The confrontation with the merchants was postponed as the financial standing of the existing theater continued to deteriorate. Between 1786 and 1791 the Petrovsky stagnated. Frustrated by the repertoire choices and miserable salaries, some of Maddox’s star performers relocated to St. Petersburg and the Imperial Theaters. Leased serfs and the orphanage provided replacements, including some true talents. Maddox hired Arina Sobakina and Gavrila Raykov, two comic dancers taught by Paradis, as well as the great actor Andrey Ukrasov, purported to be a trendsetter among young Muscovites—but these overexposed, underpaid performers could not, on their own merits, keep the Petrovsky afloat.
Maddox could not pay interest on his debt, much less pay down the principal, and his efforts in 1786 to solicit even more funding from the Opekunskiy sovet predictably came to naught. He was branded a deadbeat. His merchant lenders renewed their demands for repayment, raising the interest rates and threatening him with prison. He tried to plead his case in St. Petersburg, “going there during the winter for five months and in the end leaving my petition behind without any hope of it being taken up.”48 Then, back in Moscow that same year before the governing board, he fell to his knees: “Since I have no means whatsoever to settle my debts, that which is owed to the orphanage and my particular creditors,” he begged, “I find myself for faithful payment with no recourse but to surrender the entire matter to the governing board, and with it to surrender myself, all of my possessions and the income they provide, in free will to the management of the governing board.”49
With that, the theater on Petrovka Street, later known as the Bolshoi, became a government operation. The Opekunskiy sovet assumed complete control over the building and its finances. Maddox retained the title of general director, along with a budget of 27,000 rubles to pay his performers, the doctor, the furnace stoker, and the hairdresser. His salary was pegged to the success of the ballets and operas that he staged—5,000 rubles if receipts from the performances exceeded 50,000 rubles, 3,000 rubles if not. If, as was expected, expenses outweighed receipts, then he would receive nothing, not even firewood and candles for his apartment. To survive, Maddox appealed to the masses, staging more comedies than tragedies. The rich regarded him with suspicion, but he had a common touch. His repertoire choices showed his preference for exuberant childlike characters, mad dreamers rather than representatives of boring convention. Characters like him.
In the first year of the new arrangement, he earned his 5,000 rubles, relying on the advice of noblemen with an avid interest in the theater when sorting out the season. Some of these noblemen operated private serf theaters and were no less keen to keep tabs on Maddox as he was on them. They approved the good and censored the bad—not just those works that offended etiquette, but also those whose actors failed to emote, or whose dancers botched the bourrée.
The government too stepped in. Alexander Prozorovsky, an arch-conservative, anti-Enlightenment figure, took a special interest in Maddox and his business dealings. He had been appointed governor general of Moscow in an effort to prevent a repeat, in imperial Russia, of the fall of the Bastille in Paris. The delights of his command of Moscow included book-burning parties, the suppression of occult groups and non-Orthodox religious sects, the Freemasons in particular, and the recruitment of spies to monitor the comings and goings of potential insurrectionists.
The Petrovsky fell outside of Prozorovsky’s control, which made Maddox a target of special investigation. The governor general sought to prove that Maddox had been negligent in fulfilling the duties granted him by the empress, and to negate the exclusive rights that remained in force despite his financial ruin. Confusion dominates his reports to Catherine, and to the noblemen’s club, as to whether Maddox’s exclusive rights terminated in 1791 or 1796. Maddox of course defended the latter date, but the proof the governor general demanded could not be found, neither in Maddox’s home nor in the files of Mikhaíl Volkonsky, the deceased governor general of Moscow, nor in police records. Maddox claimed that the papers granting him his privilege had mysteriously vanished. When pressed, he argued that the papers had been destroyed in the fire that had occurred back in February of 1780, in the three-sided wooden theater on Znamenka Street. Likewise next to nothing remained of the architectural plan, including the model, of the theater on Petrovka Street. The original architect, Christian Rosberg, informed the chief of police that Maddox had confiscated the model from him, but when the plan and model were demanded of him, by threat of force, all that Maddox managed to produce were the keys to a drawer filled with moldy, indecipherable scraps of paper. In the absence of documents legitimizing Maddox’s theatrical activities, the governor general ordered the chief of police to extract an affidavit from Maddox “to add to the file.”50 The noblemen running Moscow under Prozorovsky blanched at the thought of buying Maddox out for 250,000 rubles, as he proposed.
Having failed to discredit Maddox, Prozorovsky resorted to extreme measures. He turned to the court with the unfounded allegation that Maddox’s house, which stood on the grounds of the Petrovsky Theater, had been built with embezzled funds. The petition failed, after which, with extreme malice, Prozorovsky directed the police to burn the house down, no questions asked. The order was not carried out. The denouement of the drama involved Prozorovsky ordering a punitive inspection of the theater and scolding Maddox for its deficiencies:
It is my duty to say that you ought to endeavor to keep said theater unsoiled and maintain in it plentiful heat and yet forestall any suffocating fumes … The hall in which you perform is riddled with a multitude of grave errors of architecture, though for this not you but the architect is at fault, and in so great a hall there is but one ingress and egress, and the only other way out is by means of a vile rope ladder. My predecessor had ordered an atrium to be erected, several years have passed, and yet you are not even thinking about it, and so I demand and assert that you must at all costs this coming summer raise that atrium, or else I will order your theater shut down until such time as it is built.51
In an attempt to deflect the criticism, Maddox reminded his antagonist of the good things that he had accomplished in his rotting theater, including the absorption of the school for thirty girls and boys and the promotion of the Russian repertoire. Prozorovsky changed the subject in response, shifting his invective from the sagging ceiling to the imperfect personnel:
It surpasses all understanding that your choir master is deaf, and that the German master of dancing in that ballet was lame, or else crooked-legged, and your ballet master is also old, as is his wife likewise, and no good as a teacher, for you have not a single student of either sex who would be at least tolerable in their dancing.52
In January 1791 Maddox asked the Opekunskiy sovet to free him from his financial obligation to the orphanage (10 percent of the receipts), as a form of “compassion to the oppressed.”53 The money would then be used to renovate the Petrovsky. The request was approved, but ultimately the matter rested with Betskoy. Maddox persisted, listing all of his services to the Moscow public: the building of the theater and its circular auditorium, the masquerades that he arranged in the Taganka Vauxhall, an investment of 100,000 rubles. The Russian (not Italian) ballets and operas that he produced needed to be taken into account, as well as their sets and costumes. The power brokers relented and, as a “good, humane deed,” bought out his exclusive