HISTORY: The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia By Douglas Smith Yale University Press, 352pp. £25TODAY'S THESPIANS might complain of having to perform for slave's wages. But their counterparts in late 18th-century Russia were just that - slaves.
"Serf theatre" was then all the rage as bored nobles indulged their taste for opera and theatre, pressing their indentured cooks, footmen, peasants, and chambermaids into double service as tenors, bassos, and sopranos.
The best of them were sold for high prices like any other piece of property - a noblewoman from Tambov cashed in her entire choir and orchestra, totalling 98 people, with their instruments, for 37,000 rubles in 1805.
While actors and directors still fear the critics' lash, at least they don't have to worry about receiving a good whipping after a lacklustre performance - the standard punishment meted out by perfectionist noble impresarios. The most ambitious and profligate of these, count Nicholas Sheremetev, was more humane. As Douglas Smith writes in The Pearl: "Nicholas was generally loath to use corporal punishment."
Sheremetev had inherited the theatrical bug from his father Peter, after whose death Nicholas took this enthusiasm to a whole new level, ordering the construction of one of the largest theatres in Europe at his estate in Ostankino outside St Petersburg, which was launched with the triumphant premier of Osip Kozlovsky's Zelmira in July 1795.
While minor nobles couldn't afford to let their actors forsake regular duties in the kitchens and fields, Sheremetev created a dedicated company and orchestra - drawn from the hundreds of thousands of serfs across his many estates - who even received small salaries. Professional instructors were hired from France and Italy to ensure that they reached the highest standards.
While he may have spared his performers the rod, the count was not at all averse to another long-standing theatrical tradition - bedding his actresses. This overlapping exercise of the droit de seigneur and what might be called the droit de metteur en scène ultimately led to true romance.
He became so smitten by his most talented diva, Praskovia Kovalyova, nicknamed The Pearl, that she became his life companion and eventually his wife after he had bought her out of serfdom (despite a brief administrative hitch when it transpired that Sheremetev had omitted to pay the entire 60 kopecks required).
Though the tsar gave his reluctant blessing to the initially secret union, a large part of the court was predictably scandalised. Following Kovalyova's death, from what Smith surmises must have been a bacterial infection brought on by the trauma of childbirth, Sheremetev wrote movingly to his infant son: " . . . when my wife's death reduced me to despair, few could be found to comfort me or share in my grief when all it took to give my soul the slightest comfort was one small tear, the least sigh or one heartfelt word of a true friend, an honest man".
By then, the count's fabulous opera house had been closed and the company disbanded. Sheremetev had been called to court to serve the unpopular tsar Paul I as chief marshal. But Smith irritatingly neglects to explain why the count brought down the curtain on his theatre, which he had only constructed a few years beforehand, alluding only to the end of Kovalyova's own operatic career due to ill health. Such imprecision mars the whole of The Pearl.
Although entertaining and well-informed on the subject of chattel theatricals, Smith's book is an uneven and basically self-defeating attempt to write about what he admits in his prelude does not really exist. There is minimal documentary evidence about Kovalyova and no diaries or letters written in her name.
Smith concludes that "so much of her life remains out of sight, irretrievable, frustratingly unknowable". He thus excuses himself for relying on the "conjurer's tricks" of fiction: "I have had to summon my subject's spirits and engage them in imagined conversations across the centuries for insights into the hidden pathways of their hearts."
What follows is manifestly unconvincing and The Pearl is padded out with long, unnecessary descriptions of the rooms in Sheremetev's palaces as well as over-written psychological speculation. "One can almost feel the wave of euphoria mixed with exhausted relief that must have washed over Praskovia," writes Smith about the end of a performance to mark a visit from Catherine the Great. Later, he announces that, as Sheremetev's mistress, Praskovia Kovalyova "was filled with shame to the point of self-loathing, and this feeling, far from lessening over the years, only grew as time passed and her relationship with Nicholas remained unchanged." In the hands of a talented novelist or dramatist, this material might make for a powerful and moving tale, but these speculative forays read like bad history in The Pearl.
Like Sheremetev and Kovalyova themselves, Smith has tried to cross a boundary - in his case a literary one. But writing a good non-fiction novel requires rare chutzpah and style. In Cold Blood this is not and Smith's clumsy efforts to get inside Kovalyova's head detract from a decent body of factual research which could have formed the basis for a shorter, more coherent treatise on serf theatre.
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Max McGuinness is a columnist and blogger for The Dubliner