history of Russia throughout the early eighteenth century, Tatishchev's History was a scientific work, seeking to combine his knowledge of geographical and military problems with a critical, comparative examination of the manuscript sources. Its aim was, moreover, the frankly secular one of proving useful background reading for those engaged in war and statecraft. Not only was its framework free of the traditional preoccupation with sacred history and genealogy, but it was even free of a narrowly Russian focus, making an effort to include the history of the non-Russian peoples of the empire. It introduced a descriptive scheme of periodization, defended unrestricted autocracy as the only form of government suited to a country of Russia's size and complexity, and generally served as a model for many of the subsequent synthetic histories of Russia.57
'There is a kind of continuity between the reign of Peter and that of the Empress Anna, the most important of his immediate successors. During her rule throughout the 1730's, the influence of Baltic Germans continued to predominate. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the son of a metal forger and sculptor brought to Russia by Peter, built a new Winter Palace-the first permanent imperial residence in the new capital-but he devoted more of his talent to building a new palace for her favorite, Biron, miles to the west at Mitau (Jelgava) in Courland. St. Petersburg was still looked on as a kind of hardship post for mercenary officers. Court life in the new capital was marked by continued crudeness and vulgarity. Like Peter, Anna relied on dwarfs and freaks for entertainment and enjoyed mocking traditional ceremonies and court personalities. Probably the most remarkable jnew building of her reign was the great ice palace she built on the Neva during the severe winter of 1739-40. Eighty feet long and thirty-three feet high, the palace was equipped With furniture, clocks, and even chandeliers-all molded from be. It was built largely as a mock gesture to an unfaithful courtier, who was forced to marry an old and ugly Kalmyk and spend his wedding night naked in the icy 'bedroom' of the palace, with his 'bride' the only conceivable source of warmth.58
Like Peter, Anna was suspicious of intellectual activity that had no practical value and might conceivably lead men to question the imperial authority. She conducted a personal vendetta against the most cultured Russian of the age, the new scion of the Westernized Golitsyn family, Dmitry. Even more than his first cousin once removed, Vasily, who had been exiled by Peter, Dmitry Golitsyn was a man of ranging cultural interests. As an ambassador to Constantinople and voevoda of Kiev from 1707-18, he had amassed a six-thousand-volume library and launched an
extensive personal project for translating such Western political theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf, and John Locke. Under their influence, 'golitsyn_be-came, m effect, Russia's first secular political theorist. He waTthe first native Russian to popularize the familiar Western idea of objective natural law.^Al.the same time, Golitsyn became the spokesman for the new service nobility by drawing uptheconstitutional project of 1730 in an effort to limit autocratic authority by a council of the higher nobility. This project represented a genuine innovation rather than a traditionalist protest movement. The models were Swedish, and the objective was to extend the Petrine reforms further in the same Westward direction which the original reforms pointed.60 The Senate, which Peter had created in 1711, was not basically a legislative or even a consultative body, but an executive organ of the emperor for transmitting his commands to the provinces and to the administrative colleges, which were created subordinate to it in 1717. Like Peter, Anna was inhospitable to any limitation on her power; and Golitsyn suffered an even crueler fate than had befallen Tveritinov and Pososhkov in the preceding decades. His library was taken, and he was imprisoned in the Schliisselburg fortress. In 1737 he became the first in a long line of reformers to die within its walls.
Nonetheless, Anna was forced to concede a few new privileges to the service nobility. The founding in 1731 of a school for the Corps of Nobility accelerated the trend begun by Peter of providing a veneer of Western manners to his crude new ruling class. The name of the corps, shliakhetsky korpus, was derived from the Polish word for nobility, szlachta, and reveals the source of inspiration for this effort to civilize the ruling classes. But the teachers and the language of instruction were-as in the Academy of Sciences-primarily German. This school, like that founded for the Corps of Pages in 1759, provided the non-technical curriculum of an aristocratic finishing school.61 Graduates of these schools (and of the somewhat more rigorous gymnasium of the Academy of Sciences) provided the nucleus of a Western-educated minority.^A new secular culture slowly began to emerge under Anna as the first orchestra was assembled and the first opera was performed on Russian soil. Certain emphases of this new culture were already apparent by the end of her reign.
First of all this new world rejoiced in the discovery of the human body. The cutting off of the beard destroyed man's sense of community with the idealized likenesses of the icons. The introduction of secular portraiture, of heroic statuary, and of new, more suggestive styles of dress-all aided in the discovery of the human form. The beginnings of court ballet and of stylized imperial balls under Anna placed a premium on elegance of form and movement that had never been evident in Muscovy.
Gradually, the individual was being discovered as an earthly being with personal attributes, private interests, and responsibilities. The word persona was used to describe the new portraits which were painted of men in their actual, human state rather than in the spiritualized saintly manner of the icons. By the late seventeenth century, this word had begun to acquire the more general meaning of an important or strong individual. Even he who was not important enough to become a persona in his own right was now considered an individual 'soul' by the all- powerful state, which began to exact taxes and services directly from the individual rather than from the region or household.
Prokopovich introduced the word 'personal' (personal'ny) in its modern sense early in the eighteenth century; and the first precise terms for 'private' and 'particular' also entered the Russian language at this time. Words that are now used for 'law' and 'crime' had long existed in Slavic, but 'they did not penetrate into the language of Russian jurisprudence with their modern meaning until the eighteenth century.'62
There was also a new love of decorative effects, of embellishment for its own sake. The lavish ornamentation and illusionism of the European baroque quickly imposed itself on the new capital. Guided by the bold hand of Rastrelli, the first original style for Russian secular architecture emerged under Anna's successor: the so-called Elizabethan rococo. At Peterhof and in the rebuilding of Tsarskoe Selo and the Winter Palace, this style superimposed decorative effects drawn from Muscovite church architecture on the giant facades, theatrical interiors, and monumental staircases of the European baroque. A similar ornateness soon became evident in furniture, hair styles, and porcelain.
Finally, a cult of classical antiquity began to emerge on Russian soil. Taken over first from Poland and then from Italian and French visitors was the idea that classical forms of art and life might serve as a supplement (if not an alternative) to Christian forms. The belief subtly grew that classical antiquity could-unaided by Christian revelation-answer many of the pressing problems of life. The first work of classical antiquity translated into Russian in the eighteenth century was Aesop's Fables; and the first ensemble in the new medium of sculpture to be displayed in St. Petersburg was a series of statues by the older Rastrelli, illustrating the morals of these fables. The new poets and writers that emerged under Elizabeth's reign in the 1740's all used classical forms of exposition: odes, elegies, and tonic verse rather than the syllabic verse of the late seventeenth century. The new operas, plays, and ballets of the Elizabethan era were built around classical more often than scriptural subjects-in marked contrast to the theater of Alexis' time. Peter the Great had himself sculpted in the guise of a Roman
emperor; and Latin became the scholarly language of the new Academy of Sciences.
This summoning up of classical images in a land so remote from the classical world points to the underlying unreality of early post-Petrine culture. The turquoise blue with which buildings were painted lent an unreal coloration to the great edifices of the new capital. The endless proliferation of three-dimensional decorative effects-artificial pilasters, statuary, and garden pavilions-reflects the general desire of baroque art to achieve
