who might be their parents or grandparents; sometimes their masters grew fond of them. Nevertheless, no serf, no matter how intelligent or talented, was ever allowed to forget that he or she remained a form of property; a favorite for a while, perhaps, but always vulnerable to being separated from his family; forbidden to marry or forced to marry someone not of his or her choice; expected to cook, sweep, or wait on tables as well as to dance or play an instrument; always subject to abuse and humiliation; always prey to predatory lust. Against this treatment, there was no protest. The serf could always be sent back to the fields. Or sold.
The history of Russian serf theater is filled with episodes of cruelty. One nobleman suddenly seized a singer who was playing the part of Dido. Slapping her face, he promised that when her performance was over she would be properly beaten in the stable. The singer, her face scarlet from the blow, had to go on singing. A visitor backstage at a princely theater found a man wearing a heavy metal collar lined with sharp spikes; when he moved even slightly, he suffered great pain. “I punished him,” the prince explained, “so that he plays the role of King Oedipus a little better next time. I’m having him stand like this for a few hours. His performance is sure to improve.” In the same theater, a backstage visitor found a man chained by the neck so that he couldn’t move. “This is one of my fiddlers,” the host explained. “He played out of tune so I’ve had to punish him.” The same owner would jot down his actors’ slightest errors and then go backstage during intermission and whip them.
Ownership of young men, women, boys, and girls gave free rein to serf owners wishing to act out their erotic fantasies. Some female serf performers were forced to act as servants at dinner, then move to the stage to perform, then move on to the bedrooms of the master’s male guests. One host assigned each visitor a serf girl for the length of his stay. Prince Nicholas Yusupov treated his guests to orgies that began on stage. When the prince tapped his cane, all of his dancers would strip off their costumes and dance, naked.
Against this backdrop of exploitation and cruelty, one romantic fairy tale stands out. Inevitably, it ended in shame, tragedy, and death.
For generations, the Sheremetevs had been one of Russia’s preeminent noble families. They had served the grand princes of Moscow, predecessors of the tsars. A Sheremetev was married to Ivan the Terrible’s son, Ivan, who was murdered by his father. Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev commanded the Russian army in Peter the Great’s historic victory over Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava in 1709. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Sheremetev family was the wealthiest noble family in Russia, with estates totaling two million acres spread across the empire. Some of these estates consisted of dozens of villages, each village including more than a hundred households. Sheremetevs possessed saddles, billiard tables, and hunting dogs imported from England, ham brought from Westphalia, and clothing, pomade, tobacco, and razors, from Paris. Count Nicholas Sheremetev, the head of the family during most of Catherine’s reign, owned 210,000 serfs, more people than made up the population of St. Petersburg.
Kuskovo, one of the richest of the Sheremetev estates, lay only five miles east of the Moscow Kremlin. Here, in an Italianate palace, the walls of hallways and ceremonial rooms were hung with Rembrandts and Van Dykes. In the library, busts of Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin faced shelves with twenty thousand volumes, including works by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Corneille, Moliere, and Cervantes, and French translations of Milton, Pope, and Fielding. Outside the palace, in an artificial lake dug by serfs, floated a fully rigged warship and a Chinese junk.
Nicholas Sheremetev, grandson of the field marshal and heir to this wealth, grew up in a world of luxury and privilege. He was taught Russian, French, and German, the violin and the clavichord, and given lessons in painting, sculpture, architecture, fencing, and riding. As a boy, he was selected by Empress Catherine to became a playmate of her son and heir, Grand Duke Paul.
Nineteen years after Nicholas’s birth, a young serf girl named Praskovia was born on a Sheremetev estate. Her father was an illiterate blacksmith with a weakness for the bottle. He was often violent and regularly beat his wife in front of their children. At the age of eight, Praskovia was taken into the palace. Neither she nor her parents had a choice; serfs routinely were forced to give up their children whenever and for whatever purpose the master decided. She was taught to read and write. She met Nicholas when she was nine and he was twenty-six. Nicholas, still unmarried, liked women, and the women he found most appealing—or perhaps simply more available and undemanding—were his own serfs. He and Praskovia became lovers in the mid-1780s, when she was seventeen and he was approaching thirty-five. They grew closer, bound to each other not only because he was the master but by a shared passion for music. She had displayed a rare talent as a singer and he was driven by a vision of creating the finest opera company in Russia. She made her debut on the stage of the new Sheremetev opera theater while still an adolescent and immediately established herself as the star. With dark, expressive eyes, a pale complexion, auburn hair, and a slight, almost fragile build, she performed under the name of “the Pearl.” Her soprano voice has been described by her biographer as “a miracle of color and beauty, with amazing range, emotion, power, precision and clarity.”
Between 1784 and 1788, Nicholas staged over forty different productions: grand operas, operas comiques, comedies, and ballets. The Russian nobility flocked to see and listen to Praskovia sing. Empress Catherine, on her return from her Crimean trip in 1787, came to Kuskovo and, despite her tin ear, was deeply moved by Praskovia. It was, the empress said, the “most magnificent performance” she had ever attended. After the opera, Catherine asked to meet Praskovia, who was brought forth. The empress spoke to the singer briefly and later sent Praskovia a diamond ring worth 350 rubles—this at a time when giving gifts to serfs was unprecedented.
By 1796, however, Praskovia was suffering from an illness manifesting itself in severe headaches, dizziness, coughing, and pains in her chest. Forced to retire, she last sang on April 25 of that year when she was twenty- eight. Nicholas closed his theater and, in 1798, gave Praskovia her freedom. Later he explained:
I had the most tender, the most passionate feelings for her. Yet I examined my heart—was it overwhelmed merely by passionate desire, or did it see past her beauty to her other qualities? Seeing that my heart longed for more than love and friendship, more than mere physical pleasure, for a long time I observed the character and qualities of my heart’s desire and found in her a mind adorned with virtue, sincerity, a true love for humanity, constancy, fidelity, and an unshakable faith in God. These qualities captured me more than her beauty for they are more powerful than all the external charms and much rarer.
He proposed that they marry. The idea was revolutionary; no nobleman of Nicholas’s rank had ever married a woman born a serf. What would it mean—marriage between Russia’s wealthiest aristocrat and a serf, even one now liberated? Nicholas ignored the consequences and went ahead. On November 4, 1801, he married Praskovia. On February 3, 1803, at the age of thirty-four, she gave birth to her only child, Dmitry. Three weeks later, on the morning of February 23, Praskovia died. The city’s nobility, still enraged that Nicholas had married a former serf, refused to attend the funeral. Nor was Nicholas present; crushed by grief, he was unable to leave his bed. Six years later, at fifty-seven, he died and was laid beside her in St. Petersburg’s Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Their son, Dmitry, his only legitimate child, inherited the Sheremetev estates.
The story became a legend. It is said that in 1855, Catherine’s great-grandson, Tsar Alexander II, was walking at Kuskovo with Dmitry, listening to stories about Dmitry’s mother, Praskovia. Immediately afterward, according to family history, the tsar signed the initial decree that led in 1861 to the emancipation of Russia’s serfs. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed America’s black slaves.
48
“Madame Orlov Could Never Be Empress of Russia”
IN THE FIRST YEARS of Catherine’s reign, Gregory Orlov was always at her side in his scarlet uniform, wearing on his chest the emblem of the empress’s favor: her portrait set in diamonds. The empress loved him as a man and as the hero who, with his brothers, had put her on the throne. He was also, of the four men with whom she had slept, the one who had given her the most physical satisfaction. He rode in the imperial carriage, sitting next to the sovereign, while men of great aristocratic families rode escort outside on horseback. People wishing to make their
