In his writings and civic activities the Count found a new role for the Russian aristocrat, no longer surveying his limitless material demesnes in the present, but turning over salvaged fragments of memory as a curator, a melancholy nostalgic researching lost time, a collector assembling and reassembling objects from the past for display. He made public the private, domestic history of the aristocracy, as though preparing for the catastrophic loss of property that, even in his quiet defiance, he seemed to perceive on the near horizon.
In The Romanov Court on Vozdvizhenka, the Count records that in the early seventeenth century the quiet and remote lane ‘on the white earth between Nikitsky and the Arbat in the parish of Dionysus the Areopagite’ in the walled White City to the west of the Kremlin was the demesne of Boyar Romanov. He reconstructs the eighteenth-century street from old architectural plans, filling in the family homes of a collegiate assessor and a lieutenant governor of the City of Moscow among the grander buildings of Romanov Court, as well as all the arrangement of store rooms, barns, awnings, outhouses, wells, cellars, vegetable plots, summer houses and fruit orchards.
By the end of the eighteenth century, as the Count writes, the street contained two palaces: an older, larger palace (now part of the Kremlin Hospital) on one side, and the Corner House on the other, which had been built in 1790 for Count Razumovsky. Count Nikolai Sheremetev bought all these properties in the last year of the eighteenth century, and the exquisite ‘Moscow baroque’ brick-and-whitewash Church of the Sign behind the first palace, which became the domestic church of the Sheremetev family. Count Nikolai and Praskovia ‘the Pearl’ began their married life in the Corner House after their secret nuptials in St Simeon the Stylite, a tiny onion-domed church a little further up the street.
In Old Vozdvizhenka, Count Sergei pores over the inventories of the sale of the Corner House, in which, he observes, Praskovia’s name is never mentioned. He gives precise descriptions of the layout of the rooms, their shapes and dimensions, refurnishing them one by one. He describes the ceremonial staircase with its ornamented balustrade, which led up to a front reception room with four long windows. Next to this was a dining room with yellow walls and a sky-blue ceiling, two fireplaces and a portrait of the great Russian saint Sergius of Radonezh. Columned Venetian windows gave an unbroken view of the Kremlin. On the orange walls of the drawing room hung an icon of the Vladimir Mother of Tenderness, the Eleousa, one of Russia’s most sacred images. Room by room, the Count lists musical instruments, folding screens, icons, wall-coverings, oak tables, red and green morocco armchairs, brass and mahogany commodes. From its furnishings – a clavichord, a prie-dieu, an icon of the Mother of God of Smolensk and a portrait of Praskovia in a gold frame – he deduces that one particular room was the bedchamber of the hidden ‘Pearl’.
Reading these pages in this library, in whose collections his contemporary Fyodorov conceived the systematic work of bodily resurrection, I sensed that there was more at work in the Count’s researches than aristocratic family nostalgia and an antiquarian sensibility. This was a religious activity, like icon painting. The Count was finding access to the dead city of his ancestors as an icon painter creates a portal into the transcendent world, controlling the viewpoint, adding golden light. ‘A recollection is a lightning flash of the past, which shines and lights up the path we have travelled,’ wrote Pushkin’s friend, the poet Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, lines which Count Sergei uses as an epigraph to his memoirs. He was using that light to look for his ancestors and their world in heaven, which, according to his Orthodox beliefs, is made of the material of this world, redeemed. All past time is present. Everyone returns, called by name, transfigured.
In the redeemed world of the Russian aristocracy as Count Sergei paints it, social divisions are a sweetly ordered hierarchy. Ascetic piety and humility of spirit are possible, indeed made all the more sincere and beautiful, within the conditions of limitless wealth in which the family lived before the abolition of serfdom and the rise of the money economy. The Count’s mother died too early for him to have any recollection of her. Family affection came in abundance from his father, various pious aunts and his two adored grandmothers, Varvara Petrovna and Ekaterina Vasilievna. ‘Each room contains such precious memories’, he wrote, invoking beloved names, tenderly remembered personalities: the servant girls, Aksyusha, Cristina, Polya and Persida the Serb, who sang and could write; Matvei Yermolaev, the ancient footman whose sole duty was to sit at the top of the great staircase that led up from the street, ready to announce the arrival of guests.
The Count’s own childhood rooms were in the larger palace, in the fourteen-windowed piano nobile of the side wing that looked over the street, which always lay clean when it snowed because so little traffic passed. He could see all the way to the Church of Christ the Saviour, away down the Moscow River. The quiet was only broken when new recruits lined up outside the State Chamber on Vozdvizhenka. There were snowball fights in the courtyard and Christmas trees full of lights and toys, and an organ that his mother had ordered from abroad before her death, around which the family would gather to sing.
The Count remembers the jubilee of Tsar Nicholas I in 1850, when both palaces shone with magnificent illuminations organised by his father. Loyalty to the Tsar was not unmixed with liberal sensibilities in the lives of the Sheremetevs. The democratic ideas of the Decembrists had once been discussed in a serious literary circle in the Corner House in the years before the aristocratic uprising against the Tsar in December 1825. The group stayed together after that fateful date, and its members remained sympathetic to republican ideals. After the jubilee one of the conspirators, Ivan Yakushkin, who had married into the Sheremetev family, came to stay in the Corner House, still under careful watch by police spies, after the amnesty by Alexander II in 1856 and his return from over thirty years in Siberian exile, to repair his broken health and spirit.
The Count’s grandmothers embody the virtuous spirit of the aristocracy. Their submission to providence and quietism in the face of history become the spirit of the memoir itself, which, for all its devotion to the past and lamentation at the spectacle of urban change, is a self-schooling in detachment, in the acceptance of loss, with the hope of redemption. Varvara Petrovna, a famous beauty in her youth, held the family together. He pictures her at her desk in a white peignoir, writing letters to her grandchildren, her long braid reaching almost to the floor. Ekaterina Vasilievna, who lived out her days in the Corner House, always referred to it as ‘le réfuge des Chéreméteff’. Her humbly furnished room was known as her ‘cell’; she ate plain food, always with a bunch of dill beside her plate. (Food at the Corner House was always poor, the Count notes, except for the famous ‘Sheremetev liqueur’, made by the servant girl Marisha, as the family was too kind to reproach or dismiss their incompetent cook.) Every day, the family doctor, Karl Karlovich Pfel, would call on the old lady for a glass of coffee. ‘You would sit for a while in her room’, Count Sergei remembers, ‘and your soul would become quiet’. He remembers her odd pronunciation, her fear of half-open doors which reminded her of yawning mouths, and her dislike of the dusk hour before the lamps were lit. She loved spiritual reading and poetry, and would quote the poet Mikhail Lermontov’s lines on the fleetingness of life. Among her guests were the melancholic Kachalov, returned from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; the tiresome rattle-trap Varvara Raevskaya, who published her own book of pieties, and Dr Popandopulo, author of a treatise on the subject dearest to his heart, the maladies of Napoleon.