Catherine the Great (56 page)

Nor was the princess alone in seeking to publicise her heroine’s glorious achievements. Documents about Catherine accounted for almost four-fifths of the historical material published in Russian journals in the first five years of the nineteenth century.
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Within months of Alexander’s accession, Catherine’s own historical works had been republished alongside a translation of her correspondence with Dr Zimmerman. Editions of some of her plays and multiple Russian versions of her correspondence with Voltaire and Field Marshal Rumyantsev soon followed.
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As a bandwagon of publications in praise of the late empress
began to roll, Nikolay Karamzin set the tone in 1802 with a paean of praise eulogising the formative role of the ruler in Russian history.
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Sponsored by seventy subscribers, including Maria Perekusikhina and Metropolitan Amvrosy, Peter Kolotov published a six-volume chronology of Catherine’s reign in 1811, drawing on material he had been collecting for the past twenty years.
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Three years later, Ivan Sreznevsky published a collection of short anecdotes declaring it ‘desirable that all the works of the Great Catherine, having glorified and magnified Russia, should be made known to everyone’.
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‘Every circumstance attending Katherine’s Time begins to bear a sacred stamp already,’ noted Martha Wilmot following a visit to Tsarskoye Selo in 1808: ‘The grounds are not remarkable for beauty nor the Contrary; they interest one as being often
walk’d
by Katherine.’
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Nor was it only at Tsarskoye Selo that Catherine had left her indelible imprint. ‘Without Catherine,’ one memoirist claimed, St Petersburg ‘would soon have sunk back into the bog from which it emerged’.
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The capital, however, was Peter the Great’s shrine. To reach a territory that was distinctively Catherine’s, it was necessary to radiate outwards to Tver, where the triumphal gates marking the empress’s visit in 1767 still stood, or to that other favourite city of hers, Kazan, where Peter Sumarokov ‘bowed his head with heartfelt feeling’ to the berth in Catherine’s cabin on her galley in 1838.
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Among the military men who proved especially susceptible to the mixture of nostalgia and self-importance that characterised Catherine’s posthumous admirers, none was more gallant than Denis Davydov, hero of 1812 and hero-worshipper of Field Marshal Suvorov. Horrified that ‘the immortal Catherine’ should be subjected to ‘lampoons about her private life’, Davydov praised her reign in 1831 as ‘most brilliant, most triumphant’, and no less useful to Russia than that of Peter the Great. Many fellow veterans shared in his veneration of Catherine’s ‘miraculous age’.
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It was partly among such circles of ‘old people, officers of the Guards in Catherine’s time’ that the young Alexander Herzen grew up in Moscow in the 1830s.
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For all their importance as mythmakers, however, soldiers were ultimately outranked by salon hostesses. Though Alexandra Branicka, Potëmkin’s eldest niece and one of Catherine’s closest friends, remained closeted on her husband’s estate at Belaya Tserkov, there was no shortage of female relics of Catherine’s reign who continued to proclaim it as their finest hour. Catherine’s last maid of honour, Praskovia Myatleva (née Saltykova), lived until 1859, when the cream of Petersburg society processed down Nevsky Prospect behind her catafalque.
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The most flamboyant was Platon Zubov’s elder sister, Olga Zherebtsova, who became a legend in her own right as
a former lover of the British ambassador Charles Whitworth, an alleged lynchpin in the conspiracy to assassinate Tsar Paul. Steeped as deeply as her heroine in the works of the French
philosophes
, Zherebtsova struck Herzen, who met her in her seventies, as ‘a strange, eccentric ruin of another age, surrounded by degenerate successors that had sprung up on the mean and barren soil of Petersburg court life.’
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But she was far from the only Russian noblewoman to delight in reminiscing about her gilded youth in the shadow of the empress. Alexandra Shishkova hung a full-length portrait of Catherine in her bedroom alongside another of Christ and was said never to wear any other blouse than those she had purchased from the empress’s wardrobe. Maria Kikina, daughter of a leading Court official, also preserved her sitting room as a shrine to Catherine.
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Even a chance encounter with the empress was enough to infuse a lasting glow in those who outlived her. Yet the sense that hers had been a golden age was by no means confined to subjects who were prominent enough to revel in the memory of personal contact. On the contrary, these few members of the elite merely personified the strong tide of popular sentiment that swelled demand for Nikolay Utkin’s engraving of Borovikovsky’s
Lady with a dog
, commissioned in 1826 by Count Nikolay Rumyantsev and printed in the following year.
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A whole generation of Russians grew up, like the writer Apollon Grigoryev, at the feet of grandfathers who reminisced about Catherine and her times as the smoke from their pipes curled into the night.
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Many, it seemed, still succumbed to the mood of nostalgia which engulfed the ‘babbling old Widow’ the Wilmot sisters met at Tsarskoye Selo in 1808, ‘who has been talking of the days that were pass’d till she was obliged to wipe her eyes in the sleeve of her gown’.
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While the modern eye might not detect anything sinister in any of this, the tsar was understandably wary of attempts to veil intemperate demands on his own regime under praise for aspects of Catherine’s, and he could hardly have been expected to approve of attempts to manipulate the past as a means of reproaching the present. ‘Happily for us,’ wrote a canny contributor to Karamzin’s
Messenger of Europe
in 1804, ‘everything demonstrates the particular resemblance in heart and soul between Alexander and Catherine–favourite grandson of his adored grandmother.’
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Writers were particularly keen to urge the tsar to reject his father’s philistinism and return to the more tolerant atmosphere of the 1760s and 1770s. Before the reign of Alexander II in the mid-nineteenth century, no one paid much attention to Catherine’s own literary achievements. The point was that by joining the ranks of the writers, she had radically improved the status of their emergent profession. Without the empress’s personal interest and
protection, the argument ran, there would have been no Fonvizin, no Derzhavin, and none of the other ‘immortal’ literary figures who emerged in her reign.
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‘Talents perish like spring flowers from stormy winds and frost,’ warned Nikolay Grech in a lecture at the Imperial Public Library in 1817, ‘but in Russia there are no such obstacles…Catherine gave her subjects the freedom to express their thoughts freely both in print and in speech.’
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Catherine had loved scholarship for scholarship’s sake, Grech told readers of his history of Russian literature. Others took up the refrain. ‘Here, at every step,’ wrote Konstantin Batyushkov of the Academy of Sciences, ‘the enlightened patriot should bless the memory of the monarch who deserves to be called “great and wise” by posterity not so much on account of her victories as for the useful institutions’ she established.
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It was impossible not to notice the veiled criticism of the tsar who had conquered Napoleon. In his speech to the Russian Academy in 1818, Karamzin offered another tactful reminder to Alexander that Catherine had loved ‘both the glory of victory and the glory of reason’, accepting ‘this happy fruit of the Academy’s work with the same flattering favour with which she succeeded in rewarding everything praiseworthy and which she bequeathed to you, gracious Tsar, as an unforgettable, precious memory’.
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The note of reproach sounded rather more obviously in the Decembrist journal
Polar Star
, which looked back on Catherine’s reign in 1823 as a ‘golden age for literary scholars’: ‘All our best writers arose or were educated under her dominion.’
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‘The Age of Catherine is the age of encouragement,’ Pushkin remarked in 1825. ‘In that respect it is no worse than any others.’
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In private, scholars were more openly critical. Already in 1810, the American ambassador John Quincy Adams met an official at the Academy of Sciences who complained ‘of the neglect of the sciences in the present day. The Age of Catherine is past.’
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The fate of the empress’s Instruction in the new century seemed to confirm the point. At first, the signs seemed optimistic. Appointing her former favourite, Peter Zavadovsky, to chair a new commission to codify the laws in 1801, the tsar considered it ‘almost superfluous to note…that the suppositions in the
Nakaz
by my Most Kind Grandmother, the Empress Catherine II…may cast great light on the commission’s work. You know this better than anyone else.’
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For some, such as the poet Derzhavin, the treatise had always remained an object of veneration. While the Russian transcript had been sent to the Senate in 1777, the French original had been placed in a bronze casket at the Kunstkammer, where it was exhibited to foreign visitors and taken to meetings of the Academy of Sciences. The casket and its priceless contents remained on the table at the Academy at its
centenary celebrations in 1826.
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Neither did Catherine’s treatise lack practical application. Predictably ignored in the reign of Tsar Paul, it was quoted in at least forty-one court cases under Alexander I.
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Turning to the
Nakaz
in the context of the proposed codification of the laws, the liberal Alexander Turgenev remarked that though it may only have been a work of theory, it had done more to educate and enlighten the conscience of Russian judges than twenty reprints of the Muscovite law codes. For all this enthusiasm, however, few people seem to have read the
Nakaz
. By 1817, the fiftieth anniversary of the Legislative Commission, Nikolay Turgenev was urging another of his brothers to read Bibikov’s memoirs to discover that the empress’s efforts were ‘not so risible as people generally think’. In the following year, 1421 copies of the empress’s treatise were pulped at 4 roubles 5 kopecks per pood.
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However promising an official revival of Catherine’s principles may have seemed in 1801, the opportunity had evaporated almost as soon as it emerged. Although his grandmother’s name appeared in a number of edicts promulgated by Alexander I between his accession and his coronation, it subsequently disappeared from view. In practice, his early reference to Catherine’s ‘heart and soul’ was no more than a rhetorical disavowal of his father’s arbitrariness. Early in the new reign, Dashkova was disturbed to learn that ‘for all the disagreement among the people surrounding the emperor, they were unanimous in disparaging the reign of Catherine II and instilling in the young monarch the idea that a woman could never govern an empire.’
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To attempt to turn the clock back would have been hard enough even had the tsar had no aspirations of his own. But his determination to take an ethical approach to both foreign and domestic affairs was in itself sufficient to question Catherine’s morals, as Karamzin doubtless realised when criticising the personal ‘foibles’ that made him ‘blush for mankind’ in his
Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia
, written in 1810–11.
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Mikhail Speransky, the tsar’s leading minister between 1808 and 1812, was a genuine constitutionalist with little time for Catherine’s style of absolutism. Dismissing her gurus Montesquieu and Blackstone as ‘superficial minds’, Speransky was scathing about her attempts simultaneously ‘to enjoy all the benefits of despotism with all the honour of philosophical conceptions’: ‘Comparing her instructions and various economical and juridical institutions with the unlimited power and accountability of the administrators, one might say that our laws were written in Athens or England, and our mode of government borrowed from Turkey.’
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The empress’s fascination with the French Enlightenment seemed equally suspect to a generation which had been taught by French émigré propaganda and
the dictates of international politics to regard the
philosophes
as perfidious mentors. ‘Posterity judges, and will judge, Catherine with all human prejudice,’ wrote Countess Golovina. ‘The new philosophy, by which she was unfortunately influenced, and which was the mainspring of her failings, covered as with a thick veil her great and fine qualities.’
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The Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 understandably made such anxieties more urgent. Ascribing ‘all our mistakes’ to ‘the French alone’, Ivan Muravëv-Apostol blamed the
philosophes
for the decline of French morals from the time of Louis XIV. It was then, he declared, that ‘the light of true enlightenment begins to fade; talents are employed as a weapon of depravity, and that most dangerous of sophists, the false-sage of Ferney [Voltaire], strains every nerve of his extraordinary mind over the course of half a century to strew with flowers the cup of hemlock he prepared to poison future generations’. The poet Konstantin Batyushkov could only watch in horror as the fall of Moscow set the seal on a catalogue of French treachery: ‘And this nation of monsters dared to speak of freedom, of philosophy, of humanity! And we were so blind that we imitated them like apes! How well they have repaid us!’
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Once Alexander had made his own glory by defeating Napoleon, any lingering need to cling to his grandmother’s skirts was finally removed. Celebrating the tsar’s ‘subjugation of Paris’ in 1814, when he rode down the Champs Elysées at the head of his troops on a magnificent white charger, Derzhavin was led to wonder whether even ‘Peter and Catherine were as great as you’.
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Nicholas I, who succeeded his brother in 1825, was certainly not the man to restore Catherine’s reputation. Born in the year of her death, nineteen years younger than Alexander, he had no personal memory of his grandmother. So notorious did Nicholas’s hostility to her memory become that in 1885 a set of miniature portraits of the tsars was identified as his on the grounds that only Catherine’s and his own were missing. Devoted, like his father, to the martial image of Peter the Great, and exuding the same uncompromising masculinity, Nicholas did little to hide his contempt for Catherine’s legacy. Even before her beloved Russian Academy was absorbed into the Academy of Sciences in 1841, the Chesme Palace was converted into a dilapidated home for invalids, while the palace at Tsaritsyno became a barracks, the ultimate symbol of the Nicolaevan regime.