Peter the Great's Cabinet of Horrors

from "Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist"
by Daniel Kalder.
(the author travels through Russia)

I came upon some exhibition rooms just down some steps from the kremlin.* They were built into a wall, and definitely prerevolutionary. There were no windows, and the ceilings were low; I suspected they had been storerooms for the nobles of the kremlin in an earlier period. There was very little to draw your attention to them, just a placard on the pavement outside. But what I found there was one of the great wonders of Russia- bottled mutant babies from Peter the Great's collection of freaks.

(* all Russian cities have "a" kremlin.)

In his youth, Peter the Great traveled around Europe, studying ships and engineering and contemporary Western customs. He worked incognito in the shipyards of Holland, learning for himself the skills he planned to import into backward Russia. Simultaneously, he indulged a fascination for the natural world. He haunted auction rooms and markets, buying fossils, seashells, and stuffed animals. Then, in 1697, in Amsterdam, he paid a visit to the workshop of Frederik Ruysch, who was renowned as the greatest embalmer in Europe. Peter's casual shopping for dead things was about to enter a new, darker, much more obsessive level.

For Ruysch was an artist of death. He liked to do things with the bodies and limbs he preserved. He looked at the corpses of children and saw that they were terribly pretty. So he dressed them in lace and placed them in little coffins, adorned with beads, flowers, and small candles and made them look beautiful. When Ruysch looked at the skeletons of fetuses, he thought they would look wonderful mounted in dioramas illustrating allegorical themes. So he took the little bones and stuck them all together in morally instructive combinations. Most gruesome of all, however, was his collection of nature's own "sports", or whimsies- still-born mutant babies, floating in jars of his preserving fluid.

Ruysch opened his workshop to the public twice a week, and Peter's was only one of many famous signatures in the guest book. But the tsar's fascination with what he saw there was both profound and intimate. He was so affected by the beauty of one dead infant "embalmed so masterfully that it seemed the child was merely sleeping" that this giant of a man could not help but kiss her.

Twenty years after his first visit, Peter returned to Amsterdam and paid Ruysch twenty thousand gulden for the entire collection, and had it transported to St. Petersburg. It would become the foundation of his "Kunstkamera"- the first public museum in all Russia.

Ruysch, althogh seventy nine years old at the time, immediately set about assembling a new collection. Peter, meanwhile, began augmenting the original one. In 1718 he issued his famous "monsters decree", obligating his subjects to bring "monsters" and "ugly ones" from all over the empire to his new museum. For ten years, monsters, both living and dead, were delivered to the Kunstkamera, and Peter's collection came to include live specimens of dwarfs and mutated animals as well as dead ones. Those who attempted to conceal their monsters were subject to a hefty fine of discovered.

Among the exhibits were an eight-legged lamb, a three-legged infant, and a sheep with two mouths and two tongues. But the most celebrated freak of all was Foma Ignatiev, a dwarf who actually lived in the museum. Not only was Foma a mere 126 centimeters tall, but he suffered from ectodactyly, which meant that his hands and feet terminated in two clawlike digits. In the carnivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a man with his condition would have been billed as a lobster boy.

Peter claimed his goal was "to instruct and teach about Nature- living and dead- and about the artistry that flows from the hands of men." Legend has it that visitors to the museum were even offered a free glass of vodka and a slice of salto (salted pig's fat) to entice them within, so keen was the tsar for his people to come and learn.

I had been to the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg a couple of times. Unfortunately there were no longer any live exhibits, and what survived of Peter's collection was divided between two rooms. One was particularly atmospheric. It was circular, with multiple exits and entrances, and the walls were lined with old wooden cabinets. They contained, among other things, a stuffed two-headed lamb, the skeleton of a two-headed baby, a severed hand made curiously elegant by the addition of a lacy frill, and a child's head with the cap of the skull sawn off. The child had glass eyes. They peered out through the aged, yellow glass, blank and somehow weary, as curious schoolchildren gazed into the twisting coils of its brain.

The best stuff, however, was the cabinet of bottled babies. These infants are now three hundred years old, and sleep in an eerie and unsettling sleep. Drained of all color, they float there, pale and soft and squishy, as if in suspended animation, awaiting the day they will be awoken.

I saw a wide variety of abnormalities, from microencephalics with tiny heads to macroencephalics with great, swollen, balloon skulls. There was a child born with his brain outside his skull, and infants whose faces appeared to have collapsed in on themselves. There was a fleshy mermaid, labelled a "siren", and a cyclops. And there were the grimacing Siamese twins, who appeared locked in a deadly struggle to wrench themselves free of each other.

The exhibit in Kazan (Tatarstan) was a lot smaller, but even more gruesome. In addition to a cyclops, a pumpkin head, and a baby with its vestigial twin embedded in its body, there were Siamese twins of every variety: babies joined at the face, at the waist, end to end, scalp to scalp.

For some reason, although I always enjoy the company of the dead babies in St. Petersburg, it was difficult to spend much time with those in Kazan. I kept thinking of the grief and terror of the mothe5r when she saw the monster that had come from her womb. How was she treated by her community? Were the parents pitied, or shunned as sinners, bearers of the devil's curse? These sleepers were blissfully oblivious to the pain and horror they had brought.

I also found the corpses more nauseating, more shocking than the first time I saw them. Perhaps it was the element of surprise. I wasn't prepared.

I returned to the street where the sun was shining, relieved to escape that dark cavern of nature's horrors. Nonetheless, I was glad I had spent the time with the babies. It was a surprise, a bonus, something slightly magical, even. I wondered idly where else Peter's collection was stored. Perhaps, I thought, in some remote corner of cold Siberia there is a small town where you can pay to enter an old storage room and see the pickled remains of Foma, his dwarf.