Now let us see what progress vice has made during the reign of Catherine I. and Peter II., and how it has established itself in Russia.
The feminine sex is generally more prone to luxury than the male, and so we see the Empress Catherine I. having her own court even during the life of her husband, Peter the Great. Her chamberlain was Mons, whose unbounded luxury was his first quality that brought him to a shameful death; her pages were Peter and Jacob Fedórovich Balkóv, his nephews, who during his misfortune were driven from the Court. She was exceedingly fond of ornaments, and carried her vanity to such an excess that other women were not permitted to wear similar ornaments, as, for example, to wear diamonds on both sides of the head, but only on the left side; no one was allowed to wear ermine furs with the tails, which she wore, and this custom, which was confirmed by no ukase or statute, became almost a law; this adornment was appropriated to the Imperial family, though in Germany it is also worn by the wives of burghers. Does not this vanity seem to indicate that when her age began to impair her beauty, she was trying to enhance it by distinctive adornments? I do not know whether this opinion was just, and whether it was proper for the Emperor to appear every hour of the day before his subjects in a masquerade dress, as if he lacked other distinguishing adornments.
Vasíli Petróvich Petróv. (1736-1799.)
Petróv was the son of a poor clergyman. He studied in the Theological Academy at Moscow, where he was made a teacher in 1760. Through Potémkin, his friend, he was presented to the Empress, who, in 1768, appointed him her private translator and reader. In 1772 he was sent to England, where he soon acquired the language. In London he translated Milton’s Paradise Lost and made a careful study of Addison, especially of his Cato. Petróv wrote a large number of adulatory odes, now long forgotten; he showed more talent in his satires, which he wrote in England, and in which the influence of the English writers whom he studied may be perceived. The following ode, probably his best, is from Sir John Bowring’s Specimens of the Russian Poets, Part II.
ON THE VICTORY OF THE RUSSIAN OVER THE TURKISH FLEET[140]
O triumph! O delight! O time so rich in fame
Unclouded, bright and pure as the sun’s midday flame!
Ruthenia’s strength goes forth—see from the sea emerge
The Typhons of the north!—The lightning, in its might,
Flashes in dazzling light,—