Catherine the Great (24 page)
Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
Only his wife’s death could release Stroganov from his misery. It came in 1768, but not before she had caused him further embarrassment by embarking on an open affair with Nikita Panin. Though it had amused Panin to make fun of his friend’s marital problems over lunch with Grand Duke Paul, he was disconcerted to find himself the butt of jokes by a public which, as Sir George Macartney remarked, could ‘scarce pardon an undisguised boyish passion, in a man of his years, station and experience’.
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Not even a failed marriage could dull Stroganov’s natural wit: as Catherine’s regular ‘carver’ on state occasions, he had stood behind her chair at the fateful banquet when Peter III denounced her as a fool, comforting her with ‘the witty banter of which he was such a master’.
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However, the real life and soul of the empress’s inner circle was Lev Naryshkin. Though his presence at the empress’s side doubtless helped to reinforce his family’s grip on senior appointments, Lev Aleksandrovich himself played no overt part in either government or the administration of the Court. It became a running joke that he had been made Master of the Horse because he was so rarely to be seen in the saddle (‘We must mount him on a donkey,’ Catherine quipped).
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Critics dismissed him as a gadfly–‘a quite intelligent man’, as Prince Shcherbatov put it, ‘but with the sort of mind that never concentrates, greedy for honours and gain, prone to every luxury, a joker, and, in a word, from his behaviour and his love of joking, more fit to be a court-jester than a grandee’.
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Yet these were precisely the qualities that Catherine had loved and admired since Naryshkin first lit up the Young Court in the dark years of Elizabeth’s reign. Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had liked him then for his ‘good heart and quick understanding’. To Catherine, he was simply ‘the most trustworthy person I have among this nation’.
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As she put it in her memoirs:
He was one of the most singular personages that I have known, and no one ever made me laugh as much. He was a born Harlequin, and had he been of different birth, he could have made a living and a lot of money from his genuinely comic talents. He lacked for nothing in qualities of mind, he had heard tell of everything, and it was all uniquely arranged in his head. He was capable of discoursing on whatever art or science one might wish. He used the relevant technical terms and spoke to you continuously for a quarter hour or more, and
when he stopped, neither he nor anyone else could make anything of the stream of words that had flowed from his mouth, and everyone ended up bursting with laughter.
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‘No serious person could resist him’, she said, particularly on the subject of politics. Perhaps only such an accomplished jester could have managed the tightrope act of remaining equally trusted by Peter III and his consort, right down to the very day of Catherine’s coup.
Observing that the empress’s life was ‘a mixture of trifling amusements and intense application to business’, Buckinghamshire singled out Countess Bruce as the leading lady in Catherine’s ‘private party’. Even in her thirties, she remained ‘the first ornament of the circle’:
She dresses well, dances tolerably, speaks French with fluency and elegance, has read a dozen plays and as many
brochures
, and has naturally a partiality for a nation to whom she is indebted for all her acquired accomplishments. Not averse to gallantry, but discreet in her choice of those she favours, her affections, ever subservient to her judgement and studiously observant of those of her mistress, fix upon an object so connected with the favourite of the hour as must necessarily introduce her to the confidence of the secrets and the society of the pleasures.
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The amorous adventures of Countess Praskovya Bruce were eventually to be her undoing. In 1779, she was banished from Court when Catherine discovered, long after it had become public knowledge, that the countess had ‘conceived a violent passion’ for her own twenty-four-year-old favourite, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov.
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But there was no sign of such indiscretions in the 1760s, when the empress could look back on a friendship lasting more than twenty years. As the second daughter of Countess Rumyantseva, Catherine’s first Russian governess in 1744, Praskovya had been introduced to Catherine soon after her arrival in Moscow. They formed an immediate bond. ‘At my request, she often slept in my room, and even in my bed, and then the whole night was spent in romping, dancing and frolics. Sometimes it was nearly morning before we went to bed, so great was the racket we made.’
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Despite the fact that, like Naryshkin, Praskovya later became attached to Peter III in ‘heart, body and soul’,
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she recovered Catherine’s confidence to the point where ‘of all the Ladies she is the one who comes to me most often’. The empress dedicated her first significant memoir to this trusted female ‘friend,
to whom I can say everything without fear of consequences’.
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In a Court shot through with rumour and innuendo, that was no mean tribute.
Praskovya had known about Catherine’s affair with Grigory Orlov from the moment it began in 1761 and the two of them performed regularly in amateur theatricals.
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Although there could be no question of a marriage in the aftermath of the Khitrovo fiasco, Catherine had come to rely on Grigory’s bear-like support, seeing his intellectual limitations not as a defect but rather as an opportunity for her to bring him on. To the astonishment of the foreign ambassadors, she made no attempt to conceal their shared domestic bliss. He occupied rooms above hers at the Winter Palace, connected to the imperial apartments by a private staircase. There was a similar arrangement at the Summer Palace, where Grigory indulged his passion for astronomy in an observatory occasionally visited by Grand Duke Paul. (They missed the eclipse of the sun in August 1765 because it was too cloudy, though Paul’s tutor was no less satisfied with the close-up of the capital’s bell towers afforded by Grigory’s telescope.
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)
Considered alongside the crucial role the Orlovs had played in Catherine’s coup, the widespread eighteenth-century assumption that only a man could hold the reins of power was enough to persuade many foreigners that the empress must be in thrall to her favourite. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Grigory certainly served as an important counterweight to Panin and his acolytes and took an interest in many of Catherine’s initiatives. His appointment as president of the Chancellery of Guardianship of Foreigners, opened on 22 July 1763 as a means of attracting foreigners to make more productive use of the vast Russian lands, was a clear indication of the significance she attached to the scheme. This was a big operation–17,866 potential colonists were dispatched from Lübeck in 1766 alone; the total number of registered arrivals between 1762 and 1775 was 30,623–and Grigory played an active part in the administration. Indeed, he did more than that. While Catherine apparently visited settlers in transit for the Volga in the barracks built for her husband’s Holstein regiments at Oranienbaum, Grigory settled individual colonists at Peter III’s old estate at Ropsha (given to him by the empress in 1764), where Pastor Eisen was commissioned to continue his experiments with peasant land-ownership.
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At his house on Millionnaya, Orlov also hosted meetings of the Free Economic Society, founded in 1765, puffing on his pipe as he listened to learned papers on agronomy. In political terms, he represented Catherine’s most personal link to the Guards regiments who had brought her to the throne. Yet he was not a natural man of intrigue. ‘He is good natur’d, indolent, unaffected, and unassuming,’ Macartney
reported in 1767. ‘His sudden elevation has neither made him giddy nor ungrateful; and his present friends are the same satellites which attended his course when he moved in a humbler sphere.’
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While Catherine showered him with expensive gifts of porcelain, decorated with symbols of their mutual love, he made every attempt to entertain her in the manner to which she had become accustomed. On his name day, 25 January 1766, he threw a ball in her honour at which sixty-seven guests sat down to a banquet accompanied not only by Court choristers, but also by table fireworks in the manner preferred by Peter III. Afterwards Grigory was joined in a comedy by his fellow amateurs. Catherine enjoyed herself so much that she stopped out until two in the morning.
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She was not so keen to stay up for the mind-numbing round of public masquerades she had hated as a grand duchess. These were now staged with such obvious economy (no food, and only sour milk to drink) that Panin thought it would have been better to abandon them altogether, despite their popularity with the merchantry.
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More popular still was the theatre, which remained as central to the rhythm of the Court’s secular festivities as it had been under Elizabeth. Only the setting was different. A team of twenty-seven artists worked round the clock for two months to allow the theatre in the south-west corner of the Winter Palace to open on 13 December 1763 with a performance of Sumarokov’s familiar tragedy,
Sinav and Truvor
. With an auditorium seating 600 in four rows of boxes and the stalls, this was to remain the principal Court stage for the next twenty years.
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The main imperial box faced the stage, but Catherine also had another one stage-left, immediately opposite her son’s (he was often brought to see her after a performance). This was where Paul developed his lifelong delight in French comedies, though he cried if they lasted too long and showed worrying signs of petulance if the audience applauded before he did, a practice that his mother was happy to tolerate.
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It was even harder for his tutors to keep Paul amused at gala performances of
opera seria
. The boy enjoyed the battle scene in Manfredini’s
Carlo Magno
[
Charlemagne
], staged to commemorate Catherine’s name day in 1764, but he was glad when the performance ended at half past eight: ‘although Italian operas are bad’, he remarked to his tutor, ‘this one was good because it finished early’.
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The adults were no better pleased. Learned as they may have been, Manfredini’s intricate arias failed to sustain his audience’s attention and Count Sievers determined
to secure the services of a more celebrated composer. While the search was on, Manfredini partially redeemed himself with an extravagant musical drama for the third anniversary of Catherine’s accession. The Court celebrated the occasion with a week-long military exercise at Krasnoye Selo, where the empress wore nothing but uniform and Paul, who had been dreaming about the event for almost a year, was sick with excitement.
Apollo and Minerva
required an orchestra and two choruses; dinner was served in a marquee to some 365 guests, including the whole
generalitet
and all the Russian staff officers; and the entertainment was brought to a spectacular conclusion at midnight when fireworks were used to blow up an artificial town.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.