Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design and Building Projects Under Catherine the Great Jennifer Milam

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Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design and Building Projects under Catherine the Great Jennifer Milam

abstract An emerging cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century bolstered the search for the foundations of a shared humanity across the boundaries of different cultures, which was one of the central aspects of Enlightenment thought. Similar ideas and principles transformed the traditions of European garden design in the second half of the eighteenth century with William Chambers’s writings on Chinese gardens suggesting aesthetic values that both paralleled and rivalled those found in the English gardens of his contemporaries. In 1771, Catherine the Great translated Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757) into Russian, which led to the creation of the largest complex of chinoiserie in any eighteenth-century European garden. Taking as my focus the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo, I explore the tensions between cosmopolitanism, exoticism, and imperialism in Russian garden design under Catherine the Great.

author Jennifer Milam is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney. She is the author of “Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art” (2011) and “Fragonard’s Playful Paintings: Visual Games in Rococo Art” (2006), and co-editor with Melissa Hyde of “Women, Art and The Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe” (2003). Her current project addresses cosmopolitanism and nationalism in eighteenth-century garden design.

Le roi de la Chi-i-i-i-ne Quand il a bien bu-u-u-u-u Fait une plaisante mi-i-i-ne.—Catherine the Great1

For the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo, Catherine ii ordered the most expansive example of the taste for chinoiserie in eighteenth-century Europe.2 When faced with a cost estimate of her imaginary China, which included the creation of two artificial hills of considerable height, a theatre, a substantial pavilion, and a complete village with more than forty buildings, Catherine balked initially, but then gave approval to her team of architects, surveyors, gardeners, and craftsmen, reportedly saying, “Very well, let it be my caprice.”3 Unlike other anglo-chinois European gardens of the same period, which typically included some exotic feature of chinoiserie, this imagined Chinese space was not hidden away as a feature to be happened upon and experienced through surprise and wonder. Instead, many of these enormous Chinese features and structures could be seen from both the entrance to the estate and as a principal vista from the famed Cameron Gallery (see Figure 1).4 As both 1 Catherine the Great wrote this poem in a private letter during 1781 to her frequent correspondent, Charles Joseph de Ligne, a French diplomat and man of letters. See Les lettres de Catherine ii au Prince de Ligne (Bruxelles et Paris: Librarie nationale d’art et d’histoire, 1924), 38. Also cited in Alexander Lukin, The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia’s Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations since the Eighteenth Century (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 12; and Barbara Widenor Maggs, Russia and “le rêve chinois”: China in Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature (Oxford:Voltaire Foundation, 1984), 108, see also n63. 2 Chinoiserie (kitayshchina in Russian) appeared in Russian architecture prior to the reign of Catherine the Great. One of the first examples was the Lacquered Study at Monplaisir Palace (1714–23) in the Lower Garden of Peterhof, which dates to the early eighteenth century and includes red, black, and gold lacquered panels in an “Oriental” style created by Russian painters and craftsmen. I would like to thank Katja Abramova for her research assistance and transla- tions from Russian sources, and her sister Maria Abramova for photographs of the Chinese Palace and the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo. 3 This explanation of the origin of the term “caprice” in landscape architecture, which was used in the naming of the two manmade hills that included cut-through arches, Chinese pavilions, and unusual plantings, is found in E. Gollerbakh, Detskosel’skiye dvortsy, muzei i parki [Palaces, Museums, and Parks at Detskoye Selo] (Petrograd: n.p., 1922), 83. See also Dimitri Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 171–72. 4 Shvidkovsky discusses garden design and architecture at Tsarskoye Selo as an “ideological system determined by the empress” in which she built “her ideal country of the Enlightenment.” Shvidkovsky, “Catherine the Great’s Field

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University russian garden design 117 landscape and architecture, “China” at Tsarskoye Selo stood out as a destination, enticing people to travel into the garden and enjoy it as a space of cosmopolitan imagination. What did it mean to imagine a voyage to China in Russia under Catherine the Great? In this article, I place this imaginary voyage within a broader contextual understanding of the anglo-chinois garden in eighteenth-century Europe as a space informed by cosmopolitan thought—a physical context in which forms from the East and the West were not only juxtaposed for comparison but were also merged into a harmonious natural environment, and where an idea of travel encouraged cultural contact, either as a visual framework for self-reflection or to signal a readiness to borrow from other lands and civilizations in the formation of intellectual, cultural, and artistic patterns.5 My interest in garden design as an expression of cosmopolitan thought is informed by a desire to seek out the aesthetic implications of cosmopolitanism as a visual experience. In considering this Russian material, I have analysed not only the actual garden designs ordered by Catherine the Great, but also her correspondence with major writers of the Enlightenment who were engaged in the develop ment of cosmopolitan ideals. I have also examined the writings of the most important figure in the development of a litera ture of garden design in eighteenth-century Russia, Andrey Timofeyevich Bolotov, who was a provincial nobleman and the author of countless essays on the topic in the Economicheskiy

of Dreams: Architecture and Landscape in the Russian Enlightenment,” in Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present, ed. James Cracraft, Daniel Bruce Rowland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 56–57. 5 Cosmopolitanism in eighteenth-century Russia remains relatively unexplored within the relevant scholarship. For some discussion of the use of the term in contemporary travel writing, literature, and thought, see Sergei Kozlov, Russkiye puteshestvenniki Novogo vremeni: imperskiy vzglyad ili vospriyatiye kosmopolita [Russian Travellers in the 18th and in the 19th centuries: Imperial View or Cosmopolitan Perception], in Beyond the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context, ed. Tetsuo Mochizuki (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2008), 133–47; O. Fishman, Kitay v Evrope: mif i realnost’ (13–18 v.) [China in Europe: Myth and Reality (13th–18th Centuries)] (Saint Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskoye vostokovedeniye, 2003), 404; and Maggs, 141. For an introduction to European notions of cosmopolitanism during the eighteenth century, see Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977).

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University 118 jennifer milam magazin.6 While this article does not directly address Bolotov as a garden designer and theorist, it makes use of the ideas that he published at the end of Catherine’s “plantomania” in order to consider Russian gardens in relation to developing notions of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and imperialism in the late eighteenth century.7 In an article entitled “Some Thoughts on Russian Gardens” (1786), Bolotov theorized for the first time in Russian history what it might mean to develop a national style of garden design: “At the moment there is a big mess in garden fashions in Europe. There are constant changes, and there is no universal trend yet. It would therefore be wise to be cautious and not to hurry to borrow styles from other countries.”8 Bolotov further states that Russians should start creating gardens in their own taste, but he does not specify what that might be; instead, he sums up his thoughts by proposing that “knowledge of gardens from other countries should be used by us when necessary. We should use the best ideas that are most appropriate for our circumstances, add something from ourselves, and create something new.”9 This issue of cultural borrowing is an important one because eighteenth-century palace and garden design in Russia is too often dismissed in the field as merely derivative and purely driven by competitive excess.10

6 For an introduction to Bolotov’s writings on garden design, see Margrethe Floryan, Gardens of the Tsars: A Study of the Aesthetics, Semantics and Uses of Late 18th-Century Russian Gardens (Portland: Sagapress, 1996), 56–70. For an analytical approach to Bolotov’s writings related to garden design and his atti- tudes towards nature, see Andreas Schönle, The Ruler in the Garden: Politics and Landscape Design in Imperial Russia (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 116–63. 7 Catherine described her own obsession with gardening as “plantomania” in a letter to Voltaire (25 June 1772). See W.F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767 in the English Text of 1768 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 163. 8 “S sadami vo vsey Yevrope proiskhodit velikaya beriberda i raznoobraznye peremeny, i nikakogo eshche odnogo vseobshchego vkusa ne ustanovilos’. Vsego by blagorazumneye bylo byt’ nam koliko mozhno ostorozhnymi i ne speshit’ perenimat’ manery u drugikh.” Andrey Timofeyevich Bolotov, Ekonomicheskiy magazin 26 (1786): 60. 9 “Imeya svedeniya o sadakh raznikh gosudarstv, mozhem imi pri sem sluchaye pol’zovat’sya, i izvlekaya iz vsekh luchshiye i boleye s obstoyatel’stvami nashymi soobraznye veshchi, prisoyedinyat’ k nim nechto ot sebya, i chrez samoye to sostavim nechto osoboye.” Andrey Timofeyevich Bolotov, Ekonomicheskiy magazine 26 (1786): 62. 10 For an exploration of the relationship between the building spree during the reign of Catherine the Great and Russia’s westernization, see Albert J. Schmidt,

The owners of Russian palaces vied with one another and with their European peers in their building projects. Prince Yusupov, for example, explained the purpose of his Moscow estate as one of conspicuous consumption: “As Arkhangel’skoye is not kept for income, but rather to cost money and to be enjoyed, one has to do one’s best to buy what is rare and to make everything better than it is elsewhere.”11 Such appetites for luxury goods were well known in the European markets at the time: in referring to the first major commission he received from Catherine ii, Josiah Wedgewood described how he “trembled for the Russian service” and worried that if it did not please the tsarina he would be afforded no further opportunities to increase his trade with the Russian court.12 Although Catherine lamented the enor mous costs of such expansive building programs in a letter to Friedrich Melchior Grimm, she also acknowledged that it was an uncontrollable obsession: “Our storm of construction now rages more than ever before, and it is unlikely that an earthquake could destroy as many buildings as we are erecting. Construction is a sort of devilry, devouring a pile of money, and the more you build, the more you want to build. It’s simply a disease, something like a drinking fit—or, perhaps, just a habit.”13 Such comments made

“Westernization as Consumption: Estate Building in the Moscow Region during the Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 4 (1995): 380–419. 11 Cited in M. Iljin, “Russian Parks of the Eighteenth Century,” Architectural Review 135 (February 1964): 109. 12 Further analysis of Wedgewood’s desire to access Russian markets can be found in a series of articles by Neil McKendrick, including McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley: An Inventor Entrepreneur Partnership in the Industrial Revolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 14 (1964): 1–33 ; and McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques,” Economic History Review 12, no. 3 (1960): 408–33 . See also Herbert H. Kaplan, “Russian Commerce and British Industry: A Case Study in Resource Scarcity in the Eighteenth Century,” in Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A.G. Cross (Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1983), 325–47. 13 “Strast’ k stroitel’stvu – eto d’yavol’shchina, ona pogloshchayet den’gi, i chem bol’she ty stroish, tem bol’she tebe khochetsya stroit’. Eto tak zhe op’yanyaet, kak vino.” Translation from William Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 262. Also cited in Antoine Chenevière, Russian Furniture: The Golden Age 1780–1840, trans. Anna Borisovna Bely and Marilyn Caron-Delion (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 22.

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University 120 jennifer milam by the most prominent patrons of the day confirm the extent to which Russians followed fads of building fashion, which is true on one level. But I would also argue that another aspect of this impulse relates to an expanded notion of commercial humanism, which had circulated among European philosophers and mer cantile apologists since the early seventeenth century and was increasingly used to frame universal standards in matters of European good taste, something that Thomas Schlereth has described as a primary feature of Enlightenment cosmo poli tanism.14 To illustrate this point further, in this article I consider the instances of cultural borrowing in Catherine ii’s first major building project—the Chinese Palace at Oranienbaum—before returning to Tsarskoye Selo and the imagined prospect of a voyage to China by the empress. The Chinese Palace at Oranienbaum was built for Catherine ii after she seized power from her husband Peter iii in 1762, a coup d’état that resulted in Peter’s murder by Alexey Orlov, brother of Catherine’s lover, Grigory Orlov. She ascended the imperial throne and immediately set about making plans to build a private retreat at Oranienbaum, which had been her husband’s estate. Eight years earlier, Catherine acquired some lands adjacent to Oranienbaum with the purpose of planting a garden. At the time of her ascension to the throne, it is unclear what progress had been made with her garden plans, but we know that she began in earnest to build a palace that would be “hers alone.”15 It is likely that plans for the 14 Schlereth, xi–xii. For more on the tensions between commercial humanism and mercantilism, see Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis xiv: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 23. 15 Catherine described her initial interest in laying out a garden at Oranienbaum as an “exercise of imagination” that amused and entertained her while still a Grand Duchess. See The Memoirs of Catherine the Great, trans. Moura Budberg, ed. Dominique Maroger (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 236– 37. For a succinct introduction to the history of Oranienbaum, see Will Black, The Chinese Palace at Oranienbaum: Catherine the Great’s Private Passion (Boston: Bunker Hill Publishing, 2003), a short book intended to support the restoration of the Chinese Palace. For a brief account of the “oriental style” that appeared at Oranienbaum and the Chinese Palace, see Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect, 168–72. The most thorough accounts of Oranienbaum are found in Russian sources. See D.A. Kyuchar’yants, Khudozhestvennye pamyatniki goroda Lomonosova (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1985); Kyuchar’yants, Antonio Rinal’di (Leningrad: Stroizdat, 1984); and A. Raskin, Gorod Lomonosov (Oranienbaum): Dvortsovo-parkovye ansambli xviii veka (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1979).

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University russian garden design 121 palace and gardens were laid out together starting in 1762, but that the gardens were not completed until towards the end of the project in the early 1770s, around the time that Catherine turned her attention to the Chinese features of the gardens at Tsarskoye Selo. This would explain the late introduction of forty wooden Chinese structures, all of which are now lost, but are known to have been designed by Antonio Rinaldi after 1770, once Catherine became aware of William Chambers’s 1757 publication, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils: To Which Is Annexed a Description of Their Temples, Houses, Gardens, etc., and ordered a Russian translation in 1771.16 The results of decisions she made about the interior decoration of the palace influenced new directions in the ornamentation of the gardens. As originally conceived, the Chinese Palace was intended as a maison de plaisance, rather than a grand palace, inspired by a French architectural concept but based on German interpretations of the original model. Catherine’s inspirations were close to home: she most certainly had in mind the recent projects of her northern- European neighbour, as well as her powerful ally and adversary, Frederick the Great, who built his “little vineyard house” as he called it, at Sans Souci in the late 1740s.17 The great Prussian ruler was closely involved in the design of the building, sending plans back from the battlefield for realization by his team of architects and designers. By 1755, he was installed in the summer palace and had played host to the philosopher Voltaire for two years, earning Frederick the status of a “philosopher king,” esteem to which Catherine the Great would similarly aspire. Frederick ordered construction of a Chinese Teahouse, which was completed in 1764, exactly at the time when Catherine began to build and to contemplate the furnishings of interiors appropriate for a palace notionally defined as “Chinese.” While the design of the palace 16 Tsentral’ny Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov [Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents], fond 10, opis’ 1, ed. khr.383, referenced by Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect, 257n20. On Rinaldi’s work at Oranienbaum, see Kyuchar’yants, Antonio Rinal’di. For the most thorough account of the garden near the Chinese palace see L. Nevostrueva, “Ansambl‘ Rinal’di v gorode Lomonosove,” in Arkhitekturnoye nasledstvo 7 (1955): 109. David Porter describes Chambers as “one of the most prominent and influential practi- tioners of cross-cultural translation.” Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth- Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39. 17 Catherine may also have been influenced by King Adolf Fredrik of Sweden’s Kina Slott (Chinese Pavilion), which was built in 1753 within the grounds of Drottningholm Palace as a gift for Queen Lovisa Ulrika.

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University 122 jennifer milam had little or nothing to do with China, images of the East were frequently used within the interior to draw comparisons with the West. The possible meanings of those comparisons in the context of this space merits a brief consideration. Such comparisons begin shortly after entering the palace. Starting in the great hall, the decoration is surprisingly simple— brightly coloured scagliola (or faux marble), busts of Peter the Great on one side and Elizabeth (Peter’s daughter) on the other, and overhanging entrances to both the east and west wings (see Figure 2). Originally, a ceiling fresco by Giambattista Tiepolo de picted the Triumph of Mars, but the artwork was unfortunately lost during World War ii.18 The conventional and easily interpreted imagery here refers to the military might of Russia and a line of powerful rulers running from Peter to Catherine who had successfully westernized Russian culture and made it a part of Europe. Yet this central room is a distinctly Russian space in the eighteenth century—a comparatively blank slate of decoration leading to rooms of cultural borrowings that were mixed and matched, and helped to further identify Russian taste as cosmo politan. In effect, the rooms that flow from the great hall combine references to other cultures in order to generate, through a varied approach to decoration, a cosmopolitan self-image. Moving from the great hall to the east wing, the principal room of the suite is the “Muses Lounge” with a ceiling painting that depicts the Triumph of the Muses, alluding to the cultural achievements of the classical past that inspire activity in the arts in western history (see Figure 3).19 In contrast, the primary decora tive theme of the west wing is Chinese in tenor, with lacquer walls and a ceiling painting Uniting Europe and Asia (see Figure 4).20 This cultural union takes on greater meaning if one considers that the world has been turned upside down and reordered by Russian space: the East is in the West, the West is in the East, but both come together in the tsarina’s Chinese Palace. This arrangement presents a provocative parallel considered in relation to the growing geo political aspirations of the Russian state, which involved not only recognition of Russia as a European state, but also territorial 18 Black, 31; and Kyuchar’yants, Khudozhestvennye pamyatniki goroda Lomonosova, 103. 19 Stefano Torelli executed the ceiling painting. See A. Raskin, Gorod Lomonosov: Dvortsovo-parkovye ansambli xviii veka (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1979), 31. 20 The Barozzi brothers designed the ceiling painting (Raskin, 31).

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University russian garden design 123 ambitions that led to the annexation of the Crimea and a “secret” plan laid with the Austrians to reclaim Constantinople for the West, which became known as the “Greek project.”21 One of the questions that I explore here is the extent to which we can interpret this arrangement—the physical layout of rooms— as a rewriting of the map of Europe and Asia, claiming an “in- between space” for Russia that projects an image of heritage connected back to the Greek world.22 The Greek project is con nected to Catherine’s ambition of reclaiming a Russian link with antiquity. As it was understood at the time, the origins of European culture were passed from Greece to Rome to western Europe and from there to Petrine Russia. Catherine attempted to rewrite this history in order to claim a direct lineage between antiquity and Russia, with the latter as heir to the Eastern Roman Empire. A remarkably well-read woman, as indicated by the content of her letters to major Enlightenment figures, Catherine was clearly familiar with the authors of antiquity, and it is con ceivable that she aligned Russia’s position on the map of the world with Aristotle’s vision of Greece, not as purely European but as standing between Europe and Asia. While my conclusions drawn from the configuration of space are not automatically inferred, and may not have been overtly intended by the patron or her advisors at the time, I am confident that the Chinese Palace begins to represent an idea of aesthetic cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century derived from an Enlightenment ideal of a shared humanity that can be achieved through cultural borrowings and the pursuit of generalized principles of aesthetic judgment.23 The basis of this notion of an 21 For historical evaluations of the Greek Project, see Hugh Ragsdale, “Evaluating the Traditions of Russian Aggression: Catherine ii and the Greek Project,” Slavonic and East European Review 66, no. 1 (1988): 91–117 ; and Andrey Zorin, Kormya dvuglavogo orla ... : Literatura i gosudarstvennaya ideologiya v Rossii v posledney treti xviii–pervoy treti xix veka (Moscow: NLO, 2001), 31–64. 22 A similar sense of an imaginary geography has been explored in connection with eighteenth-century travel literature by Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 23 Schlereth attempts to define the distinguishing characteristics of cosmopolitanism, not as an aesthetic category but as an idea explored by eighteenth- century writers and philosophers. The close relationship proposed by Schlereth between universalism and cosmopolitanism has been called into question recently by Matthew Binney in The Cosmopolitan Evolution: Travel,

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University 124 jennifer milam aesthetic cosmopolitanism during the Enlightenment stems from the writings of Voltaire, who argued in his essay on epic poetry, “Would each Nation attend more than they do to the Taste and Manners of their respective Neighbours, perhaps a general good Taste might diffuse itself throughout all of Europe from such an intercourse of Learning and useful exchange of Observations.”24 This treatise was directed at a European audience, and despite Catherine’s assertion that “Russia is a European State” in her instructions of 1767, Russia had only started to look European through the adoption of western art forms since the time of Peter the Great.25 The search for standards of taste defined as “universal” rather than “French,” “English,” or “German” was infinitely more appealing because the universal standards gave Russia an even playing field on which to demonstrate their status as patrons of the arts with cosmopolitan knowledge of a variety of European (and non-European) art forms.26 One room within the Chinese Palace serves to illustrate this point. Unique and unparalleled among contemporary European interiors, the decoration of the “Glass Beaded Salon” appears exotic, but European; extraordinary, yet familiar. By all accounts, it is the most spectacular room at the Chinese Palace, displaying scenes of foreign birds, cornucopias, and flowers made from more

Travel Narratives, and the Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century European Consciousness (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006). Simultaneously Margaret C. Jacob proposed the need to move beyond cosmopolitanism as an ideal and to seek out “lived experiences” of cosmopolitanism. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 24 From Florence D. White, Voltaire’s Essay on Epic Poetry: A Study and an Edition (Albany: Brandow Printing, 1915), 135. On the reception of this essay in eighteenth-century Europe and variations between the English (1727) and French (1733) editions, see David Williams, “Voltaire’s ‘True Essay’ on Epic Poetry,” Modern Language Review 88, no. 1 (1993): 46–57 . Thirty years later, David Hume took a more theoretical approach to argue in favour of aesthetic judgments that could be taken as universally valid in his “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). 25 Documents of Catherine the Great, ed. Reddaway, 216. 26 Yekaterina Dmitriyeva and Ol’ga Kuptsova have argued that the use of western European examples as models for Russian garden designs was more than a borrowing of ideas. Instead, Russian patrons and artists aimed to copy western forms as a formal expression of a desire to be part of Europe. Consequently, the authors regard such copying as a Russian pursuit of universalism, which represented a challenge among equals, rather than a response to the foreign. Dmitriyeva and Kuptsova, Jizn’ usadebnogo mifa: utrachenny i obretenny ray (Moscow: OGI, 2002), 23.

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University russian garden design 125 than two million shimmering horizontal glass beads (see Figure 5). The effect is dazzling, with the silk over panels of white glass, and would have been even more spectacular with the room’s original glass floor (the wood inlay currently in situ copied the glass design when it had to be removed in the nineteenth century). The designs were made by the Barozzi brothers, Italian decorative artists who had been invited years earlier to work at the court of Elizabeth. Production was by Russian embroiderers, highly skilled local women who sewed the beads into the silk.27 The glass beads came from the factory founded by Mikhail Lomonosov in Ust-Rudits, with the project achieved between 1762 and 1764. Established in the same period, this would have been one of the factory’s first major commissions to supply glass beads.28 The decoration of the salon interior represents a certain cos mopolitan collaboration through its very making, with the large- scale designs produced in France under the direction of the Italian-born Barozzi brothers and the use of beads made in Russia and embroidered by Russian women. The shimmering results are a monument to Russian artistic and technological innovations that built on the traditions of western Europe, but which were unmatched at the time and therefore unique. Through this type of enterprise, Russia staked a claim for itself both artistically and technologically, as capable of equaling and possibly surpassing not only other European nations, but also Asia. Lomonosov’s “Letter on the Use of Glass” suggests the wider implications of this room for visitors in comparison with the in vention of porcelain credited to the Chinese.29 Lomonosov had 27 Kyuchar’yants, Khudozhestvennye pamyatniki goroda Lomonosova, 116; and M. Voronov ‘Avdot’ya Loginova i drugiye‘, Neva 6 (1979). 28 V.K. Makarov, Khudozhestvennoye naslediye M.V. Lomonosova: Mozaiki [M.V. Lomonosov’s Artistic Heritage: The Mosaics] (Moscow and Leningrad: Akademia nauk SSSR, 1950). For a brief history of this factory, see Kyuchar’yants, Khudozhestvennye pamyatniki goroda Lomonosova, 99–100. Kyuchar’yants states that a chemical analysis of the beads proves that they were produced in this factory. 29 In addition to being an amateur scientist, Lomonosov was a poet and in the quotation that follows those two interests are joined: “Having transformed into Porcelain with their artistry / The heavy enormity of the fruit of emp- tied hills, / They attract themselves, with its beauty, / Peoples who sail there, despising the fierceness of the seas.” Quoted in Lukin, 11; and Maggs, 107. Original Russian found in M.V. Lomonosov, Pis’mo o pol’ze stekla [Letter on the Use of Glass], in M.V. Lomonosov Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy [Complete Works] (Moscow and Leningrad: Akademia Nauk SSSR, 1959): “Ogromnost’

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University 126 jennifer milam been one of three students from the Russian Academy of Science sent by Empress Elizabeth to study metallurgy at Meissen in Germany. The aim was to begin the domestic manufacture of true porcelain, which was an ambition of all the major courts of Europe.30 The motivation had less to do with mercantilism than with universalism, a desire to demonstrate parity between Russian productions and those of the highest quality in western Europe, which could be merged and displayed together as an example of a pan-European taste. Increasingly, European taste referenced a comparison with Asia, which was raised not only through the interiors of the Chinese Palace, but also in its gardens. More importantly, at this late date and in the context of a European Russian space, the reference took on another meaning, pointing to the growing power of international commerce spawned by increased consumerism in the market for luxury goods. Yuri Lisyansky, an officer in the Russian navy at the end the reign of Catherine the Great, noted that “no ruler in Europe can compete with the might of the British East India Company now. Who can claim that he rules so much land and monarchs as these merchants! No scepter in the world except for Russian is capable of it.”31 The might of the Russian Empire is evident in the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo, which Andreas Schönle describes as a space in which Catherine staged a performance of Russian imperial con quests following the successes of the first Russo-Turkish war and the eventual annexation of the Crimea.32 Catherine’s letters to Voltaire give considerable weight to this interpretation. In

tyazhkuyu ploda lishennikh gor/Khudozhestvom svoim preobraziv v Farfor,/ Krasotoy ego k sebe narody privlekayut,/Chto, plavaya, morey svirepost’ prezirayut.” 30 For a discussion of Catherine the Great’s efforts to further porcelain manu- facturing in Russia, see Irina Bagdasarova, “Catherine’s Porcelain and the Triumph of the ‘Russian Minerva,’” in Catherine the Great: Art for Empire, Masterpieces from the State Hermitage Museum Saint Petersburg, ed. Nathalie Bondil, exhibition catalog by Irina Bagdasarova, ed. (n.p.: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Art Gallery of Ontario, and the State Hermitage Museum, 2005–6), 244–53. Further discussion of the relationship of the Russian Czars to Meissen can be found in U. Pietsch and M. Bubtshikova, Meissen for the Czars: Porcelain as a Means of Saxon-Russian Politics in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalog (Munich: n.p., 2004). 31 Cited in S. Kozlov, 136. 32 Schönle, 43–74.

1771, she writes, “If this war continues, my garden at Tsarskoye Selo will begin to resemble a game of skittles, since I order to build some sort of monument on the occasion of every brilliant action.”33 In a well-known contemporary portrait of the empress, Catherine gestures to the Chesme column that commemorates a particularly successful battle (see Figure 6). Near the Chesme column is the Turkish bath, added shortly after the column’s installation in the gardens, which further reinforces the idea of conquest and annexation of the Crimea. Her aims in glorifying Russian military might through her efforts as a garden patron were recognized by Europeans with whom she corresponded; for example, the Prince de Ligne praised the connection in his Coup d’oeil sur Beloeil: “The conqueror of the Turks is herself the gardener of Tsarskoye Selo.”34 While not a representation of military victory, the Chinese section of the gardens can be simultaneously interpreted as an imperial imperative urging an extension of the burgeoning Russian empire, an alternative space to play at being foreign, and an aspiration to an ideal of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. When Catherine acceded to the throne, the gardens at Tsarskoye Selo were already established as a playground for the tsar’s family and invited guests.35 It was a space of entertainment with swings and a giant slide for sledging. Consequently, most scholars have seen the Chinese features of the gardens that Catherine the Great added as an extension of this playground into an exotic “fairy-tale” land with fashionable features of chinoiserie architecture adopted from European examples and English pattern books.36 While clearly owing a debt to the French and English development of anglo-chinois gardens in the second half of the eighteenth century, there are other possible meanings 33 “Mais si cette guerre continue, mon jardin de Czarskozélo ressemblera bientôt à un jeu de quills, car à chaque action d’éclat j’y fais élever quelque monument.” Documents of Catherine the Great, ed. Reddaway, 129. 34 Prince de Ligne, Coup d’oeil sur Beloeil et sur une grande partie des jardins de l’Europe (Paris: Bossard, 1922), 60. 35 Under Empress Elizabeth, constructions on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo included numerous garden entertainments, including the Great Slide. See A.P. Vergunov and V.A. Gorokhov, Vertograd: Sadovo-parkovoye iskusstvo Rossii (Moscow: Kul’tura, 1996), 124; and Alexandre Benois, Tsarskoye selo v tsarstvovaniye imperatritsy Elizavety Petrovny [Tsarskoye Selo during the Reign of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna], (St Petersburg: R. Golike and I.A. Vil’borg, 1910). 36 Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect, 172–81.

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University 128 jennifer milam that the experience of moving through “China” at Tsarskoye Selo would have generated.37 At the time of Catherine the Great, visitors from St Petersburg passed through the Chinese section of the garden prior to arriv ing at the palace (see Figure 7). The road from St Petersburg led to a route through the arch of the “Large Caprice” (one of the artificial hills that had been created upon order of the empress) and emerged on the other side at a gate that marked the entrance to the palace. The gate was cut out of this “rocky mountain” that exploited unusual plantings and pruning to enhance the exotic impression. At the top was a Chinese summer house, which could be glimpsed from the carriage, but could only be reached by climbing a footpath as part of the circuit walk from the palace itself. Continuing to the palace on the carriage route, visitors went through a small tunnel before emerging on the other side where they were surprised by vistas of Chinese-inspired architecture in every direction: to the left was the “Chinese Village”; in front was the “Small Caprice”; on the right was the “Creaking Pavilion.” Considering the direction of travel—eastward from the St Peters burg road—visitors effectively journeyed through “China” (at least a China of the imagination) to reach Catherine’s complex at Tsarskoye Selo. While Dimitri Shvidkovsky also notes that the carriage route led through “China,” he focuses on the “faery” and “fantastical” qualities that he reads in direct opposition to the classical complex of Cameron’s baths and gallery.38 I am not in disagreement with this as one potential interpretation of the chinoiserie architec ture. Yet cosmopolitan thought at the time permitted another, more positive reading of Chinese elements within the gardens as creating a space that brought together aesthetic experiences from different parts of the world to be appreciated by “travellers” on the circuit walk. Shvidkovsky’s analysis of the juxtaposition supports such a reading in noting that the “chinoiserie of Tsarskoye Selo reconciled the rococo motifs of play with the didactic rationalism of Enlightenment classicism.”39 In addition to the reconciliation 37 For a general introduction to the development of the anglo-chinois garden, see John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). 38 Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect, 180. 39 Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect, 208.

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University russian garden design 129 of artistic forms that Shvidkovsky wrote about, cosmopolitan thought promoted a reconciliation of aesthetic ideals that found value in both Chinese-inspired and ancient forms. A return trip on foot to the Chinese section of the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo was anticipated by one of the principal circuit walks from the Great Palace (now known as the Catherine Palace). Leaving through the central gates, the visitor walked across the “Chinese Bridge,” decorated with life-sized Chinese figures holding lanterns (see Figure 8), along the central allée through the regular parterres, which had been modified but still conformed to their original Dutch and French formal structure. Taking a route to the left at the centre of the square, the visitor moved further into gardens laid out on the western side, where “China” beckoned across two iron bridges, each framed by orientalized porticoes. Once in this “Chinese” section of the garden, the visitor was able to explore the “Chinese Village” with the “Large Caprice” towering above (see Figure 9). The village was composed around a short street and an octagonal plaza. A pagoda sat at the centre, and all the buildings were brightly ornamented, which gave the structures a toy-like appearance (see Figure 10). A climb to the top of the “Large Caprice” allowed the visitor to view all of “China” while looking eastward to the complex of Baroque and classical buildings that composed the palace, the gallery, and the baths. As with the interiors of the Chinese Palace at Oranienbaum, the East was placed in the West in this Russian imperial space. The circuit walk returned to the palace along a path by lakes, islets, and one last Chinese-inspired building, the “Creaking Pavilion.” Other paths led off to other sections of the gardens, where classical architecture and sculpture, Egyptian pyramids, and a Turkish kiosk and baths dotted the landscape. The flow between cultures was striking as vistas often mixed together eastern and western architectural forms within one perspective (see Figures 11 and 12). It is thus not difficult to see the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo as a conflation of national influences, exemplifying the confusion that Bolotov would note nearly a decade later: Dutch and French in the old formal sections, English in the new landscapes featuring artificial lakes with curving outlines and the planting of artificial trees. The garden architecture was similarly mixed in the section to the south of the avenue that led to the Cameron Gallery and baths along the pente-douce: columns and temples in emulation of classical antiquity and Turkey (with designs that aimed to copy

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University 130 jennifer milam buildings seen in the Crimea).40 China, however, was across the road, so to speak—a fantasy that is played out in the visitor’s movement through space. The designs for the “Chinese Village” were originally planned by Rinaldi, but Charles Cameron made several changes when he arrived from England to work for Catherine, and many of the final structures were built by Russian architects and surveyors—Yury Fel’ten, who built the “Creaking Pavilion,” and the Neyelovs. Catherine sent Vasily and Ilya Neyelov to England, to study Chambers’s garden at Kew and to obtain further English pattern books, and to the Crimea, to make drawings based on eastern forms of architecture that she found seductive and intriguing.41 Despite these charges from the empress that aimed at studying with the intent to copy, the resulting image of China at Tsarskoye Selo, as a form of extended three-dimensional chinoiserie, is unique possibly because it is the result of the transnational collaboration of an Italian, a Scot, and several Russians working under the watchful eye of a culturally curious yet politically ambitious empress. Catherine touted the gardens as “unprecedented” in a letter to Baron von Grimm, “if one is to judge from the reaction by Englishmen, travellers from various countries, and Russians who have gone abroad.”42 Hence, for Catherine, the assessment of the gardens by cosmopolitan visitors was one that recognized the quality judged through standards of taste informed by international experience (English expatriates, those who journeyed through other nations, and metropolitan, not provincial, Russians). While it is possible to see this image of China within the gardens of Catherine the Great as part of the same imperialist 40 The Turkish Kiosk was based on drawings of a kiosk in the Sultan’s parks in Constantinople, and was furnished with divans and carpets from Turkey. 41 During the reign of Peter the Great, attempts were made to bring an architect from China, but they were unsuccessful. Shvidkovsky notes that the Czar was the only European ruler in the eighteenth century to deem it necessary for the architect of his Chinese pavilions to be Chinese and to command his envoy to make the necessary arrangements. Although a Chinese architect was never imported, the envoy Lev Ismailov did arrange for drawings and objects show- ing Chinese buildings to be sent back to Russia (Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect, 167). 42 “Ce jardin, entre nous soit dit, devient une chose comme il n’y en a pas, au dire des Anglais, des voyageurs de tout pays et des nôtres qui ont voyage.” Letter from Catherine to Grimm, 1 June 1782. Reproduced in Sbornik Imperatorkogo Rossiyskogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva, 23:239.

ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University russian garden design 131 goal that can be found in the use of monuments and Turkish forms in other sections, they can also be seen as part of an aesthetic cosmopolitanism that sought out a common visual language and shared aesthetic values expressed through cultural borrowings and imaginary travel. One reading does not exclude the other. Certainly there are examples of the image of China used in Russian literature as a symbol of a remote place that could be reached by Russian imperial power. The poet Derzhavin wrote, “We will gain access to the center of the world, / We will gather gold from the Ganges, / We will suppress the arrogance of China, / Like the cedar establishing our root.”43 The planting metaphor is particularly apt in this context. By bringing China into the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo, Catherine has replanted the Asian empire into her own. Voltaire provides a positive image of the benefits of adopting cosmopolitanism, encouraging Catherine in a series of letters written in 1767 to bring Enlightenment to the East. In one ex change, they argue about the merits of meeting on the Bosporus, with Voltaire urging Catherine to relocate the Russian capital to Constantinople—a challenge she did not accept. Failing to coax an invasion, in his next letter Voltaire turns his attention to Asia, not as a destination for conquest, but to flatter the Empress by calling her an unparalleled cosmopolitan among the rulers of the world:

Un voyage en Asie! allez-vous l’entreprendre ... Hélas! Votre majesté impériale ferait le tour du globe, qu’elle ne rencontrerait guère de rois dignes d’elle. Elle voyage comme Cérès la législatrice, en fesant du bien au monde. J’en e sais point la langue russe; mais par la traduction que vous daignez m’envoyer, je vois qu’elle a des inversions et des tours qui manquent à la nôtre. Je ne suis pas comme une dame de la cour de Versailles, qui disait: C’est bien dommage que l’aventure de la tour de Babel ait produit la con fusion des langues, sans cela tout le monde aurait toujours parlé français. L’empereur de la Chine, Kang-hi, votre voisin, demandait à un missionnaire si on pouvait faire des vers dans les langues de l’Europe; il ne pouvait le croire.44

43 “Dostupim mira my srediny, / S Gangesa zlato soberem, / Gordynyu usmirim Kitaya, / Kak kedr nash koren’ utverzhdaya.” The poem can be found on the Russian Virtual Library at http://www.rvb.ru/18vek/derzhavin/01text/047 .htm (accessed 2 February 2012). Cited in Lukin, 11; and Maggs, 108–9. 44 Voltaire to Catherine ii, 26 May 1767 (Documents of Catherine the Great, ed. Reddaway, 16–17).

Voltaire’s flattery here has a distinctly xenophobic edge, partic ularly in his choice of comparisons with France and China as cultures that are limited by their inability to break down the boundaries of language, which Catherine has personally achieved as a cosmopolite. Returning to the quotation that opened this article, Catherine’s poem presents an image of Asia both comic and curious: “The King of China / When he drank a lot / He made a funny face.” In building such an elaborate re-creation of China as recreation involving a village, significant pavilions, and “caprices” that moved mountains of earth in emulation of the imagined hills of China, was Catherine toying with the idea of what she called her “nice neighbour and ceremonious neighbour with tiny eyes”?45 Was cosmopolitanism simply something to be played at? Or were these building games more serious? Once the chinoiserie elements in the gardens are considered as meaningful, they can be understood as part of the complex development of a national and imperial identity in Russia under Catherine the Great, which relied upon cultural borrowings in order to present an idea of universal standards of taste that transcended barriers of language (visual, literary, and verbal) to draw from across the globe that which is best and to which they could claim ownership through their military might and as grand patrons of the arts. •

45 Catherine refers to the Prince de Ligne in her private letters. Les Lettres de Catherine ii au prince de Ligne (1780–1796) publiées avec quelques notes par la princesse Charles de Ligne (Brussels: G. van Oest, 1924), 6 November 1790. Cited in Lukin, 13.

Figure 1 (top). Ychitelev Pavel, View of a Part of the Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoye Selo (1880s). Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Natalia Antonova, Inna Regentova. Reproduced by permission. Figure 2 (bottom). View of the Great Hall, Chinese Palace. Photo by Ekaterina Abramova, reproduced by permission.

Figure 3(top). View of the Muses Lounge, Chinese Palace. Photo by Ekaterina Abramova, reproduced by permission. Figure 4 (bottom). View of the Chinese Study, Chinese Palace. Photo by Ekaterina Abramova, reproduced by permission.

Figure 6 (bottom). Vladimir Borovikovsky, Catherine the Great Walking in the Gardens of Tsarskoye Selo (1794). The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 8 (bottom). The Chinese Bridge, Tsarskoye Selo. Photo by Maria Abramova, reproduced by permission.

Figure 9 (top). The Large Caprice, Tsarskoye Selo. Photo by Maria Abramova, reproduced by permission. Figure 10 (bottom). The Creaking Pavilion and the Chinese Village, Tsarskoye Selo. Photo by Maria Abramova, reproduced by permission.

Figure 11 (top). View of the Great Pond. Photo by Maria Abramova, reproduced by permission. Figure 12 (bottom). View of the Gardens of Tsarskoye Selo (1790s). The State Museum of Tsarskoye Selo. Reproduced by permission.

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