Peter and Alexis: The Romance of Peter the Great

A cursed country, a cursed people! Brandy, blood, and dirt! It is difficult to say which is the ruling characteristic. Dirt, perhaps. The Danish King had good reason to say: “Th...

“I have purchased a Venus,” wrote Beklemísheff to Peter from Italy. “She is highly prized in Rome. The statue differs in no wise from the celebrated Florentine Venus, and is eve...

On the Neva, near the rafts of the Tsarevitch, stood a large barge, which had come from Archangel, laden with Holmogorian pottery. Her owner, the rich merchant Poóshnikoff, belo...

“Our faith is not the true one; it is not worth perishing for. Oh could I but find the true faith, I would let my body be cut to pieces for it!”

Tradition says that the Apostle Andrew, who had come from Kiev to Novgorod, crossed in a boat to the island Varlaam, in the Lake Ládoga, and planted there a stone cross. And lon...

The Tsar had been warned, when he contemplated building Petersburg, that the site was not suitable for habitation, on account of the floods; twelve years previously the whole co...

He is six years old. They are watching the procession from an ancient gilded coach with mica windows, which is as clumsy and jolting as a farmer’s cart. The inside is hung with...

Afrossinia was singing, sitting at her window in the fortress of St. Elmo. She was busily unpicking the red damask lining of her sand-coloured suit of disguise; nothing on earth...

This was the song of certain heretics, the raskolniks called—“The Coffin-liers.” “Seven thousand years after the creation of the world,” said they, “the second coming of Christ...

“Do you remember, my Lord, how in your room at Preobrazhensky I asked you before the Holy Gospels, whether you would regard me as your confessor, your guardian-angel, God’s apos...

During the last few days the atmosphere had indicated the approach of the sirocco, that African wind which carries with it clouds of hot sand from the depths of the Sahara. The...

“In the beginning of the war with Sweden what great reverses did we not suffer because of our own ignorance? How much sorrow and patience did our apprenticeship cost us, before...

“Already my earthly life is drawing to a close: my voice is going, I am growing deaf and blind. I beseech you to relieve me from my office of sacristan, grant me permission to e...

“_Antichrist is coming._ He, the last of devils, has not yet come himself; but the world is teeming with his progeny. The children are preparing the way for their father. They t...

In the forest along the Vetlouga there stood a Raskolnik settlement of the “Old Believers” called “the Bank of Mosses.” The roads leading to it were impassable on account of the...

Peter fell ill. He had caught cold during the flood when, in rescuing the poor people’s chattels from the cellar dwellings, he had stood waist-deep in water. At first he paid no...

The ex-Tsaritsa, Sister Helen, was to be sent to Old Ládoga and there shut up in a convent, the Tsarevna Marya to Schlusselbourg; both to be rigorously confined and closely watc...

To Alexis the Church was no longer the true church after he became acquainted with the Tsar’s ukase, whereby the seal of the confessional was no longer inviolate. It seemed to h...

The Emperor, when he took the Tsarevitch under his protection, the more securely to hide him from his father, lodged him, under the name of a Hungarian Count, in the solitary, i...

On the night of October 1, the sirocco at last broke out. The storm howled with special fury round the summit of St. Elmo. Inside the castle, even in the closely shut up rooms,...

From the laws of Tsar Alexis Michailovitch, Chapter 22, Art. 6: “And in the case of a son petitioning against his father, no judgment shall be given; but he, having been flogged...

“The haunt of the Raskolniks is to be approached secretly, lest the people set themselves on fire. Should they shut themselves up in their monastery or chapel the soldiers must...

It was the twenty-sixth of June, 1715; a festival in honour of Venus had been arranged for that day in the Summer Garden. Her statue, newly arrived from Rome, was to be placed i...

It was an ancient building made of dry logs, so constructed as to give no opportunity for escape from the flames. Instead of windows there were narrow slits; while the doors wer...

Peter was no less fond of Peterhof than he was of his “Paradise.” He went there each summer, and personally supervised the laying out of pleasure gardens, vegetable beds, orname...

He asserted that the substance of the Holy Trinity is divided into three co-equal distinct natures. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, each have their separate place, sitt...

On the banks of the Neva, near the Church of Mary the Mother of all the Sorrowing, next to the house belonging to the Tsarevitch Alexis, stood that of Tsaritsa Martha, the widow...

On the morning of Monday, February 3, 1718, two days after Peter’s first interview with Alexis, a meeting was summoned of all the ministers, generals, prelates and other civil a...

Near one of the four huge pillars, covered with frescoes of dark faces on dim gold, which support the dome, under the canopy where the ancient Tsars of Muscovy had prayed, stood...

“My Son,—When I said good-bye to you, and asked about your resolution concerning a certain matter, on which you always gave me the reply that owing to your weakness you were not...

Peter sent an “Interrogatory” to Alexis by Tolstoi. The Tsarevitch was expected to answer in writing. Tolstoi advised him to conceal nothing, as the Tsar apparently knew everyth...

“I am confronted with great difficulties in the execution of my plans,” wrote Tolstoi to the Resident Vesselóvsky in Vienna. “Our child will never dream of leaving unless he des...

The yellow February sun flooded the small reception room of the Preobrazhensky Palace, a house almost as white and plain as the Tsar’s house in Petersburg. The windows opened on...

Tichon saw Father Cornelius surrounded by a number of hermits, peasants and children from the neighbouring villages. “Lose no time, O faithful ones!” exhorted the monk, “bravely...

Notwithstanding the sunny day, it was quite dark in the room, and the candles were burning. Not a ray could find its way through the windows, blocked up with felt, hung with tap...

On his return from the funeral to the Summer Palace, Peter took a light wherry and rowed himself across the Neva to a small wooden landing stage on the opposite shore.

“It was the will of God, Your Highness, that a great fire should visit Moscow in 1701, while the Tsar was at Voronesh building ships. In this fire the whole of the Tsar’s reside...

There was a smell of sour cabbage soup in the palace. This soup was being cooked for the imperial dinner. Peter liked it; he preferred the simple dishes of the soldiers.

Peter was a light sleeper. Walking or driving past the palace at night was forbidden. As it was impossible to avoid all noise in the house during the day he slept on his yacht.

“The examination under torture of those accused of crime shall take place in a specially reserved spot termed Sasténok, surrounded by fences and covered with a roof. The judges...

Peter had got up early. “The very devils haven’t had time to snore,” grumbled the sleepy orderly who had to light the stoves. A gloomy November morning was looking in through th...

The runaway Cossack, Averian Bespaly, and his sister, Akoulína, were condemned to suffer death on the wheel. The rest, after being flogged and having their nostrils torn, were c...

“Since monsters or abortions are known to occur among human beings, animals and birds, and are in all countries collected as curiosities, a decree was issued some years ago that...

Fear possessed them all. They remembered how two years ago, two noble extortioners, Prince Volkonsky and Opouchtine, had been publicly flogged and had their tongues burnt with r...

The very soul of Alexis was thrilled by the harmony around him; harmony in the tremor of the moon’s golden train which fell upon the water, a blazing path reaching from Posilipp...

“We have to humbly report, that your Majesty’s son, his Highness the Tsarevitch Alexis, has declared unto us this day his intention. Putting aside all former resistance, he subm...

Blumentrost was amazed when he examined the patient in the morning; the fever had gone down, and the wounds were healing up. The change for the better was so sudden that it almo...

The first Session of the High Court was opened on June 17, in the Audience Hall of the Senate House. The judges consisted of ministers, senators, generals, governors, captains o...

“All things will end one day in Russia by some fearful revolution; the Autocracy will fall, because millions of people cry out to God against the Tsar,” wrote the Hanoverian res...

The Courier Saphnov, who had been sent in advance from Petersburg, informed the Tsar that the Tsarevitch was following immediately after him, yet two months passed by and he did...

That very day the Tsarevitch was again led to the torture. After he had received fifteen blows with the knout he was taken down from the strappado, as Blumentrost declared that...

Peter drove in his cabriolet along the quay to the Summer Palace, where he was staying that year until late autumn, owing to alterations which were going on in the Winter Palace.

“You are sufficiently acquainted with the fact of the unprecedented transgression of my son against me, his father and sovereign. I possess full power, moral and judicial, and e...

When on commissariat duties in Pomerania by order of the author of my being,[2] I heard that at Moscow, in the church of the Assumption, Stephen, the Metropolitan of Riazan, den...

The Admiralty pinnacle glowed dimly through the fog, reflecting the flames of fifteen dockyard furnaces. Out of the gloom there rose the black outline of a monstrous skeleton; t...

After he had brought to an end the investigations connected with his son’s trial, Peter left Petersburg for Reval on August 8, at the head of a fleet, consisting of twenty-two m...

To-day died the last Russian Tsaritsa. Marfa Matveevna, the widow of Peter’s stepbrother, Fédor Alexeyevitch. At foreign courts she had been considered dead long ago; ever since...

But the Russian people did not believe it. Some asserted he had died under his father’s blows; others shook their heads dubiously, as much as to say, “the affair went off too qu...