Sulakadzev: The History of the Forger of All Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The first balloon flight was made by a Russian, and the Valaam Monastery was founded by the Apostle Andrew. These "historical facts" were invented by a bibliophile 200 years ago.

In 1800, Pyotr Dubrovsky returned to St. Petersburg from Europe. He spent about 20 years in France: first he served in a church at the Russian embassy in Paris, then as a secretary of the mission there. His trip abroad fell on the turbulent revolutionary years.

A Russian spiritual official with a passion for collecting, taking advantage of the general confusion, collected in France a lot of old manuscripts and early printed books. Dubrovsky brought the most valuable copies of his collection to Russia, hoping that the imperial library would buy them for good money. However, to his disappointment, the archivists there were not interested in the rarities. The discouraged Dubrovsky complained about this failure to his friend, the army supplier Alexander Sulakadzev.

He offered a simple way to improve the situation. On the margins of one of the manuscripts, clearly in Old Church Slavonic, Sulakadzev made a note indicating that Queen Anne, the daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, married to Henry I of France, had read this book. In March 1801, the murder of Paul I took place, and in defiance of the fallen Germanophile, patriotic fashion broke out in the capital and at court.

The Imperial Public Library and the Hermitage fought for the book marked "Anna Yaroslavna", wishing to get a monument of ancient Russian culture in their collections. At the same time, they bought up all the other books of Dubrovsky, with which he was very pleased. Only decades later, when neither Dubrovsky nor Sulakadzev was alive, it turned out that the "autograph of Anna Yaroslavna" is on the margins of the Serbian church charter, written three hundred years after the death of the French queen.

The history of the forger of all Russia

Alexander Ivanovich Sulakadzev was born in 1771. He came from a Georgian family that moved to Russia during the time of Peter I. His father, a provincial architect in Ryazan, assigned his son to the Preobrazhensky regiment. Alexander's military career did not interest him, and a few years later, without formally leaving the army, he began to serve in the supply department. He was a diligent official, but the meaning of his life was collecting, first of all, books.

Sulakadzev was a bibliophile. In every possible way, he obtained lists of ancient chronicles. He scoured the monastic book depositories, was a frequenter of antique salons and book breakdowns. Unfortunately, with all his efforts, he could not find anything comparable to the recent discovery of Count Musin-Pushkin.

He discovered in one of the monasteries a list of an ancient Russian poem known as "The Lay of Igor's Campaign." Sulakadzev dreamed of finding something comparable, but to no avail. Some of Alexander Ivanovich's acquaintances doubted the authenticity of the Lay and admitted that one of the contemporary writers could have authored it. Then why not try to compose an ancient poem yourself?

Sulakadzev had literary skills: he was the author of several plays, which, however, no one staged or published. He used all his talent to compose "Boyan's Anthem" - a large poem "in the Old Russian style." He presented a copy of his work to the poet Gabriel Derzhavin, saying that he had found it on an ancient parchment scroll.

Gavriil Romanovich was just working on the theoretical work Discourses on Lyric Poetry, where he argued that the traditions of Russian versification have very ancient roots. "Boyan's Anthem" came in very handy for him. In 1811 Derzhavin published the Sulakadze forgery, specifying that "the originals on parchment are among the collected antiquities from Mr. Selakadzev."

Apparently, the experienced poet still doubted the authenticity of the "Old Russian" poem, since he made a reservation that the "opening of the scroll" could be "unfair". The science of Old Russian literature was still in its infancy at that time, therefore the fact that "Boyan's Hymn" was a fake became obvious only half a century later.

Sulakadzev gained some popularity in literary and scientific circles. A few months later, he met with the abbot of the Valaam monastery, who invited the bibliophile to get acquainted with the monastery's archive. Sulakadzev readily agreed. His work on Valaam ended with the writing of the work "The Experience of the Ancient and New Chronicle of the Valaam Monastery …".

The history of the monastery really goes back hundreds of years, but Sulakadzev, referring to the "documents" allegedly found by him, claimed that the monastery was founded by monks Sergius and Herman during the time of the Roman emperor Caracalla and that the apostle Andrew himself played a significant role in the appearance of the skete on Lake Ladoga. This news greatly delighted the monks who were preparing for the visit of Emperor Alexander I to Valaam. The legend of the founding of the monastery by Andrew the First-Called turned out to be surprisingly tenacious and is still being repeated.

Sulakadzev did not seem to receive material benefits from his activities. He "lengthened" Russian history, either out of love for art, or to increase the importance of his collection of manuscripts in the eyes of the few St. Petersburg bibliophiles. The notes with which he "aged" the documents could not stand a serious check.

Alexander Ivanovich possessed rather superficial historical knowledge. He loved not science, but sensations, such as ancient historical documents in his time. Only those interested in the considerable age of these rarities could believe in the authenticity of his "artifacts": Derzhavin, who needed to confirm his theory, the monks of Valaam, who tried to present their monastery as the oldest in Russia or even in Europe.

Eternal glory or posthumous disgrace

Alexander Ivanovich died in 1829. The widow sold out an extensive library in several installments. Bibliophiles who bought books began to find evidence of "deep antiquity" in them. Not everyone could recognize Sulakadzev's hand, therefore, even decades after the death of the forger, fake sensations flared up.

In the 1920s, Bishop John Teodorovich discovered a parchment in the library of one of the Ukrainian estates. Marks in the margins of an apparently ancient manuscript testified that it belonged to Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Delighted, the bishop announced that he had found the prayer book of the saint of Russia.

In 1925-1926, the Kiev archaeologist N. Makarenko proved that the parchment is really ancient. The scientist found out that the text was written in Novgorod in the 1350s and could not have anything to do with Prince Vladimir. It turned out that the manuscript comes from the collection of Sulakadzev and came to Volhynia along with several books from his library.

An analysis of the markings in the margins confirmed that they were made by the hand of a forger. Bishop Teodorovich did not believe in the exposure and took the manuscript to the United States, where he emigrated, fleeing the Soviet regime. In America, Prince Vladimir's Prayer Book ended up in the New York Public Library. Already in the 1950s, American researchers fully confirmed the conclusions of their Ukrainian predecessors: the Novgorod manuscript was artificially aged by Sulakadzev and had nothing to do with Prince Vladimir.

Around the same time, the name of the forger sounded loudly in the USSR. The manuscript from the Sulakadzev library contained a story about how the Ryazan clerk Kryakutnaya in 1731 flew on a balloon inflated with smoke. The text was published back in 1901. But then he did not get the attention it deserves.

In the late 1940s, a campaign to combat cosmopolitanism began in the USSR. Then someone remembered Kryakutny. Newspapers and magazines wrote about the Ryazan clerk and his balloon, the USSR Post even issued a stamp dedicated to the 225th anniversary of the world's first air flight.

The matter ended in great embarrassment. In 1958, V. F. Pokrovskaya published a study of the manuscript "On Air Flying in Russia." Taking a closer look, she discovered that the words "nonrechtite Kryakutnaya" were written over the words "German baptized Furzel", which greatly undermined the Russian priority. Moreover, it turned out that Furzel did not exist either - the story about him was invented by Alexander Sulakadzev and inscribed by him in the memoirs of his ancestor Bogolepov, who lived in the Ryazan region.

This revelation is not recognized by everyone. In the heads of some people, the fake clerk Kryakutnaya mixed with the hero of the story of the writer Yevgeny Opochinin about the slave Nikita, who was executed by Ivan the Terrible for flying on wooden wings.

In Runet, you can find statements that Kryakutnaya is the first Russian paratrooper and school essays on the topic “Aeronaut Kryakutnaya as a symbol of the flight of the Russian soul”, dated 2012. In 2009, a monument to the "Russian Icarus" appeared in Kungur, which in 1656 allegedly flew freely across the sky on wooden wings. Where did the Kungur aeronautics get this date from is completely incomprehensible. Be that as it may, Alexander Ivanovich Sulakadzev could not even dream of such a result of his "old-loving pranks".