Peter and Alexis: The Romance of Peter the Great

by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

For a long time they wandered about the seemingly endless ruins, from hall to hall and terem to terem. What the flames had spared time was destroying. There were halls without doors, windows or floors, so that it was impossible to enter them; and in the walls huge gaps appeared, while the ceilings and roofs were crumbling. It was with difficulty Alexis could find the rooms in which he had spent his childhood.

He divined the unexpressed belief of Father John, that the fire, occurring in the same year in which the Tsar had begun to break down the old ways, was a sign of God’s wrath.

They entered a dilapidated private chapel, where Ivan the Terrible had prayed for the son he had slain.

A deep blue sky, such as only canopies ruins, peered through the rent in the ceiling. Iridescent cobwebs bridged the gap, and through them could be seen a cross which, snapped by the wind, was suspended by half-broken chains, and so threatening to fall at any moment. The wind had broken the mica windows, and crows flying in through the holes had built their nests in the ceilings and messed the screens. White streams of their droppings streaked the dark faces of the saints; one half of the holy gates was torn off; in the sanctuary at the foot of the altar stood a pool of water.

Father John told the Tsarevitch how the priest of the chapel, a centenarian, had long petitioned the Public Offices, Departments, and even the Tsar himself, that the structure should be repaired, because, owing to the age of the ceiling, the leakage had increased to a great extent, there was danger the Eucharist would be exposed to the elements. But nobody listened to him; he died of sorrow, and the chapel fell into ruins.

Crows, scared by their entrance, flew up with ominous cries; through the windows the wind moaned and sobbed. A spider ran to and fro in his web. Something started from the altar—apparently a bat—and began to circle round the head of the Tsarevitch. He felt terrified, and lamented the state into which the church had fallen; to his mind came the prophet’s words about “the abomination of desolation in the holy places.”

Passing the golden rails, along the front gallery of the grand staircase, they descended and entered the Granovitaia Palace, which had been less damaged than the others. But in place of the receptions to foreign ambassadors, or levées, originally held there, the palace was now used for the performance of new comedies and dialogues, and also for buffoon weddings. And to prevent the old interfering with the new, the existing writing on the walls had been covered with whitewash, and daubed over with a gay ochre pattern in the new “German style.”

In one of the lumber rooms on the ground floor Father John pointed out two stuffed lions. Alexis at once recognised them as the familiar objects of his childhood. During the reign of Tsar Alexis Michailovitch the lions were placed near the throne in the Kolomna Palace, where they bellowed, rolled their eyes, and opened their jaws like live beasts. Their brass bodies had been covered with sheepskins in lieu of lions’ skins. The mechanism, which had once produced the “leonine roaring” and moved their jaws and eyes, was secreted in a separate closet, where the bench with bellows and springs had been fitted up. The lions had probably been brought to the Kremlin for repairs, and forgotten here amid the lumber of the storehouse; the springs were broken, the bellows torn, the skins had fallen off; rotten bastwisp was protruding from their sides, and pitiful, indeed, now looked these sometime terrible playthings of former Russian autocrats—their muzzles expressing blank sheepishness.