Natasha's Dance (7 page)

    Fountain House, like Russia, was originally made of wood, a single-storey
dacha
hurriedly erected by Boris Sheremetev in his final years. Pyotr rebuilt and enlarged the house in stone during the 1740s - the beginning of the craze for palace building in St Petersburg, after the Empress Elizabeth had ordered the construction of her own great Imperial residences there: the Summer Palace on the Fontanka river (1741-4), the Great Palace at Tsarskoe Selo (1749-52), and the Winter Palace (1754-62) which we know today. All these baroque masterpieces were built by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who had come to Russia at the age of sixteen. Rastrelli perfected the synthesis of the Italian and Russian baroque styles which is so characteristic of St Petersburg. That essential style - distinguished from its European counterparts by the vastness of its scale, the exuberance of its forms and the boldness of its colours - was stamped on the Fountain House, which may have been designed by Rastrelli himself; certainly the building work was overseen by Rastrelli’s main assistant at

    Tsarskoe Selo, Savva Chevakinsky, a minor nobleman from Tver who had graduated from the Naval School to become Russia’s first architect of note. The classical facade was ornately decorated with lion masks and martial emblems trumpeting the glories of the Sheremetev clan, and this theme was continued on the iron railings and the gates. Behind the palace were extensive gardens, reminiscent of those at Tsarskoe Selo, with paths lined by marble statues from Italy, an English grotto, a Chinese pavilion, and, with a more playful touch, fountains to reflect the house’s name.
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    Inside, the house was a typical collection of European sculpture, bas-relief, furniture and decor, reflecting a taste for expensive luxury. Wallpaper (from France) was just coming into fashion and was used, it seems, for the first time in Russia at the Fountain House.
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Pyotr Sheremetev was a follower of fashion who had the house redecorated almost every year. On the upper floor was a grand reception hall, used for balls and concerts, with a parquet floor and a high painted ceiling, lined on one side by full-length windows that looked on to the water and, on the other, by enormous mirrors with gold-leaf candelabras whose wondrous effect was to flood the room with extraordinary light. There was a chapel with valuable icons in a special wing; a parade gallery on the upper floor; a museum of curiosities; a library of nearly 20,000 books, most of them in French; a gallery of family and royal portraits painted by serf artists; and a collection of European paintings, which the Sheremetevs purchased by the score. The galleries contained works by Raphael, Van Dyck, Correggio, Veronese, Vernet and Rembrandt. Today they are found in the Hermitage of the Winter Palace.
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    Not content with one palace, the Sheremetevs built two more, even more expensive ones, at Kuskovo and at Ostankino, on the western outskirts of Moscow. The Kuskovo estate, to the south of Moscow, though it had a relatively simple wooden house which gave the place a rural feel, was extraordinarily ambitious in its conception. In front of the house there was a man-made lake, large enough to stage mock sea battles watched by up to 50,000 guests; a hermitage that housed several hundred paintings; pavilions and grottoes; an open amphitheatre for the summer season; and a larger inside theatre (the most advanced in Russia when it was constructed in the 1780s) with a seating capacity of 150 people and a stage deep enough for the scene

    3.
The Sheremetev theatre at Ostankino. View from the stage. The parterre is covered by the floor, which was used for balls

    changes of French grand opera.
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Nikolai Petrovich, who took the Sheremetev opera to its highest levels, had the theatre rebuilt at Ostankino after the auditorium at Kuskovo burnt down in 1789. The Ostankino theatre was even larger than the Kuskovo one, with a seating capacity of 260 people. Its technical facilities were much more sophisticated than those at Kuskovo; it had a specially designed contraption that could transform the theatre into a ballroom by covering the parterre with a floor.

    The civilization of the aristocracy was based upon the craftsmanship of millions of serfs. What Russia lacked in technology, it more than made up for in a limitless supply of cheap labour. Many of the things that make the tourist gasp at the splendour and the beauty of the Winter Palace - the endless parquet flooring and abundance of gold leaf, the ornate carpentry and bas-relief, the needlework with thread

    finer than a human hair, the miniature boxes with their scenes from fairy tales set in precious stones, or the intricate mosaics in malachite - are the fruits of many years of unacknowledged labour by unknown serf artists.

    Serfs were essential to the Sheremetev palaces and their arts. From the 200,000 census serfs the Sheremetevs owned, several hundred were selected every year and trained as artists, architects and sculptors, furniture makers, decorative painters, gilders, engravers, horticul-turalists, theatrical technicians, actors, singers and musicians. Many of these serfs were sent abroad or assigned to the court to learn their craft. But where skill was lacking, much could be achieved through sheer numbers. At Kuskovo there was a horn band in which, to save time on the training of players, each musician was taught to play just one note. The number of players depended on the number of different notes in a tune; their sole skill lay in playing their note at the appropriate moment.
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    The Argunov family had a vital role in the development of the Russian arts. All the Argunovs were Sheremetev serfs. The architect and sculptor Fedor Argunov designed and built the main reception rooms at Fountain House. His brother Ivan Argunov studied painting with Georg Grot at the Imperial court and quickly established his reputation as one of the country’s leading portrait painters. In 1759 he painted the portrait of the future Empress Catherine the Great - a rare honour for a Russian artist at a time when the court looked to Europe for its portrait painters. Pavel Argunov, Ivan’s eldest son, was an architect who worked with Quarenghi at Ostankino and Fountain House. Yakov Argunov, Ivan’s youngest son, was well known for his 1812 portrait of the Emperor Alexander. But the most important of the three Argunov brothers was the second, Nikolai, who was indisputably one of Russia’s finest painters of the nineteenth century.
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    The position of the creative serf was complicated and ambiguous. There were artists who were greatly valued and rewarded by their lords. Prized chefs and singers were the highest paid in the Sheremetev world. In the 1790s Nikolai Petrovich paid his chef an annual salary of 850 roubles (four times the amount paid to the best chefs in English houses), and his best opera singer 1,500 roubles. But other serf artists were extremely poorly paid: Ivan Argunov, who was placed in charge

    of all artistic matters at the Fountain House, received a mere 40 roubles a year.
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Serf artists had a higher status than the other household staff. They lived in better housing, received better food, and they were allowed to work sometimes as freelance artists on commissions from the court, the Church, or other noble families. Yet, like any serf, they were the property of their master and they could be punished just like any other serf. Such servitude was a dreadful obstacle to those artists who strived for independence. As the artistic manager of the Fountain House, Ivan Argunov was responsible for supervising the frequent changes to the palace’s interior design, for organizing masquerades and costume balls, for painting sets for theatrical productions, for firework displays, as well as countless menial household tasks. His own artistic projects were constantly abandoned so that he could perform some minor duty on his master’s summons and, if he failed in this, the count would have him fined or even flogged. Ivan died a serf. But his children would be freed. According to the will of Nikolai Petrovich, twenty-two domestic serfs, including Nikolai and Yakov Argunov, received their liberty in 1809. Nine years later Nikolai Argunov was elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts, the first Russian artist of serf origin to be honoured by the state.
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    One of Argunov’s most memorable portraits represents another former Sheremetev serf: Countess Praskovya Sheremeteva. Argunov painted her in a red shawl with a sparkling miniature of her husband, Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev, suspended from her neck (plate 1). At the time of this portrait (in 1802) the marriage of the count to his former serf, the prima donna of his opera, was concealed from the public and the court. It would remain so until her death. In this prescient and moving portrait Argunov conveyed their tragedy. It is an extraordinary story that tells us a great deal about the obstacles confronting the creative serf and about the mores of society.

    Praskovya was born to a family of serfs on the Sheremetev estate at Yukhotsk in Yaroslav province. Her father and grandfather were both blacksmiths, so the family had been given the name of Kuznetsov (‘blacksmith’), although Ivan, her father, was known by all the serfs as ‘the hunchback’. In the mid-1770s Ivan became the chief blacksmith at Kuskovo, where the family was given its own wooden house with a large allotment at the back. He sent his first two sons to train as

    tailors, while the third became a musician in the Sheremetev orchestra. Praskovya was already noted for her beauty and her voice, and Pyotr Sheremetev had her trained for the opera. Praskovya learned Italian and French, both of which she spoke and wrote with fluency. She was trained to sing and act and dance by the finest teachers in the land. In 1779, at the age of eleven, she first appeared on stage as the servant girl in the Russian premiere of Andre Gretry’s comic opera
L
’
Amitie a l’epreuve
and, within a year, she had been given her first leading role as Belinda in Antonio Sacchini’s
La Colonie
.
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From that point on she nearly always sang the leading female role. Praskovya possessed a fine soprano voice, distinguished by its range and clarity. The rise of the Sheremetev opera to pre-eminence in Russia in the last two decades of the eighteenth century was intimately linked with her popularity. She was Russia’s first real superstar.

    The story of Praskovya’s romance with the count could have come straight out of a comic opera. The eighteenth-century stage was filled with servant girls who had fallen for young and dashing noblemen. Praskovya herself had sung the part of the young serf girl in
Anyuta,
a hugely popular opera in which the humble background of the charming heroine prevents her marrying the prince. Nikolai Petrovich was not handsome or dashing, it is true. Nearly twenty years Praskovya’s senior, he was rather short and stout and suffered from poor health, which brought on melancholia and hypochondria.
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But he was a romantic, with fine artistic sensibilities, and he shared a love of music with Praskovya. Having watched her grow up as a girl on the estate, then blossom as a singer in his opera, he recognized her spiritual qualities as much as her physical beauty. Eventually he fell in love with her. ‘I felt the most tender and passionate feelings for her,’ he wrote in 1809,

    but I examined my heart to know whether it was seeking pleasures of the flesh or other pleasures to sweeten the mind and soul apart from beauty. Seeing it sought bodily and spiritual pleasures rather than friendship, I observed the qualities of the subject of my love for a long time, and found a virtuous mind, sincerity, love of mankind, constancy and fidelity. I found an attachment to the holy faith and a sincere respect for God. These qualities charmed me more than her beauty, for they are stronger than all external delights and they are extremely rare.
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    Not that it started out that way. The young count was fond of hunting and of chasing girls; and until his father died in 1788, when he took up the running of the family estates, Nikolai Petrovich spent most of his time in these sensual pursuits. The young squire often claimed his ‘rights’ over the serf girls. During the day, while they were at work, he would go round the rooms of the girls on the estates and drop a handkerchief through the window of his chosen one. That night he would visit her and, before he left, would ask her to return his handkerchief. One summer evening in 1784 Praskovya was driving her father’s two cows down to the stream when some dogs began to chase her. The count, who was riding home after a day’s hunting, called the dogs away and approached Praskovya. He had heard that her father was intending to marry her off to a local forester. She was sixteen years of age - relatively old for a serf girl to marry. The count asked her if this was so and, when she replied that it was, he said he would forbid any such marriage. ‘You weren’t born for this! Today you are a peasant but tomorrow you will become a lady!’ The count then turned and rode away.
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    It is not exactly clear when the count and Praskovya became
de facto
‘man and wife’. To begin with, she was only one of several divas given special treatment by her master. He named his favourite singers and dancers after jewels - ‘The Emerald’ (Kovaleva), ‘The Garnet’ (Shlykova) and ‘The Pearl’ (Praskovya) - and showered them with expensive gifts and bonuses. These ‘girls of my house’, as Sheremetev called them in his letters to his accountant, were in constant attendance on the count. They accompanied him on trips to St Petersburg during the winter and returned with him to Kuskovo during the summer.
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Everything suggests that they were the count’s harem - not least the fact that just before his marriage to Praskovya he had the rest of them married off and gave them all dowries.
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