Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

As a progressive, Betskoy was a fan of Classicism, which should have made him an ally of Falconet’s. But no: two powerful personalities clashed, and life in the capital turned into hell for the paranoid Falconet. Betskoy controlled the sculptor’s every step, accusing him of being slow (for good reason), of wasting state funds (also not without reason), and even of making serious artistic errors (the most controversial).

In particular, Betskoy maintained that Falconet had overly cut down the huge granite boulder intended for the pedestal, which had taken two and a half years to deliver to St. Petersburg (especially for this project). When the dynamic statue of Peter the Great (his head modeled by Collot) on horseback was placed on the pedestal, wags said it looked like “a small cliff squashed by a big horse.”

Still, Falconet’s main critic and adviser was, naturally, Catherine II, for whom the project was propaganda of the first order. That would explain the unusual fact that almost the day after his arrival in St. Petersburg, Catherine began systematic correspondence with him, which continued for many years.

In their letters, the empress and the sculptor discussed literally every detail of the monument: from the spot where it would be located to the emperor’s costume (a stylized Roman toga) to the character of the horse (Catherine worried it would turn out to be a “dumb animal”).

In almost every letter Catherine tried to calm and encourage Falconet, who constantly complained about his real and imaginary enemies: “Just laugh at the fools and go your way. That is my rule.”⁵

The sculptor’s farewell gift was the inscription he suggested for the pedestal: “For Peter I erected by Catherine II.” The empress changed it to: “For Peter I Catherine II,” an editing masterpiece of her political and literary acumen. Those words, which subtly but indubitably turned her into the legitimate heir of Peter the Great, should be enough to bury the myth of “semiliterate slut.”

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Moreover, when everything Catherine II wrote (including the memoirs, historical plays, comedies, opera libretti, stories, magazine articles and pamphlets, philosophical and historical works—for example, “Notes Regarding Russian History,” intended for her grandsons—and the numerous translations, personally composed decrees and laws, and her voluminous correspondence, with such international luminaries as Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert) is collected and published, it will run to a long line of heavy tomes.

The empress was a tireless worker, rising no later than six in the morning, and sitting down to writing, writing, writing, using two new pens a day. No Russian monarch before or after covered so much paper: of course she had the right to consider Elizabeth lazy. Yet Catherine was no graphomaniac: she had a self-deprecating view of her literary works.

Catherine, cleverly following in the footsteps of Elizabeth, whom she so disliked, continued to russify Peter’s cultural project as much as possible; the poet Prince Vyazemsky later summed up the paradox this way: “The Russian wanted to make Germans of us; the German tried to turn us into Russians.”⁶

Still, for Catherine, Peter remained the example and model; how close she measured up to him is subject for debate. But the constant unfavorable comparisons seem unfair now and based on anti-intellectual or sexist prejudices, since, as we know, her workday with paper and pen was no less intense than Peter’s celebrated days at the lathe or in shipbuilding, wielding his ax.

Catherine was not a spendthrift like Elizabeth, but she spent more generously on culture than Peter had. A good example is her acquisition of paintings, engravings, drawings, sculptures, and works in porcelain and silver that formed the basis of the Hermitage collections. She often said—coyly, no doubt—that she knew nothing about art. But which great figure with a famed art collection could claim to have done it all to his or her own taste? They all turned to professional advisers.

The appearance of Catherine’s agents at Parisian art auctions panicked her competitors: she outbid them for some of the Hermitage’s acclaimed Rembrandts, Murillos, and Turners this way. It was the first huge invasion of Russian money into the European art market.

Even the philosophe Diderot, who admired Catherine, had doubts at first about the success of her collecting (“It is impossible that Russia would ever accumulate enough painting that could inspire a true taste for art”),⁷ but soon he would write from Paris to his friend Falconet in St. Petersburg: “I am eliciting real public hatred, and do you know why? Because I am sending you paintings. The art lovers are howling, the artists are howling, the wealthy are howling.”⁸