The Icon and the Axe

Polyphonic baroque music also rushed in to challenge the older Russian forms of chant; and original secular dramas were produced for the first time. The first two were written and produced in rapid succession in the autumn of 1672 by the pastor of one of the German churches in Moscow, Johann Gregory. Four other plays and two ballets followed, with Gregory's original cast of sixty from the foreign suburb of Moscow soon augmented by recruits from the Baltic regions. Performances were given in both German and Russian in settings that ranged from private homes and the Kremlin to a specially built wooden theater. Ukrainians and White Russians also wrote and staged a number of the "school dramas" that had been popular in those Latinized regions. Music accompanied most of these performances, so that Russia "first became acquainted with secular singing and secular instrumental music not in life, but in spectacles."80

The overlapping of old and new sounds at the court of Alexis was likened by his English doctor to "a flight of screech owls, a nest of Jackdaws, a pack of hungry Wolves, seven Hogs on a windy day, and as many cats. . . ."81 Nowhere was the cacophony greater than at Alexis' second wedding reception in the Kremlin, an affair which lasted most of the night and contrasted with his first puritanical wedding of 1645, in which no music was permitted. There was a kind of restoration atmosphere about Moscow in these last years of Alexis' reign. In the instructions of 1660 to his first ambassador to the restored English monarchy Alexis requested that "masters in the art of presenting comedies" be brought back to Russia.82 The first ambassador from Restoration England staged "a handsome Comedie in Prose" with musical accompaniment on arrival in Moscow four years later.83 Gregory's plays were of the "English comedy" variety; and Alexis' second wife (whom he married early in 1671, two years after the

death of his first) was from the Marx Maryshkin family which was close to foreigners including Scottish royalists who had fled the Puritan Protectorate in England.

In many ways 1672 marked "the end of the secular isolation of Russia."84 The Tsar's new wife produced a son, the future Peter the Great, and the exultant Alexis dispatched to all the major countries of Europe a "great embassy"85 which both announced the birth and prefigured the trip that Peter himself was to take West at the end of the century. Another indication in 1672 of the coming of age of Russia as a full member of the European state system was the appearance of a sumptuously colored and officially sponsored Book of Titled Figures, with 65 portraits of foreign as well as Russian rulers. These relatively lifelike pictures of European statesmen were identified as the work of individual artists in sharp contrast to the idealized, anonymous images of purely Orthodox saints that had previously dominated Russian painting.80

Already under Alexis the semi-sanctified title of tsar was giving way to the Western title of emperor. Although the title was not formally adopted until the time of Peter, Alexis' new Polish-designed and Persian-built throne of the 1660's carried the Latin inscription Potentissimo et In-victissimo. Moscovitarium lmperatori Alexio.H1 Subtly, the distinctively modern idea was being implanted of unlimited sovereignty responsible only to the national ruler. The "great crown" that arrived in June, 1655, from Constantinople contained a picture of the Tsar and Tsarina where symbols of God's higher sovereignty used to be; and pictures of Alexis began to replace those of St. George on the seal of the two-headed eagle.88 To the large group of dependent foreigners in Muscovy, Alexis was no longer the leader of a unique religious civilization but a model European monarch. As Pastor Gregory wrote in a poem of 1667:

. . . how can I praise enough

the incomparable tsar, the great prince of the Russians?

Who loves our German people more than Russians

Dispensing posts, distinctions, grants and riches.

? most praiseworthy Tsar, may God reward you.

Who would not be glad to live in this land?80

Secular curiosity was reaching out in every direction. Russians acquired their first regular postal contact with the West90 and, in 1667, made their first use of astronomical calculations for navigation91 and sent their first trade caravan to Peking, empowered to negotiate with the Chinese emperor. The head of the delegation was to bring back a favorable report on the literacy and civic spirit engendered by the Confucian tradition.92 Within Russia itself, Alexis transferred artistic talent from sacred to secular

activities. Icon painting in the Kremlin was placed under the administrative supervision of the armory; and the most important new construction inside the Kremlin in the late years of Alexis' reign was undertaken not for the church but for the foreign ministry, whose director surrounded himself not with icons but with clocks and calendars.93