003. Natal'ja Alekseevna / Наталья Алексеевна

Natal’ja Alekseevna (1673 Moscow—1716 St. Petersburg), younger sister of tsar Peter the Great, is so far the first Russian woman writer whose literary activity we can confirm. While we don't know exactly what she wrote, we do know that it was for the stage. Indeed, it turns out that Natal'ja Alekseevna effectively led Russian drama for an entire decade: from 1707 until her death in 1716, she ran two different theaters and supervised the production of numerous plays, some of which she seems also to have written.

Golicyn's brief article (178) on Natal'ja Alekseevna takes up again the problem of literary history erroneously tangling her biography with Sof'ja Alekseevna's. As noted in the previous post, the former's literary and theatrical activity has sometimes been erroneously credited to her elder half-sister, Sof'ja Alekseevna, who was Russia's regent from 1682 to 1689. The cultivation of theatrical interests would have conflicted with Sof'ja Alekseevna's traditional upbringing, however, as well as with the social conservatism that she manifested politically in her contests with Peter. The confusion between these two sisters seems to have resulted from Sof'ja Alekseevna's historical prominence: by far the better-known of Peter's female siblings, she simply eclipsed Natal'ja Alekseevna to become, in the minds of many, the only possible sister of note (Zabelin 491). In point of fact, Natal'ja Alekseevna was raised somewhat differently than Sof'ja Alekseevna. She and Peter were Tsar Aleksej Michailovič's children by his second wife, Natal'ja Naryškina, who was younger and freer in her ways than Sof'ja Alekseevna's mother had been. Moreover, Natal'ja Alekseevna was firmly allied with Peter and his modernizing reforms, and both had also been exposed to drama as children under the tutelage of their mother.

Generally speaking, women played an important role in the establishment of theater in Russia and Natal'ja Alekseevna was part of that tradition. Her father, Tsar Aleksej, is known as the first Russian sovereign to have displayed an interest in the stage,[1] and her mother, Natal'ja Naryškina, not only shared her husband's enthusiasm for drama, but also appears to have been one of its motivations. Naryškina had been acquainted with theatricals before her marriage — her guardian had staged private preformances in their home — and the small playhouse that Tsar Aleksej built on his estate at Preobraženskoe, near Moscow, aimed in part to entertain his young wife (Karlinsky 36). Despite this indulgence, the mores of the pre-Petrine era dictated that high-ranking females not be exposed to the public gaze, and when the royal couple enjoyed the first theatrical performance at the Russian court in 1672, the production of an itinerant German troupe, Natal'ja Naryškina and her children watched the players from a specially constructed "loge of sorts", which is to say "from behind a grille or rather through the chinks between some boards", safely shielded from the untoward observation of others (Jacob Reutenfels, quoted in Zabelin 470).

Although the conviction that dramatic performance involved blasphemy was slow to fade in Russia (e.g. Zabelin 468-69), and theater disappeared from the court of the sovereign with Tsar Aleksej's death in 1676, a certain acceptance of this art form within elite circles had been achieved. It seems that from the 1690s Nata'ja Alekseevna held performances in her own manor (хоромы) at Preobraženskoe, or perhaps in the structure (хоромина) that had been built there for her father's theater (Zabelin 490-91). And in 1703, Peter himself, despite his own scarce interest in the arts, decided to organize a public theater near the Kremlin on Moscow's Red Square for which venture he invited a troupe of German players and constructed a special building. This company was soon flanked by a group of Russian actors who performed works in translation, although their effectiveness was severely crippled by the lack of an appropriate idiom in which such imported theatrical notions could be expressed. In Karlinsky's words (47), "there were no Russian plays, no suitable literary language into which foreign plays could be translated, and hence no interested audience"; in short, Peter's theater an "unmitigated disaster."

The next step in the evolution of Russian theater came after the dissolution of the German company in 1706, when Natal'ja Alekseevna requested that some of its scripts, costumes, and stage properties be transferred to Preobraženskoe, where she had decided to open her own theater. It appears that the Carevna (tsarevna) aimed at a broader public than had been the case with Tsar Aleksej's earlier venture in the same location, and that her actors included some of the Russians who had been seasoned on the stage of Peter's theater in Moscow.[2] Performances were held under her supervision at Preobrazhenskoe from 1707 to 1710 (Hughes 112).

In 1711, Natal'ja Alekseevna moved to St. Petersburg (Hughes 215), the new capital founded by Peter, and opened another theater there. This, too, seems to have been a public or semi-public venue: "everyone had permission to attend", explained F. C. Weber (228), the Hanoverian envoy who lived in Russia from 1714 to 1719. While Weber himself did not actually attend the specific performance that he describes, a "tragedy" that "Princess Natalia" staged in or before January 1716, but he reports on various aspects of it, ranging from the theater building ("a large empty house was set up for [the drama] and divided into parterre and loges") to the show's overall quality: "The ten actors and actresses were native Russians who had never been outside Russia so you can easily imagine their skill" (228).[3] As for content, the show in question included the antics of a harlequin and a speaker who appeared at the end to review the production's contents and message, namely "the horror of insurrection and of its generally unhappy result." Local informants explained to Weber that the play was about "one of the last rebellions in Russia" (228).[4]

Weber's record also constitutes our most authoritative evidence of Natal'ja Alekseevna's dramaturgy. In his words, "the Princess herself composed the tragedy and the comedic interlude in Russian, taking her subjects from both the Bible and secular events" (228). Weber's note of Natal'ja Alekseevna's authorship found an echo in the later memoirs of Count H. F. von Bassewitz, envoy from Holstein-Gottorp, who commented on the Carevna's literary reputation in 1723: "they say that she had written two plays not long before her death that were very cleverly laid out and even had a certain beauty in their details, but could not be staged for want of actors" (quoted in Pekarskij 431).

How much and what exactly did Natal'ja Alekseevna write? We simply do not know. There have been several attempts to credit her with specific titles (reviewed in Begunov 29-30). The most enduring of these are based on carefully pouring over Weber's terse account to find dramas that match his desciption. Golicyn, for example, favors the hypothesis tentatively suggested by Pekarskij (442-59) — and embraced by Zabelin (492) — that the Carevna wrote a drama entitled "Stefanotokos", whose blend of divine and Petrine would seem to jibe with Weber's phrasing. Golicyn also admits, however, that this same idea was refuted by Morozov (349), who regarded "Stefanotokos" a product of the mid 18th century. Subsequent scholars (e.g. Iginia 331) have often concurred with Morozov and failed to consider "Stefanotokos" a possible feather in Natal'ja Alekseevna's cap. Another popular candidate for the drama written by the Carevna and described by Weber is "Strel'cy" (e.g. Begunov 30-33), a play which takes as its subject an insurrection among Peter's musketeers, or "one of the last rebellions in Russia". No text of "Strel'cy" survives, however, making further probing of such a claim quite difficult (Begunov 30-33).

While we have no precise indication of what Natal'ja Alekseevna authored, we do know something about what she staged. The few titles that have survived from her theatrical library and from the notes of actors who performed in her productions indicate that these were often religious subjects, sometimes derived or borrowed from the "school dramas" performed by students within Moscow's illustrious Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy, a theological seminary that also served as an important center of literary and cultural life. Plays from this repertoire were sometimes selected by the Carevna for their specific commentary on current events, but she also produced plays with more secular content, such as "The Comedy of Peter of the Golden Keys" (Комедия о Петре Златых ключей) and "The Comedy of the Beautiful Melusine" (Комедия о прекрасной Мелюзине) (Karlinsky 51). These dramas have not reached us in their entirety, but their similarity with others that did survive allows Karlinsky (49) to argue that Natal'ja Alekseevna's theater was instrumental and innovative in the importation and staging of chivalric romances: it is on her stage that "we find the earliest examples of dramatic adaptations of translated foreign tales of love and adventure, which became the most popular form of secular drama in Russia during the first half of the eighteenth century."[5]

When the Carevna fell ill and died in 1716, a few months after the performance described by Weber (another topic touched upon by Golicyn is the transposition of her tomb in 1723 within Petersburg's Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery), her theater shut its doors. Nevertheless, several women close to the court continued to be deeply involved with the spread of dramatic arts in Russia. Of particular note is Praskov'ja Saltykova, a close relation of Natal'ja Alekseevna's, who had a private theater on her estate in Izmailovo (near Moscow) from 1712 to 1723.[6] That theater, which also made use of stage properties from Peter's erstwhile theater on Red Square (Pekarskij 427-28), was run by Saltykova's daughter, Ekaterina Ioannovna, a close friend of Natal'ja Alekseevna's, who also acted on stage. A familial interest in drama extended to Ekaterina Ioannovna's sister, Anna Ioannovna, who went on to become empress of Russia in 1730, in which capacity she, like her successors Elizabeth (1741-1761) and Catherine the Great (1762-1796), further contributed the development of the dramatic arts in Russia (O'Malley 11-13).

What projects await students who would like to work on Natal'ja Alekseevna? A former student at the University of Genoa, Elisabetta Copelli, reviewed critical literature on the problem of Natal'ja Alekseevna's authorship in an undergraduate thesis to confirm that we cannot ascribe any specific texts to the Carevna's pen. That said, we do have a pair of letters that Natal'ja Alekseevna allegedly wrote to her brother Peter and that await your translation and analysis. Were these letters written by Natal'ja Alekseevna or for her, as the accompanying commentary suggests, perhaps by someone attempting to influence Peter's views through his sister? Maybe one of you will take up the question.

FURTHER READING:

Begunov, Ju. K. "Teatr carevny Natal’ji Alekseevny i drama 'Strel'cy' na Peterburgskom scene." In Russkaja dramaturgija i literaturnyj process, ed. V. A. Bočkarev. SPb and Samara: AN SSSR-Institut russkoi literatury (Puškinskij dom), 1991. 27-34.

Golicyn, N. N. Bibliograficheskij slovar' russkich pisatel'nic. SPb.: Tipografija V. S. Balaševa, 1889. 178.

Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 

Itigina, L. A. "K voprosu o repertuare oppozicionnogo teatra Elizavety Petrovny v 1730-e gody." In: XVIII vek. Sbornik 9: Problemy literaturngo razvitija v Rossii pervoj treti XVIII veka. L.: Nauka (Leningradskoe otdelenie), 1974. 321-31.

Karlinsky, Simon. Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Korsakova, V. "Carevna Natal'ja Alekseevna." In Russkij biografičeskij slovar'. Vol. 11. SPb.: Tipografija Glavnogo Upravlenija Udelov, 1914. 110-15.

Morozov, P. O. Očerki iz istorii russkoj dramy XVII-XVIII stoletij. SPb.: Tipografija V. S. Balaševa, 1888. 349-57.

O'Malley, Lurana Donnels. "Signs from Empresses and Actresses: Women and Theater in the Eighteenth Century." In Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700-1825. Edited by Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 9-23. 

Pekarskij, Petr P. Vvedenie v Istoriju prosveščenija v Rossii XVIII stoletija (v. 1 of Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom). SPb: Tovariščestvo "Obščestvennaja pol’za", 1862. 391-478.

Rosslyn, Wendy. "The Prehistory of Russian Actresses: Women on Stage in Russia (1704-1757)." In Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Wittenberg 2004. Edited by Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli. Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2007. 69-81. 

Starikova, L. M. "Russkij teatr petrovskogo vremeni, komedial'naja chramina i domašnie komedii carevny Natal'i Alekseevny. In Pamjatniki kul'tury: Novye otkrytija. Pis'mennost', iskusstvo, archeologija. Ežegodnik 1990. M.: Krug, 1992. 137-56 

Weber, F. C. Das Veränderte Russland... Frankfurt: Nicolaus Förster, 1721. 228.

Weber, F. C. ThePresent State of Russia... London: W. Taylor, W. and J. Innys, J. Osborn, 1723. 189.

Zabelin, Ivan. Domašnyj byt russkich caric v XVI i XVII st. (v. 2 of Domašnyj byt russkogo naroda v XVI i XVII st.). Moscow: Tipografiia Gračeva, 1869. 464-93.

NOTES:

[1] "The Comedy of Artaxerxes" (Артаксерксово действо), based on the Book of Esther and performed for Tsar Aleksej in the Kremlin in 1672, was, in the words of Simon Karlinsky (37), the first play that "was not a part of a religious ceremony or of school instruction[, but] simply a play put on for pleasure and entertainment. The idea of drama as drama had finally arrived."

[2] Scholars have disagreed about whether Natal'ja Alekseevna's theater should be primarily regarded as private or public. Karlinsky (49) emphasizes the blurring of these two spheres, as "her own private theater […] was open to the local public", and Starikova (148), on the basis of new materials regarding the Carevna's household budget (namely the sheer quantity of materials that she purchased for her theatricals), convincingly argues that it catered to a wider group. Starikova (155) also holds that Natal'ja Alekseevna relied partly on actors from the company that Peter set up on Red Square and that her theater should thus be considered a continuation of that prior venture.

[3] The inclusion of women players in her troupe of actors was a striking innovation in the Russian context (Rosslyn 70-72).

[4] I am very grateful to my colleague Michaela Bürger-Koftis for helping me to parse the nuances in Weber's German text. Most of the Russian translations of Weber that I've encountered in scholarly literature are fairly accurate, but the English version that appeared in 1723 contains some errors in the passage regarding Natal'ja Alekseevna and is the source of a mistaken attribution in Hughes (242) of a specific title for the Carevna's play. 

[5] Among the secular works staged by Natal'ja Alekseevna, Karlinsky also mentions "The Comedy of the Italian Marquis and of the Boundless Obedience of His Marchioness", a title for which I have not yet found the Russian equivalent. This work is not mentioned, for example, in the review of titles provided by Begunov (28).

[6] Praskov'ja Saltykova (1664-1723) was the daughter of Ivan V, Peter's half-brother and nominal co-tsar during the first part of his reign (1682-1696), although both were under the aegis of the regent Sof'ja Alekseevna until 1689. The competition between Ivan's line and Peter's, a consequence of rivalry between the respective families of Tsar Aleksej's first and second wives, continued for decades to come.

ILLUSTRATIONS:

1, 3. The first and third portraits, strikingly similar (and both available on www.rulex.ru), were painted by Ivan Nikitič Nikitin. The dates are unknown although the first would seem to show a younger Carevna and thus to predate the third.

2. This image of a 1715 miniature on enamel and gold by artist Gregorij Musikijskij is from Wikimedia Commons.

4. This canvas, another postmortem portrait by an unknown artist (and available on www.rulex.ru) dates from 1717. In the words of Lindsey Hughes (190-91), it "suggests the essential duality of [her] existence. The image in the central oval is worldly (Natal'ja is depicted in Western dress and royal ermine, elaborately coiffed, looking younger than her forty-three years); but the bulk of the texts and smaller images surrounding the central one are religious and icon-like, suggesting that Natal'ja has conquered death by piety in life. Texts and imagery point to the fleetingness of all earthly things. Fame is short-lived; all is vanity" (191).

5. "The Glorious Knight Peter of the Golden Keys" was a well-known character from a translated chivalric romance, pictured here together with "The Beautiful Queen Magilena" in an illustration from a popular chapbook dating from the 1910s (available at www.gravura-online.ru).