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Catherine the Great’s memoirs are exceptional as a literary work and as a historical document.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 tried 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.”⁷Bestuzhev-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.

Though the idea that Catherine was a nymphomaniac is pure speculation, one thing is sure: she was a graphomaniac. Catherine wrote about herself from the time she arrived in Russia, in 1744, at the age of fourteen, until her death, in 1796, at age sixty-seven. The memoirs are not one but three main documents in French. She wrote her first full memoir around 1756; her middle memoir (in three parts) dates to 1771–73, a text she revised in 1790–91; and she began the final memoir (in two parts) around 1794. In addition, there are two early, short verbal self-portraits, two extensive outlines for the middle and final memoirs, numerous sketches, notes, and anecdotes for the memoirs, and autobiographical letters. These autobiographical writings in French and Russian add up to seven hundred pages, forming the last and largest of a dozen volumes of her works, which the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences published in 1907, the first time this archival material was made public in Russia.⁸ Under Catherine’s successors—her son and his male descendants—the memoirs remained a state secret because they indicate that Paul was perhaps illegitimate and thus he and his offspring were not Romanovs. Moreover, Catherine’s unflattering picture of life at court and in the royal family, not to mention her and Peter’s affairs, were an embarrassment to the wholesome image of the nineteenth-century Russian royal family. Before 1907, scholars knew about the existence of only the final memoir, which circulated after her death in several handwritten copies. A copy was used for their first publication, in London in 1859, by the Russian radical Alexander Herzen (1812–70), in English, German, French, Russian, Swedish, and Danish.

This is the fourth English translation of her final and also fullest and longest memoir, and only the second complete translation; moreover, we are the first translators to study Catherine’s original manuscript. ⁹ We also translated her outline for the memoir, noting what she crossed out and added as she was writing. Our goal has been an accurate, readable translation that conveys her voice, which combines a well honed art of plain speaking with a vigorous style of thought. In fact, Catherine tells us that how she writes is essential to her rhetorical purpose: “Besides, this writing itself should prove what I say about my mind, my heart, and my character.”¹⁰ Catherine appears to have sought and found a profound connection between herself and her writing. For more than fifty years, she used her autobiographical writing to understand herself as a human being, a woman, and an Empress. She wrote to take stock of her life and reign. Catherine also wrote to persuade future readers, for each memoir contains a different overall rhetorical purpose related to her concerns at the time she was writing.

This preface traces Catherine’s autobiographical impulse over the course of an extraordinarily rich, accomplished, and controversial life. She expected her readers to be familiar with the history of her reign, which she does not recount in the memoir. Those eager to encounter Catherine and her memoir directly with no further introduction should have a sufficient overview of her reign and her memoirs from the preceding few pages. The remainder of this preface illuminates in detail the historical context, legacy, and uniqueness of Catherine’s memoirs. It addresses the importance of writing to Catherine’s rule and reputation abroad, the influence of the memoirs on Catherine scholarship since her death, and the genesis and unusual structure of this significant, original document. It brings together literary and historical analyses of the memoirs in a contribution to Catherine scholarship that is meant to be informative for those encountering Catherine for the first time and for experts alike.

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF A GREAT LIFE

Born on April 21, 1729, Princess Sophie Auguste Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst died of a stroke on November 6, 1796, as Empress Catherine II of Russia. The space between her birth and death is divisible into three parts; with each transformation of her identity, Catherine acquired a different title and name to match her new role. From 1729 to 1744, she was Princess Sophie, the daughter of German nobles; from 1745 to 1762, she was Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna, wife of the heir to the Russian throne and mother of his son and successor; and finally, from 1762 to 1796, she was Empress Catherine II. The opening of her last memoir indicates that her mother’s family connections—more than Catherine’s personality, experiences, or desire for glory—paved the way for her marriage to Peter III, who was Catherine’s second cousin. Catherine’s mother, Princess Johanna Elisabeth (1712–60), came from the same German family as Peter III, the house of Holstein-Gottorp (1544 –1773).¹¹ Peter’s father, Karl Friedrich (1700–39), was Princess Johanna’s paternal first cousin and married Anna Petrovna (1708–28), the eldest daughter of Peter I, “the Great” (1672–1725). ¹² In addition to her cousin’s marriage, Princess Johanna had another connection to the Russian royal family: her brother Karl August had been engaged to Anna’s sister, the future Empress Elizabeth, but had died before the wedding.¹³ These ties to the Russian royal family assumed great importance for Catherine when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1741 and brought Anna’s orphaned son Peter to Russia as her heir. A year later, when Elizabeth sought a wife for her nephew and heir, she chose her dead fiancé’s niece Catherine.

According to Catherine’s early and middle memoirs, Princess Johanna performed her job as mother and aristocrat well, and did everything to arrange a prestigious royal match for her daughter. Two presentation portraits of Catherine were sent to Elizabeth.¹⁴Elizabeth in turn performed kind gestures for Catherine’s family. In 1742, Elizabeth became the godmother for Catherine’s new sister, Elisabeth (1742–45), named after her, and sent a portrait of herself set in diamonds that were worth 25,000 rubles. She also provided an annual pension to Catherine’s maternal grandmother, Princess Albertine Friederike (1682–1755) of Baden-Durlach.¹⁵ To please Elizabeth and potentially further his own interests in Russia, the Prussian King Frederick II, “the Great” (1712–86, reigned 1740–86), promoted Catherine’s father to Field Marshal. Frederick the Great and Princess Johanna also intrigued in the Russian court, where other factions favored a French or Saxon bride. Aside from Peter, Princess Sophie’s only other serious suitor was her mother’s brother, Georg Ludwig (1719–63), who proposed and was accepted by the young Princess, but not her parents, who had greater aspirations for her. In late 1743, Elizabeth invited the fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie and her mother, but for reasons unknown, specifically not her father, Prince Christian August (1690–1747), to Moscow.

On February 9, 1744, Princess Sophie arrived in Moscow. As her early and middle memoirs make clear, although Catherine was born into a minor German noble house, her mother had prepared Catherine well for life at a royal court. In fact, Catherine shows her disappointment in the quality of Russian court life. Thanks to her mother’s godmother, the dowager Duchess Elisabeth Sophie Marie of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1683–1767), she and her mother had spent several months each year at one of the most brilliant courts in Germany, where she met and played with some of the future royalty of Europe. While her mother traveled in Europe to keep up family contacts, Princess Sophie stayed with her grandmother in Hamburg and visited, among other places, the Prussian court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. Her governess, Elisabeth Cardel, a French Huguenot and professor’s daughter, introduced her to the customs of French society and to French classical literature. This education allowed her to aspire to a royal marriage.

As Grand Duchess, Catherine’s position depended on producing a male heir and cultivating political supporters at court. She was under constant scrutiny—no part of her life at court, nor anything in the memoirs, most especially her love life, was private. Catherine had innate political instincts that guided her well during and after her introduction to life in the Russian court. By contrast, even such a successful veteran of court politics as her mother nearly caused her and her daughter’s dismissal before the wedding.¹⁶Princess Sophie willingly learned Russian, and on June 28, 1744, she converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and became Ekaterina Alekseevna, in honor of Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine I; the next day, she was betrothed and became Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess.¹⁷ Married on August 21, 1745, the sixteen-year-old bride and seventeen-year-old groom, according to Catherine’s middle memoir, failed to consummate their marriage until 1754, when each was having an officially sanctioned affair in the hopes that experience would encourage them.¹⁸ After two miscarriages, Catherine gave birth, on September 20, 1754, to Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich, the future Paul I (d. 1801), perhaps fathered by Sergei Saltykov (1726–1813). ¹⁹

The significance for Catherine of the long-awaited birth of a male heir constitutes the underlying plot of her early memoir, written around 1756. Her son made Catherine’s position at court much more secure, for she was now not only the wife of the heir apparent but also the mother of the future heir. Catherine’s personal security became especially important as Elizabeth’s health worsened and a succession struggle loomed .²⁰ Thus in 1756, in a letter to her mentor, Hanbury-Williams, Catherine planned ahead. “After being informed of her death and making sure that there is no mistake, I will go straight to my son’s room.”²¹ Her son and timely information through her allies were crucial to her political and even physical survival. The Empress countered Catherine’s intrigues by isolating her—from her son, friendly courtiers, and bad news about Elizabeth’s health—to make her less of a threat. As the memoirs make clear, the Empress also carefully kept Catherine on a limited budget of 30,000 rubles per year and watched what Catherine spent. However, Catherine ran up a debt of six hundred thousand rubles by 1762, money she used to buy the loyalty of courtiers and of her husband, as well as dresses. ²² After another miscarriage, she had two more children, a daughter, Anna Petrovna (1757–59), by a future King of Poland, Count Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1732–98), and by Count Grigory Orlov, a son, Count Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, born on April 11, 1762 (d. 1813), without any of the usual fanfare. On June 28, Catherine seized power, aided by forty supporters, including Orlov and his four brothers, and became Catherine II, Empress of Russia. This pragmatic mixture of love and politics affected her relations with her son, Paul, and with Orlov, and would reach its apogee with Prince Potemkin. Catherine’s personal relations had serious political consequences for her and others due to the concentration of power in individuals and the intimate, familial nature of rule in Russia at this time.²³

In all her memoirs Catherine balances her relationships with her husband and with Elizabeth, for although her ultimate future depends on Peter, her immediate future is in Elizabeth’s hands. This central double thread in the memoirs reflects a system of inheritance in which Elizabeth could choose and, equally important, dismiss her chosen successor. Having disinherited his eldest son, Alexei, on February 3, 1718, in a manifesto, on February 5, 1722, Peter the Great issued the Law of Succession to the Throne, in which he concluded: “We deem it good to issue this edict in order that it will always be subject to the will of the ruling monarch to appoint whom he wishes to the succession or to remove the one he has appointed in the case of unseemly behavior.” 24 He nevertheless died in 1725 without naming a successor, and his second wife, born Martha Skavronska, a Livonian peasant, became Catherine I (1684– 1727). Surely it was no more fantastic for a well-connected German Princess, not only married to Emperor Peter III but also related to him and Empress Elizabeth, to become Empress.

Much has been made of Catherine’s ominous desire for the throne, which she does not hide in the memoirs. For example, on the eve of her wedding, filled with foreboding, Catherine consoles herself: “My heart did not foresee great happiness; ambition alone sustained me. At the bottom of my soul I had something, I know not what, that never for a single moment let me doubt that sooner or later I would succeed in becoming the sovereign Empress of Russia in my own right.” Catherine’s correspondence with Hanbury-Williams gives some idea of her machinations to promote her husband, her son, and by extension herself during an uncertain succession. This all seems quite damning evidence of excessive ambition, except that it was in fact possible, though unlikely, for Catherine to rule legitimately—if Elizabeth named her as heir. According to the early and middle memoirs, Catherine’s mother urged Procurator General Prince Trubetskoi to ask the Empress whether her title should include Heiress to the Throne, and Elizabeth declined (50, 453). Yet the final memoir ends with a very important conversation between Catherine and Elizabeth that hints at the possibility that Elizabeth might disinherit Peter III, which reinforces Catherine’s case for her legitimacy.

While Catherine’s legitimacy was questioned in Russia, in the eyes of public opinion in Europe her coup and the consequent murder of her husband reflected badly on the stability of Russia and its government, which undermined her credibility.²⁵ Catherine’s final memoir addresses her ability to create a stable government by stressing her good judgment, even temper, fairness, and ultimately, her genius for rule. Catherine’s long rule broke a pattern. In eighteenth-century Russia, coups were the rule, not the exception. In the absence of male heirs of the right age, the practice of naming an heir appears to have led to a series of coups by unmarried female rulers and their favorites.²⁶ In 1727, Catherine I was succeeded by the last direct male heir of the Romanov line, Peter II (1715–30), Peter the Great’s grandson by his son Alexei (1690–1718).²⁷ Before her death, Catherine I had signed a will naming first Peter II and then her daughters, Anna and Elizabeth, as heirs.²⁸ After the sudden death three years later of Peter II at age fifteen, Elizabeth was pushed aside for Anna Ivanovna (1693–1740), the widowed Duchess of Courland and daughter of Peter the Great’s half brother and co-czar, Ivan V (1666–96). On her deathbed, Empress Anna designated her grandnephew, the infant Ivan VI (1740–64), as heir, and her German favorite, Ernst Johann Bühren (1690–1772), Duke of Courland, as regent.²⁹ Bühren lasted twenty-two days before being ousted by the infant’s parents, Anna Leopoldovna of Mecklenburg and Prince Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Bevern. In November 1741, Elizabeth seized power and imprisoned Ivan VI for life; unfortunately for Catherine, he was killed on her watch in 1764. Later, the French philosophe Denis Diderot (1713–84) advised Catherine to reinstate primogeniture as a check on the ruler’s power, which she of course could not do without making her own rule illegitimate.³⁰ But her son, Paul, in his rejection of all things Catherinian, had three sons, and upon his coronation, he immediately returned to a system of primogeniture and the ideal of a proper royal family. However, as Catherine feared, this did not prevent Paul, who behaved as a tyrant, from being overthrown and killed in a coup. Ironically too, if the memoirs are accurate and Catherine in fact knew, Paul was perhaps biologically a Saltykov, and so despite all the male heirs, the Romanov bloodline ended not with Nicholas II (1868– 1918) but with Peter III and Ivan VI.

Because of the fundamental weakness of her position, Catherine’s success depended on her political skills, her policies, and her personality. Her memoirs paint an unflattering picture of Elizabeth’s personality and style of rule, and Catherine thus implies that she has done things differently. ³¹For example, under Elizabeth, allies could become enemies overnight, and such elder statesmen as Bestuzhev-Riumin were humiliated, stripped of all privileges, condemned to death, and exiled. Elizabeth thus continued her predecessors’ method of midnight arrests, torture, and imprisonment of her enemies, which one historian has termed “mini-coups.” ³² In contrast, Catherine carefully promoted and rewarded opponents until they were no longer in a position to harm her. Like Elizabeth, Catherine depended for support on family clans, political factions, ministers, favorites, and the elite guards, who formed a complex network of alliances. Throughout her early reign, Catherine relied extensively on the clan of Grigory Orlov (her favorite from 1760 to 1772), who with the Chernyshev extended family and the elite guards supported her coup.³³ Her opponents, the faction around her son’s governor, Count Nikita Panin (1718–83), favored making Paul the Emperor and Catherine his regent until his majority in 1772, and generally tried to limit Catherine’s power. As 1772 approached and Panin agitated for transferring rule to Paul, Catherine’s son became a double-edged sword in her career, important for her legitimacy on the one hand and a potential (though never actual) threat to her power as he grew older and became independent. Catherine quashed several conspiracies, and after she put down Pugachev’s armed revolt in 1774, her hold on power became reasonably secure.

Catherine was above all a working ruler, unlike Elizabeth. In the memoirs, Catherine criticizes Elizabeth, who let her advisers and favorites write up papers based on what she said, and often did not follow through on matters. In contrast, Catherine did her own writing, had a good memory for details, delegated well, and expected things to get done. As Empress, Catherine wrote and read every day, adapting her ideas, which she acquired through reading classical, French, German, and English political philosophy, to what was possible in Russia. She inherited a country that Peter the Great had dramatically turned in the direction of modern European statehood at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Reforms, however, had remained incomplete. After Peter’s death, in 1725, the six rulers who followed did not build significantly or systematically on his reforms. Intelligent, well-read, energetic, and ambitious, Catherine, like Peter, applied herself to all aspects of Russian politics, society, history, and culture, and had a profound and lasting impact on Russia and Europe.

Histories of her reign and biographies tend to mention Catherine’s writing separately from her life and rule. Though as Grand Duchess she had written, and could write safely, relatively little, with her coup, Catherine unleashed a sudden deluge of what she called “scribbling.” ³⁴ From the very beginning of her reign, Catherine’s writing was everywhere intertwined with her reading, her thinking, and her reign. Barely a month after the coup, having written manifestos proclaiming her rule, she sent one to the French philosophe and celebrity Voltaire (1694 –1778) to initiate a literary, political, and philosophical correspondence of mutual flattery and usefulness that lasted until his death. Throughout her reign, she corresponded constantly with statesmen and women, the philosophes, her ministers, historians, and favorites. Aside from letters and state business, her daily writing included extensive notes on her reading and marginalia in her books. To the leading Enlightenment salonnière Madame Geoffrin (1699–1777), Catherine elaborates on her routine:

I regularly get up at six A.M., I read and I write all alone until eight; then someone comes to read the news to me, those who have to speak to me come in one by one, one after the other, which can take until eleven or later, and then I dress. On Sundays and feast days I go to mass, on other days I go into my antechamber, where a crowd of people usually awaits me, and after a half- or three-quarter-hour conversation, I sit down to lunch . . . and I bring my papers. Our reading, when it is not interrupted by packets of letters or other hindrances, lasts until half past five, when I either go to the theater, or play cards, or else chat with the early comers until dinner, which ends before eleven when I go to bed, to do the same thing tomorrow, and this is as fixed as the lines on a sheet of music. ³⁵

The emphasis on the regularity of her day, in contrast to her description in the memoirs of Empress Elizabeth’s bohemian lifestyle, reflects Catherine’s perception of regulated time as European and enlightened.³⁶ Like her favorites, writing and reading were a daily part of her life and rule.

To treat Catherine’s writing as either a personal or a cultural or a literary or an intellectual exercise diminishes the breadth and context, not to mention the significance, of her work. As one Soviet literary historian starkly summarizes the paradox her writings present, “Her work rarely meets the standard even of the average literary output of the time. . . . But everybody was interested in everything the Empress wrote and published.” ³⁷ The didactic tone of her writings has aged poorly, but in her day, together with most writers in a variety of genres, Catherine actively published in what Cynthia Whittaker has termed the literature of justification and advice between the monarch and her elite.³⁸ Catherine never claimed to be a literary writer, a position that was socially beneath her. Although she wrote in many genres, her memoirs and letters, especially to Voltaire, are among Catherine’s best writing, lively and polished. The integration of her writings with her life and rule ideally ought to address not only their literary quality and policy significance at the time but also their quantity, variety, and complex political, historical, and cultural functions, the sum of which she meant to transcend her era.³⁹ However, we still lack a comprehensive account, a complete collection, or even a complete bibliography of her writings.⁴⁰

Catherine wrote on politics, Russian history, education, economics, and linguistics; she wrote thousands of letters, more than two dozen plays and operas, the first Russian children’s literature, memoirs, and journalism. Fluent in Russian, French, and German, she published a good deal in Russia and abroad, in French and in translations, often “anonymously.” In this way, Catherine promoted an enlightened Russia and its monarch together, and defended them against their many foreign critics, on a European historical, political, social, cultural, and intellectual stage.

In 1767, in a direct challenge to the largely negative opinions about Russia in Europe, she opened her most influential work, the Great Instruction, to the Legislative Commission, with the pronouncement that “Russia is a European power.” By this she meant that she was a monarch subject to natural laws, rather than an absolute, Asiatic despot, as Russia’s critics maintained. For this compilation of her recommendations on the proper government of Russia, she borrowed extensively from her reading of the best and latest in European political thinking: Spirit of the Laws (1748) by Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), a comparison of relations between the state and the people in various nations, and On Crimes and Punishments (1764) by Cesare Beccaria (1735–93), a critique of penal systems. Like her predecessors, Catherine failed in the long overdue codification of Russia’s laws, last done in 1649. But she published her ideas for all of Europe to read: in Russian and German parallel texts, and also in Russian, Latin, German, and French in one volume, and by 1780, in English, Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Greek translations. In her lifetime, the Instructionwent through seven Russian editions and eight French editions, though it was banned in France.

The scholarship that exists on her writings places a premium on publication and readership that makes the memoirs, never published or read in her lifetime, marginal to her writing.⁴¹ This is to misunderstand what writing meant to Catherine and her contemporaries in the eighteenth century. Catherine’s writing was as much an activity as a concrete result, as much a verb as a noun. In a letter to her erstwhile correspondent Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1807), she evokes the ambience of the French Enlightenment salon: “I have told you a thousand times that I never write to you, I chat with you.”⁴² Catherine wrote in an era that valued informal, as well as formal, writing and also reading aloud as social activities among society’s leading arbiters of literary taste.⁴³ Thus, the first and second parts of Catherine’s middle memoir begin with dedications that evoke social conversation. In another example, like many such letters between luminaries then and now, her correspondence with Voltaire was meant to be read in private and aloud by others and only eventually published, which it was in 1785 in France, in 1797 in Russia, and thereafter in many editions and translations.⁴⁴ Letters were closely allied with conversation and thus resembled a performance.⁴⁵ Catherine continues to project a somewhat protean, ambiguous image because she wrote in an era that valued the nuances of addressing an audience appropriately, as in the art of conversation, a topic of her memoirs. Catherine’s real success as a writer in French and in Russian to addressees ranging from Voltaire, whom she never met, to Potemkin, in all his different roles, to future unknown readers of her memoirs reflects her reputed talent for both judging and pleasing her audience.

In the eighteenth century, many things were written and read without being published, but this did not diminish their importance or influence. ⁴⁶ On the contrary, the aristocratic elite could substantially aid the careers of professional writers, who were usually of a lower social class, by admitting them to salons where their works could circulate socially. In this intimate literary life, writers might publish anonymously, as Catherine did, or under pseudonyms, and still generally be known as the authors of their works. Writers also worked collaboratively, and salons could produce novels. In 1767, while traveling on the Volga, Catherine translated into Russian Chapter 9 (“On the Ruler”) of Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire (1766), which was dedicated to her and banned in France. She wrote Marmontel a description of the translation process that underscores its informal, unprofessional, and social aspects: who translated which chapters, that Count Shuvalov arrived too late and therefore had to write the dedication, and that they decided to keep the unevenness of the translation to indicate the desire to translate Bélisaire, even in “those who had never in their life worked as professional translators.” ⁴⁷ Her Great Instruction (1767) and Antidote (1770) were collaborative, as were her operas and her historical and her linguistic projects, and many of her writings were meant to be both read and heard.⁴⁸

Even without an audience in her lifetime for her memoirs, Catherine wrote them in French for a future readership that she imagined as part of the literary tradition in which she worked. Catherine followed a French tradition of worldly writing of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, by women as well as men, for educated readers in society.⁴⁹ At the same time, she recognized the classical hierarchy, articulated in Nicolas Boileau-Depréaux’s The Art of Poetry (1674), which ranked poetry as more serious than prose and praised the imitation of the classics and translations. For this reason, she tried hard, unsuccessfully, to learn to write poetry.⁵⁰ In the eighteenth century and earlier, literature was a more capacious concept than it is today; it embraced such nonfiction genres as speeches, sermons, and pamphlets. For example, Catherine’s Great Instruction, a compilation of political theory by others that includes almost exact copies of 294 of Montesquieu’s 526 articles in his Spirit of the Laws, was long considered her greatest literary achievement.⁵¹ In a remarkably fluid and dynamic literary era, Catherine wrote constantly in many genres, and paradoxically claimed not to take her writing seriously, even though she greatly valued her time. In a letter in 1789 that serves as one of her several verbal self-portraits, she manages both to emphasize and dismiss her writings: “As for my writings, I consider them trifles, I enjoyed attempting different genres, it seems to me that all I have done is rather mediocre, moreover I have never attached any importance to them, except as amusement.”⁵² In the social context of worldly writing for which she wrote, it would have been unseemly to appear to take herself seriously. Thus the memoirs entertain as they instruct, and hide the fact that Catherine planned, researched, wrote, revised, rewrote, and edited them.

In Russia, the private circulation of memoir manuscripts, practiced until quite recently, assured the influence of these works among the political, social, and literary elite without publication.⁵³ In fact, the impossibility of publishing these memoirs, combined with the identity of their author, made them even more important. Upon Catherine’s death in 1796, the last memoir was found in an envelope addressed in Russian: “To his Imperial Highness, Tsesarevich and Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, to my beloved son.” Although the other memoirs were found in her bureau, Emperor Paul I showed the memoir addressed to him to only one other person, his friend Vice Chancellor Prince Alexander Kurakin (1752–1818), who made himself a copy. In 1818, Alexander Turgenev (1785–1845) made a second copy from Kurakin’s, from which all subsequent copies were made. In 1824, at least two more copies were made, and Kurakin’s brother gave his copy to Paul I’s widow, Empress Maria Fedorovna (1759–1828). With Alexander I’s death, in 1825, a small group of the elite attempted a coup, the Decembrist Rebellion, and upon his succession, Nicholas I instituted a repressive era lasting thirty years. He read and resealed the memoirs, and had all copies confiscated. Yet somehow Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) himself managed to make a copy (in 1831–32), which Nicholas sealed upon the poet’s death. ⁵⁴ With his ascension in 1855, Alexander II read the memoirs, and again a couple of copies began to circulate. Their publication in London in 1859 was a major political coup for the radical writer and publisher Alexander Herzen, himself the author of the great nineteenth-century Russian memoir My Past and Thoughts (1852–68). For nearly fifty years, Russian scholars on Catherine quoted the memoirs from Herzen’s edition as extensively as censors allowed, that Russians might at least taste some of this forbidden fruit, until after the 1905 revolution, when censorship was eased and all her memoirs were published. Yet Catherine had a larger audience in mind than just her elite Russian circle that read French, for in the final memoir, she writes Russian phrases and then translates them into French, one indication that she imagined her future audience as foreign.

Catherine had at her disposal an unusual array of genres, means, and opportunities to manage her reputation, from emissaries to salons to letters to publication, informal and formal, unsigned and signed, abroad and at home, in Russian, French, and German. But as with her memoirs, she also looked beyond her place and time. Central to her writing practice was an understanding of herself as making history, which made everything she did significant. Yet her daily schedule, conversations, and collective authorship could be appreciated by future historians only if written down. Publication was less important because historians would eventually find her manuscripts. Catherine’s desire to leave a carefully designed personal record explains her great concern both with burning letters and papers and with preserving them.

Catherine was a prodigious writer in life, but in the middle and especially the final memoirs, she develops her reputation as a serious reader. The path her early reading took had important implications for the later variety, subjects, and genres of her writings. These memoirs contain several portentous scenes in her youth that predict Catherine’s destiny, which is a standard feature of professional memoirs.⁵⁵ In her final memoir, Catherine constructs a striking and partially apocryphal prophetic moment when at the age of fifteen, in 1745, in St. Petersburg, for the first time everything—writing, reading, thinking, and ruling—comes together for her. Thus the Swedish Count Gyllenborg had recognized her talent and “very philosophical turn of mind,” and recommended that she read the classics—Plutarch’s Lives, Montesquieu, and especially Cicero—to steer her mind through the temptations and vicissitudes of court life. Catherine reassured him by ordering the books and writing a character sketch to demonstrate her self-knowledge, “Portrait of the Philosopher at Age Fifteen.” A letter to her mother in 1750 reveals that Catherine took being a philosopher to heart and that to her it meant using her mind and being something of a stoic: “I am as philosophical as possible, no passion makes me act.” ⁵⁶ In 1766, now a philosopher-queen, she wrote to Gyllenborg that “the desire to accomplish ‘great deeds’ ” had resulted from their conversations.⁵⁷ However, in the middle memoir, Catherine writes that she has difficulty getting the books and that they bore her, until two years later she finds and reads Plutarch. In her early memoir, from 1756, she never mentions any reading; instead she traces all the difficulties of her life at court, leading to an aborted suicide attempt. Perhaps, in the two memoirs that Catherine wrote after she was in power, it became important for her both to be, and to be seen to be, well-read, which added depth to her Enlightenment credentials.

The final memoir therefore carefully describes the path her reading took, from literature to political philosophy and history, as she educated herself. Once married, she reads novels for a year, beginning with the chivalric romance Tiran the Fair. She then happens on the letters of Madame de Sévigné (1626–96) to her daughter, considered the epitome of the epistolary art, before discovering Voltaire by the end of 1746. After 1749, when the kindly, learned Ivan Shuvalov (1727–97) became Elizabeth’s favorite, Catherine had use of his excellent library. ⁵⁸ She polished off the ten-volume History of Germany by Father Barre in two months and embarked on Plato. In 1753, she read the four-volume Historical and Critical Dictionary by Pierre Bayle, the most popular work among educated readers in the eighteenth century. It was central to the philosophes’ (and Catherine’s) practice of writing often, about diverse and current subjects, for the general reader, and “for a literary culture focused not on the production of ‘great works’ but on rapid exchange, on provocation and response.”⁵⁹ With her foray into English-style satirical journalism in 1769, she encouraged this kind of give-and-take with journalist and publisher Nikolai Novikov.⁶⁰ In 1770, in Antidote, she aggressively sparred with Chappe d’Auteroche’s negative portrait of Russia and Russians in his Voyage in Siberia (1768). Her plays, too, provided a means for portraying Russians as average, decent people. In their correspondence with one another, Catherine and the philosophes share their writings on current events, and she addresses the burning questions of the day. Given this shared Enlightenment practice of lively, frequent writing, it is less surprising that Catherine wrote several memoirs and many autobiographical jottings and letters than that she revised, rewrote, and edited them.

According to the final memoir, the next formative period of Catherine’s education came in 1754, when she read her way out of postpartum depression after the birth of Paul, and acquired the historical and political cast of mind appropriate for an enlightened ruler. She read Voltaire’s Essay on Universal History, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Tacitus’s Roman history, Baronio’s Ecclesiastical History, and more, in French and especially in Russian. She matured intellectually: “I began to see more things with a black outlook and to seek the causes that really underlay and truly shaped the different interests in the affairs that I observed.” This reading proved formative for her Great Instruction. At the end of the memoir, in 1759, she is reading the first volumes of A General History ofVoyages and the Encyclopedia (1751–72) by Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83). Nine days after her coup, on July 6, 1762, she extended to Diderot an offer to publish the Encyclopedia in Russia at her expense, a grand gesture in a bid to gain friends by offending France, which had stopped its publication twice. Though he refused, Catherine’s magnanimous gestures impressed the philosophes and established her reputation with them. In 1765 she purchased Diderot’s library, and in 1778 that of Voltaire. Through intermediaries, in 1762 she invited d’Alembert to tutor her son, and in 1767, her lover, Orlov, invited Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) to live on his estate, most likely with Catherine’s permission. The speed, consistency, and vision with which Catherine moved to claim her intellectual spoils once on the throne are stunning.

The “invisible hand” that guided Catherine in her letter to Hanbury-Williams in 1756 was history, or history as she had read it, especially as the philosophes understood and wrote the history of rulers. These rulers, and the histories of them, served Catherine as models for thinking about her own life and her memoirs as history. In 1762, in her first letter to d’Alembert, Catherine acknowledges his refusal to be her son’s tutor and compares herself to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–89, reigned 1632–54). ⁶¹ Catherine had read and annotated d’Alembert’s Mémoires et réflexions sur Christine, reine de Suède (1753), which presents a model life for a woman ruler that attracted and challenged Catherine. One of the most noted learned women of Europe, Christina corresponded with the philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and invited him to Sweden. Doubtless, Count Gyllenborg had Christina in mind as he advised Catherine on her education. D’Alembert argues that despite Christina’s abdication in 1654, her life is worthy, “not in her reckless love of glory and conquests, but in the grandeur of her soul, in her talent for rule, in the knowledge of men, in the expansiveness of her views, and in her enlightened taste for the sciences and arts.”⁶² Like d’Alembert, Voltaire emphasizes the individual and culture in his histories of great rulers—Henry IV (1553–1610), Louis XIV (1638–1715), Charles XII (1682–1718) of Sweden, and Peter the Great—and their contributions to the overall progress of mankind. Under Louis XIV, Voltaire connects the flowering of the arts and humanities with his rule and with the prominence of educated women in French society.

While Catherine purposefully and selectively published many of her writings during her lifetime, the continuous stream of the whole of her writing, including her unpublished memoirs, served the still larger purpose of the future professional history of her reign. When Catherine thanks Voltaire for The History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great, commissioned by Shuvalov in 1757, she discusses the business of writing history. ⁶³ She writes that had she been Empress when he was writing, she would have given him “many other memoirs,” and that she is collecting Peter’s papers and letters, “in which he paints a picture of himself,” for publication.⁶⁴ Catherine proposed materials to Voltaire for him to write Le Siècle de Catherine II.⁶⁵ Catherine’s handwriting, in documents described as in “her own hand” and “written by herself,” does more than ascertain authorship; it is fundamental to her overall historical project. Like Peter’s letters, about which Catherine uses Horace’s metaphor from the Ars Poetica for writing as painting, these writings would create her self-portrait as an individual and a ruler. From the very beginning of her reign, Catherine actively supported the collection and publication of Russian historical documents, and similarly thought about the future of her own papers.

Central to the mutual interests of Catherine and the philosophes were the mind and character of Catherine, precisely the declared subject of her final memoir in its opening maxim. This memoir in particular is therefore an Enlightenment document that reflects Catherine’s nature as a ruler through her evaluations of Peter III and Elizabeth, and through her own actions as Grand Duchess. In his history of Peter the Great, Voltaire saw evidence for the tremendous difference one ruler could make in a nation as a lesson in reform for Europe. Despite disagreements among thephilosophes about the dangers of a strong monarch, which was a necessary evil in their programs for reform, Catherine captured their imagination as a “great man” of her age, who might in their lifetime inscribe an enlightened government on the tabula rasa of the Russian state.⁶⁶ She read their works, and could bring to life their ideas—for rational, secular government and for natural laws, inalienable rights, and a social contract. She promoted Russia and herself shamelessly, but only Diderot accepted her invitation to visit Russia in 1773–74, and he left disillusioned, as Catherine later read in his posthumous memoirs.⁶⁷ Her famous response to his theories was that rulers must “work on human skin.” ⁶⁸ More successful was her extensive correspondence with Diderot’s friend Grimm, who was in St. Petersburg in 1773; after many conversations, they began a relatively informal, wide-ranging exchange that lasted until her death. Her letters contain her responses to his biweekly newsletter,Literary Correspondence (1753–90), with new works and French news that was sent to fifteen royal subscribers, who like Catherine (who subscribed in 1764) were heads of state and nobles in central and eastern Europe. The French Revolution brought an end to Grimm’s newsletter and to Catherine’s support for the philosophes, whose radical ideas she held responsible for attacks on monarchy, and she banned their books. She of course disappointed them by not living up to their ideals. Yet, just as she balanced their theories with the exigencies of rule, the philosophes also made compromises to have the ear and generous support of one of Europe’s most powerful rulers.

In practice, during her thirty-four-year reign, Catherine maintained absolute rule as she consolidated control over Russia’s administration and vast lands by organizing them in a consistent manner. Although the memoirs take place before her reign, Catherine nevertheless carefully projects the ability and reasonable behavior necessary for an enlightened, absolute Russian ruler. She institutionalized Peter the Great’s reforms, thus building a solid foundation for the Russia of the next two centuries. She continued his, Elizabeth’s, and Peter III’s secularization of Russia by subordinating the Orthodox Church’s land and serfs to the state, in a decree she first published abroad in French (1764). Like her predecessors, Catherine attempted long-overdue legal reforms, including the codification of existing laws and the establishment of legal training, through the elected Legislative Commission (1767–68), a consultative process that allowed her to consolidate her position but also cost Catherine her ambition to undo serfdom.

Relations with her advisers and the nobility were central to her hold on power, and Peter III and the coup had raised their expectations. Catherine’s reign has been referred to as “the golden age of the Russian nobility,” and her memoirs indicate her willingness to please those upon whom she depended.⁶⁹ In particular, Peter III had freed the nobility from compulsory service to the state (1762), which Catherine agreed to only when she reorganized the nobility into a more independent, privileged body (1785). At the same time, Catherine used the nobility to institute a system of local administrative control over extensive, sparsely populated territory (1775). This problem became especially urgent after the plague in Moscow (1770–72) that killed 120,000, and which together with Pugachev’s armed uprisings (1773–74) in the southern borderlands reaching up to Kazan challenged her authority. In this period she wrote her second memoir, of which parts 1 and 2 begin with cheerful dedications to friends. With much the same deceptively light tone, she wrote many letters to Voltaire concerning these problems, and in 1772 she wrote her first plays, five social comedies, beginning with O These Times!, where only the title hints at the situation in Moscow, where the play is set.

To implement her administrative reforms of the 1770s and 1780s and create more qualified civil servants and useful citizens, Catherine, with Ivan Betskoi (1704–95), promoted universal general education. They published the General Plan for the Education of Young People of Both Sexes(1764) abroad in French with Diderot’s help, and the Statute of National Schools (1786). Her own pedagogical writings for young people included a Russian primer for reading, which was a bestseller and the first Russian work translated into English (1781); the first Russian children’s literature, written for her grandsons, translated into German, French, and English (1781, 1783), one tale of which she then made into an opera (Fevei, 1786); a collection of Russian proverbs (many of which she composed) for children (1783); her Notes Concerning Russian History (1783–84); and herInstruction to Prince Saltykov on educating her grandsons (1784). ⁷⁰

Catherine inherited a country exhausted by the Seven Years’ War against Prussia (1756–63), which forms the background to the conclusion of her final memoir. She took control of foreign policy from the outset of her reign, dispensing with a chancellor for foreign affairs, and built on Peter the Great’s military legacy. She centralized the financial administration, which allowed for budgetary planning and a national debt to pay for the costs of wars. In pursuit of a Prussophile foreign policy, Peter III had ended the war by ceding Russia’s gains back to Prussia, which Catherine used against him to justify her coup; nevertheless, she then maintained the alliance. Russia won new territories in two wars with Turkey (1768–74 and 1787–91), which, after her victory over Prussia in the Seven Years’ War, cemented her reputation in Europe as a major power. Russia had long guarded itself in the north through alliances first with Austria (1746), then briefly with France while fighting Prussia (1756), and then with Prussia (1764), in the so-called Northern Alliance. But southern acquisitions played into Catherine’s wish to regain Constantinople from Islam for Eastern Christianity, and she turned again secretly to Austria (1781).

The last expansion of Russia on this scope had happened in the sixteenth century, under the first Czar, Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (1530–84). Catherine expanded the Russian Empire to the south, adding Walachia and Moldavia (1770–74), and the Crimea (1783) and other lands north of the Black Sea, where she continued Peter the Great’s priority of building a naval fleet. As part of the spoils of war, Catherine shared out Poland in three successive partitions (1772, 1793, 1795), and the rest of Ukraine, White Russia, and Lithuania. Catherine handed out conquered lands with serfs as rewards and she encouraged immigration because she believed that agriculture and an adequate farming population formed the basis of a successful economy. When she died, in 1796, her armies were poised to take over Georgia and Armenia, and she had ordered up 60,000 troops to join with Britain in an attack on France. Though Catherine was called “Great” during her reign in recognition of the above achievements, she always refused honorific titles in her lifetime.⁷¹

CATHERINE’S CULTURAL OFFENSIVE

It is hard to overestimate Catherine’s attention and sensitivity to what was written abroad about Russia and herself, and her ceaseless work to influence foreign opinion through her writings and emissaries. Her middle and final memoirs certainly belong in this context, a genre of foreign writings that Russian scholars term “Russica,” which partly explains her decision to write them in French.⁷² Russia’s enemies throughout the eighteenth century were Sweden, Turkey, and, behind the scenes, France. Catherine fought France in part through words—via her representatives, articles in the press, political and historical books, and her correspondence, especially with Voltaire.⁷³ As with everything Catherine wrote, the fact that she was a writer demonstrated her explicit argument that Russia and Russians were civilized and that she was an enlightened ruler.

Catherine persistently engaged her French critics from the very beginning of her reign. In her first letter to Voltaire, in 1763, Catherine wrote: “I will respond to the prophecy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by giving him a most rude refutation, I hope, for as long as I live.” ⁷⁴ In The Social Contract(1762), Rousseau disagreed with Voltaire’s hopeful assessment of Russia’s future in the first volume of The History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great (1759). Rousseau saw no chance for progress in Russia because Peter the Great had crushed the desire for liberty, which had to develop naturally in the people. Yet even Voltaire thought that before Peter the Great, Russia had been a barbaric country. Encouraged directly by Shuvalov and indirectly by Catherine, Voltaire softened his negative assessments of Russia. Catherine’s correspondence with Voltaire, which, after proceeding at the rate of a handful of letters each year, increased to about forty letters each in 1770 and 1771 during the war with Turkey, as she spread her version of the war. Her letters to Mme. Geoffrin promoted Russia too, as for example when she writes: “For the past two months I have been busy working three hours every morning on the laws of this empire. It is an immense undertaking. But people in your country have many incorrect ideas about Russia.”⁷⁵ Throughout her reign, Catherine’s Great Instruction served as her most important credential in Europe that she was indeed an enlightened ruler. Indeed, the existence of her Great Instruction and the Legislative Commission confirmed that laws governed her reign.

In Russia, Catherine banned accounts of her coup, and in France, she suppressed publication by Claude Carloman de Rulhière (1734–91), the former secretary at the French embassy, of his History or Anecdotes on the Revolution in Russia in the Year 1762.⁷⁶Rulhière’s portraits of Peter and Catherine, though sympathetic, had nuances that Catherine would vigorously dispute indirectly through her middle and final memoirs. Rulhière’s History was well-known because of readings in the salons of Mme. Geoffrin and the Duc de Choiseul, the French foreign minister (served 1758– 70), Catherine’s outspoken opponent. To stop the readings, she turned to Voltaire, Diderot, and Mme. Geoffrin. Written in 1768, the work fed general European skepticism about Catherine’s chances of staying on the throne, given the series of coups in Russia.

Catherine responded most energetically to Chappe d’Auteroche’s Voyage in Siberia, about his voyage to Russia and Siberia in 1761–62 at the behest of the French Academy, which he published at the urging of Choiseul. Despite his positive references to Catherine’s reforms, Chappe d’Auteroche, like Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Rulhière before him, insisted on the barbaric nature of the Russian people. His account of Catherine’s coup, which could only be secondhand, as he left St. Petersburg in May 1762, coincided with Rulhière’s History and thus angered Catherine.⁷⁷ Catherine’s Antidote makes more than a dozen references to herself and her Instruction, and a rebuttal to Rulhière’s assertion that she did nothing as Grand Duchess finds its way into Catherine’s final memoir. The promised third volume of Antidote never appeared. Instead, in 1771 she began to write her middle memoir, as another kind of defense of herself and Russia against Rulhière as well as Chappe d’Auteroche. Her autobiographical mode of writing continued in her lifelong literary, political correspondence (1774–96) with Grimm; the letters contain numerous autobiographical passages that echo her middle and final memoirs. Other later French works that aroused Catherine’s ire included History of the Two Indies (1781) by Abbé Raynal (1713–96), an indictment of slavery and despotism that influenced A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow(1790) by Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802), for which the author was exiled.⁷⁸ Catherine’s constant vigilance against French historiography of Russia shaped the polemical subtext of many of her writing projects, including the memoirs.

At the same time, these foreigners’ criticisms spurred Catherine on with an enormous cultural and scientific agenda. With her eye on Voltaire, France, and Europe, Catherine laid the institutional foundation for Russia’s extraordinary cultural leap forward in the nineteenth century in literature, art, architecture, music, and theater. The memoirs often mention the cultural amusements at Elizabeth’s court, but Catherine aimed much higher, and beginning with her coronation ceremonies, she immediately established and publicized a brilliant court life as the center for Russian culture.⁷⁹While she rejected Chappe d’Auteroche’s opinion that the levels of Russian science, scholarship, and letters were low, in 1768 she ordered the Academy of Sciences to make expeditions, reports, illustrations, and maps in a survey of Russia. ⁸⁰ Surveys brought back accounts of different languages, and in the 1780s, when the British discovery of Sanskrit made comparative linguistics fashionable, Catherine established a research project to assemble a comparative dictionary of all the languages, not only in the Russian empire but worldwide, which she published.⁸¹

At home, historical debates coalesced against German historiography of Russia. In response, Catherine first supported, and later wrote, Russian history herself. While Catherine’s historical writing has been uniformly dismissed as naïve plagiarism, her activity as a historian promoted the development of Russian historiography, in its infancy in the eighteenth century, and shaped the writing of her final memoir as a historical document. As Antidote makes clear, most eighteenth-century foreigners had little direct knowledge of Russia and relied on the accounts of travelers who spoke no Russian. Yet Russia had few scholars, and most of these were German. Their so-called Norman theory about the foreign origin of the Russian state provoked a nationalist backlash against the Germans and galvanized Russians to take up their history, which Catherine fully supported.⁸²Under Catherine, publications included Peter the Great’s correspondence, the chronicles of Russia’s early history (1767–92), the first modern historical narrative of Russian history by a Russian, Russian History from the Earliest Times (1768) by Vasily Tatishchev (1686–1750), and more than eighty historical works that created the first public forum for Russian historiography. She bought historians’ collections of books and documents; she ordered the systematic, statistical description of the Russian empire; and she had documents collected for an account of Russia’s diplomatic history.⁸³

Catherine was of course personally interested in Russian history, and her transition to writing history in the 1780s and subsequent return to her memoirs reflect that concern. In a letter to Grimm in 1778, she had written, “Who is this best poet or best historian of my empire? It is certainly not me, as I have never written either verse or history.” ⁸⁴ But as if to rectify this omission in her writing, in 1779 she created a commission to gather documents and prepare notes for her own use. ⁸⁵ Catherine got no further than the fourteenth century; in letters to Grimm in 1794, for example, she mentions that “I’ve reached the year 1368 or 1369” and complains that Ivan Elagin’s (1725–93) historical essay ends with 1389.⁸⁶ She wrote Notes Concerning Russian History (1783–84), based on Tatishchev’s history, for her grandsons and the general reader, and rebutted Russia’s critics: “These notes concerning Russian history were composed for youth at a time when books on so-called Russian history are being published in foreign languages, which should rather be called prejudiced works.”⁸⁷ In the 1790s, Catherine continued to work on, along with her memoirs, her history, while overseeing its translation into German. In 1794, when she began the final memoir, she wrote to Grimm that “the passion for history has carried away my pen.”⁸⁸ Thus this final memoir became much more a historical document than her previous memoirs.

CATHERINE’S HISTORICAL LEGACY

After Catherine’s death in 1796, historians were not as fortunate as Voltaire had predicted they would be with Catherine’s legacy because of political circumstances and the still underdeveloped nature of Russian historiography. ⁸⁹ Under the repressive rule of her son, Paul I (reigned 1796–1801), and her grandsons Alexander I (reigned 1801–25) and Nicholas I (reigned 1825–55), historians did not have access to her papers.⁹⁰ Unable to write recent history, Russia’s budding historians continued to work on history before 1700. Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), Russia’s first imperial historiographer, left off at the year 1611 in his twelve-volume History of the Russian State (1818–29), recently reissued and still a bestseller.⁹¹ In contrast, under Catherine, there had been a boom in Russian and translated biographies of Peter the Great, with twenty-four in all and eight in 1788 alone.⁹² It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century, after the death in 1855 of the reactionary Nicholas I, that a handful of historians had the material, training, and skill to write full histories of Russia that reached Catherine’s reign.⁹³ However, no full history of Catherine and her reign has ever been published in Russia. In the one major attempt, Vasily Bilbasov (1838–1904), due to problems with the censors, published only the first two volumes (covering 1729–64) of History of Catherine II, and volume 12 (on publications abroad about her) (1890–96).⁹⁴

The void of information on her reign left by serious history was filled by European popular biographies that include such lurid titles as The Secret History of the Loves and Principal Lovers of Catherine II, Empress of Russia (1799), The Romance of an Empress(1892), The Favorites of Catherine the Great (1947), and The Passions and Lechery of Catherine the Great (1971). The most salacious representations of Catherine are primarily French and British. In France, the tradition of Salic law prohibited women rulers; moreover, the backlash against the beheading of Marie Antoinette in 1793 affected Catherine’s European reception as a woman on the throne. Catherine’s first two scholarly biographers set the tone and provided the material for later works. In his very negative The Life of Catherine II, Empress of Russia (1797), the French journalist Jean-Henri Castéra was most influenced by the recent publication of Rulhière’s long-suppressed account of her 1762 coup and interviews with those who had been at Catherine’s court. He portrays all of her actions as undertaken for the sake of trysts with her lovers rather than for politics and survival. His English translator, Tooke, doubled the size of the book by adding much scholarly material from German and Russian histories that substantially corrected Castéra’s bias against both Russia and England; Castéra then retranslated it back into French with his own improvements. The biography was banned in Russia, but Russian translations circulated in manuscript. ⁹⁵ Along with many false details, Tooke also describes secret, true events, such as Catherine’s plans with Hanbury-Williams and Count Bestuzhev-Riumin, her decisive meeting with Empress Elizabeth after Bestuzhev’s arrest, and Paul’s uncertain parentage, that her unpublished letters and memoirs (to which he did not have access) corroborate.⁹⁶ In Russia, Catherine’s posthumous supporters and detractors published biographies, memoirs about her reign, and some of her letters, that together with the circulation of manuscript copies of her final memoir ensured that the “whispering culture” of court life contributed to the consolidation of her reputation in the nineteenth century.⁹⁷

However, already in 1859, when the publication of her papers could finally begin in earnest under Alexander II (reigned 1855–81), Herzen made clear in his introduction to her memoirs that the interest in Catherine would become irrelevant before the tide of history. “In perusing these memoirs, the reader is astonished to find one thing constantly lost sight of, even to the extent of not appearing anywhere—it is Russia and the People.” Considered by some an enlightened despot in her time, Catherine was now condemned as a thorough hypocrite who cynically claimed to rule in the best interest of her people while actually expanding the institution of serfdom. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and Alexander II’s reforms began a cycle of disappointed expectations for progressive political change, and an increasingly radicalized Russian intellectual life fomented the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when sixty years of Russian scholarship about Catherine effectively ended. Soviet Marxist historians rejected not only biographies but also the study of individual rulers, the nobility, and the eighteenth century, and instead studied class conflict.

Recent scholarship on Catherine and her reign has created fertile ground for a reassessment of Catherine’s memoirs as more than the tale of a colorful life at court or an unwitting condemnation of the Russian autocracy. In the West, the publication of ten editions of two translations of the memoirs in English in the 1950s presaged the renewed scholarly interest in Catherine in the 1960s, as Western scholars gained access to Soviet libraries and archives for the first time. Isabel de Madariaga’s Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981) is an unsurpassed foundational study, the first in nearly one hundred years; her Catherine the Great: A Short History (1990) is for a general audience. In Russia, only with the fall of communism in the late 1980s did serious work on Catherine and her reign recommence, beginning with the publication of her memoirs in 1989 (last published in 1907), followed by four separate editions in 1990 alone. Drawing on her unpublished archival papers, scholars have written on modernity in the eighteenth century, Catherine’s diplomacy in the Polish partitions, and her correspondence with Potemkin.⁹⁸ The international boom in studies of Catherine celebrated the 200th anniversary of her death in 1996 with conferences, essay collections, and performances.⁹⁹ Another handful of English translations of her writings, as well as studies of her court, the memoirs, her image and the arts, and an intellectual biography, are in progress. Several scholarly biographies that successfully integrate politics with her life have freed the memoirs from their role in novelized histories.¹⁰⁰ This translation and preface foreground her writing in her life and reign and balance literary and historical approaches to the memoirs. At the very least, these projects have cleared the way to write about the real issues of Catherine’s reign, without reiterating the cynical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ad feminam canards that disputed her command of French, authorship of her writings (especially the letters to Voltaire), her control over her favorites, her political acumen, and the importance of her intellectual life to her policies.

However, the perception of Catherine is not only an issue for scholars, but formed a central organizing focus for Catherine throughout her reign, especially in her writing. Ultimately, the memoirs raise questions about Catherine as a woman, as Empress, and as a writer, and about the problem of her image, which she projected and attempted to control in all the media of her day, from publications, coins, paintings, and her collections, to palaces, gardens, and spectacles. Recent feminist biographical studies of Marie Antoinette and women in nineteenth-century France eschew the story line of traditional biography, organized around defining personal characteristics, in favor of an approach that foregrounds the representations of women, their bodies, and femininity.¹⁰¹ Catherine’s life seems ideal for such an antinarrative—a rich, active,

provocative life that refuses to cohere into a single story. ¹⁰² In fact, Catherine herself seems to have preempted her biographers by having written several different memoirs over fifty years that reflect her continuous attempts to explain the first half of her life. Just as there is no single memoir, there is no one Catherine. The memoirs represent different Catherines years apart. Larger than life, she made her mark in so many areas that any synthesis of Catherine as a woman, as Empress, and as a writer remains incomplete, in part because Catherine herself is elusive, despite, or perhaps because of, all she wrote—especially her memoirs. The urge to find the unguarded Catherine in her memoirs persists, not only because it makes her a more attractive person and less a cunning politician, but also because her pleasant, direct tone invites us to see her as honest and sincere.

THE VARIOUS MEMOIRS

As the first biographies of Catherine demonstrate, much in the memoirs was not news, and Catherine surely knew this. How she wrote turns out to be as important as what she wrote. Although she wrote some autobiographical notes in Russian, Catherine’s decision to write her three main memoirs in French reflects practical and philosophical concerns. She wrote an early character sketch for a Swede and the first memoir for an Englishman; French was their common language. Later, as Empress, she constantly fought against her image in contemporary French historiography and hoped to influence future histories about her reign. French was the European and Enlightenment lingua franca, and the language of the major memoirs and biographies she read. She used French as a European polyglot.¹⁰³ Fluent in French, Russian, and German, mixing them for added effect, she adapted herself in language, style, and substance to her audience.

Aside from the significance of her choice of French, the literary aspects of the memoirs include their organization, especially at the beginning and end, unifying ideas and themes, and her use of autobiographical genres and of language. Each memoir presents a different kind of verbal portrait of Catherine. Over the course of fifty years of writing, she learned to write memoirs, transforming a static character sketch into a chronology of events with short stories and digressions set within an overall long narrative arc. Moreover, through the process of writing, her notions of her self and the memoirs in relation to history continued to evolve. The memoirs thus reflect a highly developed autobiographical consciousness.

She began writing about herself for others as an exercise in self-knowledge. The lifelong importance she attached to knowing oneself comes through in her self-portraits and criticisms of Peter III in the three main memoirs. Her first account of herself was her 1745 “Portrait of a Philosopher” written for Count Gyllenborg. In the middle memoir, she titles it “Rough Sketch of the Philosopher’s Character at Age Fifteen,” and explains:

I found this document in 1757 and I confess that I was surprised that at the age of fifteen I already had such a deep understanding of the many facets of my soul, and I saw that this piece was profoundly reflective and that in 1757 I could not find a word to add to it, nor in thirteen years had I made any discovery about myself that I had not already known at age fifteen. [61]

This description is similar to her self-portrait in an undated one-page fragment that still exists. It begins with her birth, parents, governess, and education, and breaks off with the following sentences: “I was instructed in the Lutheran religion, I was horribly curious, quite stubborn, and most ingratiating, I had a good heart, I was very sensitive, I cried easily, I was extremely fickle. I never liked dolls, but quite liked any kind of exercise, there was no boy more daring than I, I was proud to be that and often I hid my fear, shame produced this impulse, I was quite secretive” (473).

In her later memoirs, Catherine incorporates such portraits of herself and others into her narrative. She draws out the central characteristics that motivate an individual’s actions, what in the eighteenth century were called the springs of behavior, or one’s character. Catherine here subscribes to the universalizing ideals of the Enlightenment, with its key words of “qualities,” “character,” and “mind” (esprit). Given her idea of human nature as unchanging, at age twenty-eight Catherine can claim to have understood herself fully at age fifteen. This is an Aristotelian notion of the individual who does not change with time and experience, but only reveals herself to be more thoroughly what she has always been. Education could significantly shape, but not change, someone’s nature. This view of human psychology differs significantly from post-Freudian notions, which posit fundamental, erupting, conflicting forces that can be traced back to childhood and continually evolve. In Catherine’s model, a child is in essence already a small adult. Thus in part, Catherine could start over each time she wrote a new memoir because as she understood herself, each memoir was the same portrait, only more so, no matter which particular incidents she chose to recount.

Catherine’s first sustained autobiographical narrative, like her subsequent memoirs, is a political or court memoir. She includes information about Russia that a foreigner might not know, and thus most likely she wrote it for Hanbury-Williams, who arrived at court in June 1755 and left in June 1757; their letters indicate that she trusted him with personal information. Court memoirs revolve around access to the ruler. At the end of this memoir, she explains to Hanbury-Williams: “You will perhaps find it necessary to criticize me, since seeing myself so badly treated, I never spoke with the Empress personally to justify myself against the thousand calumnies, lies, etc. etc. Know then that a thousand thousand times, I have asked to speak with her alone but she has never wanted to consent to it” (467). All the memoirs recount whatever Catherine or Elizabeth say to each other, their meals together, gestures toward each other, presents (including their value) to each other, who notices their contact, and the greatest honor, time alone with Elizabeth.¹⁰⁴Illnesses provide opportunities to show one’s affection and esteem. They exchange compliments—Catherine praising Elizabeth’s impressive appearance, Elizabeth commending Catherine’s religious observance and her Russian. Access was also reflected in physical proximity to the ruler, hence the importance of the relative location of Peter’s, Catherine’s, and her mother’s apartments in Elizabeth’s palaces. For example, Catherine is never closer to Elizabeth’s rooms than when she gives birth, a reflection of the importance of the event, though as Catherine learns, much to her chagrin, not of her own importance. Catherine’s eye for detail not only makes for vivid storytelling, but these details are the heart and soul of court memoirs, representing the language of favor and disfavor at court. Once the reader appreciates the importance of these details, the memoirs become a gripping, timeless tale of the endless rise and fall of political fortunes.

Written before Catherine’s coup, this first memoir, unlike the later ones, cannot be an attempt to justify herself on this question. Still, Catherine here deals with her Achilles’ heel before the coup. In their first conversation alone, the Empress verbally, and nearly physically, assaults Catherine for failing to produce an heir, which Elizabeth imagines as a plot against her at the behest of Catherine’s mother and Frederick the Great. Frustrated in her attempts to defend herself against endless intrigues, in her hasty conclusion Catherine provides the greatest possible self-justification for her existence. The narrative arc of this memoir concludes with the birth of her son, Paul, who finally provides Catherine with the security she desperately needs, and Elizabeth with an heir. Thus Catherine concludes: “It is true that since November 1754, I have changed my attitude. It has become more regal. They have grown more considerate of me and I have more peace than formerly” (468). Catherine’s greatly improved position increases her hopes for her political survival, with or without Peter, after Elizabeth’s death.

Although Catherine wrote her three main memoirs years apart and to make different points, scholars have tended to interpret all her memoirs through the lens of the final memoir as a justification for her coup. Thus the memoirs continue to support historians’ suspicions that Catherine is pulling the wool over their eyes. Simon Dixon suggestively proclaims, “Deafened by such self-justificatory overtones, we shall need something more than the memoirs if we are to penetrate the innermost recesses of her mind.” ¹⁰⁵ He sees the more vulnerable Catherine in her early correspondence, while Madariaga suggests that her more spontaneous voice can be found in her marginalia.¹⁰⁶ In contrast, Smith finds “some of the most honest, revealing glimpses into Catherine’s heart and mind” in her letters to Potemkin.¹⁰⁷ Barbara Heldt has dismissed the memoirs because Catherine is too self-confident and unwilling to reveal her doubts, which is apparently unrepresentative of women’s memoirs that are meant to document women’s oppression in their own words.¹⁰⁸ Though these judgments actually relate to the final memoir, they have been taken to explain all the memoirs.

Based on the abrupt ending of the final, most comprehensive memoir, scholars have interpreted the earlier memoirs as lesser fragments of an incomplete whole. In fact, the preeminent German translator of her memoirs interpolated all of them together chronologically into one memoir.¹⁰⁹However, the early memoir ends in December 1754, where the addressee (“you”) knows what happens, and thus, unlike the later memoirs, Catherine basically brings them up to the time of writing. It makes the most sense to treat her memoirs together and also as separate and even as distinct subgenres of autobiographical writing. While they all cover her life as Grand Duchess, they end differently and thus really tell different stories. Rhetorically, in conversations, stories, and the memoirs, she tends to sum up her point at the end. While her memoirs are incomplete, they are not unfinished. Though they seem structured by chronology alone, they are also organized rhetorically from the beginning to the end.

The memoirs also seem like parts of a fragmented whole because they contain many similarities. Catherine engaged in self-plagiarism, recycling phrases from margin notes, letters, and published polemics. Although the Academy edition lists 156 parallel passages between the various memoirs and notes, there are no exact parallels (741–50). For the middle and final memoirs, Catherine may have consulted earlier versions, notes, and probably a diary as she made outlines, wrote, and revised. An outline for the middle memoir has two parts written at different times; with some overlap, the first covers 1745–51, and the second is for 1749–50. In her final outline (translated and appended here), which goes from 1756–59, she crossed out events in the outline as she incorporated them in the memoir. And later, after she had experience writing Russian history, Catherine did research, using the newspapers and court journals of the time. The final memoir even contains a footnote to Büsching’s Magazin. Later, in the final memoir, in her account of her serious respiratory illness upon arriving in Russia in 1744, she elaborates on the circumstances, explaining that she became ill because of studying Russian at night while underdressed for the cold. This explanation derives from a story in the St. Petersburg Gazette,planted by her imperial supporters. These and other subtle textual differences nevertheless serve to distinguish the memoirs from one another as separate documents.

Most important, using similar subject matter, the memoirs tell different stories. Written many years apart, they subtly reflect Catherine’s immediate concerns at the time of writing. However, knowing when the memoirs were written is problematic because most are undated. A. N. Pypin made an extensive description of Catherine’s many autobiographical materials in the State Archives in the order that he found them, not how Catherine left them (731–41). Using dates and internal evidence, Pypin established their probable order. Based on internal evidence, Catherine most likely wrote the early memoir, covering 1729–54, around 1756. She probably began the final memoir around 1794; part 1 covers 1728–50, and part 2 continues with 1751 and ends in 1759.¹¹⁰ The dating of the three parts of the middle memoir, which covers 1728–50, is problematic. Part 1 begins with a heading in her hand on the first page: “Memoirs begun on April 21, 1771.” Catherine’s papers also contain two separate sheets with later dates. On one she wrote, “Memoirs begun in 1790. Part One,” which is followed by blank pages; on another she wrote, “Memoirs continued in 1791. Part Two,” which is followed by part 2 of the middle memoir. Using internal evidence from part 3, the editors of the Academy edition conclude that all three parts of the middle memoir, begun on Catherine’s birthday in 1771, must have been completed before the end of 1773. They suggest that Catherine somewhat revised this memoir in 1790–91, and then began the final memoir in 1794, in which she incorporated the middle memoir into a new part 1.¹¹¹

Codicology sheds some light on how Catherine edited the memoirs and supports this chronological scenario. For the 1756 memoir, eighteen pages long, Catherine wrote on both sides of inexpensive paper, with a 1½-inch left margin, which was insufficient for additions. For the subsequent memoirs, she wrote on both sides of excellent, heavy gilt-edged English paper that came in bifolio sheets. She folded each folio (31.7 × 19.9 cm wide) in half vertically, then wrote on one half and made additions on the other half, while also making changes to her main text. The margins of the middle memoir contain extensive additions that sometimes cover the entire page in a patchwork of sections. She most likely made these additions in 1790–91. In contrast, the final memoir has few additions, but a number of insertions on smaller pages, usually single folios, and sometimes bifolios. These smaller folios resemble the lower quality paper she used in the 1756 memoir, which suggests that these added episodes had been written years earlier and were the notes from which she had written the middle memoir. The heavy editing of the middle memoir in 1790–91 indicates that Catherine’s conception of the memoir had changed sufficiently to warrant another memoir with a new beginning and ending.

The middle memoir represents an expanded attempt to set the record straight for posterity in response to critical accounts of Russia and of Catherine’s coup by Rulhière and Chappe d’Auteroche in 1768. In particular, she counters Rulhière’s account of her background as a poor relation among German courts.¹¹² Thus part 1, while a court memoir, also contains the fullest description of her youth, family, and especially her brilliant match. It is the life of a successful German Princess, and it concludes with her marriage. She wrote it when she was looking for a similar spouse for her son, and after they had agreed upon Princess Wilhelmina of Hessen-Darmstadt (1755–76), Catherine wrote her a set of maxims about the “job,” based on her own experiences.¹¹³ The early memoir has four pages on her youth in Germany, which Catherine greatly expands in the middle memoir. In 1756, Catherine had reason to minimize her German background, given that her husband was too obviously Prussophile, but the return to her German years in 1771 allows her to evoke an alternative vision of court life to the one she had endured as Grand Duchess.

The court of Brunswick was then a truly royal court, in the number of beautiful houses this court occupied and in the decoration of these houses, the order that reigned at court, the many people of all kinds that the court supported, and the crowd of foreigners who constantly came there, and the dignity and magnificence that went into the whole style of life. Balls, operas, concerts, hunting parties, carriage drives, and banquets followed one another daily. This is what I saw for at least three or four months in Brunswick each year, from my eighth to my fifteenth year. [14]

Thus, whereas Rulhière portrays Catherine’s upbringing as poor and provincial, in her middle memoir Catherine counters with her ample experience of grand court life in Germany, which far outshone that of the Russian court. The memoirs are only one of the many ways that she attempted to repair the losses of those years in a dismal Russian court, which she summarizes in her epitaph (1778): “Eighteen years of tedium and solitude led her to read many books.”¹¹⁴

The style in which Catherine wrote her memoirs amplifies her criticisms of Elizabeth’s court and her vision of her own Russian court that combined splendor and familial congeniality. The dedication to part 1 of this memoir evokes the atmosphere of intimate conversation among her trusted inner circle at court. Catherine dedicates it to Countess Praskovia Alexandrovna Bruce (née Rumiantseva) (1729–85), her friend during all those years as Grand Duchess, “to whom I can speak freely without fear of consequences.” ¹¹⁵They had become close when Catherine first arrived in Russia in 1744 and remained thus through 1779, when Catherine learned that her friend was having an affair with her then favorite, Major Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov. Catherine’s words to Grimm noting her death are typical of her gracious practicality. “It is impossible not to miss her when one has known her long, for she was very nice; it would have upset me much more six or seven years ago, but since then we have been somewhat distant and separated.” ¹¹⁶ In her life and in her letters, Catherine practiced the art of unpretentious conversation, which she enshrined in her Rules.Conversation earns a place in her self-portrait in the final memoir: “My disposition was naturally so accommodating that no one was ever with me a quarter of an hour without falling comfortably into conversation, chatting with me as if they had known me for a long time.” Catherine’s skill at evoking the art of conversation in her writing reflected her early reading of Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter during the opulent reign of Louis XIV, which were widely known and praised for their simplicity and vivid stories of a grand court life.

In this memoir, Catherine defends herself abroad implicitly as enlightened and worldly, and at home explicitly. In her domestic self-defense, she includes a self-portrait with her resolutions to perform her job to the best of her abilities; it comes on the heels of a reprimand from the Empress for her debts. She resolved to please (1) the Grand Duke, (2) the Empress, and (3) the nation. “I admit that when I despaired of succeeding on the first point, I redoubled my care to fulfill the last two, I thought I succeeded more than once on the second, and I succeeded on the third point to the fullest extent and without any reservations at any time, and therefore I believed that I had attained my goal sufficiently” (58). She later recycled this resolution for her epitaph. The end of the memoir restates her defense in the previous memoir against the Empress’s accusation that she was at fault for not producing an heir: on their wedding night, her husband went to sleep, and this was “the state in which things remained for nine consecutive years without the least change.”¹¹⁷ She protests her innocence against rumors of her sexual appetite: “I knew nothing.” At the time that Catherine was writing this memoir, she was between the two most important relationships of her life and career, having broken with Grigory Orlov in the fall of 1772 and moving toward making Potemkin her favorite, a process she put in motion with a letter in December 1773. On February 21, 1774, she wrote one of her autobiographical letters, “a sincere confession” of her love life to an often jealous Potemkin, defending herself against gossip of having had fifteen, rather than five, lovers.¹¹⁸ Thus her autobiographical writings accomplished many purposes, only some related to her coup in 1762.

In fact, the complete middle memoir, dated to 1771–73, addresses an immediate threat to Catherine. During this period, aside from war, plague, and an armed revolt, Catherine had problems at home. This memoir ends with the arrival, on February 7, 1750, of the Ambassador from Denmark, Count Rochus Friedrich Lynar (1708–81), to negotiate for the exchange of the Grand Duke’s territory of Holstein for Denmark’s Oldenburg and Delmenhorst. This issue was relevant to Catherine’s struggle with the threat to her legitimacy presented by the majority of her son, Grand Duke Paul, on September 20, 1772. His majority pitted Paul, the Panin party, and the Vorontsovs against the Orlovs and Chernyshevs, Catherine’s supporters, in a last attempt to remove Catherine from the throne in favor of her son. ¹¹⁹ The Grand Duke’s territory in Holstein, which he inherited from his father, Peter III, created an important potential foreign base for the power of both men at court. The restoration of Holstein to its former glory formed the whole of Peter’s existence, as it had his father’s; both men had allied themselves with Russia for this purpose. In her final memoir, Catherine says that she fills in for Peter to run Holstein because he cannot be bothered, but it is very much her problem, too.

Catherine took as great an interest in Holstein before as after her coup for the same reason: the external leverage and power it gave the two men with whom her political survival was inextricably linked. Before the coup, she wanted Peter to keep Holstein, and after the coup, she took steps to deprive her son of the territory. In 1767, Catherine made a preliminary agreement with Denmark to exchange Paul’s inheritance, Holstein-Gottorp, for Oldenburg and Delmenhorst. Paul agreed on May 21, 1773, and then on July 14, 1773, signed these over to Catherine’s maternal uncle Duke August Friedrich (1711–85) in exchange for a Russian treaty with Denmark against Sweden, effectively eliminating any foreign power base for himself. At the end of the middle memoir, Catherine promises a fourth part on this issue, but returns to it only at the opening of part 2 of her final memoir, which she begins with a monologue that shows her to be a brilliant politician. In effect, she argues that in 1751, Peter (like Paul in 1773) should keep Holstein and bargain it away only for the glory of Russia and his reputation. Thus her monologue in the final memoir that she will leave her son in effect justifies her actions against him as for his benefit.

Historians have only recently begun to appreciate the political significance of Catherine’s actions in this situation. It was especially delicate for Catherine because at the very time she needed the support of the Orlovs, she had learned on April 25, 1772, that her longtime favorite, Grigory Orlov, had been unfaithful. She replaced him as favorite with Alexander Vasilchikov on September 2, 1772, whereupon Orlov returned from negotiations with Turkey in early September, apparently at Catherine’s secret request. Mikhail Safonov argues that Catherine, far from being just the hurt lover, used her break with Orlov to distract Panin (and Paul) with the potential real gain for Paul of greatly reducing Orlov’s influence at court from the distant possibility of installing Paul as Emperor. To satisfy Panin and Paul, Catherine deprived Orlov of his honors; as soon as they signed away Holstein, she restored Orlov’s honors to him.¹²⁰

The middle memoir has a second dedication that pleasantly masks another of Catherine’s important problems in the early 1770s: the plague in Moscow. Like her dedication to Countess Bruce at the beginning of part 1, this dedication, at the beginning of part 2, evokes an atmosphere of easy conversation among friends. “To Monsieur Baron Alexander Cherkasov, from whose body I pledge by my honor to extract at least one burst of laughter daily or else to argue with him from morning until evening because these two pleasures are the same for him, and I love to give pleasure to my friends” (73). Catherine had made a list of humorous causes of death of her friends: she would die trying to please others, Countess Bruce would die shuffling cards, and Cherkasov would die from suffocation by speech (653–54). ¹²¹ As with the previous dedication, Catherine creates a friendly, easy sphere that stands in vivid contrast to her withering attack on the stupidity and dangers of life at a court under Elizabeth.

High stakes card games . . . were necessary in a court where there was no conversation, where people cordially hated one another, where slander passed for wit, and where the least mention of scandal was considered a crime of lèse-majesté. Secret intrigues passed for cleverness; one carefully avoided speaking of art or science because everyone was ignorant; one could wager that half the group could barely read, and I am not quite sure that a third knew how to write. [89]

In contrast with this picture of ignorance, Baron Alexander Ivanovich Cherkasov (1728–88) had studied at Cambridge University, spoke English perfectly, and enjoyed the pleasures of life, especially food and drink. She does not mention him in this memoir, and indeed he appears just once in all the memoirs, as the future husband of the Princess of Courland in the final memoir. His importance lies in her present, not the past, as she strove with his help to control a devastating outbreak of plague in Moscow. He founded and presided over the Medical Collegium (1763–75), which Catherine used to institute reform of medical education and public health and, more important, to train Russian doctors (rather than import German ones), especially for the military. As with her dedication to Countess Bruce, Catherine added this dedication to the memoir later; it is in a different color and thickness of ink on the first page in the column she used for additions. While Gyllenborg and probably Hanbury-Williams read the autobiographical pieces she wrote for them, there is no record that either dedicatee ever saw this memoir.

Beginning in the 1770s, Catherine appears to have circulated some autobiographical writings among her inner circle. In 1778, she wrote in Russian what she called a “sixteen year examination” of her reign since 1762.¹²² She sent it to Grimm, and she mentions other readers, including Potemkin, Orlov, and Shuvalov, who found it a “chef d’oeuvre,” “very nice,” and “academic,” respectively.¹²³ In 1789, she composed another epistolary self-portrait, this one for Dr. Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728–95), Swiss royal doctor and author of On Melancholy (1756), with whom she corresponded about literature and politics (1785–95). ¹²⁴ It begins with a now familiar theme: “I have always thought that others have slandered me because they have not understood me.” She concludes her portrait with a humorous change of tone that shows her sensitivity to her reader as a listener: “Here ends the dialogue of the dead, let us return to the living” (595). However, no surviving documents of her time contain any mention of her memoirs. Perhaps she followed the advice of an illustrious predecessor, the Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), who in his Memoirs (1743) of the reign of Louis XIV warns that “he who writes the history of his times . . . would therefore have had to lose his mind even to let people suspect that he is writing. His work should ripen under the surest lock and key, thus to pass to his heirs.”¹²⁵ In a letter to Grimm in 1790, she denies writing memoirs: “I do not know what Didot has heard about my memoirs, but one can be sure that I have never written any, and if it is a sin not to have done this, then I must admit my guilt.”¹²⁶

The explicit expectation in France that she would write her memoirs may have spurred Catherine on to try again in the 1790s. In addition, Catherine found reading and writing psychologically therapeutic in difficult times. For example, her dedication to Cherkasov in the middle memoir sounds like a prescription. In 1777, in a final letter to her anxious, jealous favorite Peter Zavadovsky (1739–1812), Catherine ends things on a dry note: “Most of all, calm your spirit and be healthy and merry, and I advise you to follow the advice of SRV [Semen Romanovich Vorontsov] to translate Tacitus or to practice Russian history.” ¹²⁷ After the untimely death of her favorite, Alexander Lanskoi (1758–84, favorite as of 1778), she embarked on her comparative linguistic project to allay her grief. Likewise, Potemkin’s death, in 1791, reverberated, and Catherine took her own advice. Aside from writing her letters to Grimm and the memoirs, during this period Catherine was also composing her Russian history and corresponding (1790–92) with the French historian Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan (1736–1803), who had approached her to write a history of eighteenth-century Russia and her reign.¹²⁸ Sénac de Meilhan concludes an outline for his history of her with a comparison between Catherine and the one other enlightened European monarch with whom she was often compared, Frederick the Great.¹²⁹

In the year before she began to revise her memoirs, Catherine read and responded to writings about and by Frederick, especially his posthumous memoir, History of My Times (1788), which helped shape her new conception for the final memoir.¹³⁰ Their writings are comparable, for like Catherine, Frederick was a voluminous writer, excelling in the one genre that eluded Catherine, namely poetry; he too corresponded extensively with Voltaire, Grimm, and others. In early 1789, Catherine wrote to Grimm about her “27 notes” on the first thirty pages of Frederick’s works, which begin with his preface to his History, and concludes that “the witty bon mot often wins out over an exact account of the event, but there are many very good things in it.”¹³¹ In April 1789, she made critical notes in Abbé Denina’s Essay on the Life and Reign of Frederick II, King of Prussia(1788). According to Denina, Bayle’s dictionary was Frederick’s favorite book, though his wife found it improper for a noblewoman; Catherine writes that she thinks it is “very philosophical,” and mentions her own reading of this important work for the first time in her final memoir (675). Frederick’s History begins with the state of Prussia at the beginning of his reign in 1740: “With the death of Frederick William, King of Prussia, the revenues of the state did not exceed 7,400,000 ecus.”¹³² Similarly, in 1794 Catherine began a largely financial memoir in Russian, though she dispensed with Frederick’s classical use of the third person for himself: “In 1762, upon my ascension to the throne, I found a land army in Prussia of which two-thirds had not been paid” (517).¹³³ Frederick concludes his introduction to his History with a lesson in successful rule that sounds like his early study of Machiavelli (1740): “History is the school of Princes; it is up to them to instruct themselves in the mistakes of past centuries so as to avoid them, and to learn that one must design a plan and follow it step-by-step, and that only he who has best calculated his conduct can prevail over those who act less rationally.”¹³⁴

Catherine begins her final memoir with an unusual rhetorical maxim that hints at a moral reproach to Frederick and provides a further lesson in Enlightenment ideals and logic:

Fortune is not as blind as people imagine. It is often the result of a long series of precise and well-chosen steps that precede events and are not perceived by the common herd. In people it is also more specifically the result of qualities, of character, and of individual conduct. To make this more concrete, I will make the following syllogism of it:

Qualities and character will be the major premise.
Conduct, the minor.
Fortune or misfortune, the conclusion.
Here are two striking examples.
Catherine II.
Peter III.

In 1794, in a letter to Grimm, Catherine echoes both this maxim and Frederick’s lesson: “The good fortune and misfortune of each is in his character; this character lies in the principles that the person embraces; success resides in the soundness of the measures that he employs to arrive at his ends; if he wavers in his principles, if he errs in the measures that he adopts, his projects come to nothing.”¹³⁵ During her reign, Catherine compared herself as a Russian ruler to Peter the Great; on the European stage, she vied for power with Frederick. In contrast to such worthy historical comparisons, in her final memoir Catherine instead draws an explicit comparison between herself and the inept Peter III.

In this memoir, the principle of comparison serves another larger historical purpose for Catherine. From the very beginning, Catherine’s last memoir declares itself to be a biography in the tradition of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (100 A.D.). Plutarch pairs twenty-five individual biographies of illustrious Greek men with those of Romans, and for most pairs provides a summary comparison. Not only was Plutarch among the first serious works recommended to her by Count Gyllenborg, but he was very much a part of the vocabulary of ideas that Rousseau and Montesquieu used to discuss the merits of the legislator versus the monarch.¹³⁶ Until the end of the nineteenth century, Plutarch was standard reading for educated people, and many biographies of illustrious women as well as men use his comparative format.¹³⁷ Histories of monarchs have paired together Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I, Voltaire’s Charles XII and Peter the Great, as well as, more immediately, Catherine and Peter the Great, and Catherine and Frederick the Great.¹³⁸ Catherine has also been compared with Princess Dashkova (1743–1810). Though not a monarch, Dashkova was the most accomplished Russian woman on the international stage, and from a young age her fate was everywhere intertwined with Catherine’s political and literary life, beginning with the coup. She was Catherine’s editor at the journal The Companion of Lovers of the Russian Word (1783–84), and in 1783 Catherine appointed her director of the Russian Academy of Sciences and president of the new Russian Academy of Language. In 1789, Catherine resorts to Plutarch to compare herself to Dashkova, who apparently did not get along with people: “I can adapt myself to all people. I am like Alcibiades in Sparta and in Athens.” ¹³⁹

In 1790, Catherine appears to have been preoccupied with Plutarch while revising her middle memoir. She translated Plutarch’s pair of Alcibiades and Coriolanus.¹⁴⁰ Catherine commented, upon reading several current biographical works in the style of Plutarch, that “one must never do that, because writers today are incapable of the ancients’ tact,” adding that “it resembles fake antiques.”¹⁴¹ Later that year, after the death of Prince Viktor Amadeus of Anhalt-Bernburg-Schaumburg in battle against the Swedes, she translated Plutarch and said, “This is such a comfort, this fortifies my soul.”¹⁴² Catherine, in fact, began her final memoir with her comparative maxim, which unlike her two dedications in the middle memoir, was not added later. Thus her thinking about Plutarch significantly shaped her memoir.

Catherine’s new conception of this memoir as a classical biography explains some of the real differences, aside from the maxim, with her previous memoirs. She begins with a biography of Peter III, which integrates his genealogy. Thus, unlike the early and middle memoirs, which start with her birth in Stettin, the final memoir presents Catherine as she meets Peter for the first time, in 1739, at age ten. As in the beginning of Plutarch’s biographies, Peter and Catherine are identified through their family. She eliminates her childhood, and her wedding happens in one sentence; her life does not begin until she arrives in Russia and starts her political career. Like Frederick the Great, she makes several references to herself in the third person, which is typical for autobiographies that imitate classical biography. Even at the semantic level, her conception holds. The phrase Catherine repeats most is contrastive, serving to distinguish her thoughts and behavior from those of another: “as for me” (pour moi).

An inveterate, eclectic, and opportunistic borrower, Catherine frames her revised court memoir with Plutarch’s biographical structure to add historical weight, classical substance, and judicious distance. His biographical method allows her to generalize from part of Elizabeth’s reign to the whole of Elizabeth’s, Peter’s, and her own reigns. He outlines his method in his biography of Alexander the Great:

It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, and the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.¹⁴³

Everything that happens under Elizabeth’s reign and the details of Peter and Catherine’s stewardship of Holstein presage their different styles of rule and their relative merits as rulers. Thus Catherine’s final conversation with Elizabeth, about Holstein and Peter, is meant to predict Peter’s failure and Catherine’s success as rulers. The final comparison is less between Catherine and Peter than between their respective good and bad relationships with Elizabeth. By implication, Elizabeth should prefer Catherine to Peter as her successor.

Catherine both applies and modifies Plutarch’s principles of biography. Like Plutarch, who claims that “moral good is a practical stimulus,” Catherine is a moralist, concerned with personal virtue.¹⁴⁴ Moreover, she shares Plutarch’s view of character as static rather than evolving. Plutarch’s great men combine good and bad qualities, none more than Alcibiades. Catherine depicts herself as fairly good, while Peter and Elizabeth are portrayed as having decidedly mixed qualities. In Plutarch’s world, however, life often interferes with the best intentions. Catherine seems to agree with this in regard to her personal life alone. Here Catherine is purposefully inconsistent. In her maxim, Catherine transforms la fortune, the blind goddess Fortuna (the secular version of Providence), into carefully planned personal fortune, which the ancients thought depended as much on luck as virtue. Thus, in Catherine’s interpretation, the virtuous individual ruler can transform fortune by the force of her personality.

Catherine’s use of the Plutarchian framework of judicious comparison tempers her portrait of Peter III in the final memoir. The self-serving nature of Catherine’s increasingly negative portrayal of her husband troubles scholars. Some even accuse her of destroying Peter’s reputation posthumously in the memoirs and during her lifetime with her manifestos and the repression of any mention of him that might allow future historians a more balanced portrait. ¹⁴⁵ The early memoir is in fact neutral on Peter, but, of course, it was written before Peter became Emperor and threatened to divorce her, when everything still hinged on Catherine’s succeeding through Peter. After the coup, Catherine began to attack Peter in her manifestos, which reiterate that he acted against Russia’s interests in the Seven Years’ War, scorned the Russian Orthodox Church, and preferred Holstein to Russia.

The black portrait of Peter in the final memoir in fact appears consistently throughout her writings, thanks in part to Catherine’s habit of repeating herself. There are various earlier permutations of the conclusion to her outline, written around 1794, “that it was necessary to perish with him, by him, or else to try to save oneself.” Already in 1756, in a letter to Hanbury-Williams, she writes that after Elizabeth’s death, “be assured that I will not play the quiet and weak role of the King of Sweden, and that I will perish or rule.”¹⁴⁶ In Antidote, in 1770, she wrote: “Thus, seeing that she had only two paths before her, that of sharing the misfortunes of a husband who hated her, who was incapable of following good advice, and who had no greater enemy than himself, or of saving the Empire, the Grand Duke’s son, age seven, and herself, Catherine no longer hesitated, she saved that Empire.”¹⁴⁷ In her marginalia for Denina’s Essay on the Life and Reign of Frederick II (1789), she writes: “Peter III had no greater enemy than himself; all his actions bordered on insanity. . . . He took pleasure in beating men and animals. . . . By ascending to the throne, Empress Catherine saved the empire, herself, and her son from the hands of a madman” (680–81). In the final memoir, by comparison, Catherine has “three paths” and is less explicit about his failings: “But to speak more clearly, it was a matter of perishing with him, or by him, or else of saving myself, my children, and perhaps the state from the disaster that all this Prince’s moral and physical faculties promised” (399).

For the final memoir, using Plutarch’s model, Catherine has developed a larger historical perspective that helps to moderate her individual assessment of Peter. By the 1790s, with the execution of Louis XVI and the destabilizing effects of the French Revolution on monarchs throughout Europe, and fearing Paul as a successor, Catherine more generally had hardened her feelings toward any further instability in the rule of Russia. For example, in the manuscripts of the middle memoir, Catherine later added one significant sentence about his inclination to drink. “It was there that I saw the Prince, who later would be my spouse, for the first time: he seemed then well raised and witty. Meanwhile they already noticed his liking for wine and great irritation at everything that annoyed him;he liked my mother, but could not stand me; he was jealous of the freedom I then enjoyed, while he was surrounded by teachers and all his steps were set and accounted for” (20, emphasis added). Nevertheless, if in the middle memoir Catherine urges pity for him, in the final memoir Peter himself is immune to this emotion, which Rousseau had praised as the greatest human feeling (118). Still, even in the final memoir, her biographical assessment of Peter makes quite clear that his education, “a clash of unfortunate circumstances,” did him great harm, and that Elizabeth’s unenlightened oversight made things worse.¹⁴⁸

Overall, Catherine’s treatment of Peter is contradictory. Over time, she adopted a moralizing tone, especially evident in her portraits, that interrupts rather than meshes with the flow of her tale, which chronicles the ups and downs of the royal couple. In particular, her descriptions of the Grand Duke’s escapades, from drilling holes in the walls of Elizabeth’s suite and setting up benches for the voyeurs, to his military games with pretend soldiers, dolls, and rats, constitute some of the liveliest, most memorable episodes. Catherine ultimately finished the memoir differently than planned, ending with Elizabeth rather than Peter. Something happens between her and the Grand Duke to trigger her permanent mistrust, which in the memoir she places before the birth of her daughter, but in the outline, after their relations improve, her daughter is born, and Poniatowski leaves.¹⁴⁹ This was to have been the ending of the memoir, according to her outline. Contradictions in her approach toward Peter in the memoir mirror those in life, when, on June 26, 1795, Catherine combined a requiem service in honor of Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava in 1709 with, for the first time, one for Peter III.¹⁵⁰

Catherine’s use of Plutarch as a frame for the final memoir illustrates the increased importance of history and history writing for her. More immediate, the differences between Catherine’s middle and final memoirs reflect two contrasting emphases for memoirs in French historiography at the time. The eyewitness account of her place and time, the histoire particulière, in the earlier memoir gives way in the later memoir to the admixture of the larger national and historical scope of the histoire générale. ¹⁵¹ Particular history simply relates what happened, while general history argues why things happened as they did. Thus Frederick calls his memoir a history, which was the more prestigious genre.¹⁵² While Catherine’s memoirs are eyewitness accounts with many overlaps, the final memoir contains conspicuous changes that make it more historical and general. Catherine summarizes her main points in the margins, frequently at first and then minimally, mainly noting a new year, a practice she developed in her writings on Russian history. The maxim provides a large general context and argument for the whole memoir, and like Frederick, she mentions documents in her archives. In particular, her account of Peter’s childhood is not an eyewitness account, and she very likely researched it. In 1745, Elizabeth apparently instructed her ambassador to Denmark, Nikolai Korf, to learn about Peter’s childhood, and Catherine may have used his report.¹⁵³ Her approach to her final memoir thus represents a significant shift in her autobiographical consciousness, from viewing her years as Grand Duchess as life at court to viewing that time as history. Catherine displays those larger historical ambitions elsewhere in 1794, in a sketch she commissioned by Johann-Baptist Lampi (1751–1830), titled “Portrait of Catherine II with Allegorical Figures of Saturn and History.”¹⁵⁴

Taken together, Catherine’s various memoirs are sui generis. Catherine’s concern for facts, her unpretentious frankness, and her difficult position as Grand Duchess under Empress Elizabeth make it possible to forget that the person writing the memoir was the most powerful woman in the world. Rulers’ autobiographical writings, in various genres, were rare, and they tended toward military history and philosophy.¹⁵⁵ The only women who were rulers and writers were Queen Christina of Sweden and Queen Elizabeth of England (1533–1603), both more learned than Catherine.¹⁵⁶Around 1681, Queen Christina wrote an unfinished autobiography that is sixty-nine pages and in French; it was published in 1759 in a collection of her works, about which Catherine had read d’Alembert’s review essay, Mémoires.¹⁵⁷ While Catherine’s reign coincided with the first significant amount of Russian memoir writing, much of this writing, including her own memoirs, remained unpublished (though rarely unread) until the nineteenth century.¹⁵⁸ In contrast, the publication of French memoir writing was well established by the latter half of the eighteenth century; by the seventeenth century, the number of published French memoirs already exceeded the number of Russian memoirs— published or unpublished—by 1800. Nevertheless, as the memoirs of a ruler, Catherine’s work obviously has few peers; as those of a female autocrat, her memoirs stand alone.

Like other great memoirists, Catherine developed a unique language and structure. It took Catherine four decades and multiple memoirs, but in the final memoir, translated here, she succeeded in shaping the genre in an unusual way to suit her complex persona. The final memoir alone contains an important, unusual verbal self-portrait in which Catherine represents herself as exemplary, both as a woman and as a man. The memoir as a whole bears this out, for Catherine by her criticisms asserts that as a ruler she is superior to Elizabeth as well as Peter. Yet, the language of the self-portrait is unusual, with its universal Enlightenment terms for the self nevertheless delineated by gender. She writes: “If I may dare to use such terms, I take the liberty to assert on my own behalf that I was an honest and loyal knight, whose mind was infinitely more male than female. But for all that I was anything but mannish, and in me others found, joined to the mind and character of a man, the charms of a very attractive woman” (419). These tensions between masculine and feminine exist at the generic level too, as Catherine combined the classical biography of illustrious men with the general and individual histories of memoirs. Moreover, in this self-portrait Catherine for the first time calls her memoir a confession: “May I be pardoned this description in recognition of the truth of this confession, which my self-esteem makes without covering itself with false modesty” (419). ¹⁵⁹ In a letter to Grimm in 1791, Catherine mentions both Plutarch and Rousseau, and, arguably, both influenced her final memoir.¹⁶⁰ Despite her dislike for Rousseau’s political theories, Catherine acknowledges his sentimental aesthetic when she concludes her self-portrait with a revealing description of her heart, sensibility, and nature. Like Rousseau in hisConfessions (1782), Catherine notes that feelings do not always obey “the finest moral maxims.”

Catherine’s portrait of herself is substantially more complex and nuanced than the overly feminized picture her critics paint of her. Rulhière gives a detailed physical portrait, from which he extrapolates:

The softer characters of gentleness and goodness, which are likewise depicted there, appear, to a penetrating observer, only as the effect of an ardent desire to please; and those seductive expressions discover but too plainly an intention to seduce. A painter who was desirous of giving an allegorical representation of this great personage, proposed to exhibit her in the figure of a charming nymph, presenting with one hand, stretched forth, a wreath of flowers, and holding in the other, thrown behind her back, a flaming torch. ¹⁶¹

In Catherine’s verbal self-portrait she is a knight, the member of a royal order, not a naked nymph. Among the many painted portraits of herself that Catherine commissioned, only a handful lack the medals for the orders awarded her: St. Catherine, St. Andrei, St. George, and St. Vladimir. Empress first and foremost, Catherine sought forms and words to bring together and articulate an unorthodox personal life, a passion for ideas, and the ambition and talent to rule.

In a long writerly career, Catherine kept returning to the memoirs, writing, rewriting, and editing them. Of necessity and with real interest, Catherine studied language and languages throughout her life; moreover, she managed to make her idiomatic Russian, French, and German uniquely her own. Similarly, with the unusual opening structure of the final memoir, Catherine transformed her previous memoirs into something uniquely hers. As she wrote: “Besides, this writing itself should prove what I say about my mind, my heart, and my character” (419). To make this argument, Catherine, with her opening maxim and syllogism, forces the reader’s attention away from her body and onto her mind. As with Peter’s biography, the flow of her chronological narrative, which should begin with her physical birth, is interrupted. They present her intellect and her historical self where readers expect to find a more common opening, such as those of the early and middle memoirs: “I was born April 21 . . .” This final memoir manifests her continued search for other narratives to represent the different aspects of Catherine—human being, woman, intellectual, and, above all, Empress of Russia.

NOTES

A recent study of her reign argues “how much it mattered that Catherine the Great was committed to the ideals of the European Enlightenment,” a commitment she expressed primarily through her writings. Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (New York: Longman, 2001), 17. In Russia, through her published writings and support for publishing, Catherine actively participated in an extensive public dialogue on the monarch that can be found in one fifth of all publications. Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 5, 8–9.

Catherine to Hanbury-Williams, August 27, 1756. Correspondance de Catherine Alexéievna, Grande-Duchesse de Russie, et de Sir Charles H. Williams, Ambassadeur d’Angleterre, 1756 et 1757, ed. Serge Goriaïnow (Moscow: 1909), 88. In English,Correspondence of Catherine the Great with Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams and Letters from Count Poniatowski, trans. and ed. Earl of Ilchester and Mrs. Langford-Brooke (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1928).

Douglas Smith, ed., Love and Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). This English edition of 464 letters is drawn from the 1,162 letters in V. S. Lopatin, ed., Ekaterina II i G. A. Potemkin. Lichnaia perepiska, 1769–1791 (Moscow: Nauka, 1997). Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Thomas Dunne Books, 2001).

Catherine apparently first approached Paul’s wife and then his son with her proposal. John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 322.

On the meaning of political power in the eighteenth century and Catherine’s approach to it, see Dixon, Catherine the Great.

On efforts since 1742 to overthrow Bestuzhev-Riumin and on his foreign policy, see Evgenii Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her Russia, 1741–1761, trans. and ed. John T. Alexander (Gulf Breeze, Fla: Academic International Press, 1995), 101–9.

This and further such unattributed quotations are from the translation of the memoir and her outline in this volume.

Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, ed. A. N. Pypin, vol. 12 (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1907). Volume 6 of this series, her Great Instruction, was never published. Please note that in the preface and notes to the translation, which is based on Pypin’s definitive edition, all further references to volume 12, which contains her collected autobiographical writings with an introduction by Ia. Barskov, are given as page numbers in the text.

Catherine’s other memoirs exist in one English translation, based on the German translation, Memoiren der Kaiserin Katharina II, trans. Erich Böhme, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1913). Memoirs of Catherine the Great, trans. Katharine Anthony (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927). See the translation note for a discussion of the three earlier translations and the original manuscript.

“Au reste cet écrit même doit prouver ce que je dis de mon esprit, de mon coeur et de mon caractère” (419).

Holstein-Gottorp was located in northern Germany and carved out of Schleswig-Holstein, with interests in Denmark, which were protected through two strategic marriages with Sweden in the seventeenth century.

Reversing a practice of not marrying off royal daughters, Peter the Great sought marriages for his two daughters to guard Russia’s interests in the Baltic against Sweden, Russia’s northern enemy, while Karl Friedrich wanted a powerful ally in order to regain territory his house had lost to Denmark. Karl Friedrich groomed his son, Peter III, as the potential heir not only to the Russian but also to the Swedish throne, because Peter’s grandfather, Friedrich IV (1671–1702), Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, had married Princess Hedwig Sophia (1681–1708), sister of King Charles XII (1660–97) of Sweden, whose mother was Hedwig Eleonora (1636–1715) of Holstein-Gottorp.

In 1717, Peter the Great visited Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to arrange a marriage for Elizabeth to the future Louis XV and pry loose French support for a weakened Sweden, trounced by Peter at Poltava (in 1709). Peter tried again unsuccessfully in 1721. Rumor had it that in 1742 Elizabeth secretly married Count Alexei Razumovsky (1709–71); she had no children.

In 1742, Catherine’s grandmother had one painting done by Balthasar Denner (1685–1749), who had painted many German royals, including Peter III (27). In 1743, according to the diary of Peter’s tutor, Jacob Stählin, a second portrait of Catherine by Antoine Pesne (1683–1757), a French painter of German aristocrats, was delivered to Elizabeth at her request (Anthony, Memoirs, 77–78).

Catherine mentions 15,000 rubles in the early memoir (444), and 10,000 rubles in the middle memoir (30).

Princess Johanna was caught intriguing on behalf of Frederick the Great, and she was asked to leave after the wedding.

In the early memoir, she writes, “They forced the name I now bear on me solely because that which I had was horrible on account of the intrigues of Peter the Great’s sister, who bore the same one” (451). Tsarevna Sophia Alexeevna was regent from 1682 to 1689.

Rumor had it that Peter had to be circumcised to enable him to have intercourse; although he had several mistresses, he appears to have fathered no children.

Saltykov was her lover from 1752 to 1755. As Empress, Catherine appointed him envoy to France in 1762, and then to Saxony in 1764; little is known about his fate. Alexander, Catherine the Great, 63.

She most likely had epileptic seizures.

Catherine to Hanbury-Williams, August 18, 1756, Correspondance de Catherine, 45.

In her middle memoir, it is 657,000 rubles (475–76).

See John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Quoted in Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 411. Original in Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1649–1913, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1830), 496–97. As a result of the ensuing dynastic instability, “four signs conferred legitimacy: designation, dynastic inheritance, worthiness, and election.” Whittaker, Russian Monarchy, 63.

On Catherine’s reputation in France at the time of her coup, see Voltaire’s letters, and in Germany and England, see Ruth Dawson, “Perilous Royal Biography: Representations of Catherine II Immediately After Her Seizure of the Throne,” Biography 27.3 (Summer 2004): 517–34. Whittaker argues that through her manifestos, Catherine inaugurated a new image of legitimacy, the legal sovereign, which she added to the existing images of the reforming czar and the elected monarch. Russian Monarchy, 9, 99–102.

The role of favorite was an unofficial position of a close friend or lover (though not necessarily) with direct access to the ruler. The ruler bestowed positions, titles, and great wealth on the favorite to legitimize the favorite’s access and official duties; the favorite’s family benefited enormously. Once she came to power, Catherine had ten successive favorites, but even after Potemkin was no longer her lover, he remained the most powerful favorite and vetted nearly every successor. For a recent informative discussion of favoritism under Catherine, see Smith, Love and Conquest, xxxii–xliii. Catherine’s twelve lovers were: Sergei Saltykov (1752–55), Count Poniatowski (1755–58), Prince Grigory Orlov (1760–72), Alexander Vasilchikov (1772–74), Prince Grigory Potemkin (1774–76), Count Peter Zavadovsky (1776–77), Simon Zorich (1777–78), Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov (1778), Alexander Lanskoi (1778–84), Alexander Ermolov (1785–86), Count Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov (1786–89), and Prince Platon Zubov (1789–96). The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, trans. and ed. Kyril Fitzlyon (London: John Calder, 1956; reprint, with an introduction by Jehanne M. Gheith, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 301–2.

Peter the Great had originally trained Alexei, his son from his first marriage, to succeed him, but then had him tried as unfit to rule, which led to his death during torture. Peter had his first wife, Evdokia Lopukhina (1669–1731), forcibly exiled to a convent.

To complicate matters only slightly, the daughters were illegitimate, as Peter and Catherine only married in 1712. On the history of Russian female rule, see Isolde Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001).

Bühren became Duke of Courland in 1737. He Russified his name to Biren, and then Frenchified it to Biron when the French Dukes of Biron adopted him at the urging of Cardinal Fleury. The term for his unofficial reign was “Bironovshchina,” indicating his excessive influence.

Isabel de Madariaga, “Catherine and the philosophes, ” in Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York: Longman, 1998), 231, 234. The eighteenth-century philosophes included Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Grimm, and d’Alembert, popular intellectuals and social philosophers who argued for the systematic critique of society according to principles of reason and tolerance, pitting science against religious dogma.

On Elizabeth, see Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth, 167–81.

Eidel’man suggests that in the memoirs, Catherine implicitly condemns this aspect of Elizabeth’s reign, and she established a more respectful working relationship with her courtiers. N. Ia. Eidel’man, “Memuary Ekateriny II—odna iz raskrytykh tain samoderzhaviia,” Voprosy istorii 1 (1968): 156.

By 1762, Catherine had lost her parents and most of her immediate family. The eldest of five children, only she and her brother Friedrich August (1734–93), the last Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, lived to maturity.

Catherine’s correspondence as Grand Duchess exists in two nineteenth-century books: Ferdinand Siebigk, Katharina der Zweiten Brautreise nach Russland 1744–1745. Eine historische Skizze (Dessau, Germany, 1873); and Sbornik Imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg, 1871), hereafter cited as SIRIO.

Catherine to Mme. Geoffrin, November 6, 1764, “Pis’ma Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, k G-zhe Zhoffren,” SIRIO, 1:261–62.

Mme. Geoffrin “invented the Enlightenment salon. First, she made the one-o’clock dinner rather than the traditional late-night supper the sociable meal of the day, and thus she opened up the whole afternoon for talk. Second, she regularized these dinners, fixing a specific day of the week for them (Monday for artists, Wednesday for men of letters).” Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 91.

Written in 1947 by Grigorii A. Gukovskii, “The Empress as Writer,” in Catherine the Great: A Profile, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 68.

Whittaker, Russian Monarchy, 9.

Isabel de Madariaga concludes, “In her literary as in her legislative production she was pragmatic in her approach, pedantic in her execution, and eclectic as regards her sources.” Catherine the Great: A Short History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 204. See also Isabel de Madariaga, “The Role of Catherine II in the Literary and Cultural Life of Russia,” in Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York: Longman, 1998), 284–95.

A nearly one-thousand-page annotated bibliography of Catherine’s writings catalogs accessible Russian publications and excludes rare books, archives, and Catherine’s publications abroad in French and in translations. I. V. Babich, M. V. Babich, and T. A. Lapteva, eds., Ekaterina II: Annotirovannaia bibliografiia publikatsii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004). See also Prince N. N. Golitsyn, Bibliograficheskii slovar’ russkikh pisatel’nits (1889; reprint, Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1974), 92–109; and John T. Alexander, “Catherine II (Ekaterina Alekseevna), ‘The Great,’ Empress of Russia,” in Early Modern Russian Writers: The Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus C. Levitt, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 150 (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman and Gale Research, 1995), 43–54.

Gukovskii, for example, writes that by 1790, when she stopped publishing and was working on her memoirs and a history of Russia, “she gave up her writing.” “The Empress as Writer,” 89.

“Je vous ai dit mille fois que je ne vous écris point, je jase avec vous.” Catherine to Grimm, August 24, 1778, SIRIO, 23:100.

On this phenomenon in England and the role of women, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Ezell argues that scholarship on the growth of printing in the eighteenth-century based on outstanding work by Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier has created a progressive narrative of publication that overvalues the significance of publication for the purpose of creating a civil society. The idea that publishing is always better than not publishing, while true for scholars today, ignores the many other social and political relationships created by unpublished writing in the eighteenth century.

Catherine even left her “secret” correspondence with Potemkin to be read by her favorites, to foster trust between the men in her life; this correspondence also involved courtiers, couriers, and routes that pitted political factions against each other for influence, including the privilege of giving Catherine her mail. Smith, Love and Conquest, xxv–xxx.

Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2.

In Russia’s first biographical compilation of writers, Attempt at a Historical Dictionary of Russian Writers (1772), Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818) sometimes notes publication, along with knowledge of languages, the various genres used, and existence of manuscripts. But repeatedly, the most important fact about a writer is the esteem of “many knowledgeable people.”

Catherine to Marmontel, 1767, SIRIO, 13:269.

On Catherine’s notion of her audience as listeners as well as readers, see W. Gareth Jones, “The Spirit of the Nakaz: Catherine II’s Literary Debt to Montesquieu,” Slavonic and East European Review 76:4 (October 1998): 658–71.

Joan DeJean, “Classical Reeducation: Decanonizing the Feminine,” in The Politics of Tradition: Placing Women in French Literature, ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller, Yale French Studies, no. 75 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 26–39.

She asked both Prince de Ligne and Count de Ségur to teach her; for their examples for her, see P. Pekarskii, Materialy dlia istorii zhurnal’noi i literaturnoi deiatel’nosti Ekateriny II, Prilozhenie k III-mu tomu Zapisok Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1863), 36–37, 68–70.

Isabel de Madariaga, “Catherine II and Enlightened Absolutism,” in Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York: Longman, 1998), 198. For a literary analysis of the artistic structure of the Instruction, see Gareth Jones, “The Spirit of theNakaz.”

Catherine to Johann Georg Zimmermann, January 1789 (596).

The special underground role of memoirs in Russian culture “as a form of autobiography with . . . a conscience” is the subject of Beth Holmgren, ed., The Russian Memoir: History and Literature (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), x.

Eidel’man, “Memuary Ekateriny II,” 157–59. In Soviet times, the memoirs were transferred from the Imperial Archives in the former Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum, to the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents in Moscow.

For example, in the middle memoir she writes that “the first stirring of ambition that I felt was caused by M. Bolhagen . . . in 1736,” as he read the announcement of her cousin’s marriage to the Prince of Wales (15).

“D’ailleurs philosophe au possible, point de passion ne me fait agir.” Catherine to Princess Johanna, 1756, SIRIO, 1:72.

Quoted in Vasilii A. Bil’bassov, “The Intellectual Formation of Catherine II,” in Catherine the Great: A Profile, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 22.

John T. Alexander, “Ivan Shuvalov and Russian Court Politics, 1749–63,” in Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia, ed. A. G. Cross and G. S. Smith (Nottingham, England: Astra Press, 1994), 1–13.

Lionel Gossman, “Marginal Writing,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 381.

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 ofAnthony 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 montemps, 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).

On the political implications of pairing Catherine and Peter the Great, see Dixon, “The Posthumous Reputation of Catherine II in Russia.”

July 31, 1789. A. V. Khrapovitskii, Dnevnik A. V. Khrapovitskogo, 1782–1793 (St. Petersburg, 1874), 300.

Khrapovitskii, April 27, 1790, Dnevnik, 331. In 1790, Khrapovitskii copied her translation of Alcibiades on January 21–22, she thanked him on January 23, she gave him more to copy on February 2, and she was reading the companion life of Coriolanus on February 18, when she called in Khrapovitskii to discuss the use of the expression hoc age. Dnevnik, 323–25. This suggests that she may have been translating from a Latin translation of the original Greek into French.

Khrapovitskii, January 28, 1790, Dnevnik, 324.

Khrapovitskii, April 27, 1790, Dnevnik, 331.

Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden (New York: Random House, 2001), 2:139.

Plutarch’s Lives, 1:202.

Carol S. Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993).

Catherine to Hanbury-Williams, August 12, 1756, Correspondance de Catherine, 25. In 1755, the King of Sweden and his wife, Queen Luise, sister of Frederick the Great, had unsuccessfully attempted to seize more power for the Swedish throne from the Diet.

d’Encausse, L’Impératrice et l’Abbé, 436.

Here she contradicts Rulhière’s assessment about the root of the problem, but not the mixed result: “The care of his childhood had been committed to two men of very uncommon merit, but who fell into a great mistake in attempting to form their pupil after the grandest models, attending rather to his fortune than to his capacity.” Rulhière, A History, or Anecdotes of the Revolution in Russia, 19–20.

Rulhière offers two versions of this story, one in which only Poniatowski is detained by the Grand Duke, and the other in which he locks up Catherine too.

Alexander, Catherine the Great, 319.

Saint-Simon writes: “I call general history that which is indeed general, encompassing several nations or several centuries of church history, or one nation but many reigns, or one distant and far-reaching ecclesiastical act. I call particular history that of the time and country in which one lives. The latter, being less vast and occurring before the author’s eyes, must be much more extensive in details and circumstances, and have as its goal to place its reader in the midst of those actors of what is told, so that the reader believes less that he is reading a history or memoir, than to be himself in on the secret of everything that is represented to him, and a spectator of everything that is told.” Mémoires, xxix.

Faith Beasley argues that in seventeenth-century France, in the wake of the Fronde rebellion, which gave women a prominent political role, women especially turned to memoirs and fiction to argue for an alternative to official history that would include women.Revising Memory: Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

Anisimov mentions this report without a citation. Evgenii Anisimov, Elizaveta Petrovna (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1999), 379.

Saturn, one of the Titans, ushered in a golden age in Italy, where he fled after he was displaced by his son Zeus. The final portrait in the Hermitage Museum does not have the two allegorical figures; the sketch is in the Russian Museum.

Aside from Caesar’s Commentaries, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Frederick II’s Histoire, there are Louis XIV’s Mémoires pour l’instruction du Dauphin for his son. Catherine too wrote instructions for her grandsons.

Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus, eds., Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I: Collected Works(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

“La Vie de la Reine Christine faite par Elle-même, dédiée à Dieu,” in Mémoires concernant Christine, reine de Suède, ed. Johann Arckenholtz, vol. 3 (Amsterdam and Leipzig: P. Mortier, 1759); 4 vols. (1751–60).

Russian memoirists wrote in French as well as Russian, calling their writings “notes” (zapiski). Tartakovskii identifies 700 documentary writings in Russian and other languages in the eighteenth century, with 250 memoirs and diaries by Russians and foreigners who had lived in Russia for a long time. The latter documents include travel memoirs, ethnographic reports, memoirs of the French Revolution, and family memoirs. A. G. Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 22–23. The main source is P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospominaniiakh, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1976).

Catherine titled her autobiographical letter of February 21, 1774, to Potemkin “A Sincere Confession.” Smith, Love and Conquest, 9–11.

Catherine mentions both together in a letter to Grimm, May 13, 1791, SIRIO, 23:538.

Rulhière, A History, or Anecdotes of the Revolution in Russia, 6.