Part 3

It was a matter of course that the daughter of Christian August should be educated by an evangelical pastor. In her little room against the church, so close that the sound of the organ came through, the parson instructed her and put her through her so-called _Prüfungen_. These examinations were high lights in a monotonous childhood. The reverend, black-robed gentleman did not scamp his duty like the music-master Roellig. He built himself into the very foundation of his pupil’s character. Although she ultimately decided that he was a pedant and a block-head, she never forgot his teachings. The ghost of her old teacher accompanied her to Russia where he frequently walked and talked, and never out of character. As a middle-aged Empress, she would often quote him thus: “The joys of this world, according to Herr Wagner, are not worth its pains”; or, “The world is not good for much, said the blessed Herr Wagner, because of original sin.” Or, “You say to me that the evils for which there is no remedy, can be met with peace and resignation. You learned that from your father; it is exactly the same thing that the blessed Herr Wagner, of ancient memory, used to say.” The pastor often discoursed to his pupil on the Last Judgment. Fike was so impressed with the difficulty of being saved that she began to have fits of weeping at twilight. Babet found her hiding behind the window curtains to indulge these melancholy thoughts, and induced the child to tell her the reason. Herr Wagner was forbidden to frighten Fike in the future with his sermons on the Last Judgment.

The pastor was the faithful representative of the Princess’s father. He was dear Papa’s man. The Prince of Anhalt, always on the march, could rest easy in the thought that his daughter was being firmly grounded in the doctrine of her fathers. In addition to her daily lessons with Herr Wagner, who was after all merely an army chaplain, she had higher religious education from the Lutheran pastor at Brunswick. By the time she was fourteen, the Prince could well afford to congratulate himself, as he did, on the thoroughness of his daughter’s religious foundation.

Yet Fike did not swallow Wagner whole; she argued with him. She declared it unjust that Marcus Aurelius and other heroes of antiquity should be damned because they had not known salvation. The pastor proved by chapter and verse that they were damned, but his pupil stubbornly defended her point. Babet Cardel was called in by the irate pedagogue and the governess patched up a peace between them. A second argument arose on the subject of chaos. Chaos, said the teacher, is what went before the world. “But what is Chaos?” demanded the pupil. And again Babet had to intervene and make peace. It was the same way with circumcision which the pastor refused to explain. Babet’s tact was once more called into service and order restored. It appears that Babet was not allowed to use the rod. Only dear Mama could do that. But a quick box on the ears was more in Mama’s manner.

Fike was conscious of solid obstacles in her world. If she had been a 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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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