Catherine the Great (14 page)

For a further representation of the power and prosperity that Elizabeth claimed to have brought to the Russian throne, visitors to Tsarskoye Selo had only to glance up at the ceiling in the Great Hall. In the words of the artist, Giuseppe Valeriani, his painting’s allegorical central panel depicted:

The New Year firework in 1751 represented the northern hemisphere of a
colossal globe, where the empress’s initials burned at the centre of a vast map of Russia.
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Writers conveyed similar messages, sometimes in overtly sexual terms. In Lomonosov’s anniversary ode for 1748, for example, Russia ‘sits and spreads her legs upon the steppe’, turning her ‘lively eyes’ to ‘take stock of the prosperity around her, leaning with her elbow on the Caucasus’.
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Masculine associations were even more frequent. Female rule had been associated with bravery in Russia since Catherine I’s legendary role at the battle of the Pruth in 1711, and Elizabeth’s clerical mythmakers duly seized on the image to portray their empress as ‘Peter’s daughter’.
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Since no artistic form was better suited to represent heroism than opera, opera libretti, usually published simultaneously in St Petersburg in Russian, Italian and French, added to the chorus. As Jacob Stählin reminded readers of the
St Petersburg News
, everything in opera was ‘exaggerated, magnificent and amazing. It contains nothing save high and incomparable deeds, godlike faculties in man, a prosperous world, and portraits of golden ages.’
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Giuseppe Bonecchi drove the point home by announcing that the hero of Araja’s opera
Bellerofont
, staged to commemorate the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession in 1750, was intended to represent ‘an image of Her Imperial Majesty, who, gloriously surmounting on that day all the obstacles that injustice and envy had placed in her way, came to the paternal throne, to which she has consistently brought glory, and to which she gives by her virtues more éclat than she receives in return’.
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Indeed, the very presentation of Italian opera in St Petersburg was widely interpreted as evidence of the civilised blessings that Elizabeth’s rule had conferred on her empire. As Voltaire declared in his
Anecdotes on Peter the Great
, published in 1748 to flatter the Russian Court: ‘Magnificence and even taste have in every respect replaced barbarity.’
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In such a cultural climate, only the monarch mattered. Although Catherine’s birthday (21 April) and her name day (24 November) were cause for formal celebration, as were Peter’s (10 February and 29 June), these were secondary events, designed more to promote the dynasty than to fete the heir and his wife. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, the most important days in the Court calendar were, in descending order of significance, the empress’s accession day (25 November), coronation day (25 April), name day (5 September) and birthday (18 December). It was these that provided the occasions not only for operas and literary commemorations, but also for extravagant banquets culminating in the presentation of intricate allegorical desserts, each of which was a work of art in itself.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the sugar subtleties first created for
medieval Arab potentates had slid far enough down the English social scale to be recommended by Hannah Glasse in
The Art of Cookery
(1747), one of the bestselling books of the age: ‘If you make them in pretty little figures, they make a fine little dish.’
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In Russia, they remained a novelty confined to the Court elite, though a marginally wider group of readers could drool over the descriptions that appeared in the official press. To celebrate one of her triumphs against the Turks in the late 1730s, Anna’s Parisian confectioner made a model fortress complete with twelve sugar cannons; on another occasion, the dessert resembled the park and gardens at Peterhof.
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Under Elizabeth, designs became more ambitious still. At the first coronation-day banquet Catherine attended, shortly after her recovery from illness in April 1744, the dessert took the form of a coronation hall, complete with throne and regalia. ‘Among the subtleties at high table,’ reported the
St Petersburg News
, ‘there were various triumphal gates with avenues, and magnificent buildings with entertainment gardens and
parterres
; incidentally, the chamber of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and the Kunstkamera with its observatory in St Petersburg were also represented, in models done to scale.’
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Sheer extravagance was itself a powerful enough symbol of prosperity, and Rastrelli’s favourite device, used on many occasions after Catherine’s wedding, was a pyramid of fire created by setting light to wax poured through thousands of glass globes.
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These were merely the centrepiece of fantastic theatrical settings. Fountains played in the banqueting hall, where tables for up to 200 guests were laid out in a single ‘figured’ sequence, flanked by orange and pomegranate trees. Our earliest description dates from 1738, when the tables were arranged in the shape of a double-headed eagle.
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Even a genius such as Rastrelli found it hard to keep up this level of inspiration, but Catherine attended banquets where the architect had laid out the tables in the form of her own monogram, or the empress’s, or in an echo of the formal palace gardens. One young officer retained a sufficiently vivid memory of a Summer Palace feast to reproduce the table plan in his memoirs: Elizabeth, Catherine and Peter were placed as jewels in a crown, from which four long tassels trailed out, one for each of the guards regiments.
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On state occasions, when the tables were arranged in a single sequence like this, Catherine sat to the left of the empress with the Court ladies ranged out alongside her in order of seniority, while her husband was placed on Elizabeth’s right next to members of the g
eneralitet
. At lesser banquets, when the tables were set separately, the heir and his consort were expected to entertain the foreign diplomats and leading courtiers, dining either in their own apartments or in one of the palace staterooms. At the premier of Araja’s opera
Mithridates
on 26 April
1747, when Peter and Catherine hosted the ambassadors in the empress’s box, dinner was served throughout the performance. There was plenty of time for a banquet: the performance of
Seleucco
on 9 January 1746 lasted more than seven hours.
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Only Peter’s manners left something to be desired. In 1746, Chancellor Bestuzhev felt obliged to instruct the Young Court that the grand duke must refrain from pulling faces and telling vulgar jokes to foreign dignitaries, and that when at table, he must not, for example, ‘pour his drinks over the poor servants’ heads’.
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Such puerile behaviour was doubly embarrassing in church, where Catherine spent a good deal of her time. Elizabeth’s reign was a golden age of Baroque church-building. Most of the major monasteries she visited underwent major reconstruction. In and around the old capital, she spent a small fortune rebuilding the Trinity Lavra and the ‘New Jerusalem’ Ascension monastery, established by Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century to represent the Holy Sepulchre in Russia. In St Petersburg, not content with founding the St Nicholas (Naval) Cathedral and the Smolny Cathedral, Elizabeth commissioned Savva Chevakinsky to build a sumptuous new chapel at Tsarskoye Selo, consecrated in 1756, ten years after the foundation stone was laid.
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Several of the capital’s churches incorporated a ‘tsar’s place’ where she could listen to the liturgy, and some had more than one of these gilded canopies since, as Catherine later recalled, the empress liked to wander about during the service, in the manner of humbler members of the congregation. There was no doubt about the sincerity of her conspicuous piety. It was at Elizabeth’s behest, for example, that public floggings were prohibited on religious feast days and a ban was placed on imported porcelain and other items bearing images of the crucifixion.
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However, in keeping with her quest for privacy, the empress preferred to make her devotions in the seclusion of the smaller of the two Winter Palace chapels, named after St Zachary and the Blessed Elizabeth, where she could emulate her father by ‘singing with great grace in the most difficult motets’ and ‘competing with the strongest choristers’.
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In her absence, Peter and Catherine, and even Catherine alone, were often left to represent the imperial family in the Great Chapel, not only at regular Sunday services, but also on the major feast days in the Orthodox calendar.

Churches were often perishingly cold. On Christmas Day in 1748, when the Court was in Moscow, Catherine and her husband were already preparing to take
the carriage to mass when they were told that Elizabeth had excused them because ‘it was twenty-eight or twenty-nine degrees below zero’. It was barely warmer in April, when Catherine returned from the Easter service ‘as blue as a prune’.
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Faced with such icy conditions, courtiers were inclined to stay away, much to the irritation of the empress who accepted only illness as an excuse for their absence (those who failed to attend the blessing of the waters at Epiphany in 1752 were threatened with a ban from Court receptions).
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Less of an ordeal were the summer sanctification services, which appealed to Catherine’s sense of theatre. In her first summer in St Petersburg, she and her mother followed the procession of the cross to a Jordan on the Moika canal. When the ritual was performed at Peterhof–where the upper pond was christened ‘the Jordan’ to symbolise the flow of ‘holy water’ through the palace’s system of ponds and fountains–Elizabeth occupied a gallery lined with velvet to the left of the Jordan, while the attendant notables took their places in a second stand lined with scarlet cloth.
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On fast days the Court dined on fish and vegetables, though the variety of dishes served scarcely amounted to the sacrifice which many common people made and which threatened to undermine the performance of Russian troops in the field. In and around Moscow alone, there were at least sixty-five imperial orchards and kitchen gardens in the first half of the eighteenth century, supplying the Court with their choicest produce and sending the rest to market. Tons of fruit and berries from the orchards at Kolomenskoye, Izmailovo and Vorobëvo were stewed and sweetened at the end of every summer under the direction of the Court’s deputy confectioner. The largest operation was at Kolomenskoye, where cabbages (Russian, red and Savoy), beans (Russian and Turkish), peas and cucumbers were also grown in prodigious quantities. In 1737 alone, Kolomenskoye supplied 2500 buckets of chopped cabbage, 500 buckets of shredded cabbage and 2000 buckets of cucumber for the imperial table. Mint, used in cooking since the seventeenth century and also for flavouring vodka, became a particular speciality of the Dmitrovo kitchen gardens, which each year supplied between 400 and 500 poods of mint to the Court by the end of Elizabeth’s reign (a pood weighed approximately 36 lb or 16.38 kg).

Gardeners from Kolomenskoye were sent out to advise the winegrowers at Chuguyev; they also travelled to Astrakhan, from where fruit was shipped to Tsaritsyn before beginning the long overland journey to St Petersburg. (In an effort to prevent it from rotting, Elizabeth personally decreed that the posting stations should be no more than thirty versts–around thirty-two kilometres–apart.) Still more Muscovite specialists helped to establish the imperial kitchen
gardens in St Petersburg, where several acres of both the Summer Garden and the Italian Garden were given over to orchard and allotments. There were similar establishments at all the suburban palaces, where foreign specialists such as Michelangelo Mass, Justus Riger and Johann Brandt, assisted by Russian apprentices, coaxed radish, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, onions and various sorts of grass and flowers to grow in the orangeries all year round, so that the Court could enjoy them even out of season.
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And then there were the fish. ‘I have dined with Russians in Lent,’ reported an English governess in St Petersburg in the mid-1730s, ‘and seen them eat heartily of a sole of salmon raw.’
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The Court was offered even richer pickings. In the normal run of things, the second upper kitchen served up for Catherine and Peter almost exactly the same daily fare as the first upper kitchen prepared for the empress’s table: 3 poods of ham, 1 pood and 20 pounds of mutton, 1 fresh tongue, 1 and a half poods of veal, 4 and a half poods of lamb, 3 pounds of lard, 2 geese, 4 turkeys, 4 duck, 38 Russian hens, 3 suckling pigs, 5 chickens and a selection of grouse and partridge in season. On fast days, these quantities were halved to cater for foreign guests and heterodox courtiers while Orthodox members of the household dined on 6 sterlets (a particular delicacy, generally boiled but sometimes roasted), 14 pike (usually fried), 2 bream, 2 ide-carp, 10 burbots, 16 perch, 10 roach, 3 freshwater salmon, 6 grayling, 2 pike-perch, 1 salmon, 50 ruff fish, 100 crayfish and a variety of salted fish and caviars.
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On such a diet, it is no wonder that courtiers were plagued by constipation. But then, as Catherine soon discovered, personal comforts were everywhere subordinated to the relentless requirements of representational display. She grew up surrounded by scaffolding and workmen, ever-present symbols of recurrent alterations to the imperial palaces, usually completed at breakneck speed. If Rastrelli submitted a budget for 200 labourers for a project lasting six months, he was likely to be told to recruit 1200 and complete the job in four weeks, though such a timescale never allowed for the empress’s frequent changes of mind over the details, often announced on a whim over lunch.
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One of the Court architect’s first commissions in St Petersburg, the summer house he built for Empress Anna, was simply chopped in two in 1748 and rebuilt on either side of the palace at Yekaterinhof, where the empress stipulated that the trees should not be destroyed.
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Elsewhere, his pattern was to begin with cosmetic changes before
launching into wholesale reconstruction, as at Peterhof.
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‘This was the work of Penelope,’ Catherine remarked of a similar operation at Tsarskoye Selo: ‘they pull down tomorrow what has been built today. This house was destroyed and rebuilt six times before it reached its present state.’
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The result was a restless progress from palace to palace, in which she and Peter scarcely ever returned to the apartments they had previously occupied.