boy her life would have been different. She would one day have ruled
over Anhalt-Zerbst instead of Fritz. But girls do not reign. In Fike’s
home, however, everything was ruled by women. The Princess Johanna
Elisabeth managed her husband and smacked her daughter. As between
Babet Cardel and Pastor Wagner, it was always Babet who decided things
and gave orders to the pastor. If Mama had been a Prussian General,
even under the close-fisted Frederick William who wore a short coat
because he was too stingy to buy cloth for a long one, she would
not have been content with the small pay and inferior post of the
Prince, her husband. The Princess was proud and ambitious. But she had
obvious faults as a tactitian; her nerves and quick temper sometimes
betrayed her. Babet, who ruled by common sense and reason, was a better
diplomatist. Fike had to admire Babet since she herself invariably
succumbed to Babet’s methods.
An old German Baroness who lived in the Stettin household says this
of Fike’s childhood: “Princess Sophie was born, grew up, and was
educated under my eyes. I witnessed her school instruction and her
progress and I helped her to pack her trunks before her departure (for
Russia). I enjoyed her confidence to a degree that entitled me to
believe that I knew her better than anybody else. Yet I had no idea
that she was destined to attain so much fame. In her youth I noticed
in her a serious, calculating and cold personality, which was as far
removed from anything distinguished or brilliant as it was from error,
eccentricity and frivolity. In a word, I thought her just an ordinary
person.”
If the Princess of Zerbst did not make much of her daughter, it is
not likely that one of her women would have held a different opinion.
Probably the young girl was sufficiently commonplace. It remained for
circumstances to make her into the unique and powerful personality that
she came to be. For the rest, it is true that at all stages of her life
she was more cool and calculating than she was eccentric and frivolous.
To this extent the Baroness was right.
3
Fike grew up in an atmosphere of illness. The first misfortune of the
kind which befell the family was when her mother lay nineteen weeks
in bed after her birth. The Princess had a delicate constitution.
In letters which are still preserved in the archives at Moscow in
a binding of pink plush lined with blue silk, she complains of the
“vapours” and the “crampe d’estomac” as afflictions from which she
habitually suffered. She could not endure blood-letting either for
herself or her children, and since this was the only resource of the
doctors of those days she was not a good patient.
Two daughters of the house died in infancy and two sons developed into
invalids. The elder had a genuine affliction, a dislocated hip, which
obliged him to walk with a crutch. The poor boy was dosed incessantly
and sent to the baths at Teplitz and Karlsbad but all in vain. The best
physicians in Germany were consulted but were never able to diagnose
his case until after his death, when he was “dissected.” His invalidism
made a profound impression on his sister. It was an expense which the
family could ill afford and it made the mother over-precious to her
second son, who, although he was not really delicate, was also sent
around to baths in search of health. The strain of the expense was long
remembered by Fike, who, as we have seen, sent the first money she ever
owned to pay for her brother’s sojourn at the Homburg baths.
With her governess, Fike read Molière’s plays in which various forms
of hypocrisy and hysteria are exposed and satirized. Through Babet’s
eyes, which had been opened by Molière, she viewed the cases of illness
about her. “You must know,” she afterwards wrote in a letter to Grimm,
“that Mademoiselle Cardel made me mistrustful toward all physicians
and medicine in general.” It remained a pet life-long prejudice.
Whenever, as Empress, she summoned a physician for a post, she usually
prefaced her appointment with the remark that she had no confidence in
his profession. She never lost a chance to criticize its pretensions.
“Tell me now,” she wrote, “why does the most Christian King assemble
all the charlatans to talk of their charlatanry? Does he believe in the
physicians?”
Her prejudice was of course not consistent. Babet Cardel, the scorner
of physicians, had never been able to cure her pupil of tone-deafness.
The Empress was sometimes plaintive about her lack and wondered
wistfully whether the physicians might not succeed where the teachers
had failed. “All that depends on the organization, does it not? Mine
is faulty. I long to hear and enjoy music, but in vain do I try. It
is noise and that is all. I long to send to your society of medicine a
prize for him who will invent an effective remedy against insensibility
to the sounds of harmony.”
Fike was herself a healthy child. She remembered only one attack of
illness in her Stettin years. Her recollection of this experience
gives us a picture of her home, its gloomy pieties and its crude
superstitions; above all, its wounded family pride due to the lameness
of the one bright hope of the house, the future Prince of Anhalt.
“It was the custom,” says Fike, “to kneel down every evening and
morning to say our morning and evening prayer. One evening as I was
praying on my knees, I fell to coughing so violently, that the strain
caused me to fall upon my left side, while sharp pains almost took away
my breath. Some one sprang to me and I was put to bed where I remained
three weeks. I lay always on the left side and had a cough, stitches
and fever. There was no proper doctor in the neighborhood. They gave
me remedies, but Heaven knows of what they consisted. Finally, after
much suffering, I was able to get up. When I was dressed it was seen
that I had taken on the form of a Z: my right shoulder was higher
than the left, the backbone had a zig-zag line, and the left shoulder
was hollow. My women and those of my mother who were taken into
consultation, decided to call my parents’ attention to it.
“The first thing done in the emergency was to command the strictest
silence about my condition. My parents were unhappy that one of their
children should be lame, the other deformed. Finally, after several
experts had been consulted with the greatest secrecy, it was decided
to seek out a skillful man who knew how to heal dislocations. The
search was vain, for they had a horror of calling in the only person
who had this kind of skill, because he was the executioner of the
place. They hesitated a long while, but finally decided to fetch him
secretly. Only Babet and a chamber-maid were taken into confidence.
The man examined me and ordered that every morning a girl, before she
had eaten, should rub with spittle first the shoulder and then the
spine. Then he himself prepared a kind of jacket which I was never to
remove by day or night except to change my linen. He came every other
day early in the morning to examine me further. Besides this he had me
wear a large black ribbon which went around my neck, passed over the
shoulder and the right arm, and was fastened in the back. In short, I
know not whether I had no tendency to become crooked or whether these
methods were effective. In any case, after a year and a half of such
treatment, hope for my health was restored. I did not lay aside the
uncomfortable jacket until I was ten or eleven years old.”
Fike’s inflammation of the lungs befell her at the age of seven. It
coincided with her period of deepest pity, her melancholy absorption
in the Last Judgment. She had been saturated with bigotry by the
conscientious long-faced Wagner. On her knees in prayer she was struck
down with a prolonged and serious illness. It was not an experience
which the seven-year-old sinner could ever forget, especially when
as a consequence she was obliged to wear for four long years an
uncomfortable strait-jacket designed by the local hangman. Pneumonia
and the Day of Judgment were welded in her mind. Having recovered
from this illness, she resumed her position as the healthy child
of the family. Not until she was fifteen years old did she fall ill
again. This was on the threshold of her Russian career when an attack
of pneumonia almost killed her while she was preparing to leave the
Lutheran church and adopt the Greek faith. It was not easy for the
daughter of Christian August and a descendant of the Anhalt Princes to
become a turncoat in the matter of religion.
[Illustration]
III
RUSSIA
The long line of Russian monarchs have all belonged to three houses:
the house of Rurik, the house of Romanov, and the house which was
founded by the Princess of Zerbst, half German and half Russian. The
house of Rurik and the house of Romanov culminated respectively in
the titanic figures of the Terrible Ivan and the Great Peter. After
them, the Ruriks and the Romanovs seemed to fall away as if exhausted
by the effort into a swift decline. The super-Czars were followed by
a twilight of feeble heirs who opened the way for usurpers and women.
Interlopers like Boris Gudunov and Sophie of Zerbst found it easy to
dispose of the descendants of these Great and Terrible fathers.
It appears that tyrants are usually under somebody’s thumb. They
are given to having favorites and to being ruled by them. Ivan
was influenced by the monk Sylvester and Peter by the pastry-cook
Menshikov. Neither was engaged in what is usually regarded as a
red-blooded masculine occupation, but they were powerful men through
their influence on their protectors who were autocrats. It is commonly
said of Peter that he sacrificed his son for the sake of the new Russia
which he had created, because Alexei was inimical to his father’s
work. Menshikov played a large objective part and no doubt a larger
psychological one in the torture and death of the miserable Czarevich.
Similarly, Ivan the Terrible followed the advice of his favorites in
browbeating the son whom he finally slew. “Give the son in his youth no
power,” said the monk Sylvester. “Break him with the rod; he will not
die but only grow stronger.”
Of all the murders which have disfigured the family-life of Russian
rulers, these two are perhaps the most revolting and at the same time
the most romantic. As themes they have intrigued the imaginations
of painters and dramatists. Ivan and Peter were primitive fathers
who recalled an age in which their deed would have been regarded as
blood-sacrifice and not as crime. They brought the practice of ritual
murder down into modern history. The inheritors of a dark tradition,
they helped to carry on a bad example for the future. Homicide in one
form or another, in family quarrels and palace-revolutions, was never
far away from the royal family of Russia. In all the struggles around
the dynasties and against them, violence has survived into modern times
as a Russian folk-way.
Peter the Great was a miracle of energy. He was a madman, who built and
destroyed with demonic power. If we knew the source of his phenomenal
energy, we should know one of the profoundest secrets of human nature.
Whence came his amazing drive, his mysterious complexities, his
staggering contradictions, his power nevertheless of being always at
one with himself in the supreme act of authority? We are forced to
believe that his enormous stature played some part in his psychological
complexity. He was six feet and seven inches tall, with the flashing
eyes of a magician and the soft lips of a woman. Memories of the
Norsemen and of Rurik the Viking who was the first ruler of Russia,
were dear to him. They urged him to the sea and to a life-long struggle
to procure for Russia adventurous outlets to the sea. He dreamed of a
campaign to India; as Rurik the Norseman had come to rule over Russia,
so Peter the Russian would one day come to rule over India. Through his
work, Europe and Asia would be united. He died without realizing this
magnificent dream but left it as a heritage for the greatest of the
women autocrats who came after him.
As the youngest son of old Alexis Michaelovich and his girl-wife,
Natalie Narishkin, Peter had at first little prospect of inheriting the
crown. But the death of his step-brother Feodor elevated Peter and his
half-brother Ivan to a double throne. The throne, which was literally
a double one built for two Czars, is still to be seen in the Kremlin.
Behind the seat of Ivan is a concealed opening through which Sophie
Alexeievna, who was regent for six years, was accustomed to whisper
responses to the weak-witted Ivan. The high-spirited Peter soon tired
of a situation which enabled his sister to rule Russia from behind the
scenes. At the age of seventeen, already a physical giant, he secured
from his brother a voluntary abdication and forced his domineering
sister into a convent. His hatred for Sophie was as intense as was his
love for his mother, the beautiful young widow who spent her life among
the colored shadows of the Kremlin. His victory over Sophie gave Peter
his first taste of violence. Then came the revolt of the Streltsi, in
which the ambitious Sophie shared. Hastening home from Europe, Peter
executed the conspirators before his sister’s convent window. With his
own hands, he severed their heads from their bodies. This was his
first actual taste of blood.
After his return home, Peter found his first wife, Eudoxia, too dull
and too orthodox. She was sent to languish with shorn locks in a
convent, while Peter began a new life with his good-natured concubine,
Catherine I, who had been a camp-follower in her time but was soon to
become an Empress and deign to let Princes kiss her hand. Peter shared
her favors with his best friend Menshikov, a practice not uncommon
in mediæval friendships. To Catherine and Menshikov Peter remained
loyal for the rest of his life. All his aberrations were in the nature
of orgies from which he always returned to his permanent favorites.
“He was a real artist in lust,” said Admiral Villebois; “and, though
hard-working, he abandoned himself from time to time to attacks of
amorous frenzy in which age and sex mattered little to him.”
2
The history of morals in Russia differs from the history of morals
in the rest of Europe. This was once pointed out by Catherine the
Great in a letter to Sénac de Meilhan: “Every stranger who writes of
Russia ignores the ancient cast of its manners and morals and by this
he misleads himself many and many a time.” The woman who made this
comment on Russian life was born and brought up under the concentrated
influence of the German Reformation. Her early education taught her to
appreciate the difference.
The religious, political, and economic development of Russia has
been unique and the development of morals has been equally so. The
introduction of Christianity in the eleventh century was accompanied by
no great revolutionary upheaval. The Greek Church with its bejewelled
priests was assimilated by the Russians with suspicious ease. Religious
persecution, notwithstanding the Raskolnik burnings, never went so far
in Russia as it did in Western Europe. The Russian did not tremble
before an awful God but made a household pet of him, hanging the
icon in the corner of the best room and surrounding it with family
portraits. As late as the seventeenth century, a serious European
scholar published a work on the subject: Are the Russians Christians?
They had accepted the Christian symbols and imbued them with the pagan
spirit.
In Russia religion remained a passion play. The people slumbered on
in their mediæval idolatry while the rest of Europe struggled through
an age of passionate protestantism. The rise of private property in
the west, which was logically bound up with the monogamous inheriting
family, had no corresponding period in Russia. The break-up of the
psychology of communism which came with the growth of private property
in Western Europe, had no survival value among the Russians. The
peasants continued to hold their land in common and pagan habits
survived within the church.
Standards of conduct which derived from the Greeks were in good odor
all the way down through the eighteenth century. This is especially
true with regard to sexual relationships. That curious and fascinating
chapter in the history of European morals which deals with the rise
of romantic love had no duplicate in the history of Russia. There was
never any Russian Sir Galahad. The Byzantine Madonna never attained
the prestige of her Italian sister. She had an oriental cast of
features slightly suggestive of the queen of the playing cards. Her
dark beauty betrayed her Greek and rather pagan origin. Besides she
belonged to a cloistered sex which spent its life in terems, those
semi-oriental apartments in which the women and children were secluded
and which differed from harems only in that the Russians were not
polygamous.
The seclusion of women continued to exist after the acceptance of
Christianity and Madonna-worship. It explains why romantic love did not
flower in Russia with the beginning of the Christian centuries. While
the Russians raised altars to the wonder-working virgin they continued
to build churches to masculine saints who reigned in pairs. Saint Peter
and Saint Paul were enshrined together; Saint Boris and Saint Gleb,
Saint Kyril and Saint Method were their Russian counterparts, just as
the two Czars Peter and Ivan were enthroned together. The romantic
value which the Russians attached to brotherly love is seen in the way
in which large families of brothers clung together after marriage with
the same degree of loyalty and dependence. It colors the myths and
legends of the country. Masson relates the following: “It is singular
enough that in the same countries that were said to have been inhabited
by a society of women (Amazons) who proscribed all men, a society of
Zaporogue Cossacks have dwelt, who would not suffer a single woman
among them, recruiting their forces solely by carrying away youths
from the neighboring lands. This barbarous republic was destroyed by
Potiomkin, and they who composed it were distributed in the different
armies and among the other Cossacks.” That such a myth could still
persist and be believed in the Russia of the eighteenth century is
not surprising when we remember that, prior to this century, all the
visible political and social life of the country was, as in ancient
Greek, carried on exclusively by men.
It was Peter the Great who changed all this. With his usual way of
regimenting everybody, he commanded the women to come out of their
terems and take part in society. But just as the Russian men clung to
their beloved beards when Peter commanded them to shave, so the women
clung to their precious privacy. Peter brooked no nonsense: he shaved
the men by force and sent the military officers to fetch the women to
balls and dinner parties. The ladies, however, showed courage. They
resisted emancipation bravely all through Peter’s reign and for a long
time afterward. It was not until a generation later, during the reign
of the Empress Elisabeth, that the Russian women assimilated the idea
and began to enjoy the free life which Peter’s ukas had unlocked for
them.
3
After the death of the great Czar a woman sat for the first time on
the throne of Russia. The autocrat who had killed his son because he
was incompetent to rule left his country to a woman who could neither
read nor write. Good-natured, tawdry, and illiterate, the second wife
of Peter the Great became Catherine I, autocrat of all the Russias. She
ushered in a regiment of women. For three-quarters of a century Russia
was ruled by women monarchs. Except for the brief reigns of Peter II
and Peter III, the eighteenth century was dominated by three women
autocrats, Anna Ivanovna, Elisabeth Petrovna, and Catherine Alexeievna.
Russians, priests and peasants alike, who had been brought up to
believe such proverbs as: “A chicken is not a bird, nor is a woman
human” and “The more you beat the wife the better tastes the borstch,”
were obliged to bow the knee three times in succession to autocrats in
skirts. Among the Raskolniks were consistent fanatics who had to be
knouted because they refused to take the oath of allegiance to women.
Catherine I, who had eleven children, was survived by only two of
them: the melancholy Anne, married for a strip of sea-coast, and the
frivolous Elisabeth, who remained unwed. The Empress left a will
bequeathing the crown to the twelve-year-old son of the murdered
Alexei. But the boy died of the smallpox after a brief reign of two
years, and another Empress ascended the throne. His successor was Anna
Ivanovna, daughter of the weak-witted Ivan, who had “of his own free
will” surrendered the crown to Peter the Great. Ivan’s daughter, who
had been considerably Germanized since leaving her Russian terem to
become a Duchess of Courland, was now enthroned as supreme autocrat.
She was the first of the two Annas, both unbeautiful and unpopular.
Having no children, she adopted a niece, Anna Leopoldovna, the daughter
of a favorite sister. Her niece was married to Prince Anthony Ulrich of
Brunswick, a poor shadow of a man whom she much disliked and by whom
she was much disliked in return. Nevertheless, they had a large family
of children, the first of whom was destined to become the infant Czar,
Ivan VI. Scarcely was this child born when Empress Anna died, leaving
the regency for the infant Czar in the hands of Bühren, her favorite.
The mother of Ivanushka did not long submit to this arrangement. She
contrived to send Bühren to Siberia and had herself made regent in his
place.
Anna Leopoldovna was a recluse and a sloven. She left the government
to her minister, and reverted to the old terem life, spending her
days in dishabille with her favorite, Julie von Mengden and Julie’s
numerous female relations. Her neglected husband was more neglected
than ever. The Regent became more and more invisible; her retirement,
more and more obsessional. She only went forth on moonlit nights to
take the air. Ivanushka was shown to the public from a balcony on state
occasions, when for instance the Persian Ambassadors brought the first
elephants to Moscow. As the Imperial family withdrew from sight, gossip
about them ran faster and faster. The Regent was only living as women
had formerly always lived in the Russian terems, but her way of life
was now regarded as reprehensible and scandalous. Julie von Mengden,
her favorite, was after all a harmless, unambitious person but she
became a popular bogy. Anna Leopoldovna was unable to reign because
she was too shy to show herself. One of the duties of her office was
what Catherine the Great called “representation” and she neglected it.
Consequently she lasted only one year.
4
In the meantime Elisabeth Petrovna had been living her own life in
her own way. Having signed her dying mother’s will, for Catherine
I could not read or write, she retired to private life apparently
without regret and left the crown to her half-brother, Peter II. The
Empress Anna who followed Peter was as ugly as Elisabeth was beautiful.
From jealousy she drove the debonair Princess away from the capital.
Elisabeth lived in the country and shared the life of the peasants.
She had a profound liking for low company and could not avoid being
picturesque. In the company of her lover Shubin, she took part in all
the peasant festivals. She loved to wear men’s clothes and for years
wore nothing else. Her tall figure and radiant beauty were at their
best in masculine attire. When she was obliged as Empress to return
to skirts again, she introduced a fashion at court of balls called
“metamorphoses,” where all the women were obliged to dress as men and
all the men as women. The metamorphoses were not popular with the
diplomats who tangled themselves hopelessly in their skirts while the
Empress marched about gracefully and happily in her velvet breeches.