Prince Nick. Bor. Yusupov. - The wealth of the Yusupov family. - Prince Grigory Yusupov. - The village of Arkhangelskoye. – Prince Golitsyn, a nobleman of Catherine’s times. - Theater. - The wealth of greenhouses. - The prudence of the Yusupov princes. - Directorate. – Yusupov’s land wealth. – Anecdotes from the life of Yusupov. – T.V. Yusupova. - Prince B. N. Yusupov. – The ancestral house of the Yusupov princes in Moscow. – The working life of Prince B. N. Yusupov. - Countess de Chevaux.
One of the last nobles of the brilliant century of Catherine II was also in Moscow, Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov. The prince lived in his ancient boyar house, donated to his great-great-grandfather, Prince Grigory Dmitrievich, by Emperor Peter II for his service.
This house stands on Kharitonyevsky Lane and is remarkable as an old architectural monument of the 17th century. Here his grandfather treated the crowned daughter of Peter the Great, Empress Elizabeth, during her visit to Moscow.
The Yusupovs' wealth has long been famous for its colossal size. The beginning of this wealth dates back to the time of Empress Anna Ioannovna, although even before that time the Yusupovs were very rich. Their ancestor, Yusuf, was the ruling sultan of the Nogai Horde. His sons arrived in Moscow in 1563 and were granted by the tsar rich villages and hamlets in the Romanovsky district (Romanovsko-Borisoglebsky district of the Yaroslavl province). The Cossacks and Tatars settled there were subordinate to them. Subsequently, one of Yusuf's sons was given some more palace villages. Tsar Feodor Ivanovich also repeatedly granted lands to Il-Murza. False Dmitry and the Tushinsky thief granted Romanovsky Posad (county town of Romanov, Yaroslavl province) to his son Seyush.
Upon ascending the throne, Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich left all these lands behind him. Yusuf's descendants were Mohammedans even under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Under this sovereign, the great-grandson of Yusuf, Abdul-Murza, was the first to accept Christianity; At baptism he received the name Dmitry Seyushevich Yusupovo-Knyazhevo.
The newly baptized prince soon fell into royal disgrace due to the following incident: he decided to treat Patriarch Joachim to goose at his dinner; the day turned out to be a fast day, and the prince was punished with batogs for this violation of the charters of the church on behalf of the tsar and all his property was taken away from him; but soon the king forgave the culprit and returned what had been taken.
There is the following anecdote regarding this incident. Once, the great-grandson of Dmitry Seyushevich was the chamber cadet on duty during dinner with Catherine the Great. The goose was served on the table.
- Do you, prince, know how to cut a goose? – asked Ekaterina Yusupova.
- Oh, the goose must be very mindful of my last name! - answered the prince. “My ancestor ate one on Good Friday and for that he was deprived of several thousand peasants granted to him upon entering Russia.
“I would take away his entire estate, because it was given to him on the condition that he should not eat fast food on fasting days,” the empress remarked jokingly about this story.
Prince Dmitry Yusupov had three sons, and upon his death all his wealth was divided into three parts. Actually, the wealth of the Yusupovs was started by one of the latter’s sons, Prince Grigory Dmitrievich. The descendants of the other two sons did not grow rich, but became fragmented and fell into decline.
Prince Grigory Dmitrievich Yusupov was one of the military generals of the times of Peter the Great - his intelligence, fearlessness and courage brought him the favor of the emperor.
In 1717, the prince was appointed, among other persons, to investigate the abuses of Prince Koltsov-Masalsky regarding salt collection in Bakhmut. In 1719 he was a major general, and in 1722 a senator. Catherine I promoted him to lieutenant general, and Peter II appointed him lieutenant colonel of the Preobrazhensky regiment and first member of the Military Collegium. He was also entrusted with the search for Solovyov, who transferred millions belonging to the prince to foreign banks. Menshikov.
He also carried out an investigation into government items hidden by the Chief Chamberlain, Prince I. Dolgoruky. In addition to this, as Karnovich says, he was engaged in the extremely profitable at that time provisions and quartermaster department, and also built ships. Peter II gave him a large house in Moscow in the parish of the Three Saints, and in 1729 he granted him eternal hereditary possession of many of the villages of Prince Menshikov assigned to the treasury, as well as the estate with a suburban settlement that had been taken over from Prince Prozorovsky.
The Spanish ambassador Duke de Liria characterizes Prince Yusupov as follows: “Prince Yusupov is of Tatar origin (his brother is still a Mohammedan), a completely well-bred man, who served very well, quite familiar with military affairs, he was covered with wounds; the prince loved foreigners and was very attached to Peter II - in a word, he was one of those people who always follow the straight path.” One passion overshadowed him - a passion for wine.
He died on September 2, 1730, at the age of 56 from birth, in Moscow, at the beginning of the reign of Anna Ioannovna, and was buried in the Epiphany Monastery 67 (in Kitai-gorod), in the lower church of the Kazan Mother of God. His gravestone inscription begins like this:
“Teach, he who passes away, this stone will teach you much. The general-in-chief is buried here, etc., etc.”
Yusupov left three sons, two of whom soon died, and the only remaining son, Boris Grigorievich, received all his enormous wealth. Prince Boris was raised by order of Peter the Great in France. He enjoyed Biron's special favor.
Under Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, Yusupov was president of the Commerce Collegium, chief director of the Ladoga Canal, and for nine years managed the cadet land gentry corps.
While managing this Corps, he was the first in the capital to introduce theatrical performances for his own pleasure and for the entertainment of the few dignitaries detained against their will by service on the banks of the Neva. The court was in Moscow at that time; cadet actors acted out the best tragedies in the Corps, both Russian ones, composed at that time by Sumarokov, and French ones in translations.
The French repertoire consisted primarily of Voltaire's plays, presented in a distorted form 68 . When the court returned from Moscow, the Empress wished to see the performance, and in 1750, on Yusupov’s initiative, the first public performance of the Russian tragedy of Sumarokov’s work “Khorev” took place, and in the same year, on September 29, the Empress, by her oral decree, ordered Trediakovsky and Lomonosov to compose based on the tragedy . A month later, Lomonosov composed the tragedy “Tamira and Selim.” As for Trediakovsky, two months later he also delivered the tragedy “Deidamia,” the “catastrophe” of which “was the queen’s leading to sacrifice to the goddess Diana.” The tragedy, however, was not even worthy of publication at the Academy.
But let's return again to Boris Yusupov. Empress Elizabeth, pleased with the management of his gentry corps, granted him for eternal hereditary possession in the Poltava province, in the village of Ryashki, a state-owned cloth factory with all the mills, tools and artisans and with the village attached to it, so that he would register Dutch sheep to this estate and brought the factory into a better arrangement.
The prince undertook to supply the treasury annually with first 17,000 arshins of cloth of all colors, and then supplied 20 and 30 thousand arshins.
The son of this prince, Nikolai Borisovich, as we said above, was one of the most famous nobles who ever lived in Moscow. Under him, his estate near Moscow, the village of Arkhangelskoye, was enriched with all kinds of artistic objects.
He laid out a large garden there with fountains and huge greenhouses that housed more than two thousand orange trees.
He bought one of these trees from Razumovsky for 3,000 rubles; there was nothing like him in Russia, and only two of these, located in the Versailles greenhouse, were a match for him. According to legend, this tree was already 400 years old.
The village of Arkhangelskoye, also Upolozy, is located on the high bank of the Moscow River. Arkhangelskoye was the ancestral estate of Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Golitsyn, one of the educated people of Peter the Great's time.
Under Empress Anna Ioannovna, the prince was exiled to Shlisselburg, where he died. During his disgrace, the prince lived on this estate; here, according to I.E. Zabelin, he collected an elegant library and museum, which in their wealth were second only to the library and museum of Count Bruce at that time. Most of the manuscripts from Arkhangelsk later passed into the collection of Count Tolstoy and then belonged to the Imperial Public Library; but the best ones were stolen during the inventory of the estate - even the Duke of Courland Biron used them, as Tatishchev says.
During the time of the Golitsyns, Arkhangelskoye resembled the ancient village life of the boyars in its unpretentiousness and simplicity. The prince's courtyard consisted of three small rooms, actually eight-arshina huts, connected by an entrance hall. Their interior decoration was simple. In the front corners there are icons, against the wall there are benches and stoves made of yellow tiles; in one small room there were two windows, in another four, in the third five; in the windows the glass was still in the old-fashioned way in lead bindings or frames; oak tables, four leather chairs, a spruce bed with a feather bed and a pillow, in colorful and embossed pillowcases, etc.
There was a bathhouse next to the lighthouses, and in the courtyard, fenced with a lattice fence, there were various services - a cookery, a cellar, glaciers, barns, etc. Not far from the house there was a stone church in the name of the Archangel Michael, founded by the prince's father, boyar Mikhail Andreevich Golitsyn. But what did not correspond to the unpretentious simple boyar life here then were two greenhouses, very unusual for that time; overseas trees wintered here: laurus, nux malabarica, myrtus, cupresus and others.
Opposite the greenhouses there was a garden 61 fathoms long, 52 fathoms wide, in which were planted: sambucus, chestnuts, mulberries, serengias (2 pcs.), 14 walnuts, lady trees, small lilies, etc.; on the ridges grew: carnation, catheter, lychnis chalcedony, iris (blue and yellow), calufer, hysop, etc.
Opposite the mansion there was a garden 190 fathoms long, 150 fathoms wide, with prespective roads along which standard maples and linden trees were planted. The last of the Golitsyns who owned Arkhangelsk was Nikolai Alexandrovich, married to M.A. Olsufieva. This Golitsyna sold Arkhangelskoye for 100,000 rubles to Prince Yusupov.
After purchasing the estate, the prince cut down a lot of forest and began the capital construction of the estate. The house was designed in excellent Italian taste, connected by colonnades, with two pavilions, in which, as in the seventeen rooms of the house, 236 paintings were located, consisting of originals: Velasquez, Raphael Mengs, Perugini, David, Ricci, Guido Reni, Tiepolo and others . Of these paintings, Doyan’s painting “The Triumph of Metellus” deserved special attention; Among the Arkhangelsk marbles there is a remarkable group of Canova “Cupid and Psyche” and a beautiful statue of “Cupid” by the Kozlovsky chisel, unfortunately damaged during transportation in 1812. Yusupov collected an art gallery for thirty years.
But the best beauty of Arkhangelsk is the home theater, built according to the design of the famous Gonzago, for 400 spectators; twelve changes of scenery of this theater were painted with the brush of the same Gonzago. Yusupov also had another theater in Moscow, on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, which previously belonged to Pozdnyakov and where French performances were given during the French stay in Moscow in 1812.
Yusupov's library consisted of more than 30,000 volumes, including the rare Elseviers and the Bible, printed in 1462. There was also a house in the garden called “Caprice”. They said about the construction of this house that when Arkhangelskoye still belonged to the Golitsyns, husband and wife quarreled, the princess did not want to live in the same house with her husband and ordered a special house to be built for herself, which she called “Caprice”. The peculiarity of this house was that it stood on a small hill, but to enter it there was no porch with steps, but only a sloping path that sloped to the very threshold of the doors.
Prince Yusupov was very fond of old bronzes, marbles and all sorts of expensive things; at one time he collected such a quantity of them that it was difficult to find another such rich collection of rare antique things in Russia: by his grace, money changers and junk dealers Shukhov, Lukhmanov and Volkov became rich in Moscow. Prince Nikolai Borisovich, in his time, received an excellent education - he was an envoy in Turin during the reign of Catherine. The prince received his education at the university of this city and was Alfieri's comrade.
Emperor Paul, at his coronation, granted him the star of St. Andrew the First-Called. Under Alexander I, he was for a long time the minister of appanages, under Emperor Nicholas - the head of the Kremlin expedition, and under his leadership the Small Nicholas Kremlin Palace was rebuilt.
He had all the Russian orders, a portrait of the sovereign, a diamond cipher, and when there was nothing else to reward him with, he was awarded one pearl epaulette.
Prince Yusupov was very rich, loved luxury, knew how to shine when necessary, and being very generous, he was sometimes very calculating; Countess Razumovskaya, in one letter to her husband, describes a holiday in Arkhangelsk at Yusupov’s, given to Emperor Alexander I and King Frederick William III of Prussia.
“The evening was excellent, but the holiday was the most deplorable. It would be too long to tell everything, but here is one detail by which you can judge the rest. Imagine, after a snack we went for a ride on terrible roads and damp, ugly places. After a half-hour walk we arrive at the theater. Everyone is expecting a surprise, and sure enough, the surprise was complete, the scenery was changed three times, and the whole performance was ready. Everyone bit their lips, starting with the sovereign. Throughout the entire evening there was terrible chaos. The august guests did not really know what they should do or where to go. The King of Prussia will have a good idea about the Moscow nobles. The stinginess in everything was unimaginable.”
All the Yusupovs were not distinguished by extravagance and tried more to accumulate wealth. Thus, when giving brides from their family, the Yusupovs did not give much as a dowry.
According to the will, for example, of Princess Anna Nikitichna, who died in 1735, only 300 rubles were allocated to her daughter per year, from household items: 100 buckets of wine, 9 bulls and 60 rams. When Princess Evdokia Borisovna was married to the Duke of Courland, Peter Biron, only 15,000 rubles were given as a dowry. with an obligation on the part of the bride's father to provide the future duchess with a diamond headdress and other equipment with the price of each item indicated. The princess-bride was of dazzling beauty and did not live long in marriage to Biron.
After her death, Biron sent Yusupov her stately bed and all the furniture from her bedroom as a souvenir; The upholstery was blue satin and silver.
Also interesting is the wedding contract between Prince Dmitry Borisovich Yusupov and the okolnichy Aktinfov, who agreed to pay him 4,000 rubles if he did not marry his daughter to the prince by the appointed date. penalties - a very significant amount for the half of the 17th century.
The village of Arkhangelskoye has been honored more than once with the arrival of the highest dignitaries; Empress Maria Feodorovna stayed for several days, and in the garden there are marble monuments with inscriptions about when and which of the highest persons visited there. It is very clear that, while receiving royalty, Yusupov also gave magnificent holidays.
The last of these holidays was given by Yusupov to Emperor Nicholas after his coronation. Almost all the foreign ambassadors were here, and everyone was amazed at the luxury of this noble estate. The holiday turned out to be the most luxurious and magnificent.
On this day in Arkhangelskoye there was a dinner, a performance and a ball with illumination of the entire garden and fireworks.
Prince Nikolai Borisovich was a friend of Voltaire and lived with him in Ferney Castle; in his youth he traveled a lot and was received by all the then rulers of Europe. Yusupov saw the court of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette in full splendor; Yusupov was in Berlin more than once with the old king Frederick the Great, introduced himself in Vienna to Emperor Joseph II and the English and Spanish kings; Yusupov, according to his contemporaries, was the most friendly and sweet person, without any pomposity or pride; he was exquisitely polite with the ladies. Blagovo says that when in a familiar house he happened to meet some lady on the stairs - whether he knew her or not - he would always bow low and step aside to let her pass. When he walked in his garden in the summer in Arkhangelskoye, everyone was allowed to walk there, and when he met, he would certainly bow to the ladies, and if he met someone known to him by name, he would come up and say a friendly word.
Pushkin sang Yusupov in his charming ode “To the Nobleman”. Prince Nikolai Borisovich managed theaters from 1791 to 1799, and, like his father, who laid the foundation for the Russian drama theater in St. Petersburg, he also did a lot for art in this field; The prince had his own Italian opera buffa in St. Petersburg, which brought pleasure to the entire court.
According to biographer Nikolai Borisovich, he loved the theater, scientists, artists, and even in his old age brought tribute to the fair sex! It cannot be said that even in his young years Yusupov ran away from the fair sex; according to the stories of those who knew him, he was a big “ferlakur,” as they called a red tape worker back then; in his village house there was one room where there was a collection of three hundred portraits of all the beauties whose favor he enjoyed.
In his bedroom there hung a painting with a mythological plot, in which he was represented by Apollo, and Venus depicted a person who was better known at that time under the name of Minerva. Emperor Paul knew about this painting and, upon his accession to the throne, ordered Yusupov to remove it.
Prince Yusupov, in his old age, decided to go into business and started a mirror factory; At that time, all mirrors were mostly imported and were very expensive. The prince did not succeed in this enterprise, and he suffered great losses.
In the last years of his life, Prince Yusupov lived constantly in Moscow and enjoyed great respect and love for his purely aristocratic courtesy to everyone. There was only one thing that harmed the prince a little, and that was his addiction to the female sex.
Prince N.B. Yusupov was married to Prince Potemkin’s own niece, Tatyana Vasilievna Engelhardt, who was previously married to her distant relative Potemkin. Yusupov's wife brought enormous wealth.
The Yusupovs did not know the count of either their millions or their estates. When the prince was asked: “What, prince, do you have an estate in such and such a province and district?”, he answered: “I don’t know, you need to find out in the memorial book.”
They brought him a memorial book in which all his estates were recorded by province and district; he managed, and it almost always turned out that he had property there.
Prince Yusupov in his old age was very youthful and loved to make fun of his old peers. So, once when he blamed Count Arkady Markov about his old age, he answered him that he was the same age as him.
“For mercy,” the prince continued, “you were already in the service, and I was still at school.”
“What’s my fault,” Markov objected, “that your parents started teaching you to read and write so late.”
Prince Yusupov was friends with the famous Count Saint-Germain and asked him to give him a recipe for a long life. The Count did not reveal the whole secret to him, but said that one of the important means is abstinence from drinking not only intoxicating drinks, but also anything else.
Prince Yusupov, despite his gallantry with women, when he was the director of the theater, knew how to be strict, when necessary, with the actresses subordinate to him. One day some Italian opera singer whimsically called out sick; Yusupov ordered, under the guise of attending to her, not to let her out of the house and not to let anyone in except a doctor. This delicate arrest frightened the capricious artist so much that her imaginary illness disappeared.
Prince Yusupov, as we said, was married to the widow Potemkina. In the life of this rich woman, as Karnovich mentions, there was one remarkable circumstance: the very strange Duchess of Kingston, Countess of Worth, who came to St. Petersburg under Catherine the Great, fell in love with the then young Tatyana Vasilievna Engelhardt so much that she wanted to take her with her to England and give her to her all his untold fortune. The Duchess arrived in St. Petersburg on her own magnificent yacht, which had a garden and was decorated with paintings and statues; With her, in addition to numerous servants, there was a music orchestra. Tatyana Vasilievna did not agree to the duchess’s proposal and, having become a widow, married Yusupov in 1795. The couple subsequently did not get along very well and did not live together, although they were not in a quarrel. The prince died before his wife, the latter died after him, ten years later. They had one son. It is remarkable that in this line of the Yusupovs, as in the younger line of the Sheremetev counts, only one heir remained alive at all times. Now it seems that this has changed - the Sheremetevs have several, and the Yusupovs have none.
Tatyana Vasilievna Yusupova was also not known for extravagance and lived very modestly; she managed all her estates herself. And out of some kind of frugality, the princess rarely changed her clothes. She wore the same dress for a long time, almost to the point of wear and tear. One day, in her old age, the following thought came to her mind:
“Yes, if I adhere to this order, then my female servants will have a few belongings left after my death.”
And from that very hour there was an unexpected and drastic revolution in her toilet habits. She often ordered and wore new dresses made from expensive materials. All her family and friends were amazed at this change, congratulating her on her panache and on the fact that she seemed to look younger. She, so to speak, was dressing up for death and wanted to replenish and enrich her spiritual testament for the benefit of her servants. She had only one costly passion - collecting precious stones. The princess bought the famous diamond “Polar Star” for 300,000 rubles, as well as the diadem of the former Queen of Naples Caroline, wife of Murat, and also the famous pearl in Moscow from the Greek Zosima for 200,000 rubles, called “Pelegrina”, or “Wanderer”, once belonged to King Philip II of Spain. Yusupova then spent a lot of money on her collection of antique carved stones (cameo and intaglio).
Tatyana Vasilievna’s only son, Boris Nikolaevich, is known as a very active and caring person in the performance of his duties. According to the stories of his contemporaries, he died in the service and at the economic affairs of his vast estates, and the day before his death he was engaged in the affairs of the service. According to his biographer, “happiness opened up a brilliant field for him.”
He was the godson of Emperor Paul and received the Order of Malta as a child, and from his father the hereditary command of the Order of St. passed to him. John of Jerusalem. After passing the exam at the Test Committee at the St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute, he hastened to enter the civil service.
As we have already said, hardworking activity was a distinctive feature of his character. The prince, owning estates in seventeen provinces, surveyed his vast estates every year. Even such terrible things as, for example, cholera, did not keep him from household chores; and at a time when the latter was raging in Little Russia, he was not afraid to come to his village of Rakitnoye, where this epidemic was especially destructive; Without fear of infection, the prince walked everywhere in the village.
In his home life, the prince shunned luxury; his entire morning was devoted to official and economic matters.
But at lunchtime he was always glad to meet his friends and acquaintances: he did not discriminate or differentiate by rank, and, once invited by him, they had access to him forever.
In conversation, the prince was humorous and witty and knew how to deftly notice the oddities of his acquaintances. In the evening, the prince was always at the theater, a love for which he inherited from his father, who managed theaters for a long time; The prince, however, only loved to attend Russian performances.
The prince played the violin excellently and had a rare collection of Italian violins. Boris Nikolaevich did not like his Arkhangelskoe and never lived in it for a long time; At one time he began to take a lot from there to his St. Petersburg house, but Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich, who remembered his Arkhangelskoye, ordered the prince to be told not to devastate his Arkhangelskoye.
The prince never gave festivities on this estate and, when coming to Moscow, he usually stayed in his ancient boyar house, given, as we said above, to his great-grandfather by Emperor Peter II.
This house in Zemlyanoy Gorod, on Bolshoy Kharitonyevsky Lane, was a rare monument of architecture of the late 17th century; it previously belonged to Alexey Volkov. The stone two-story Yusupov chambers with extensions to the eastern side stood in a spacious courtyard; adjoining their western side was a one-story stone building, behind a stone storage room, then there was a garden, which before 1812 was much more extensive, and there was a pond in it. According to A. A. Martynov, the first chamber has two tiers, with a steep iron roof with four slopes, or epancha, and is distinguished by the thickness of the walls, made of 18-pound bricks with iron ties. Strength and safety were one of the first conditions of the building. At the top, the entrance door has partially retained its former style: it has a broken lintel in the form of a semi-octagon and with a sandstone at the top, in the tympanum there is an image of St. blessed princes Boris and Gleb. This is reminiscent of the cherished pious custom of Russians to pray before entering the house and when leaving it. There was a boyar's living room, dining room and bedroom; to the west side there is a chamber with a vault, with one window to the north, apparently, it served as a prayer room. On the lower floor, under the arches, there is the same division; under it there are cellars where barrels of premium Fryazhian overseas wines and Russian preserved and bulk honey, berry kvass, etc. were stored. The two-story chamber added to the east, which formerly comprised one chamber, is now divided into several rooms.
Here Prince Boris Grigorievich treated the sovereign daughter of Peter the Great, who loved her father’s faithful servant. Above the chamber rises a tower with two windows, where, according to legend, there was a church; from it in the wall you can see the same cache as that found in the Chamber of Facets. This house has been in the Yusupov family for about two hundred years; On major holidays, a crowd of thousands of peasants gathered in this house with bread and salt, according to an ancient established custom, to bring congratulations. The mortal remains of Prince Yusupov were also brought here in the hands of the same peasants for burial in the village of Spasskoye near Moscow. The Yusupov princes are buried in a special stone tent attached to the church; The following inscription, written by the deceased himself, is carved on the tomb of Boris Nikolaevich:
“Here lies the Russian nobleman Prince Boris, Prince Nikolaev, son of Yusupov, born 1794, July 9th, died 1849, October 25th,” below is written in French his favorite saying: “L'honneur avant tout” .
A golden cross and anchor are visible at the base; on the first there is the inscription “Faith in God”, on the second - “Hope in God”. Prince Boris Nikolaevich was married twice: his first wife was Princess N.P. Shcherbatova (died October 17, 1820); the second - Zinaida Ivanovna Naryshkina, born in 1810; in his second marriage to a foreigner, Count de Chevaux. From his first marriage, a son, Prince Nikolai Borisovich, was born on October 12, 1817. The prince was considered the last of his kind: he had no sons - only daughters.
Alexander I (from 1801)
Nicholas I (from 1825)
Moscow
Official positions held: chief manager of the Armory Chamber and the Kremlin Expedition, director of the Imperial Theaters (1791-1796), director of the Hermitage (1797), headed the palace glass, porcelain and trellis factories (since 1792), senator (since 1788), actual privy councilor ( 1796), Minister of the Department of Appanages (1800-1816), member of the State Council (from 1823).
Biography
The only son of the Moscow mayor Boris Yusupov, a representative of the richest princely family of the Yusupovs, who set his sights on his great-granddaughter Zinaida.
Helping to acquire works of art for Empress Catherine II and her son Paul I, the prince was an intermediary in the execution of imperial orders by European artists. Thus, Yusupov’s collection was formed from the same sources as the imperial one, therefore Yusupov’s collection contained works by major landscape painters.
Family traditions and service affiliation with the College of Foreign Affairs had a significant influence on his personality and destiny. In his long life, several stages can be distinguished that were decisive for the formation of the collection.
First of all, this is the first educational trip abroad in 1774-1777, staying in Holland and studying at Leiden University. Then interest in European culture and art arose, and a passion for collecting arose. During these years, he made a Grand Tour, visiting England, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Austria. It was presented to many European monarchs and was adopted by Diderot and Voltaire.
My books and a few good paintings and drawings are my only entertainment.
N. B. Yusupov
In Leiden, Yusupov acquired rare collectible books, paintings and drawings. Among them is an edition of Cicero, published by the famous Venetian company Aldov (Manutsiev), with a commemorative inscription about the purchase: “a Leide 1e mardi 7bre de l’annee 1774” (in Leiden on the first Tuesday of September 1774). In Italy, the prince met the German landscape painter J. F. Hackert, who became his adviser and expert. Hackert commissioned the paired landscapes “Morning in the Outskirts of Rome” and “Evening in the Outskirts of Rome” completed in 1779 (both at the Arkhangelskoye State Estate Museum). Antiquity and modern art - these two main hobbies of Yusupov will continue to determine the main artistic preferences, consonant with the era of formation and development of the last great international artistic style in European art - classicism.
The second important stage in the formation of the collection was the 1780s. As a person well-versed in the arts and well-known at European courts, Yusupov entered the retinue and accompanied the Count and Countess of the North (Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich and Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna) on a trip to Europe in 1781-1782. Possessing great knowledge and a taste for the fine arts, he carried out orders from Pavel Petrovich and significantly expanded his connections with artists and commission agents, for the first time he visited the workshops of the most famous artists - A. Kaufman in Venice and P. Batoni, the engraver D. Volpato, widely known for his reproduction engravings from the works of Raphael in the Vatican and Rome, G. Robert, C. J. Vernet, J.-B. Greuza and J.-A. Houdon in Paris. Then relations with these artists were maintained for many years, contributing to the replenishment of the prince’s personal collection.
1790s - the rapid rise of Yusupov's career. He fully demonstrates his devotion to the Russian throne, both to the aging Empress Catherine II and to Emperor Paul I. At the coronation of Paul I, he was appointed supreme coronation marshal. He performed the same role at the coronations of Alexander I and Nicholas I.
From 1791 to 1802, Yusupov held important government positions: director of the imperial theatrical performances in St. Petersburg (from 1791), director of the imperial glass and porcelain factories and trellis manufactory (from 1792), president of the manufactory board (from 1796) and minister of appanages (from 1800). ).
In 1794, Nikolai Borisovich was elected an honorary amateur of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1797, Paul I gave his jurisdiction to the Hermitage, where the imperial art collection was housed. The art gallery was headed by the Pole Franz Labensky, who had previously been the keeper of the art gallery of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, whom Yusupov accompanied during his stay in St. Petersburg. A new complete inventory of the Hermitage collection was carried out. The compiled inventory served as the main inventory until the middle of the 19th century.
The government positions held by the prince made it possible to directly influence the development of national art and artistic crafts. He acquired the Arkhangelskoye estate near Moscow, turning it into an example of a palace and park ensemble. Yusupov is the founder of the famous clan meeting, an outstanding and bright personality. He collected a large collection of paintings (over 600 canvases), sculptures, works of applied art, books (over 20 thousand), porcelain, most of which he placed in the estate.
In Moscow, Yusupov lived in his own palace in Bolshoi Kharitonyevsky Lane. In 1801-1803 the Pushkin family lived in one of the wings on the palace grounds, including little Alexander Pushkin. The poet also visited Yusupov in Arkhangelskoye, and in 1831 Yusupov was invited to a gala dinner in the Arbat apartment of the newlyweds Pushkin.
It languished magnificently for eighty years, surrounded by marble, painted and living beauty. In his country house, Pushkin talked with him, who dedicated it to him, and painted Gonzaga, to whom Yusupov dedicated his theater.
He died during the famous cholera epidemic in Moscow, in his own home in the parish of the Charitonia Church in Ogorodniki. He was buried in the village of Spasskoye-Kotovo, Mozhaisk district, Moscow province, in the ancient Church of the Savior Not Made by Hands.
(1849-11-06 ) (55 years)
Biography
Born into the family of a prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov And Tatyana Vasilievna, nieces and heirs of Prince Potemkin. At baptism, the successor (godfather) was Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich. Even as a child, Borenka, as he was called in the family, received the Order of Malta, and from his father the hereditary command of the Order of St. passed to him. John of Jerusalem. His younger brother died in infancy (around 1796).
He received his initial upbringing in his parents' home under the supervision of his mother, and then spent several years in a fashionable French boarding school, which was run in St. Petersburg by the famous abbot Karl Nicol, who later became the director of the Richelieu Lyceum in Odessa. Having passed the exam at the St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute, Prince Yusupov began to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1815. In 1817 he was granted the court title of chamberlain.
Service
His untold wealth made Yusupov completely independent; he had no need to resort to hypocrisy; he did not value his service and constantly quarreled with important persons, incurring their displeasure with his caustic witticisms and ridicule. According to Count M.A. Korf, Prince Yusupov had:
Private life
After the death of his father in the summer of 1831 from cholera, Boris Nikolaevich inherited a huge inheritance - 250 thousand acres of land, more than 40 thousand peasants in different provinces of Russia, and at the same time a colossal debt of about 2 million rubles. Prince Yusupov, a reveler in his youth, became a calculating man over the years. He was not as sociable as his father, and considered all his hobbies a useless waste of money and lordly manners.
Living permanently in St. Petersburg, Yusupov almost never visited Arkhangelsk, his beloved father. To pay off debts, he farmed out the ponds for fishing, sold the botanical garden to the Moscow University, and began transporting the priceless collection from the estate to his St. Petersburg palace on the Moika, until Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich, who remembered Arkhangelskoye in its heyday, told the prince that he should own Arkhangelsk didn't empty it.
A good business executive, Yusupov gave his freedom to his serfs and with this act, strange in the eyes of others, he quickly liquidated all his own and his father’s debts. Moreover, he became a secret moneylender and increased the family’s fortune tenfold by buying factories and mines in Donbass. The evil-tongued prince P.V. Dolgorukov wrote:
Prince Yusupov owned estates in seventeen provinces, tried to travel around them regularly, and under him they flourished. He opened hospitals on his estates, supplied them with medicines, and kept doctors and pharmacists with them. During the cholera outbreak in the Kursk province, he was not afraid to come to his village of Rakitnoye, where there was an epidemic; Without fear of infection, he walked everywhere in the village. During the terrible harvest that befell Russia in 1834-1835, when rye was sold at eight times the usual price, Yusupov fed up to 70,000 people on his estates without resorting to government benefits. In a letter to one of the managers, the prince wrote:
Prince Yusupov devoted his morning to official and economic matters; during the day he received his friends and acquaintances, and in the evenings he always went to the theater. The pragmatic Boris Nikolaevich shunned luxury in his home life; this trait was noted by many of his contemporaries. He was often the object of ridicule in the world. Prince A.M. Meshchersky called Yusupov an extremely prudent person with a unique character.
The writer V. A. Sollogub found the magnificent balls given by Yusupov “devoid of a hint of innate panache and lordliness”, and attributed to the prince himself “ legendary stinginess”, which forced him, at the meeting of the Sovereign and Empress, to immediately give economic orders such as “Their Majesties’ traveler was given two glasses of tea, and the coachman one” .
Donated 73,300 rubles to the Board of Trustees of public charity institutions in St. Petersburg for city almshouses.
Last years
In 1845, Prince Yusupov was awarded the rank of chamberlain. In the summer of 1849, he was appointed Chief Director of the exhibition of industrial works in St. Petersburg. The deadline for opening the exhibition was short; at the same time he had to take care of preparing the place for the exhibition and all the orders for its placement and opening. Wanting to speed up the work, Boris Nikolaevich spent whole days in the vast halls among the crowd of workers, giving them orders on all parts of the exhibition. His health, already damaged by the cholera he had suffered, could not withstand the dampness and cold this time. Not paying attention to the signs of illness, Yusupov did not stop managing the works until the end of the exhibition, and the victim of his zeal was exposed to typhoid fever.
Prince Yusupov died on October 25, 1849 in St. Petersburg, his body was transported to the village of Spasskoye-Kotovo near Moscow, where he bequeathed to be buried in the Savior Church next to his father. On his tomb was carved an inscription written by himself during his lifetime: “Here lies a Russian nobleman, Prince Boris, Prince Nikolaev, son of Yusupov”, the date of birth and death, and under them his favorite saying was written in French: "Honor is above all."
Alexander I (from 1801)
Nicholas I (from 1825)
Moscow
Official positions held: chief manager of the Armory Chamber and the Kremlin Expedition, director of the Imperial Theaters (1791-1796), director of the Hermitage (1797), headed the palace glass, porcelain and trellis factories (since 1792), senator (since 1788), actual privy councilor ( 1796), Minister of the Department of Appanages (1800-1816), member of the State Council (from 1823).
Biography
The only son of the Moscow mayor Boris Yusupov, a representative of the richest princely family of the Yusupovs, who set his sights on his great-granddaughter Zinaida.
Helping to acquire works of art for Empress Catherine II and her son Paul I, the prince was an intermediary in the execution of imperial orders by European artists. Thus, Yusupov’s collection was formed from the same sources as the imperial one, therefore Yusupov’s collection contained works by major landscape painters.
Family traditions and service affiliation with the College of Foreign Affairs had a significant influence on his personality and destiny. In his long life, several stages can be distinguished that were decisive for the formation of the collection.
First of all, this is the first educational trip abroad in 1774-1777, staying in Holland and studying at Leiden University. Then interest in European culture and art arose, and a passion for collecting arose. During these years, he made a Grand Tour, visiting England, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Austria. It was presented to many European monarchs and was adopted by Diderot and Voltaire.
My books and a few good paintings and drawings are my only entertainment.
N. B. Yusupov
In Leiden, Yusupov acquired rare collectible books, paintings and drawings. Among them is an edition of Cicero, published by the famous Venetian company Aldov (Manutsiev), with a commemorative inscription about the purchase: “a Leide 1e mardi 7bre de l’annee 1774” (in Leiden on the first Tuesday of September 1774). In Italy, the prince met the German landscape painter J. F. Hackert, who became his adviser and expert. Hackert commissioned the paired landscapes “Morning in the Outskirts of Rome” and “Evening in the Outskirts of Rome” completed in 1779 (both at the Arkhangelskoye State Estate Museum). Antiquity and modern art - these two main hobbies of Yusupov will continue to determine the main artistic preferences, consonant with the era of formation and development of the last great international artistic style in European art - classicism.
The second important stage in the formation of the collection was the 1780s. As a person well-versed in the arts and well-known at European courts, Yusupov entered the retinue and accompanied the Count and Countess of the North (Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich and Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna) on a trip to Europe in 1781-1782. Possessing great knowledge and a taste for the fine arts, he carried out orders from Pavel Petrovich and significantly expanded his connections with artists and commission agents, for the first time he visited the workshops of the most famous artists - A. Kaufman in Venice and P. Batoni, the engraver D. Volpato, widely known for his reproduction engravings from the works of Raphael in the Vatican and Rome, G. Robert, C. J. Vernet, J.-B. Greuza and J.-A. Houdon in Paris. Then relations with these artists were maintained for many years, contributing to the replenishment of the prince’s personal collection.
1790s - the rapid rise of Yusupov's career. He fully demonstrates his devotion to the Russian throne, both to the aging Empress Catherine II and to Emperor Paul I. At the coronation of Paul I, he was appointed supreme coronation marshal. He performed the same role at the coronations of Alexander I and Nicholas I.
From 1791 to 1802, Yusupov held important government positions: director of the imperial theatrical performances in St. Petersburg (from 1791), director of the imperial glass and porcelain factories and trellis manufactory (from 1792), president of the manufactory board (from 1796) and minister of appanages (from 1800). ).
In 1794, Nikolai Borisovich was elected an honorary amateur of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1797, Paul I gave his jurisdiction to the Hermitage, where the imperial art collection was housed. The art gallery was headed by the Pole Franz Labensky, who had previously been the keeper of the art gallery of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, whom Yusupov accompanied during his stay in St. Petersburg. A new complete inventory of the Hermitage collection was carried out. The compiled inventory served as the main inventory until the middle of the 19th century.
The government positions held by the prince made it possible to directly influence the development of national art and artistic crafts. He acquired the Arkhangelskoye estate near Moscow, turning it into an example of a palace and park ensemble. Yusupov is the founder of the famous clan meeting, an outstanding and bright personality. He collected a large collection of paintings (over 600 canvases), sculptures, works of applied art, books (over 20 thousand), porcelain, most of which he placed in the estate.
In Moscow, Yusupov lived in his own palace in Bolshoi Kharitonyevsky Lane. In 1801-1803 the Pushkin family lived in one of the wings on the palace grounds, including little Alexander Pushkin. The poet also visited Yusupov in Arkhangelskoye, and in 1831 Yusupov was invited to a gala dinner in the Arbat apartment of the newlyweds Pushkin.
It languished magnificently for eighty years, surrounded by marble, painted and living beauty. In his country house, Pushkin talked with him, who dedicated it to him, and painted Gonzaga, to whom Yusupov dedicated his theater.
He died during the famous cholera epidemic in Moscow, in his own home in the parish of the Charitonia Church in Ogorodniki. He was buried in the village of Spasskoye-Kotovo, Mozhaisk district, Moscow province, in the ancient Church of the Savior Not Made by Hands.
Moscow
Official positions held: chief manager of the Armory Chamber and the Kremlin Expedition, director of the Imperial Theaters (1791-1796), director of the Hermitage (1797), headed the palace glass, porcelain and trellis factories (since 1792), senator (since 1788), actual privy councilor ( 1796), Minister of the Department of Appanages (1800-1816), member of the State Council (from 1823).
Biography
The only son of the Moscow mayor Boris Yusupov, a representative of the richest princely family of the Yusupovs, who set his sights on his great-granddaughter Zinaida.
Helping to acquire works of art for Empress Catherine II and her son Paul I, the prince was an intermediary in the execution of imperial orders by European artists. Thus, Yusupov’s collection was formed from the same sources as the imperial one, therefore Yusupov’s collection contained works by major landscape painters. Family traditions and service affiliation with the College of Foreign Affairs had a significant influence on his personality and destiny. In his long life, several stages can be distinguished that were decisive for the formation of the collection.
First of all, this is the first educational trip abroad in 1774-1777, staying in Holland and studying at Leiden University. Then interest in European culture and art arose, and a passion for collecting arose. During these years, he made a Grand Tour, visiting England, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Austria. It was presented to many European monarchs and was adopted by Diderot and Voltaire.
My books and a few good paintings and drawings are my only entertainment.
N. B. Yusupov
In Leiden, Yusupov acquired rare collectible books, paintings and drawings. Among them is an edition of Cicero, published by the famous Venetian company Aldov (Manutsiev), with a commemorative inscription about the purchase: “a Leide 1e mardi 7bre de l’annee 1774” (in Leiden on the first Tuesday of September 1774). In Italy, the prince met the German landscape painter J. F. Hackert, who became his adviser and expert. Hackert commissioned the paired landscapes “Morning in the Outskirts of Rome” and “Evening in the Outskirts of Rome” completed in 1779 (both at the Arkhangelskoye State Estate Museum). Antiquity and modern art - these two main hobbies of Yusupov will continue to determine the main artistic preferences, consonant with the era of formation and development of the last great international artistic style in European art - classicism.
The second important stage in the formation of the collection was the 1780s. As a person well-versed in the arts and well-known at European courts, Yusupov entered the retinue and accompanied the Count and Countess of the North (Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich and Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna) on a trip to Europe in 1781-1782. Possessing great knowledge and a taste for the fine arts, he carried out orders from Pavel Petrovich and significantly expanded his connections with artists and commission agents, for the first time visiting the workshops of the most famous artists - A. Kaufman in Venice and P. Batoni, engraver D. Volpato, widely known for his reproduction engravings from the works of Raphael in the Vatican and Rome, G. Robert, C. J. Vernet, J.-B. Greuza and J.-A. Houdon in Paris. Then relations with these artists were maintained for many years, contributing to the replenishment of the prince’s personal collection.
1790s - the rapid rise of Yusupov's career. He fully demonstrates his devotion to the Russian throne, both to the aging Empress Catherine II and to Emperor Paul I. At the coronation of Paul I, he was appointed supreme coronation marshal. He performed the same role at the coronations of Alexander I and Nicholas I.
From 1791 to 1802, Yusupov held important government positions: director of the imperial theatrical performances in St. Petersburg (from 1791), director of the imperial glass and porcelain factories and trellis manufactory (from 1792), president of the manufactory board (from 1796) and minister of appanages (from 1800). ).
In 1794, Nikolai Borisovich was elected an honorary amateur of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1797, Paul I gave his jurisdiction to the Hermitage, where the imperial art collection was housed. The art gallery was headed by the Pole Franz Labensky, who had previously been the keeper of the art gallery of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, whom Yusupov accompanied during his stay in St. Petersburg. A new complete inventory of the Hermitage collection was carried out. The compiled inventory served as the main inventory until the middle of the 19th century.
The government positions held by the prince made it possible to directly influence the development of national art and artistic crafts. He acquired the Arkhangelskoye estate near Moscow, turning it into an example of a palace and park ensemble. Yusupov is the founder of the famous clan meeting, an outstanding and bright personality. He collected a large collection of paintings (over 600 canvases), sculptures, works of applied art, books (over 20 thousand), porcelain, most of which he placed in the estate.
- Examples of paintings from the collection of N. B. Yusupov
| The only thing Moscow is busy with now is the death of Prince Yusupov. On Tuesday he was still quite healthy, he dined with great appetite, ate a lot of peaches, grapes and melon. At night he complained of stomach pain. People, fearing that it might be cholera, sent for a doctor. Then vomiting appeared. The people, seeing that the doctors were in great fear, sent for the priest, who was kept hidden next to the sick man's room; when the sick man was asked to fulfill his duty to the church, he gladly agreed and was confessed and given communion. After that he felt even worse, and by 6 o'clock in the morning he was no longer alive. |
Personal life
Wife - Tatyana Vasilievna, née Engelhardt (1769-1841), widow of M. S. Potemkin, niece of Prince G. A. Potemkin, one of the latter’s heirs. Sons:
- Boris (1794-1849) - chamberlain, honorary guardian. Since 1827 he has been married to Zinaida Ivanovna Naryshkina.
- Nicholas (died in infancy).
Among Yusupov's favorites were the French ballerina Bigottini and the St. Petersburg dancer Arina Tukmanova. In 1820, the prince took under his protection Didelot's student, 18-year-old Ekaterina Petrovna Kolosova, who, according to the testimony of choreographer Glushkovsky, “was not a beauty herself, but a talented artist; The St. Petersburg public loved her very much.” She died after living with the prince for no more than four years and leaving him with two sons. Yusupov gave the children the surname Gireysky and put 50 thousand rubles for each. to the Board of Trustees. One of them died at the age of seven, the other, Sergei Nikolaevich, received a good education and lived mostly abroad.
Awards
- Commander of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem (1798)
- diamond signs for the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called Apostle (1801)
- Order of St. Vladimir, 1st class (1814)
- insignia for 50 years of blameless service (08/22/1830)
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Notes
Literature
- Shilov D. N., Kuzmin Yu. A. Members of the State Council of the Russian Empire, 1801-1906: Bio-bibliographic reference book. - St. Petersburg. : Dmitry Bulanin, 2007. - pp. 890-893.
- Prakhov A.V. Materials for describing the art collections of the Yusupov princes // Artistic treasures of Russia. - 1906. - No. 8–10. - P. 180.
- Malinovsky K.V. The history of collecting paintings in St. Petersburg in the 18th century.. - St. Petersburg. : Kriga, 2012. - P. 536. - 600 copies. - ISBN 978-5-901805-49-7.
- Ivanova V. I. Another Yusupov: (Prince N.B. Yusupov and his possessions at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries): Historical essay. - M.: Griffin, 2012. - 144 p. - 300 copies. - ISBN 978-5-98862-091-4.(region)
- // Russian biographical dictionary: in 25 volumes. - St. Petersburg. -M., 1896-1918.
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An excerpt characterizing Yusupov, Nikolai Borisovich
Pierre did not see people separately, but saw them moving.All these people and horses seemed to be being chased by some invisible force. All of them, during the hour during which Pierre observed them, emerged from different streets with the same desire to pass quickly; All of them equally, when confronted with others, began to get angry and fight; white teeth were bared, eyebrows frowned, the same curses were thrown around, and on all faces there was the same youthfully determined and cruelly cold expression, which struck Pierre in the morning at the sound of a drum on the corporal’s face.
Just before evening, the guard commander gathered his team and, shouting and arguing, squeezed into the convoys, and the prisoners, surrounded on all sides, went out onto the Kaluga road.
They walked very quickly, without resting, and stopped only when the sun began to set. The convoys moved one on top of the other, and people began to prepare for the night. Everyone seemed angry and unhappy. For a long time, curses, angry screams and fights were heard from different sides. The carriage driving behind the guards approached the guards' carriage and pierced it with its drawbar. Several soldiers from different directions ran to the cart; some hit the heads of the horses harnessed to the carriage, turning them over, others fought among themselves, and Pierre saw that one German was seriously wounded in the head with a cleaver.
It seemed that all these people were now experiencing, when they stopped in the middle of a field in the cold twilight of an autumn evening, the same feeling of an unpleasant awakening from the haste that gripped everyone as they left and the rapid movement somewhere. Having stopped, everyone seemed to understand that it was still unknown where they were going, and that this movement would be a lot of hard and difficult things.
The prisoners at this halt were treated even worse by the guards than during the march. At this halt, for the first time, the meat food of the prisoners was given out as horse meat.
From the officers to the last soldier, it was noticeable in everyone what seemed like a personal bitterness against each of the prisoners, which had so unexpectedly replaced previously friendly relations.
This anger intensified even more when, when counting the prisoners, it turned out that during the bustle, leaving Moscow, one Russian soldier, pretending to be sick from the stomach, fled. Pierre saw how a Frenchman beat a Russian soldier for moving far from the road, and heard how the captain, his friend, reprimanded the non-commissioned officer for the escape of the Russian soldier and threatened him with justice. In response to the non-commissioned officer's excuse that the soldier was sick and could not walk, the officer said that he had been ordered to shoot those who lag behind. Pierre felt that the fatal force that had crushed him during his execution and which had been invisible during his captivity had now again taken possession of his existence. He was scared; but he felt how, as the fatal force made efforts to crush him, a life force independent of it grew and strengthened in his soul.
Pierre dined on a soup made from rye flour with horse meat and talked with his comrades.
Neither Pierre nor any of his comrades talked about what they saw in Moscow, nor about the rudeness of the French, nor about the order to shoot that was announced to them: everyone was, as if in rebuff to the worsening situation, especially animated and cheerful . They talked about personal memories, about funny scenes seen during the campaign, and hushed up conversations about the present situation.
The sun has long since set. Bright stars lit up here and there in the sky; The red, fire-like glow of the rising full moon spread across the edge of the sky, and a huge red ball swayed amazingly in the grayish haze. It was getting light. The evening was already over, but the night had not yet begun. Pierre got up from his new comrades and walked between the fires to the other side of the road, where, he was told, the captured soldiers were standing. He wanted to talk to them. On the road, a French guard stopped him and ordered him to turn back.
Pierre returned, but not to the fire, to his comrades, but to the unharnessed cart, which had no one. He crossed his legs and lowered his head, sat down on the cold ground near the wheel of the cart and sat motionless for a long time, thinking. More than an hour passed. Nobody bothered Pierre. Suddenly he laughed his fat, good-natured laugh so loudly that people from different directions looked back in surprise at this strange, obviously lonely laugh.
- Ha, ha, ha! – Pierre laughed. And he said out loud to himself: “The soldier didn’t let me in.” They caught me, they locked me up. They are holding me captive. Who me? Me! Me - my immortal soul! Ha, ha, ha!.. Ha, ha, ha!.. - he laughed with tears welling up in his eyes.
Some man stood up and came up to see what this strange big man was laughing about. Pierre stopped laughing, stood up, moved away from the curious man and looked around him.
Previously loudly noisy with the crackling of fires and the chatter of people, the huge, endless bivouac fell silent; the red lights of the fires went out and turned pale. A full moon stood high in the bright sky. Forests and fields, previously invisible outside the camp, now opened up in the distance. And even further away from these forests and fields one could see a bright, wavering, endless distance calling into itself. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the receding, playing stars. “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! - thought Pierre. “And they caught all this and put it in a booth fenced off with boards!” He smiled and went to bed with his comrades.
In the first days of October, another envoy came to Kutuzov with a letter from Napoleon and a peace proposal, deceptively indicated from Moscow, while Napoleon was already not far ahead of Kutuzov, on the old Kaluga road. Kutuzov responded to this letter in the same way as to the first one sent with Lauriston: he said that there could be no talk of peace.
Soon after this, from the partisan detachment of Dorokhov, who went to the left of Tarutin, a report was received that troops had appeared in Fominskoye, that these troops consisted of the Broussier division and that this division, separated from other troops, could easily be exterminated. The soldiers and officers again demanded action. The staff generals, excited by the memory of the ease of victory at Tarutin, insisted on Kutuzov to implement Dorokhov’s proposal. Kutuzov did not consider any offensive necessary. What happened was the mean, what had to happen; A small detachment was sent to Fominskoye, which was supposed to attack Brusier.
By a strange coincidence, this appointment - the most difficult and most important, as it turned out later - was received by Dokhturov; that same modest, little Dokhturov, whom no one described to us as drawing up battle plans, flying in front of regiments, throwing crosses at batteries, etc., who was considered and called indecisive and uninsightful, but the same Dokhturov, whom during all Russian wars with the French, from Austerlitz until the thirteenth year, we find ourselves in charge wherever the situation is difficult. In Austerlitz, he remains the last at the Augest dam, gathering regiments, saving what he can, when everything is running and dying and not a single general is in the rearguard. He, sick with a fever, goes to Smolensk with twenty thousand to defend the city against the entire Napoleonic army. In Smolensk, as soon as he dozed off at the Molokhov Gate, in a paroxysm of fever, he was awakened by cannonade across Smolensk, and Smolensk held out all day. On Borodino Day, when Bagration was killed and the troops of our left flank were killed in a ratio of 9 to 1 and the entire force of the French artillery was sent there, no one else was sent, namely the indecisive and indiscernible Dokhturov, and Kutuzov hurries to correct his mistake when he sent there another. And small, quiet Dokhturov goes there, and Borodino is the best glory of the Russian army. And many heroes are described to us in poetry and prose, but almost not a word about Dokhturov.
Again Dokhturov is sent there to Fominskoye and from there to Maly Yaroslavets, to the place where the last battle with the French took place, and to the place from which, obviously, the death of the French already begins, and again many geniuses and heroes are described to us during this period of the campaign , but not a word about Dokhturov, or very little, or doubtful. This silence about Dokhturov most obviously proves his merits.
Naturally, for a person who does not understand the movement of a machine, when he sees its action, it seems that the most important part of this machine is that splinter that accidentally fell into it and, interfering with its progress, flutters in it. A person who does not know the structure of the machine cannot understand that it is not this splinter that spoils and interferes with the work, but that small transmission gear that silently turns, is one of the most essential parts of the machine.
On October 10, the same day that Dokhturov walked half the road to Fominsky and stopped in the village of Aristov, preparing to exactly carry out the given order, the entire French army, in its convulsive movement, reached Murat’s position, as it seemed, in order to give The battle suddenly, for no reason, turned left onto the new Kaluga road and began to enter Fominskoye, in which Brusier had previously stood alone. Dokhturov at that time had under his command, in addition to Dorokhov, two small detachments of Figner and Seslavin.
On the evening of October 11, Seslavin arrived in Aristovo to his superiors with a captured French guardsman. The prisoner said that the troops that had entered Fominskoe today constituted the vanguard of the entire large army, that Napoleon was right there, that the entire army had already left Moscow for the fifth day. That same evening, a servant who came from Borovsk told how he saw a huge army entering the city. Cossacks from Dorokhov's detachment reported that they saw the French Guard walking along the road to Borovsk. From all this news it became obvious that where they thought they would find one division, there was now the entire French army, marching from Moscow in an unexpected direction - along the old Kaluga road. Dokhturov did not want to do anything, since it was not clear to him now what his responsibility was. He was ordered to attack Fominskoye. But in Fominskoe there had previously only been Broussier, now there was the entire French army. Ermolov wanted to act at his own discretion, but Dokhturov insisted that he needed to have an order from His Serene Highness. It was decided to send a report to headquarters.
For this purpose, an intelligent officer was elected, Bolkhovitinov, who, in addition to the written report, had to tell the whole matter in words. At twelve o'clock at night, Bolkhovitinov, having received an envelope and a verbal order, galloped, accompanied by a Cossack, with spare horses to the main headquarters.
The night was dark, warm, autumn. It had been raining for four days now. Having changed horses twice and galloping thirty miles along a muddy, sticky road in an hour and a half, Bolkhovitinov was in Letashevka at two o'clock in the morning. Having dismounted from the hut, on the fence of which there was a sign: “General Headquarters,” and abandoning his horse, he entered the dark vestibule.
- The general on duty, quickly! Very important! - he said to someone who was rising and snoring in the darkness of the entryway.
“We’ve been very unwell since the evening; we haven’t slept for three nights,” the orderly’s voice whispered intercessively. - You must wake up the captain first.
“Very important, from General Dokhturov,” said Bolkhovitinov, entering the open door he felt. The orderly walked ahead of him and began to wake someone up:
- Your honor, your honor - the courier.
- I'm sorry, what? from whom? – said someone’s sleepy voice.
– From Dokhturov and from Alexey Petrovich. “Napoleon is in Fominskoye,” said Bolkhovitinov, not seeing in the darkness who asked him, but by the sound of his voice, suggesting that it was not Konovnitsyn.
The awakened man yawned and stretched.
“I don’t want to wake him up,” he said, feeling something. - You're sick! Maybe so, rumors.
“Here’s the report,” said Bolkhovitinov, “I’ve been ordered to hand it over to the general on duty immediately.”
- Wait, I’ll light a fire. Where the hell do you always put it? – turning to the orderly, said the stretching man. It was Shcherbinin, Konovnitsyn's adjutant. “I found it, I found it,” he added.
The orderly was chopping the fire, Shcherbinin was feeling the candlestick.
“Oh, disgusting ones,” he said with disgust.
In the light of the sparks, Bolkhovitinov saw the young face of Shcherbinin with a candle and in the front corner a still sleeping man. It was Konovnitsyn.
When the brimstones lit up with a blue and then a red flame on the tinder, Shcherbinin lit a tallow candle, from the candlestick of which the Prussians ran, gnawing it, and examined the messenger. Bolkhovitinov was covered in dirt and, wiping himself with his sleeve, smeared it on his face.
-Who is informing? - said Shcherbinin, taking the envelope.
“The news is true,” said Bolkhovitinov. - And the prisoners, and the Cossacks, and the spies - they all unanimously show the same thing.
“There’s nothing to do, we have to wake him up,” said Shcherbinin, getting up and approaching a man in a nightcap, covered with an overcoat. - Pyotr Petrovich! - he said. Konovnitsyn did not move. - To the main headquarters! – he said, smiling, knowing that these words would probably wake him up. And indeed, the head in the nightcap rose immediately. On Konovnitsyn’s handsome, firm face, with feverishly inflamed cheeks, for a moment there remained the expression of dreams of a dream far from the present situation, but then suddenly he shuddered: his face took on its usually calm and firm expression.
- Well, what is it? From whom? – he asked slowly, but immediately, blinking from the light. Listening to the officer’s report, Konovnitsyn printed it out and read it. As soon as he had read it, he lowered his feet in woolen stockings onto the earthen floor and began to put on his shoes. Then he took off his cap and, combing his temples, put on his cap.
-Are you there soon? Let's go to the brightest.
Konovnitsyn immediately realized that the news brought was of great importance and that there was no time to delay. Whether it was good or bad, he did not think or ask himself. He wasn't interested. He looked at the whole matter of war not with his mind, not with reasoning, but with something else. There was a deep, unspoken conviction in his soul that everything would be fine; but that you don’t need to believe this, and especially don’t say this, but just do your job. And he did this work, giving it all his strength.
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