SIMON DIXON Religious Ritual at the Eighteenth-Century Russian Court
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SIMON DIXON Religious Ritual at the Eighteenth-Century Russian Court in MICHAEL SCHAICH (ed.), Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 217–248 ISBN: 978 0 19 921472 3 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 8 Religious Ritual at the Eighteenth-Century Russian Court SIMON DIXON Since there is no monograph on the eighteenth-century Russian court, and even its secular ceremonies have attracted only limited attention, its religious ritual has never been systematically studied. 1 Indeed, as Peter the Great and his successors are widely supposed to have transformed the court into an icon of secular cosmopolitanism, the subject might seem unpromising. Inspired by Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii's emphasis on the binary opposition between old and new,2 Richard S. Wortman not only suggests that 'the triumphal entry had displaced the religious procession as the central public ritual of Russian monarchy' as early as 1696, but also stresses the milita- rization of ecclesiastical ritual under Peter, whose regime 'laid claim to Muscovite ceremonies, but changed them freely to give religious sanction to the principle of utility, Western ways and the unchallenged supremacy of secular power'. 3 I. A. Chudinova similarly insists that eighteenth-century reforms signalled the collapse of a medieval liturgical culture whose every element- visual, aural, and textual-had been organically related to the others in a balanced, integral whole. In its place, Peter's drums and trumpets, his cannonades and his fusillades, combined with 1 N. E. Volkov, Dvor russkilch imperatorov v ego proshlom i nastoiasluhem (St Petersburg, 1900), compiles relevant legislation; N. A. Ogarkova, Tsererrumii, pr<l<,dneswa, muzyka russkogo dvora XVIIl-nachalo XIX veka (St Petersburg, 2004), is much more substantial than 0. Iu. Zakharova, Svetskie tseremonia!_y v Rossii. XVIII-nachala XX v. (Moscow, 2001). 2 Ju. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskij, 'The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (Up to the End of the Eighteenth Century)', in eid., The Semiotics ef Russian Cu/Jure, ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor, 1984), 3-S5· 3 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios ef Puwer: M,yth and Ceremo1!J in Russian Monarclry, i. From Peter the Great to the Death ef Nu:holas I (Princeton, 1995), 49, 60, 62, 69, and passim. For Wortman's debt to Lotman, see the discussion of his book in 'Kak sdelana istoriia', Novot uteratumoe oboqenie, 56/4 (2002), 42-66, at 63. SIMON DIXON traditional carillons and chants to create a new kind of theatrical spectacle contributing simultaneously to the secularization of the church and the sacralization of tsar and state.4 No one could deny the force of such arguments. Yet the fact that a ceremony changed in form and meaning is scarcely a reason for ignoring it, and the following account, emphasizing practice rather than ideology, will show that religious ritual, in whatever revised form, continued to play a significant part in Russian court culture throughout the eighteenth century. The Court and the Sources far its History Whereas the peripatetic nature of Peter I's (1682-1725) early court is encapsulated by campaign journals (pokhodnye zhurnaly) tracing his route marches during the Great Northern War, the later, peaceful years of his reign required a different sort of record to account for the sedentary regime of banquets, balls, and fireworks focused on the household of his second wife, Catherine.5 The first such journal, covering the period 1July to 1 November 1726, dates from Catherine I's (1725-7) own reign. Following a brief return to Moscow under Peter II (1727-30), Anna's (1730-40) re-establishment of the court in St Petersburg signalled a period of expansion and stability reflected in the maintenance of a detailed ceremonial journal, whose first extant version runs from 11 May to 30 October 1734. The following year saw the publication of the first court calendar (Pridvornyi kalendar') in a series that lasted until 1917,6 and 1736 marked the start of a more or less uninterrupted sequence of records subse- quently known as chamberlains' journals (kamer-fur'erskie zhur- naly). 7 Though the initial volumes described only major + I. A. Chudinova, Penie, zyo,ry, ritual· Topografo.a tserkovno-rnuzykal' noi kul' tury Peterburga (St Petersburg, 1994), passim. 5 See Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age I/[Peter the Great (New Haven, 1998), 248-g7. 6 Svod,ryi katalog russkoi knigi gra;:Juianskoi pechati XVIII veka 172J1800, 5 vols. (Moscow, 196!r75), iv. 255-6o, notes that the first extant copy dates from 1736. 7 [S. Sobolevskii], Iuma[y i kamer-fur'erskie ;:Jiuma[y 169J1774 godov (Moscow, 1867), lists the various original titles.Journals for 16g5 to 1774 were privately printed between 1853 and 1855 in an edition of 102 copies intended primarily for distribution within the imperial family. Christine Thomas at the British Library has established that Sobolevskii's own set was acquired by the British Museum for £25 in 1873. Subsequent volumes (consulted at Helsinki University Library, to whose staff I remain indebted) were published serially, the volumes for 1817 being the last to appear in 1916. Religious Ritual at the Russian Court 219 occasions, these journals incorporated a day-to-day record by the mid-1760s, and such was their degree of detail in the second half of Catherine II's (1762-96) reign that the volume for 1795 amounts to more than 1,000 printed pages. This extraordinary body of material, hitherto little exploited by historians,8 forms the principal source for this essay, which concentrates on the period between the accession of Anna in 1730 and the death of Catherine II in 1796. Restrictions of space have obliged me merely to sketch several significant aspects of the subject, not least dress, and I have said nothing at all about music. 9 Several limitations of the chamberlains' journals must also be acknowledged. First, they are incomplete. Nothing survives for 1740, 1741, 1747, or 1777; records of the Great Fast of 1753 are also lost; illness and laxity delayed the journal's submis- sion for almost two years towards the end of Elizabeth's (1741-61) life; 10 the entries for Peter III's (1761-2) brief reign break off at I March 1762; information on some of the court's visits to Moscow is either patchy or missing. Such gaps can often be filled, 11 and they do not prevent us from establishing long- term patterns. Even at their most detailed, however, the journals offer little sense of what went wrong, though it was only natural for ambition occasionally to exceed execution. At the consecra- tion of the cathedral at Sofiia on 20 May 1788, Catherine ll's secretary not only witnessed an argument when Metropolitan Gavriil (Petrov) initially refused to serve with the dean-shaven Father A. A. Samborskii, but also realized, too late, that no one had invited the knights of the Order of St Vladimir, created in 1782 at the height of the Empress's fascination with her 'Greek project': Potemkin would not have forgotten, Catherine 8 An important exception is John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great· Life and Legend (New York, 198g), which says little about court ritual. Historians of music and the theatre have also made use of the journals. 9 This last deficiency is partly compensated for by Chudinova, Penu, zvo'!)I, ritual, and by the same author's contributions to A. L. Porfir'eva (ed.), Muzykat'!)li Peterburg: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', 3 vols. (St Petersburg, 1996-g), see, in particular, i. 24-35; ii. 456---78; and iii. 240-50. 10 Kamer-far' erski.e dwmaly [henceforth cited as Jlf,?ft with years in brackets followed by page references] (1753), 21; (1759), 219---20, 'Raport Kamer-Fur'era Vasiliia Rubanovskago v Pridvornuiu Kontoru, ot 12 liuniia 1761 goda, s predstavleniem Kamer-Fur'erskikh Zhurnalov s I Genvaria 1759 goda po 25 Sentabria 1760 goda'. 11 e.g., Catherine II's multiple visits to the Dormition Cathedral in 1775 are recorded in (Prot A G. Levshin], Istoricheskoe opisanu pcrvostol'nago v Rossii kh:rama Moskovskago bol'shogo Uspenskago Sobora (Moscow, 1783), 123--sS. 220 SIMON DIXON remarked. 12 Most frustratingly of all, since the kamer-fur'erskie zhurnaly reveal nothing about the content of the services, it is impossible to test plausible recent claims that the example of the chapels royal led the parish churches of St Petersburg to shorten their services. 13 Still, while archives may ultimately illuminate individual episodes in greater detail, the rich printed sources reveal patterns of worship which have hitherto passed almost entirely unnoticed, and it is these that form the principal subject of this chapter. The Ritual Setting Outside the September pilgrimage season, Muscovite religious ritual was largely confined to the Kremlin: the tsars were crowned in its Dormition Cathedral (Uspenskii sobor), worshipped in the Cathedral of the Annunciation (Blagoveshchenskii sobor) and a variety of chapels in the neighbouring palaces, and were buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael (Arkhangel 'skii sobor).