The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  RULES* FOR THE BEHAVIOR OF ALL ENTERING THESE DOORS

  NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  NOTE ON NOBLE FAMILIES

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  PREFACE - CATHERINE THE GREAT AND HER SEVERAL MEMOIRS

  PART ONE

  1728—43

  1744

  1745

  1746

  1747

  1748

  1749

  1750

  PART TWO

  1751

  1752

  1753

  1754

  1755

  1756

  1757

  1758

  1759

  NOTES

  APPENDICES

  CATHERINE’S OUTLINE, 1756–59

  TABLE OF RANKS AND CHIVALRIC ORDERS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  Copyright Page

  TO OUR PARENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This new translation of Catherine the Great’s last memoir reflects the generous, timely support of several institutions, and collaboration over many years with teachers, colleagues, friends, and students. In 1989, in his seminar at Columbia University on Russian memoirs, Robert L. Belknap introduced Catherine’s memoirs as part of a rich literary tradition. At Columbia too, Irina Reyfman counseled a new rather than revised translation. The project became a reality in 2000-1, during a leave from teaching at Stetson University and a residency as the Jesse Ball DuPont Fellow at the National Humanities Center, where former NHC trustee Lloyd Cotsen awarded the project a grant for scholarship to strengthen college teaching. Another trustee, the late Kirk Varnedoe, encouraged a trip to Catherine’s archives. A Wallace Travel Grant from Macalester College paid for research on the manuscripts of the memoirs in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (RGADA) in Moscow. The extensive Russian holdings at the Columbia University libraries and the NHC librarian, Eliza Robertson, made all other research possible. Edward Kasinec, curator of the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library, and Hee-Gwone Yoo shared their knowledge and the resources of a large collection of Russian visual material. Archivist Marina Dobronovskaya performed invaluable services in Moscow.

  Sarah M. White intently perused the entire translation. Sharon Bow-man greatly improved the opening. Master dix-huitièmiste Philippe Roger shared his intimate knowledge of the period. Julie Candler Hayes and Thomas Bonfiglio explained the nature of Catherine’s eighteenth-century French and German. Students from New York University and Macalester College in our seminars on French translation and on Tolstoy’s War and Peace spurred us with their questions about the translation and Catherine.

  Simon Dixon reviewed the project at an early stage and suggested several crucial articles and improvements for the preface. Douglas Smith patiently answered the questions of a non-historian privileged to climb the mountain of Catherine scholarship. Other scholars of Russian, French, and German literature and history made invaluable general suggestions that were gratefully accepted: Robert L. Belknap, Ruth Dawson, Gina Kovarsky, Michelle Lamarche Marrese, Peter Pozefsky, Irina Reyfman, and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker. An economist in game theory, Dorothea Herreiner graciously took on the role of the general reader. With a student’s insight, Susannah Johnson asked the right questions. Best friend Nancy Workman took time off from having cancer to edit the preface. Monique Hoogenboom kept Catherine in perspective.

  RULES* FOR THE BEHAVIOR OF ALL ENTERING THESE DOORS

  1.

  Leave all ranks outside, likewise hats, and particularly swords.

  2.

  Orders of precedence and haughtiness, or anything however similar, must be left at the door.

  3.

  Be merry, but neither damage nor break anything, nor gnaw on anything.

  4.

  Be seated, stand, walk, as you see fit, regardless of others.

  5.

  Speak with moderation and not too loudly, that those present not have

  an earache or headache.

  6.

  Argue without anger or passion.

  7.

  Do not sigh or yawn, and do not bore or fatigue anyone.

  8.

  Others should join in any innocent fun that someone thinks up.

  9.

  Eat well, but drink with moderation, that each can always find his legs upon going out the door.

  10.

  Disputes shall not be taken outside the izba;†and what goes in one ear should go out the other before one steps through the doors.

  Whoever infringes the above, on the evidence of two witnesses, for any crime each guilty

  party must drink a glass of cold water, ladies not excepted, and read a page of the

  Tilemakhida‡ out loud.

  Whoever infringes three articles in one evening is sentenced to learn six lines from the

  Tilemakhida by heart.

  And whoever infringes the tenth article will no longer be admitted.

  * Catherine’s rules for behavior in her hermitage are in Russian. See Mikhail B. Piotrovsky, ed., Treasures of Catherine the Great (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 17.

  † An izba is a peasant hut.

  ‡ The Tilemakhida (1766) by Vasily Trediakovsky (1703–69) is about Odysseus’s son Telemachus, based on François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699). Trediakovsky’s experiment with ancient Greek hexameters in Russian was considered pedantic and difficult to read or appreciate.

  Monsieur Diderot . . . In all your plans for reform you forget the difference between our two positions: you work only on paper, which tolerates everything; it is smooth, supple, and offers no resistance to either your imagination or your pen; whereas I, a poor Empress, work on human skin, which is much more irritable and ticklish.

  COMTE DE SÉGUR,

  Mémoires ou Souvenirs et anecdotes,

  2nd ed., vol. 3 (Paris, 1826), 42–43.

  NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  This translation and the annotations follow the edition established by A. N. Pypin in volume 12 of Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II na osnovanii podlinnykh rukopisei i s ob”iasnitel’nymi primechaniiami (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1907). In the extremely helpful apparatus, the editors nevertheless did not include an explanation of how they modernized her French.1

  Such a note would have dispelled the myths disparaging Catherine’s linguistic abilities not only in French but also in Russian and German. In the eighteenth century, French was not yet standardized; traditionally, typographers served as editors.2 Punctuation was even less fixed than spelling. Rousseau was among the first to take an interest in the correction of his manuscripts, and he was most concerned about punctuation. Only in the nineteenth century did spelling become an issue of social status and means for social exclusion. The complaints by early French biographers and scholars about Catherine’s French reflect this later prejudice. Similarly, eighteenth-century German was not yet standardized; here Catherine’s interesting deviations include regionalisms. Eighteenth-century Russian was in great flux, and it was not until the nineteenth century that the status-conscious elite became concerned about correct Russian.3

  Catherine’s critics further posited that her secretaries, writers, and ministers did her writing for her in Russian as well as French. Yet, Pekarsky first rebutted these arguments as long ago as 1863. In the manuscripts by Catherine that he saw, the corrections by others in French and Russian were limited to orthography and were never substantive. While he found t
hat her Russian contained “incorrect expressions, Germanisms, and grammatical mistakes,” he also quotes Catherine as saying that Elizabeth put a stop to Catherine’s study of Russian by saying, “That’s enough studying for her; she’s smart enough without it.” According to his source, Catherine “ ‘spoke Russian quite correctly and loved to use simple, native Russian words, of which she knew many.’ ”4 As her most recent translator explains, “Catherine’s Russian [is] a rare, if not to say unique, mixture of then antiquated expressions, folk or peasant words and phrases, and the esoteric linguistic mannerisms of the Russian Francophile elite.”5 In 1869, Shchebalsky noted that Catherine’s French was as good (or bad) as that of Frederick the Great, and although Voltaire was known to have corrected Frederick’s French, no one suggested that Frederick did not know French well or write his own works.6 Clearly, there has long been a double standard applied to Catherine’s linguistic ability. Readers can judge for themselves in Catherine’s published letters to Mme. Geoffrin, which retain her original French orthography.7

  In the manuscript of the memoirs, we found the following orthographic habits, of which the first six are common in the eighteenth century:

  –oi instead of –ai, and –t instead of –s for the first-person singular, which was typical for Catherine (“Je vient de dire que je plaisoit” instead of “Je viens de dire que je plaisais”)

  minimal and inconsistent use of accents

  “tems” instead of “temps,” and the absence of –t in words ending in –ant and –ent

  double consonants that were officially simplified in 1740 (“jettés” instead of “jetés”)

  uncertainty about whether to hyphenate compound words (“la dessus” instead of “là-dessus”)

  “scavoir” (instead of “savoir”), which was specific to the humanist tradition

  missing –s on plural nouns and adjectives (“les plus belles maxime” instead of “maximes”)

  rare lapses into phonetic spelling (“vous repartirai” instead of “vous repartirez,” or “m’est” and “mais” instead of “mes”), sometimes caused by the awkward insertion of an apostrophe (“s’avoit” instead of “savoit”)

  inconsistent agreement of adjectives with nouns in number and gender (“leurs pretendu vues” instead of “leurs prétendues vues”)

  inconsistent spelling of names

  Her vocabulary, on the other hand, is extensive, precise, and almost always correct, and she has idiomatic fluency.

  As was typical for the eighteenth century, Catherine used punctuation lightly and inconsistently. Pypin solved this problem with extensive punctuation—especially semicolons—to make sense of the text. In the manuscript, each punctuation mark may have different functions depending on the context. However, periods, which are used sparsely, always indicate the end of a sentence. Catherine inserted commas to emphasize, to end sentences, and to indicate direct discourse. Occasionally, she used periods, semicolons, colons, and quotation marks; there is one exclamation point. She capitalized nouns, as was typical in the eighteenth century, though sometimes this indicates a new sentence. She also capitalized pronouns for royal persons.

  There are about forty paragraphs in the whole manuscript of the memoir. Catherine wrote in long paragraphs that are not composed of sentences as we think of them. Rather, her thought unfolds in longer and shorter phrases, some of which stand alone as sentences, but which often function as relative clauses. These clauses may be joined by the word que (“that”), or simply strung together by commas.

  We paid careful attention to Catherine’s punctuation and use of paragraphs. We tried to preserve her cadence in the long sentences and paragraphs as an indication of her style of thinking and her representations of how others think. While much indebted to the three translators who preceded us for solutions to many tricky passages, we wanted to avoid novelizing the memoirs by breaking up the text into paragraphs that followed the plot. Instead, we followed her chronological margin summaries to make paragraphs; as the margin summaries disappeared, we continued to make chronological paragraph breaks using references to seasons, religious holidays, anniversaries, name days, birthdays, and moves between palaces. We also decided to provide summaries at the start of each year, instead of in the margins. When possible, we kept Catherine’s punctuation for emphasis, adding it where Pypin had eliminated it.

  In our attempt to be faithful to the content, style, and spirit of the original manuscript, we did not change the order of the text, omit anything, or try to improve the text. Pypin omitted several passages relating to Catherine’s sex life, and while the contents of those passages have been known from copies and translations, we are the first English translators to restore these passages by consulting the original. Those passages are transcribed below in French, along with a small list of mistakes in Pypin’s edition. We aimed for a lexical middle register in order to reflect Catherine’s plain, direct prose. We translated such important eighteenth-century Enlightenment words as esprit and caractère as consistently as possible and retained repetitions. Words not in French are in the original languages, with translations in footnotes where necessary, though Catherine sometimes provides them herself in her text.

  We made these decisions in response to the work of the three previous English translators of the final memoirs. The first English translation in 1859 was done quickly from a copy of the manuscript; Pypin catalogs the errors in this copy (710–16). However, the virtue of this translation is that it alone leaves the final memoir intact. In contrast, Moura Budberg’s translation (1953, 1954, 1955, 1961), based on Dominique Maroger’s French edition of the memoirs (1953, 1959), is an invented compilation of the middle and final memoirs, and is generally unreliable. Lowell Bair (1957) made by far the best translation, reliable and intelligent, with good contemporary English. There are only some omissions and changes, most notably to the opening; it begins with Catherine’s arrival in Moscow and then moves back to Peter’s biography, without the opening maxim (as does Budberg’s translation).

  Our translation uses a modified Library of Congress system of transliteration for Russian, without diacritics. Though well-known names of people and places are left as customary (Catherine instead of Ekaterina, Peter instead of Petr, Moscow instead of Moskva), most names are given in their Russian form, with feminine endings for women’s family names. Names ending in –skii are rendered –sky in the text but –skii in the notes. For names, Catherine used French spellings and variations, with many inconsistencies, which we have standardized.

  Catherine tended to date things using Russia’s Julian, or Old Style (O.S.), calendar, which in the eighteenth century was eleven days behind Europe’s Gregorian, or New Style (N.S.), calendar. Until 1700, Russia used the Byzantine practice of dating from the beginning of the world (5509 B.C.). In 1700, Peter the Great introduced the Julian calendar, although much of Catholic Europe had long used the calendar introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582. The Protestant parts of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland only did so between 1699 and 1701, while Britain waited until 1752. Thus Peter’s curious decision to update to an already outmoded calendar in 1700 may have been as much political as religious. In 1918, the Bolsheviks adopted the Gregorian calendar, while the Russian Orthodox Church continued to use the Julian calendar. Dates are given as they appear in Catherine’s memoirs and in the Russian newspapers of the time; they are Old Style. Russian practice until 1918 was to give dates as Old Style/New Style, especially as they relate to events outside Russia. Dates in New Style alone are indicated by N.S.

  OMITTED PASSAGES

  Pypin’s edition lists variants in the manuscript (750–56). Below, we list errors in Pypin and provide the three omitted passages concerning Catherine’s sex life.

  197 strike second “Pierre III”; first margin note should read: “Pierre III, son père, et sa mère,” not “son père et as mère”

  199, 1.26 “inculquer,” not “incalquer”

  247, 1.22 “Vers la mi carème,”
not “Vers le carème”

  251, 1.32 “renvoyées,” not “renvoyés”

  253, 1.12 “manqué,” not “mauqué”

  297, 1.22 “meilleures,” not “mailleures”

  328, 1.21 “rats,” not “srats”

  373, 1.32 close quote where there is no quoted material

  377, 1.16 “de oui et de non,” not “de oui et non”

  383, 1.28 “jeux,” not “jeu”

  389, 1.24 add “1758” to the margin

  393, 1.17 “illuminé,” not “illuminéc”

  429, 1.1 “secondes,” not “secdones”

  317 omitted passage: RGADA, Secret packet, fond 1, delo 20, fol. 136v Mad. Tchoglokof lui repondit que pour d’avoir des enfans il n’en étoit pas questions, que ceux ci ne pouvoit venir sans cause et que quoique leurs A.I. étoit mariés depuis 1745. Cependant la cause n’en existoit pas. Alors . . .

  322 omitted passage: RGADA Secret packet, fond 1, delo 20, fol. 141v-142r Sur ses entrefaites Madame Tchoglokof qui avoit toujour son projet favorit en tete de veiller a la succession, me prit un jour a part et me dit, écoutés, il faut que je vous parle bien sérieusement. J’ouvrit yeux et oreille comme de raison, elle débuta par un long raisonnement de choses à sa maniere, sur son attachement a son mary sur sa sagess, sur ce qu’il fallait et ne fallait pas pour s’aimer, et pour faciliter ou apesantir les liens conjugal ou conjugaux, et puis elle se rabatit a dire qu’il y avoit quelques fois des situations d’un interet majeur quit devoit fair exception a la regles, je la laissoit dire tout ce qu’elle voulut sans l’interompre ne sachant point ou elle en vouloit venir, un peu étonée, et ignorant si c’etait une embuche qu’elle me dressait ou si elle parlait sincerement; au moment que je faisait interieurement ces reflexions elle me dit Vous allez voir comment j’aime ma patrie et combien je suis sincere: je ne doute pas que vous n’ayé jettés un oeuil de preference sur quelqu’un, je Vous laisse a choisir entre S.S. et L.N. Si je ne me trompe c’est le dernier; a ceci je m’ecriais non non pas du tout; la dessus elle me dit: he bien si ce n’est pas lui c’est l’autre sans faute, a cela je ne dis pas un mot et elle continua en me disant Vous verrés que ce ne sera pas moi qui Vous ferés naitre des difficulté, je fit la niaise jusqu’au point qu’elle m’en gronda bien des fois tant a la ville qu’enfin a la campagne ou nous allames après Paques; ce fut alors. . . .