NATASHA

The Sheremetev palace on the Fontanka river is a legendary symbol of the Petersburg tradition. The people of that city call it 'Fountain House'. The poet Anna Akhmatova, who lived there, on and off, in an annexe flat from 1926 to 1952, thought of it as a precious inner space which she co-inhabited with the spirits of the great artistic figures of the past. Pushkin, Krylov, Tiutchev and Zhukovsky - they had all been there.

I don't have special claims

On this illustrious house,

But it happens that almost my whole life

I have lived under the celebrated roof

Of the Fountain Palace… As a pauper

I arrived and as a pauper I will leave…²⁵

The history of the palace is a microcosm of the Petrine plan to set down Western culture on Russian soil. It was built on a plot of marshland granted in 1712 by the Tsar to Boris Sheremetev, the Field Marshal of Peter's army at the battle of Poltava. At that time the site was on the edge of Petersburg and its forests gave the palace a rural character. Peter's gift was one of several to distinguished servitors. They were ordered to construct European-style palaces with regular facades on the Fontanka side as part of the Tsar's plan to develop Petersburg. Legend has it that the land was empty in 1712. But Akhmatova believed that a Swedish farmstead had been there, since she distinguished oak trees from pre-Petrine times.²⁶

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sheremetev family was already well established as a hugely wealthy clan with close connections to the court. Distantly related to the Romanovs, the Sheremetevs had been rewarded with enormous tracts of land for their loyal service to the ruling house as military commanders and diplomats. Boris Sheremetev was a long-standing ally of Peter's. In 1697 he had travelled with the Tsar on his first trip to Europe, where he remained as Russian ambassador to Poland, Italy and Austria. A

veteran of the wars against the Swedes, in 1705 he became Russia's first appointed count (graf) - a title Peter imported from Europe as part of his campaign to Westernize the Russian aristocracy. Boris was the last of the old boyars, the leading noblemen of Muscovy whose wealth and power derived from the favour of the Tsar (they had all but disappeared by the end of Peter's reign as newly titled nobles superseded them). Russia did not have a gentry in the Western sense -an independent class of landowners that could act as a counterbalance to the power of the Tsar. From the sixteenth century the state had swept away the quasi-feudal rights of the local princes and turned all nobles (dvoriane) into servants of the court (dvor). Muscovy was conceived as a patrimonial state, owned by the Tsar as his personal fiefdom, and the noble was legally defined as the Tsar's 'slave'.* For his services the nobleman was given land and serfs, but not as outright or allodial property, as in the West, and only on condition that he served the Tsar. The slightest suspicion of disloyalty could lead to demotion and the loss of his estates.

Before the eighteenth century Russia had no grand noble palaces. Most of the Tsar's servitors lived in wooden houses, not much bigger than peasant huts, with simple furniture and clay or wooden pots. According to Adam Olearius, the Duke of Holstein's envoy to Muscovy during the 1630s, few Russian noblemen had feather beds; instead, 'they lie on benches covered with cushions, straw, mats, or clothes; in winter they sleep on flat-topped stoves… [lying] with their servants… the chickens and the pigs'.²⁷ The nobleman seldom visited his various estates. Despatched from one place to another in the Tsar's vast empire, he had neither the time nor the inclination to put down roots in one locality. He looked upon his estates as a source of revenue, to be readily exchanged or sold. The beautiful estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, for example, exchanged hands over twenty times during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was lost in games of cards and drinking bouts, sold to different people at the same time, loaned and bartered, mortgaged and remortgaged, until after

*Even as late as the nineteenth century noblemen of every rank, including counts and barons, were required to sign off their letters to the Tsar with the formulaic phrase 'Your Humble Slave'.

2. Seventeenth-century Muscovite costumes. Engraving, 1669

years of legal wrangling to settle all the questions of its ownership, it was bought by the Volkonsky family in the 1760s and eventually passed down through his mother to the novelist Tolstoy.²⁸ Because of this constant state of flux there was little real investment by the nobles in the land, no general movement to develop estates or erect palaces, and none of what took place in Western Europe from medieval times: the gradual concentration of a family domain in one locality, with property passed down from one generation to the next, and ties built up with the community.

The cultural advancement of the Muscovite boyars was well behind that of the European nobles in the seventeenth century. Olearius considered them 'among the barbarians… [with] crude opinions about the elevated natural sciences and arts'.²⁹ Dr Collins complained that 'they know not how to eat peas and carrots boiled but, like swine, eat them shells and all'.³⁰ This backwardness was in part the result of the Mongol occupation of Russia from about 1230 to the middle of the fifteenth century. The Tatars left a profound trace on boyar customs

and habits. For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus', the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium. The old princely families were undermined and made more servile to the state of Muscovy, whose economic and military power provided the key to Russia's liberation from the Mongol khans. The Russian nobleman of the Muscovite era (c. 15 50-1700) was not a landed lord in the European sense. He was a servant of the Crown. In his material culture there was little to distinguish him from the common folk. He dressed like the merchant in the semi-oriental kaftan and fur coat. He ruled his family, like the merchant and the peasant, via the patriarchal customs of the Domostroi - the sixteenth-century manual that instructed Russians how to discipline their households with the Bible and the birch. The manners of the Russian nobleman were proverbially boorish. Even magnates such as Boris Sheremetev could behave at times like drunken louts. During Tsar Peter's trip to England his entourage resided at the villa of the diarist John Evelyn at Sayes Court, Kent. The damage which they caused in their three-month stay was so extensive - lawns dug up, curtains torn, furniture destroyed, and family portraits used for target practice by the visitors - that Evelyn was obliged to present the Russian court with a large bill.³¹ The majority of the nobility could not read and many of them could not even add up simple sums.³² Little travelled or exposed to Europeans, who were forced to settle in a special suburb in Moscow, the nobleman mistrusted new or foreign ways. His life was regulated by the archaic rituals of the Church - its calendar arranged to count the years from the notional creation of the world (with the birth of Adam) in 5509 bc* With Peter's reformation of society, the nobleman became the agency, and his palace the arena, of Russia's introduction to European

* Peter the Great introduced the Western (Julian) calendar in 1700. But by 1752 the rest of Europe had changed to the Gregorian calendar - thirteen days ahead of the Julian calendar (which remained in force in Russia until 1918). In terms of time, Imperial Russia always lagged behind the West.

ways. His palace was much more than a noble residence, and his estate was far more than a noble pleasure ground or economic entity: it became its locality's centre of civilization.

Peter laid the basis of the modern absolutist (European) state when he turned all the nobles into servants of the Crown. The old boyar class had enjoyed certain rights and privileges that stemmed from its guardianship of the land and serfs - there had been a Boyars' Council, or Duma, that had approved the Tsar's decrees, until it was replaced by the Senate in 1711. But Peter's new aristocracy was defined entirely by its position in the civil and military service, and its rights and privileges were set accordingly. Peter established a Table of Ranks that ordered the nobles according to their office (rather than their birth) and allowed commoners to be given noble status for their service to the state. This almost military ordering of the nobles had a deep and lasting effect on their way of life. As readers of Gogol will know, the Russian nobleman was obsessed by rank. Every rank (and there were fourteen in Peter's Table) had its own uniform. The progression from white to black trousers, the switch from a red to a blue ribbon, from silver to gold thread, or the simple addition of a stripe, were ritual events of immense significance in the nobleman's well-ordered life. Every rank had its own noble title and mode of address: 'Your High Excellency' for the top two ranks; 'Your Excellency' for those in ranks three and four; and so on down the scale. There was a strict and elaborate code of etiquette which set out how nobles of each rank should address the