoughts on the passions with René Descartes – has been caged in her own box. In the summer gardens there’s only deep winter. No one there to talk to, nothing at all to say.
In Sankt Peterburg city he’s wandered further and further: walking out over Neva ice to the far embankment, to inspect the curiosities of the twelve Academies or the fascinations of the Great Academical Globe, which enfolds him inside, shows the universe he belongs to in its cosmic strangeness. Somewhere out there, beyond the steppes he has not seen, the fog, ice-cap, permafrost, the ever wintering marshes, there’s another and different world; we call it Europe. It’s a light-dark place, of wars and hostile religions, plagues and pestilences, nobles and suffering peasants, minds and bodies, arts and music, misery and delight. It’s a brightlit theatre of comedy and tragedy, pleasure and disaster, where a single life plays all the different roles. Now it’s behind him. Since the fog swirled in forever, snow started falling every single day, the long black nights took over, it’s impossible to imagine anything other than Sankt Peterburg. The dream city, the place he once devised on his Parisian pillow, has grown big and true. It’s so real it enfolds him entirely. It’s everything he first imagined, yes, but a thousand times more. No doubt about it, it’s an enormous fantasy of a city – presenting mind and spirit, consciousness and senses with a form of society that never before existed, and perhaps even now is only in its first stage of taking real shape.
In fact it’s just like those weird imaginary cities that fill the devisings of the authors he loves best. Raging Doctor Swift; witty mocking Doctor Sterne; needling canine-toothed Voltaire, writers who for the service of the age invent the most grotesque worlds they can in order to shame and reform the drab and real one. Yet here he is in the middle of just those things: in a city, a capital, a court that might have served the imagination of any of them: been devised as a fresh port of destination for Lemuel Gulliver, that misanthropic unfortunate ship’s surgeon, or a mad place of resort for the wandering simpleton Candide. He’s been reading their adventures again, with a new sense of truth, while he lies each night in the darkened Narishkin Palace, the watchmen shout their way along the hemp-lit city streets, the guardsmen in the barracks shout drunkenly and sound alarms on their drums, the black nights grow longer and start to occupy the territory of the days.
By now he’s spent over forty nights by the Neva. Yet nothing has grown any more familiar, any less confusing, unreal, absurd. If the city still seems strange, so do its people. He’s in a world built and populated by fellow-Europeans – people who speak the languages he knows, wear the same kinds of topcoats and stockings, practise the same civilities. Here are watchmakers and carriage-builders, astronomers and garden designers, monks and English vicars, architects and gunsmiths, barber-surgeons and ship-masters, honest citizens of the world. There are men in fine wigs and powder, women in silks and beauty spots, speaking German, speaking French. They stroll the great prospekts, frequent the coffee houses, attend the theatre, opera, ballet. They draw fashion from Paris, china from Dresden, silk from Venice, spice from Samarkand. Every night is an entertainment: a festivity by Gluck, a solemn tragic opera by Rameau, a play by Racine: maybe even a piece by the brilliant hero of the age, his own Monsieur Voltaire.
This in a city that has raised up street after street of the grandest Viennese or Venetian buildings, where society goes out nightly to its treats and celebrations in the very best glitter and gold, driven through the streets by frogged-coated coachmen in castellated carriages or gilded sleds. Half of its people call themselves counts, princes, generals, chancellors or chamberlains, and many do have a place in the very long tables of ranks. There are Russian gentlefolk who’ve spent half their lives in Paris, Germans who’ve spent all their lives in Moscow; rich merchants, London fops, Vauxhall courtesans, inventors and honest artisans of every kind. Yet, when a card is played or a bet is wagered, the winner’s prize often comes not in the shape of a bag of gold but a thousand human (or perhaps sub-human) souls. And for all the silks and satins, airs and graces, there are bare-knuckle fights even within the Hermitage. Now and then, even at court itself, a duel is fought, a throat is slit, an eye gouged out, a captain of guard knouted and taken off to the Peter and Paul.
Perhaps it’s the same in the great courts all the world over (the Sublime Porte, the Peacock Throne); he wouldn’t really know. But the streets of the town are stranger yet. Here’s a new European city in the building, as Paris is building, Dresden and Berlin, London and Vienna. Everywhere there’s something new. The boulevards, squares, prospekts are carefully planned and ruled, the mansions regulated, the gardens ordered. The great street lamps burning their stinging hemp oil strangely illuminate the city every night. Great flares on the embankments guide the ships going in and out, the streets are swept every day; prostitutes do it by way of punishment. The great arcades are full of the richest goods and pleasures; everywhere a new academy, a fresh institute for noble girls, another convent seems to open. On Nevsky Prospekt, the greatest and most obsequious shopkeepers of the world have begun to trade, selling shining new English carriages, glistening Dutch clocks, furniture with new woods from the Americas, Japanese
porcelains, floating dresses from Tashkent and Muckden.
And yet, and yet . . . this too seems a mask, an illusion, disguising something entirely different. Behind every symbol of elegance there’s a traffic in depravity. Bodies are sold cheaply for any purpose: serfdom, labour, sea-faring, sex. For all who stroll or strut, swagger or march, there are the thousands who tout and cringe, beg and grovel. For every grand palace housing this prince there are a thousand wooden apartment sheds, packed with screaming, teeming, fighting humanity: hovels that only the winter freeze prevents tumbling straight into the stewed waters of the canals. Winter has deepened suddenly. Stray cats shudder in their fur as they prowl through sodden streets. A smell of stale brine, like frozen bear-piss, comes unremittingly off the Neva. Snowflakes fall always – sometimes like a constant thin powder that seems to have the power of penetrating human skin, sometimes like a spilled cartload of balled wool that brings movement to a halt. Behind the arcades, each alley and entry is filled with unspeakable things: drunken human bundles, noisily copulating twosomes, maimed beggars, soliciting tots, decaying corpses. As shopkeepers compete for custom, here they compete for sins. In a world where existence itself is criminal, criminality is a serious form of existence.
Most big booming cities are much the same, he knows. The great capital of civilization he’s come from himself is capable of more than its fair share of crimes, horrors, executions. Paris and London famously stink with fetid open sewers. Venice has piss in every canal, excrement in every doorway, Lisbon shivers to its earthquakes as foundations tremble and its buildings topple to the ground. Moscow rots with disease and disorder, its buildings constantly burn or collapse. But Sankt Peterburg is a new city, a new idea. Its people claim to be from everywhere, and see the world afresh. Yet who are the true natives, the Russian people: the ones who are not émigré, Huguenot, Swiss, Prussian? Some claim they all descend from the noble Vikings, others say the Slavs. Yet half are Tartar, Cossack, oriental, speak a strange repertory of languages, write, when they are able to, an alphabet that has wandered up from a Mediterranean monastery, and which he’s already begun to replan and improve. If some are freemen of Europe, hunting an opportunity, many are the slaves off the steppes, brought here by imperial fiat or obligation, herded in off the Siberian wastes. Even nobles and gentlefolk are often brute souls, brought off distant estates by draconian law to serve at court or in the army, before disappearing into war, drunkenness, exile, servitude.
To the Hermitage Page 34