One of Argunov's most memorable portraits represents another former Sheremetev serf: Countess Praskovya Sheremeteva. Argunov painted her in a red shawl with a sparkling miniature of her husband, Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev, suspended from her neck (plate 1). At the time of this portrait (in 1802) the marriage of the count to his former serf, the prima donna of his opera, was concealed from the public and the court. It would remain so until her death. In this prescient and moving portrait Argunov conveyed their tragedy. It is an extraordinary story that tells us a great deal about the obstacles confronting the creative serf and about the mores of society.
Praskovya was born to a family of serfs on the Sheremetev estate at Yukhotsk in Yaroslav province. Her father and grandfather were both blacksmiths, so the family had been given the name of Kuznetsov ('blacksmith'), although Ivan, her father, was known by all the serfs as 'the hunchback'. In the mid-1770s Ivan became the chief blacksmith at Kuskovo, where the family was given its own wooden house with a large allotment at the back. He sent his first two sons to train as
tailors, while the third became a musician in the Sheremetev orchestra. Praskovya was already noted for her beauty and her voice, and Pyotr Sheremetev had her trained for the opera. Praskovya learned Italian and French, both of which she spoke and wrote with fluency. She was trained to sing and act and dance by the finest teachers in the land. In 1779, at the age of eleven, she first appeared on stage as the servant girl in the Russian premiere of Andre Gretry's comic opera L'Amitie a l'epreuve and, within a year, she had been given her first leading role as Belinda in Antonio Sacchini's La Colonie.55 From that point on she nearly always sang the leading female role. Praskovya possessed a fine soprano voice, distinguished by its range and clarity. The rise of the Sheremetev opera to pre-eminence in Russia in the last two decades of the eighteenth century was intimately linked with her popularity. She was Russia's first real superstar.
The story of Praskovya's romance with the count could have come straight out of a comic opera. The eighteenth-century stage was filled with servant girls who had fallen for young and dashing noblemen. Praskovya herself had sung the part of the young serf girl in Anyuta, a hugely popular opera in which the humble background of the charming heroine prevents her marrying the prince. Nikolai Petrovich was not handsome or dashing, it is true. Nearly twenty years Praskovya's senior, he was rather short and stout and suffered from poor health, which brought on melancholia and hypochondria.56 But he was a romantic, with fine artistic sensibilities, and he shared a love of music with Praskovya. Having watched her grow up as a girl on the estate, then blossom as a singer in his opera, he recognized her spiritual qualities as much as her physical beauty. Eventually he fell in love with her. 'I felt the most tender and passionate feelings for her,' he wrote in 1809,
but I examined my heart to know whether it was seeking pleasures of the flesh or other pleasures to sweeten the mind and soul apart from beauty. Seeing it sought bodily and spiritual pleasures rather than friendship, I observed the qualities of the subject of my love for a long time, and found a virtuous mind, sincerity, love of mankind, constancy and fidelity. I found an attachment to the holy faith and a sincere respect for God. These qualities charmed me more than her beauty, for they are stronger than all external delights and they are extremely rare.57
Not that it started out that way. The young count was fond of hunting and of chasing girls; and until his father died in 1788, when he took up the running of the family estates, Nikolai Petrovich spent most of his time in these sensual pursuits. The young squire often claimed his 'rights' over the serf girls. During the day, while they were at work, he would go round the rooms of the girls on the estates and drop a handkerchief through the window of his chosen one. That night he would visit her and, before he left, would ask her to return his handkerchief. One summer evening in 1784 Praskovya was driving her father's two cows down to the stream when some dogs began to chase her. The count, who was riding home after a day's hunting, called the dogs away and approached Praskovya. He had heard that her father was intending to marry her off to a local forester. She was sixteen years of age - relatively old for a serf girl to marry. The count asked her if this was so and, when she replied that it was, he said he would forbid any such marriage. 'You weren't born for this! Today you are a peasant but tomorrow you will become a lady!' The count then turned and rode away.58
It is not exactly clear when the count and Praskovya became de facto 'man and wife'. To begin with, she was only one of several divas given special treatment by her master. He named his favourite singers and dancers after jewels - 'The Emerald' (Kovaleva), 'The Garnet' (Shlykova) and 'The Pearl' (Praskovya) - and showered them with expensive gifts and bonuses. These 'girls of my house', as Sheremetev called them in his letters to his accountant, were in constant attendance on the count. They accompanied him on trips to St Petersburg during the winter and returned with him to Kuskovo during the summer.5 Everything suggests that they were the count's harem - not least the fact that just before his marriage to Praskovya he had the rest of them married off and gave them all dowries.60
Serf harems were extremely fashionable in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Among Russian noblemen the possession of a large harem was ironically seen as a mark of European manners and civilization. Some harems, like Sheremetev's, were sustained by gifts and patronage; but others were maintained by the squire's total power over his own serfs. Sergei Aksakov, in his Family Chronicle (1856), tells the story of a distant relative who established a harem
among his female serfs: anyone who tried to oppose it, including his own wife, was physically beaten or locked up.61 Examples of such behaviour abound in the memoir literature of the nineteenth century.62 The most detailed and interesting such memoir was written by Maria Neverova, a former serf from the harem of an octogenarian nobleman called Pyotr Koshkarov. Twelve to fifteen of his prettiest young serf girls were strictly segregated in a special female quarter of his house and placed under the control of the main housekeeper, a sadistic woman called Natalia Ivanovna, who was fiercely devoted to Koshkarov. Within the harem was the master's room. When he went to bed he was joined by all his girls, who said their prayers with him and placed their mattresses around his bed. Natalia Ivanovna would undress the master and help him into bed and tell them all a fairy tale. Then she would leave them together for the night. In the morning Koshkarov would dress and say his prayers, drink a cup of tea and smoke his pipe, and then he would begin 'the punishments'. Disobedient girls, or the ones it simply pleased him to punish, would be birched or slapped across the face; others would be made to crawl like dogs along the floor. Such sadistic violence was partly sexual 'play' for Koshkarov. But it also served to discipline and terrorize. One girl, accused of secret liaisons with a male servant, was locked for a whole month in the stocks. Then, before the whole serf community, the girl and her lover were flogged by several men until each collapsed from exhaustion and the two poor wretches were left as bloody heaps upon the floor. Yet alongside such brutality Koshkarov took great care to educate and improve his girls. All of them could read and write, some of them in French; Neverova even knew by heart Pushkin's Fountain of Bakhchisarai. They were dressed in European clothes, given special places in church, and when they were replaced in the harem by younger girls they were married to the master's hunting serfs, the elite of his male servants, and given dowries.63