Jerusalem. The Biography

gold braid and shoulder-boards of Russian uniforms, worn by princes and generals, while teeming with the sheepskins and smocks of thousands of peasant pilgrims, all encouraged by Nicholas who also despatched an ecclesiastical mission to compete with the other Europeans. The British consul warned London that ‘the Russians could in one night during Easter arm 10,000 pilgrims within the walls of Jerusalem’ and seize the city. Meanwhile the French pursued their own mission to protect the Catholics. ‘Jerusalem’, reported Consul Finn in 1844, ‘is now a central point of interest to France and Russia.’
    GOGOL: THE JERUSALEM SYNDROME
     
    Not all Russia’s pilgrims were soldiers or peasants and not all found the salvation they sought. On 23 February 1848, a Russian pilgrim entered Jerusalem who was both typical in his soaring religious fever and utterly atypical in his flawed genius. The novelist Nikolai Gogol, famed for his play
The Inspector-General
and for his novel
Dead Souls
, arrived by donkey in a quest for spiritual ease and divine inspiration. He had envisaged
Dead Souls
as a trilogy, yet he was struggling to write the second and third parts. God was surely blocking his writing to punish his sins. As a Russian, only one place offered redemption: ‘until I’ve been to Jerusalem,’ he wrote, ‘I’ll be incapable of saying anything comforting to anyone.’
    The visit was disastrous: he spent a single night praying beside the Sepulchre, yet he found it filthy and vulgar. ‘Before I had time to pull my wits together, it was over.’ The gaudiness of the holy sites and the barrenness of the hills crushed him: ‘I have never been so little content with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and afterwards.’ On his return, he refused to talk about Jerusalem but fell under the power of a mystic priest who convinced him that his works were sinful. Gogol manically destroyed his manuscripts then starved himself to death – or at least into a coma – for when his coffin was opened in the twentieth century, his body was found face down.
    The special madness of Jerusalem had been called ‘Jerusalem fever’ but in the 1930s, it was recognized as Jerusalem Syndrome, ‘a psychotic decompensation related to religious excitement induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem’. The
British Journal of Psychiatry
, in 2000, diagnosed this demented disappointment as: ‘Jerusalem SyndromeSubtype Two: those who come with magical ideas of Jerusalem’s healing powers – such as the writer Gogol.’ 12
    In a sense, Nicholas was suffering from his own strain of Jerusalem Syndrome. There was madness in his family: ‘as the years have passed,’ wrote the French ambassador to Petersburg, ‘it is now the qualities of (his father Emperor) Paul which come more to the fore.’ The mad Paul had been assassinated (as had his grandfather Peter III). If Nicholas was far from insane, he started to display some of his father’s obstinately impulsive over-confidence. In 1848, he planned to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem but he was forced to cancel when revolutions broke out across Europe. He triumphantly crushed the Hungarian revolt against his neighbour, the Habsburg emperor: he enjoyed the prestige of being the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ but Nicholas, wrote the French ambassador, became ‘spoiled by adulation, success and the religious prejudices of the Muscovite nation’.
    On 31 October 1847, the silver star on the marble floor of the Grotto of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, was cut out and stolen. The star had been donated by France in the eighteenth century; now it had obviously been stolen by the Greeks. The monks fought in Bethlehem. In Istanbul, the French claimed the right to replace the Bethlehem star and to repair the roof of the Church in Jerusalem; the Russians claimed it was their right; each cited eighteenth-century treaties. The row simmered until it became a duel of two emperors.
    In December 1851, the French president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the inscrutably bland yet politically agile nephew of the great Napoleon, overthrew the Second Republic in a coup d’état and prepared to crown himself Emperor Napoleon III. This womanizing adventurer whose sharply-waxed moustaches could not distract attention from an oversized head and an undersized torso was in some ways the first modern politician and he knew his brash, fragile new empire required Catholic prestige and victory abroad. Nicholas, on