Catherine the Great

1769. Soon the Hanoverian Johann Busch (John Bush) joined the list, signing a contract for a salary of 1500 roubles a year in January 1771. Having briefly worked at Oranienbaum, he took charge of landscaping the English park at Tsarskoye Selo, where Vasily Neelov, who had worked there since the 1740s, was already busy rearranging the paths and bridges. An even more obvious result of Neelov’s six-month visit to England in 1770 was the fashion for all things Chinese. In 1772, he completed the Large Caprice, a Chinese summer house spanning the road to the palace. He also worked on Rinaldi’s Chinese Village, a neo-oriental fantasy which comprised some fifteen small houses by the time it was finished by Charles Cameron, connected by a colonnade that cost 41,000 roubles and dominated by a pagoda built for 48,000. Chinoiserie was equally prominent in Thomas Whately’s influential Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), which Catherine acquired in French translation in 1771.¹²¹

Though the Russian version she planned never appeared in print, Catherine dedicated her adaptation of Whately’s book ‘To the owners of estates bordering the sea and lying along the Peterhof road… by one who has seen their natural attractions and capabilities, so that they should be further improved according to the principles herein prescribed.’¹²² One such owner was Lev Naryshkin, to whom Novikov dedicated the second printing of The Drone on 28 July 1769, the eve of Naryshkin’s annual masquerade at Leventhal (Lev’s Valley). To Novikov, the estate seemed ‘the most perfect Eden’, and indeed, three years later, it proved to be the ideal setting for an entertainment that was remembered in Russia long into the nineteenth century.¹²³ By the time Catherine arrived at 7 p.m. on 29 July 1772, 2000 guests had already spent a pleasant afternoon strolling in her friend’s sylvan groves. When two shepherdesses, played by his daughters, Natalia and Katerina, gambolled into view to invite her to their hut on a nearby hillside, it seemed that they were to witness no more than a conventional pastoral idyll. Soon, however, the crowd gasped when the hillside parted, as if by magic, to reveal a magnificent temple of victory, its entrances guarded by statues representing the Russian army and navy. Dressed as the ‘genius of victory’, Naryshkin’s son Dimitry led the empress through a portal emblazoned with the slogan ‘CATHERINE II: CONQUEROR’. Inside, he presented her with a laurel wreath and a speech which had been printed (in French) along with plans of the temple in a booklet distributed to all the guests. As she crossed the threshold into a hall adorned with the trophies of war, a cannon salute signalled the first of a series of scenes representing a litany of all her finest triumphs at Khotin, the River Larga, Kagul, Chesme and Bender. Only after reliving the glories of her annus mirabilis was she permitted to relax among Naryshkin’s colourful Chinese pagodas, where attendants in Chinese costume were on hand to serve her to the accompaniment of Chinese musical instruments. There was still a magnificent banquet to come. Not until three in the morning, an exceptionally late hour, did she finally return to Peterhof.¹²⁴

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Although St Petersburg in the early 1770s remained, as a British traveller remarked, ‘only an immense outline, which will require future empresses, and almost future ages, to complete’, there was no doubt about the scale of Catherine’s ambitions in the field of urban reconstruction.¹²⁵ ‘Augustus said that he had found Rome built of brick and left it built of marble,’ she told Frau Bielke in July 1770, ‘and I shall say that I found Petersburg almost entirely made of wood and will leave it with buildings decorated in marble. Despite the war and the Welches, we continue to build.’¹²⁶ In the light of her determination to press ahead in difficult circumstances, it was all the more frustrating to see hard-earned progress undone. ‘I have resembled Job since yesterday’, she wrote angrily to Panin, after a fire destroyed part of Vasilevsky Island on 23 May 1771. ‘I sent Count Orlov into town with instructions not to return until the last spark is extinguished.’ Having initially suspected arson, she soon blamed careless residents.¹²⁷ Voltaire received a different explanation: ‘There is no doubt that the wind and the excessive heat caused all the damage which will soon be repaired. In Russia we build faster than in any other country in Europe.’ She was as good as her word. On 26 July, plans were approved for the development of low-rise stone houses to replace the majority of burnt-out wooden ones.¹²⁸

Designs for Moscow were more grandiose. Vasily Bazhenov had been appointed to oversee a major reconstruction of the Kremlin just before Catherine’s departure from the old capital in January 1768 and she kept in close touch with him as he surveyed the foundations. ‘Be so good as to open the air-vents,’ she instructed Saltykov at the end of May. ‘Bazhenov needs to move about the cellars and if the vents won’t open he’ll be in danger of suffocating.’¹²⁹ Warned that even this prestige project would be subject to wartime economies, the architect took advantage of successive delays to develop increasingly ambitious plans. Having originally intended to begin with new government buildings, the empress soon opted instead for a four-storey neoclassical palace with a 700-yard frontage onto the Moscow River.¹³⁰ Pandering to her obsession with posterity, Bazhenov planned to glorify her name with a building to rival all the wonders of the world, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Parisian Palais Royal: the main reception hall alone was destined to measure seventy metres by fifty metres. However, as he soon discovered, Catherine was just as preoccupied with more immediate practicalities. After meeting him in St Petersburg in December 1768, she insisted that the kitchens and confectionery should be built side by side for ease of service.¹³¹ And she could barely conceal her irritation on discovering, a year later, that crucial comforts had been neglected. On reviewing the revised plans in February 1770, Grigory Teplov reported that ‘Her Majesty made the following observations’:

1: Nowhere in the palace is there provision for the necessary, without which it will be impossible for a large number of residents and visitors to remain there, and if this is not taken care of, then there will always be dirtiness and filth in the palace. 2: Nowhere can it be seen how and from where carriages will arrive at the various entrances so that it will not to be too far to walk in case of a severe frost.¹³²

Catherine was equally determined that the works should not damage the three great Muscovite cathedrals, monuments of the national heritage that she was proud to show off to Prince Henry along with the university and the foundling home in December 1770.¹³³ Not satisfied with mere preservation, the empress wanted their priceless frescoes to be restored to their former glory by appropriately qualified ‘religious people’. There was no shortage of such experts in the old capital and its monasteries, she reminded Archbishop Amvrosy, instructing him to ‘make sure that they carry out their work with the decorum appropriate to God’s holy churches’.¹³⁴ This was no mere whim. After Amvrosy’s assassination, responsibility for the work was transferred to the disciplinarian Samuil (Mislavsky), a favourite Court preacher whom Catherine had appointed to a suffragan see in the diocese of Moscow. Though modern scholars are aghast at the damage done by eighteenth- century ‘restoration’ methods, she was pleased to learn that the work had been completed over the following two years, first in the Annunciation cathedral and later in the Archangel and Dormition cathedrals.¹³⁵

She was not present at the foundation ceremony for the Kremlin Palace on 1 June 1773, but Bazhenov’s speech on that occasion left no doubt about the meaning of his plans. If Catherine had yet to conquer Constantinople, Constantinople must come to her in a classic instance of translatio imperii:

The Eastern Church celebrates the renovation of Tsar-Grad because the pious Constantine transferred his throne from the banks of the Tiber to Byzantium and adorned it with magnificence, and consecrated that place in the spirit of God. On this day Moscow, too, is renewed. You, great Catherine, in the midst of a bloody conflict, and in the midst of the many affairs entrusted to you by God, have not forgotten the adornment of the capital city… Exult, O Kremlin! On this day, we are laying the first stone of a new temple of Ephesus.¹³⁶

It proved to be a false hope. Before the building could rise from the ground, Bazhenov’s project was cancelled. The empress had a more pressing need for a residence in Moscow, where she planned to celebrate her ultimate victory against the Turks. When Elizabeth’s Golovin Palace finally burned down in December 1771, Catherine expressed surprise ‘only that it had survived for so long, despite my hundredfold prophesies about it’.¹³⁷ In the search for a replacement the following autumn, her thoughts turned first to the Menshikov Palace at Lefortovo. As usual, she was closely involved in the design. ‘Ask Prince Makulov if he agrees to take on the construction work,’ Catherine instructed Prince Volkonsky, Salytkov’s successor as Moscow’s Governor General, ‘and tell him that he will see from my plan that the internal wall of this palace should be rebuilt and pushed out into the courtyard so that we obtain a double room whose width is indicated on the plan.’ Only after the architect went to see her in St Petersburg did she concede that her designs were impracticable. ‘I see that it is