Federal Agency for Education

State educational institution

Higher professional education

"St. Petersburg State

University of Engineering and Economics".

Department of Public Relations, History and Political Science
Discipline: "National history"
Abstract on the topic :

"The life of the royal family inXVIIcentury"

Completed by a student

Faculty of Entrepreneurship and Finance

Course 1

Group No. 3354

Rusakova Ekaterina

Vladimirovna
scientific adviser

Goncharenko N.A.

Saint Petersburg

2005
Content

Introduction ………………………………………………………….3

1.Historical features of the device of life

Russian tsars in the 17th century …………………………………………………4

2. General concepts of the palace …………………………………………...5

2.1. The appearance of the palace …………………………………….5

2.2. Carved woodwork ……………………………….6

2.3. General overview of the interior decoration of the rooms ……….8

2.4. Room painting ……………………………………10

2.5. Private view of some rooms ……………………13

3. Entertainment of the royal family ……………………………………… 17

4. The appearance and life of the Kremlin palaces of the XVI-XVII centuries …………..18

5. Schedule of the day ………………………………………………………20

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………25

Introduction:

Our country has a great, centuries-old history, which we can rightfully be proud of. Over the years of the historical development of the Russian state, there have repeatedly been moments that, undoubtedly, can be called heroic, requiring the maximum exertion of moral strength and the attraction of huge material resources. However, studying various historical eras, we often forget about the everyday life of people who lived in those distant times. Namely, this everyday life was an expression of all socio-historical formations that have changed over the long history of the Russian state. The study of the economic foundations and political relations without studying the domestic life and traditions of people living in the time we are studying significantly impoverishes our understanding of it. One of the first domestic historians who paid attention to the daily life of people was Professor of Moscow University Ivan Egorovich Zabelin, who wrote: “At the present time, with the current direction of historical work, the study of the domestic life of obsolete generations is of great importance. The conclusions of science reveal the truth that a person's home life is an environment in which lie the germs and rudiments of his development and all kinds of phenomena of his life, social and political, or state…” 1 .

Soviet historiography, based on the principles of historical materialism, the leading law of which is the idea of ​​the economic foundations of socio-political formations, paid insufficient attention to people's daily lives. Only in recent years have public studies on this issue appeared. The abstract is devoted to the study of the daily life of the royal family in the early and least studied period of the birth and formation of the Russian state - the 17th century.

1. Historical features of the structure of life of Russian tsars in XVII v.

In the middle of the 17th century, an autocratic monarchy was finally formed and legally formalized in the Russian state. At the Zemsky Sobor in 1648-1649. the Council Code was adopted, which contained a decree on the protection of the honor and health of the king, on the procedure for conducting a trial and executing punishments. For actions directed against the state order, property and life of the sovereign, the death penalty was due. one

The domestic life of the people and kings in the internal development of the country is the external expression of its existence. The foundations of the entire social system lie in everyday charters, orders, in its moral principles. Thus, the most conspicuous type of history is the "sovereign" in the general sense, as owner, possessor, or master. "This type is considered in its three main types: the life of the best people, the life of average people and the life of younger people" 2 . In the ancient domestic life of the kings, the supreme meaning of this type is revealed and then gradually leads to its younger branch - to the children of the boyars, the ordinary princely squad.

According to its political structure, Russia of the 17th century is an autocratic monarchy. 3

The life of the Russian great sovereign expressed itself most fully by the end of the seventeenth century. But no matter how wide and regal its dimensions were in general terms and in general provisions, it did not at all depart from the typical, primordial outlines of Russian life. The Moscow sovereign remained the same prince - an patrimonial. The patrimonial type was reflected in all the orders of his domestic life and household. It was a simple rural, and, consequently, purely Russian way of life, not at all different in its main features from the life of a peasant, a way of life that sacredly preserved all customs and traditions. The name sovereign was associated with domestic life, with the owner-owner and the father of the family. “Even in Russkaya Pravda, the word sovereign, ruler, together with the word lord, owner of property, householder, patrimony, is denoted. The ruler was a person who combined in its meaning the concepts of the head of the house, the direct ruler, judge, owner and manager of his household.

1.1. External and internal view of the palace.

The palaces of the 17th century were buildings of various sizes, scattered everywhere, commensurate primarily with considerations of convenience. Such was the appearance of the palaces at the end of the 17th century. “In this regard, the palace did not have a facade. The buildings were crowded next to each other and further increased the diversity with their various roofs in the form of tents, stacks, barrels, with patterned pipes, skillfully folded. In other places towers with eagles, unicorns and lions stood instead of weathercocks” 1 . According to the Italian Barberini (1565), the roofs and domes of the royal palace were covered with gold, along the cornice of the Middle Golden Patate there was an inscription “In the summer of August 70-69. By the command of the pious Christ-loving. Moscow, Nougorod. tsar of Kazan. and the Tsar of Astrakhan. Sovereign of Pskov and Grand Duke of Tver. Yugra. Perm. Vyatsky. Bulgarian. and other sovereigns of the Livonian land. city ​​of Yuriev and others. and with his noble children. Tsarevitch Ivan: and Tsarevich Theodore Ioanovich of All Russia, Autocrat.

“The roof of the Stone Terem was originally decorated in 1637 with burrs induced with gold, silver and paints.” (Expenditure books of the Treasury order in the Arch. Armory, No. 958). Subsequently, it was gilded.

Especially, pretentious variegation and patterning were manifested to a greater extent, as in external architectural decorations and various kinds of ornaments, usually located along the cornices, or gaps of buildings in the form of belts, shoulder blades or pilasters and columns; also at windows and doors in the form of sandriks, platbands, capitals, patterned carved from wood in wooden and from white stone in stone buildings. In the carving of these ornaments between leaves, herbs, flowers and various patterns, emblematic birds and animals occupied not the last place. (Archive of historical and legal information relating to Russia, published by N. Kalachov. M., 1854. Det. V. C. 33.)

1.2. Carved woodwork.

In the decorations of princely and boyar choirs, carving showed more intricacy, but the nature of art, in its techniques, remained the same. A drawing or a badge completely depended on the icon-painting style, which always translated memorized samples almost according to a stencil. The carving was dominated by the cutting of quite simple geometric figures: teeth, towns, rivets, grooves, etc. An excellent and most characteristic monument of ancient Russian carving is wooden royal place in Moscow Assumption Cathedral 1 . Together with other similar monuments, it gives the most complete and correct idea of ​​the architectural types of its time and the nature of the carved patterns that decorated the royal mansions. Carving with the same self-styled character survived until the second half of the 17th century, when, under Tsar Alexei, to replace antiquity, German carving, figured, in the Renaissance style, was brought to us, according to the invention of the German engineer-architect Dekenpin in 1660. Then, in In 1668, the mansions of the Kolomna Palace and the dining room of Tsarevich Alexei Alekseevich in the Kremlin Palace were decorated in the same style. Reitenfels, who was in Moscow in 1670, generally remarks about the Kolomna Palace that it “was so superbly decorated with carvings and gilding that you would think it was a toy just taken out of a box.” In 1681, the new mansions of Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich, built at the northeastern corner of the Terem Palace 2, were painted and gilded. The next year, in April 1682, shortly before the death of the tsar, on these mansions “attics were painted on the outside with pink colored paints on both sides, from the Stone Towers, the other side from the Church of the Life-Giving Resurrection” 1 . Flowers, herbs, birds, and also animals were depicted on the window shutters. Existing walls of stone buildings were decorated in the same character. In 1667, all the buildings that made up the face of the palace from the side of the Cathedral Square were decorated in this way, i.e. The Annunciation porch, the Red Porch and the Faceted Chamber. Carving of Fryazh herbs on a white stone. (Cases of the Palace Orders, 17th century, in the Arch. Armory), which were then covered with red gold and colored paints, can still serve as a model of ancient fryashchina in jewelry. In the same way, the Stone Tower was painted, which to this day has largely retained its former appearance. The porch leading to Terem was called Golden. The outer decorations of the Terem were renewed several times during the reign of Tsars Alexei Mikhailovich and his son Fyodor. Also on all the gates of the palace, from the outside and from the inside, i.e. from the yard, there were icons painted on boards. So, for example, on the Kolymazhny Gates, on one side, there was an image of the Resurrection, and on the other, the Most Holy Theotokos of Smolensk.

1.3. General overview of the interior decoration of the rooms.

Everything that served as decoration inside the choir or was their necessary part was called attire. There were two types of attire: mansion and tent. The mansion was also called the carpenter's, i.e. they hewed walls, ceilings and walls, sheathed them with red boarding, made benches, taxes, and so on. This simple carpenter's attire received a special beauty if the rooms were cleaned with joinery carvings. The tent attire consisted of cleaning the rooms with cloth and other fabrics. Much attention was paid to the ceilings. There were two types of ceiling decoration: hanging and mica. Hanging - wooden carving with a number of attachments. Mica - mica decoration with carved tin decorations. The decoration of the ceilings was combined with the decoration of the windows. The floor was covered with boards, sometimes paved with oak bricks.

The usual furniture in the royal mansions were benches, which were arranged near the walls, around the whole room or chamber, sometimes even near the stoves. Under the benches they made lockers with shutters, a kind of small cabinets. Such lockers under the benches were arranged in 1683 in the front room of Tsar Peter Alekseevich.

The stoves were tiled, or “exemplary, valuable” (Historical review of the enamel and valuable business in Russia in the Notes of the St. Petersburg Archaeological Society (1853, Vol. 6, Section 1)) from blue tiles and ant or green from green. In the seventeenth century Polish green stoves are also mentioned. The stoves were placed quadrangular, round, flat, the shape of the tiles was varied: they depicted herbs, flowers, people, animals and various patterns. Despite the clean, smooth finish of the choir, the walls, ceilings, benches, and floors were almost never left bare. They were draped with colorful cloths. Sometimes the walls and ceilings were upholstered in half with green satin: the rooms of Tsarina Natalya Kirillovna and Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich were upholstered with such an atlas in 1691, which is why they were called satin rooms. During the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, some of his rooms were upholstered with gilded bass leather, with carved herbs, flowers and animals. Such leathers were also upholstered: in 1666 the doors of the sovereign's Room and the third in Terems, in 1673 the upper hut, above the Cross, near Tsaritsa Natalya Kirillovna, and the room of Tsarevich Peter with silver skins, in 1681 with golden skins of the room and canopy in the new wooden mansions of Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich, built at that time near the Towers and the Church of the Resurrection 1 .

On important occasions, during embassy receptions or on solemn days and royal holidays, the entire mansion outfit received a completely different look. Then, instead of the cloths used to clean the rooms in ordinary times, the walls were decorated with rich gold and silk fabrics, Aksamites, etc., and the floors were decorated with Persian and Indian carpets. In addition to solemn receptions and holidays, a rich mansion outfit was also used on other occasions, especially important in the family life of the sovereign. The royal books of 1662 describe this attire as follows: “The sovereign was sitting in large armchairs, and in the Golden one was an outfit from the Treasury: on the table the carpet was silvered with wormy earth, the lapels were gold, that with stains, gold carpets on the horses, on two windows embroidered golden carpets, on white satin, on the third window a golden Kizilbas carpet.

1.4. Room painting.

Much more remarkable is another kind of ancient choir decoration - namely, room painting, wall and ceiling painting, which served as the most magnificent and from the middle of the 17th century, a rather ordinary decoration of the royal reception chambers and bed choirs. In the 17th century it was known under the name byteisky letters. This name already sufficiently explains what kind of objects were depicted on the walls and plafonds of the royal chambers.

By the nature of his education - religious, theological - a Russian person liked to personify parables and church life, with images of which he decorated his mansions. In the absence of an aesthetic element in his education, he did not know art in the sense that modernity gives it, therefore, in the parables and beings that were depicted on the walls of his chambers, he wanted to see, first of all, edification, teaching, spiritual benefit in a religious sense, and not delighting the eye with beautiful images that were tempting and always carefully removed. The evolutionary processes that took place in the state system of Russia in the 17th century, the breakdown of the traditional worldview, the noticeably increased interest in the world around us, the craving for "external wisdom" were reflected in the general character of Russian culture. Contributed to the changes and unusually expanded country's ties with Western Europe. The expansion of the themes of images, the increase in the share of secular, historical subjects, the use of Western European engravings as "samples", allowed artists to create with less regard for traditions, to look for new ways in art. However, we must not forget that the golden age of ancient Russian painting is far behind. It was no longer possible to rise to the top again within the framework of the old system. Icon painters found themselves at a crossroads. The beginning of the 17th century was marked by the dominance of two artistic trends inherited from the previous era. One of them was called the "Godunovskaya" school, since most of the famous works of this direction were commissioned by Tsar Boris Godunov and his relatives. "Godunov's" style as a whole is distinguished by its gravitation towards narrative, the overload of the composition with details, the corporality and materiality of forms, and the fascination with architectural forms.

Another direction is usually called the "Stroganov" school. Most of the icons of this style are associated with the orders of the eminent merchant family, the Stroganovs. The Stroganov school is the art of icon miniature. It is no coincidence that her characteristic features are most clearly manifested in works of small size. In the Stroganov icons, with impudence unheard of at that time, the aesthetic principle asserts itself, as if obscuring the cult purpose of the image. It was not the deep inner content of this or that composition and not the richness of the spiritual world of the characters that worried the artists, but the beauty of the form in which all this could be captured.

Elements of a kind of realism, observed in the painting of the Stroganov school, were developed in the work of the best masters of the second half of the 17th century - the royal icon painters and painters of the Armory. Their recognized head was Simon Ushakov.

The 17th century completes more than seven centuries of history of ancient Russian art. From that time on, ancient Russian icon painting ceased to exist as a dominant artistic system.

At this time, all the eminent people of the country are trying to capture their image in the portrait. The royal icon painters Simon Ushakov, Fyodor Yuryev, Ivan Maksimov painted portraits of Prince B. I. Repnin, the steward G. P. Godunov, L. K. Naryshkin and many other images. So, under the supervision of Simon Ushakov, the choir of Alexei Mikhailovich was decorated with wall and grass writing.

Today we have been taught to think that colored stained-glass windows in the windows of houses and cathedrals are a typical attribute of exclusively Western European buildings. It turns out that this idea is wrong. Colored, patterned and painted window panes were also used in the "Mongolian" way of life in Russia-Horde of the 16th century.

In the 17th century, mica in the windows began to be decorated with paintings. So, in 1676, the painter Ivan Saltanov was ordered to paint a window on mica in the mansions of Tsarevich Peter Alekseevich "in the circle of an eagle, in the corners of the grass; and write in such a way that it was visible through the mansion, and from the courtyard into the mansions, so that it was not visible" one . In 1692, it was ordered to register the death of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich in the mansion, so as not to see through them. Various images of people, animals and birds, painted with colors, can also be seen on the mica windows left from the Pereslavl Palace of Peter the Great.

Heating of premises was practiced with the help of pipes laid in the walls and floors. Hot air flowed through the pipes. "The upper floors of the wooden choirs were mostly heated with wire pipes from the furnaces of the lower tiers. These pipes were also tiled with air vents ... All the large royal ceilings, Faceted, two Golden ones, Canteen and Embankments, were also heated with wire pipes from furnaces arranged under them in the cellars.

1.5. Private view of some rooms.

The room, in its own sense, was a study, or in general such a room in which one remained most of the day. In the emperor's room, where he usually received reports, even in the rooms of adult princes, the table was covered with red cloth and cleaned with various items necessary for writing classes. There was a clock on it, there were books that the sovereign needed for the case, for example, the “Book of the Code” , different papers lay in notebooks, in columns and in scrolls. The emperor used feathers, traditional for that time, swan feathers. Noble people at that time rarely wrote in goose. Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich had a “book in silver”, which in 1676 Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich took to his mansion. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, when he was a prince, the boyar Prince Ivan Borisovich Cherkassky brought "the whistle of silver enamel." Among the writing instruments of his room table were also "a German clock in a dog, under them in a box of ink and a sandbox, a knife, scabbards." The little book of Tsarevich Ivan Mikhailovich was unusually richly decorated. She was set in gold and strewn with precious stones. In 1683, Tsarevna Sofya Alekseevna was given into the room “a box that puts letters with an inkwell, and with scissors, and with a bone, than letters are sent.”

The main rooms of the royal half were: the Front Room, the Room (study), the Cross, the Bedchamber and the Mylenka. I would like to fix my eyes on the bedchamber, because this room had the richest decoration at that time. So, bedchamber. The main item of decoration of the bed room was the bed "bed".

The bed corresponded to the direct meaning of this word, i.e. she served as a shelter and had the appearance of a tent. The tent was embroidered with gold and silver. The veils were trimmed with fringes. In addition to curtains, dungeons (a kind of drapery) were hung at the heads and at the foot of the bed. The dungeons were also embroidered with gold and silver silk, decorated with tassels, they depicted people, animals and various outlandish herbs and flowers. When in the 17th century the fashion for German curly carving went on, the beds became even more beautiful. They began to be decorated with crowns crowning tents, gzymzas (cornices), sprengels, apples and puklys (a kind of ball). All carvings, as usual, were gilded, silvered and painted with paint.

Such a bed can be seen in the Grand Kremlin Palace, and although that bed belongs to a later time, the idea is, in general, reflected.

Prices for royal beds ranged from 200 rubles. up to 2r. The most expensive and richest bed in Moscow of the seventeenth century cost 2800 rubles. and was sent by Alexei Mikhailovich as a gift to the Persian Shah. This bed was decorated with crystal, gold, ivory, tortoiseshell, silk, pearls and mother-of-pearl.

If the beds were so richly arranged, then the bed itself was cleaned with no less luxury. Moreover, for special occasions (weddings, christenings, the birth of a child, etc.) there was a bed. So, the bed consisted of: a cotton mattress (wallet) at the base, heads (a long pillow the entire width of the bed), two down pillows, two small down pillows, a blanket, a bedspread, a carpet was spread under the bed. Many have the idea that the bedchambers of those times were hung with icons. This is not so, the cross rooms served for the prayer service, which looked like small churches due to the number of icons. In the bedchamber there was only a bow cross.

Three, sometimes four rooms side by side, one next to the other, in one connection, served as a very sufficient room for the Sovereign.

As said, these rooms were not particularly spacious. With their spaciousness, they were equal to a peasant's hut or a peasant's cage, i.e., they had a width and length of only 3 sazhens (1 sazhen = 2.134 m.), i.e. 9 arshins (1 arshin = 0.71 m.), Like now peasant huts are being built, and they always had three windows outside. And inside they were likened to the same hut, because ordinary shops were always set up near the walls. Chairs were not used at that time. There was only one chair in the room for the Emperor himself.
In the same way, the queen's mansions were located, which were placed separately from the king's choir, but connected to them by passages or passages. At the tsaritsa, after the Anterior, followed the Cross, and then the Room. Special mansions with the same rooms were set up for the sovereign's children and were also connected
The emperor usually got up at four in the morning. The bed-keeper, with the help of sleeping bags and lawyers, gave the sovereign a dress and cleaned (dressed) him. Having washed, the sovereign immediately went out to Krestovaya, where the confessor or the priest of the cross and the cross clerks were waiting for him. The confessor or cross priest blessed the sovereign with a cross.

Having finished the morning cross prayer, the sovereign, if he rested especially, sent the servant on duty to the queen in the mansion to ask her about her health, how did she rest? Then he himself went out to greet her in her anteroom or dining room. After that, they listened together in one of the riding churches to matins, and sometimes to early mass.

In domestic life, the kings were a model of moderation and simplicity. According to foreigners, the simplest dishes, rye bread, a little wine, oatmeal mash or light beer with cinnamon oil, and sometimes only cinnamon water, were always served at the table of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. In addition to fasting, he did not eat anything meat on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Thus, his attitude towards food was stricter than that of many monks. At the ordinary table of the sovereign on meat and fish days, about seventy dishes were served, but almost all of these dishes were served by the boyars and other persons to whom the sovereign sent these servings as a sign of his goodwill and honor.

After Vespers, business was sometimes also heard and the Duma met. But usually all the time after vespers until the evening meal or supper, the sovereign spent already in the family or with the closest people.

The palace had a special Amusement Chamber, in which various kinds of amusements amused the royal family with songs, music, dance, rope dances and other "actions". Among these mercenaries were: merry (buffoons), guselniki, skrypotchik, domrachi, organists, cymbals. Fools-jesters also lived in the palace, and fools - jokers, dwarfs and dwarfs lived in the queen's house. They sang songs, somersaulted and indulged in all sorts of gaiety, which served as no small amusement to the sovereign family, which continued after dinner until evening. The emperor spent most of the summer in country palaces, entertaining himself with hunting and farming. In winter, he sometimes went on a bear or an elk himself, hunted for hares.

2. Entertainment of the royal family.

2.1. Theatre

Among the new genres that expressed the growth of self-awareness, dramaturgy occupies a special place. The first theatrical performances took place in 1672 in the court theater of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, where plays based on ancient and biblical subjects were staged. The founder of Russian dramaturgy was S. Polotsky, whose plays (the comedy The Parable of the Prodigal Son and the tragedy The King of Nebuchadnezzar) raised serious moral, political and philosophical problems.

The king liked the theatrical performances. In the boardwalk theater, ballets and dramas were presented to the king, the plots of which were borrowed from the Bible. These biblical dramas were spiced with rough jokes; So, in Holofernes, a maidservant, seeing Judith's severed head of the Assyrian governor, says: "The poor thing, waking up, will be very surprised that they took his head away." It was, in fact, the first theater school in Russia.

In 1673, staged by N. Lim, the Ballet about Orpheus Eurydice was first presented at the court of Alexei Mikhailovich, which marked the beginning of periodic performances in Russia, the emergence of the Russian ballet theater.

And wandering artists walked around the cities and villages - buffoons, guslyar - songwriters, guides with bears. Puppet shows with the participation of Petrushka were very popular.

2.2. Music.

There was a stereotype that musical organs are a typical accessory of exclusively Western European life. However, this idea is incorrect. Organs were also distributed in Russia. Even under Mikhail Fedorovich, he was summoned to Moscow organ player Ivan, to arrange organ fun in the palace. Perhaps he was also a master of these instruments and at the same time started building them, if he did not bring ready-made ones with him ... In the 17th century, along with the organs, clavichords or cymbals were brought to the palace ... Further, "organs and cymbals" are mentioned already as the most common items of palace fun ... In 1617, the organs that were in the Amusement Chamber are mentioned; further in 1626 "to the sovereign's joy", i.e. during the wedding of the king, in the Palace of the Facets they played cymbals and organs ...

Unfortunately, there are no descriptions of the organs that stood in the Faceted and Amusement Chambers. In the treasury of the Armory Chamber in 1687, already dilapidated and damaged "four-voiced organs with a belch were stored, and in those organs there are 50 pipes, and 220 pipes on the face; there are no carvings all around, the slander is broken 1". Subsequently, the organ business became a common thing for Moscow palace masters, so the sovereign already sent organs, as a curiosity, as a gift to the Persian Shah. The organs of Moscow work were sent there for the first time in May 1662.

3. The appearance and life of the Kremlin palaces of the epoch of the XVI-XVII centuries.

The appearance and life of the Kremlin palaces of the epoch of the 16th-17th centuries does not correspond well to the picture suggested to us by later historians. They contradict the surviving documents.

Starting from the 18th century, historians paint us a rather barbaric picture of the life of the Moscow tsars of the epoch of the 14th-17th centuries. Say, a wild country that for a long time was under the heavy yoke of the evil Horde-Mongol conquerors. Snow, bears, a rather primitive way of life, even at the royal court. However, acquaintance with the documents that survived after numerous Romanov purges reveals a significantly different face of old Russia. It turns out that the icons painted by Russian icon painters at the end of the 17th century. were taken in Europe for monuments of the 10th or 12th centuries. Most likely, the chronological shift of about 500-600 years is explained by the fact that Russian icon painters painted in the 17th century, probably very primitively, like primitive wild peoples. "Such images of the 16th and 17th centuries, both in bas-reliefs and in whole figures, very often resemble primitive art, which is found only among peoples of ancient times, or among savages, in general, at the first stage of civil development." From the point of view of the new chronology, there are no contradictions here. The "strange similarity" of the art of the 17th century and allegedly of the 10th-12th centuries is explained by the fact that many later works were incorrectly dated by historians of the epoch of the 17th-18th centuries, and as a result, they "left down" in time. Having generated "in the distant past" a phantom reflection of the era of the XV-XVII centuries.

As early as the beginning of the 17th century, Tsar Boris Godunov sent 18 young boyar people to London, Lübeck and France to study foreign languages, while young Englishmen and Frenchmen went to Moscow to learn Russian 1 .

If a number of suburban monasteries represented a series of fortifications near the capital, then the Kremlin, the royal castle, the dwelling of the great sovereign, seemed to be a large monastery, because it was filled with large, beautiful churches, among which was the royal palace - a motley mass of buildings of the most diverse sizes, scattered without any symmetry, purely for convenience.

Quite a lot of astronomical images remained in the Kremlin of the 17th century. In the dining room, built by Tsar Alexei in 1662, in the ceiling was written the astronomical celestial movement, the twelve months and the gods of heaven... the celestial luminaries of the night, wandering comets and fixed stars, with astronomical precision.Each body had its own sphere, with a proper deviation from the ecliptic; the distance of the twelve celestial signs is so precisely measured that even the paths of the planets were marked by golden tropics and the same colors of the equinoxes and the turns of the sun to spring and autumn, winter and summer "... The celestial star movement of the royal Dining Chamber enjoyed special respect at that time and several times served as a model for decorating other rooms. So, in 1683, it was written in the dining room of the lower room of Princess Sofya Alekseevna, and in 1688 in the wooden front room of Princess Tatyana Mikhailovna and in the upper stone room of Princess Marya Alekseevna. In addition, the dining huts of the country royal choirs, in Kolomenskoye and Alekseevsky, and the dining room in the new mansions of Tsarevich Ivan Alekseevich, in 1681 were also decorated with these images of heavenly races ...

4 . Daily schedule.

4.1. Typical day

The day of the sovereign began in the room or resting department of the palace. Earlier in the morning, the sovereign found himself in Krestovaya, with a richly decorated iconostasis, in which lamps and candles were lit even before the appearance of the sovereign. After completing the prayer, which usually lasted about a quarter of an hour, after listening to the final spiritual word read by the deacon, the sovereign went to the reception room. In the meantime, devious, duma, boyars, and close people were gathering in the Front "with their foreheads to hit the sovereign." Having greeted the boyars, having talked about business, the sovereign, accompanied by courtiers, marched at nine o'clock to one of the court churches to listen to a late mass. Lunch lasted about 2 hours. After mass in the Room (office), the tsar listened to reports and petitions on ordinary days, and was engaged in current affairs. After the boyars left, the sovereign (sometimes with especially close boyars) went to the table meal, or dinner. Undoubtedly, the festive table was strikingly different from the usual. But even the dining table could not be compared with the table of the sovereign during fasting. One could only be surprised at the piety and asceticism in the observance of the posts by sovereigns. For example, during fasting, Tsar Alexei ate only 3 times a week, namely on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, on other days he ate a piece of black bread with salt, a pickled mushroom or cucumber and drank half a glass of beer. He ate fish only 2 times during the entire seven-week Great Lent. Even when there was no fast, he did not eat meat on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. However, despite such fasting, on meat and fish days, up to 70 different dishes were served at an ordinary table. After dinner, the emperor usually went to bed and rested until the evening, about three hours. In the evening, the boyars and other officials again gathered in the courtyard, accompanied by them, the tsar went to Vespers. Sometimes, after vespers, business was also heard or the Duma met. But most often the time after vespers until the evening meal, the king spent with his family. The king read, listened to bahari (tellers of fairy tales and songs), played. Chess was one of the favorite pastimes of the kings. The strength of this tradition is evidenced by the fact that there were special chess masters at the Armory.

In general, the entertainment of that time was not as poor as we think. At the court there was a special Amusement Chamber, in which all kinds of amusements amused the royal family. In winter, especially on holidays, the king liked to watch the bear field, i.e. fight of a hunter with a wild bear. In early spring, summer and autumn, the king often went falconry. Usually this fun lasted all day and was accompanied by a special ritual. The day of the king usually also ended at the Baptismal 15-minute evening prayer.

4.2. Day off

By mass, the sovereign usually went out on foot, if it was close and the weather allowed, or in a carriage, and in winter in a sleigh, always accompanied by boyars and other service and court ranks. The splendor and richness of the sovereign's weekend clothes corresponded to the significance of the celebration or holiday on the occasion of which the exit was made, as well as the state of the weather that day. In the summer he went out in a light silk fur coat and in a golden hat with a fur rim, in the winter - in a fur coat and a fox hat, in the autumn and in general in inclement weather - in a single-row cloth. In the hands there was always a unicorn or Indian ebony staff. During great festivities and celebrations, such as Christmas, Epiphany, Bright Sunday, the Assumption and some others, the sovereign was accused of royal outfit to which belonged: the royal dress, the royal camp caftan, the royal hat or crown, the diadem, the pectoral cross and the bandage, which were placed on the chest; instead of a staff, a royal rod. All this shone with gold, silver, precious stones. The shoes worn by the sovereign at that time were also richly trimmed with pearls and adorned with stones. The severity of this attire was very significant, and therefore, in such ceremonies, the sovereign was always supported by the stolniks, and sometimes by the neighboring boyars.

Here is how the Italian Barberini (1565) describes such an exit: “Having dismissed the ambassadors, the sovereign gathered for mass. Passing through the halls and other palace chambers, he descended from the courtyard porch, speaking quietly and solemnly, leaning on a rich silver gilded staff. He was followed by more than eight hundred retinues in the richest clothes. He walked among four young people who were about thirty years old, strong and tall: these were the sons of the noblest boyars. Two of them walked ahead of him, and the other two behind him, but at some distance and at an even distance from him. All four were dressed in the same way: on their heads were high hats of white velvet with pearls and silver, lined and trimmed all around with lynx fur. Their clothes were of silvery fabric up to their feet, it was lined with ermines; on his feet were white boots with horseshoes; each carried a large ax on his shoulder, shining with silver and gold.

4.3. Christmas

In the winter, before Christmas, on December 21, there was a big feast in Moscow in memory of the miracle worker Peter, the first metropolitan, who began to live in Moscow and consecrated its greatness. The holiday was actually the holiday of Petrov's successor. On the 19th, the patriarch came to the palace to call the great sovereign and the senior prince for the holiday and eat, usually all the nobility were invited. On the eve of the Nativity of Christ, four hours before light, the sovereign went to the prison and English courtyards and granted alms from his own hands. Along the way, the sovereign distributed alms to the wounded soldiers and the poor. In total, more than a thousand rubles were distributed. On the feast of the Nativity of Christ itself, the sovereign listened to matins in the Dining Room or the Golden Chamber. At two o'clock in the afternoon, while the evangelization for the Liturgy was beginning, he made his way to the Dining Room, where he expected the coming of the patriarch with the clergy. To do this, the Dining Room was dressed up with a large outfit, cloth and carpets. In the front corner was placed the place of the sovereign, and next to him was the chair of the patriarch. The patriarch, accompanied by metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, archimandrites and abbots, came to the sovereign in the Golden Chamber to glorify Christ and greet the sovereign, bringing with them a kissing cross and holy water. The sovereign met this procession in the hallway. After the usual prayers, the chanters sang many years to the sovereign, and the patriarch said congratulations. Then the patriarch went in the same order to glorify Christ to the queen, to her Golden Chamber, and then to all the members of the royal family, if they did not gather with the queen. Having said goodbye to the patriarch, the sovereign in the Golden or in the Dining Room put on the royal outfit, in which he marched to the cathedral for mass. After the liturgy, changing the royal attire for an ordinary evening dress, the sovereign went to the palace, where then a festive table was prepared in the Dining Room or the Golden Chamber. This ended the celebration.

On Christmas Day, the king did not sit at the table without feeding the so-called prison inmates and prisoners. So in 1663, on this holiday, 964 people were fed on a large prison table.

Conclusion:

"The house is not to weave bast shoes."

This folk wisdom succinctly expresses the attitude of a Russian person to the House and household, its inhabitants in accordance with the centuries-old tradition, which does not fit into the schematic representations of modern systems, ideas or concepts. To lead the house to the sovereign, that is, both to the citizen (the original meaning of the word sovereign), and to the owner, and to the lord. Our history provides the most convincing proof of the extraordinary strength and vitality of the immediate folk elements of life, and even of the very forms in which these elements are expressed. So, for more than three hundred years, since the first transformations of Peter I, we have been under the influence of continuous reforms, we have taken advantage of a lot during these tireless restructurings, but immeasurably more remains in the same position, and very often our actions reveal people in us XVII centuries. “The power of folk life is the power of nature itself, and in order to successfully guide it, direct the course of its development in one direction or another, in order to successfully serve it, as they usually say, for its happiness and good, you must first know its properties well and in detail. listen attentively to her demands, find out the direct springs of her life, always deeply hidden in the petty and diverse living conditions…”.

At first glance, modern life with its lightning-fast pace, developed communications, numerous media with the Internet and inclusive television, and the wide participation of the population in the political process bear little resemblance to the leisurely life of our ancestors in the 17th century. However, its foundations (public service, traditions of family relations, home arrangements, habits, or what is called everyday life) were laid precisely in those distant times. And knowledge of these fundamentals significantly expands the horizons of modern man. This is what I tried to cover in my essay.

List of used literature

1. 
   I.E.Zabelin Sovereign's court, or palace. - M.: Book, 1990. - 312 p.
2. 
   CM. Solovyov Readings and stories on the history of Russia. - M.: Pravda, 1989. - 768 p., ill.
3. 
   House of the Romanovs. / Authors-compilers P.Kh. Grebelsky and A.B. Mirvis. - St. Petersburg, 1992, 280 p.
4. 
   Ishimova A.O. History of Russia in stories. - St. Petersburg: NIC "Alpha", 1992. - 432 p., ill.
5. 
   History of modern Russia. 1682 - 1861: Experimental textbook for universities. / Under the general editorship of V. Shelokhaev. – M.: TERRA, 1996. – P.71-127.
6. 
   Story. Handbook./S.V. Novikov. – M.: Philol. Island "Slovo", Center for the Humanities at the Faculty of Journalism, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov, 1999. - 736 p.
7. 
   Sakharov A.N. Russian history. – M.: Pravda, 1996
8. 
   Karamzin N.M. Traditions of the Ages - M .: Pravda, 1988. - 768 p.

1 Zabelin I.E. Home life of Russian tsars in the 17th century. - M .: Book, 1990. - S. 36.

1. History. Handbook./S.V. Novikov. – M.: Philol. Island "Slovo", Center for the Humanities at the Faculty of Journalism, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov, 1999. - P.112.

2 Zabelin I.E. Home life of Russian tsars in the 17th century. - M .: Book, 1990. S. 44.

3 History of modern Russia. 1682 - 1861: Experimental textbook for universities. / Under the general editorship of V. Shelokhaev. – M.: TERRA, 1996. – P.18.

2 Shelokhaev V. history of modern Russia - M.: TERRA. 1996. P.236.

1 Zabelin I.E. Home life of Russian tsars in the 17th century. – M.: Book, 1990. S. 134.

1 Zabelin I.E. Sovereign's court or palace. - M .: Book, 1990. - P. 136.

2 Grebelsky P.Kh. House of the Romanovs. SPb., 1992, - S. 26

1 Zabelin I.E. Sovereign's court or palace. - M.: Book, 1990. - S. 138

1 Zabelin I.E. Sovereign's court or palace. - M .: Book, 1990. - P. 146

1 Zabelin I.E. Sovereign's court or palace. - M .: Book, 1990. - S.238 - 239.

1 Karamzin N.M. Traditions of the Ages - M .: Pravda, 1988. - P. 603.

1 S.M. Solovyov Readings and stories on the history of Russia. - M.: Pravda, 1989. - S. 256.

The Romanovs are a female dynasty

The royal dynasty of the Romanovs in the 17th century was predominantly a female dynasty. The number of children was large: the first Romanov, Mikhail Fedorovich, had 10 children, his son Alexei Mikhailovich had 16. At the same time, infant mortality occupied a significant percentage of the number of births, although it decreased over time. But most importantly, more girls were born than boys (by the way, an interesting pattern existed in the Romanov family - the birth of four girls in a row in one family).

Equestrian portrait of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich.
1650-1699 years Google Cultural Institute

For men, life expectancy was lower than for women. So, of the Romanov tsars in the 17th century, no one overcame the 50-year milestone: Mikhail Fedorovich lived for 49 years, Alexei Mikhailovich - 46, Fedor Alekseevich did not live up to 21 years, Ivan Alekseevich lived for 29 years. By today's standards, all the tsars of the Romanov dynasty in the 17th century were relatively young or mature, but by no means old people. The life expectancy of the princesses fluctuates between 42 (Princess Natalya Alekseevna) and 70 (Princess Tatyana Mikhailovna) years. However, only two princesses did not live to be 50 years old - Natalya Alekseevna and Sofya Alekseevna (she lived for 46 years), most of them crossed the 50-year mark. Physically, the women of the Romanov family were, apparently, much stronger than men.

Despite the presence of a large number of young women, the Romanov dynasty was in absolute international genealogical isolation. An insurmountable obstacle stood in the way of dynastic marriages with foreign ruling families. The Russian tsar (or tsarevich) could marry a person of lower status (a “simple” noblewoman), thereby elevating her. The princess, on the other hand, could not marry a person below her in status - therefore, only an equal marriage was possible. In this case, the groom had to be Orthodox (and there were almost no other Orthodox kingdoms except Russia) or convert to Orthodoxy before marriage and stay in Russia.

Mikhail Fedorovich made an attempt to marry his eldest daughter Irina to the natural son of the Danish king, Duke Voldemar, but the question of the groom's conversion to Orthodoxy turned out to be the stumbling block against which all plans were shattered. This unsuccessful attempt, apparently, discouraged the Romanovs from looking for other suitors for their princesses - be that as it may, until 1710 not a single princess from the Romanov family ever married, and most of them lived to death in the royal palace unmarried virgins (the opinion that they massively took monastic vows is not true, in fact, such cases were isolated).

Tree of the State of Moscow (Praise of Our Lady of Vladimir). Icon of Simon Ushakov. 1668 Google Cultural Institute

Safe marriages to noblewomen

Only once, the very first, the Romanovs tried to intermarry with the Russian aristocracy - the princes Dolgorukov, but this first marriage of Mikhail Fedorovich was very short-lived. Subsequently, the Romanovs became related to the "ordinary", not very noble nobility, which existed far from palace intrigues.

The choice of a bride from, as they say, "broad strata of the noble masses" probably symbolized the connection of the royal family with their subjects, with the then "society", from where the Russian queens came from. In the 17th century, the Romanovs became related to the nobles Streshnevs, Miloslavskys, Naryshkins, Grushetskys, Apraksins, Saltykovs and Lopukhins. Subsequently, many relatives of the queens, even very distant ones, such as, for example, Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy Petr Andreevich Tolstoy(1645-1729) - associate of Peter the Great, statesman and diplomat, active privy councillor. or Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev(1686-1750) - Russian historian, geographer, economist and statesman; author of "History of Russia". Founder of Yekaterinburg, Perm and other cities. occupied important places in the public life of the country. In other words, the matrimonial policy of the royal dynasty remained deeply peculiar.

How Peter I inherited the throne

Tsaritsa Natalya Kirillovna. Painting by Pyotr Nikitin. Late 17th century Wikimedia Commons

After the death of Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich, the struggle of two branches of the Romanov family for the throne was clearly revealed. The older branch was the descendants of Alexei Mikhailovich from his first marriage, with Tsarina Maria Ilyinichnaya (Miloslavskaya), the youngest - the descendants from his second marriage, with Tsarina Natalya Kirillovna (Naryshkina). Since the only man in the senior branch, Tsarevich Ivan Alekseevich, was of little ability, and the only man in the younger branch, Tsarevich Pyotr Alekseevich, reached only ten years of age, relatively young women of the royal family - the princess Sofya Alekseevna, who at that time was 24 years old, and her stepmother, Tsaritsa Natalya Kirillovna, at the age of 30 years.

As you know, the victory in the events of 1682 remained with Tsarevna Sophia, who actually became the real ruler under two tsars - Ivan and Peter. The dual kingdom situation was unique in Muscovite Russia, although it had some basis in the earlier tradition of the Rurikids and the more distant dynastic tradition of Byzantium. In 1689, young Peter Alekseevich was able to remove Princess Sophia from power, and after the death of his brother Ivan in 1696, he remained the sovereign sovereign of Russia. Thus began a new era in the history of the country and in the history of the Romanov dynasty.

Princess Sofia Alekseevna. 1680s Bridgeman Images/Fotodom

In the 18th century, the royal dynasty met in the following composition: two men (Tsar Peter Alekseevich and his ten-year-old son and heir Alexei Petrovich) and fourteen (!) Women - three queens, two of them widowed (Marfa Matveevna, widow of Fyodor Alekseevich, and Praskovya Feodorovna, widow of Ivan Alekseevich) and one who was “out of work” and tonsured a nun (Peter’s first wife, Evdokia Fedorovna) and eleven princesses - the seven sisters of the king (six consanguineous, including Sofya Alekseevna imprisoned in a monastery, and one relative; almost all of them left from the normal childbearing age for that time), one aunt of the tsar (Tatiana Mikhailovna, the last of the children of Mikhail Fedorovich) and three nieces of the tsar (daughters of Ivan Alekseevich and Praskovya Feodorovna). Accordingly, only in relation to the last three women could one hope for marriages and the continuation of offspring. Due to this situation, the royal family was under a certain threat. Peter I carried out fundamental changes in dynastic politics and changed the dynastic situation itself.

An extraordinary phenomenon was the actual divorce of the king and his second marriage to a rootless native of Livonia, Marta Skavronskaya, who in Orthodoxy received the name of Ekaterina Alekseevna. The marriage was concluded in 1712, while the spouses had by that time two premarital daughters (who survived among others who died in infancy) - Anna (born in 1708) and Elizabeth (born in 1709). They became "married", which, however, did not remove the question of the legality of their origin. Subsequently, Peter and Catherine had several more children, but they all died in infancy or childhood. By the end of the reign of Peter I, there were no hopes for continuation of the family in the male line from the second marriage of the tsar (emperor).

Peter I

Three dynastic marriages, breakthrough to the West

Portrait of the family of Peter I. Enamel miniature by Gregory of Musikiy. 1716-1717 years Wikimedia Commons

A breakthrough phenomenon was the conclusion of marriages with representatives of foreign sovereign dynasties. This turned out to be possible thanks to a tolerant attitude towards the issue of religion - at first it was not even required that one of the spouses convert to the faith of another. A breakthrough into Europe also meant the recognition of the royal dynasty as a European dynasty, and this could not happen without appropriate matrimonial unions.

The first foreign marriage among the Romanovs was the marriage of Princess Anna Ioannovna (niece of Peter I and future Russian Empress) with Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke of Courland, concluded in 1710. It was of great geopolitical importance, since Courland was a prominent Baltic state that played a significant role in this region. The borders of Russia directly came into contact with the borders of Courland after the annexation of Livonia as a result of the Northern War. Despite the fact that the duke died two and a half months after the wedding, Anna, remaining the Dowager Duchess of Courland, at the behest of Peter went to her new homeland, where she lived for almost twenty years (note that she remained Orthodox).

Ceremonial portrait of Princess Sophia Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. 1710-1715 years Wikimedia Commons

The second marriage, concluded under Peter, was of even greater dynastic significance. In 1711, Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich, who was the heir to the throne, married in Europe Charlotte Christina Sophia, Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (neither the bridegroom nor the bride changed their religion). The most significant aspect of this marriage was that the bride's sister, Elizabeth Christina, was the wife of the Austrian prince Charles, who in the same 1711 became emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation under the name of Charles VI (it was to his brother-in-law that Alexei Petrovich later fled) .

The Holy Roman Empire was the leading and most status state of the then European world. Parenting with its rulers (albeit through property) put Russia in the rank of leading European countries and strengthened its status in the international arena. The heir to the Russian throne became the brother-in-law of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and the future sovereigns were directly related (this was actually the case - Peter II was the cousin of the future Empress Maria Theresa; however, they ruled at different times and Peter did not leave offspring). So, thanks to the marriage of Tsarevich Alexei, the Russian dynasty intermarried with the Habsburgs.

The third dynastic marriage was concluded in 1716: Peter's niece Ekaterina Ivanovna married Karl Leopold, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The territory of this state occupied the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, and this union further strengthened Russia's position in the Baltic region. Finally, after the death of Peter, the previously prepared marriage of the eldest daughter of the Tsar Anna Petrovna and the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp Karl Friedrich was concluded. Holstein was the northernmost Germanic duchy, bordering the Kingdom of Denmark and also overlooking the Baltic Sea. However, the important point was that Karl Friedrich was the mother's nephew of the Swedish king Charles XII, which means that his descendants could claim the Swedish throne. And so it happened: Anna Petrovna's son, Karl Peter, named after Charles XII and Peter the Great, was for some time considered the heir to the Swedish throne. Thus, under favorable circumstances, the descendants of Peter I, that is, representatives of the Romanov dynasty, could take the Swedish throne.

So Peter the Great covered almost the entire Baltic region with dynastic marriages. To the southwest of the territory of the Russian Empire was the duchy of Courland, where his niece ruled. Further west, the southern coast of the Baltic Sea was occupied by the duchy of Mecklenburg, which was ruled by the husband of another niece and where her offspring might subsequently rule. Further, the southern part of the Baltic was closed by Holstein, where the son-in-law of Peter ruled, whose descendants had rights not only to the Holstein throne, but also to the Swedish one - and the long-time enemy of the Great Northern War could become in the future not only an ally, but also a relative of the Romanovs. And the territory of Sweden (in its Finnish part), as you know, adjoined the lands of the Russian Empire from the north-west. In other words, by entering the Baltic and gaining a territorial foothold there, Peter I simultaneously consolidated Russia dynastically in almost the entire Baltic region. But this did not help solve the main problem - the problem of succession to the throne in Russia itself.

Problems of succession. Tsarevich Alexei. Catherine I

Portrait of Tsarevich Peter Alekseevich and Tsarevna Natalya Alekseevna in childhood in the form of Apollo and Diana. Painting by Louis Caravaque. Probably 1722 Wikimedia Commons

A dramatic collision of Peter's reign was the infamous case of Tsarevich Alexei. Accused of treason, the son and heir of the king was imprisoned, where he was interrogated and tortured, as a result of which he died in 1718 (his wife had died even earlier). At that time, in the male generation, the offspring of Peter consisted of two three-year-old children - the grandson (son of Alexei), Grand Duke Peter Alekseevich, and the son from Catherine, Tsarevich Peter Petrovich.

It was Peter Petrovich who was declared the next heir to the throne. However, he died before he was four years old, in April 1719. Peter had no more sons from Catherine. From that moment on, the dynastic situation in the royal family became threatening. In addition to Peter and Catherine, the royal family consisted of the grandson and granddaughter of Peter through the son of Alexei - Peter and Natalia, two daughters from Catherine (the third, Natalia, who lived to a relatively adult age, died a little over a month after the death of Peter himself) and three nieces - Catherine , Anna and Praskovya (their mother, Tsaritsa Praskovya Fedorovna, died in 1723). (We do not take into account Peter's first wife, Evdokia Fedorovna, in monasticism Elena, who, of course, played no role.) Anna was in Courland, and Ekaterina Ivanovna left her husband in 1722 and returned to Russia with her daughter Elizabeth Ekaterina Khristina, a Lutheran religion (the future Anna Leopoldovna).

In a situation where the circle of potential heirs is extremely narrow, and the heir himself theoretically may not justify the trust of the monarch (as happened, according to Peter, in the case of Tsarevich Alexei), Peter I made a cardinal decision by issuing the Charter on the succession to the throne in 1722. According to this document, the sovereign had the right, at his own discretion, to appoint an heir from any of his relatives by means of a will. One might think that in that situation it was the only way to continue the succession of power in the fading Romanov dynasty. The former order of succession to the throne from father to eldest son was abolished, and the new one became, contrary to the wishes of its establisher, one of the factors in the frequent change of power on the Russian throne, which in historiography was called the “epoch of palace coups”.

Peter I on his deathbed. Painting by Louis Caravaque. 1725 Wikimedia Commons

But Peter I did not have time to use his right of will. The famous legend that he allegedly wrote before his death: “Give everything back,” and to whom, he did not have time to finish, is a fiction. At the time of his death in 1725, the only heir in the male line was his grandson Peter Alekseevich, nine years old. In addition to him, the widow of Peter Ekaterina Alekseevna made up the Romanov dynasty; their daughters are Anna, who was at that time the bride, and Elizabeth; three nieces, one of whom was in Courland, and two in Russia (one with her daughter), as well as Peter's granddaughter, Natalya Alekseevna (she would die in 1728 during the reign of her younger brother Peter II). Perhaps anticipating difficulties in the event of his death, back in 1724, Peter crowned his wife Catherine as empress, giving her the absolutely legal status of empress consort. However, by the beginning of 1725, Ekaterina Alekseevna had lost Peter's confidence.

There were two possible contenders for the throne - Peter's widow, Ekaterina Alekseevna, and his grandson, Peter Alekseevich. Catherine was supported mainly by Peter's associates, primarily Menshikov; Petra - representatives of the old boyar families from the royal environment, such as the princes Golitsyn, Dolgorukov, Repnin. The intervention of the guards decided the outcome of the confrontation, and Catherine I was proclaimed empress.

The era of palace coups

Catherine I (1725-1727)

Catherine I. Painting supposedly by Heinrich Buchholz. 18th century Wikimedia Commons

Catherine's family directly consisted of two daughters - Anna, who married the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and unmarried Elizabeth. There remained the direct heir of Peter I in the male line - Grand Duke Peter Alekseevich. In addition to him, the royal family included: his older sister Natalya Alekseevna and three nieces of Peter I - the daughters of Tsar Ivan Alekseevich, one of whom was outside Russia. The potential heir was Peter Alekseevich (there was even a plan to "reconcile" the two lines of descendants of Peter I - the marriage of Peter Alekseevich to Elizaveta Petrovna).

At the insistence of Menshikov, who planned the marriage of Peter to his daughter Maria, on behalf of Catherine I, shortly before her death, a testament was signed - a will, according to which Peter Alekseevich became the heir to the throne. In the event of his childless death, Anna Petrovna and her descendants followed, then Elizaveta Petrovna and her possible descendants, then Pyotr Alekseevich's older sister Natalya Alekseevna and her possible descendants. Thus, this document for the first time, due to actual circumstances, assumed the transfer of rights to the throne through the female line.

It is significant that the throne was assigned only to the descendants of Peter I, and the offspring of Tsar Ivan Alekseevich were excluded from the line of succession to the throne. In addition, it provided for the exclusion from the order of succession of persons of a non-Orthodox religion, as well as those who occupied other thrones. In connection with the infancy of the heir, his reign was originally to be held under the tutelage of the Supreme Privy Council - the highest state body in the empire, created in 1726. After the death of Catherine I in May 1727, Peter II was proclaimed emperor in accordance with her will.

Peter II (1727-1730)

Peter II. Painting by Johann Paul Ludden. 1728 Wikimedia Commons

Shortly after the accession to the throne of Peter II, the eldest daughter of Peter I and Catherine I, Anna Petrovna, together with her husband, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, left Russia. She died in 1728, having given birth to a son, Karl Peter (the future Peter III). In 1728, the elder sister of Peter II, Natalya Alekseevna, also died childless. There was an acute question about the possible marriage of the emperor. Menshikov's plans to marry Peter to his daughter collapsed as a result of court intrigues. Representatives of the family of princes Dolgorukov had a great influence on the young emperor, at the insistence of which Peter was betrothed to Alexei Dolgorukov's daughter Ekaterina. The young emperor died suddenly of smallpox in January 1730, on the eve of the announced wedding, and did not leave a will. An attempt by the princes Dolgorukov to present a false testament of the emperor in favor of his bride as a genuine one failed. With the death of Peter II, the Romanov family came to an end in the direct male line.

By the time of the death of Peter II, the line of descendants of Peter I was represented only by the grandson of Peter I - the Holstein prince Karl Peter (two years old), who was in the capital of Holstein, Kiel, and the daughter of Peter I, unmarried Elizaveta Petrovna. The line of descendants of Ivan Alekseevich was represented by three daughters of Tsar Ivan and one granddaughter of the Lutheran faith. The circle of potential heirs narrowed to five people.

The issue of succession to the throne was decided at a meeting of the Supreme Privy Council headed by Prince Golitsyn. The testament of Catherine I, according to which, in the event of the childless death of Peter II, the throne should have passed to the offspring of Anna Petrovna (however, the Lutheran religion of Karl Peter could probably serve as an obstacle in this), and then to Elizabeth Petrovna, was ignored. The offspring of Peter I and Catherine I were perceived by members of the Council as premarital, and therefore not entirely legal.

At the suggestion of Prince Golitsyn, the Duchess of Courland Anna Ioannovna, the middle of the three sisters - the daughters of Tsar Ivan (which again contradicted the testament of Catherine I - also because Anna was the regent of the foreign throne) was to become the empress. The main factor in choosing her candidacy was the opportunity to realize the plan of the members of the Supreme Privy Council to limit autocracy in Russia. Under certain conditions (conditions), Anna Ioannovna was invited to take the Russian throne.

Anna Ioannovna (1730-1740)

Empress Anna Ioannovna. 1730s State Historical Museum / facebook.com/historyRF

At the very beginning of her reign, Anna Ioannovna, as you know, rejected plans to limit autocratic power. In 1731 and 1733, her sisters, Praskovya and Ekaterina, died. The only relative of the Empress along the line of Ivan Alekseevich was her niece, the daughter of Catherine's sister, who in the same 1733, shortly before her mother's death, converted to Orthodoxy with the name Anna (Anna Leopoldovna).

The offspring of Peter the Great still consisted of two people - the grandson, Karl Peter, who in 1739 became the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and his daughter, Elizabeth Petrovna. In order to secure the succession to the throne for her line, Anna Ioannovna already in December 1731 signed a manifesto "On taking an oath of allegiance to the Heir to the All-Russian Throne, who will be appointed by Her Imperial Majesty." Thus, the principle of the Petrine Charter on the succession to the throne was fully restored - the exclusively testamentary nature of the Russian succession to the throne.

The future son of Anna Leopoldovna (Anna Ioannovna's niece) was supposed to be the heir. Only in 1739, Anna Leopoldovna was married to Anton Ulrich, Prince of Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel, who had been in the Russian service since 1733. His candidacy as the wife of the Empress' niece was lobbied by Austria. Through his mother, Antoinette Amalia, the prince was the nephew of Elizabeth Christine, wife of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, and Charlotte Christine Sophia, wife of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich. Consequently, he was a cousin of both Empress Maria Theresa and Peter II. In addition, the prince's younger sister, Elisabeth Christina, had been the wife of the Prussian heir to the throne, Frederick (later the Prussian King Frederick II the Great) since 1733. In August 1740, the first-born was born to Anna Leopoldovna and Anton Ulrich, who was named the dynastic name of this line of the Romanov family - Ivan (John).

A few days before her death, Anna Ioannovna signed a will in favor of Ivan Antonovich, and then appointed the Duke of Courland Biron as regent until he came of age. In the event of the premature death of Ivan Antonovich, who left no offspring, the next potential son of Anna Leopoldovna and Anton Ulrich became the heir.

John VI (1740-1741)

Ivan VI Antonovich. 1740s Wikimedia Commons

The short reign of Emperor John VI (officially he was called John III, since at that time the account was kept from the first Russian Tsar, Ivan the Terrible; later it began to be kept from Ivan Kalita) was marked by the quick elimination and arrest of Biron as a result of a conspiracy organized by Field Marshal Munnich. Anna Leopoldovna was proclaimed ruler under the young emperor. In July 1741, Ivan Antonovich's sister Ekaterina was born. On November 25, 1741, Ivan Antonovich was overthrown from the throne as a result of a coup led by the daughter of Peter the Great, Elizabeth Petrovna.

Elizaveta Petrovna (1741-1761)

Portrait of a young Elizabeth. Painting by Louis Caravaque. 1720s Wikimedia Commons

During the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, the "Brunswick family" - Anna Leopoldovna, Anton Ulrich, John Antonovich and their other children (Catherine and later born Elizabeth, Peter and Alexei) were imprisoned and exiled (Anna Leopoldovna died in 1746). The only heir to the unmarried Empress was her nephew, Duke Karl Peter of Holstein. In 1742, he arrived in St. Petersburg, where in November of that year he converted to Orthodoxy with the name Pyotr Fedorovich and was officially declared heir to the throne. In 1745, Peter Fedorovich married Ekaterina Alekseevna (before the adoption of Orthodoxy, Sophia Frederick Augustus), the daughter of Prince Anhalt-Zerbst. By mother, Catherine also came from the family of the Dukes of Holstein-Gottorp and was brought to her husband by a second cousin. Catherine's maternal uncle in 1743 became the heir to the Swedish throne, and then the Swedish king, and his son, the Swedish king Gustav III, was Catherine's cousin. Another uncle was once the groom of Elizabeth Petrovna, but died of smallpox on the eve of the wedding. From the marriage of Peter Fedorovich and Ekaterina Alekseevna in 1754, a son was born - Pavel Petrovich. After the death of Elizabeth Petrovna, the last representative of the Romanov family proper, in December 1761, Peter Fedorovich became emperor under the name of Peter III.

Peter III (1761-1762) and Catherine II (1762-1796)

Portrait of Grand Duke Pyotr Fedorovich and Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna. Painting supposedly by Georg Christopher Grotto. Approximately 1745 Russian Museum: virtual branch

The unpopular Emperor Peter III was overthrown on June 28, 1762 in a coup led by his wife, who became Empress Catherine II of Russia.

At the beginning of the reign of Catherine II, while trying to free (in accordance with a certain order), the former emperor John Antonovich, who was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress, was killed. Anton Ulrich died in exile in 1776, and four of his children were sent by Catherine to their aunt, the Danish queen, in 1780 (the last of them, Ekaterina Antonovna, died in Denmark in 1807).

Ekaterina's heir, Pavel Petrovich, was married twice. From the second marriage, with Maria Feodorovna (nee Princess of Württemberg), during the life of Catherine, three sons and six daughters were born (another son was born after Paul I came to the throne). The future of the dynasty was secured. Having become the Russian emperor after the death of his mother in 1796, Paul I adopted a new law on succession to the throne, which established a clear order of succession to the throne in order of seniority in a direct male descending line. With its adoption, the Petrine Charter of 1722 finally lost its force.

The court department in Imperial Russia included the Imperial Court, as well as institutions serving its needs.

“The imperial court,” notes the historian L. E. Shepelev, “usually means the royal residence, as well as court ranks, court cavaliers and ladies with court ranks. These persons constituted the smallest and at the same time the most elitist part of the civil bureaucracy. The total number of courtiers was initially small. In the first half of the XVIII century. there were several dozen of them, and by the middle of the XIX century. increased to several hundred. Later, in 1881, the number of courtiers exceeded 1300, and in 1914 -1600 people. In addition, there were several small courts - the courts of individual representatives of the imperial family - the Grand Dukes, their staff usually consisted of several people from persons who either had no titles at all, or had them in the imperial court and were seconded to small courts. The life of the imperial family proceeded both in the capital and suburban residences.

Catherine II's attachment to Tsarskoe Selo, where she loved to celebrate her namesake on November 24, was shared by her grandson Alexander I. The climatic and ecological advantages of this area were immediately noticed. The writer and journalist P. P. Svinin wrote in 1817: “Finally, the main advantage of Tsarskoye Selo is its healthy location. Being on the one hand closed from the damp sea winds by the high Pulkovo and Dudorovsky mountains (Dudergof heights - L.V.), it rises above the surrounding environs, so that it is 70 feet higher than Pavlovsky. For this reason, even in autumn, a very light dew falls here in the evenings, and diseases themselves, according to doctors, are less dangerous here. Fogs are unknown to Tsarskoye Selo - everyone here breathes pure fragrant air and drinks pure crystal water.

The private quarters of Catherine II in the last years of her life were in the southern part of the palace - (building) 10. On the first floor of it in the 1790s. the chambers of the last favorite of Catherine II (since June 1789), one of the Zubov brothers, who was 38 years younger than the august mistress of the palace, were built.

When in 1780 Catherine II moved to new rooms in the southern part of the palace, she gave her former apartments to her eldest grandson Alexander. The interiors facing the garden were turned into private quarters of the Grand Duke, and those facing the palace square were turned into front rooms. Alexander's bedroom was the former bedchamber of the empress, into which the sun peeped early in the morning13. Alexander, like his grandmother, got up early and was usually on his feet at 6 o'clock in the morning.

When Alexander Pavlovich married, a new grand ducal court was formed in Tsarskoe Selo. The young people soon moved to the one presented to Alexander, where three Tsarskoye Selo summers quickly flew by.

In the 1790s, thanks to the work of Joseph (Joseph) Bush-son, a Garden near the Alexander Palace in a landscape style appeared nearby. The work was finally completed at the beginning of the 19th century.

Empress Catherine II died on November 6 (17), 1796. The new Emperor Paul I defiantly ignored the residence of Catherine II. Only a few times he visited Tsarskoye Selo. So, on June 22, 1800, on the parade ground in front of the Grand Palace, Paul I consecrated the new standards of three cavalry squadrons. After the ceremonial, the court retinue gathered in, and (White front dining room).

The destruction of Tsarskoye Selo by Paul I, which was accompanied by the removal of sculptures and other losses, and the reduction in the staff of ministers, however, turned out to be short-lived.

The final fourth stage in the creation of the Tsarskoye Selo palace and park complex covers the entire first half of the 19th century. By the beginning of the reign of Alexander I, the general appearance of the Great Catherine Palace was fully developed.

The inhabitants of Tsarskoye Selo, according to P. P. Svinin (1817), in the summer sometimes gathered in the vast palace courtyard “to listen to the beautiful military music that plays here daily at dawn.” “This yard,” wrote P.P. Svinyin - has the appearance of an amphitheater and extends over the entire facade of the palace, i.e. 140 fathoms in length, and on the opposite side it is surrounded by semicircular low outbuildings and a rich lattice with two gates. Military divorces and solemn formations were made in the courtyard.

In one of the palace buildings of the Catherine Palace - a four-story wing, where the grand dukes used to live, was established, solemnly opened on October 19, 1811. More than one hundred thousand rubles were allocated for its maintenance.

On May 12, 1820, a fire broke out in the Catherine Palace, about which on May 14 N. M. Karamzin informed I. I. Dmitriev: “I am writing to you from the ashes: on the third day, about half of the local magnificent palace burned down: the church, the Lyceum, the rooms of Empress Maria Feodorovna and sovereigns. The restoration of the palace and the Lyceum was also carried out by the architect V.P. Stasov. At the request of Alexander I, the rooms for his mother, the Dowager Empress Marie and Feodorovna, who did not live here, preferred Pavlovsk, were also put in order.

The interior of the late emperor's bedroom was recorded with great care in (1840s). On the personal instructions of Nicholas I, everything was left in the bedroom "as before." In the left corner of the drawing in the foreground, near the sofa (from its fragment, one can only suggest that it resembles a sofa designed by C.I. Rossi for the Yelagin Palace), the boots of Alexander I are highlighted. There is also a small round table. On the right in the niche is shown a folding camp bed by the window. A similar folding bed was in the study-bedroom of Paul I in the Mikhailovsky Castle. Maria Fedorovna took her to Pavlovsk; later, until the Great Patriotic War, it was kept in Gatchina (it was lost during the war years). Nearby is a table with a decanter, tables of various shapes and chairs in the Empire style are also visible. Between the two windows in the background there is a large penche mirror, high to the ceiling. A The drawing is signed: “Adini December 6”. (Nikola Zimny ​​is the name day of Nicholas I; children often made gifts to their father on this day in the form of handwritten drawings).

It is interesting to note that later in 1855 L.O. Premazzi. Unless, it more carefully shows the decorative decoration of the hall, also draws a piece of the ceiling with two allegorical figures of a man and a woman. As the authors of the catalog note, “the watercolor was commissioned by Empress Maria Feodorovna in connection with the 30th anniversary of the death of Alexander I” 21. Plots related to the furniture collection of Tsarskoye Selo palaces are reflected in detail in the works of I. K. Bott and other researchers.

The Grand Palace of Tsarskoye Selo in the last years of the life of Alexander I gave the impression of some desolation. Elizaveta Alekseevna wrote down on December 29, 1822: “I come here from time to time when the Emperor takes refuge here. Since it is very cold in my summer apartment at this time of the year (in the room near the church), and the Emperor's apartments are separated from me by even more dank halls, he forced me ... to take part of his rooms. Three of them are not used by anyone, they have been furnished with extraordinary elegance in recent years, and all have been restored with even more sophistication than before the fire.

Countess Sophie de Choiseul-Gouffier, wife after a long absence, who visited Tsarskoye Selo in 1824, conveys this feeling of detachment: “I passed by the palace, a huge building in the old French style, decorated with statues and gilding, domes, etc. me deserted; only sentries stood guard in the yard. The solitude in which the sovereign lived inspired me with gloomy thoughts ... Perhaps I will not get even a glass of water in this palace, inhospitable, like all the dwellings of the greats of this world ”25. Soon she managed to examine the palace from the inside:“ I then visited the palace: the gilded hall where Empress Catherine gave audiences: the chambers of Emperor Alexander, some of which are truly magnificent. The walls are covered with lapis lazuli, porphyry, amber, etc.: the parquet is decorated with mother-of-pearl and precious wood inlays, etc.”

Departing on his last trip to the South of Russia, Alexander I drove from St. Petersburg at night to Tsarskoye Selo, where he made a stop. Here, in the church of the Grand Palace, a quiet and family farewell to the body of the late emperor took place. As evidenced by the Chamber Fourier magazine, the body of the late emperor was brought to Tsarskoye Selo from an overnight stay from Pit Tosna on February 28, 1826, on Sunday, the coffin was opened and those present "kissed the late emperor many times." Then the life physician Willie again soldered the lead coffin with tin, which in turn was placed in a wooden coffin. There were two more boxes (one made of lead in wood with entrails; the other wooden with a silver urn with a heart), which were sent in advance from Tsarskoye Selo to the Peter and Paul Cathedral.

True to his domestic attachments, the new Emperor Nicholas I continued to live in the Alexander Palace, to which he had become accustomed from his youth. “The family retired to the Alexander Palace,” writes L. V. Bardovskaya, “and receptions, solemn festivities, church services from that time were held in the old Tsarskoye Selo (Catherine) Palace” 28. In the same place, in the Grand Palace, apartments were allocated for the heir and his family.

In 1841, on April 16, a wedding took place in St. Petersburg and (Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt). “The young people,” as L. V. Bardovskaya notes, “moved to Tsarskoye Selo, which has now become their favorite place to stay. The couple settled in the Zubovsky wing of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace, where they continued to live, becoming emperor and empress. Preserved (1850). Paintings and watercolors on the walls with military scenes and military uniforms are clearly visible. Particularly noteworthy is the figure of an “Arab” (arapa) in a red fez, a vest trimmed with a gold braid, trousers supported by a wide belt, and a round tray in his hand, captured in the opening of the open door in the form of a staffage.

Beginning with Alexander I, "Araps" were civilian servants, often from among African Americans.

In the Great Tsarskoye Selo Palace under Nicholas I lived ladies-in-waiting, if necessary, hurrying on business to the Alexander Palace.30. But, even earlier, the wedding of his eldest daughter Maria Nikolaevna with the Duke of Lichteinberg took place. By a special decree of Nicholas I, she was granted the title of Grand Duchess (higher than the ducal title of her husband). In the same summer, the young people visited Tsarskoye Selo. Information has been preserved on the expenses for the “interpretation” (money amounts released for food) of the young couple and their entourage in Tsarskoye Selo for 1839 (August) and 1841 (May 11-June 14), including various wines32 . However, the assortment of wines at the court of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna and Duke Maximilian Lsikhteinber did not differ from the assortment of the Great Court. Unless the Duke of Leuchtenberg was given Chateau-cremaux, and Maria Nikolaevna herself (according to another archival source) was clearly a lover of German fine wine from the banks of the Rhine Johanisberg (then from the estates of Chancellor Metternich).

By tradition, in the Pushkin era, dinner began with dry wines and ended with cold champagne. However, it could also be served at the request of the guests before the roast. According to one of the instructions of 1837, red wine was supposed to be taken out of the cellars in advance, in the morning and placed in a warm room, and white, which was to be served cold, a few hours before dinner. Champagne was served immediately from the cellar, where it was stored in ice. It had to be very cold, but without snow and ice, so that it could pour easily33. One of the surviving income and expenditure books of the wine cellar of the Winter Palace for 1849 testifies to a wide range of wines and other drinks. In 1849, only 2064 bottles of champagne from the cellars of the Winter Palace (not counting the cellars of country residences) were drunk, of which 950 bottles were issued for His Majesty, not counting another 20 taken by the emperor on the road during his trip to Warsaw (probably for brother Mikhail Pavlovich, who was there). Judging by the book of the wine cellar of the Winter Palace, the most consumed at the Court were "Medoc" (red Bordeaux wine from the Medoc region), Madeira, champagne of various brands, popular among the ladies-in-waiting Barzac (the area near Bordeaux Barzac was famous for sweet wines - L.V.), known from A.S. Pushkin Chateau Lafitte (red Bordeaux dry wine), Spanish Sherry, Baie Sauternes (white Bordeaux wine), Saint-Julien (community in Bordeaux - L.V.)34. The glory of Burgundy red wines is already a thing of the past. This is about the Bordeaux dry wine Chateau-Lafite, contrasting it with the insidious champagne Ai wrote A.S. Pushkin wrote in "Eugene Onegin": "But you are Bordeaux, like a friend." Empress Alexandra Feodorovna was often served Claudevujo wine in her rooms. However, they also gave out vodka (for servants), as well as alcohol for heating tea and coffee.

Naturally, in the cellars there were large stocks of various cognacs and vodkas: (“French”, “sweet Lang”, “Asorta vodka” of the vodka breeder Gartoch. In addition to elite vodka, there was “plain wine” (vodka was then called bread wine), in barrels, measured buckets. This vodka came from the St. Petersburg excise-farming commissariat. It was issued "in portions to the lower military ranks." Contracts for the supply of elite beers were first concluded with Abraham Kron, the founder of the modern brewery named after Stepan Razin, and after his death, - with his son, Fyodor Abramovich Kron. For some brands of beer, kvass and honey, contracts were also concluded with I. M. Glushkov, E. Shpilev, Platon Sinebryukhov and Artamonov 36. Honey and lemonade were ordered to be served at masquerades.

Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich did not drink wine, except for a glass of champagne in connection with the toast. Just like his father Paul I, he was not distinguished by gastronomic whims and was extremely moderate. According to the testimony of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, “when everyone was having dinner, he again drank tea and ate, sometimes pickled cucumber to him” ~. The chamber page of the wife of Nikolai Alexandra Feodorovna P. M. Daragan left memories of Nikolai Pavlovich immediately after his marriage, when the grand ducal couple was in Tsarskoe Selo.

He wrote that the Grand Duke "was very abstemious in food, he never ate dinner, but usually, when carrying pickles, he drank two spoons of cucumber pickle"38. Pickles, apparently, were the only weakness of the emperor noticeable to those around him. According to the statement of 1840, Nikolai Pavlovich was to be served 5 pickles daily in the morning39. In addition to the fact that the author of these lines had to write about the gastronomic habits of Emperor Nicholas I, one can cite a quote from the letters of a close acquaintance with the emperor in 1836, 1842-1843: “The Emperor is a great teetotaler; he only eats cabbage soup with bacon, meat, some game and fish, and pickles. He only drinks water."

Just like in other imperial summer residences, various theatrical performances and theatrical performances often took place in Tsarskoe Selo. Talking about the time immediately after the suppression of the Polish uprising, (in 1831 she was 9 years old) she mentioned her first visit to a theater production in Tsarskoye Selo, when the girls were promised “a visit to the Tsarskoye Selo theater one of the Sundays, if we have good grades during the week ". For the reason that. that the older sister Mary (Maria Nikolaevna) let her down twice, the visit was postponed. Perhaps the repertoire did not fit either. But two weeks later, the long-awaited event came: “At that moment, Dad unexpectedly entered the room and said:“ Ollie. Go! ... They gave Othello: it was the first opera that I heard.

There were several stages in Tsarskoye Selo - the Chinese Theater, halls adapted for theatrical productions in the Alexander and Catherine's Grand Palaces. In the Catherine Palace, one of the halls was allocated to the artists for a meal. F. A. Burdin tells about one curious case, testifying to the sovereign’s condescending attitude towards the minor sins of the artists: “Once after a performance in the palace in Tsarskoe Selo, two little artists Godunov and Becker drank too much and quarreled with each other. The quarrel reached the point where Godunov threw a bottle at Becker; the bottle flew past, crashed against the wall and ruined it. We dined in the amber hall; a piece of amber bounced off the impact of the bottle. Everyone was terribly frightened; having learned this in fear of running: the director, the minister of the court, Prince Volkonsky; everyone was horrified at the thought of what would happen when the sovereign found out about this. You can't fix it soon, you can't hide it. The sovereign, passing daily through this hall, was sure to see a damaged wall. The culprits were put under arrest, but this did not fix the matter, and the minister and the director expected a thunderstorm. Such a misdemeanor could not go unpunished even with such a strict sovereign. The minister was afraid of a sharp reprimand, the director was afraid of resignation, and everyone predicted a red hat for the guilty (detainee company - L.V.). Indeed, a few days later, the sovereign, seeing the damaged wall, asked Prince Volkonsky: “What does this mean?” The minister answered him with fear that it was spoiled by the artists who drank an extra glass of wine. - “So for the future, give them more water,” said the sovereign; that's how it ended."

A general view of the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo from the side of the Front Court is depicted in (1845). But the favorite house of the imperial family in Tsarskoye Selo under Nicholas I became, built in 1792-1796. for the beloved grandson of the Empress Alexander Pavlovich This was the last major undertaking of Catherine II in Tsarskoye Selo.

After the accession of Alexander I, the Alexander Palace, like the English Palace in Peterhof, was used primarily as a reserve "housing stock" for high-ranking or close people, who were usually settled on the second Cavalier floor. This is how the New Palace was perceived in 1824 by the already mentioned Countess Sophia de Choiseul-Goufier, whom Alexander I, with his usual courtesy towards ladies, offered to settle in this palace instead of a hotel.

The countess recalled: “The next day, at seven o’clock in the morning, the first valet of the sovereign appeared for me in one of those light, elegant carriages in which they usually drive around the park. The carriage was drawn by a pair of magnificent horses. I quickly got dressed and went with my child. I was brought to the Alexander Palace, which bears this name, as it was built for Alexander on the orders of Empress Catherine, according to the drawings and plans of an excellent Italian architect. This palace is remarkable for its elegance and rare harmony of all sizes. The lower floor was usually occupied by the Grand Duke Nikolai and his august wife, but at that time their Imperial Highnesses were absent. The room intended for me was on the second floor and adjoined a long open gallery that opened onto the dining room and served as choirs for musicians during large dinners. From all the windows of my room there was a charming view - the park and the imperial palace a hundred paces from the Alexander Palace. ... In my room an elegantly served breakfast was prepared with baskets of fruits, rare in Russia even in summer. ... I was all alone in the huge palace, apart from court servants: the maids were still in the hotel.

Since the first edition of the memoirs was published abroad in 1829, it is important that a contemporary testify that even at the turn of the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, the palace was, at least unofficially, but in some cases still called Alexander Palace. Although, only in 1843, after repair and restoration work in memory of its original owner, the New Palace, by order of the emperor, was officially called Alexander Palace.

As is known, they had to spend their honeymoon in 1817 in Pavlovsk, but they also took short walks to Tsarskoye Selo. The future Empress Alexandra Feodorovna mentioned one conflict with her mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress: “The only time she once scolded us, I remember when she met us in the park in a convertible and asked: where did we ride? We answered that we were going from Tsarskoye, from. Then she remarked to us that we should have first asked her permission to make this visit; I admit, it even seemed strange to me. But over time, she forgot about this reprimand, and we could go to Tsarskoe without asking anyone for permission.

In Tsarskoye Selo, Alexandra Fedorovna sometimes worked with, studying Russian. After becoming empress, she wrote to her mentor from Moscow in 1826 during the coronation celebrations: “Classes are going well ... In Tsarskoe Selo, I sometimes attended lessons; here I have to vegetate, and my day is spent sitting on the balcony (the letter was written at Orlova's dacha on August 31 - L.V.), drinking donkey's milk, reading or working, but away from all the excitement and receptions.

Receptions in the Cabinet of the Alexander Palace under Nicholas I were held according to a well-established scenario, which is reflected in the description of a confidential conversation with the emperor on September 28, 1846 by S. V. Safonov, head of the office of the Caucasian governor M. S. Vorontsov.

This is how, according to his testimony, the emperor met his old acquaintance: “... According to the written order of the Minister of War I received the day before, I went to Tsarskoe Selo and appeared to him at 9 1/2 hours. At 10 o'clock I went with him from the Old Palace to the New. We waited in the room in front of the sovereign's office for about a quarter of an hour. Then His Majesty's valet came out of the office and called Prince Chernyshev. His Excellency's report lasted about half an hour. Upon leaving the office, Prince Chernyshev told me that the sovereign would deal with Adlerberg and then receive me. Another half hour passed. I heard the ringing of the bell and after that, at 11 3/4 o'clock, the doors opened again, the valet came out and said to me: "Come to the sovereign." I entered the office. His Majesty was standing in the middle of the room in the frock coat of the Semyonovsky regiment without an epaulette. I bowed. "Great," said His Majesty, "dear Safonov! Very glad to see you." And held out his hand to me. I kissed the emperor's shoulder. "Sit down," His Majesty said, "and showed me a chair by the window. Sitting down opposite me, he began a conversation that lasted about an hour and a half.

There are many characteristic features in this description, in particular, calling visitors through the valet (not by hitting the drum, as some "historians" wrote). It is also characteristic that the sovereign met the visitor already standing and often in the middle of the room. Novgorod nobles, invited to an audience at the "Small" Palace of Tsarskoe Selo on August 22, 1831, after the rite of baptism of the newborn Nikolai Nikolayevich, left memories of the reception room. The reception room had two windows, three doors, a sofa and several armchairs, and pictures hung on the walls. The sovereign then went out of the side door, which he "deigned to close himself."

Later, Alexandrovsky became the favorite place of residence of Nicholas II, since 1905 - permanent residence. In the spiritual testament of Nicholas I, after listing the estates of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, it was especially noted: “I wish, however, that my wife be allowed to use her chambers in the Winter Palace, on Elagin Island and in the New Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. It was in the chambers of the Alexander Palace that Alexandra Feodorovna died on October 20, 1860 in the bedroom she had occupied since 183769. Later, Alexander II, Alexander III and the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (widow of Alexander III) lived in this "Nikolaev half".

It was here that the imperial family learned about the capture of rebellious Warsaw on the night of August 26-27 (September 7-8), 1831. From the Alexander Palace, this news was brought to the ladies-in-waiting to the Grand Palace by a footman. The daughter of A. O. Smirnova-Rosset conveyed her mother’s memories of this event in this way: “We all rushed to the Alexander Palace, as we were, without hats and umbrellas, and, passing by Kitaev’s house, I did not think to announce this to Pushkin. What happened in the palace, in the very study of the Empress, I do not undertake to describe. The sovereign himself sat at her table, sorted out letters, written hastily, others not sealed, handed them out by hand and sent them to their destination.

In the Alexander Palace, sometimes performances, ceremonial dinners for guests, courtiers and aide-de-camp were arranged. Anna Sergeevna Sheremeteva, appointed maid of honor to the Imperial Court in 1832, proudly reported to her parents in a letter dated August 20 of the same year: “Yesterday was quite tiring: Mass was in the morning. Then a big dinner in the Alexander Palace for 60 people, all the aide-de-camp ... After dinner, we, the ladies-in-waiting, accompanied the empress to music, where there were a lot of people, and upon returning home we had to change clothes again and go to the evening meeting ... "

During the days of mourning and in connection with other circumstances, performances were staged not in the Catherine Palace, but in the Alexander Palace. Usually two plays, French and Russian, were played. In the diary of A. I. Khrapovitsky on October 22, 1838, a production was recorded in the Alexander Palace: “The entire imperial family with a large court was present at this performance. There was almost no applause during the French play (it was E. Scribe's "Officer for Special Assignments" - L.V.), but during the Russian play, the sovereign applauded and laughed a lot. Then the highest favor was declared to everyone.

In front of the Catherine Palace there was a private garden, created by the architect A. Vidov and the garden master Joseph Bush on the territory from the Zubovsky building to the Cahul (Rumyantsev) obelisk in 1855. The family of Alexander II walked here. Among the numerous flower beds and lilac bushes of the Own Garden, the royal children often played. The personal rooms of Alexander II, located on the first floor of the Zubovsky wing, overlooked this garden. On white nights in the Own Garden, rural balls were held in the open air, the orchestra was then located in the bosquet, and the dances took place in the spirit of "elegant simplicity."

Only exceptional events revived the Tsarskoye Selo Palace and its parks under Alexander I. Such an event was, in particular, the arrival in St. about Tsarskoye Selo: “Their Imperial and Royal Majesties gathered again in June in Tsarskoye Selo. There, rides were arranged in twenty droshkys, which followed one after another with the Emperor Alexander at the head; dinners that took place in various pavilions of the garden - there was an evening meeting in the Hermitage, another meeting - on an island in the middle of the pond, and also in Pavlovsk, at the Dowager Empress.

The droshky of Alexander I, made in 1819 for carriage masters Dmitry Yakovlev, has been preserved. They were presented in the former Court and Stable Museum in the complex at 4, Konyushennaya Square in St. Petersburg.

But let us return to Tsarskoe Selo to the Hermitage mentioned by Alexandra Feodorovna. In a later letter to Tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich from Tsarskoe Selo, dated May 26 (June 7), 1839, Nicholas I mentioned a trip by a large company to Pavlovsk. On the reverse aphids, he reported, “they returned directly to the Hermitage, where they had played before, then had dinner, and played again, after which they rode on the rulers of Mary (Maria Nikolaevna - L.V.), Mama, Max (Duke Maximilian Leuchtenberg, from 1839 g. - husband of Maria Nikolaevna - L.V.), I, M. Stolypin, O. Trubetskaya, M. Barteneva and Poltavtseva, and returned home; the evening was lovely."

Usually gentlemen and guests who came to Tsarskoye Selo were settled either in or in the Chinese village to the south-west of the Catherine Palace. It was located near the Podkapriznaya road on the very edge of the Aleksandrovsky (New) park. When guests from the south entered Tsarskoe Selo along the Podkaprizovaya Road, they first passed the Big Caprice Arch, left the Chinese Village on the left and drove up to the Catherine Palace through the Small Caprice Arch.

According to P. P. Svinin, the houses of the Chinese Village "served during the stay of the magnificent Catherine's court as a dwelling for courtiers." This is also confirmed by the poet I. I. Dmitriev: “It was the haven of her secretaries and regular courtiers in the service.” Countess Choiseul-Gouffier, recalling the summer of 1824, wrote: “... So I reached the Chinese city, as they call pretty houses built in Chinese style, about twenty in number, where His Majesty's adjutants live. Each of them has his own special house, stable, cellar and garden. In the middle of this small town, located in the shape of a star, there is a round arbor surrounded by poplars, where Mr. adjutants are going to balls and concerts ... ". Later, under Nicholas I, guests of honor were settled in the Chinese village.

Alexander Park deserves a special story in the memoirs of Countess Choiseul-Goufier. She mentions built in 1810-1811. on the outskirts of Alexander Park. “... A beautiful farm,” writes Choiseul-Goufie, “is one of the favorite pastimes of Emperor Alexander, who was interested in following the field work there. I was shown a magnificently bound book in which the sovereign, for the sake of entertainment, himself recorded the income from his rams: and he was very pleased that the cloth of his uniform was worked out from his wool. These simple occupations brought the sovereign closer to nature, brought rest to his mind. exhausted by long hard work.

After the death of Atexander I, the question arose about the ownership of Tsarskoye Selo. Nicholas I made a knightly gesture. The Dowager Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna was still in Taganrog, so Nicholas I wrote to Prince P.M. Volkonsky in a letter dated December 23, 1825: “... Moreover, Oranienbaum and Kamenny Island are the hereditary property of the Empress; and Tsarskoye Selo remains for her life at her disposal; I don’t write to her about that, because I don’t know and I don’t know how. But everyone, all of her, starting with me, tell her this as best you can. On April 21 (May 3), 1826, Elizaveta Alekseevna left Taganrog, and on May 4 (16), 1826, she died in Belev on the way to the coronation of Nikolai Pavlovich in Moscow.

Nicholas I spent the first months of his reign in Tsarskoye Selo while the Imperial apartments of the Winter Palace were being renovated. From here, he made the necessary trips to St. Petersburg, or went to dinner with his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, in Pavlovsk. The journey took no more than half an hour. In the Chamber Fourier journal for April 1826, by the way, we find entries that on April 2, Friday, “at 6 o'clock (in the evening - L.V.), the Emperor received a report from the Chief of the General Staff, Baron Dibich. At the evening table H.I.V. I ate in my coal room. Her Majesty ate in the study with the maid of honor the Countess of Moden and the maidens Euler and Rosset.

Educational games of children also did not forget. On an island located on a pond near the Alexander Palace, A. M. Gornostaev built a one-story building. The island itself began to be called "Children's".

The childhood memories of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, who left the characteristics of V. A. Zhukovsky, teachers and close people, date back to the time of the construction of the Children's House. During these years, parents were often on long trips. “In the years 1828-1830,” writes Olga Nikolaevna, “my parents lived in Warsaw because of the upcoming coronation and opening of the Seimas there”

In fact, in 1828 Nicholas I was in the Balkans due to the start of the Russian-Turkish war; Alexandra Feodorovna lived for some time in Odessa. Then, indeed, there were the coronation of Nicholas I in Warsaw as the Polish king (May 12, 1829), and the opening of the Sejm (May 16), a trip to Berlin and much more. Children then for a long time remained "under the supervision" of Princess V. M. Volkonskaya and Prince A. N. Golitsyn. Then began the European revolutions of 1830, the Polish uprising.

“We remained in Tsarskoye Selo, under the supervision of Princess Volkonskaya [Varvara Mikhailovna Volkonskaya], an insignificant and very ugly woman, and Prince Alexander Golitsyn, an old family friend and former page of Empress Catherine II. His grateful memory preserved all the pictures of that era, he was an inexhaustible storyteller of anecdotes, he knew how to tell them well, and we did not get tired of listening to him. I sincerely regret that no one in our environment thought of writing down his stories. These would be excellent comments on the era of the Great Empress Catherine.

A lady-in-waiting, an old maid, Princess Varvara Mikhailovna Volkonskaya is mentioned, she was previously the chamber-maid of honor of Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna. Cavalry Lady of the Order of St. Catherine the Lesser Cross, lived a long life. The young lady-in-waiting A.F. Tyutcheva saw her in 1853: “... Princess Volkonskaya, a poor, wrinkled old woman, who spent all day sitting in her salon in gloves, disassembled like an icon. Every morning one could see how she trotted along the maid of honor's corridor with small steps, heading to the church, where she attended mass every day at the choirs and prayed fervently. Broken by paralysis a few years later, with paralyzed legs and almost falling into childhood, she almost until the last day of her life insisted that she be taken in an armchair to church choirs for mass. She kept her vow given in 1812 until her death.

After the suppression of the Polish uprising, the situation in the royal family was discharged. “The assault on Warsaw,” writes Olga Nikolaevna, “finished the Polish campaign, the Pope became cheerful again and began to take part in our summer games in the air. In Tsarskoe Selo, our company has grown even more, thanks to the children of our neighbors.” Near the house there was a flower garden, which was looked after by children. In good weather, they sometimes dined there under a spreading linden tree. The heir Alexander and his comrades rode a boat, fished, and according to his plan a small harbor was built. In the second half of the 19th century, a monument to V. A. Zhukovsky, known from photographs of the early 20th century, was erected on Detsky Island.

Later, the teacher of Konstantin Pavlovich, Admiral F.P., also recalled the training sessions of the royal children. Litke. In a letter from St. Petersburg, V.A. On December 3, 1842, he wrote to Zhukovsky: “... And our educational (in Ts.S.) did not move from the place where it flourished for 10 years. On the former half of the sovereign-heir, smaller grand dukes fit. And in the city we are crowded in the old way.

For children's games, the "Private Garden" at the Alexander Palace was intended or, in bad weather, the Cameron Gallery. Then the grandchildren of Nicholas I also played there. In the watercolor by L. O. Premazzi on the floor of the gallery, a children's horse with a carriage and with a large supply of green grass is depicted. The collections of the Museum of the Tsarskoye Selo Reserve have preserved a garden carriage for the children of Pavel Petrovich, made by the London craftsman Kremer in the second half of the 18th century. Riding in a miniature pony carriage was both fun and educational. It is known that his father Pavel Petrovich also presented such a stroller to the future Emperor Nicholas I.

At the beginning of the reign of Nicholas I, while the construction of the Peterhof "Alexandria" was going on, Nicholas I, with his usual pedantry, took over the economy of Tsarskoe Selo. The story of A. O. Smirnova, probably related to this time, published by her daughter, has been preserved - a well-known anecdote about an orange tree: “Once Nikolai Pavlovich saw in a remote alley of Tsarskoye Selo Park, behind the sentry pavilion, and asked him:“ What are you doing here? » The soldier answered: "I am on watch with orange." - “What an orange? Where is he? - "Your Majesty, there is no orange, I did not see him." The sovereign was so intrigued that he asked Prince. Peter Volkonsky, Minister of the Court… We made inquiries, and, finally, a very elderly lackey, from the time of Empress Catherine, explained this secret. Around the pavilion, orange trees were placed in boxes; they began to bloom, and one orange appeared. Wanting to know if it will ripen, Empress Catherine ordered that the tree be protected and placed aside behind the pavilion by the lake. The following year, the tree was taken away, but the sentry remained. The sovereign went around the park and reduced other equally useful sentries. A large number of unopened boxes were found in the palace storerooms at the dacha. They turned out to be art objects, porcelain, and they were completely forgotten about.

In June 1826, the diplomatic corps, invited to the feast in Tsarskoe Selo, was accommodated in the houses of the Chinese Village, since the coronation ceremony in Moscow was postponed due to the death of Elizabeth Alekseevna.

One of the attractions of Tsarskoye Selo was the Tsarskoye Selo flotilla, created under Catherine II. It continued into subsequent reigns. Countess Choiseul-Gouffier, describing her impressions of Tsarskoye Selo in 1824, remarked about the Great Lake: "Large yachts and a miniature ship float on it." "Ship" is probably the name of the yacht of the beloved sister of Alexander I, Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna. Leaving Russia in 1816 after her second marriage, she presented her brother with a small yacht “about twelve small guns”, on which she went from Tver to St. Petersburg. After her unexpected death on December 28, 1818 (January 9, 1819), the yacht was installed on the Big Lake. The yacht and boats were also used by the royal children for educational and educational purposes.

Later, in 1826, characterizing the heir to the Tsarevich, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, the writer Francois Anselot, who visited Russia with the French delegation (who arrived at the coronation of Nicholas I), in a June letter of 1826, spoke about a characteristic case associated with the heir, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich: “Representatives of both French embassies went to inspect Tsarskoye Selo and were going to cross the pond on gilded barges, which in many cases cover its waters in the summer. The Grand Duke, driving his own shuttle, stood at the helm and invited several foreigners to join him. One of the invitees made an awkward movement and rocked the boat so hard that the helmsman staggered, the rudder hit him in the side, and his face contorted in pain. Everyone rushed to him, but the tutor of the Grand Duke exclaimed: "It's okay, Russians can endure pain!" The young man answered him with a smile, deftly turned the shuttle around and gave a sign to set sail. During the entire walk, the beautiful face of the heir did not betray the suffering he endured.

Life surgeon D.P. Tarasov tells in his memoirs about the visit of Alexander I to the poultry yard. Early in the morning, the sovereign “went out into the garden through his own exit to his alley, from which he constantly went to the dam of a large lake, where they usually expected him: the chief gardener Lyamin and the whole bird society: up to a hundred swans, as well as geese and ducks that lived in the poultry yard near this dam. By the time of His Majesty's arrival, the shshshchniks usually prepared food for the birds in koreins. Sensing the approach of the sovereign from afar, all the birds greeted him in their different voices. Approaching the baskets, His Majesty put on a glove specially prepared for him and began to distribute food to them himself.

A visit to the poultry yard by the imperial family, accompanied by the King of Prussia and the princes, is reported by the Chamber Fourier magazine for June 20, 1818. It was in the evening: “40 minutes of the 8th hour, the highest family deigned to go to the garden to the poultry yard in a droshky: His Majesty the King (Frederick-Wilhelm III - L.V.)) with Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna, the Sovereign Emperor with Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna ..., Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich with Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Prince of Mecklenburg with Hesse-Hamburg, accompanied by his retinue ... ”Feeding birds, apparently, was an old tradition. The well-known French portrait painter Madame Vigée-Lebrun, who visited Tsarskoye Selo under Catherine II (in 1795), wrote: I walked through the Tsarskoye Selo gardens, which are a true extravaganza. The empress had a terrace connected to her chambers, where many birds were kept; I was told that she feeds them every morning, finding in this the greatest pleasure for herself.

In 1837, on July 31, when Nicholas I went on a big trip to the South of Russia, his younger children remained in Tsarskoye Selo. Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna recalled: “Our drawing teacher arranged for me an atelier in Sasha’s tower, to which a hundred steps led. From there you could watch clouds and stars. He wanted to teach me how to write quickly and successfully. I set to work with delight, and was soon able to copy some of the paintings in the Hermitage.” Thus, it was here that Olga Nikolaevna, who already knew the technique of drawing, learned to paint in oils.

May 23, 1842 - the 25th anniversary of the marriage of the Sovereign Emperor was celebrated Nicholas I. At 7 pm, a knightly motorcade consisting of 16 ladies and 16 cavaliers set out from the Arsenal site. The cavaliers were in armor confiscated from the Arsenal, ladies in dresses of the 16th century. Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich and Tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich were in armor from the time of Maximilian, and the younger Grand Dukes were in pageant costumes of the same era. The motorcade, preceded by heralds and music, drove through the park, arrived at the site in front of the Alexander Palace, which was not yet planted with lilac curtains at that time. Here the so-called carousel was performed, consisting of a quadrille and other complex evolutions in the equestrian formation. A few years later, at the request of the Sovereign, Horace Vernet wrote a picture depicting this knight's holiday, located now in Gatchina.

The writer P. P. Sviyin wrote in an essay about Tsarskoye Selo: A park adjoins the Alexander Castle, surrounded by a stone wall for several miles. Once this menagerie was filled with herds of deer and wild goats, but now you can see only a few llamas and two huge turtles, brought last summer from Brazil on a ship of the Russian-American Company. The turtles were from the Galapogos (Turtle) Islands. Choiseul-Gouffier did not forget to mention the lamas. The countess, not very well versed in zoo-geography, placed their homeland in another part of the world: “Not far from the farm,” she writes, “there is a man who walks from Asia. Lamas lived here until the time of Nicholas II.

In the same area, according to the project of A. Menelas, a building with a house for ministers was built. The stables were intended for "royal saddle horses that are retired." The French writer Henri Troyatt (a native of Moscow with Russian-Armenian roots) describes with some irony the love of Nicholas I for horses: “Among all representatives of the animal world, he prefers horses. Adoration is so great that in the 30s. On the territory of the Alexandria Park in Tsarskoye Selo, the architect Menelas begins the construction of a red brick building, which should become a “nursing home” for horses that once had the exclusive privilege of carrying a representative of the imperial family on their backs. This exemplary stable is jokingly named by His Majesty's relatives the "House of the Invalids". Nikolay often visits these ancient witnesses of his "horse exploits". When one of them dies of old age, he experiences real grief and orders that the animal be buried nearby, in a horse cemetery created on his initiative. Mares and noble stallions rest there under marble slabs with the names of each engraved on them, the date of birth and death, the main achievements and the name of the august owner. The king can meditate on the grave of the mare Viuta, who died in 1834, or the black gelding Hamlet, who left the world in 1839. This passion of Nicholas for horses is accompanied by an equally whimsical love for dogs. Ion was not the only Emperor who organized burial places for his dogs in Tsarskoye Selo:

• The cemetery of dogs in the "garden of Emperor Alexander" - the cemetery of dogs of the imperial family, which once existed in the maid of honor's garden, was lost during the Second World War
• dog cemetery Catherine II - the lost graves of the dogs of the Empress at the foot of the Pyramid in Catherine's Park
• The dog cemetery on Children's Island is the cemetery of dogs of the imperial family of the last Emperor Nicholas II that has survived to this day

The territory of the former Menagerie by this time had finally turned into a home park. Emperor Nicholas I was not particularly fond of hunting and, unlike his older brother Alexander I or the heir Alexander Nikolayevich, shot mediocrely. Sometimes he took up a gun in Tsarskoe Selo to shoot crows, which, in particular, he informed his son Alexander in a letter dated November 2 (14), 1838. And after 3 days, in a letter, he noticed that in the evening he "went with a gun to miss."

D. A. Lyapin (Yelets)

RUSSIAN FAMILY IN THE XVII CENTURY: CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS

The seventeenth century occupies a special place in Russian history. This is the last century of the patriarchal Russian state, imbued with the spirit of antiquity and traditions. Of course, already after the Time of Troubles, the process of the country's movement towards absolutism begins, many innovations appear in almost all spheres of the life of society and the state, behind which the figure of a formidable reformer, Peter, was already visible.

What was the main feature of the political structure of the Muscovite state? Was it Eastern despotism, or was Russia closer to European monarchies? Apparently, neither one nor the other was in Russia. Here there was a different principle of the relationship between power and society. According to the old tradition, the Russian state was understood as a single whole, united by a moral and political factor. Such relations are based on paternalism, which was clearly manifested already in the 15th century. The Muscovite state was very reminiscent of a traditional Russian patriarchal family. Such an experienced researcher of medieval Russia as Yu. G. Alekseev very correctly outlined the tradition of relations between the authorities and society of that time: “In Russia there was not and could not be contractual relations between the sovereign and his subjects, just as there cannot be contractual relations son in an Orthodox family. The sovereign was perceived by the population as a father, he was not a despot, and his power was limited by moral principles.

Hence, the study of the family has an importance that goes far beyond the domestic sphere. This is, first of all, the study of society itself, its foundations and features.

There are quite a lot of documents that indirectly reflect the Russian patriarchal family in the 17th century. A large layer of archival sources, which concerns the royal family, has been preserved in the RGADA.2 However, for the most part, these documents are known to researchers, since they are often used in historical works. In this article, we would like to approach the chosen topic from a different angle, namely: to look into the province. What was the Russian family like in the provinces? This is the question we would like to answer. To do this, we consider it possible to use rich archival material on a single county. Since the author had to devote his scientific activity to the study of the Yelets district more than to the study of other regions, we will dwell on it.

Ancient Yelets was destroyed by the Tatars in 1414. The city was rebuilt in 1593. Yelets County occupied the vast space of the Upper Don, located between the Voronezh and Tula regions. Yelets uyezd was the largest in terms of population and territory on the Upper Don in the first half of the 17th century. Only in Yelets, Kursk and Voronezh did large settlements and trade and crafts population exist. Yelets was also the most important defensive point in southern Russia in the 16th-17th centuries. Finally, rich archival material on the Yelets district allowed us to create a clear, holistic view of the Russian patriarchal family of that time.

The family for a person of old Russia is the basis of his whole life, the foundation and support of his own existence. Here it is more appropriate to use the term "clan" or "genus". It was the clans that were the basis of the life of merchants, nobles, and the highest court nobility. The more difficult and dangerous was the position of a person, the more he depended on his family, his clan. But on the other hand, we see a similar situation: how could a peasant or a single-palace landowner survive without a family, cope with plowing the land, taking care of the harvest and various crafts - the basis of life. Who will look after the land and the peasants of the landowner, who went on a campaign to the sovereign's service for several months, or even for a year, if not members of his family.

A man without a family in the 17th century. was almost impossible. At that time, a person living without a normal family looked in the eyes of his contemporaries as unusual and sympathetic as if he had no arms or legs.

The family hierarchy can be restored from documents. The materials of interrogations (“fairy tales”) show us that the Yelchans, describing their family, always started with a man, apparently, he was the head. Then came his parents, then the wife's parents, then the brothers, then the wife's brothers, the wife herself, sons, nephews, daughter-in-law, daughter and grandchildren.

The child as a member of society was considered not quite complete. Children received names at baptism and nicknames in the first years of life. Sometimes the nickname took root so that it remained for life, completely replacing the name. For example, a person who was conceived in fasting received an offensive nickname - “faster”. In the event that children in the family received the same names, they, according to custom, were called “big”, “middle”, “junior”. But most of the nicknames were given already in adulthood.

Until the age of fifteen, the boy was looked upon as a worker, if his father was a peasant, a small serviceman or a townsman. If the boy was born in the family of a landowner, then he also claimed a piece of land. In the materials of the review of nobles in 1622, even entire estates and peasants were recorded for orphans who lost their parents in the Time of Troubles, although some of them were not even a year old3. Speaking of orphans. How were these orphans alive? Some were apparently looked after by local peasants. But there were children of the landlords who, at the direction of the scribe, "roam between the yards." Behind them were plots of land, but why are they for children from one to ten years old? Most likely, these children lived on alms and the care of their neighbors. The state, in any case, did not write them off. Behind them were estates. The state reasoned something like this: as long as they wander around the neighbors' yards, and there, look, they will survive and go into service, they will be able to cultivate their lands themselves. Well, what if they don't survive? Officials did not raise such a question, and, in most cases, such children survived. In this case, "wandering between courtyards" can be understood as living by someone else's mercy, hope for good people. And there were good people. The total number of noble orphans in 1622 in the Yelets district was 130 people.

Many boys had to enter adulthood from an early age. By the age of fifteen or sixteen, the son of a serviceman should have been able to kill an enemy in military service, since this age was considered serviceable. From the age of twelve or thirteen, literate boys could already serve in petty officials. The main thing is the ability to count. So, in Yelets in 1615, Yermol Sterligov, who was not even fifteen, served as a tavern kisser. By the way, he was blamed for the losses of the tavern and the plunder of the tavern treasury for that year. When the voivode Polev interrogated Yermol, his testimony only confused the investigation: “We ask ... did you steal Yermochka ... the sovereign’s treasury and he says that he stole, but let’s start asking what he stole or what he didn’t steal and he says he didn’t steal. The governor himself explained Sterligov's behavior during interrogation: "That fellow is small, he doesn't understand"4.

The family looked at the girl as if she were some kind of worker, but still they hoped to marry her as soon as possible. This "rather" often came from the age of thirteen or fourteen, but, on average, the girl lived in the family until she was sixteen or seventeen. Until this age, the girl worked at home. Like adult female representatives, the girl had to take care, first of all, of the cattle. From the documents it can be seen that it was women who always hurried to drive the cattle grazing outside the city during the attack of the Crimean Tatars. Often girls in such cases fell into full. In 1658, the Tatars took away the “maiden” Akulina Pryanikova, who was trying to save the sheep (she saved almost all ten sheep, the Tatars took away only three with her)5.

Since the family played a huge role in a person’s life, marriage is one of the central events of his life. There were almost no unmarried people. Here's what the statistics say. In 1659, of the 2,210 mentioned residents of Yelets, only one was unmarried6. A wedding is a complex ceremony. This is evidenced by the tavern books. The tavern business, the sale of alcoholic beverages were the monopoly of the state. In the tavern they sold bread wine (like vodka), beer, and honey. It was possible to make alcoholic drinks only with the permission of the state, indicating some important event as the reason. From the tavern books it is clear that in January the time of weddings began. For example, twenty-one weddings took place in Yelets and the district in January 1616. At the end of January, weddings in Yelets ceased. The last to apply for permission to “smoke wine for the wedding” on January 29 was the “old man” of the Vvedenskaya Church, Vasily Vasilyev7. They brewed wine and beer for the wedding. The amount of alcohol for the wedding was small. On the 3rd of January, the first Cossack, Sevostyan Lisitsyn, asked to make only an octopus, the archer Arist Yastrebov expected to brew a quarter of beer. Wines more than octopus were not brewed by the Yelchans for the wedding. And two people cooked the octopus. A wedding is an event of great importance, but the main thing for a person of the 17th century is to take a woman worker into the house, so they looked at the wedding rather as a necessary ceremony and tried not to spend too much money. A wedding had a greater ritual significance for a woman than for a man. This she left her parental home forever and acquired a new social status.

Sometimes a woman in a family, judging by the available documents, was generally something like a “thing” that did not have any right to vote and her own opinion. So, of course, it was not everywhere, but there are facts that speak for themselves. In November 1593, the centurion of the Yelets archers, Osip Kaverin, was summoned to Moscow. While he was away, the archer A. Kazlitin stole from him a "zhonka with dabr." Kazlitin with someone else's wife fled to his homeland, to the city of Livny. The returned centurion filed a complaint against the archer. The investigation into this case was carried out in early December by the Livny authorities under the leadership of the voivode. Sagittarius Kazlitin was discovered in his brother Michael by a local priest. O. Kaverin personally came to arrest Kazlitin and his comrades. He, along with a local priest, broke into the courtyard of Mikhail Kazlitin at night. Upon learning that they had come "for him", A. Kazlitin and his comrades fled, but were caught and beaten by O. Kaverin. Along the way, Kazlitin reported that he had been repeatedly beaten by his boss, and therefore decided to run away9. It was decided to rob the centurion and steal his wife as compensation for moral damage.

Relations between a man and a woman in the family were built in most cases in favor of the man. But there were cases when a woman could play a big role in the family, which can be explained by the peculiarities of the characters of the spouses.

Men usually married equal in social status. The landowner had a direct benefit from this: to receive as a dowry part of the land of the father of the bride. Moreover, a clever landowner could lay claim to his father-in-law's land. For example, this happened in the case of the marriage of the landowner Ivan Bekhteev with the daughter of Gerasim Shabunin10. Bekhteev inherited part of his father-in-law's estate in the village of Oksizovo in 75 quarters. G. Shabunin was then a rich landowner. According to the data for 1622, three peasants and two horsemen worked on his land11. The enterprising Bekhteev received the best part of his father-in-law's estate after his death. The other part was received by Shabunin's son Ivan. On it, the Shabunin family became impoverished and “fell thin”12. Ivan Bekhteev, on the contrary, became the founder of an outstanding noble family, the Bekhteevs13.

In 1617, two peasant families fled from the Yelets landowner Denis Sukhitin to the neighboring landowner Semyon Manyakhin. A lawsuit began, as a result of which, in 1621, Sukhinin returned all the peasants. But for some reason he did not give the young peasant woman Anna. This was not immediately discovered by Sukhitin. Only in 1623 did he begin to seek the return of the peasant woman. In a petition to Moscow in this case, he drew attention to the fact that Anna was married to a peasant in a neighboring village, and that she had a seven-year-old daughter who lived with her father. However, Manyakhin did not want to give up the peasant woman. It is interesting that Anna's family - husband, father and mother - did not demand her return from the landowner at all. In any case, there are no documents confirming this, and Sukhitin does not say a word about them in his petition14. There is also no information that Anna herself tried to return back.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the role of women in a patriarchal family. Due to physical superiority, the man had more power, but the role of the woman did not decrease in these cases, but rather became less noticeable. Consider cases where a woman showed great courage and vitality.

In the spring of 1628, the ataman of the robbers Demyan the Razoritel escaped from the Yelets prison. The Yelets governors reported this incident to Moscow and on June 10 received an order to conduct an investigation into this case. Prison officials, watchmen and relatives of Demyan the Razorite were arrested. The arrestees were put in jail and interrogated in the course of the investigation.

The first and only relative was Demyan's wife, whose name was never mentioned in the documents. Father-in-law died the day before, after a fight in his village. The wife was also arrested and imprisoned. During the interrogation, the wife did not tell anything, although she was tortured. However, during interrogations, prison officials reported that for a fee, the watchman let Demyan the Ravager go to his wife for the night. For regular walks to see his wife, the ataman paid the watchman 2 altyns15.

Another example is the landowner Anna Khrushcheva. After the death of her husband, steward and nobleman Ivan Lukich Khrushchev, all his possessions were transferred to the widow Anna16. This was unusual because she was supposed to get only a small plot in the "subsistence". Moreover, the Khrushchevs left five male children (three already adults). But none of them received a separate estate, and all lived with their mother. Only the eldest son Denis served in Moscow at court, and later his other sons followed suit. This probably indicates that Anna had great authority with the children and neighbors. No one dared challenge her rights to her husband's estate.

On the estate of Anna Khrushcheva, ten peasants and four beavers lived in their yards. The size of her land is 255 quarters of land and haymaking 200 kopecks. Anna had great economic abilities. She significantly increased her possessions by expanding the village of Borisoglebsky, which completely belonged to her. In 1646, Anna Khrushcheva became one of the largest landowners in the Yelets district17. One hundred and sixteen peasants and bobyls lived on its land, despite the fact that 60% of the local landowners had no peasants at all18.

Women also had their own holiday: "women's porridge." It was celebrated on December 26th. This holiday is now almost forgotten by the population, and only ethnographers remember it. Meanwhile, in December 1615, fifteen women asked for permission in a tavern to “boil wine” for this holiday. "Women's porridge" as a holiday is associated with the birth of children. First of all, it is a holiday of young girls and midwives, as well as women in childbirth. Women went on this day to women in labor and midwives with refreshments and drinks. A special ceremony was performed, again associated with the use of alcohol. Women with children went to the midwives, brought wine, pies, pancakes and all kinds of food. Such visiting and eating with midwives took place from evening until morning. Of course, it was not just a feast. A special rite, a ritual associated with the birth of children, was performed.

In their way of life, the common people's life almost did not differ from the royal one, only outwardly it was poorer. A vivid example of this is the celebration of "baby porridge" at the royal court. “When the tsarina,” writes I. E. Zabelin, “had a home or baptismal table, then, by the way, porridge was also served with it, probably symbolic, and a pair of sables worth 5 rubles was attached to it ... which the tsarina always favored the foster grandmother "nineteen.

The ceremony of "women's porridge" certainly has ancient pagan roots. The population that lived in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. BC, used pots of porridge in magical rituals dedicated to fertility deities. Cooking and eating porridge had a ritual character. The ashes of the dead were also buried in porridge pots. Probably, this rite, dedicated to fertility and women in childbirth, reached the 17th century. As can be seen from the documents, women of the older generation mainly applied for permission to make wine or beer for “baby porridges”21.

So the family as a whole, and the women and men in that family, were all one close-knit group. Old people also took their place in this group. True, according to our calculations, in the middle of the XVII century. only about 50% of the Yelets families included old people. Moreover, there is a clear predominance of women over men. Old people are rarely mentioned in documents. In the noble environment, the elderly often left the service due to injuries and injuries. The responsibility of maintaining the elderly lay with their children. We meet an indication of this in the Cathedral Code of 1648/49. as a customary rule of law. Children were obliged to feed their father and provide everything necessary. But one of the articles of the Code shows that this was not always the case. Moscow sometimes received complaints from fathers, old servicemen, about their children and grandchildren, who officially undertook to support them. The Cathedral Code writes about this: “They don’t feed them and knock them out of their estates, and they don’t tell the peasants to listen to them ...”23 But in practice, such cases were rare.

Since the aged nobleman ceased to serve, and the old peasant ceased to work, the state was no longer interested in them. That is why they are rarely mentioned in documents. However, in 1658, during the attack on Yelets, the aged father of the Cossack Merkul Zhivalev, Miron rode out of the fortress with an unclear purpose armed on horseback. Myron was taken in full by the Crimean Tatars along with the horse. Nobody tried to stop him. After this event, Miron's son was especially worried about a horse with a bridle and "all military harness"24.

Relationships between brothers played an important role in the family. The very term "brethren" meant close, friendly ties, belonging to something united, uniting and unifying. In the documents, we clearly see how the brothers helped each other, contributed to their careers and business activities.

So, in 1625, the nobleman, archery centurion Philip Ivanovich Tyunin, using his authority and property position, decides to redeem his brother Bogdan from Turkish captivity. For this purpose, he came to Moscow in 1624, where he was given a captive Tatar from prison. Philip Ivanovich took the captive on a receipt, "so that he would not hysterize that Tatar." In the spring of 1625, he received permission to exchange prisoners. On April 4, 1625, the Voronezh governors I. Volynsky and S. Urusov received a letter in which they ordered to meet Philip Tyunin with a Tatar in exchange for his brother Bogdan. In Voronezh, a Tatar was imprisoned. At the same time, Bogdan was brought to Azov, which was reported to Voronezh. After that, the Tatar "with bail" was released from prison. At the same time, Bogdan was also released from Azov25. Why did Philip Tyunin need this? It's not just brotherly love. People from Turkish captivity, as a rule, were highly valued, they received good places in counties for important positions. Therefore, having redeemed his brother, Philip Tyunin enlisted the support of his relative, who, by the way, was given the post of Yelets siege head.

In local disputes and even in land matters, the authority of the clan, family, clan was taken into account. The first place was played by men: grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers. A striking example of this is the noble families who managed to enter the local elite and break into the service in Moscow. In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to look at the fate of the Yelets nobles Bekhteevs, Khrushchevs and Lazarevs. Only due to the fact that all of them for two or three generations amicably rushed to power and increased their land wealth, their representatives were surrounded by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, Princess Sophia and Peter I26.

Family cohesion had not only practical purposes. For a respected person, the family is a part of his life, an object of pride and care. A vivid example of this is the townsman Prokofy Fedorovich Orlyankin. Prokofy began his career around 1618, when he was fifteen or sixteen years old. He served as a kisser at the Yelets customs. His task was to accurately keep customs books. Soon he saved up money and started a trading shop in Yelets. Around that time, he started a family. In 1626, Orlyankin sold the shop and engaged in a larger trade.

By 1660, he was one of the richest residents of Yelets, engaged in the grain trade. Prokofy Fedorovich built a mill in the district and ground flour. He bought captive foreigners (Lithuanians, Turks, Poles), in total he had thirteen people to work at the mill and around the house. His attitude towards relatives was the most sincere, if we read the "fairy tale" recorded from his words. He affectionately calls all members of his family: “My mother Anna, my little wife Efimitsa, and three sons ...” He even calls the bought captive workers with a patronymic and in a diminutive form: Ivashka Stepanov's son, Pashka Andreev's son. He gave Russian names and patronymics to all the captured workers. It is very significant that the richest resident of Yelets, Prokofy Fedorovich Orlyankin, has one of the largest families in the city. In his mansions lived: a mother, a brother, a wife, three sons of ten or seventeen years old, a brother's wife, a brother's son, and some other "thin man" Grisha Bubkov, thirty-five years old, with his wife and two children. In total, eight members of the family. Interestingly, thirty-five-year-old Grisha Bubkov had daughters nineteen and twenty years old. This means that he became a father at the age of fifteen, despite the fact that his wife is probably younger than him in age. But Prokofy Fedorovich was in no hurry to have children. His first son was born closer to forty years. But it can also be assumed that Orlyankin lost his first sons at an early age. On the other hand, in 1660 there is no mention of Orlyankin's daughters, who could already be married by that time27.

Divorces were rare and almost never met among the common people. Divorce was perceived extremely negatively by the population, especially by relatives and neighbors. This is connected, first of all, with the concept of personal "lot", that is, the fate given to man by God. Hence, family life, no matter how difficult it was, was perceived as a lot. In such a situation, the correct stereotype of human behavior is “to live in truth”. After one of the next Tatar raids on Yelets, the Yelets residents testified about the losses of their family in the voivodeship hut. Testimony was recorded. Many traditionally explained the raid of the Tatars on Yelets by God's punishment for sins. One of the first testimonies was given by archer Fyodor Astapov. There is some emotionality in his tale, probably inspired by reasoning about the raid as a punishment of God: “ And de I lived in truth... and last year, in 1658, when military dashing people came ... and at that time my family from military people was all intact.

We have given enough facts from the life of people in the 17th century to understand what the family was like at that time. First of all, family cohesion is striking. Here, behind the tradition, there is a practical interest: the family, clan, clan helped to survive in difficult and unstable times, which was mainly our past. In those years, there were almost no manifestations of individuality, personality, since life itself did not allow such phenomena to spread. Features of historical development, the traditions of Orthodoxy, climatic conditions - all this contributed to the development of strong family relationships. As a result, even the consciousness of medieval man was family, tribal. This psychological feature remained in the future. For a Russian girl of the XVIII-XIX centuries. The most important event in life is marriage. Much of the rich folklore is related to marriage in one way or another. Songs, fortune-telling, beliefs in the female folk environment always have the goal of a successful marriage. A girl who did not marry at the right time could become an outcast in the 19th century. Ethnography clearly testifies to this. You can point to the rich ethnographic material that is stored in the State Archives of the Oryol Region. 90% of this material is from the middle of the 19th century. connected in one way or another with the theme of marriage and the family.

1 Alekseev Yu. G. Sudebnik of Ivan III. tradition and reform. - St. Petersburg, 2005. - S. 432.

2 Nehvatko O.V. Notebooks of the Moscow Table of the Discharge Order of the 17th century. - M., 2001; RGADA. - F. 142. - Op. one.

3 RGADA. - F. 210. - Op. 4. - D. 87. - L. 290 - 292v.

4 Ibid. - Belg. Art. stlb. 2. - L. 41 - 43.

5 Ibid. - 1659. Belgorod table. - Art. 433. - L. 77.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid. - Discharge bindings. - D. 2. - Part 2. - No. 2. - L. 36v.

8 Ibid. - L. 25, 25v.

9 Ibid. - F. 141. - D. 1. - L. 159.

10 Ibid. - F. 1209. - D. 136. - L. 357.

11 Ibid. - F. 210. - Op. 4. - D. 87. - L. 48.

12 Ibid. - D. 88. - L. 97.

13 Lyapin D. A. Genealogy of the Bekhteev nobles according to documents of the 17th century. // Unity of humanitarian knowledge: a new synthesis: Proceedings of the 19th Scientific Conference of the Russian State University for the Humanities. - M., 2007. - S. 201-204.

14 RGADA. - F. 210. - Op. 19. - D. 9. - Part 1. - L. 287-288.

15 Ibid. - Art. Order table. - D. 31. - L. 462-472.

16 Ibid. - F. 1209. - D. 132. 1628/30. - L. 887.

17 Ibid. - D. 135. - L. 177-177ob.

18 Lyapin D. A. Social differentiation of boyar children in the South of Russia in the 17th century. // Bulletin of VSU. Series: Humanities. - Voronezh, 2006. - Issue. 2. (Part 2). - S. 273-284.

19 Zabelin I.E. Home life of Russian tsars in the 16th-17th centuries. - M., 2005. - S. 546.

20 Rybakov B. A. Paganism of Ancient Russia. - M., 1987. - S. 77.

21 RGADA. - F. 210. - Discharge mating. - D. 2. - Part 2. - No. 2. - L. 20-22.

22 Cathedral Code of Alexei Mikhailovich of 1649 // Russian legislation of the X-XX centuries. - M., 1985. - T. 3. - S. 168.

23 Ibid. - S. 165.

24 RGADA. - F. 210. 1659. - Belgorod table. - Art. 433. - L. 19.

25 Glazyev VN Power and Society in the South of Russia in the 17th century. - Voronezh, 2001. - S. 190.

26 See: Lyapin D. A. Genealogy of the noble families of the Yelets district according to documents of the 17th century. // Auxiliary historical disciplines. Classical Heritage and New Directions: Proceedings of the 18th Scientific Conference of the Russian State Humanitarian University. - M., 2006. - S. 273-276.

27 RGADA. - F. 210. 1659. - Belgorod table. - Art. 433. - L. 126.

The last five thousand years, the feminine gender has experienced hard times. The fate of the Moscow woman can be called unenviable even by our domestic standards. Clouds were gathering over her. So, even in Kievan Rus, the dignity of a woman was protected both from the social and from the religious side. In the 12th century, the Novgorod priest Kirik, in his well-known questions, asked Bishop Nifont: can a priest serve in a chasuble, patched with a flap from a woman's dress? - And Vladyka answered: what is the filthy woman?

On the other hand, the Russian scribes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had in great honor the sayings of Solon, who said that the sage thanks the gods every day for having created him a Greek, and not a barbarian, a man, and not an animal, a man, and not a woman; and Aristotle, who taught that citizens were given full power over children, slaves, and women. Ancient pagan wisdom was mixed with Christian concepts about the origin of sin. Eastern Christianity, with its ascetic ideal, looked at the woman extremely severely. In the minds of the people of Moscow Russia, the opinion of Byzantine theologians was firmly rooted that Eve, the culprit of the fall of mankind, is “an unclean creature 12 times”, a temptation, and even a direct tool of the devil: who leads a person away from God through female flesh: “from the wife the beginning of sin and by that (from that) we all die. The monastic rule taught: “If a monk goes through two fields with his wife, let him bow 12 (times) in the evening, 12 in the morning”, i.e. It is impossible for a monk to walk side by side with a woman even half a kilometer without later curing his involuntary sin with repentant bows.

And they didn't stand on ceremony with this "unclean" creature.

The life of a Muscovite of the 16th-17th centuries was often an uninterrupted series of tortures - from a young age from the harsh power of her father, then from the heavy hand of her husband. Before marriage, for the most part, she never saw her “betrothed”, due to which the wedding wish for love and advice was very rarely embodied in subsequent family life. The wife turned, in fact, into a domestic servant. She did not dare to take a step without the permission of her husband. "Domostroy" (a collection of religious, moral and economic teachings) knew only one person - father, parent, husband, as the head of the whole house. All other persons - wife, children, servants - were, as it were, appendages of this one true personality, which had almost absolute power over them. Only the care of “every deanery fell to the share of the wife: how to save the soul, please God and the husband and build your house well; and in everything to him (husband) submit and that the husband will punish, then with love accept and with fear listen and do according to his punishment (order) ... "



The head of the family was supposed to inspire fear in the household, without which the then upbringing was not conceivable. This fear was caught up with a fist, a whip, a stick, or the first object that came to hand. Natural stupidity said: "Love your wife like a soul, and shake her like a pear." If a wife does not listen to her husband, Domostroy teaches, then “it is worthy of a husband to punish his wife ...”, but only “beat not in front of people, but in private.” It is necessary to beat “carefully and reasonably” so as not to spoil living property: “neither in the ear, nor in the face, nor under the heart with a fist, nor with a kick, nor with a staff; do not beat with any iron or wooden ones: whoever strikes from the heart or from the torsion, - many troubles happen from that: blindness and deafness, and the arm and leg will be dislocated, and fingers: and headache and toothache; but in pregnant women the injury occurs in the womb.”

There was no mention of the pleasures of his wife: she could not spend an hour without work and needlework. Songs and dances were severely persecuted as a demonic obsession. “Domostroy” even determines for the wife how and what to talk about with the guests: “how good wives live and how they keep order (important matters), and how to build a house, and how children and servicemen are taught; and how they listen to their husbands, and how they are questioned, and how they obey them in everything...

In only one case, the independence of a woman was legal and indisputable - when, after the death of her husband, she remained a "mother widow", i.e. widow - mother of sons. "Mother Widows" left a noticeable mark in public life, in historical events, as well as in folk poetry, in epics and songs.

A childless widow, according to the opinion of the century, was equated in her position with an orphan, and, together with other "wretched people", came under the patronage of the Church.

Sometimes women were treated as if they were objects. Patriarch Filaret denounced the Moscow service people that, going to remote places for service, they pledged their wives to their comrades, giving them the right to marry for a certain fee. If the husband did not redeem his wife within the prescribed period, the lender sold her to another who wished, that to a third, and so on.

But the commoners had at least one freedom - freedom of movement. Women from noble families did not have this either - they spent their lives in the female half of the house, in the tower. The Moscow tower had nothing to do with the eastern harem. It was not the primitive jealousy of the male, not the age-old way of life, but the ideal of Christian piety that had developed in Muscovite Russia and the fear of sin, temptation, corruption, and the evil eye that prompted the Russian people to keep women locked up.
In epics we read:

She sits behind distant castles,
Yes, she sits at a distance of keys,
So that the wind does not start, and the sun does not bake,
Yes, and good fellows, so as not to see ...

***
Daughter beautiful Opraksa royal,
She sits in a tower in a golden top;
On the nude, the red sun does not patronize,
Violent windmills will not fan,
A lot of people don't get pissed...*

* Galitsya - stare, look; drag; also laugh, mock.

“The condition of women,” wrote Sigismund Herberstein at the beginning of the 16th century, “is the most deplorable: a woman is considered honest only when she lives locked up at home and does not go anywhere; on the contrary, if she allows strangers and strangers to see herself, then her behavior becomes shameful ... Very rarely they are allowed to go to church, and even less often in friendly conversations, except in old age, when they cannot incur suspicions ” . According to another foreigner, Prince Daniel Buchau (second half of the 16th century), noble people did not show their wives and daughters not only to strangers, but even to brothers and other close relatives. Around the same time, the Englishman Jerome Horsey wrote about the Moscow boyars: “They keep their wives locked up, so that no one can see their wives among people with some dignity, except when they go to church at Christmas or Easter or visit their friends.”




The queens and princesses were, of course, spared the charms of the married life of commoners. However, they were far from complete happiness. For example, the royal daughters were actually doomed to celibacy: custom forbade them to marry Russian people, that is, their subjects, and differences of religion prevented them from marrying them to foreign princes. The Russian tsars firmly insisted that their daughters, after marriage, retain Orthodoxy - at this point of the marriage contract, the matchmaking of a foreign groom usually ended.

Therefore, the whole life of queens and princesses took place in the tower, and ended in the monastery. The king's wife and daughters lived in strict seclusion, spending their days partly in prayer and fasting, partly in needlework and indoor fun with hay girls. Of the men, only the patriarch and close relatives could see them. Doctors, if necessary, examined sick women in a dark room, feeling the pulse through a handkerchief. They went to the church through hidden passages and stood there in a specially fenced off aisle. Participation in court festivities was strictly ordered to them. Only the coronation and burial of the king gave them a reason to leave the tower. Thus, during the coronation of Fyodor Ioannovich, Jerome Horsey observed the public appearance of Empress Irina: “In the palace, the empress sat on a throne, set in front of a large open window, in the most expensive and rich clothes, shining with precious stones and studded with oriental pearls, she had a crown on her head; the queen was accompanied by princesses and noble ladies. In the funeral processions, the princesses followed the coffin in impenetrable bedspreads, and the hay girls also fenced them off from worldly attention with special "crosslinks" - long and high cloth floors.

Once, during the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, the Polish ambassadors wanted to bring gifts to the wife of the king, but they were not allowed to reach her, and the sovereign himself accepted the gifts intended for her. The writer of the 17th century, the clerk Grigory Kotoshikhin, explained this act to foreigners by saying that “the female sex of the Muscovite state is illiterate and unlearned ... while others are simple-minded and unintelligent and bashful for excuses: from infancy until marriage with their fathers, they live in secret chambers, and besides the most close relatives, strangers, none of them, and they can’t see people ...”, therefore the king was afraid that the queen “having listened to the embassy herself would not make any answer, and from that it would come to the king himself ashamed.”
If we see in the XV-XVI centuries near the Moscow throne women who boldly appear before their subjects and foreign ambassadors, then these are always people from neighboring lands - such as Sofya Vitovtovna and Elena Glinskaya (Litvinka) or Sofia Fominishna (Greek) .

However, the irresistible desire of Muscovites of the 17th century for innovations also affected the lives of Moscow women. By the end of the century, times began to gradually change, and the amazing princess Sofya Alekseevna appeared in the Kremlin chambers, whose reign became a prologue to the long “female kingdom” of the 18th century.