The walls inside the houses are bare and show the beams; there is a scent of resin, with amber drops trickling like tears everywhere. Holy lamps are glimmering before the images. All is bright, fresh, clean, and innocently young.
The Tsarevitch is fond of this spot. He says he would like to live here always, and demands nothing better than to be left alone.
He reads, writes in the library, prays in the chapel, works in the garden and the orchard, fishes and roams about the forest. At this moment I see him from the window of my room. He has just been digging in the beds, planting bulbs of tulips from Haarlem; now he stands resting on the spade, as still, as if he were trying to catch some sound. Infinite stillness reigns around. Only the axe of a woodcutter is heard somewhere far, far away in the wood, and the call of the cuckoo. His face is calm and joyous. His lips are moving; he is probably humming one of his favourite prayers or hymns, the akathist of his saint, Alexis the Man of God, or the Psalm:
“I will sing unto the Lord all the days of my life. I will sing unto my God while I have my being.”
May 16.
Nowhere have I seen such evening glows as here. To-day the sunset was particularly strange; the whole of the sky bathed in blood, red clouds were scattered like rags of bloodstained garments; it seemed as though a murder or some sacrifice had been performed in the skies, and that blood was running down from heaven upon the earth. Amid the jet-black pointed needles of the firwood the patches of red clay showed like blood stains.
As I stood looking in amazement I heard a voice from somewhere above me, coming as it were from this terrible sky:
“Fräulein Juliana!”
It was the Tsarevitch who called me, standing on the dove house, in his hand a long pole, such as are used here to scare away doves. He is a great lover of doves.
I went up the shaky ladder and on reaching the platform the white doves started, like snow flakes to which the evening glow had given a roseate hue, surrounding us with the wind and rustle of their wings.
We sat down on the bench, and, little by little, drifted again, as we had repeatedly done of late, into a religious discussion.
“Your Martin Luther has allowed himself to be guided by the Spirit of the world and by his own personal predilections, not by the steadfastness of his soul. And you, poor things, have allowed yourselves to be caught by the allurement of an easy life.
“You have believed the words of your seducer and you left the narrow difficult path ordained by Christ Himself. Martin has shown himself to be an universal fool; the great poison of the serpent of hell is hid in his teaching.”
I have got used to Russian pleasantries and no longer take any notice of them; reasonable proofs avail as much in arguing with such people, as a rapier against a club. But this time I was roused, for some reason or other, and I spoke out all that for a long time I had stored up within my heart.
I began by showing that the Russians, while considering themselves superior to all Christian people, lived in reality worse than heathens; they confess the law of love, and yet practise such cruelties as are met with nowhere else in the world; they fast, and during the fast they drink like beasts; they go to church and use the most shocking expressions there; they are so ignorant that in Germany young children know more about religion than adults and priests in Russia. Hardly one out of a dozen could say the Lord’s Prayer. A pious old woman answered my question, who is the third person in the Trinity? by asserting he was St. Nicholas the wonderworker. And really this Nicholas is a true Russian God, and one might easily believe that they had none other God but he. Not in vain did the Swedish theologian Botivid in 1620, discuss the question in a thesis at the Upsala Academy, “Are the Muscovites Christians?” I know not how much more I would have said had not the Tsarevitch stopped me; he had the whole time listened with perfect calmness, it was this calm that exasperated me.
“I have meant for a long time, to ask you, Fräulein: Do you believe in the Divinity of Christ?”
“What do you mean? Does not your Highness know that all we Lutherans——”
“I do not speak generally now, I am asking you in particular. I had once a talk with your teacher Leibnitz: he shifted and shuffled, avoiding a direct answer, but, nevertheless, I at once saw that he did not truly believe in Christ. And now what about you?”
He steadily looked at me. I cast down my eyes, and for some inexplicable reason suddenly remembered all my doubts, my debates with Leibnitz, the unsolvable contradictions of metaphysics and theology.
“I think,” said I, trying also to shuffle, “that Christ was the best and wisest of the sons of men.”
“And not God’s son?”
“We are all sons of God.”
“And is He like unto the rest?”
Unwilling to lie I remained silent.
“Well, that is the point,” he said, with such an expression on his face as I had never seen before. “Your people are wise, learned, strong, honourable, famous. You have everything; but you don’t possess Christ, and you don’t need Him, you save yourselves. We, on the other hand, are stupid, poor, naked, drunk, repugnant, we are worse than barbarians, worse than beasts, and are ever on the brink of falling. But we have the Christ, our Lord with us, and with us He will remain from eternity to eternity. It is by Him, our Light, that we are saved.”
He spoke about Christ as I had noticed the common people, the moujiks, speak here, as if He were their own, one of their family, a moujik just like themselves. I know not whether this is a sign of the highest pride and blasphemous, or, one of the greatest humility and sanctity.
We both remained silent. The doves were returning to their house, and settling down thickly between us, their white fluttering wings as it were uniting us.
Her Highness sent for me. When I had come down, I turned round to have a last look at the Tsarevitch; he was feeding the doves. They had surrounded him, perched on his hands, shoulders, head. He stood there high above the black charred wood in the red bloodstained sky, covered with them, as if wrapt in white wings.
October 31, 1715.
Now that all is over I will end this diary also.
We had returned to Petersburg from Roshdestveno towards the end of May. About the middle of August—ten weeks before the time of her Highness’s delivery, she fell on the stairs and hurt her left side. They say she made a false step, because the heel of her slipper was broken, but in reality she fainted. She had seen below in the courtyard the Tsarevitch drunk, embracing and kissing his mistress, the serf-girl Afrossinia.
He had been living with her for a long time; he does it almost publicly; on his return from Karlsbad he took her into the quarter of the house which he inhabits. I did not mention this in my diary, afraid lest her Highness should read it.
Did she know? Even if she did, she tried not to know, she did not believe it till she saw it. A serf-girl is the rival of the Duchess of Wolfenbüttel—the Emperor’s sister-in-law. “Things which never happen, happen in Russia,” said a Russian to me. The father with a laundress, the son with a serf-girl!
Some say she is a Finnish woman, taken prisoner by soldiers in the same way as the Tsaritsa; others say she is a serf belonging to the tutor of the Tsarevitch—Nikiphor Viasemski; the latter statement seems more probable. She is handsome enough, yet her low origin is at once obvious. She is tall, fair-skinned, and has auburn hair, her nose is slightly turned up; her eyes are large, clear, slanting and almond shape like a Kalmuck’s, with the untamed gaze of a wild goat. She seems, on the whole, to have something goat-like about her, like the female satyr in Rubens’ picture of the Bacchanalia. It is one of those faces which revolt us women, and almost invariably please men. The Tsarevitch is supposed to be madly in love with her. It is said that when they first met she was innocent, shy, tameless, and for a long time resisted him. He did not please her at all. Neither promises nor threats would help. But once, after a drinking bout, he met her in one of those fits of madness which he, like his father, is subject to. He beat her unmercifully and nearly killed her; then threatening to stab, at last seduced her. Russian manners!
And this is the same being who looked so like a saint when in the woods of Roshdestveno, sang the akathist to Alexis the Man of God, and, surrounded by doves, spoke about the Lord Christ! For the rest, it is a special Russian gift to unite such extremes—a gift which, thank the Lord! has as yet not been revealed to us foolish foreigners.
The Tsarevitch himself once told me: “We Russians can never keep the middle path, but are always roving either on the heights or in the abysses.”
After the fall her Highness felt a pain in her left side. “I feel as if pins were pricking my body all over,” she used to say, yet, on the whole, she was calm, as if she had finally made up her mind, and knew that nothing would alter her decision. She never talked to me about the Tsarevitch again, neither did she complain of her lot. Only once she said: “I know I am irrevocably doomed. I hope my sufferings will soon end; I long for nothing in the world so eagerly as for death. Death is my sole salvation.”
On October 12th she was safely delivered of a boy, the future heir to the throne, Peter Alexeyevitch. The first days after her confinement she felt well, yet when people congratulated her, and wished her good health, she would grow angry and ask everyone to pray God to send her death. “I want to die, and die I will,” she said, with that awful, calm determination which never left her again. She obeyed neither doctors nor midwife; she seemed purposely to do everything which was forbidden her. On the fourth day she sat in an arm-chair, ordered herself to be carried into another room, and gave the child the breast herself. That same night she felt worse: fever set in, sickness, convulsions and such pains, that she cried out more than at the time of her delivery.
When the Tsar, who himself was ill at that time, knew about it, he sent Prince Ménshikoff and four court physicians, Areskin, Polikolo, and the two Blumentrosts, to hold a consultation. They found her dying, in mortis limine.
When they tried to persuade her to take medicine she tossed the glass to the ground, saying: “Don’t torment me, let me go peacefully, I don’t want to live.”
The day before her death she summoned Baron Loewenwold and communicated to him her last will: none of her people were to speak ill of the Tsarevitch, either here or in Germany; she was dying young, earlier than she expected, yet she was content with her lot and blamed none.
Then she took leave of us all. She gave me her blessing like a mother.
The Tsarevitch did not leave her. His face was terrible to look at. He fainted three times. She did not talk to him; it almost seemed that she did not recognise him. Only just before all was over, when he pressed her hand to his lips, she looked at him with a long look, and said something in a low voice. All I could hear was:—
“Soon, soon we shall see each other again!”
She died as if she had fallen asleep. The dead face expressed more happiness than it had ever shown in her lifetime.
By the Tsar’s order a post mortem examination was made, he himself being present.
The funeral was fixed for October 27th. There was a long discussion whether the rank of a Crown Princess demanded cannon to be fired at her funeral; if so, how many guns to the salute. All the foreign ambassadors were questioned on the subject. The Tsar troubled himself more about this cannonade than he had ever troubled himself about the lot of her Highness when alive. It was decided not to fire.
The coffin was borne along a narrow bridge constructed on purpose, from the house to the Neva. The Tsar and Tsarevitch walked behind the coffin. The Tsaritsa was not present—she hourly expected her delivery. A mourning frigate stood waiting on the Neva; it was draped with black, and black standards were hoisted on it. Slowly to the sounds of funeral music, the ship bore us towards the Peter and Paul Cathedral, not yet completed, where the grave of the Crown Princess had to remain under the open sky until the closing of the vaulted roof. The sky wept over her when alive; it will rain on her when dead.
The evening was dull and calm, the sky seemed like the vault of a grave; the Neva, a dark gloomy mirror. The town, wrapped in mist appeared like a phantom or nightmare. All I had experienced, seen, and heard in this dreadful city, now, more than ever, seemed to me as a dream.
From the cathedral we returned at night to the house of the Tsarevitch, for a commemoration banquet. Here the Tsar handed a letter to his son; I learnt later that he threatened to disinherit and curse him unless he reformed.
The next day the Tsaritsa was delivered of a son.
The fate of Russia wavers between those two children, the son and the grandson of the Tsar.
November 1.
I went in to the Tsarevitch last evening to talk over my departure for Germany. He sat near the lighted stove and was thrusting in burning papers, letters and manuscripts. He is probably afraid of some search.
He was holding in his hand and was just about to throw into the fire a small booklet in a well worn leather binding, when—I am even now amazed at my presumption—I inquired what it was. He handed it to me. I looked inside. It was his diary and notes. The ruling passion of women in general, and of myself in particular, is curiosity. It made me be guilty of a still greater presumption, I asked if I might borrow it to read.
He thought for a minute, then looking at me, and with his sweet child-like smile of which I am so fond:
“Quid pro quo—I read your diary, you can read mine.”
He made me promise that I would never talk to anybody about these notes and would return them to be burnt on the morrow. I have sat up the whole night with them; the booklet itself is really an old Russian calendar, a church calendar printed at Kiev. It had been given to the Tsarevitch by the late Metropolitan of Rostov, Demetrius, who is counted a saint by the people. The Tsarevitch had put down his thoughts and the events of his life partly on the margin and the blank spaces on the pages, partly on separate leaflets either simply inserted or pasted in.
I decided to make a copy of the diary.
I will not break my word, during my lifetime and his. Nobody shall know about his notes. But they must not be irrevocably lost.
God Himself will judge between father and son. But men have slandered the Tsarevitch. Let this diary, should it ever reach posterity, accuse or justify him, in any case reveal the truth.
Crown with Thy loving kindness, O Lord, this year which now begins!
When on commissariat duties in Pomerania by order of the author of my being,[2] I heard that at Moscow, in the church of the Assumption, Stephen, the Metropolitan of Riazan, denounced the decree relating to delators—informers in civil and church matters—and other laws contrary to the Church, crying unto the people:—
“Be not amazed that rebellious Russia is agitated with bloody storms. How great is the gulf between the laws of man and the laws of God!”
The Senators came to the Metropolitan and accused him of spreading revolt among the people and of touching upon the Tsar’s honour. The whole incident was reported to the Tsar.
I told the Metropolitan to reconcile himself with my father as best he could. What advantage was there in their being at variance with one another? I was anxious to see a reconciliation, for if Stephen was deposed from his see, it would be difficult to find any one worthy to replace him.
Previous to this exhortation he used to write to me and I to him; not often, however, only on important affairs. But since then I have stopped the correspondence, and broken off all intercourse with him, as my father’s anger was kindled against him, and it became therefore dangerous for me to write any longer. It is rumoured he will be deposed from his see.
The Metropolitan concluded the above-mentioned sermon by praying to Saint Alexis, the Man of God, with special reference to myself, a sinner:—
“O Saint of God! remember thy namesake, the chosen keeper of God’s laws, thy most faithful follower, Tsarevitch Alexis Petrovitch! Thou didst abandon thy house; he too wanders among strangers. Thou wert bereft of slaves, subjects, friends and relatives; so it is with him. Thou art a man of God; he, too, is a true servant of Christ. We beseech thee, O Saint of God! deign to protect thy namesake, our only hope, shelter him under the cover of thy wing, like a dearly beloved fledgeling, and keep him, who is the very apple of our eyes, safe from all evil.”
During my stay in foreign parts, where by the will of the author of my being I had to apply myself to the study of navigation, fortification, geometry, and other arts, I greatly feared to die without confession and the last rites of the church. So I have written to my chaplain, Father James, on the subject as follows:—
“We have no priest with us, nor is there any possibility of our procuring one. I entreat your holiness to find me a priest in Moscow and send him here secretly. Make him discard all priestly insignia: shave his beard and let hair grow over his tonsure, or else shave his hair too, and wear a wig and foreign dress. Let him come under the guise of an orderly of mine. Please father do it! Have mercy upon my soul, and let me not die without the consolation of the church. This is all I want him for in case of death, and should I live, he would be my confessor. It would be well if he were a young man, unmarried and unattached. Let his departure from Moscow be kept so secret that even his friends shall not know whither he has gone. As to the shaving of the beard, let him have no misgivings on the point; necessity alters even such laws; it is better to transgress in minor things than to let a soul perish without absolution. See to this without delay, and should you refrain from doing as I ask you, God may have to call you to account for my soul.”
On my return to Petersburg from abroad, the author of my days welcomed me graciously and inquired whether I still remembered what I had learnt? To which I replied “Yes,” as if I really did; he then ordered me to bring him my drawings. But I, fearing I could not please him, if asked to draw in his presence, decided on injuring my right hand and thus disable it for use. Loading a pistol, I took it in my left hand and fired across my right palm; though the bullet did not touch my hand, yet the powder badly scorched it. The bullet embedded itself in the wall of my closet where it has remained visible even unto this day. The author of my being, noticing my burnt hand, asked how it happened. I gave a false reason.
Chapter 7, Art. 63 of the military regulations: “Whoever makes himself ill or breaks his limbs and thus unfits himself for service is liable to have his nostrils torn, and be condemned to forced labour.”
From the laws of Tsar Alexis Michailovitch, Chapter 22, Art. 6: “And in the case of a son petitioning against his father, no judgment shall be given; but he, having been flogged for such petition, shall be delivered up to the father.”
This is unjust, for though children are dependent upon their parents’ will, yet they must not be treated like dumb animals. The natural law is not fulfilled by the procreation of children alone; humaneness forms also part of a father’s duty.
I hear that the author of my days hates houses being built in Moscow, for it is his will to live in Petersburg.
It lies not with one man alone to change national customs. The country which changes its customs cannot endure. The Russian people have forgotten the water in their own cisterns, and have begun to slake their thirst with the turbid waters of strangers.
Job, the Archimandrite of Novgorod, told me: “Evil awaits thee in Petersburg, yet I feel God will deliver thee. Thou wilt see what will happen.”
God has so willed it with us sinners that foreigners do with us just as it pleases them. We all suffer from a mania. This fatal illness is a mad passion for foreign things and people, which has infected our whole nation. Truly says the prophet Baruch: “Let a stranger come near thee and he will destroy thee.” The Germans boast and have a saying, ‘he who wants to eat bread without work, let him go to Russia.’ They call us barbarians and choose to reckon us among the beasts instead of men. They try to make us out before other nations as worse than dead dogs. It would be as well to stop some of these foreign antics; they don’t come natural to us and we only make a muddle in meddling with them. The foreign way becomes with us the fool’s way. We degrade ourselves, our language, our nation; and we expose ourselves to the ridicule of every one.
The intrusion of foreign languages has spoilt the purity of the Slavonic tongue. I know not what need we have to use foreign words. It must be only to make a boast of, there is little honour in doing it. Sometimes they speak in a way that neither they themselves nor others can understand.
Sit not down under a stranger’s hedgerow. Rather among nettles if they are thine own. A stranger’s wit forsakes thee at the threshold. Keep thine own counsel; thine own counsellors. Pleasant is the sound of the tambours beyond the hill; but when brought hither they are but baskets of bast.
Foreigners are far beyond us, I grant you, in knowledge; yet in natural quickness of wit our people are, thank God, not worse equipped than they, and they do wrong in railing at us. I am persuaded that God created us Russians not inferior to other human beings.
I doubt whether it be really true that man’s welfare standeth on knowledge or the sciences alone. For folk used to learn much less in the old days, and were happier than we to-day with our much learning. It is possible with much culture to be a rascal. Learning in a depraved heart is a powerful weapon for evil.
We Russians can do without bread. We devour each other, and are satisfied.
The boyars are great withered trees; their massive trunks hide the people from the Tsar. My father is exceedingly intelligent; yet Ménshikoff is always hoodwinking him.
All administrators, whether young or old, are greedy of gain. The ancient laws have fallen into desuetude: the new ones also count for nothing. What a number are decreed! and to what purpose? Nothing is really changed. I don’t see that much good will come of these reforms in the future.
A sovereign’s duties:
Not to trust in one’s brilliancy of mind, but to be zealous to protect the people, the land and the villages, and to love, be zealous for, interested in the lesser brethren of Christ and to know their needs. Severe shall be His judgment upon the great and mighty ones! The little shall be forgiven, but torment awaits the mighty ill-doers. This I should do well to remember, should God grant me to become Tsar.
On St. Eustace the martyr’s day we held high fête and got grievously drunk. Our faces were well pummelled; Jibanda had a blow in the eye, the Lasher lost a tooth. I don’t remember anything, and I hardly know how I got away. I was exceedingly filled with the gifts of Bacchus.
In Roshdestveno I remained at home alone. The days flowed by like water; nothing save utter stillness.
Time passes and brings us nearer death; the end of our days approaches; I recognise the frailty of my life.
I await death, but without fear or desire.
A little drunk.
My wife is pregnant.
Eros, Eros, heathen god! Passions have harassed me from my youth up. I accuse others of godlessness, and am myself the most godless of all. Afrossinia! I know my iniquity and have not redeemed myself from shame. Thy hand weighs heavily upon me, O Lord! When shall I come and appear before God? my tears have been my meat, day and night; and my soul fainteth for the courts of the Lord.
I am amazed at my father. Why does he love Theodosius? Is it because the latter introduces Lutheran customs among the people and authorises everything? He really is an atheist, and a deep enemy of the cross of the Lord.
I have seldom seen so subtle a rogue. He is very adroit, he will never do wrong openly. We must be on our guard with him and be careful and stealthy in thwarting him, since we are obliged to live under his orders.
The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up, O Lord. I am sore afraid and troubled lest Christianity perish entirely in Russia.
Theodosius, the heresiarch, and his crew have openly begun to wage war against the Church; they abolish fasts, they treat confession and self-immolation as nonsense; they ridicule celibacy, self-imposed poverty, and change other strait and narrow ways of the Christian life into the smooth broad ways which lead to eternal damnation. They fearlessly teach a debauched self-indulgent life; they recognise no sin, everything is holy, and by their teaching they have brought the children of the world into such fearless voluptuousness, that many take up the mere Epicurean attitude: “Eat, drink, and be merry. There is no account to render after death.”
They call the holy icons idols, the church singing bulls’ roaring. They destroy chapels, and where the walls have remained, they allow tobacco and barbers’ shops to be opened. They take miracle-working icons away on stinking dung carts under dirty mats, thus insolently defiling them before the people. In this way they attack the Orthodox faith, under the pretext that it is not Christianity, but only useless and harmful superstitions which they are trying to uproot. What a number of clergy have been destroyed, unfrocked and tortured under this pretext! If you ask for a reason, the only answer you get is: they were superstitious, bigots, sanctimonious humbugs! He who keeps fast is a bigot; he who prays, sanctimonious; he who adores the icons, invariably (they say) a hypocrite.
All this is done with such cunning, and the intention both to exterminate the Orthodox clergy in Russia, and to introduce their newly invented Lutheran and Calvinistic, priestless sects.
He is truly mad who does not detect in them the atheistic spirit.
The church bells have been altered, they no longer chime, but tinkle as if sounding an alarm. And everything else is changed, the icons are painted, not on wood but on canvas, after foreign models; for instance, the image of Emmanuel the Saviour is quite like a German, fat, as if conceived in the flesh; the fleshy type is preferred, the celestial nature is ignored. The churches are no longer built after the ancient style, but with pointed towers like those in Germany, and the chimes even imitate Lutheran organs.
Poor Russia! Why dost thou set thy heart on German ways and actions?
There are to be no more monasteries; a decree is being prepared which will prohibit the taking of fresh vows; retired soldiers will fill the vacancies in the monasteries. It is written “He who comes to me I will in no wise cast out;” but they consider the scriptures as nothing.
As there is a military code, so now there exists a code of faith.
What sort of prayer can that be, which is enforced by a decree, under pain of punishment?
Beggars are to taken be up, ruthlessly beaten with rods, and sent to hard labour, so that they may not eat their bread unearned. This is the Tsar’s decree, while Christ says, “For I was an hungered and ye gave me no meat. I was thirsty and ye gave me no drink, I was a stranger and ye took me not in, naked and ye clothed me not. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
The whole of Russia is dying of spiritual famine. The sower does not scatter the seed, the earth does not receive it. The priests do not keep watch over the people who go astray. The village priest cannot be distinguished from a moujik. The moujik ploughs, the priest ploughs. And meanwhile Christians die like cattle. Drunken priests use obscene language and rail at one another within the sanctuary; they wear a pall of gold, while their bast shoes are dirty; the holy loaves are made of black rye flour; the Lord’s holy host is kept in exceedingly vile vessels swarming with bugs, cockroaches, and grasshoppers. Monks have fallen into habits of tippling and stealing.
The whole monastic and priestly system calls for thorough reform, as there hardly remains a trace of the true priest and monk.
We are guilty of neither keeping our religion, such as it is, nor maintaining our clergy in decency, but of living almost like brutes. I doubt whether in Moscow one in a hundred knows what the Orthodox belief is, or who God is, or how to pray to Him, or how to fulfil His holy will.
There is no sign of Christianity left to us except the name.
We have all lost our senses, we tremble in our faith, like a leaf on a tree; we have gone astray in strange and diverse ways, some incline towards the Roman faith, others towards the Lutheran; we, baptized idol-worshippers, are maimed in both legs. We have forsaken the paps of our mother Church; we are seeking nourishment instead from all kinds of foreign and heretical sources. We are like blind puppies which have been thrown away, we err in all directions; but where we shall finally arrive, no one knows.
Fomka the barber, an iconoclast, has split up the image of St. Alexis the Metropolitan with his iron axe, because he did not revere the holy icons, the life-bringing cross, nor holy relics; the holy icons, said he, and the holy cross are merely the work of man; and he did not believe that relics brought pardon for his own transgressions. Neither did he accept the Church dogma and traditions, nor did he believe the Eucharist to be the true body of Christ, but simply bread and wine.
Stephen, the Metropolitan of Riazan, handed Fomka over to the church anathema. He was burnt at the stake in the Red Square.
Then the gentlemen of the Senate, having summoned the Metropolitan to Petersburg to account for his action, gave satisfaction to the heretics; the iconoclast, Dmitri Tveretinoff, a physician, whose disciple Fomka had been, they pronounced innocent, while driving Stephen, the saintly bishop, with great contumely from the Judgment hall. He went out weeping and saying:—
“O Lord Christ, our Saviour! Thou hast said: ‘They will persecute you, even as they persecuted me.’ Now I am driven out, but not I, it is Thou whom they are persecuting. Thou, who beholdest all things, wilt see that their judgment is unjust; judge them Thyself!”
And when the prelate came out of the senate into the square, all the people were moved with compassion towards him and wept. The anger of the author of my being against Stephen has grown more intense.
The Church is more powerful than the Tsardom; but nowadays the Tsar rules the Church.
The ancient Tsars bowed to the ground before the patriarch; now the occupant of the Patriarchal throne signs himself in his letters to the Tsar, thus: “Your Majesty’s slave and footstool, your humble Stephen, the little Shepherd of Riazan!” The head of the Church the Tsar’s footstool!
Demetrius, the Metropolitan of Rostov, was a very saintly man; when the author of my being made him drink Hungarian wine, and began questioning him on clerical affairs, the saintly old man did not answer at all, but silently and repeatedly blessed the Tsar with the sign of the holy cross, and thus he succeeded in escaping.
The priests say, “It is impossible to swim against the stream; the whip cannot break the axe.”
But the martyrs for the sake of the faith did not spare their lives!
The Tsar keeps his table for the bishops. “He whose bread I eat, his man I am.”
The ancient Russian prelates stood up for their country, but the prelates of to-day do not seek to obtain justice from the Tsar, but aim rather at flattering and corrupting his pious rank and power.
If the people sin, the Tsar can divert God’s wrath; if the Tsar sins, the people are helpless. God visits the sin of the monarch upon the whole country.
Lately at a drinking feast, the “little Shepherd of Riazan” said to my father: “You Tsars—gods on earth—are like unto the Heavenly Tsar,” and the Kniaz-Pope, a drunken fool, reviled the prelate: “Though I,” said he, “am but a mock patriarch, yet even I would not have spoken such words to the Tsar! God is greater than the Tsar,” and the Tsar praised the buffoon for saying this.
When in the course of the same feast, the bishops began to talk about the widowed state of the Church and the need of a Patriarch, the author of my being in great wrath unsheathed his short sword; all were terror stricken, thinking he was going to kill them; he struck the table with the flat of the blade, and shouted: “I am the Patriarch; Tsar and Patriarch in one!”
Theodosius is trying to persuade the author of my being to assume the title of Emperor, after the example of the ancient Roman Caesars.
In the year 1709, during the celebrations of the Poltava victory, the clergy erected on the Red Square in Moscow an imitation of a Roman temple with an altar, consecrating it to the virtues of the Russian god Apollo and Mars, that is in honour of the author of my being, and over the ancient temple ran the inscription:—“Basis et fundamentum reipublicae, religio.”
But what religion? Faith in what God, or gods?
There was also represented an “Apotheosis of the Russian Hercules,” that is, the author of my days slaying many animals and peoples, and, at the end of these feats, being borne up to heaven in Jove’s chariot, drawn by eagles along the Milky Way, with the inscription:—“Viamque affectat Olympo.”
In the pamphlet, written by the arch-monk Joseph, the Prefect of the Academy, the Apotheosis is described in the following words: “It should be known that this is neither a church, nor a sanctuary built to a saint, but a political or civil ceremony.”
Theodosius is trying to persuade my father to insert in the decree, which ordained the holy Synod, or in the Russian oath of allegiance itself, words declaring that, “The people should honour their ruler’s name as head and father of their country equally with the name of Jesus Christ.”
Men want to usurp God’s glory and the honour due to Christ, the Eternal and only King of kings. It is in the Roman Laws that these impious sacrilegious words are found: “The Roman autocrat is the Lord of the Universe.”
We confess and believe that Christ alone is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and there is no man Lord beside him.
Jesus Christ, the wondrous Rock, struck and destroyed the Roman Empire and smashed its feet of clay. And we create and build up what God has shattered. Does not this mean that we defy God?
Look at Roman History. The Emperor Caligula saith: Everything is allowed to Caesar, “Omnia licent.” Not only to Roman Emperors, but nowadays to all knaves and servile creatures and quadrupeds, is everything permitted!
Nebuchadnezzar the King of Babylon saith, “I am God,” and he became a beast.
On Basil Island, in the house of the Tsaritsa Prascovie, there lives an old monk, Timothy Arkhípich, he is the refuge of the desperate, the hope of the hopeless, a mad man in the eyes of the world, yet he is intimately acquainted with the griefs and hearts of men. I went over to see him a few nights ago and had a talk with him. Arkhípich says Antichrist is a pretender—a veritable cursed one—and that he is on his way. I read the Metropolitan of Riazan’s Signs of the Coming of Antichrist, and a great fear thereupon possessed me.
In Moscow, Gregory of Talitsa was burnt because he spoke to the people about the coming of Antichrist. Talitsa was a man of great intelligence. Basil Levin, a captain of the Dragoons who was with me on my way from Lvoff to Kiev in 1711, the priest Lebedka, chaplain to Prince Ménshikoff the clerk Larion Dokoukin, and many others think in the same way about Antichrist.
A Raskolnik spilt Christ’s sacrament and trampled it under foot.
Near Lubetch a flight of locusts appeared; from midday to midnight it was passing—“God’s Wrath,” the superscription on their wings.
The days are short and gloomy; old people say the sun shines no longer as it used to.
I was drunk; we drank a large quantity of vodka. The Lord knows it is fear which makes us drink, in order to forget ourselves.
The fear of death has come upon me. The end is at hand, the axe is at the root, death’s scythe is over our heads.
Lord, help Russia! Thrice-pure Mother of God protect and intercede for us!
O martyrs of these latter days, Christ is about to rise again! Christ is, and will dwell within you, and you will say, Amen! to His Kingdom.
With these words the diary of Tsarevitch Alexis closed. I was present when he threw it into the fire.
December 31.
To-day died the last Russian Tsaritsa. Marfa Matveevna, the widow of Peter’s stepbrother, Fédor Alexeyevitch. At foreign courts she had been considered dead long ago; ever since her husband’s death, during thirty-two years, she had lived half mad, a prisoner in her rooms, and never showed herself to anybody.
She was buried at dusk with great pomp. The funeral procession moved between two rows of torches planted in the ice all the way along from her house, (she lived next to us near the Church of All the Sorrowing) up to the Peter and Paul Cathedral, across the Neva on the ice. It was the same way along which her Highness’s body had been borne two months or more ago in the frigate of death. Then the first foreign Princess was buried, now the last Russian Tsaritsa.
First came the clergy in gorgeous palls, carrying candles and incense burners, chanting funeral songs. The coffin was drawn on sleighs. Behind it walked the Privy Councillor Tolstoi carrying a crown set with priceless gems.
The Tsar had for the first time at this funeral prohibited the ancient Russian custom of wailing; it was strictly ordered that none should cry aloud.
All moved along in silence, the night was still, nothing was heard but the crackling of the burning resin, the crunching of steps on the snow, and the funeral chanting. This silent procession aroused a shudder of terror. It seemed as though we were gliding along the ice after the dead, ourselves also dead, into the black eternal gloom.
With this old Tsaritsa New Russia seemed to be burying Old Russia, and Petersburg burying Moscow.
The Tsarevitch, who had loved the deceased as his own mother, was terribly upset by this death. He sees in it a bad omen for himself, his own fate. Several times during the ceremony he whispered to me, “The end has come, the end of everything!”
January 1.
To-morrow morning I leave Petersburg, together with the two Barons Loewenwold for Riga, and then travel through Danzig into Germany. This is my last night in the Tsarevitch’s house.
This evening I went to bid him good-bye; the way we parted made me feel how much I love him, and that I will never forget him.
“Who knows,” said he, “we may meet again. I would like to pay another visit to Germany and other foreign countries; I liked those parts, you live in gaiety and light and freedom.”
“What holds your Highness back?”
He sighed heavily.
“I would like to go to heaven; it is my sins which keep me back.” And then he added with his genuine child-like smile, “The Lord keep you, Fräulein Juliana, do not remember my worst; greet the European countries for me, and your old friend Leibnitz. May be he will prove to be in the right, and that we shall, with God’s help, not eat, but serve one another.”
He embraced and kissed my forehead with brotherly tenderness.
I could not help crying. Once more I turned round and had a last look at him, and again my heart sank with a presentiment, just as on that day when I saw in the dark, and as it were prophetic mirror, the face of Charlotte and Alexis, when both had seemed to me to be victims doomed to some great suffering. She had perished, now his turn had come. And then I recalled him as he stood the last day in Roshdestveno, on the dove-cote, high up over the sullen wood against the blood-red sky, as it were wrapt in the white doves’ wings. So he will ever remain in my memory.
I hear that prisoners set free sometimes regret their prison. I experience a kindred feeling at the present moment with regard to Russia. I began this diary with curses. I cannot close it with blessings. I will only say, what probably many in Europe would say, were they better acquainted with Russia—“A mysterious country—a mysterious people.”
The Tsar had been warned, when he contemplated building Petersburg, that the site was not suitable for habitation, on account of the floods; twelve years previously the whole country up to Nienshantz had been under water, and similar disasters recurred about every five years. The original inhabitants of the Neva Delta did not erect permanent houses, but only small huts. Whenever a great flood, by one sign or another, seemed to be threatened, they were taken to pieces, the logs and planks were tied together in a raft and fastened to trees, while the people themselves sought refuge on the hill Dooderhof. But to Peter, the new city seemed a “Paradise” just because of the abundance of water which, like a waterfowl, he loved; and he hoped that in this place, quicker than anywhere else, he could accustom his subjects to a seafaring life.
At the end of October 1715, the Neva began to freeze, snow fell, the sleighs were brought out and everybody was expecting an early, settled winter. But quite unexpectedly the weather changed; it became warm again. In one night all the snow and ice had melted. The wind brought a fog from the sea, a putrid, yellow, suffocating mist, which caused much sickness among the people.
“I pray God to deliver me from this place of perdition,” wrote an old boyar to Moscow. “I am seriously afraid of falling ill; since the thaw began we have been enveloped in such a balmy scent and such gloom, that it is impossible to go out. Many die because of the infectious air in this ‘Paradise.’”
The south-west wind continued to blow for nine days; the water in the Neva rose; several times it began to overflow. Peter issued decrees by which the inhabitants were bidden to empty their cellars of all goods, to keep boats in readiness and to drive the cattle on to the higher ground.
But the water after mounting, receded every time. The Tsar, noticing that his decrees only troubled the people, and having come to the conclusion, by signs known only to himself, that there would be no great flood, resolved to trouble himself no more about the rise of the water.
The first fashionable winter “Assembly” was fixed on November 6, in the house of Fédor Apraksin, President of the Admiralty. The house was situated on the quay opposite to the Admiralty buildings, and next to the Winter Palace. On the eve of the Assembly the water rose again. People of experience predicted that this time the calamity could not be escaped, and various signs were quoted in support of this belief; the cockroaches in the palace had begun to creep from the cellars up to the garret; the mice had left the flour stores; the Tsaritsa had dreamt that Petersburg had become a prey to the flames, and fire in a dream means flood. Not quite recovered from her confinement, she could not accompany Peter to the “Assembly,” and entreated him to stay at home.
Peter read in the looks of all that ancient dread of water, which all his life he had vainly sought to overcome: “the sea brings sadness and grief—where water is there is grief also—even the Tsar cannot appease a flood.”
He was warned on all sides. At last he was so annoyed that he forbade even the mentioning of a flood. He all but struck the Chief Constable Devière with his club. An unknown peasant had terrified the whole town by predicting that the water would rise above the high elm which grew on the quay near the Trinity Church. Peter ordered the elm tree to be felled and the peasant to be flogged on the site; during the performance a drum was to be beaten and a persuasive exhortation addressed to the people.
Before the “Assembly” commenced, Apraksin came to the Tsar asking permission to have it in the house itself, and not in the pavilion generally used on such occasions, which stood out in the courtyard and was connected with the main building only by a narrow glazed gallery, far from safe in case of a sudden rise of water, when the guests might easily be cut off from the staircase which led out to the upper rooms. Peter thought it over, yet decided to have his own way, and ordered the “Assembly” to be held in its usual quarter, the pavilion.
“An Assembly,” the decree explained, “is a free gathering not only for pleasure but for work.
“The host is neither obliged to receive his guests nor to see them to the door when they depart, nor is he expected to press them to eat.
“At the ‘Assembly’ people are free to sit, walk about, or join in the games and no one has a right to interfere, or check another’s actions; ceremonies, such as rising up to greet, conducting to the door, are forbidden under penalty of the fine of the ‘Great Eagle.’”
Both the supper-room and the room for dancing were spacious, but with exceedingly low ceilings; the walls of the former were covered with blue tiles, after the style of Dutch kitchens, pewter dishes were ranged along the shelves, the brick floor was strewn with sand, the large tiled stove was overheated. One of the three long tables was spread with cold savoury dishes, Peter’s favourite oysters, pickled sprats, lemons; on another table, chess and draught boards were laid; on a third packets of tobacco, baskets with clay pipes and piles of wooden splinters for pipe-lighters.
Tallow candles were faintly glimmering through the clouds of smoke. The low room, packed with people, reminded one of a skipper’s saloon in Plymouth or Rotterdam. The similarity was accentuated by a number of English and Dutch ship captains. Their wives, fat, smooth, glossy, with red cheeks, their feet tucked in fur warmers, knitted stockings, chatted and evidently felt quite at home.
Peter, smoking a short clay pipe, sipping mulled ale mixed with cognac, sugar and lemon juice, was playing chess with the Archimandrite Theodosius.
Anton Devière, the Chief Constable, timidly approached the Tsar like a guilty dog. It was difficult to decide whether he was a Jew or a Portuguese; his feminine face expressed that combination of sweetness and weakness found sometimes amongst southern faces.
“Your Majesty, the water is rising.”
“How much?”
“Two feet nine inches.”
“And the wind?”
“West south-west.”
“Nonsense, I myself have just registered it, South-west south.”
“It has changed,” replied Devière apologetically, as if he were responsible for the direction of the wind.
“Never mind,” said Peter decidedly, “the water will soon fall. The barometer points to fair; it won’t deceive, never fear.”
He believed in the infallibility of the barometer as he did in that of mechanics in general.
“Your Majesty, is there no order?” Devière asked plaintively. “Otherwise I really don’t know what to do. People are getting exceedingly frightened. Intelligent experts say——”
The Tsar closely eyed him.
“One of these intelligent experts I have had flogged near Trinity Church; and you too won’t escape, unless you give up talking nonsense. Go, fool!”
Devière, shrinking yet more, like the affectionate dog, Lizette, at the sight of a stick, instantly disappeared.
“What is your opinion about this extraordinary ringing, Father?” Peter turned to Theodosius, continuing their conversation about the Novgorod church bells which, according to recent information, were tolling miraculously at night: the rumour spread that this was a foreboding of great calamities.
Theodosius stroked his thin beard, played with the double-faced panagia, adorned with the crucifix and the Tsar’s portrait, cast a side glance at the Tsarevitch Alexis, who was sitting next to them, blinked with one eye as if taking aim, and suddenly his diminutive face, like the snout of a bat, lit up with rarest subtlety:—
“Anybody can understand the meaning of this speechless droning. It obviously comes from the fiend; Satan is sobbing because his reign over the Russian people is coming to an end; he is cast out from the possessed, the Raskolniks, the monks, the old hypocrites, whom your Majesty has taken great pains to cure.”
And Theodosius led the conversation to his favourite topic, the uselessness of the monks.
“Monks are parasites. They escape taxation in order to eat the bread of idleness. What gain are they to society? They count their civil position for nothing, describing it as part of the vanities of the world. They have a saying to this effect:—‘He who becomes a monk no longer works for the Tsar of earth, but for the Tsar of heaven. They lead an animal life in the deserts. They seem incapable of realizing that the Russian climate makes a real hermit life impossible.”
Alexis understood that this talk about hypocrites was aimed at him.
He rose. Peter looked at him and said, “Stay where you are!”
The Tsarevitch submissively returned to his seat, casting down his eyes, as he felt, with the air of a hypocrite.
Theodosius was in his best vein. Stimulated by the attention of the Tsar, who had brought out his notebook and was taking notes for future decrees, he suggested measure after measure; ostensibly for the reform, but to Alexis it seemed for the destruction, of monasticism in Russia.
“Establish in the monasteries regulation hospitals for discharged dragoons, also schools for arithmetic, geometry; in the convents foundling institutions for illegitimate children; the nuns should be employed in weaving.”
The Tsarevitch did his best not to hear; yet stray words would reach him like authoritative commands.
“The sale of mead and oil in churches must be finally forbidden, the burning of tapers before icons placed outside the churches must be stopped. Chapels must be closed up; no new relics to be announced. Mendicants to be taken into custody and relentlessly beaten with rods; no miracles to be invented.”
The wind rattled at the window shutters; a draught passed through the room, and the candles flickered. A countless host of enemies seemed to be besieging and breaking into the house; and in the words of Theodosius, Alexis felt the same inimical force.
It was the attack of a storm from the west.
The walls of the dancing-room were hung with woven tapestry and pier glasses; chandeliers with wax candles supplied the light. Musicians with deafening wind instruments were placed on a small platform. The ceiling, with its allegorical representation of “A journey to the Isle of Love,” was so low that the naked Cupids with their fat calves and legs were almost brushed by the wigs of the dancers.
The ladies in the intervals between the dances sat as if dumb; they seemed dull and stupefied; in dancing, they hopped round like wax figures; they answered all questions in monosyllables, and were quite scared by compliments. Daughters seemed tied to their mother’s skirts; while the mother’s faces clearly expressed: we would rather our daughters were drowned than here.
William Mons was repeating a compliment, culled from a German book of savoir-faire, to that same Nastenka, who was in love with a naval officer and had been crying over a tender missive at the Venus Festival in the Summer Garden.
“Through repeatedly meeting you, fair angel, such a desire to know you better has arisen within me, that, unable to conceal it any longer, I am compelled to lay it deferentially before you. I heartily wish that you, my lady, might have found in me a person whose habits and agreeable conversation could satisfy you; a person whose behaviour and conversation might not displease you; but since nature has given me no advantages, deign to accept instead my devoted faithfulness and service!”
Nastenka was not listening. The buzz of monotonously sounding words had made her sleepy; later on, she complained to her aunt, that though her partner seemed to speak Russian, yet with the best intention she could not make out a single word.
The Secretary to the French Ambassador, George Proskóurov, son of a Moscow clerk, who had lived for some time in Paris, and had become there a “Monsieur George,” a perfect “petit maître” and “galant homme,” was singing to the ladies a modern ditty about the coiffeur Frison, and the street-girl, Dodun: