Category: The Case of the Dead Cheese Master

The various reports of Tinguely’s possessions disagreed on a few specifics, but agreed that those possessions included a significant amount of cheese, and that the cheese was valuable. The long list of his possessions concluded that he had produced cheese that was worth 820 rubles—a significant amount, enough to make the true ownership of the cheese a real issue.

The fate of the cheeses is one of the topics that appears only gradually in the archival file about Tinguely’s death—the documents are in part filed out of chronological order, and even if they were in stricter order, their ability to tell a straightforward narrative would be limited by the fact that later documents report on events that happened even earlier in time. So, a report on the cheeses is followed by a request to report on the cheeses, which is followed by a statement from the local court spelling out the circumstances of Tinguely’s death and his prior business arrangements.

Those prior business arrangements turned out to be the real issues in the case. At the time of his death, Tinguely had been working both for the Gatchina administration and on his own account. This is why he left behind a fair bit of livestock and several good (and many bad) cheeses that belonged to the palace administration, and far more good cheeses that were “his own,” and “kept at General Ramburg’s estate of Novaia Ivanovskaia.”

Before I get to the fate of the cheeses, I want to take a post to talk about the other things Tinguely left behind. The archival file includes two inventories of Tinguely’s private property, virtually identical. The first (ll. 6-7) follows closely on the inventory of livestock and cheeses I talked about in my last post. It lists the property in precise detail:

• silver table spoons — 5
• silver table forks — 5
• silver ladle with a wooden handle — 1
• silver shoe buckles — 1 (presumable one pair)
• shoes, old, leather, mens — 1 (pair)
• kamzol (a jacket or jerkin), black satin, old — 1
• breeches, black satin, old — 1
• frock coats, cloth, old — 3
• kamzoly, various, worn out (vetkhye) — 3
• shirts with cuffs — 9
• cloth — 1
• silk stockings:
• — Black pairs — 2
• — White pairs — 2
• linen towels — 7
• mirror, small — 1
• handkerchiefs, cotton, worn out — 2
• breeches, suede/doe-skin, old — 1
• jacket with sleeves, for work — 1
• chairs, simple, worn out — 4
• cow hides, untanned — 2
• goat hides, untanned — 12
• boots, leather, warm — 1
• boots, cold, pairs — 2
• pans, copper — 3
• pot, copper — 1
• frying pans, iron — 2
• dishes, porcelain, pale yellow — 5
• bowl, the same — 1
• harnesses, old (?) — 2
• saddle — 1
• fur coat, bear, Polish, covered in camlet (a kind of cloth), old — 1
• featherbeds — 2
• pillows — 4
• blankets, fabric, old — 2
• blanket, flannelette — 1
• iron-bound chest — 1
• gun, old — 1
• various written documents and а copy of his passport
• And his own livestock and fowl:
  • pigs — 5
  • goats — 3
  • rams — 1
  • ewes — 1
  • bull — 1
  • geese — 20
  • ducks  — 15
  • chickens, Russian — 18

Over the last couple of posts, I’ve thought a lot about Tinguely’s long-distance travel—of the ways he moved around between Switzerland and France, and then of how he might have made his way to Russia. It turns out that there’s just as much to say about the areas much closer to where he died.

First of all, there’s the question of what it means that he was hired on to work for the palace administration of Gatchina. Gatchina meant multiple things. First, there was Gatchina palace, the one built by Grigory Orlov and given by Catherine to her son Paul in 1783. Then, there was the village of Gatchina (more normally Gatchino at the time we’re talking about) which abutted the palace grounds (the palace and village are circled in red on the map, and if you have an hour to spare definitely click through the link in its caption to look at the map in closer detail). And then there were the many smaller villages (20 according to the manifesto, but more according to other sources) that were considered to be part of the larger estate. In other words, figuring out where exactly Tinguely lived and worked during his time in Russia is more complicated than simply noting that he worked at Gatchina.

In some ways, the identification of Gatchina with the palace alone is the most narrow of the possible definitions. After all, the palace, as complicated a place as even just it was, was the smallest part of the larger lands. At the same time, however, it is also among the most powerful of those possible definitions. The alphabetical index to the (first) Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, for example, files everything to do with Gatchina under the heading “palaces” rather than under any of its other possible classifications that could apply to it. And the governance of all these lands and places fell under the jurisdiction of the palace, and eventually of the Ministry of the Imperial Court. Only during the reign of Alexander III did jurisdiction over Gatchina, the former court village, move to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (which had jurisdiction over virtually all similar inhabited spaces). So the records of the palace administration are heavily intertwined with all the histories of these various villages, from Gatchina itself down to the tiniest ones.

I initially planned this post to focus on the lands around Gatchina proper where the cheese master lived and worked. But then I started following up on a couple of comments made about the last post, and suddenly I’d written 1000 words. So, instead of the lands around Gatchina, here are more thoughts about trade routes, the French Revolution, bull-running (!!) and being an old Russia hand.

After I posted about the last entry in this tale on Facebook, I got a couple of comments that I felt like I had to investigate. Did I really think, Alexander Martin asked, that the cheese master had traveled to Russia along that long overland route I mapped out, or would he have been more likely to travel up the Rhine, and then enter Russia by sea? It’s a good question, and one that I certainly can’t answer for certain. I suspect, though, that the overland route is indeed the one that Tinguely traveled, for several reasons.

The Swiss cheese master was an employee of the palace of Gatchina at the time of his death. He’d been hired just a couple of years before, at a time when Gatchina—both the palace and the village—were undergoing some significant changes that had to do with its owner, the newly crowned Emperor Paul, the supposed “crowned psychopath,” the most autocratic of Russian autocrats whose intemperance got him murdered and replaced by his angelic son.

Paul was actually a far more complicated figure, as even those who were very critical of him admitted. According to one such account, “he was really benevolent, generous, of a forgiving temper, ready to confess his errors, a lover of truth, and a hater of falsehood and deception, ever anxious to promote justice, and repress every abuse of authority, especially venality and corruption.” Such a paragon of virtue ought to have reigned long and well. But the same author goes on: “unfortunately, all these good and praiseworthy qualities were rendered useless to himself and to the empire by a total want of moderation, an extreme irritability of of temper, and an irrational and impatient expectation of implicit obedience.”  (“Reminiscences of the Court and Times of the Emperor, Paul I of Russia, up to the Period of his Death. From the Papers of a Deceased Russian General Officer. Part I,” Frazer’s Magazine (August 1865): 236-237)

Why was a Swiss cheese-master (or perhaps a Swiss-cheese master) working for the administration of Gatchina in 1799? There are (at least) two ways of answering this question. The first has to do with the development of a taste for cheese—and by this I mean a taste for aged cheese, not for soft fresh cheese—among Russia’s elite during the eighteenth century, and a corresponding concern with the Empire’s finances.

While Russia had a long tradition of milk products and soft cheeses, cured cheeses came into fashion during the eighteenth century as imported luxury goods. Peter the Great supposedly preferred cheese to sweets as a dessert (and loved Limburger above all others); by the start of the nineteenth century travelers and others described imported cheeses as common parts of the culinary world of Russia’s nobility.  So wrote Theodore Faber as he described St. Petersburg: “The cheese of Parma is an indispensable need in all kitchens; one never serves the Macaroni of Italy without adding in its perfume.  Nothing is more common than that article.  A housewife speaks of her supply of Parmesan, like in Germany one would speak of the supply of onions or of parsley.  The cheeses of England, of Holland, of Switzerland, are the ordinary dessert.” [1. Bagatelles.  Promenades d’un désœuvré dans la ville de St.-Pétersbourg, vol. 1 (St.-Pétersbourg: L’imprimerie de Pluchart et cie., 1811), 181-2.]

At least among the elite, this might not have been much of an exaggeration. Household records from noble families of the time suggest that they regularly spent significant sums on imported cheese. A register from the Vorontsov family lists a round of Parmesan, a tin of Stilton, a round of Swiss cheese, and 20 funts (more than 8 kilograms!) of “English Chester” cheese in the household stores. [1. RGADA f. 1261, op. 2, d. 668, l. 14 (it also listed 200 bottles of olive oil, 6 bottles of tarragon vinegar, 20 funts of mustard powder, and 5 poods of coffee)] They also suggest something else—that a housewife was less likely to speak of her supply of Parmesan than her husband might have been. Parmesan might be used in cooking, but the other cheeses appeared primarily as part of the zakuski table, the display of pre-dinner snacks presented separately from the main meal, and part of the man’s world. In the records of the Golokhvastov family, most cheese purchases appear in the account books of the man of the house, not in the general kitchen expense accounts. [1. RGADA f. 1264, op. 1, dd. 169, 294, 305]

On the morning of August 8, 1799, the peasant Pavel Spiridonov found a dead body on the road near his village. And he found not only “a dead male unknown body,” but close to it a saddled chestnut horse. What had happened, and who was this man?

Spiridonov was the local sotskii or “hundreder,” a peasant constable or guard, and he immediately turned to the zemskii sud, the district-level land court, for help. The district doctor and a district police officer by the name of Krivoshein were called in to consult. The police officer reported that they found no signs of violence on the body. The doctor gave more information about the state of the corpse: the man suffered from gangrene (антонов огонь) caused by “frequent consumption of spirits.” The doctor also reported that the death had been “sudden,” a fact that suggested that this chronic (over-)consumption of alcohol likely caused the man’s death. The exact mechanism of that death was still unclear. Was the man riding while drunk, and as a result fell off the horse, killing himself in the process? Or had he had some sort of attack caused by the gangrene or the drink, died, and then toppled off the horse’s back?

The horse wasn’t talking, but at least these reports suggested that there had been no foul play in the man’s death. As a result, the only task left was to identify the body. This, however, was no simple matter. Spiridonov, as the village constable, would have recognized any local man. This man was no local, nor was he recognized by anyone in the area.

The only thing that was immediately apparent was that “this unknown man was probably of moderate means (из людей посредственных).” The proof of this was his clothing: “a dark green flannel overcoat, a coat and waistcoat of coffee-colored cloth, white linen trousers and a fine cloth shirt.” No other personal items were found on the body.

This kind of detailed description of clothing was a normal part of identifying dead bodies. Once local newspapers (Gubernskie vedomosti) were established in many provinces at the end of the 1830s, they often featured notices of “found dead bodies” in need of identification. Descriptions of the bodies focused on where they had been found, and to a certain extent on their physical description—their facial features, height, and hair color. But perhaps because those physical descriptions were often made difficult due to decomposition, the notices most of all focused on the clothing and possessions of the dead bodies.

The report from the land court is unclear on how exactly identification was eventually made. Presumably the clothing helped, as did the fact that the man was only recently dead (though death in August was not ideal for identification purposes). Whatever the process was, it took some time. The body was discovered on August 8, and a first report was sent to the governor’s office on August 10. Only on August 22 did the head of the court, Kruze, present a report identifying the body: he was indeed no local, but instead a master cheese-maker named Tengli (or Tingeli or Tinguely), by birth Swiss, and before his death working for the palace administration of Gatchina, one of the many imperial residences outside St. Petersburg.

This identification solved the problem facing the lower court. But who this man was, how he got to be there, and what he left behind, remained questions for those who dealt with the aftermath of his death, still to be uncovered.

(RGIA f. 491, op. 1, d. 365, ll. 39-39ob)