The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Page 2

  419 omitted passage: RGADA, Secret packet, fond 1, delo 20, fol. 250r-v Je vient de dire que je plaisoit, par consequend la moitié du chemin de la tentation étoit faite et il est en pareil cas de l’essence de l’humaine nature que l’autre ne sauroit manquer; car tenter et etre tentée sont fort proche l’un de l’autre, et malgré les plus belles maxime de morales imprimée dans la tete quand la sensibilité s’en mele, dès que celle ci aparoit on en est deja infiniment plus loin qu’on ne le croit, et j’ignore encore jusqu’ici comment on peut l’empecher de venir. Peut etre la fuite seule pourroit y remedier, mais il y a des cas, des situation, des circonstances ou la fuite est impossible, car comment fuir éviter, tourner le dos, au milieu d’une cour, la chose meme feroit jaser, or si vous ne fuyés pas il ni a rien de si dificile selon moi que d’echaper a ce qui vous plait foncierement. Tout ce qu’on vous dira a la place de ceci ne sera que propos de pruderie non calqués sur le coeur humain, et personne ne tient son coeur dans sa main et le ressere ou le relache a poingt fermé ou ouvert a sa volonté.

  NOTES

  See for example the modernization note in each volume of Diderot’s collected works, on which we have based our comments. Diderot: Édition critique et annotée, 25 vols. (Paris: Hermann, 1975– ).

  The editorial role of typographers allowed Pypin to conclude that the first edition of Catherine’s Antidote, which was published in 1770 without indicating where, was published in St. Petersburg by inexperienced typographers who failed to make the usual corrections. Moreover, because the many mistakes include those typical for Catherine, Pypin concluded that she had certainly participated in writing what was probably a collaborative work. Her authorship of Antidote has long been disputed, in part because there is no copy in her hand. The next edition was published in Amsterdam without those mistakes, presumably by knowledgeable typographers. Sochineniia, 7 (1901): xlvi–xlviii.

  W. Gareth Jones, “The Russian Language as a Definer of Nobility,” in A Window on Russia: Papers from the V International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Gargnano, 1994, eds. Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice Edizioni, 1996), 293–98.

  A. M. Gribovskii, Zapiski o imperatritse Ekaterine Velikoi polkovnika, sostoivshago pri ee osobie stats-sekretarem, Adriana Moiseevicha Gribovskogo (Moscow, 1847), 41, quoted in Pekarskii, Materialy dlia istorii, 36.

  Smith, Love and Conquest, lii.

  P. K. Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II kak pisatel’nitsa,” Zaria 2 (1869): 101–2. “One can name many French statesmen (even at the end of the previous century) who knew nothing, and apparently did not want to know anything, about French grammar” (102). “Until her death, [Catherine] did not know Russian grammar (like nearly all her contemporaries, incidentally), but she knew Russian well, especially in the second half of her reign, though incorrectly, yet completely fluently. Catherine’s most common mistakes are incorrect use of cases and of perfective and imperfective verb aspects” (119).

  SIRIO, 1:253–91. Pekarskii retains the original orthography for her epitaph. Materialy dlia istorii, 70–72.

  NOTE ON NOBLE FAMILIES

  In the memoirs, Catherine often mentions a person’s relatives to draw a quick portrait, to indicate his or her significance, and to explain a situation. These connections constitute the warp and woof of the Russian court, the government, and the military in the eighteenth century, and they are often unspoken because everyone knew them and took their importance for granted. While the index presents individuals, this note provides some background on the history of the complex interrelationships of noble families, which provides an essential window into the world of Catherine’s memoirs.

  In this memoir Catherine makes particular mention of the importance of Mme. Vladislavova, appointed by Empress Elizabeth in 1748 as head of Catherine’s personal court.

  Her name was Praskovia Nikitichna. She got off to a very good start; she was sociable, loved to talk, spoke and told stories with intelligence, knew all the anecdotes of past and present times by heart, knew four or five generations of all the families, had the genealogies of everyone’s fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and paternal and maternal great-grandparents fixed in her memory, and no one informed me more about what had happened in Russia over the past hundred years than she.

  The essential lore of the history of kinship relations of noble families at the Russian court proved invaluable to Catherine, who was an outsider. Armed with this information, she could better understand and use the women and men around her.

  Individual families formed noble patronage networks through marriage, especially with the czars. Through their marriages and official and unofficial positions, families fought for prestige and power, or access to the ruler and to the distribution of patronage. Most important for Catherine’s purposes, they intrigued in succession struggles to promote their candidates and bring down their opponents. Thus in this memoir, Catherine takes a great personal interest in Mme. Vladislavova’s knowledge.

  The wives of the seventeenth-century czars created two major extended families, the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs. Peter the Great’s mother was Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina (1651–94), and the extended Naryshkin clan included the Streshnevs (Peter’s grandmother) and the Lopukhins (Peter’s first wife), and came to include the Golitsyns and the Trubetskois. Peter the Great’s half brother and co-ruler, Ivan V, married Praskovia Fedorovna Saltykova (1664–1723); their daughter Anna, Duchess of Courland, became Empress. The Saltykov clan included the Dolgorukovs and Apraksins.1 As Catherine writes in this memoir, “the Saltykov family was one of the oldest and most noble of this empire. It was related to the Imperial house itself by the mother of Empress Anna, who was a Saltykov.” When Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth succeeded Anna in a coup in 1741, the Naryshkins defeated the Saltykovs by adding several members to Elizabeth’s senate, in particular Vice Chancellor (later Chancellor) Count Bestuzhev-Riumin and Prince Alexander Kurakin (1697–1749).2 The prestige, power, and collective fortunes of these two clans changed, but they remained the two most powerful groups throughout Catherine’s reign and into the nineteenth century.3

  The ruthless competition between these two families during the succession struggles after Peter the Great’s death abated under Elizabeth.4 The Saltykovs expanded to include the Trubetskois (through three marriages), and the Naryshkins added the Kurakins and the Golitsyns.5 In addition, Elizabeth’s mother’s family, the Skavronskys, provided a way to advance politically and themselves needed to solidify their power with status. Elizabeth married her niece Anna Skavronskaia to Mikhail Vorontsov (from an old noble family). Vorontsov continued his ascent by plotting with the family of Elizabeth’s favorite, the Shuvalovs, against Chancellor Count Bestuzhev-Riumin, and succeeded him after his arrest in 1758, where Catherine’s memoir ends. Two husbands of two other Skavronsky nieces likewise succeeded to important posts at this time, as did relatives of the Naryshkins, thus leaving the Saltykovs in the background.6 Under Peter III, the Vorontsovs placed Elizabeth Vorontsova as his mistress, but Catherine cut short their hopes in 1762 with her coup. However, Vorontsova’s sister, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, was at Catherine’s side during the coup, and the family continued to prosper under Catherine.

  To maintain the balance of power between rival clans, Elizabeth went outside Russia to choose her own candidate as a wife for her nephew Grand Duke Peter. However, she turned to the two main families ten years later. Elizabeth responded to Peter and Catherine’s failure to consummate their marriage and have children with a plan so sensitive that it was left out of the Russian Academy edition of Catherine’s final memoir. In 1753, Elizabeth’s niece Mme. Choglokova proposed that Catherine take a lover and offered her “L.N.” or “S.S.” Given the central importance of the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs to the ruling Romanov family, Elizabeth had found a respectable and reasonable, albeit unorthodox, solution to dynastic instability by proposing an affair with either Lev Naryshkin or Sergei Saltykov. Thus Elizabeth
could accept Paul as a possibly illegitimate future heir. (Elizabeth herself was illegitimate, which had been an impediment to a royal marriage.) Catherine recalls the affair with Saltykov as a matter of necessity in the account of her lovers that she wrote for Potemkin.7

  In this memoir, Catherine demonstrates how she understood and used this system of relationships in which women as well as men played potentially important roles. Thus in 1757 Catherine arranged a marriage that improved her relations with the Razumovskys, the family of Elizabeth’s favorite and secret husband, at the expense of the family of Elizabeth’s other favorite, the Shuvalovs. These two families opposed each other in the succession struggle.

  The marriage of Lev Naryshkin linked me more strongly than ever in friendship with the Counts Razumovsky, who were truly grateful to me for having procured such a good and advantageous match for their niece, nor were they at all upset to have gotten the upper hand over the Shuvalovs, who were not even able to complain about it and were obliged to conceal their mortification. This was yet one more advantage that I had obtained for them.

  Catherine leaves the obvious unsaid: both the Razumovskys and the Shuvalovs needed to solidify their relatively recent ascents as favorites’ families, and the Razumovskys gained more prestige and power from a connection with the Naryshkins than with almost any other family, thus significantly outdoing their rivals. The Shuvalovs later married into the Saltykovs. Catherine too does not explain that in return for her support, Kirill Razumovsky was instrumental in organizing her coup. Thus, noble family relations provide an essential key to understanding the dramas at court and continuous rise and fall of Catherine’s position in the evolving succession struggle that forms the background for the final memoir.

  NOTES

  John P. LeDonne, “Ruling Families in the Russian Political Order, 1689–1825,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 28.3–4:233–322 ( July–December 1987). He includes charts of the major families.

  Bestuzhev-Riumin’s brother Mikhail was married to Anna Gavrilovna Golovkina (died 1751), whose father, Gavriil Golovkin, was the second cousin of Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina. Kurakin’s mother, Kseniia Fedorovna Lopukhina (1677–98), was the younger sister of Peter the Great’s first wife, Evdokiia. LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 298–99; V. Fedorchenko, Imperatorskii dom: Vydaiushchiesia sanovniki, 2 vols. (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2000).

  Neither Elizabeth nor Catherine, once widowed, officially married, but their favorites performed a similar function for the ruling class. John LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 4.

  LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 301.

  Ibid.

  Ivan Glebov and Nikolai Korf. LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 300.

  Catherine to Potemkin, February 21, 1774. Smith, Love and Conquest, 9–11.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Page xciv: First page of manuscript of Catherine the Great’s final memoir, 1794, RGADA, Moscow, Secret Packet, f. 1, d. 1. 1. 1.

  INSERT

  Portrait of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevma, c. 1745 (oil on canvas), Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49). Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. www.bridgeman.co.uk

  Portrait of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna and Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich, 1744–45 (oil on canvas), Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49). Odessa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine. www.bridgeman.co.uk

  Portrait of Empress Elizabeth (1709–62) in a black masquerade domino, 1748 (oil on canvas), Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. www.bridgeman.co.uk

  Catherine the Great holding her Instruction, 1765–79 (enamel). Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. Corbis.

  St. Petersburg and Neva River panorama, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail Ivanovich Makhaev. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  Peterhof and the Grand Cascade, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail Ivanovich Makhaev. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  Oranienbaum, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail Ivanovich Makhaev. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  The Summer Palace (Catherine Palace), Tsarskoe Selo (Czar’s Village): View of Her Imperial Highness’s summer home from the north side, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail Ivanovich Makhaev. From Vidy S.-Peterburgskikh okrestnostei (St. Petersburg, 1761). Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  PREFACE

  CATHERINE THE GREAT AND HER SEVERAL MEMOIRS

  Catherine the Great’s memoirs are exceptional as a literary work and as a historical document. Yet, over the two hundred years since Catherine wrote them, they have been judged both infamous and marginal. While biographers have mined them for details about her sex life and court gossip, historians have dismissed them as blatant self-justification for her seizing the throne. These approaches underestimate the memoirs’ significance. Catherine’s autobiographical writings occupy a central place in her extensive, varied oeuvre, which unquestionably shaped her thinking and reign in fundamental ways.1 Catherine ruled as an absolute monarch in a century of growing ambivalence about the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. Well aware of European criticism of Russian rule as innately tyrannical and of herself as an enlightened despot, Catherine used her writings to demonstrate that she was indeed enlightened but not a despot. Through numerous memoirs, Catherine attempted to portray herself as just, wise, and merciful, and thereby justify her use of absolute power.

  During some of the most challenging years of her long reign (1762–96), Catherine secretly wrote, revised, and recommenced memoirs about her life under the rule of her predecessor, Empress Elizabeth I (reigned 1741–61). This first half of her life might appear irrelevant to the second half of her life as Empress, but Catherine wrote three such memoirs that all reflect her immediate difficulties in the periods when she was writing. Catherine wrote her first memoir around 1756, before she became Empress, during a period of ruthless court politics in preparation for the succession struggle that would occur when the ailing Elizabeth died. Although she does not write about her role in these politics, her letters from this period to the British Ambassador, her friend and mentor Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams (1709–59), for whom she most likely wrote the memoir, explain her difficult position in the Russian court. She writes:

  I would like to feel fear, but I cannot; the invisible hand that has guided me for thirteen years along a very rough road will never allow me to falter, of that I am very firmly and perhaps foolishly convinced. If only you knew all the perils and misfortunes that have threatened me, and that I have overcome. You will have a little more faith in arguments that are too hollow for someone who reasons as solidly as you.2

  Catherine’s sense of her destiny sustained her both as Grand Duchess and later, during her reign. With similar confidence in her ability to successfully confront challenges as Empress, she wrote her middle memoir from 1771 to 1773, while Russia fought a war against Turkey and partitioned Poland, Moscow suffered a serious outbreak of plague, and Catherine overcame two threats to her rule.

  In her last decade, during several critical turning points over which she had only limited control, Catherine returned to her memoirs to write about past difficulties overcome. She made revisions to her middle memoir in 1790, and then began her final memoir in 1794, the fiftieth anniversary of her arrival in Russia, a period in which she began to feel old and alone. She had written her epitaph in 1778, and in 1792 she wrote her will. In 1791, Catherine lost her closest confidant, who was for several years her lover and most likely her secret husband, Prince Grigory Potemkin (b. 1739), viceroy for all of Southern Russia and one of Russia’s greatest military statesmen. 3 As she looked to the future, the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 struck fear in the hearts of Europe’s monarchs. Afraid for Russia’s stability after her death, she trie
d unsuccessfully to bypass the rightful succession of her son Paul in favor of her grandson, Alexander. 4 Her final memoir, translated here, indirectly responded to these future challenges to her legacy.

  In all her memoirs, but especially in the last memoir, we see the perils of power through the eyes of an intelligent woman who was a consummate political animal. Her fundamental concern—political power— never changed.5 In this final memoir, contemplating her death and place in history, Catherine recounts her brilliant but unhappy marriage to the heir to the Russian throne, and gives the fullest account of the events leading up to the most dangerous year of her career. On December 25, 1761, Empress Elizabeth I died, and her nephew and heir designate, Catherine’s husband, became Emperor Peter III. Pregnant by her lover Count Grigory Orlov (1734–83), Catherine found herself at risk of arrest, exile, or worse, as Peter hinted at plans to install his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova (1739–92), as his consort, and did not declare his and Catherine’s son as his heir. Six months later, Catherine seized the throne and declared herself Empress Catherine II, while Peter abdicated and was killed a week later by members of her political faction, though without her approval. Catherine’s last memoir never explicitly addresses her coup or her husband’s murder, but it has long been understood as an exercise in implicit self-justification. Her unstated premise is that although she had no claim to the throne, by virtue of her character and actions she nevertheless deserved, and was even meant, to rule.

  The final memoir builds up to the crisis provoked in 1758 by the arrest and exile of her ally, Chancellor Count Alexei Bestuzhev-Riumin (1693– 1767), who was in charge of foreign affairs.6 This overthrow of Empress Elizabeth’s senior statesman serves as a dress rehearsal for the dangers of Catherine’s coup of 1762. Catherine writes about the day of his arrest: “A flood of ideas, each more unpleasant and sadder than the next, arose in my mind. With a dagger in my heart, so to speak, I got dressed and went to mass.”7 Bestuzhev-Riumin’s arrest implicated her in his plans for the succession after Elizabeth’s death, which were to have Catherine rule either alone or jointly with her husband, Peter. Her enemies hoped to force her into exile abroad instead. Catherine saved herself, her position, and her children through an extended, brilliant appeal in a letter and two conversations with Empress Elizabeth. In a calculated display of humility, she turned her enemies’ threat to her advantage and in fact asked to be sent home to the German state of Anhalt-Zerbst, a dramatic step that Elizabeth, known for her indecisiveness, rejected. With a nod toward her situation four years hence, Catherine concluded her outline for the final memoir with the point of her story: “Things took such a turn that it was necessary to perish with him, by him, or else to try to save oneself from the wreckage and to save my children, and the state.” In the memoir, she placed this conclusion after citing her husband’s remark in 1758: “God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies. I really do not know if this child is mine and if I ought to recognize it.” In 1762, her rights and safety would hinge on precisely the recognition of her son’s, and thus her, legitimacy.