St. Petersburg
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The head of the Cadet Corps, Prince Yusupov, encouraged his pupils to perform Russian as well as French plays. In 1746, a merchant from Yaroslavl was so taken with one of these performances that he returned home to set up a troupe. It developed such a reputation that – ten years later – Elizabeth decreed:
We have ordered that there be established a Russian Theatre for the presentation of tragedies and comedies; we assign for its use Golovin’s stone house on Vasilevsky Island near the House of the Cadets. Actors and actresses are to be engaged for this theatre: actors, from among the student singers and members of the Yaroslavl troupe who are now at the Corps of Cadets, as well as others who are not in the service – as many as are needed; likewise, let a sufficient number of actresses be engaged. For the maintenance of the said theatre . . . the sum of 5000 roubles shall be paid yearly . . .33
Thus a permanent Russian state theatre was founded and directed by the politically progressive playwright Alexander Sumarokov. There were performances, in patchy and guttural French, of Racine, Molière and Corneille, and the prolific Sumarokov produced a steady supply of the moralistic tragedies that were popular at Elizabeth’s court.34 The empress, who had used subversive drama as an emotional safety-valve during her years of tension with Anna, was now grateful for Sumarokov’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which foregrounded the hero’s sense of duty to the state rather than his obsession with revenge.35 Sumarokov’s own sense of duty was called into question when he was fired from his directorship by Ivan Shuvalov in June 1761 for mismanagement and, perhaps, embezzlement. After the incident, the director was able to dedicate himself to his first love, poetry. He wanted to be recognised and valued as a professional poet – a novelty in St Petersburg.36
If theatre went public during Elizabeth’s reign, so did concerts. In July 1746, a promoter charged one rouble for admission to a recital by a foreign bass, given in the house of General Artemy Zagriazky. Permission for the performance was sought from the Police Chancery and posters pasted about the city advertised the concert. Two years later, early-evening Wednesday concerts began in the house of Sergei Gargarin – entrance, once again, was one rouble. While merchants and townspeople were welcome in the audience, drunken servants and ‘unsuitable’ women were not. In addition to such presentations, a musical curiosity invented for Sergei Naryshkin by a Bohemian member of Elizabeth’s court orchestra was seen and heard both at court and out and about on the city streets. It was a ‘living organ’, which required a group of twenty-five to forty performers – clearly an invention for a society in which labour was cheap. Every pipe was blown by a different player, and the result was that this absurd-looking contraption could perform ‘the completest symphonies of every kind, from the slowest largo to the quickest prestissimo’.37
The sweet-voiced Elizabeth loved court chapel-singing and often stood in the shadows and sung along. It was to the ranks of these court singers that St Petersburg owes a patron saint. When the singer Colonel Andrei Petrov died, his wife, Xenia, gave away their possessions, dressed in his old clothes and wandered the streets of the capital for the next forty years, aiding and praying for the poor. People came to love her, and her otherworldliness proved of commercial benefit to those who were kind to her. Merchants giving her food or cabmen offering her free rides attracted custom, their kindness rewarded by a population grateful for their generosity to a holy fool. After Xenia’s death, her grave in the Smolenskoe Cemetery became a place of pilgrimage, attracting upwards of 5,000 people a day in the first years of the twentieth century. In 1988 – towards the end of the communist era – she was canonised by the Orthodox Church as St Xenia of Petersburg.38
Opera as a court entertainment had been well established under Anna, and after Elizabeth took the throne, more Italian troupes with increasingly elaborate stage effects delighted court audiences. Giovanni-Battista Locatelli’s travelling company arrived at the end of 1757 and presented opera buffa. Locatelli was a great publicist for his art and gave lectures at his house while his chief dancer, Niodini, taught the court ladies how to improve their dancing.39 Increasingly, Russian-trained performers were seen. The first Russian female opera singer was heard on the Petersburg stage during the 1740s, and the first dancer whose career was recorded was Aksinia Sergeeva, who had been chosen to dance at Elizabeth’s coronation.40
The ‘living organ’.
Francesco Araja created about thirty operas during Elizabeth’s reign, including Scipio, written in 1745 for the sumptuous marriage of the empress’s seventeen-year-old nephew, Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich, to his sixteen-year-old German fiancée, Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg. Sophie had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church a year earlier, taking the name Ekaterina Alekseyevna, and would play a significant role in Russia’s future. The marriage involved ten days of celebration, during which there were services, gun salutes and banquets. Court guests dined around large tables ‘incorporating fountains, cascades and pyramids of candles’ while, out in Palace Square, the populace was treated to wine fountains and roasted meat.41 The dandy Sergei Naryshkin was applauded for arriving at the marriage wearing a jewelled kaftan and travelling in a carriage inlaid with glittering mirrors.42 Festivities culminated in a huge and highly elaborate ball of masked quadrilles, after which the Grand Duchess Catherine settled into the boredom of her new life.43 She left a detailed but not impartial account of her youth at Elizabeth’s court, presenting herself as too intelligent and energetic to be stifled by an unfortunate marriage to an imbecilic man, the future Peter III.
Easily bored by the luxurious court, wary of its manipulative empress – yet all the while learning how to negotiate the complicated power struggles of an ambitious nobility – Catherine took refuge in reading. She consumed everything from cutting-edge philosophy to the classics. One day it was Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois or Voltaire’s L’histoire universelle, the next it was Tacitus or Cicero. Although the grand duchess detested hunting, she developed a love of riding, straddling the horse like a man – much to the consternation of the empress, who felt the position might compromise the grand duchess’s ability to produce an heir.44 Indeed, it seemed as if Elizabeth’s anxieties were founded when – after nearly a decade of marriage – Catherine and Peter produced no offspring and were both sanctioned to take lovers. During 1752, Sergei Saltykov was known to be making overtures to Catherine so that, when she gave birth to the Grand Duke Paul Petrovich on 20 September 1754, people speculated that Peter was not the father. The French Ambassador, the Marquis de L’Hôpital, noted curtly in his despatches that the child ‘belongs to Monsieur Saltykov’. Nevertheless, the birth empowered Catherine, who was now not only the wife of the heir apparent, but also the mother of a future emperor. After Elizabeth confiscated the baby Paul, to supervise his upbringing, Catherine went on to have children by a number of lovers – a daughter, Anna, by the Polish Count Poniatowski; and a son, Count Brobinsky, by Gregory Orlov. These lovers and pregnancies helped the rapidly maturing grand duchess understand that, at court, everything private was public, and a secret was what a good number of people made it their business to know. As for Peter, he didn’t seem to be a party to court intelligence45 – ‘God knows where my wife gets all her pregnancies. I really do not know if this child is mine and if I ought to recognise it.’46
If the birth of Paul weakened Elizabeth’s position in relation to Catherine,47 it did little to curb her exuberant displays of power. Although the number of guests at court balls seldom exceeded 200, the feasts were extravagant. One particular delicacy, pâté de Périgueux truffé – foie gras en croûte – was carried overland to Elizabeth in crates of ice on carriages given diplomatic immunity as they passed through hostile Prussia. At court, a perennial favourite was the ‘Empress Roast’: a culinary matryoshka doll in which a lark was stuffed with olives and then stuffed into a quail, which was stuffed into a partridge, which was stuffed into a pheasant, which was stuffed into a capon, which was stuffed into a suckli
ng pig – all intended for a single guest. There were four courses to a dinner, but each course contained between two and fifteen dishes. Such a selection was only meant to be sampled, and functioned primarily as a display of imperial wealth. Elizabeth had a sweet tooth and the tables were piled with pyramids of sweets surrounded by sugar ornaments or ‘subtleties’ for decoration – often small-scale versions of Petersburg landmarks.48
When the empress left the capital, the court went with her and St Petersburg became silent. When she returned, the capital became a theatre in which the saga of autocracy was played out and – under Elizabeth – kaleidoscoped into make-believe. The seductive deception of cross-dressing added one more strategy for escape and pandered to Elizabeth’s vanity. The empress awarded herself the male Order of St Andrew, appointed herself colonel of five regiments, and captain of a grenadier company of the Preobrazhensky Guards.49 Lord Hyndford witnessed her wearing the uniform of the guards and marvelled at the transformation: ‘I am persuaded that those who had not known her, would, by her air, have taken her for an officer.’50 Jonas Hanway observed that the empress appeared particularly impressive when sitting ‘at the table with her officers, in regimentals as their colonel’.51 The Grand Duchess Catherine recorded in her Memoirs that during transvestite masques:
Most of the women resembled stunted little boys, and the eldest had fat, short legs that hardly flattered them. No women looked truly and perfectly good in men’s clothing except the Empress herself; since she was very tall and had a somewhat powerful build, men’s clothes suited her marvelously. She had more beautiful legs than I have ever seen on any man and admirably proportioned feet.’52
With uncharacteristic generosity, Catherine added that Elizabeth ‘dressed to perfection and everything she did had the same special grace whether she dressed as a man or a woman’.
During her reign, cross-dressing became implicated in a controversial diplomatic intrigue, A lawyer by training, Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont-Chevalier d’Eon for short – was a military officer, a skilled fencer and an authority on history, economics and politics. He was also recruited to the Secret du Roi, a group of agents employed by Louis XV of France. Above and beyond all that, the Chevalier d’Eon was one of the most infamous transvestites in history. He spent his first five decades largely as a man and his remaining thirty-two years largely as a woman, and he claimed that he used his feminine self- Lia de Beaumont – in espionage against Russia and England.
What a self-mythologising spy presents as truth is obscured by layers of deception, and d’Eon’s autobiography plays with the ambiguities of transgendered life. One purpose behind his tale was to justify cross-dressing by demonstrating how it served the interests of his country. The chevalier concocted the story that he disguised himself as one of Empress Elizabeth’s maids in order to gain access to her and inveigle her into making a secret alliance with France against Austria. When he was dining with Chancellor Vorontsov at Tsarskoe Selo during his first ‘secret’ mission to Russia, his host informed d’Eon that a French tutor in the empress’s service was convinced that ‘she knew you when you stayed with the Benedictine Sisters in the Royal Abbey of Noëford in Meaux’ and that she remembered earrings and ‘a small wine-coloured birthmark on the left cheek’. D’Eon recorded, ‘I blushed to the roots of my hair’, sensing ‘that this discovery would make my dragoon uniform lose its lustre’. Vorontsov confessed that he and his wife had spotted the birthmark and noticed d’Eon’s pierced ears. Quick in his defence, d’Eon protested that he had lately thrashed several German fencing masters and suggested that it is unlikely he developed such a skill with the sisters of Noëford. The French tutor, he added, was ‘a drowsy, flighty girl who dreamed that the moon was made of green cheese’. Vorontsov was undeterred: ‘If these suspicions are correct, as I suspect they are, you have nothing to fear in spite of your disguise . . . Your circumspection and knowledge would be very useful to the empress. Wear a dress once again and go off for only a month or two to the convent for well-born girls . . . and the position of reader will be yours.’53 In fact d’Eon’s work at the Russian court was straightforwardly diplomatic. During his two trips to St Petersburg he had three roles: political observer, agent of the Secret du Roi attempting to frustrate the impractical Anglo-Russian Subsidy Treaty, and secretary to the embassy. Nowhere in the French diplomatic archives does it state that d’Eon ever posed as a transvestite reader to the empress.’54
Although Elizabeth was modestly educated and preferred dazzle and debauchery over scholarship, St Petersburg was becoming a centre for learning. The first Russian study of the city – a lengthy topographical description with illustrations – was produced between 1749 and 1751 by Andrei Bogdanov, assistant librarian at the Academy of Sciences. It claimed that Elizabeth’s capital was so ‘adorned and exalted with such glorious new buildings’ that it was superior to many European cities ‘renowned for their antiquity’. A growing nationalism was palpable. At the outset of Elizabeth’s reign, Mikhail Lomonosov celebrated the overthrow of German influence with the kind of images that had been used to apotheosise Peter the Great. Son of an upwardly mobile fisherman from Arkhangelsk, Lomonosov became St Petersburg’s leading savant, a giant of science and letters. He was, suggested Pushkin, ‘our first university’ – a chemist, geologist, grammarian, playwright, poet and creator of literary Russian. Centuries after his arrival in western Europe, Renaissance man appeared in Russia. Lomonosov founded the journal Monthly Compositions in 1755, in order to discuss issues raised by the Enlightenment – ideas that might help contour the kind of rationalised state of which Peter the Great had dreamed. Although Elizabeth could take little personal credit for these intellectual advances, in her capacity as a ‘protector of science’ she was held to embody the qualities of Minerva. During her reign the city was no longer just ‘Petropolis’, but-according to a panegyric written for her name-day in 1759- ‘ancient Rome, and ancient Athens’.55 The dawn of a new and great culture broke while the court was hungover from the night before.
Anna had supported plans for an Academy of Arts, but these were rejected by the Academy of Sciences in 1733. It was only when Lomonosov fought for its creation that the Imperial Academy of the Liberal Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture came into being in 1758. Part of Moscow University, the Imperial Academy was situated in St Petersburg – absurd as that may seem, the capital was where artists of calibre obtained commissions and where the best instructors could be found. Despite the institution’s nationalistic aspirations, its first three teachers were a French painter, a French sculptor and a German engraver. Of its initial intake of thirty-eight pupils, eleven were from the nobility and twenty-seven were from the lower court and governmental ranks.56 The 1750s saw other important developments in learning directed by Peter Shuvalov’s cousin, Ivan, who became a kind of Minister of Education. Paving the way for Russia’s military successes in the second half of the century, a second Cadet School was opened to replace the Naval Academy in 1752, and the Artillery and Engineers’ schools were amalgamated in 1758. There was also an attempt to improve the quality of service at court when, in 1759, the Corps of Pages was set up to train young nobles.57
The city’s sixth-largest flood occurred in October 1752, followed by a second, less dramatic one a few days later. That year, when Count Choglokov invited Catherine and her lover, Sergei Saltykov, to hunt on his island in the Neva, the party had just sat down to supper when ‘a great wind arose at sea, which made the water rise so considerably that it reached the bottom of the stairs, and the island was covered in several feet of seawater’.58 During Elizabeth’s twenty-year reign, the city suffered one-tenth of its total number of major floods. ‘Sooner or later,’ suggested the Marquis de Custine when he visited early in the following century, ‘the water here will get the better of human pride.59 There were also major fires in the poorer quarters during the 1740S, clearing more slums. But for all the natural and man-made catastrophes, the
streets were becoming safer. Before Empress Anna returned the court to St Petersburg there had been a move to shut the brothels that did such a lively trade in a city full of soldiers and sailors. But the problem had not been solved, as the prostitutes merely plied their trade in taverns instead. So, under Elizabeth, taverns were closed on the main thoroughfares as part of the continuing fight against the sale of sex.60 In 1750, the city was rocked by a scandal in which a German madam, Anna-Cunegonda Felker – known as ‘Dresdensha’ – bribed an official in the Police Chancellery in order to run prostitution outlets across the city: hot-spots offering music, dancing and a selection of girls. Dresdensha attracted important clients such as Prince Boris Golitsyn, Count Fyodor Apraksin and a number of court officials. The investigation against the racket, led by State Councillor Demidov, ended with 250 arrests. The guilty were knouted, the prostitutes were sent to work in mills and the foreigners were deported. After the success of his operation, Demidov remarked how quiet the streets had become at night.61
During the day, however, there was steadily increasing activity. The early-morning streets saw the arrival of maids from neighbouring villages carrying their milk in cool, decorated birch-bark and earthenware pots. In the cold weather, hawkers roamed the streets selling zbiten, a cheap, steaming drink made from honey, spices and hot water.62 All over the capital, merchants set up small tables and sold soup, pierogis, blinis and kvas – that working man’s brew of fermented meal, malt and bread.63 Markets were operating in different quarters, and the wholesale flour trade operated from barges moored on the outskirts of the city near the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.64 From there, flour was reloaded onto smaller boats for distribution to the large number of shops or stalls selling loaves, buns and pastries. Fish barques – with reservoirs for fresh fish in their holds – were moored on the Neva and along the canals.65 In the coldest months, fish pulled from the water would freeze within seconds.