The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Page 10

  Marcus C. Levitt, “Catherine the Great,” in Russian Women Writers, ed. Christine D. Tomei, vol. 1 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 3–27.

  Catherine to d’Alembert, November 13, 1762, Oeuvres et correspondances inédites de d’Alembert, ed. Charles Henry (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 205. Veronica Buckley, Christina, Queen of Sweden (London: Fourth Estate, 2004).

  Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Oeuvres complètes de d’Alembert (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 2:148. Mémoires appeared in Mélanges de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (1753).

  Voltaire first got the idea for a history of Peter the Great in 1737 from the future Frederick the Great, and in 1745 he first approached Elizabeth. Thus his relationship with Catherine had a precedent. P. K. Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II, kak pisatel’nitsa: literaturnaia perepiska Ekateriny, V,” Zaria 8 (1869): 68–111.

  Catherine to Voltaire, September 1763, Voltaire’s Correspondence, ed. T. Besterman, 107 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1953–65), 53:30 (no. 10597).

  Bil’bassov, “The Intellectual Formation of Catherine II,” 27.

  On Catherine’s and the philosophes’ ideas about the great man in history, see Dixon, Catherine the Great, 5–8.

  Madariaga, “Catherine and the philosophes,” 215–34.

  Quoted in Comte de Ségur, Mémoires ou souvenirs et anecdotes, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Paris, 1826), 43.

  John LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), viii.

  An average print run was 600 books; Catherine’s primer sold 20,000 copies.

  To Grimm she wrote: “I beg you to no longer call me, nor to any longer give me the sobriquet of Catherine the Great, because primo, I do not like any sobriquet, secondo, my name is Catherine II, and tertio, I do not want anyone to say of me as of Louis XV, that one finds him badly named; fourthly, my height is neither great nor small.” Catherine to Grimm, February 22, 1788, SIRIO, 23:438.

  For a survey of 774 foreign publications about Catherine from 1744 to 1796 in the Russian Public Library’s Russica collection, see Vasilii A. Bil’basov, Istoriia Ekateriny vtoroi, vol. 12 (Berlin, 1896).

  Dr. Georg Sacke, “Die Pressepolitik Katharinas II von Russland,” Zeitungswissenschaft 9 (1934): 570–79.

  Catherine to Voltaire, September 1763, Voltaire’s Correspondence, 53:31 (no. 10597). Catherine never forgot Rousseau’s criticism, for in a letter to Grimm while she was revising her middle memoir, she cites a similar passage by Rousseau on Poland’s loss of liberty. Catherine to Grimm, May 13, 1791, SIRIO, 23:538.

  Catherine to Mme. Geoffrin, March 28, 1765, SIRIO, 1:266.

  Claude C. de Rulhière, A History, or Anecdotes of the Revolution in Russia, in the Year 1762 (1797; reprint, New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1970).

  For a history of French writings about Russia, with both edited texts and correlated passages, see Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, ed., L’Impératrice et l’Abbé: Un duel littéraire in édit entre Catherine II et l’Abbé Chappe d’Auteroche (Paris: Fayard, 2003).

  A revisionist view of much Russian historiography argues that “the dialogue between ruler and ruled in Russia aspired to be nonconfrontational.” Whittaker, Russian Monarchy, 7.

  On Catherine’s coronation festivities, which took place for six months, Richard Wortman writes that “their magnificence and scale reconfirmed the European character of the Russian court and stunned foreign visitors.” Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 118.

  Richard Wortman, “Texts of Exploration and Russia’s European Identity,” in Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825, ed. Cynthia Hyla Whittaker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 97.

  She was influenced by the linguist Antoine Court de Gébelin’s (1725–84) Histoire naturelle de la parole, ou Précis de l’origine du langage & de la grammaire universelle (Paris, 1776), and was aided by Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811), who published a two-volume edition of Sravnitel’nye slovari vsekh iazykov i narechii, sobrannye desnitseiu vsevysochaishei osoby (St. Petersburg, 1787 and 1789), and later by Jankevich de Marijevo, who published a revised and expanded four-volume edition, Sravnitel’nyi slovar’ vsekh iazykov i narechii, po azbuchnomy poriadku raspolozhenii (St. Petersburg, 1791). See Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II kak pisatel’nitsa,” Zaria 6:2 (1870): 17–27; and Friedrich von Adelung, Catherinen’s des Grossen verdienste um die vergleichende Sprachenkunde (St. Petersburg, 1815).

  Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 33.

  Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II kak pisatel’nitsa,” Zaria 3 (1870): 10–14.

  “Qui est ce meilleur poète et ce meilleur historien de mon empire? Ce n’est pas moi pour sûr, n’ayant jamais fait ni vers ni histoire.” Catherine to Grimm, August 24, 1778, SIRIO, 23:100.

  L. M. Gavrilova, “Istochniki ‘Zapisok kasatel’no rossiiskoi istorii’ Ekateriny II,” Vspomogatel’nye istoricheskie ditsipliny 20 (1989): 167.

  Catherine mentions Ivan Perfil’ievich Elagin, writer and Freemason, in her final memoir, for with his silence he supported her during Bestuzhev-Riumin’s arrest in 1758. Her letter of January 12, 1794, to Grimm refers to Elagin’s Attempt at a Narrative on Russia. SIRIO, 23:589.

  Sochineniia 8 (1901): 5. Gavrilova, “Istochniki ‘Zapisok,’ ” 164–74. Most history in the eighteenth century focused on the ruler, and, like Tatishchev, Catherine believed that because of its size, history, and culture, Russia needed an absolute monarch. In addition to this empirical model, Whittaker also describes dynastic and antidespotic models of history. Russian Monarchy, 119–40.

  “J’en conviens, mais la rage de l’histoire a emporté ma plume.” Catherine to Grimm, January 12, 1794, SIRIO, 23:589.

  “Fortunate will be the writer who in a century compiles the history of Catherine II.” Voltaire to Catherine, December 3, 1771, Voltaire’s Correspondence, 80:169 (no. 16442). Voltaire here complains that the documents of history are unreliable and only great deeds will remain.

  In An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), Andrew Wachtel traces Russian writers’ (including Catherine’s) willingness to treat their history, long the exclusive turf of professional historians in other countries, as if there was a mystery to the problem of writing history in Russia. Censorship and lack of access to materials still remain problems today.

  Its value continues to lie in his discussion of many historical documents that were burned during Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow in 1812.

  W. Gareth Jones, “Biography in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 22 (1989): 70–80.

  These historians include Sergei Solov’ev (1820–79), Vasilii Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), and Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943). Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 115, 138, 146.

  On the story behind Bil’basov’s history, see Simon Dixon, “Catherine the Great and the Romanov Dynasty: The Case of the Grand Duchess Mariia Pavlovna (1854– 1920),” in Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony G. Cross, ed. Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes (Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2004), 202.

  This biography went through four editions and retranslations, as Castéra unwittingly collaborated with an English translator, William Tooke. David M. Griffiths, “Castéra-Tooke: The First Western Biographer(s) of Catherine II,” Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter 10 (1982): 50–62.

  For example, on Paul’s parentage, Tooke writes: “In the mean time the grand duke cohabited with his spouse; and thenceforward Soltikoff thought he had no longer any danger to prevent; he now tasted without disturbance or remorse those pleasures from the consequences of which he had nothing to dread.” William Tooke, The Life of Catharine II, Empress of Russia, 3rd ed. (London, 1799), 1:112.

  Simon
Dixon, “The Posthumous Reputation of Catherine II in Russia, 1797–1837,” Slavonic and East European Review 77:4 (October 1999): 656.

  Aleksandr Kamenskii, “Pod seniiu Ekateriny”: Vtoraia polovina XVIII veka (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1992), Zhizn’ i sud’ba Imperatritsy Ekateriny Velikoi (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Znanie, 1997), and Rossiiskaia imperiia v XVIII veke: traditsii i modernizatsii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999); P. V. Stegnii, Razdely Pol’shi i diplomatiia Ekateriny II: 1772, 1793, 1795 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2002); Lopatin, Ekaterina II i G. A. Potemkin; and Smith, Love and Conquest.

  Claus Scharf, Katharina II: Deutschland und die Deutschen (Mainz, Germany: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1995); M. Fainshtein and F. Göpfert, eds., Katharina II: Eine russische Schriftstellerin, FrauenLiteraturGeschichte, vol. 5 (Wilhelmshorst, Germany: Verlag F. K. Göpfert, 1996); Hans Ottomeyer and Susan Tipton, eds., Katharina die Grosse (Eurasburg, Germany: Edition Minerva, 1997); Piotrovsky, Treasures of Catherine the Great; Lurana Donnels O’Malley, ed., Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998).

  N. I. Pavlenko, Ekaterina Velikaia (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003); Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Catherine II: Un âge d’or pour la Russie (Paris: Fayard, 2002); and Alexander, Catherine the Great.

  Dena Goodman, ed., Marie-Antoinette: Writing on the Body of a Queen (New York: Routledge, 2003); Jo Burr Margadant, ed., The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  A first attempt was made by Mary Hays, “Catherine II,” in Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (London, 1803), 2:247–404, 3:1–271. She recycles Tooke’s Life and Masson’s Secret Memoirs. She justifies Catherine’s love life as no worse than Elizabeth’s (her paraphrase of the above Tooke quotation leaves out that Catherine was sleeping with both her husband and her lover when Paul was conceived [2:266]) and like Masson, emphasizes her writings. On Hays, see Anthony Cross, “Catherine the Great: Views from the Distaff Side,” in Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel de Madariaga, ed. Roger Bartlett and Janet Hartley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 203–21.

  Nobles, particularly those of the mostly minor German states, needed the entrée of French to arrange the international royal marriages they aspired to. For example, in addition to Russian and French, Empress Elizabeth knew German and Italian. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Russian court functioned in German and French as well as Russian, while government business was in Russian.

  For example, for their betrothal: “The ring the Grand Duke gave me was worth 12,000 rubles, and the one he received from me, 14,000.” Later: “From my betrothal to our departure, there was not a day when I did not receive presents from the Empress, of which the least was worth from 10,000 to 15,000 rubles, in jewels, money, fabrics, etc., everything that one could imagine. In sum, she manifested great tenderness” (452– 53). These monetary details, less evident in the final memoir, were printed in the newspapers.

  Dixon, Catherine the Great, 26.

  Madariaga, Catherine the Great, 5.

  Smith, Love and Conquest, xxxi.

  Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

  Katherina II in ihren Memoiren, ed. Dr. Erich Böhme (1920; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972).

  The last memoir really ends in 1758, because toward the end, Catherine was off by a year for such things as the birth of her daughter and Bestuzhev-Riumin’s arrest. On the dating of this memoir, see also O. Kornilovich, “Zapiski Imperatritsy Ekateriny II,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 37 ( January 1912): 37–74.

  The editors note that in the middle memoir Catherine does not know the end of the Baturin affair (1749), but that a letter from her to the Procurator General in late 1773 makes clear that she has followed the matter closely and by then knows how it has ended; she recounts the entire matter in the final memoir (viii–ix). Monika Greenleaf ’s dating of Catherine’s middle memoir is at variance with Pypin’s dating; she dates part 1 to 1771 and parts 2 and 3 to 1791. The chronology of the memoirs is central to her argument that Catherine “refashioned her narrative images in response to the shifting literary practices, currents of political ideology, and attitudes to gender that prevailed in each decade” (425). “Performing Autobiography: The Multiple Memoirs of Catherine the Great (1756–96),” The Russian Review 63 ( July 2004): 407–26.

  “The princess Catherine d’Anhalt-Zerbst passed her earlier years in rather a middling condition. Her father, the sovereign of a petty state, and a general in the service of the King of Prussia, resided in a frontier town, in which, from infancy upward, she was accustomed to the military homages of a garrison; and if, now and then, on her ceasing to be a child, her mother carried her to court, to attract a transient smile from some one of the royal family, an ordinary eye could not have distinguished her amidst the crowd which attend on such occasions.” Rulhière, A History, or Anecdotes of the Revolution in Russia, 3.

  SIRIO, 13:332–36.

  Ibid., 23:77. She modeled her epitaph on one for her English greyhound, Sir Tom Anderson (Pekarskii, Materialy dlia istorii, 70–72).

  In this memoir, Countess Bruce is mentioned only twice, as her friend and as a recipient of her gifts, and thus a cause of her debts.

  Catherine to Grimm, April 14, 1785, SIRIO, 23:330.

  “Mémoires commencés le 21 d’Avril 1771,” fond 1 (Secret Packet), opis’ 1, delo 21, fols. 73v–74, Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (RGADA), Moscow.

  Smith, Love and Conquest, 9–11.

  Catherine had no celebration for Paul’s majority; she further distracted him by arranging a marriage to Princess Wilhelmina of Hessen-Darmstadt on September 29, 1773, but then not giving the couple a separate court, which she knew from personal experience could be used to meddle against her. Alexander, Catherine the Great, 138, 166.

  Safonov argues that by means of the surprisingly intimate ending of part 1 of the middle memoir, where Catherine writes that her marriage was unconsummated for nine years, she justifies depriving Paul of his inheritance and questions his right to rule by hinting that he is a bastard. However, it was common knowledge that her son might be illegitimate, and she had made the same point in her early memoir, and would make it again in the final memoir. Like Greenleaf (2004), Safonov overlooks the conclusion of the editors of the Academy edition that the middle memoir in its entirety dates to 1771–73, while the revisions date to 1790–91. When we redate the middle memoir, the ending of part 3 (about Holstein) nicely supports Safonov’s argument that this memoir certainly relates to Paul’s majority. Moreover, Catherine does not mention the Holstein issue in the first memoir, a further indication that the circumstances in which she wrote the middle and final memoirs raised the issue. M. M. Safonov, “’Seksual’nye otkroveniia’ Ekateriny II i proiskhozhdenie Pavla I,” in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon, and Maarten Fraanje (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 96–111.

  She concludes, “Two of the group will die from pleasure, but one does not say their names nor whether they are men or women” (654).

  Later, she mentions that a secretary has prepared another such examination for her. Catherine to Grimm, July 5, 1779, SIRIO, 23:148.

  Catherine to Grimm, August 24, 1778, SIRIO, 23:100.

  Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II kak pisatel’nitsa,” Zaria 9 (1869): 84–101.

  Mémoires complets et authentiques du Duc de Saint-Simon sur le siècle de Louis XIV et la régence (Paris: Hachette, 1882), 1:xxxv.

  Catherine to Grimm, June 22, 1790, SIRIO, 23:484. François Ambrose Didot (1730– 1804) was a well-known printer in France. The editors of the Academy edition cite this passage too, but in an unusual mistake, claim it is Diderot, who had, however, died in 1784 (ix).

  Alexander, Catherine
the Great, 352. He was favorite from 1776 to 1777.

  “Imagine the passion for writing about ancient events that no one cares about and that no one will read.” Catherine to Grimm, January 12, 1794, SIRIO, 23:589.

  “Histoire de la Russie au 18-me siècle,” Sochineniia, 11:521–22. Catherine’s response, “Réflexions sur le projet d’une histoire de Russia au 18-ième siècle,” Sochineniia, 11:560–71. Sénac de Meilhan even compared Catherine to a building in his published booklet, “Comparaison de St. Pierre de Rome avec Catherine II. St. Petersbourg, 1791,” Sochineniia, 11:543–44.

  Frederick’s first memoir, Memoirs on the House of Brandenburg (1751), goes up through the reign of his grandfather Frederick I (1657–1713).

  Catherine to Grimm, January 23, 1789, SIRIO, 23:470.

  Frederick II, L’Histoire de mon temps, vol. 1 of Oeuvres posthumes de Frédéric II, Roi de Prusse (Berlin, 1788), 25.

  In English, Anthony, Memoirs, 299–307. Catherine concludes this memoir with her Instruction in 1767. Frederick wrote: “I will speak of myself only when necessity obliges me, and if one will allow it, as Caesar did, in the third person, to avoid the horror of egoism.” In his opinion, Commentaries on the Gallic War (about 50 B.C.) by Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.) was the last accurate history, in that it agreed with contemporary sources and “contained neither panegyrics nor satires.” Frederick II, L’Histoire de mon temps, 10, 6.

  Frederick II, L’Histoire de mon temps, 24.

  Catherine to Grimm, February 13, 1794, SIRIO, 23:595–96. This letter and her financial memoir help date the beginning of the final memoir.

  Numa ruled Rome by religion and culture, which disappeared with his death, while Lycurgus of Sparta ruled by laws that provided a model for Plato’s Republic; on the philosophes’ views, see Dixon, Catherine the Great, 75–77.

  For example, Catherine may have read Brantôme’s Les vies des dames illustres de France de son tems (1665), Les vies des Dames galantes (1666), and Les vies des hommes illustres et grands capitaines étrangers (1666).