Russia's Dark Enlightenment

In Brief

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant an exploration of intellectual values to most of Europe. Russia tried hard to keep up with these new sensibilities but unfortunately managed to pick up only the expensive furniture and the habit of throwing orgies while leaving the finer philosophical points of this "best of all possible worlds" way back in Versailles.

Party On

You might also be interested in: Voltaire's Beatings: Part I Voltaire gets the snot beat out of him. Again. Peter the Great Peter as Frat-boy: drunken orgies, boat building, and dinner parties. Catherine and Peter: The Odd Couple Russia's Catherine the Great looks on whilst husband Peter plays with toy soldiers. Catherine the Great's Ascent Russia's Peter III acts childish and loses the throne to Catherine the Great Hangin' with the Peasants Russian peasants had no need for well-meaning city-slickers. Cambridge at the Time of Newton Cambridge was a complete dump. Professors skipping classes, etc.

Inspired by the antics of capricious Russian Tsars (cf. Peter the Great I & II, and Catherine the Great I & II), we turn this week to the Russian court and its brief flirtation with Enlightenment. Humorous as we may find them, contemporary foreigners saw these antics simply as what was to be expected of a hopelessly backward people. Snooty European travelers spared little love for the common folk: "Most Russians express crude and senseless opinions about the elevated natural sciences and arts," wrote seventeenth-century ambassador and globetrotter Adam Olearius. "They regard astronomy and astrology as witchcraft." To be sure, Olearius had a bit of a chip on his shoulder: he labeled Russian religious icons "wretchedly colored and ill-proportioned" to boot.

To be fair, Russia was truly behind. Since its earliest Muscovite rulers had chosen Eastern Orthodoxy over Catholicism, the cultural gap between Russia and Europe had yawned wide. An occupation by that most cultured chap, Ghenghis Khan, in the fifteenth and sixteenth century did not go too far to help. Peter the Great was the first Tsar to be truly obsessed with European culture and was determined to bring it to Russia. Unfortunately, many western Europeans shared Olearius's sentiments and wanted no truck with the effort. Well, if Peter couldn't bring Europe to Russia, he'd have to bring Russia to Europe. In a page stolen from the Grateful Dead playbook, he decided to take his entire court on permanent tour of France, England, and Germany.

Russia's European Vacation

While this did pose a few niggling administrative problems, Peter and his pals compensated with vigorous enthusiasm. Indeed, following in his footsteps to this very day, hordes of backpack-toting American students still descend on Europe summer after summer hoping a grungy hostel will provide some sort of cultural catharsis or, failing that, at least provide a staging ground for sexual escapades with the local hotties. For his part, Peter was on most days beside himself with excitement at all the grand ideas he was going to take back to Russia. But like our intrepid backpackers, Peter couldn't be expected to stop partying in his own larger-than-life style. Priscilla Roosevelt describes the aftermath of a stay in England in her beautiful book Life on the Russian Country Estate:

The Russians left an English suburban villa, Sayes Court, in shambles following a three-month occupancy. John Evelyn, the outraged owner, presented his government with a huge bill for a destroyed lawn, smashed furniture, torn curtains, and family portraits that had been used for target practice.[1]

But all good things must come to an end; his eventual return accompanied his decision that an uneducated Russia with peasant sensibilities and a medieval way of life was not for him. Determined to change it, he had made literacy a requirement for nobles to marry, and encouraged the speaking of French and the learning of art and music at his court. He forced the noblemen to shave their beards. Beard patrols marched into palaces and estates to ensure Peter's orders were carried out. Astute readers will note that even these draconian measures didn't seem to dampen the lively spirit of the Russian court.

Throne To the Wolves

Peter's death brought a respite to this attempt to modernize the reluctant Russians. Noblemen busy growing their beards back out witnessed a swift series of coups and games of musical thrones. Peter's own daughter Elizabeth bungled her ascension to the throne by sleeping around too much at crucial times: in one of the recent regal switcheroos, Emperor Peter II had died but, her bed too full and her mind someplace else, she let the crown go to Peter the Great's niece, Anna Ivanovna. Fortunately, Anna croaked some years later and Elizabeth got out of bed long enough to overthrow the recently crowned infant Ivan VI. (It is likely that Ivan himself was drugged into imbecility and transferred from prison to prison the rest of his life, to ensure he'd never come back to power. Also recall Peter had his own son killed.) Elizabeth threw Peter's reforms to the wind and proved a true heir to his taste for outlandishness. Our friend Henri Troyat details her reign in Catherine the Great:

In her new role as Empress, Elizabeth displayed a curious mixture of laziness and obstinacy, coquetry and cruelty, piety and licentiousness. Her amorous excesses, her taste for orgies and her mania for clothes (she never wore the same dress twice) did not prevent her from fearing God and worshiping icons... she had abolished the death penalty out of the goodness of her heart... but, when [some dignitaries] were compromised in a plot against her, she had their tongues cut out.

A secret agent of Louis XV had the same sorts of things to say: "Her Majesty has a pronounced taste for strong liquors. She is sometimes disposed to fall in a swoon. Then her dress and corsets must be cut away. She beats her servants and her women."[2]

Boys Will be Girls...

Elizabeth's parties themselves were fairly off-kilter. Every Tuesday she threw a ball in which the men were forced to dress up as women, and the women as men. The men tripped over the hoop skirts and cursed this affront to their masculinity, whereas the women complained about the tightness of the ill-fitting gentleman's suits they sported. Elizabeth was convinced she looked absolutely smashing in men's accoutrements, and deigned that everyone else should be able to enjoy the privilege. In The Comedy of Catherine the Great, Francis Gribble claims, "It may be argued that such gaities are, in themselves, innocent and harmless..." an apologetic standing in stark contrast to the zeal with which Troyat reveals them: "Again a taste for transvestitism!"[3]

As Elizabeth's transvestite parties show (cf. Alexander the Great), Peter's efforts to bring culture to Russia brought the accoutrements, and not the meat, of the European Enlightenment. Russians proved far more interested in the hedonistic aspects of Europe's cultural awakening than they were in any sort of intellectualism or economic progress. European reports of Russia at the time tend to depict a nation of filth and mud punctuated with occasional nuggets of wealth or art. Catherine the Great wrote in her memoirs

It is not unusual to see an immense courtyard full of mire and all kinds of filthy refuse, adjoining a ramshackle habitation of rotten wood, from which a superbly dressed lady covered with jewels drives out in a magnificent carriage drawn by six sorry nags in dirty harness, with unkempt lackeys wearing handsome livery which they dishonor by their clumsy bearing....

Sleeping Their Way to the Top

The parties and the clothes attest to an emulation of the European enlightenment. But in France and England great works such as Voltaire's writings and Diderot's Encyclopedie (an ambitious effort to catalogue all of human achievement), were the hallmark of this movement. Russia produced no such great works. Back in the motherland, Russian men shaved their beards and put on powdered wigs while catty women fought over the latest French fashions, but the mind was stifled while the ego and the loins took over. Troyat writes:

The courtiers threw themselves into debauchery... and this licentiousness was not even accompanied, as it was at other European courts, by a minimum of intellectual refinement. Here the ladies-in-waiting vied with each other for the most elegant wardrobes, but most of them did not know how to read... the men, whether officers of the guard or high functionaries, were no more interested in books than the women. Their favorite pastimes were gambling, drinking and amorous adventures. Manhood was demonstrated by exploits with the bottle and at the gaming table, not by prowess with the pen or before the printed page.[4]

The Russia of Catherine was a Russia of squalor and wasted finery. Is it any wonder she distracted herself with strapping young guards?

Footnotes

1. Roosevelt, 12. It would appear Peter had obtained a copy of the 1998 US National Hockey Team's playbook as well.
2. Troyat, 23
3. While we commend Troyat for the depths of his dirt-digging, we rather wonder about his fascination with sexual deviancy. Perhaps he ought to visit an analyst.
4. Troyat, 54-55

Bibliography

1. Henri Troyat. Catherine the Great. Meridian, 1980.
2. Priscilla Roosevelt, William C. Brumfield. Life on the Russian Country Estate : A Social and Cultural History. Yale University Press, 1995.
3. Francis Gribble. The Comedy of Catherine the Great. E.P. Dutton & Company, 1942. [Out of Print]

 
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