were performed within the walls of the Uspenski Cathedral, profane history afforded such themes as the “Siege of Troy” and “Alexander the Great” for the amusement of the court in the private hall. Native themes were not so general: “The Judgment of Chemiaki” was one; such plays as the “Good Genius,” “The Mirror of Justice,” appear to have been derived from the Arabs, and it is said that many themes from the Hindu “Panchatantra” were also utilised. Prince Galitzin spoke Latin as fluently as a German Professor; the tsarevna Sophia was his equal in that tongue; and the princess, so far from being satisfied with the routine of the terem, amused herself in writing a tragedy and a comedy in verse, both of which were performed in Moscow. There seems to be no doubt that great liberty was accorded her; but she, unfortunate in the choice of her advisers, became ambitious, and herself was the principal figure in one of the greatest of the real dramas Moscow has furnished. The “Tranquil” Tsar, as Alexis became to be called, amassed great wealth and amused himself in building a fleet for the Caspian Sea, which the water-brigand, Stenki Razin, the pirate of the Volga, promptly destroyed; and then Alexis, like Peter, played with toy boats on the ornamental lake he had made in the Kremlin. To him, much more truly than to Peter, do Karamzin’s lines apply:—
“Russia had a noble Tsar,
Sovereign honoured wide and far:
He a father’s love enjoyed,
He a father’s power employed,
And sought his children’s bliss
And their happiness was his.”
He constructed much of the old Moscow still visible; not a church or a monastery of earlier date but he rebuilt, extended, or improved. Outside the Kremlin, throughout the different zones of the town, beyond the last ramparts far away into the forests that skirted the suburbs, the marks of his work, churches, palaces and halls, testify to the immensity and riches of this Moscow of the Tsars; wherever one may go in or about the Moscow of to-day, that of the seventeenth century cannot be wholly escaped.
CHAPTER VIII
The Kremlin
“The Kremlin is our Sanctuary and our Fortress; the source of our strength and the treasury of our Holy Faith.”
Viazemski.