Maddox’s strongest supporters were dead and gone, and the new generation ruling Moscow proved hostile to his endeavors. He had maneuvered from the start to secure the protection of the crown, and he needed it to survive. In the 1790s his theater fell entirely out of fashion, and he into disrepute. His merchant creditors persisted in their campaign to prosecute him and took the time away from feasting, praying, and abusing their wives to dictate a letter to their literate sons for submission to Nikolay Sheremetyev, the owner of a first-class serf theater who had married, to the shock of the aristocratic establishment, his leading lady. The language of the complaint, dated July 4, 1803, is ornate, stuffed with proverbs, Ryazan dialect, and biblical arcana in the service of invective. The merchants sought to reclaim the 90,000 rubles they were owed, and hoped for Sheremetyev’s assistance in imprisoning Maddox, since he had played them for fools for years, “twisting like a snake and a toad” to avoid his obligations, and leaving them “as helpless as crawfish in a shallow” when it came time to collect.55 Moreover, he had insulted their bushy beards. Arson was not an option. If the Petrovsky was, God forbid, to burn down, the merchants would not recoup their losses. The 90,000 rubles Maddox owed to them—on top of the 250,000 he owed to the governing board—could not be gotten from Maddox’s candle and firewood suppliers, who were also victims of his cunning, nor could it be beaten out of the orphans in the troupe, who would protest, should extortion be attempted, that they had earned their wages through hard toil:
Verily is this Maddox the craftiest of all living beings, and back when we had not yet learned all his ways and taken full measure of his cunning—to wit, that he pays none of his debts and yet keeps putting away all the profit from the Theater into his own pocket on the sly—back then, while begging us for a reprieve in collecting a payment, would he bawl openly in front of us all, so much so that he could draw pity from stones. And what a master of trickery he is—you can be the smartest merchant in the world, and yet until you get to know him inside and out, he’ll fool you over and over. And towards the end, having dispossessed us of both our wares and our capital, he set off treating us in an impolitic way: in his house did he curse and shout at us, simpletons, solely for our asking for that which was due to us. “How dare you,” he says, “you beard-heads, set your foot in a house of a gentleman? Don’t you,” he says, “know that I, just like the local gentlemen here, carry a sword? And I am,” he says, “made as ever the master of the Theater for all perpetuity.” And so indeed we do believe that he is a man of magnitude, therefore, while all the local powers that be, may the Lord keep them in good health, we approach with no fear whatsoever, were we terrified to even think of showing ourselves before Maddox towards the end. For as it says in the Holy Scripture, “poverty doth humble a man,” and Maddox is nowadays so proud that no cat will want to sit in his lap, and there’s no sign that he is dwelling in poverty, but, he says, “I am only obliged to pay you one and a half thousand rubles a year; that,” he says, “is what it says in the paper that the governing board has. How dare you demand more from me?” And that’s his whole argument. Well, simple-minded as we are, we don’t buy that kind of reasoning and think to ourselves, “Was it not he himself who made it so that he only has to give us that much?” And so the trustees, in their kindness to us, did judge that “Maddox, as they say, is poorest of the poor, nothing more can be gotten from him, and it’s as good an end to a vile state of affairs as can be”—and thought that this would make us content. Will, now, Maddox succeed in having his way with us even here? For if he decided to pay us even one-and-a-half of ten thousand rubles a year, so we are certain as certain can be that the trustees would not hinder him in this but furthermore would commend him for dispensing with grace that which he gathered wickedly.56
The merchants wanted Maddox to sit in jail until his attitude improved and he opened his purse. But it was not, in the end, in the interest of the governing board to deprive him of the chance to settle his debts with the orphanage. In terms of his finances, Maddox was as “naked as a falcon,” the governing board advised the merchants, but he had the backing of the crown and could not be touched.57 Their desire to see him in a cold, damp prison cell, tormented by parasites, or sent on foot to Siberia, betrayed their ignorance of the perks of aristocratic relationships. Maddox knew these very well. Connecting the budget of his theater with that of the orphanage had shielded him from arrest, leaving his merchant creditors powerless. He would “dive to the bottom of hell” with the 90,000 rubles they had lent him, leaving their children with “no meat for their soup.”58
By 1794, he was having trouble meeting payroll and found himself begging his stars to accept, in place of a salary, the chance to perform whatever and whenever they liked and keep a large percentage of the proceeds. The arrangement he made along these lines with Pyotr Plavilshchikov, a pudgy, doe-eyed actor committed to representing the plights of the lower ranks, was advertised in Moskovskiye vedomosti on December 13, 1794. “The performance is a benefit for M. Plavilshchikov, who receives no payment from the theater” and asks for “the indulgence of the esteemed public” in “flattering his hope” by attending.59 He performed, then he quit, taking with him the conductor of the orchestra and leaving the public, which took the side of the actors over Maddox, disgusted.
The crisis deepened in the final year of Catherine the Great’s reign and the first years of her daughter-in-law’s rise to power as spouse of Tsar Paul I. Receiving word of the strife, the empress consort, Mariya, dispatched one of her spies to report on the Petrovsky.60 The spy, Nikolay Maslov, wrote back three weeks later, on November 28, 1799, with a long list of calamities. He complained that the theater changed its shows so unpredictably that actors could not learn their lines in time. Their costumes were often ill kempt, or sometimes even performers simply wore street clothes. Plus the theater and dressing rooms were so frightfully cold that the performers often fell ill. “The management, all the while,” he continued, “rebukes them harshly.”61
Mariya expressed genuine surprise that the mistreated actors had not taken matters into their own hands and staged a hostile takeover of the theater. The Petrovsky had been bankrupt for at least three years, she realized. It had died along with her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great. Although Maddox announced business as usual in Moskovskiye vedomosti at the end of the official period of mourning for the empress, not even fireworks in the great rotunda could suppress the sad truth. He had nothing in the coffers, no one to clean the stage or bait the mousetraps, no coal to stoke or wood to burn. Still harboring the delusion that he might placate his nemesis, Prozorovsky, he had pledged to repair the theater and offered to heat it in advance of performances, rather than letting the rabble shiver in their stalls. He had also sought to increase receipts with a production of Pygmalion, an Ovid-derived melodrama about a sculptor who, having renounced the pleasures of the flesh, falls in love with one of his own creations. (The goddess Venus takes pity on him and brings the statue to life.) Maddox’s 1794 and 1796 performances of the drama, to sweet music by the Bohemian violinist Georg Benda, succeeded, but most of his other stagings of the period failed. The entire theatrical enterprise had fallen to pieces, and no one from the Moscow aristocratic establishment wanted to clean up the mess. Maddox sent a long letter to Mariya in 1802 in hopes that the orphanage would assume his debts and he would be allowed to retire from twenty-six years of service to Russian culture with his dignity intact. Following an audit that found both the theater and the orphanage awash in red ink, Mariya ordered the liquidation of Maddox’s estate.
The debts to the Opekunskiy sovet exceeded 300,000 rubles, which Tsar Paul, Mariya’s husband, absorbed on behalf of the crown. The Ryazan-Moscow boyars, for all their colorful invective, did not get their 90,000 rubles back.
The Petrovsky Theater closed, in ghastly fashion, on Sunday, October 8, 1805. At three o’clock, just before a performance of the popular mermaid spectacle Lesta, or the Dnepr Water Nymph, a spark became a flame, which became an inferno. The theater burned for the next three hours, a conflagration seen far and wide. The curious gawked; police, theater workers, and firemen milled helplessly around. The cause of the blaze was a subject of speculation. Two eyewitnesses, gentle people in their dotage, proposed that the Day of Judgment had at long last arrived for Maddox and his scandalsinged theater. Lesta was a benign thing, a comic opera that retold an old legend of a mermaid who pines for a prince,