Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

This passage is interesting not only because it reveals that an artist had his own carriage and servant, and not only because it is a vivid description of a typical attack by robbers for that time, but also because it mentions the man Zubov was going to see—Dimitri Kantemir.

Serene Prince Dimitri Kantemir was an exotic figure, yet characteristic of the Petrine era. The former ruler of Moldavia, which was then under Turkish rule, Kantemir spent many years of his youth as a hostage in Constantinople, where the Turks treated him with the greatest respect and allowed him to get a brilliant education.

Dimitri Kantemir became a polyglot, and his History of the Ottoman Empire, written in Latin and later published in French and English, received the approval of the philosopher Denis Diderot and Voltaire, who used it as a source for his tragedy Mahomet (1739). (And in the early twenty-first century in New York, I witnessed Turkish melodies and marches still being performed in the notation made more than three hundred years earlier by Kantemir.)

In 1711, a year after he inherited the Moldavian throne from his father, Dimitri Kantemir tried to free his country from the Turks, entering into a secret alliance with Peter I. That time, the attempt failed. Kantemir and his family fled to Russia, where he settled.

In Russia, Kantemir, just a year younger than Peter, became his chief adviser on all eastern and Turkish problems. Peter bestowed many gifts on Kantemir, gave him the highest-rank title of serene prince, and supported his historical research. Zubov illustrated one of Kantemir’s books, On the Mohammedan Religion.

One of Dimitri’s four sons, Antioch, was a wunderkind. In 1718, at the age of ten, Antioch gave a public speech in Greek at the Moscow Slavic-Greco-Latin Academy. In 1722 Antioch accompanied his father, who with Peter went on the legendary Persian Campaign, in which Russia tried to push the Ottoman Empire and Iran out of Transcaucasia. Peter’s army took Derbent and, later, Baku.

Antioch could observe Peter up close for seven months. The unbearable heat made Peter cut off his hair; it was carefully saved and made into a wig, which to this day ornaments the head of the famous “wax person,” the posthumous sculptural depiction of Peter the Great in life size, seated on a throne, created in 1725 by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli the elder and now located at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

We can imagine the shock felt by young Kantemir when Peter, fifty-two years old, his health undermined by his tempestuous lifestyle, died unexpectedly in 1725 (it is thought now that he had prostate cancer or an inflammation of the bladder). The tsar’s funeral was held in St. Petersburg’s Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, where Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, a prolific writer and close comrade-in-arms of Peter’s in church affairs, began his speech at the emperor’s grave with the emotional words that were memorized by Russian schoolchildren for almost two centuries: “What is this? What have we lived to see, O Russians? What do we see? What are we doing? Burying Peter the Great!”³⁵

His graveside sermon was not long; it should have taken fifteen minutes but lasted almost an hour because it was interrupted by the sobs and wailing of mourners. The speech and other panegyric works by Prokopovich celebrating the emperor became the foundation of the myth of Peter the Transformer, one of the most enduring cultural paradigms of Russian history.

Peter the Great was and perhaps remains the most popular Russian political figure of the new era, like Napoleon in France. Everyone agrees that his reforms were extraordinary in scope and significance. The disagreements come in the assessment of those reforms. He has his apologists and many severe critics.

Heated discussions about Peter’s role have continued for almost three hundred years, with alternating prevalence of the arguments pro and contra. The emperor’s proponents maintain that he led Russia onto the European stage, without which all of Russia’s subsequent great cultural achievements would have been impossible.

But at what price? counter their opponents. “The artificial state constructed by Peter moved for two centuries from crisis to crisis, engendering ever greater anger of its citizens, until it collapsed in blood and flames.”³⁶

It is doubtful that this argument will be resolved any time soon. The point is this: after Peter the Great, all political leaders of Russia, to this day, look over their shoulders at the first Russian emperor, imitating him or rejecting him, but inevitably measuring themselves against him.

This reaction is typical for the great cultural figures of Russia as well. None remained indifferent to Peter’s ideas and legacy. In their polemics about Peter the Great, they defined their own place in the continuing cultural and historical debates about Russia’s fate and path.

CHAPTER 2