Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon Page A

fortnight. 58
    On arrival at Kiev in the last week of August, Catherine had her first taste of the embarrassment caused by over-eager subjects. When they went to see a theatrical performance staged in the grounds of a nearby convent, where they had to pass through the chapel to reach their seats, it became clear that they were in for a long evening:
    There were prologues, ballets, a comedy, in which Marcus Aurelius hanged his favourite, a battle in which the Cossacks defeated the Poles, a fishing scene on the Boristhène [the River Dnieper], and choruses without end. The empress kept her patience until almost two in the morning, when she sent someone to ask if it might finish soon. She was told that they were not yet half way through, but that if Her Majesty ordered it, they would stop straightaway.
    Stop they did, but only to launch a disastrous firework. The first rockets flew straight into the main marquee, causing pandemonium among the imperial party and a stampede of the horses waiting patiently by the nearby carriages. 59
    The main reason for visiting Kiev was to pay tribute to the cradle of Orthodoxy in the empire, for it was there that Prince Vladimir had accepted the Christian faith in 988. At the Monastery of the Caves, the pious empress was in her element. Though it would soon be possible, with the aid of a telescope, to see back to Kozelets from the top of the Baroque bell tower which she commissioned, the monastery’s real ‘sights’ lay within its own walls, in the catacombs and in the ancient Cathedral of the Dormition, where the relics of the great men of Kievan Rus were objects of open veneration (the head of Vladimir himself had been returned to the monastery in 1634). 60 Catherine and her fiancé were forbidden entry to the catacombs in case they caught a chill, but she was much taken by the cathedral. ‘I had never been more struck in my life,’ she recalled in 1771, ‘than I was by the extreme magnificence of that church, where all the icons were covered in gold, silver and jewels. The church itself is spacious and built in the Gothic style of architecture that gives churches a much more majestic appearance than the current ones, where the size and transparency of the windows makes them indistinguishable from a ballroom or a [winter]–garden.’ 61
    Back in Moscow for Elizabeth’s name day on 5 September, the Court launched into its customary autumn round of celebrations. Although Catherine took dancing lessons with the ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé, nothing in her experience had prepared her for the cross-dressing balls that so delighted the empress. Elizabeth enjoyed showing off her excellent legs, but no one else took much pleasure from these so-called metamorphoses, at which the men were forced to stumble about the dance floor in huge hooped skirts. 62 They were happier watching the French comedies and German dramas staged at the 5000-seat opera house built near the Golovin Palace for Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742. 63 No less important to the life of the Court were its ‘theatres of piety’ in which the imperial family celebrated the major autumn feasts in the Orthodox calendar: the Nativity of the Mother of God on 8 September, the Exaltation of the Honourable and Life-Giving Cross on 14 September, and the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Temple on 21 November. 64 Since the reign of Empress Anna, this last had been appropriated as the annual celebration of the Semënovsky Guards, so that the day which began with morning service culminated in a banquet and ball. 65 Now there were two new fixtures to add to the list of secular festivities: the birthday of Johanna Elisabeth on 13 October and Catherine’s name day on 24 November. The following day was Elizabeth’s accession day–the most significant event in the Court calendar. 66 The sickly Peter missed it all, beingconfined to bed by a chest infection in October and by chickenpox in November. Only when he seemed well enough