Alexis' claim to the vacant throne of Poland.75
Polotsky is a more serious figure: an articulate White Russian priest who wrote the Sceptre of Rule, a stern guide to ecclesiastical discipline which received the formal endorsement of the 1667 council. Later in the same year he became court preacher and tutor to the Tsar's children. For the secular occasion of New Year's Day, 1667, Polotsky published The Eagle of the Russias, an elaborate secular panegyric to his imperial benefactor, replete with baroque decorations, anagrams on the Tsar's name, and praise above that given to Hercules, Alexander the Great, and Titus. All this adulation merely echoes his earlier poem, which called Alexis the sun and his wife the moon and ended:
May thou be victorious over all the world And may the world And faith by means of thee.76
Polotsky's knowledge of classical political philosophy enabled him to give a sophisticated secular defense of tsarist absolutism. The scholastic method acquired in his Kievan education rapidly became a fashionable idiom of the new church hierarchy in Moscow, thanks to such works of the late sixties as The Key of Reason by Rector Goliatovsky of the Kiev Academy and Peace with God for Man by 'the Russian Aristotle,' Archimandrite Gizel of the Monastery of the Caves.
Gizel's Sinopsis, an officially commissioned history of Russia that underwent five editions by the end of the century, flatly attributed the victory of Muscovy over Poland to God's preference for absolute autocracy over the divided sovereignty of a republic. 'Hetmans' and 'senators' had led Poland 'from tsardom to princedom, and from princedom to voevodism.' But the Tsar of Muscovy has now delivered 'the mother of Russian cities' from its bondage to Catholic Poland, and emerged as 'the strongest of monarchs.' True Christian Empire has thus returned to the East for the first time since the fall of Byzantium 'as if the eagle had recaptured its youth.'77
Polotsky also popularized in Moscow this new sense of imperial destiny and the new language of scholastic disputation which the Kiev academy had introduced. He was, moreover, an aggressive spokesman for new, Western art forms. His ornate syllabic verse and decorative book illustrations establish him as a master of the baroque. In 1667 Polotsky
wrote a memorandum to the Tsar, setting forth a new and more permissive theory of iconography, which was upheld during the following two years in a series of pronouncements by visiting patriarchs, by the leading practitioner of the new methods of painting, Simon Ushakov, and by the Tsar himself.78 Citing classical as well as Christian authorities, Polotsky contended that creative talent was a gift of God and must be used inventively; that icons could convey the physical realities and inner feeling of a given subject along with its traditional, stylized form. In the same year, 1667, Alexis went even further, hiring Nikon's former portrait painter as the official painter of the royal family. Within a few months illustrations from the German Piscator Bible were adorning the walls of his son Alexis' apartment, and a new illustrated manuscript even depicted the long-proscribed figure of God the Father-as a fat and prosperous figure reclining on a divan.79
Polyphonic baroque music also rushed in to challenge the older Russian forms of chant; and original secular dramas were produced for the first time. The first two were written and produced in rapid succession in the autumn of 1672 by the pastor of one of the German churches in Moscow, Johann Gregory. Four other plays and two ballets followed, with Gregory's original cast of sixty from the foreign suburb of Moscow soon augmented by recruits from the Baltic regions. Performances were given in both German and Russian in settings that ranged from private homes and the Kremlin to a specially built wooden theater. Ukrainians and White Russians also wrote and staged a number of the 'school dramas' that had been popular in those Latinized regions. Music accompanied most of these performances, so that Russia 'first became acquainted with secular singing and secular instrumental music not in life, but in spectacles.'80
The overlapping of old and new sounds at the court of Alexis was likened by his English doctor to 'a flight of screech owls, a nest of Jackdaws, a pack of hungry Wolves, seven Hogs on a windy day, and as many cats. . . .'81 Nowhere was the cacophony greater than at Alexis' second wedding reception in the Kremlin, an affair which lasted most of the night and contrasted with his first puritanical wedding of 1645, in which no music was permitted. There was a kind of restoration atmosphere about Moscow in these last years of Alexis' reign. In the instructions of 1660 to his first ambassador to the restored English monarchy Alexis requested that 'masters in the art of presenting comedies' be brought back to Russia.82 The first ambassador from Restoration England staged 'a handsome Comedie in Prose' with musical accompaniment on arrival in Moscow four years later.83 Gregory's plays were of the 'English comedy' variety; and Alexis' second wife (whom he married early in 1671, two years after the
death of his first) was from the Marx Maryshkin family which was close to foreigners including Scottish royalists who had fled the Puritan Protectorate in England.
In many ways 1672 marked 'the end of the secular isolation of Russia.'84 The Tsar's new wife produced a son, the future Peter the Great, and the exultant Alexis dispatched to all the major countries of Europe a 'great embassy'85 which both announced the birth and prefigured the trip that Peter himself was to take West at the end of the century. Another indication in 1672 of the coming of age of Russia as a full member of the European state system was the appearance of a sumptuously colored and officially sponsored Book of Titled Figures, with 65 portraits of foreign as well as Russian rulers. These relatively lifelike pictures of European statesmen were identified as the work of individual artists in sharp contrast to the idealized, anonymous images of purely Orthodox saints that had previously dominated Russian painting.80
Already under Alexis the semi-sanctified title of tsar was giving way to the Western title of emperor. Although the title was not formally adopted until the time of Peter, Alexis' new Polish-designed and Persian-built throne of the 1660's carried the Latin inscription Potentissimo et In-victissimo. Moscovitarium lmperatori Alexio.H1 Subtly, the distinctively modern idea was being implanted of unlimited sovereignty responsible only to the national ruler. The 'great crown' that arrived in June, 1655, from Constantinople contained a picture of the Tsar and Tsarina where symbols of God's higher sovereignty used to be; and pictures of Alexis began to replace those of St. George on the seal of the two-headed eagle.88 To the large group of dependent foreigners in Muscovy, Alexis was no longer the leader of a unique religious civilization but a model European monarch. As Pastor Gregory wrote in a poem of 1667:
. . . how can I praise enough
the incomparable tsar, the great prince of the Russians?
Who loves our German people more than Russians
Dispensing posts, distinctions, grants and riches.
? most praiseworthy Tsar, may God reward you.
Who would not be glad to live in this land?80
Secular curiosity was reaching out in every direction. Russians acquired their first regular postal contact with the West90 and, in 1667, made their first use of astronomical calculations for navigation91 and sent their first trade caravan to Peking, empowered to negotiate with the Chinese emperor. The head of the delegation was to bring back a favorable report on the literacy and civic spirit engendered by the Confucian tradition.92 Within Russia itself, Alexis transferred artistic talent from sacred to secular
