Peter and Alexis: The Romance of Peter the Great

by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

CHAPTER I

The Tsar had been warned, when he contemplated building Petersburg, that the site was not suitable for habitation, on account of the floods; twelve years previously the whole country up to Nienshantz had been under water, and similar disasters recurred about every five years. The original inhabitants of the Neva Delta did not erect permanent houses, but only small huts. Whenever a great flood, by one sign or another, seemed to be threatened, they were taken to pieces, the logs and planks were tied together in a raft and fastened to trees, while the people themselves sought refuge on the hill Dooderhof. But to Peter, the new city seemed a “Paradise” just because of the abundance of water which, like a waterfowl, he loved; and he hoped that in this place, quicker than anywhere else, he could accustom his subjects to a seafaring life.

At the end of October 1715, the Neva began to freeze, snow fell, the sleighs were brought out and everybody was expecting an early, settled winter. But quite unexpectedly the weather changed; it became warm again. In one night all the snow and ice had melted. The wind brought a fog from the sea, a putrid, yellow, suffocating mist, which caused much sickness among the people.

“I pray God to deliver me from this place of perdition,” wrote an old boyar to Moscow. “I am seriously afraid of falling ill; since the thaw began we have been enveloped in such a balmy scent and such gloom, that it is impossible to go out. Many die because of the infectious air in this ‘Paradise.’”

The south-west wind continued to blow for nine days; the water in the Neva rose; several times it began to overflow. Peter issued decrees by which the inhabitants were bidden to empty their cellars of all goods, to keep boats in readiness and to drive the cattle on to the higher ground.

But the water after mounting, receded every time. The Tsar, noticing that his decrees only troubled the people, and having come to the conclusion, by signs known only to himself, that there would be no great flood, resolved to trouble himself no more about the rise of the water.

The first fashionable winter “Assembly” was fixed on November 6, in the house of Fédor Apraksin, President of the Admiralty. The house was situated on the quay opposite to the Admiralty buildings, and next to the Winter Palace. On the eve of the Assembly the water rose again. People of experience predicted that this time the calamity could not be escaped, and various signs were quoted in support of this belief; the cockroaches in the palace had begun to creep from the cellars up to the garret; the mice had left the flour stores; the Tsaritsa had dreamt that Petersburg had become a prey to the flames, and fire in a dream means flood. Not quite recovered from her confinement, she could not accompany Peter to the “Assembly,” and entreated him to stay at home.

Peter read in the looks of all that ancient dread of water, which all his life he had vainly sought to overcome: “the sea brings sadness and grief—where water is there is grief also—even the Tsar cannot appease a flood.”

He was warned on all sides. At last he was so annoyed that he forbade even the mentioning of a flood. He all but struck the Chief Constable Devière with his club. An unknown peasant had terrified the whole town by predicting that the water would rise above the high elm which grew on the quay near the Trinity Church. Peter ordered the elm tree to be felled and the peasant to be flogged on the site; during the performance a drum was to be beaten and a persuasive exhortation addressed to the people.

Before the “Assembly” commenced, Apraksin came to the Tsar asking permission to have it in the house itself, and not in the pavilion generally used on such occasions, which stood out in the courtyard and was connected with the main building only by a narrow glazed gallery, far from safe in case of a sudden rise of water, when the guests might easily be cut off from the staircase which led out to the upper rooms. Peter thought it over, yet decided to have his own way, and ordered the “Assembly” to be held in its usual quarter, the pavilion.