time. From days in the torture chambers at Preobrazhenskoe, Peter went directly to nights of festivity and a succession of feasts and entertainments. Almost every night during that fearful autumn and winter, Peter attended a banquet, a masquerade, a wedding, a christening, a reception for foreign ambassadors or a mock-religious ceremony with his Drunken Synod. He did this partly to drive out his anger at the rebellion and his gloom at the terrible work of retribution and partly because he was happy, after eighteen months in the West, to be home again with friends.
On many of these occasions, Anna Mons was present. Already Peter's mistress before he left with the Great Embassy, now—with Eudoxia out of the way—the lady who described herself as the Tsar's 'loyal friend' stepped forward into public recognition: on his arm, she attended the christening of the son of the Danish ambassador; on her birthday, Peter came to dine at her mother's house. Her presence and that of a small but increasing number of other women broke a precedent that carousing evenings involving Russian males should be exclusively male. Nor were these banqueters exclusively Russian. In all of these activities, the ambassadors of Denmark, Poland, Austria and Brandenburg were included in Peter's company of favorites. Indeed, Peter gloried in their presence; they gave him a sense of the closeness of Western culture and they, more than his boyars, could understand his hopes and ambitions. Their presence was fortunate for history—their reports and diaries provide vivid descriptions of life at Peter's court.
The fullest and most colorful of these accounts is that of Johann-Georg Korb, secretary to a visiting Austrian ambassador. Not always reliable, often repeating hearsay, Korb was nevertheless an industrious reporter who recorded every sight he saw as well as every rumor he heard. His pages give a rich picture of Peter's life in the few years between his return from the West and his plunging into the great war which would dominate the rest of his life and reign.
The young Austrian diplomat arrived in Moscow in April 1698 when Peter was still in London. The entry of his ambassador into the Russian capital was conducted with great pomp, and the traditional formal banquet welcoming the embassy was opulent; in all, the guests counted at least 108 different dishes.
Peter received the embassy when he returned. The audience was held at Lefort's house.
Numbers of magnates were around His Majesty and amidst them all the Tsar stood preeminent, with a handsome figure and lofty look. We made our reverential obeisances which His Majesty acknowledged with a gracious nod which augured kindness. . . . The Tsar admitted the Lord Envoy and all the officials of the embassy and the missionaries present to kiss his hands.
But Korb and his colleagues quickly found that the formality of this welcome was only a facade. In fact, Peter could not tolerate official functions of this kind, and when forced to participate he became awkward and confused. Dressed in ceremonial finery, standing or sitting on the throne, listening to newly accredited ambassadors, was painful for him and he would breathe heavily, grow red in the face and perspire. He considered, as Korb was to. learn, that it was 'a barbarous and inhuman law enacted against kings alone that prevented them from enjoying the society of mankind.' He rejected such laws and dined and talked with his companions, with German officers, with merchants, with ambassadors of foreign countries—in short, with anyone he liked. When he was ready to eat, no flourishes of trumpets sounded. Instead, someone shouted, 'The Tsar wants to eat!' Then, meat and drink were placed on the table in no special order, and each reached for what he wanted.
To the Austrian visitors, accustomed to the formal banquets of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, these Moscow banquets seemed informal and rowdy. Korb wrote:
The Tsar ordered a dinner to be prepared by General Lefort and all the ambassadors and chief boyars to be invited. The Tsar came later than usual, having been engaged in important business. Even at table, without taking notice of the presence of the ambassadors, he still continued discussing some points with his boyars, but the consultation was almost an altercation, neither words nor hands being spared, everyone excited beyond measure, each defending his own opinion with obstinacy, and with a warmth perilous beneath the eye of His Majesty. Two, whose lower rank excused them from mingling in this knotty discussion, sought favor by trying to hit one another's heads with the bread which they found upon the table; for all, in their own way, did their best to give genuine proofs of their true origin. Yet even among the Muscovite guests some there were whose more modest speech betokened high character of soul. An undisturbable gravity of manners was remarkable in the aged Prince Lev Cherkassky; ripe prudence of counsel characterized Boyar Golovin; an apt knowledge of public affairs was distinguishable in Artemonowicz. These men shone all the more as their species was evidently very rare. Artemonowicz, indignant that such a variety of madmen should be admitted to a royal banquet, exclaimed aloud in Latin, 'The whole place is full of fools,' that his words might more easily reach the ears of those who knew Latin.
Peter used these banquets to conduct all kinds of business:
Dancing followed immediately after the table was removed and now took place the farewell to the envoy of the Poles. The Tsar broke hastily away, quite unexpectedly from the gay crowd into a place next to the dining room where the glasses and drinking cups were kept, commanding the Polish ambassador to follow him. The whole body of guests, eager to know what was going on, crowded after them. Impeded by their own haste, they had not all got into the room when the letters of credentials had been handed back to the Polish envoy, and the Tsar, coming out of the room, bumped into those who were still pushing and shoving to get in.
For all their disdainful attitude, the Westerners sometimes behaved as badly and as childishly as the Muscovites. At one dinner for the ambassadors of Denmark and Poland, the Polish ambassador received twenty-five dishes from the Tsar's table and the Dane merely twenty-two. The Dane was indignant, and his pique was mollified only when he was allowed to precede his Polish rival at the moment of kissing the royal hands upon departure. Thereupon, the foolish Dane so preened and strutted his minor victory that the Pole was furious. Eventually, Peter heard of the argument and, hating all protocol, cried out, 'Both of them are donkeys!'
Some of the foreign ambassadors tended to make the same mistake that Peter's boyars occasionally made: having the Tsar among them as comrade and fellow carouser, they forgot who the tall man with whom they were heatedly arguing actually was. Then, suddenly, the argument would turn a corner and they would be brought up sharply with the perilous fact that they were challenging a man who was an absolute autocrat, the sole arbiter of life and death for an entire nation. Some of these arguments were relatively mild. At one dinner, Peter was telling the company that in Vienna he had been getting fat, but on his return the nature of the fare in Poland had made him quite slender again. The Polish ambassador, a man of great girth, disputed this, saying that he had been brought up in Poland and owed amplitude to the Polish diet. Peter shot back, 'It was not in Poland, but here in Moscow that you crammed yourself'—the Pole, like all ambassadors, was provided with his food and expenses by the host government. The Pole, wisely, let the matter drop.
On another occasion,
during dinner, there was discussion about the differences between countries; the one that lay next to Muscovy [Korb does not say which one] was very ill-spoken of. The ambassador who came from there replied for his part that he had noticed a great many things in Muscovy that were deserving of censure. The Tsar retorted: 'If thou were a subject of mine, 1 would add thee as a companion to those of mine that are now hanging from the gibbet—for I well know what thy speech alludes to.'
The Tsar later found an opportunity of setting the same personage to dance with his fool, a laughing-stock of the court, amidst a general titter. And yet the ambassador [danced away, thinking that Peter's jest was meant as a sign of affection], not understanding what a shameful trick was played on him until the Imperial ambassador had quietly given him warning not to forget the dignity of his office.
Peter's moods were strange and unpredictable, given to violent swings between elation and sudden anger. One minute he was jovial, happy to be in the company of his friends, jesting over the surprising appearance of a newly shaven companion, yet a few minutes later he could sink into deep, irritable gloom or explode with sudden rage. At one banquet, Peter angrily accused Shein of selling offices in the army for cash. Shein denied it, and Peter stormed out of the room to question soldiers on sentry duty around Lefort's house
to learn from them how many colonels and other regimental officers the General-in-Chief had made without reference to merit, merely for money.
Continuing this account, Korb describes what happened next:
In a short time when he came back, his wrath had grown to such a pitch that he drew his sword, and facing the General-in-Chief horrified the guests with this threat: 'By striking thus, I will mar thy mal government.' Boiling
