Christopher Marsden - Palmyra of the north. The first days of St. Petersburg

The First Days of St. Petersburg

by Sacheverell Sitwell

It is important, at the outset, that this book should not be regarded as a mere compilation of extravagances. What it really unfolds before our eyes is an awakening of the Russian idiom. The awakening, and not the birth, because, of course, the Russian idiom speaks in unmistakable accents out of the darkness of the early tomb mounds. Greek craftsmen fashioned many of the silver cups and bowls from the Crimea, now in the Hermitage, but their works, in the aggregate, record the primitive era of the Slavs. And this accent or tinging of a foreign importation is typical of Russia.

When, next, Russia touches the history of the arts it is to give a new direction or emphasis to the arts of Byzantium. Moscow was the third Rome, the heir of Byzantium. A picture of Moscow, in that perspective, is to be found in the Travels of Macarius, the Syrian archbishop, who journeyed to Russia in the middle years of the seventeenth century. His book is inimitable to read. It is the equal of, and contemporary to Madame dAulnoys Voyage en Espagne Italian, German, and Dutch architects worked on the walls and towers of the Kremlin, and the churches. Yet this is no Milan, or Nuremburg, or Amsterdam. Macarius describes for us the giant Patriarch Nikhon, and the naked anchorites seated at the banquet beside the fur-clad boyars. He describes the silver wine cisterns and the flowing bowls of mead. The Russian character may be violent and bloodthirsty (there are unending blood baths and mass executions, whether of the Streltsi or the Trotskyites) but, at least, it is not niggardly or parsimonious. And so we reach to the reign of Peter the Great, who was six feet eight inches tall; and large, in his projects, in proportion to that.

The main labour of this modern Hercules was to drag the centre of Russia four hundred miles to the West, and set it up on new foundations upon the shores of the Baltic Sea. He died before his plans were finished. The careful detail in which this book upon the great period of St. Petersburg is wrought follows Peter the Great to Western Europe, and will give the reader a startling account of what the giant Czar ate at Godaiming; how he gazed at the aged Madame de Maintenon through the curtains of her bed; and picked up and kissed the infant Louis Quinze. He had the stride and manners of a huge barbarian; and came back to Russia determined to imitate what he had seen. It was the Dutch, more particularly, who had impressed him. The first phase of the new St. Petersburg is, therefore, in the Dutch manner; but the whole population of Holland would have had to be transplanted in order to keep it clean. St. Petersburg was, already, we may think, beginning to take character from the Finnish marshes. But it was the Russian or Muscovite upon the Baltic shores. How different from Stockholm or Helsingfors!

When Peter the Great, this overwhelmingly masculine personality was dead, Russia for the remaining three quarters of the eighteenth century was ruled by women. The Czars, without exception, reigned for a few months and came to an untimely end. The Empress Anne, some may think this typical of Russian history, was the daughter of Peters imbecile brother, Ivan. Her diversions were of a brutal and barbarian nature. But, in 1740, the Empress Elizabeth began her reign, and we reach a period of the utmost interest and fascination which we believe to be almost unknown to the English reader. It is this, in fact, that forms the principal subject of this present book. But the term Elizabethan Russia would be confusing in our ears. For its application, in our minds, is to the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Yet, to the Russian, it is Elizabethan Russia. And, from whatever point of view it is regarded, this is certainly a great period in their history.

Owing to the complication of the Romanov succession it is possible that many persons do not realize that a daughter of Peter the Great was Empress of the Russias from 1741 till 1762, for the whole of the middle decades of the eighteenth century, and during a great period of European enlightenment. The mother of the Empress Elizabeth was a Courland peasant who had been married to a Swedish corporal. From her father, Peter the Great, Elizabeth inherited her huge stature, her liveliness or ebullience of disposition, and not much of his ability. She was part peasant, part giant grenadier, never so happy as when masquerading as a man. Particularly, she affected to disguise herself as a sailor. Her great propensity, in fact, was the pursuit of pleasure, and as St. Petersburg had reached a stage of construction where fine buildings were required of the capital, and there were large sums of money to squander, a happy compromise was possible between utility and extravagance.

The Empress Elizabeth was not the person to invite the French encyclopaedists to the capital. It may be considered probable that she had never read a book. She was illiterate, like her peasant mother, but with a native or physical vigour derived from her giant father, and a certain robustness of temperament which makes it not wholly ridiculous to compare her, as the daughter of a great man, with our own Tudor queen, who was the child of a huge father. She may, certainly, be compared with Queen Elizabeth in one other point, the fantastic improbability of her clothes. But, above all else, the Empress Elizabeth was Russian. Russian, certainly, in her choice of the Ukrainian peasant, Razumovsky, to be her lover. This could never have happened with Queen Elizabeth. The Tudor temperament was too haughty, and too much a product of the Renaissance. She would not have spoken the same language as an uneducated peasant.

Perhaps the huge physical force of this daughter of Peter the Great gave a more masculine solidity to the age of the rococo that was her background. It may not be too fanciful to think that this is reflected in the vigorous and emphatic faades of her buildings, painted in their bright colours. She had not to look far for an architect. One was ready to her hand, in the person of the younger Rastrelli, of Florentine origin, who had come to Russia as a young boy with his less famous father. Rastrelli, in fact, is the architect of her reign, and, as such, the main subject of these pages. He had the ability to construct upon an enormous scale, without falling into monotony. The faades of Tsarskoe Selo are, indeed, immeasurably richer and more varied than that of Versailles; while, if we would compare his talents with those of his contemporaries, in, for instance, the Royal Palace at Madrid, what is to be immediately recognized in him is a curious barbarian quality that could never be coldly classical. The Italian architect of the Empress Elizabeth contrived, by some mysterious transmutation, to be wholly and entirely Russian: nowhere so much as in the bright tones with which his buildings were painted; orange, light green, or blue, or lilac. This was done with a particular emphasis upon the Russian climate. Buildings, so treated, would look garish in the bright air of Paris. They are intended to be seen in snow and in the Northern summer.