Catherine the Great (23 page)

Immediately behind this throne lay a green and gold dining room which doubled as a billiard room in the evenings. Although Catherine was always keen to enrich the imperial porcelain collection–she paid the Saxon merchant Poggenpohl more than 13,000 roubles for a 256-piece service for Tsarskoye Selo in 1762–banquets were also served on gold and silver tableware dating back to time of Ivan the Terrible and Mikhail Fëdorovich. Though Paul was bored by a visit to the storerooms at the foot of the main staircase, where Panin insisted on scrutinising every item of his priceless heritage, these historic dinner services offered a further reminder of a usurper’s claims to dynastic legitimacy.
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Above the dining-room ceiling was a glass lantern, initially placed by Georg Veldten over the western entrance to the palace, which was large enough to have doors leading to a balcony. Here Catherine occasionally listened to the liturgy when she failed to attend the chapel, which was entered via a large gallery leading northwards from the dining room between the two inner courtyards.

Directly to the east of the dining room was the Diamond Room, so called because the regalia were kept there when not on public display. Though this was formally the state bedroom, equipped with an appropriately imposing
lit de parade
under a canopy in an alcove on the northern wall, it was in effect the empress’s salon, furnished with two sofas, four armchairs, two upright chairs and several marble tables, all designed by Vallin de la Mothe in keeping with his neoclassical concept for the palace interior. ‘As you know, every piece of furniture is a different colour, even in the same room,’ Panin reminded his mistress in 1767.
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Here the empress was to spend countless evenings at the card table. Beyond lay a dressing room leading to her bedroom, whose panels were decorated in green lacquer. It was there that Catherine heard reports from her advisers each morning, sitting on an upright chair at a small table. (Her secretaries occupied a nearby room, overlooking the inner courtyard and accessible via a private staircase.) Catherine’s bedroom led to a small boudoir and from there to her study, at the far south-eastern corner of the palace. This gave access to the last of her private apartments, the library, which stretched northwards towards the chapel until she had it moved upstairs in the mid-1770s, converting the lower apartment to a Mirror Room where in later life she worked every morning from seven until nine. It was in her library that Catherine had scientific experiments set up for visiting ambassadors, using apparatus such as the ‘small electrical machine’ with which her son enjoyed electrocuting his servants.
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Since all these interiors were either lost in subsequent alterations or destroyed by the great fire of December 1837, the achievements of Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe have come down to us only in their plans and correspondence.
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However, it seems clear that the Winter Palace impressed visitors then, as now, more by its massive proportions than by any claim to elegance or beauty. In its final incarnation, the building could boast 1050 rooms, 117 staircases, 1886 doors and 1945 windows. Its principal cornice was almost two kilometres long.
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The full extent of such a colossal structure could only be appreciated from the opposite bank of the Neva. To Lord Cathcart, who arrived as British ambassador in 1768, the conception was comparable in both extent and magnificence to ‘Inigo Jones’s idea for Whitehall, with which it also corresponded in the happy circumstance of being situated on a very noble river’.
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Nevertheless, as European tastes swung from Baroque exuberance towards classical simplicity, Rastrelli’s monster was bound to seem ‘very large and very heavy’. And as another traveller pointed out in the mid-1770s, comparing the palace with the work of Britain’s most lugubrious Baroque architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, the creator of Blenheim Palace and
Castle Howard, it was still ‘not quite finished, like almost everything else in Russia’.
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Panin, who was negotiating an alliance with the Danes in the autumn of 1764, liked to boast that the Winter Palace had cost twenty times as much as the royal palace in Copenhagen.
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Magnificent as it seemed as a symbol of Russian power and prosperity, it was too vast and uncomfortable for the relaxed sociability in which Catherine excelled. Not that she found it easy to relax once she had ascended the throne of all the Russias. ‘Believe me,’ she complained to Madame Geoffrin in 1764, ‘there is nothing more unpleasant in the world than greatness’:

Courtiers could be forgiven for approaching the empress with caution since, for all her yearning for informality, she was swift to complain when they failed to observe due ceremony. Emerging unexpectedly early from her apartments one Sunday in July 1765, she was furious to find only the senior chamberlain in attendance. Count Sheremetev’s subsequent admonishment to his juniors caused ‘much whispering’ at lunch.
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By the time the image of Medusa’s head recurred in a letter of 1781, Catherine seemed more sympathetic to her courtiers’ dilemmas: ‘With due respect to my fellow monarchs, I suppose that we must all of us, such as we are, become unbearable people in society…There are no more than ten or a dozen people who put up with me without constraint.’
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One of the pleasures of this more intimate entourage, which remained remarkably constant throughout her life in Russia, was the opportunities it offered to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the palace. Nowhere was etiquette more relaxed than at the aristocratic country houses which had sprung up along the Peterhof road since Peter the Great first laid out regular plots ‘like the keys of a giant piano pressed up against the south shore of the Gulf of Finland’. As Derzhavin put it in his poem ‘Picnics’ in 1776, it was here, in a striking reversal of the bourgeois notion
Stadtluft macht Frei!
(City air makes you free!), that the Russian elite could abandon the social distinctions imposed on them in the capital:

Ivan Chernyshëv had one such estate by the sea where Catherine occasionally called in on the way to Peterhof and Oranienbaum; Yakov Sievers owned another. Some of their freedoms carried over to Peterhof itself, where she could go fishing and her friends liked to help cook what they had caught. In the heat of the summer, they loved swimming there, too, following the empress into the sea or the pool at Monplaisir until they were up to their necks in water. ‘It must be said that they were fully clothed,’ recorded Paul’s strait-laced tutor, Semën Poroshin, after Yelagin had regaled the Young Court with one such escapade.
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Alexander Stroganov lived closer in at Chernaya Rechka (Black River) on St Petersburg’s Vyborg Side, a favourite hunting ground for Empress Elizabeth. From Colonel Passek’s house, Catherine could drive to Stone Island, which she purchased from Bestuzhev in 1765 for the use of her son, to watch the common people at play in the delta of the River Neva.
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Along with Zakhar Chernyshëv, Prince Andrey Beloselsky and the Orlov brothers, these were among the empress’s closest intimates. She played billiards or cards with them most nights. Gambling presented Catherine with a dilemma. On the one hand, she condemned its pernicious impact on society. ‘The noble who has squandered his money,’ she warned Moscow’s Governor General in 1763, ‘will be obliged to sell his village, which other nobles, lacking sufficient resources, will be in no position to buy; and in that case the only remaining purchasers will be manufacturers…so you are to make very sure that no games of chance are played, and confirm to the police that the published edicts about this are to be precisely enforced.’
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On the other hand, import duties on foreign playing cards and a tax on Russian-made packs led the College of Commerce to promise her in 1765 a combined annual revenue of 27,000 roubles, which Betskoy persuaded her to donate to the Moscow Foundling Home.
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The empress’s favourite game was ombre, the fashionable Spanish three-hander whose addictive powers were satirised in 1763 by the poet Vasily Maikov.
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Piquet was another regular pastime. Nothing, however, gave her greater pleasure than her friends’ amateur theatricals. In the carnival of 1765, she went to the Sheremetev Palace on the Fontanka to see Stroganov, Beloselsky, Prince Peter Khovansky and the Prussian ambassador, Count Solms, perform
Le philosophe marié
under the
direction of Ivan Chernyshëv. His brother Zakhar was the house manager who collected the tickets while Ivan’s fiancée played the part of the usher. More than a hundred top-ranking courtiers made up the audience with the foreign ambassadors. Catherine enjoyed herself so much that she returned four days later for a repeat performance.
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In private, the company was even more relaxed, and especially so on Christmas Day when they gathered late in the afternoon with Paul and his Young Court to play games in the audience chamber of the Winter Palace. Ribbon dancing and hunt the treasure were particular favourites. In the Russian dances that followed, Catherine was partnered by Panin, who remained on the fringes of her inner circle, never quite a friend. In a mock tribute to the Smolny Institute, and in a curious echo of Elizabeth’s cross-dressing masquerades, several of the men, including the beefy Passek and Grigory Orlov, excelled themselves by dressing up as noble girls under the watchful eye of their ‘mama’, Prince Beloselsky. ‘They were all wearing jackets, skirts and bonnets,’ Paul’s tutor noted warily. ‘Only Beloselsky had a scarf, and he was dressed worse than the others.’ There was more mischief as they sat down to punch and a cold table, and then the dancing began all over again.
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Not all Catherine’s leisure pursuits were so mindless. In Alexander Stroganov she had acquired a genuinely cultivated companion who provided an important link to Paul’s Young Court. In a ceiling painting at the Stroganov Palace by Giuseppe Valeriani, Alexander’s grand tour in the 1750s was represented in the guise of Fénelon’s celebrated
Adventures of Télémaque
(1699), in which the young son of Ulysses encounters contrasting models of good and bad kingship as his tutor leads him on a journey through the Mediterranean world.
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It was an appropriate analogy. While his friends Alexander and Ivan Cherkasov went to Cambridge–‘not a very entertaining place in itself, but pleasant enough in good company’–Stroganov chose Geneva, where, in addition to winning his spurs at the riding school, he learned to play the clavichord, studied Latin and Italian, and launched himself with enthusiasm into courses in natural law, geometry and physics under the direction of Professor Jean Jallabert, an expert in electricity.
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Ancient history, his favourite subject, was taught by Pastor Jacob Vernet, celebrated for his attempts to steer between revealed religion and Enlightened reason. By the end of the century, Stroganov had produced his own scholarly catalogue of what had become one of the finest private art collections in Europe. Though many of his sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Italian paintings were acquired during his second spell in Paris in the 1770s, Stroganov had bought his first
significant work, by Antonio Correggio, as early as 1755.
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Already a committed bibliophile by the time of his grand tour, he admired a collection belonging to the Elector of Hanover which contained ‘the best books now to be found’. Later, he saw the more extensive holdings at Frankfurt am Main and a library that surpassed them both in Cardinal de Soubise’s palace at Strasbourg. Above all, he was impressed by access afforded to the public at the royal library in Turin, which was open every day except Thursdays, Sundays and holidays so that ‘anyone who wishes may subscribe and read there’.
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On his return to Russia, Stroganov opened up his own collection, which ran to some 4000 titles in 10,000 volumes. According to the loan book kept in his own hand and dating from the period between Catherine’s accession and her coronation, the empress herself borrowed a French play called, appropriately enough,
Le Philosophe
.
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Stroganov entertained her to an annual banquet lunch in January and his palace became open house to leading courtiers. It was there, in 1766, that a plan was formed to found the Imperial Russian Public Library, of which he was eventually appointed director in 1800.
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Stroganov had plenty of time to spend with the empress and her son because his marriage to Anna Vorontsova had fallen apart by the summer of 1765. Their wedding seven years earlier had been sandwiched in between those of Count Buturlin and Lev Naryshkin. According to Catherine, Kirill Razumovsky made a bet with the Danish ambassador as to which of the three grooms would be cuckolded first, and it turned out to be Stroganov, ‘whose new wife seemed at the time the ugliest, the most innocent, and the most childish’.
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By spring 1766, as the British ambassador reported, both partners desired a divorce with equal zeal, ‘the only thing in which, it is said, they ever agreed in’.
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Yet as Catherine had already explained to Count Mikhail Vorontsov, this was a matter over which she had no control: