Catherine the Great

For boatmen and workmen on the boats during the cruise and other necessities 18,335 r.

For repairing the road and bridges to Moscow 2,000 r.

For schools, almshouses and hospitals in Moscow, Novgorod and Tver provinces 27,900 r.

For the building of homes for the homeless, in Novgorod, 6,000 and in Klin, 2,000 8,000 r.

For things used on the journey 36,305 r.

Total: 231,493 r 18.5k.²³

Back at Peterhof for the twenty-third anniversary of her coup, Catherine boasted to Grimm about the comparative etymological dictionary on which she had been working since the death of Lanskoy: ‘It is perhaps the most useful thing that has ever been done for all languages and every dictionary, and namely for the Russian language, of which the Russian Academy has undertaken to produce a dictionary, and for which, if the truth be told, it totally lacked the requisite knowledge.’²⁴ Requests for information were sent across Europe, and also to both South and North America. Invited to contribute lists of Native American words by the marquis de Lafayette, George Washington replied in May 1786 that he would do his best to help Catherine, ‘but she must have a little patience—the Indian tribes on the Ohio are numerous, dispersed & distant from those who are most likely to do the business properly’.²⁵ She forged ahead regardless. Linguarum totius orbis, vocabularia comparativa was published in 1787 with a title page in Russian and Latin. Since the empress’s contribution depended more on enthusiasm than expertise, the scholarly value of the work owed most to Peter Simon Pallas, the leader of the Academy of Sciences’ expeditions to the steppes. However, her own patriotic instincts were reflected in a determination to detect Slavonic influences in many of the world’s languages.²⁶

Unlike her etymological dictionary, another of Catherine’s projects in the summer of 1785 was still incomplete in 1796 when her son decided to dismantle it. By that time, she had spent at least 823,389 roubles on the monumental neoclassical Pella Palace, designed by Ivan Starov overlooking a bend in the River Neva to the east of St Petersburg. Here, opposite Potemkin’s estate at Ostrovki, she could watch the barges from Vyshny Volochek gliding silently towards the capital and indulge her passion for garden design. ‘It’s a beautiful situation,’ she had told Grimm in April, ‘with a variety of views and it will be good to enhance it all with an English park.’ Having commissioned three white marble columns for her garden when she returned from Moscow, she confided the ‘fantasy that took hold of me three days ago, when I had a sort of fever for these three columns that I wish to see executed in all their grandeur and beauty’.²⁷

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Only one false note had been struck on the visit to Moscow, and it was possibly a significant one. Although she reacted favourably to most of the new buildings there, Catherine angrily rejected the interiors at suburban Tsaritsyno, declaring the palace uninhabitable as it stood.²⁸ Bazhenov, who had kept her secretaries in close touch with his plans since being commissioned in 1776, had evidently failed to prepare the empress for the results.²⁹ She was not the only critic of his stunning neo-Gothic extravaganza. An English visitor in 1792, who found the buildings at Tsaritsyno ‘crowded together in such manner, that one could fancy it the object of the architect to shut out as much as possible the beauties of the situation’, noted that the external embellishments were ‘stuck all over in such profusion that we compared the ground on which they were stuck to a larded chicken’.³⁰ Yet perhaps there was a more ideological reason for the empress’s irritation. Though she did not say so, it has often been supposed that she was offended above all by the Masonic symbolism of Bazhenov’s designs.

Catherine had certainly lost patience with Freemasonry by the time of her visit to the old capital. Unable to distinguish between philanthropic Rosicrucians devoted to the inner life and the revolutionary mysticism of the ‘illuminati’ and Saint Martin, she was excluded from the movement by her sex and suspicious of it as a Prussian- dominated espionage network with the potential to ensnare her son. (Though it seems doubtful that Paul ever belonged to a Masonic lodge, it emerged in 1792 that Bazhenov himself had delivered a parcel of mystical and devotional literature to the grand duke on behalf of the publisher Nikolay Novikov.)³¹ Having been nauseated by the visit to St Petersburg in 1779 of Count Cagliostro—the Sicilian charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo, who was a pseudo-alchemist rather than a Freemason—Catherine condemned Freemasonry to Grimm as ‘one of the greatest extravagances ever in fashion among the human species’.³² Cagliostro was resurrected in the guise of Kalifalkzherston, a character who embezzles gold from gullible victims in Catherine’s play The Deceiver, one of three anti-Masonic dramas dating from 1785–6 that she claimed proved a ‘prodigious success’ with her audience.³³

Governor General Bruce had been expressing anxiety about unregulated publishing for more than a year by December 1785, when the empress ordered him to investigate some of the books published by Novikov’s Moscow university press so that she could be sure that they contained no Masonic ‘ravings’. In March 1786, warning Bezborodko that he faced ‘complete ruin’ from the sequestration of his stock, Novikov implored Catherine’s secretary to intervene on his behalf. Shortly afterwards, she banned only six Masonic texts, including the Rosicrucian New Chrysomander and the Chemical Psalter, a pseudo-Paracelsus. Sent to test the publisher’s faith, the sympathetic Archbishop Platon could find no contradiction between his Freemasonry and his Christian beliefs. Nevertheless, the empress’s suspicions continued to be fuelled by her confessor, Father Ioann Pamfilov, in cahoots with one of Platon’s most influential enemies, Archpriest Peter Alekseyev of the Archangel Cathedral in Moscow. Although no further systematic censorship was imposed, Bruce and these clerics led her to worry that her 1783 edict permitting private publishers had generated not only the sorts of ‘useful’ book she was keen to propagate, but also a lot of dangerous and potentially subversive nonsense. Though she was pleased to learn that Dr Zimmerman admired her final anti-Masonic drama, The Shaman of Siberia, ‘because I like that play very much’, she feared that it was likely to ‘correct no one: absurdities are tenacious and these particular absurdities have become fashionable. The majority of German princes think it good form to bow their heads to all these illusionists’.³⁴

While Novikov’s books were impounded, Catherine continued her own voracious reading. Necker’s Compte rendu reminded her that Louis XVI’s finances were ‘in general, completely disgusting’.³⁵ The long-awaited arrival of Diderot’s library and manuscripts in the autumn of 1785 unnerved her more. Nothing had prepared her for the shock of finding his critical ‘Observations’ on her Nakaz, which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Directing his treatise as much against Montesquieu as against the empress, Diderot had been able to see ‘only a formal difference’ between despotism and pure monarchy: ‘It is the spirit of pure monarchy which has dictated the Instruction of Catherine II. Pure monarchy remains as it is or reverts to despotism, according to the character of the monarch. It is therefore a bad sort of government.’ His verdict on serfdom was equally uncompromising: ‘There is only one way to avoid the abuses of serfdom and prevent its dangers: and that is to abolish serfdom and rule only over free men.’³⁶ ‘This essay,’ the empress retorted, ‘is utter drizzle in which one finds neither an understanding of things, nor prudence, nor foresight.’ Observing that ‘criticism is easy, but art is difficult’, she insisted to Grimm that her Nakaz had been ‘not only good, but even excellent, and well adapted to circumstances’ because ‘everyone benefits from the principles established by this Instruction’.³⁷

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The benefits of Quarenghi’s Hermitage theatre were destined to be enjoyed by a much narrower circle. When the space above the stables in the courtyard of the Small Hermitage proved too small for the purpose, it was decided to build on the river on the site of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace. ‘I shall not need the theatre this winter,’ Catherine commented in response to the plans the architect sent her in 1784. ‘Therefore you may quietly proceed with the drying and painting, since it won’t be used until the winter of 1785, that is, you have a full 14–15 months ahead of you.’³⁸

Meanwhile, Quarenghi had plenty of other projects to occupy his time. He had written without exaggeration in 1783 that he had ‘so much work’ that he scarcely had ‘time to eat and sleep’. Two years later, he sent another Italian correspondent a staggering list of commissions which were soon to transform not only the urban landscape in St Petersburg, but also many provincial towns and estates:

…three pavilions in the new garden at Peterhof…; the Stock Market; a large building for the State bank; a very large two-storey block of shops for the fair in Irkutsk; a church with a hospital attached for their imperial