Jolly Drunkards on the Banks of the Neva : Duke De Liria and an Early Episode in the History of Fraternal Societies in Russia

This paper reconstructs the origins and the meaning of the “Most Illustrious and Incomparable Order of Antisobres,” that was to be instituted in 1728 in St Petersburg by Duke de Liria, the Spanish ambassador. While this unusual fraternal society might have never taken off the ground and remained on paper only, this episode serves as an important missing link, bridging the Petrine and immediately post-Petrine forms of sociability, on the one hand, and both their contemporary Western European analogues and later Russian formats of socializing, on the other. The article also demonstrates how such formats of fraternizing were central for international diplomacy of the era. Insofar as Duke de Liria was a prominent Jacobite, this microstudy also contributes to the early history proto-masonic societies in which Jacobites were important players