The Sukharev Tower warlock: what Jacob Bruce left on paper

The Sukharev Tower came down in 1934, between April and June.⁴⁵ Moscow’s later legend says Stalin had it taken apart brick by brick to find the black book of Jacob Bruce, the warlock supposed to have lived there.⁶ The papers we could read are plainer: Stalin and Voroshilov wrote to Kaganovich that the tower must be demolished and traffic widened.⁷⁸

Jacob Bruce was a general and associate of Peter the Great, and died at his estate at Glinki, near Moscow, in 1735.⁹ Three things tie the warlock to the man: a tower, a library and a calendar.

The tower came down for traffic

The tower was built between 1695 and 1701 on Peter’s orders.¹¹ Gilyarovsky wrote that Peter named it for Sukharev, a streltsy colonel who stayed loyal to him.¹¹ From 1925 until 1934 it housed the Moscow Communal Museum, whose first director, Petr Sytin, studied the tower’s history and the legends about it.¹²

Konstantin Mikhailov, in Kommersant, writes that a note signed by Stalin and Voroshilov reached Kaganovich on 18 September 1933; it says the tower must be demolished and traffic widened.⁷ RBC prints the same note without a date and shows it as a page of the journal Izvestiya TsK KPSS.⁸ A Moscow Soviet inspector wrote in Izvestiya in the spring of 1934 that the square had earned the name “historical meat grinder”.¹³ The Moscow city website gives the same reason: the tower was razed because it hindered a transport route.¹³

Protests went to Stalin and Kaganovich in 1933 and 1934 from the painter and art historian Igor Grabar, the architects Ivan Fomin, Ivan Zholtovsky and Aleksei Shchusev, the art historian Abram Efros and the painter Konstantin Yuon.¹⁴ The Museum of Moscow says letters to the leadership and to Stalin himself survive.¹⁴ They failed.¹³ Mikhailov writes that the Central Committee agreed on 16 March 1934 to the Moscow party committee’s proposal.¹⁵ RBC, written with the Shchusev Museum, which supplied the archival documents, puts the start in the night of 13 to 14 April 1934.⁴ Kommersant says the night of 14 April.¹⁶ By the end of June, Rodina writes, nothing was left of the tower.⁵

RBC brings up Bruce to say that some people wrongly think the tower was built as the house of the sorcerer and black magician Bruce.¹⁷ It calls that a legend, says he lived nearby and did visit the tower, and says he had nothing to do with building it.¹⁷ Fedorov, in Vokrug sveta, says Bruce did not live in the tower at all and was in Moscow only on visits.¹⁸

None of the demolition accounts we read mentions a book.

Five tellings, in the order they were written

The oldest telling we found has no tower in it at all. Here is each text we could read, by date.

Pekarsky tells it this way. Dying, Bruce hands Peter a flask of living and dead water and says to sprinkle it on his corpse if the tsar wants him alive.² Years later Peter remembers, has the grave opened and finds the dead man lying as if alive, the hair on his head and in his beard grown long, and nails on his hands.² The tsar is so struck that he has the grave filled in quickly and smashes the flask.² Pekarsky adds that Bruce in fact died ten years after the tsar.²

The Russian Biographical Dictionary, in 1908, says Bruce belonged to the merry society of the Neptunes, which met in secret on top of the Sukharev Tower, “where by tradition they practised black magic”.¹⁹ The signed entry by P. M. Maikov does not say whose tradition.

Gilyarovsky wrote in 1926 that many legends went around about the tower: the “sorcerer Bruce” made gold from lead there, and a black book written by the devil was kept in its hiding places.³ He calls them “hundreds of legends, one more absurd than the other”.³ We found no earlier text that puts a black book in the tower.

The flask did not die out. The 2018 magazine piece reports a version in which Bruce makes living water, tells his pupil to kill him and revive him younger, and his unfaithful wife smashes the vessel.²⁰

Who first called him a warlock

Pekarsky wrote that Bruce’s reputation in eighteenth-century Russia as a black magician and an astrologer was well known.²¹ He heard stories of it himself as a child in a remote province.²² He found nothing in Bruce’s life to justify it:

His own guess was that the tale began with Peter buying a secret embalming method from the famous Ruysch, and with Bruce’s astronomical observations and talks with the tsar.²²

The Russian Biographical Dictionary says that once Bruce had settled at Glinki, studying the sciences and writing to Leibniz, he “got the name of a sorcerer”.²¹ Natalia Kopaneva of the Kunstkamera ties the reputation to his astronomy.²¹

The Moscow city website says folktales made Bruce a sorcerer, an astrologer and the master of the tower, with an iron bird with a human head that carried him to the tsar and a mute girl who served the tsar’s guests and fell apart into flower buds.²³ It dates those legends to the early eighteenth century and draws on Sytin’s book of 1926, without a page reference.²³ We have not seen the book.

The dating is where the sources part. Fedorov reports that the historian Aleksandr Filimon puts the black-magician legends no earlier than the 1810s or 1820s.²⁴ He quotes Andrei Nartov, who knew Peter’s circle, as writing that Bruce was a learned man who “did not believe in the supernatural”, and adds that no source of Peter’s time reports a sorcerer’s repute.²⁵ Pekarsky’s book is the earliest print we found, and we do not know whether Filimon knew it. We have not read Filimon.

What the Academy took from Glinki

The books that went from Bruce’s house to the Academy were mostly mathematics and the sciences, with a handful on astrology and magic among them.²⁶²⁷ Kopaneva reads the collection, from the inventories, as less a collector’s than a working scientist’s cabinet.²⁸

Bruce died in April 1735.⁹ On 30 May the Academy’s head, Korff, asked the Cabinet for his books, instruments, antiquities, rare coins and stones.²⁹ The whole book collection reached St Petersburg in December 1735 and went into the Academy’s library; the curiosities went to the Kunstkamera.³⁰ The Russian Biographical Dictionary says instead that Bruce bequeathed his cabinet, library and collections to his nephew and also to the Academy “for public benefit”.³¹

The register of the library is printed in the Academy’s own papers, edited by Sukhomlinov in 1889, under 1 June 1742.³² It is headed “Vedomost”, a statement of what turned up in the house of the late field marshal, “in the library of books, German of various dialects and Russian”.²⁹ Its numbered entries run to 1,432, and an entry can bundle several works.³² Chekmarev writes that Bruce’s library passed 1,600 volumes by 1725 and was fully open to the tsar.³³

Nine entries that we picked out of the register by title, as astrology, geomancy or magic on our reading, are listed here as the register prints them.²⁷

The register does not say which of these Bruce read, and no entry we found is called a black book. We read the register’s pages for these entries as images and the rest only in the text layer, so the nine are a floor and not a count.

By the count of S. P. Luppov, as Kopaneva reports it, most of the books were on mathematics, astronomy, physics, mechanics, optics and mineralogy; among the humanities, most books were on history, numismatics and politics, with travel, religion and art beside them.²⁶ Chekmarev adds that the library held works on painting, drawing, goldwork and lacquer.²⁶

The cabinet held minerals, instruments, coins and medals, paintings, intaglios and Chinese objects.³⁴ Pekarsky says Bruce collected Chinese curiosities.³⁴ The register of instruments opens with a celestial globe of the Tychonic system by Willem Blaeu, an arshin and a half across, then a terrestrial globe of the same size.³⁵ Kopaneva says Bruce made lenses, telescopes and burning glasses himself, and lists 147 burning glasses of different sizes handed to Delisle for the observatory and a concave mirror of 1733, now in the Hermitage.²⁸ She notes that his translation of Huygens’s Cosmotheoros, which sets out the Copernican system, came out in 1717.³⁶

The calendar’s own imprint

The calendar that carries Bruce’s name was put together and engraved by a librarian.¹³⁷ Pekarsky transcribes the lettering of the first sheet:

Pekarsky writes that the name “Bruce’s calendar” is not quite fair, since the calendar itself says it was compiled and published by the librarian Kipriyanov, and Bruce only supervised.¹ He says that supervision was marked on all books from the Moscow civil press.³⁸ The Russian Biographical Dictionary agrees that Kipriyanov composed and first printed it in Moscow in 1709, and that Bruce’s name stuck because of the supervision line.¹ The Russian National Library catalogues a sheet with Vasily Onufrievich Kipriyanov as its author.¹

The engraving was Kipriyanov’s too.³⁷ A line at the foot of sheet 1 reads, in Pekarsky’s transcription, that he engraved it with his pupil Aleksei Rostovtsev.³⁷ The Presidential Library says the first edition was engraved on copper by Kipriyanov and printed on six large sheets.³⁷

Bruce’s own part was the press.³⁸ The Russian Biographical Dictionary has him in charge of Russian book printing from 1706, and Chekmarev has him supervising the Moscow civil printing house from 1705.³⁸ Chekmarev adds that he edited and translated publications prepared for printing there.³⁸

Whether he chose the calendar’s forecasts or read its proofs, no source we read says.

Sources differ on when the calendar was printed.³⁹ Pekarsky separates a quarto calendar of 28 December 1708 from the engraved wall calendar of 1709.³⁹ He reads the sheets’ imprints as May 1709, November 1709 and 1710.³⁹ The Presidential Library puts the printing of the six-sheet first edition at the end of December 1708, or early January 1709 in the new style.³⁹

The name outlived the sheet.⁴⁰ Pekarsky says the calendar sold in many editions, partly for its everlasting Easter table and the hours of sunrise and sunset.⁴⁰ The Presidential Library says later editions differed from the first and grew to 47 sheets, and Fedorov says other presses kept issuing versions under the Bruce name into the early twentieth century.⁴⁰