Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Sure enough, just six days later, Harris reported Zorich’s dismissal, ‘conveyed to him very gently by the Empress herself’. Zorich exploded in bitter reproaches, probably about Potemkin. He had already been granted the exceedingly valuable estate of Shklov, with 7,000 souls and an ‘immense sum of ready money’. He was last recorded at Court on 13 May.¹⁷ A day later, Catherine met Serenissimus for dinner at the Kerekinsky Palace on the way home from Tsarkoe Selo: ‘The child had gone and that’s all,’ she wrote after discussing Potemkin’s military plans, ‘as for the rest, we’ll discuss it together…’. She was most likely referring to the object of her new-found happiness.

—

At the Kerekinsky, Prince Potemkin arrived with ‘Major Ivan Nikolaevich Rimsky-Korsakov’. Naturally, by the time Catherine parted with Zorich, she was already infatuated with a new friend. Zorich was still making blustering threats when Rimsky-Korsakov was appointed Potemkin’s adjutant on 8 May.¹⁸ Far from being a heartless hedonist, Catherine always experienced emotional crises, if not complete collapse, during these changes. Zorich was still brooding in St Petersburg when, according to Harris, Catherine contemplated recalling ‘the plain and quiet’ Zavadovsky. Potemkin ‘who has more cunning for effecting the purposes of the day than any man living, contrived to effect these good resolutions…’. He ‘introduced’ Korsakov ‘at the critical moment’.

A couple of days later, the Empress, along with her Court and many of Potemkin’s family, including two of his nieces, set off to stay at another of the Prince’s estates ‘to forget her cares…in the society of her new minion’. Potemkin’s estate was Eschenbaum (Osinovaya Rocha) ‘on the confines of Finland’. If one reads Catherine’s letter to Grimm from Eschenbaum, in which she raved about the views of lakes and woods from her window while grumbling that her entourage had to squeeze into a mere ten bedrooms, one would have no idea that her new passion had already hit a snag. Two grand and libidinous middle-aged women were competing for the attentions of Potemkin’s pretty adjutant.¹⁹

There were twenty guests out at Eschenbaum, including of course Potemkin’s old friend Countess Bruce, supposedly the sampler of Catherine’s lovers. Someone else – it must be Countess Bruce – was also attracted to the fine Korsakov. Catherine had noticed and hesitated before letting herself go. ‘I’m afraid of burning my fingers and it’s better not to lead into temptation…’, she wrote to Potemkin in an enigmatic appeal in which she seemed to be asking him to get someone to keep her distance: ‘I’m afraid that the last day dispelled the imaginary attraction which I hope is only one-sided and which can easily be stopped by your clever guidance.’ She obviously wanted the ‘child’ herself, but ‘I don’t want, wanting and I want, without wishing…that’s as clear as the day!’ Even in this oblique gibberish, it was clear she was falling in love – but wished the competition to be removed.

Potemkin’s ‘clever guidance’ did the trick. Countess Bruce, if it was she, backed off and Catherine claimed her new mignon.²⁰ The house-party ended. Two days later, on 1 June, Korsakov was officially appointed adjutant-general to the Empress. In an age of neo-Classicism, Rimsky-Korsakov, aged twenty-four, immediately struck her with his Grecian ‘ancient beauty’, so that she soon nicknamed him ‘Pyrrhus, King of Epirus’. In her letters to Grimm, she claimed he was so beautiful that he was ‘the failure of painters, the despair of sculptors’.²¹ Catherine seemed to choose alternate types because Korsakov was as elegant and artistic as Zorich has been muscular and macho: portraits show his exquisitely Classical features. He loved to sing, and Catherine told Prince Orlov that he had a voice ‘like a nightingale’. Singing lessons were arranged. He was showered with gifts – 4,000 souls and presents worth half a million roubles. Arrogant, vain and not terribly clever, he was ‘good-natured but silly.’²²

Once again, Catherine was wildly happy with her new companion: ‘Adieu mon bijou,’ she wrote to Potemkin in a summary of their special marriage. ‘Thanks to you and the King of Epirus, I am as happy as a chaffinch and I want you to be just as happy.’²³ With the Empress happy, the Prince, increasingly busy running the army and governing the south, was so supreme that when Zavadovsky finally returned to Petersburg to find another favourite ensconced in his old apartment, he was shocked that Potemkin ‘doesn’t have any balance against him. In all the centuries’, he grumbled to Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, ‘God has not created such a universal person as this. Prince P is everywhere and everything is him!’²⁴