Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

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. 138His 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. 139The 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 Thursday 27 June and immediately interred in the neighbouring cemetery following a funeral service conducted by Metropolitan Gavriil. 140Bezborodko’s attempts not to trouble the empress with the details were thwarted by typically persistent questioning which, as he pointed out, ‘only made her grief the greater’. Catherine did not attend, having been confined to her apartments since Sunday. She, too, had developed alarming symptoms—a sore throat and a high fever—which prompted Dr Rogerson to draw two cups of ‘extremely inflamed’ blood on the day of the funeral. By then, he decided, she was out of danger. Prescribing salt to relieve the indigestion that had prevented her from sleeping, he confidently predicted a full recovery. 141In physical terms, he was right. Emotionally, however, Catherine took longer to recuperate. She shunned most visitors. Sasha’s mother, who arrived in response to the empress’s letter of condolence in the hope of securing her family’s favour, was deflected onto a lady-in-waiting. 142Though Catherine could hardly refuse to receive Paul and his wife on Paul’s name day, the audience was brief and the subdued celebrations went ahead without her. Servants were confined to their everyday livery and the customary salute, music and toasts were all cancelled as a mark of respect. 143

Soon the wider implications of the crisis were on everyone’s lips. Princess Dashkova would scarcely mourn the favourite, observed her younger sister: ‘They hated one another.’ 144Personalities were scarcely the point, countered Alexander Vorontsov. Even those who had no connection with Lanskoy must regret his passing when they learned of its impact on Catherine: ‘The preservation of the empress is too interesting to us all.’ 145Riding to the rescue from Kremenchug, Potëmkin arrived at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July, having covered 760 miles in barely a week. He and Fëdor Orlov went straight to comfort their bereaved sovereign. On the following Sunday, they were joined briefly by Bruce, Osterman, Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshëv and Lev Naryshkin. Catherine was persuaded to ride out in her carriage with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Maria Perekusikhina, but not even such close friends could draw her out of her self-imposed seclusion. She continued to dine alone, seeing few apart from Bezborodko, Potëmkin, Orlov and her confessor. Though she received further brief visits from Paul and Maria Fëdorovna, she avoided the traditional rituals during the Dormition Fast. By 18 August, she felt well enough to write a jocular letter to the Prince de Ligne, explaining (without mentioning Lanskoy) that she had immersed herself in work on her universal etymological dictionary. Anticipating Ligne’s next visit to Russia, she teased him about his son’s abortive flight in the Montgolfier balloon that tore open in mid-air on 19 January:

If you arrive here by balloon, my Prince, I shall reconcile myself to this fine invention, which I have banned for fear of increasing the danger of fire among the wooden buildings of which we have too many in our territories. The crash of the balloon at Lyon has not caused this new method of travel to be believed in here. 146

Yet it was one thing to joke to a friend, another to face her Court. While the feast of St Alexander Nevsky on 30 August brought a welcome opportunity to see her elder grandson, the annual celebrations, transferred from the monastery to Tsarskoye Selo, were conducted in her absence. To deepen her misery, a courier arrived from Moscow next day to announce the death of Zakhar Chernyshëv. At the time of their dalliance in 1751, Catherine had been unable to imagine paradise without her dashing cavalier; now he had got there before her. 147

Having initially intended to remain in the country until 10 September, she returned to town five days early, travelling in a simple two-seater with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Anna Protasova, and sleeping in the Hermitage. The rooms she had occupied with Lanskoy carried too many memories, and it was not until the following spring that she returned to her usual Winter Palace apartments. Looking back, Catherine remembered the summer of 1784 as a perpetual series of battles to recover her equilibrium: ‘one to be fought, one to be won, one to be lost.’ 148Only on 8 September did she finally summon the courage to appear in public on the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. After mass, she endured a lengthy hand-kissing ceremony before retiring to the Hermitage for lunch with Potëmkin, a handful of friends, and Prince Repnin, who had come to request her permission to take his sick daughter abroad. 149‘In truth,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm, ‘it was such a big effort that on returning to my bedroom, I felt so exhausted that anyone else would have fainted, something which has never happened to me in my life.’ ‘If you want to know my true state,’ she continued a fortnight later:

I will tell you that for three months from yesterday I have been inconsolable over the irreparable loss I have sustained, that the sole improvement is that I have got used to human faces again, that otherwise my heart still bleeds just as it did at that first moment, that I do my duty and try to do it well, but that my grief is extreme, and such as I have never felt in my life, and it is now three months that I have been in this cruel situation, suffering like the damned. 150