Catherine the Great

1782 marked the beginning of a renaissance at Court that lasted, with varying degress of intensity, for the remainder of the decade.¹¹⁹ On 24 January 1783 Dashkova was unexpectedly named as director of the Academy of Sciences in succession to the ineffectual Sergey Domashnev. As Isabel de Madariaga has written, ‘it was a tribute to Catherine’s perception and to her disregard for current prejudices, that she appointed a woman to take charge of an institution regarded as a male preserve. It was also a way of keeping a busybody busy.’¹²⁰ Lacking nothing in nerve and determination, Dashkova set to work with her customary tactless vim. Led into the hall by the mathematician Leonhard Euler, the most distinguished scientist to work in eighteenth-century Russia, then in the final year of his life, she presided over her first meeting less than a week after her appointment. It took all the organisational ability she could muster to tackle the Academy’s mounting debts, revitalise its publishing activity, organise public lectures and reform its creaking administration.¹²¹ Impressed by the rapid results, Catherine appointed her later in the year to preside over a new Russian Academy tasked with producing a dictionary of the Russian language (its first six volumes were published between 1789 and 1794). It was in Dashkova’s new journal, The Companion of Lovers of Russian Literature (1783–4), that the empress published her first essays on Russian history, a subject that was to remain a more or less constant preoccupation for the rest of her life. But it was too much to hope that Dashkova’s return would be trouble free. It was not long before her ambitions for her son put her at loggerheads with Alexander Lanskoy.

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En route to Mogilev in 1780, Cobenzl had reassured Joseph II that Lanskoy belonged to ‘that species of favourite, who are frequently subject to change, have no influence on affairs, and who limit themselves to making their fortune and that of all those who belong to them’.¹²² The twenty-two-year-old major general certainly relished the trappings of office, strutting about at Court ‘dressed most magnificently with a shoulder knot of fine brilliant diamonds’. True to form, he ‘leapt like a hind’ when he learned that Gustav III planned to invest him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star.¹²³ To Catherine, however, the dashing young Sashinka was no mere trinket. Her relationship with him was the closest she came to repeating her experience with Grigory Orlov, except that Lanskoy lacked Orlov’s streak of ruthless courage and both she and Potemkin always treated him like a child in a gilded cage.

After Catherine’s roller-coaster ride with Potemkin—‘the leading nail-biter in the universe’¹²⁴ —life with Sasha Lanskoy must have seemed reassuringly undemanding. It was certainly less competitive. Catherine’s illegitimate son, Aleksey Bobrinsky, who paid regular visits to the Winter Palace during his time at the Cadet Corps, caught the prevailing balance of power in a note on a game of billiards in 1782: ‘She won the game, then started another one and began to win again. She told me to finish the game for her, and I won it.’¹²⁵ Dashkova recalled a scene in which a petulant favourite allegedly tried to deter the empress from giving her a treasured bust he regarded as his own: ‘“But this bust is mine,” exclaimed Lanskoy in protest. “It belongs to me.”’¹²⁶ Sasha, however, was a ‘golden individual’, accustomed to such ‘sacrifices’. It was presumably easier to regard them with equanimity when Quarenghi was not only designing a house for him at Sofia, but also working on a grandiose palace at Vele, the estate Catherine had bought for him in Pskov province. Sent there to plan the park, the Scot James Meader, who had designed the English Park at Peterhof, found that ‘the spot where the gardens are to be is very fine laid & planted by nature so that it only wants a little polishing & planting to complete it’.¹²⁷ Lanskoy was just as keen to share the empress’s passion for engraved gemstones. She tried to stimulate his literary interests, too. As the sceptical French charge noted in September 1780, ‘He has just been bought a library for 10,000 roubles, which he certainly will not read.’¹²⁸

Lanskoy’s support was more emotional than intellectual. As she approached her mid-fifties, Catherine faced the loss of some of her closest companions. When she learned of General Bauer’s fatal illness in the autumn of 1782, she complained to Dr Rogerson that ‘there was scarcely a doctor who knew how to cure even the bite of a bed-bug’. Bauer’s death on 11 February prompted ‘great floods of tears for many days’.¹²⁹ Though the carnival continued all around her—3130 nobles and merchants attended the masked ball at the Winter Palace on 17 February—it was almost three weeks before the empress could bear to break the news to Grimm, a sure sign of the depression which often afflicted her at times of personal despair.¹³⁰ Before making her annual confession at the end of the first week of the Great Fast, she quipped bleakly to her souffre- douleur that the ‘bovine medics’ had seen off ‘yet another person who has been close to me for thirty-three years’. Only Monsieur Tom, a favourite greyhound, was safe—‘he who has no use for any doctor’.¹³¹ At the end of March, Panin, who had had ‘one foot in the grave’ since his sacking in 1781, finally breathed his last. And worse was to come. Since the autumn, the empress had been nursing Grigory Orlov, whose descent into insanity after the death of his wife disturbed all who witnessed it. ‘One cannot see him in this state without pity,’ Zavadovsky admitted.¹³² Refusing to have her patient confined, Catherine tended him with unfailing compassion. ‘His wild and incoherent discourse ever affect her to tears,’ Harris learned, ‘and discompose her so entirely, that for the remainder of the day she can enjoy neither pleasure nor business.’¹³³ Though the end, when it came in Moscow on 11 April, was a blessed release, it was no less shocking for that. On hearing the news at Tsarskoye Selo just before her fifty-fourth birthday, Catherine confessed ‘the most acute affliction’ to Grimm. In Orlov, she had lost ‘a friend and the man to whom I have the greatest obligations in the world… General Lanskoy is tearing himself apart to help me bear my grief, but that makes me melt even more.’¹³⁴ ‘It has been a black year for me,’ she admitted to Potemkin when Field Marshal Golitsyn went to his grave in October: ‘It seems that whoever falls into Rogerson’s hands is already a dead man.’¹³⁵

The one loss for which nothing had prepared her was the death of Lanskoy himself. In her mind, at least, everything seemed set fair for a long and happy future. Plunged into ‘the most acute grief’ by her bereavement, she made one of her frankest admissions to Grimm:

I thought I myself would die as a result of the irreparable loss I sustained, just eight days ago, of my best friend. I hoped that he would be my support in my old age: he applied himself, he profited, he acquired all my tastes. This was a young man whom I brought up myself, who was grateful, sweet and honest. He shared my troubles when I had them and rejoiced in my happiness. In a word, I have the misfortune to tell you, sobbing as I am, that General Lanskoy is no more.¹³⁶

Not yet twenty-six, Lanskoy died of what was probably diphtheria on Tuesday 25 June 1784. The tragedy rapidly became the stuff of legend. Following a raucous dinner in 1792 at which the guests cracked crude jokes about the empress’s insatiable sexual appetite, John Parkinson, an Oxford don conducting a young English nobleman on the Grand Tour, wrote a ‘Note on Lanskoy’ that gives a fine sense of the fecundity of the Petersburg rumour-mill in the last years of Catherine’s life:

It is certain that after his death his legs dropped off. The stench was also insufferable. The boy who gave him his coffee disappeared or died I believe the day after. All these circumstances lead [one] to suppose that he was poisoned. The Empress was inconsolable for his loss. No person but her faithful valet de chambre was suffered to approach her. Grief and the loss of sleep occasioned some spots to appear on her breasts which led her to fancy that she had caught the putrid fever of which they made her believe that L[anskoy] died. For four months afterwards, she kept herself shut up at Peterhoff. Her first reappearance was on occasion of the Polish Deputies; which gave Nariskin occasion to say ‘A plague on these Polish Deputies, I have not sat down to one of these murderous dinners before for an age.’¹³⁷

Apparently inspired by Quarenghi, and demonstrably inaccurate in almost every respect, such a tissue of invention tells us little about the events of summer 1784. Yet, along with Princess Dashkova’s claim that Lanskoy’s ‘stomach burst open’ after his death, it has helped to prompt some impossibly romanticised accounts of the favourite’s demise.¹³⁸ His corpse, it is alleged, was left to rot in the heat of the summer because Catherine could not bear to see it buried for more than a month.¹³⁹ The truth is more prosaic, but none the less touching for that.

The favourite’s lifeless body was taken from the palace at Tsarskoye Selo to the house Quarenghi had designed for him in Sofia. From there it was borne ‘with due honour’ to Cameron’s new cathedral on the morning of