Catherine the Great

she went to the Sheremetev Palace on the Fontanka to see Stroganov, Beloselsky, Prince Peter Khovansky and the Prussian ambassador, Count Solms, perform Le philosophe marie under the direction of Ivan Chernyshev. His brother Zakhar was the house manager who collected the tickets while Ivan’s fiancee played the part of the usher. More than a hundred top-ranking courtiers made up the audience with the foreign ambassadors. Catherine enjoyed herself so much that she returned four days later for a repeat performance.⁵⁷

In private, the company was even more relaxed, and especially so on Christmas Day when they gathered late in the afternoon with Paul and his Young Court to play games in the audience chamber of the Winter Palace. Ribbon dancing and hunt the treasure were particular favourites. In the Russian dances that followed, Catherine was partnered by Panin, who remained on the fringes of her inner circle, never quite a friend. In a mock tribute to the Smolny Institute, and in a curious echo of Elizabeth’s cross-dressing masquerades, several of the men, including the beefy Passek and Grigory Orlov, excelled themselves by dressing up as noble girls under the watchful eye of their ‘mama’, Prince Beloselsky. ‘They were all wearing jackets, skirts and bonnets,’ Paul’s tutor noted warily. ‘Only Beloselsky had a scarf, and he was dressed worse than the others.’ There was more mischief as they sat down to punch and a cold table, and then the dancing began all over again.⁵⁸

Not all Catherine’s leisure pursuits were so mindless. In Alexander Stroganov she had acquired a genuinely cultivated companion who provided an important link to Paul’s Young Court. In a ceiling painting at the Stroganov Palace by Giuseppe Valeriani, Alexander’s grand tour in the 1750s was represented in the guise of Fenelon’s celebrated Adventures of Telemaque (1699), in which the young son of Ulysses encounters contrasting models of good and bad kingship as his tutor leads him on a journey through the Mediterranean world.⁵⁹ It was an appropriate analogy. While his friends Alexander and Ivan Cherkasov went to Cambridge—‘not a very entertaining place in itself, but pleasant enough in good company’— Stroganov chose Geneva, where, in addition to winning his spurs at the riding school, he learned to play the clavichord, studied Latin and Italian, and launched himself with enthusiasm into courses in natural law, geometry and physics under the direction of Professor Jean Jallabert, an expert in electricity.⁶⁰ Ancient history, his favourite subject, was taught by Pastor Jacob Vernet, celebrated for his attempts to steer between revealed religion and Enlightened reason. By the end of the century, Stroganov had produced his own scholarly catalogue of what had become one of the finest private art collections in Europe. Though many of his sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Italian paintings were acquired during his second spell in Paris in the 1770s, Stroganov had bought his first significant work, by Antonio Correggio, as early as 1755.⁶¹ Already a committed bibliophile by the time of his grand tour, he admired a collection belonging to the Elector of Hanover which contained ‘the best books now to be found’. Later, he saw the more extensive holdings at Frankfurt am Main and a library that surpassed them both in Cardinal de Soubise’s palace at Strasbourg. Above all, he was impressed by access afforded to the public at the royal library in Turin, which was open every day except Thursdays, Sundays and holidays so that ‘anyone who wishes may subscribe and read there’.⁶² On his return to Russia, Stroganov opened up his own collection, which ran to some 4000 titles in 10,000 volumes. According to the loan book kept in his own hand and dating from the period between Catherine’s accession and her coronation, the empress herself borrowed a French play called, appropriately enough, Le Philosophe.⁶³ Stroganov entertained her to an annual banquet lunch in January and his palace became open house to leading courtiers. It was there, in 1766, that a plan was formed to found the Imperial Russian Public Library, of which he was eventually appointed director in 1800.⁶⁴

Stroganov had plenty of time to spend with the empress and her son because his marriage to Anna Vorontsova had fallen apart by the summer of 1765. Their wedding seven years earlier had been sandwiched in between those of Count Buturlin and Lev Naryshkin. According to Catherine, Kirill Razumovsky made a bet with the Danish ambassador as to which of the three grooms would be cuckolded first, and it turned out to be Stroganov, ‘whose new wife seemed at the time the ugliest, the most innocent, and the most childish’.⁶⁵ By spring 1766, as the British ambassador reported, both partners desired a divorce with equal zeal, ‘the only thing in which, it is said, they ever agreed in’.⁶⁶ Yet as Catherine had already explained to Count Mikhail Vorontsov, this was a matter over which she had no control:

From your letter of 14 November, I have seen your request about the divorce of your daughter from her husband, to which I can make no other reply than to say that I am very sorry about your considerable domestic sadness over the differences between your daughter and son-in-law; however, divorce does not depend on me, but is solely an ecclesiastical matter, in which I cannot and will not intervene. Count Stroganov sent me a similar request a month ago, but I ordered it to be given back to him with the message that I cannot intervene in this affair because it is spiritual and there are established channels for such a case; secondly, in the absence of his wife and your daughter [who were then abroad], there can be no resolution; and third, I hesitate even more to intervene in this case because of the close relationship between the Counts Skavronsky and my late grandmother of blessed memory, Catherine I.⁶⁷

Only his wife’s death could release Stroganov from his misery. It came in 1768, but not before she had caused him further embarrassment by embarking on an open affair with Nikita Panin. Though it had amused Panin to make fun of his friend’s marital problems over lunch with Grand Duke Paul, he was disconcerted to find himself the butt of jokes by a public which, as Sir George Macartney remarked, could ‘scarce pardon an undisguised boyish passion, in a man of his years, station and experience’.⁶⁸

Not even a failed marriage could dull Stroganov’s natural wit: as Catherine’s regular ‘carver’ on state occasions, he had stood behind her chair at the fateful banquet when Peter III denounced her as a fool, comforting her with ‘the witty banter of which he was such a master’.⁶⁹ However, the real life and soul of the empress’s inner circle was Lev Naryshkin. Though his presence at the empress’s side doubtless helped to reinforce his family’s grip on senior appointments, Lev Aleksandrovich himself played no overt part in either government or the administration of the Court. It became a running joke that he had been made Master of the Horse because he was so rarely to be seen in the saddle (‘We must mount him on a donkey,’ Catherine quipped).⁷⁰ Critics dismissed him as a gadfly—‘a quite intelligent man’, as Prince Shcherbatov put it, ‘but with the sort of mind that never concentrates, greedy for honours and gain, prone to every luxury, a joker, and, in a word, from his behaviour and his love of joking, more fit to be a court-jester than a grandee’.⁷¹ Yet these were precisely the qualities that Catherine had loved and admired since Naryshkin first lit up the Young Court in the dark years of Elizabeth’s reign. Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had liked him then for his ‘good heart and quick understanding’. To Catherine, he was simply ‘the most trustworthy person I have among this nation’.⁷² As she put it in her memoirs:

He was one of the most singular personages that I have known, and no one ever made me laugh as much. He was a born Harlequin, and had he been of different birth, he could have made a living and a lot of money from his genuinely comic talents. He lacked for nothing in qualities of mind, he had heard tell of everything, and it was all uniquely arranged in his head. He was capable of discoursing on whatever art or science one might wish. He used the relevant technical terms and spoke to you continuously for a quarter hour or more, and when he stopped, neither he nor anyone else could make anything of the stream of words that had flowed from his mouth, and everyone ended up bursting with laughter.⁷³

‘No serious person could resist him’, she said, particularly on the subject of politics. Perhaps only such an accomplished jester could have managed the tightrope act of remaining equally trusted by Peter III and his consort, right down to the very day of Catherine’s coup.

Observing that the empress’s life was ‘a mixture of trifling amusements and intense application to business’, Buckinghamshire singled out Countess Bruce as the leading lady in Catherine’s ‘private party’. Even in her thirties, she remained ‘the first ornament of the circle’:

She dresses well, dances tolerably, speaks French with fluency and elegance, has read a dozen plays and as many brochures, and has naturally a partiality for a nation to whom she is indebted for all her acquired accomplishments. Not averse to gallantry, but discreet in her choice of those she favours, her affections, ever subservient to her judgement and studiously observant of those of her mistress, fix upon an object