CHAPTER I
Peter had got up early. “The very devils haven’t had time to snore,” grumbled the sleepy orderly who had to light the stoves. A gloomy November morning was looking in through the window. By the light of a tallow candle end, in a night cap, dressing gown, and craftsman’s leather apron, the Tsar was sitting at his lathe turning a candelabrum of ivory for the Church of St. Peter and Paul, in gratitude for the benefit he had derived from the Martial water during his illness. Then he started carving out of birch-wood a little Bacchus with grapes for the lid of a goblet. He worked with as much zeal as if his livelihood depended upon it.
At 4.30 a.m. in came his private secretary, Makaroff. The Tsar took his place at a walnut-wood desk—so high that the chin of a man of medium height was but level with it, and began to dictate decrees to the different Colleges or Departments, which were being established in Russia on the advice of Leibnitz, “following the example and precedent of other civilised Empires.”
“As in a clock, one wheel sets the other in motion,” said the philosopher to the Tsar, “so in the great administrative machine one college ought to work another, and if everything is harmoniously organised in exact proportions, then the hands of the state clock will invariably point to happy hours for your whole country.”
Peter loved mechanics, and the thought of converting the government into a machine delighted him. Yet what seemed so simple in theory, proved far otherwise in practice.
The Russian people neither understood nor liked the idea of colleges, and mockingly called them “kaleki,” which means cripples. The Tsar had invited learned foreigners “versed in law.” They worked through the medium of interpreters. This however did not answer. Young Russian clerks were then despatched to Königsberg, “to learn the German language and thereby facilitate the working of the Colleges,” and supervisors were sent with them to prevent them from idling. But the supervisors idled with the supervised. The Tsar published a decree: “All colleges are obliged to draw up regulations for their work on the Swedish model. If some of the points in the Swedish regulation are inapplicable, or are unsuited to the conditions of this Empire, the same should be altered at discretion.” But judgment was sadly lacking, and the Tsar felt the new institutions would prove as inefficient as the old ones. “It is all in vain,” he thought, “until the direct good, the supreme patriotic interests of the Empire is realised—a thing that can’t be expected for another hundred years, at least.”
The orderly announced a Foreign Office translator, Koslovsky. A young man came in, haggard, pale and consumptive-looking. Peter rummaged among his papers and gave to him a manuscript corrected and marked with pencil notes on the margin; it was a treatise on mechanics.
“It is badly translated. It must be done over again!”
“Your Majesty,” stuttered Koslovsky in fear and trembling, “the author himself has written the book in very involved language. More mindful of the subtlety of his philosophical style than of the benefit people could derive from the book, he is abbreviated and abstruse. For my part with my dull brain I cannot possibly follow him.”
The Tsar patiently instructed.
“There is no need to translate literally, but, having ascertained the meaning clothe it in language which can best convey it, employing only what is necessary for presenting the main ideas. To try and retain the style is not necessary. Your matter should be useful and not written for effect, without any superfluous words which only waste time and distract the reader’s attention. Avoid the high-flown Slavonic style, and write the plain Russian speech. Do not use high sounding words but the language of the Foreign Office. Write as you speak, simply. Do you understand me?”
“Quite so, your Majesty,” answered the translator, with the precision of a soldier, yet he hung his head with as melancholy an air as if he remembered the fate of his predecessor Boris Wolkoff, also a translator to the Foreign Office, who in despair over a French book on gardening, ‘Le jardin de Quintiny,’ and afraid of the Tsar’s wrath, opened his veins, and perished.
“Well go, God be with you! Put all your heart in the work! And also tell Avrámoff that the type in the new books is fatter and not so clean as in the older ones. The types of letters B. and P. must be altered, they are too broad. The binding also is defective, especially as he binds the pages together too tightly; the books won’t close. He should sew them at the hinges more loosely and give them more space at the back.”
When Koslovsky left him, Peter remembered the dreams of Leibnitz about a general Russian Encyclopedia—the quintessence of sciences, such as was not yet in existence; a Petersburg Academy, the college of learned administrators with the Tsar at their head; a future Russia, which having surpassed Europe in knowledge, would act as lighthouse of the world.
“That bread will be long in baking,” thought Peter with a bitter smile. “Before we can begin to teach Europe we must ourselves learn to speak Russian, write, print, bind and make paper.”
He dictated an ukase:—
“In all towns and villages all bits of rags and linen should be carefully collected and sent to the chief office in Petersburg, where fourpence per pood will be paid for them.”
These rags were intended for the paper factories.
Then followed the ukase about the melting of fat, the right way of plaiting bast shoes, and the dressing of hides for boot leather: “Inasmuch as the hide commonly used for shoe leather is exceedingly unfit for wear, being dressed with tar, which does not prevent it from rotting, nor from letting water in in damp weather, it would be more expedient to dress the same with train oil.”
He glanced at his slate, which, together with a piece of pencil, hung at the head of his bed; he used to note on it any thought which occurred to him during the night. That night he had jotted down:
“Where should manure be deposited? Don’t forget Persia—mats.”
He made Makaroff read out the ambassador Volinsky’s letter concerning Persia.
“The present monarch here is such a fool that it would be difficult to find his equal even among simple peasant folk, much less among the crowned heads. His power will not last long. Although our present war with the Swedes may hinder us, yet, nevertheless, seeing the feeble resources of this country as I do, I deem it possible to annex a major part of Persia simply with a small force. There could not possibly be a more favourable time than the present.”
In his answer to Volinsky, Peter ordered him to send merchants down the river Amu-Daria in order to discover a water way to India, and to draw a map describing it. At the same time to prepare a letter to the Grand Mogul—the Dalai Lama of Tibet. (A road to India, an alliance between Europe and Asia, was an old dream of Peter’s.)
Some twenty years ago, a Russian church had been erected in Pekin, in honour of St. Sophia—the Wisdom of God.
“Le Czar peut unir la Chine à l’Europe,” prophesied Leibnitz. “The Tsar’s conquests in Persia will lay the foundation of an Empire greater than that of the Romans,” the foreign diplomats warned their sovereigns. “The Tsar, like another Alexander, strives to conquer the world,” said the Sultan.
Peter reached down from a shelf, and unfolded a map of the globe which he had once drawn himself while musing on Russia’s destiny. With the words Europe on the west, Asia towards the south, and on the space between the headland Tchoukotsk, and the Niemen and across from Archangel down to Astrakhan the word RUSSIA appeared in the same sized letters as EUROPE and ASIA. “They are all mistaken in calling Russia ‘an Empire’; it is half the world.”
But the next moment, with his usual ductile will power, he turned sharply from musings to business, from the grandiose to the petty. He began to dictate ukases as to a fit place for the deposit of manure; on the substitution of hair sacks for sacks of matting in which to carry biscuits to the galleys; and barrels, or linen bags, for grain and salt, “mats should on no account be used”; on the saving of lead bullets used at practice-firing; the preservation of forests; “the prohibition of hollowed-out trunks for coffins”, which were to be made of planks. “N. B.—England to be written to for a model.”
Then he turned over the pages of his notebook to ascertain whether anything of importance had been forgotten. The first page bore the inscription: “In Gottes Namen”—“In the Lord’s name.” Then followed various notes and memoranda: sometimes two and three words indicated a long train of thought—
“Of a certain discovery which will help to find out various mysteries in nature.”
“Clever experiments: how to extinguish earth oil with vitriol.” “How to boil hemp in saltpetre water.” “Buy the secret of making German sausages.”
“Draw up a concise catechism for the peasants, and have it read in churches for their instruction.”
“Exposed foundling infants are to be educated.”
“Whaling to be organised.”
“The fall of the Greek Monarchy was caused by contempt of warfare.”
“Order French Gazettes to be sent.”
“Engage foreign comedians at high pay.”
“Russian proverbs. A Russian lexicon.”
“Chemical secrets for testing ore.”
“If it be true that laws of nature are rational, why then do animals devour one another? and why do we cause them so much suffering?”
“Present and past judgments against atheists.”
“Compose a prayer for the soldiers: Great, eternal, Holy God, etc.”
The journal of Peter recalled the diary of Leonardo da Vinci.
At six in the morning he began to dress. Pulling on his stockings he noticed a hole; he sat down, got a needle and a ball of wool, and began darning. Ruminating about a road to India in the footsteps of Alexander of Macedonia, he darned his stockings.
Then he had some anisette brandy, with a cracknel; lit his pipe; went out of the palace, and drove in a cabriolet with a lantern (for it was yet dark) to the Admiralty.