Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. The Military, Historical and Political Memories of the Count de Hordt, 2 vols. (London, 1805–6), ii: 72. On the new capital’s bells, see I. A. Chudinova, Penie, zvony, ritual: Topografiia tserkovnomuzykal’noi kul’tury Peterburga (SPb, 1994), 26–36.

  2. I. A. Chudinova, ‘Kolokol’nye zvony’, MP, ii: 75; W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An historical survey of magic and divination in Russia (Stroud, 1999), 240–1.

  3. E. V. Williams, The Bells of Russia: History and Technology (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 148–65; J. M. R. Lenz, Moskauer Schriften und Briefe, ed. H. Tommek, 2 vols. (Berlin, 2007), Textband, 35, 460–6, reviewed by R. Bartlett in SGECRN, 37 (2007). The cracked bell is now a major tourist attraction in the Kremlin.

  4. Williams, Bells of Russia, 166, translation marginally amended.

  5. Opisanie, 58.

  6. Opisanie, 51, 56; E. Clarke (1800), quoted in Williams, Bells of Russia, 166–7. Slizov’s bell smashed to the ground during the Napoleonic invasion of 1812.

  7. ‘Zamechatel’nye liudi iz russkago belago dukhovenstva v XVIII stoletiia’, Strannik, Feb. 1897, 261–2.

  8. SIRIO, vii: 121; Bil’basov, ii: 145, n. 3.

  9. KfZh (1745), 62. The others were Count Ivan Chernyshëv, Count Sergei Iaguzhinskii, Peter Naryshkin, Mikhail Budlianskoi, Count Peter Buturlin and Count Andrei Shuvalov: Opisanie, 68.

  10. Opisanie, 51–2.

  11. R. Wortman, ‘The Russian Coronation: Rite and Representation’, The Court Historian, 9 (2004), 23.

  12. Opisanie, 29–36.

  13. Giving no source, Montefiore, 52, puts Potëmkin at the coronation, though he was too junior to be mentioned by name in Opisanie.

  14. M. A. Alekseeva, Mikhailo Makhaev: master vidovogo risunka XVIII veka (SPb, 2003), 185–6.

  15. Quoted in D. Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1: In the shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–1780 (Cambridge, 1987), 435.

  16. Coxe, i: 264.

  17. On Moscow in this period, see J. T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore, MD, 1980), ch. 2, esp. 70–1.

  18. Opisanie, 13.

  19. Coxe, i: 265.

  20. Opisanie, 252–86, lists more than 200 members of the commission and their responsibilities. The architects included Prince Dmitrii Ukhtomskii and Matvei Kazakov, ibid., 258–62.

  21. RA, 1870, nos. 4–5, 748, C. to I. I. Melissino, 8 Nov. 1765, enclosing a petition from Antropov; Opisanie, 255. On earlier triumphal arches, see E. A. Tiukhmeneva, Iskusstvo triumfal’nykh vrat v Rossii pervoi poloviny XVIII veka (M, 2005).

  22. Opisanie, 26–35. N. A. Ogarkova, Tseremonii, prazdnestva, muzyka russkogo dvora XVIII-nachalo XIX veka (SPb, 2004), 264–6, reprints the chant with musical notation.

  23. RA, 1884, no. 2, 253, C. to I. I. Nepliuev, 16 Sept. 1762.

  24. Despatches, i: 73, Buckinghamshire to Grenville, 24 Sept. 1762 NS.

  25. Bil’basov, ii: 148; Alexander, 63–5; G. L. Freeze, ‘Subversive piety: religion and political crisis in late imperial Russia’, Journal of Modern History, 68 (1996), 324–5.

  26. Opisanie, 50–1.

  27. Ibid., 228–33.

  28. Ogarkova, Tseremonii, 19–20, 191, n. 23.

  29. For the walkway, missing from de Veilly’s illustrations, see Opisanie, 49–50, 182.

  30. Ibid., 58–9. I. L. Buseva-Davydova, Khramy Moskovskogo Kremlia: sviatyni i drevnosti (Moscow, 1997), 38, mistakenly suggests that the west door was used for coronations.

  31. Cross, 41, 70–1.

  32. Opisanie, 59–67.

  33. Ibid., 67–9.

  34. On canopies in Western Europe, see J. Adamson, ‘The making of the ancien-régime Court, 1500–1700’, in Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500–1700 (London, 1999), 29.

  35. Despatches, i: 100, undated ‘Russian Memoranda’, probably 1763–4.

  36. KfZh (1753), 20–5, 25 Apr. On this occasion, no alterations were made to the interior of the cathedral.

  37. Sochineniia, xii: 323.

  38. Sochineniia, xii: 641–2, ‘Réflexions sur Pétersbourg et sur Moscou’.

  39. Wortman, ‘The Russian Coronation’, 21, 31.

  40. Pis’ma gosudaryni imperatritsy Ekateriny Velikoi k Feld’marshalu grafu P.S. Saltykovu (M, 1886), 9, 29 June 1762, ‘the day after our accession to the throne’.

  41. Annual Register, July 1762, quoted by J. T. Alexander, ‘Catherine II’s efforts at liberalization and their aftermath’, in R. O. Crummey, ed., Reform in Russia and the USSR (Urbana, IL, 1989), 73.

  42. PSZ, xvi: 11,598 (Manifest o koronatsii Imperatritsy Ekateriny Vtoroi); 11,599 (Manifest o konchine Imperatora Petra III).

  43. Compare D. Cannadine and S. Price, eds., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1985), 8, 40.

  44. D. L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, CT, 1975), 65–8.

  45. Quoted in L. Hughes, Sophia: Regent of Russia 1657–1704 (New Haven, CT, 1990), 268.

  46. R. A. Jackson, Vive le roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill and London, 1984), 11.

  47. Bil’basov, ii: 144–5; SIRIO, cxl: 91, Breteuil to Choiseul, 9 Oct. 1762 NS.

  48. Sochineniia, xii: 161.

  49. Bil’basov, ii: 171–84.

  50. Opisanie, 73; SIRIO, cxl: 82, Breteuil to Louis XV, 5 Oct. 1762 NS.

  51. Quoted in S. L. Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, CA, 1991), 39.

  52. Opisanie, 194–9.

  53. J. P. LeDonne, ‘Ruling families in the Russian political order, 1689–1825’, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 28 (1987), 233–322; G. Hosking, ‘Patronage and the Russian State’, SEER, 78 (2000), 301–20.

  54. Sochineniia, xii: 696.

  55. Obstoiatel’noe opisanie Torzhestvennykh Poriadkov Blagopoluchnago Vshestviia v tsarstvuiushchii grad Moskvu i Sviashchenneishago Koronovaniia…Imperatritsy Elisaveta Petrovny (SPb, 1744), 74; Opisanie, 65, 176. The important account of C.’s coronation in R. S. Wortman, Scenarios of ower: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 1: From Peter I to Nicholas I (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 115, inadvertently suggests that Talyzin carried the state banner, another of Elizabeth’s innovations, depicting a double-headed eagle clutching both orb and sceptre in its fearful claws.

  56. Despatches, i: 98.

  57. M. Lepekine, ‘Catherine II et l’Eglise’, in Catherine II et l’Europe, ed. A. Davidenkoff (Paris, 1997), 179.

  58. Madariaga, 114.

  59. SIRIO, cxl: 83, Breteuil to Choiseul, 9 Oct. 1762 NS.

  60. Opisanie, 48–9.

  61. Ibid., 45–7.

  62. Zapiski Shtelina, i: 78–9.

  63. J. McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, Vol. 1: The Clerical Establishment and its Social Ramifications (Oxford, 1998), 8.

  64. Opisanie, 54.

  65. ‘Mémoires de la Princess Dashkaw, d’après le manuscrit revu et corrigé par l’auteur’, AKV, xxi: 101–4 (104).

  66. Opisanie, 75. This is psalm 100 in the Orthodox psalter.

  67. See below, pp. 212–3.

  68. The Dormition Cathedral contains the earliest known panel icon of the Apocalypse in the Byzantine world: M. S. Flier, ‘Till the End of Time: The Apocalypse in Russian Historical Experience Before 1500’, in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, eds. V. A. Kivelson and R. H. Greene (Philadelphia, PA, 2003), 140–3.

  69. See Khristianskie relikvii v Moskovskom kremle, ed. A. M. Lidov (M, 2001).

  70. Baehr, Paradise Myth, 30–1, 38–40.

  71. SIRIO, cxl: 57, Louis XV to Breteuil, 10 Sept. 1762 NS.

  72. Beales, Joseph II, 36.

  73. Opisanie, 78.

  74. Correspondance, 88, 27 Aug. 1756.

  75. Opisanie, 84.

  76. Wortman, Scenarios, 115; Opisanie, 234.

  77. Bil’basov, ii: 146.

  78. Opisanie,
86–9.

  79. ‘Mémoires de la Princess Dashkaw’, 61.

  80. Quoted in Wortman, Scenarios, 116.

  81. Wortman, ‘The Russian Coronation’, 19.

  82. B. A. Uspenskii, Tsar’ i Patriarkh: Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model’ i ee russkoe pereosmyslenie) (M, 1998).

  83. Sochineniia, xii: 615; Opisanie, 102.

  84. SIRIO, cxl: 85, Breteuil to Choiseul, 9 Oct. 1762 NS.

  85. Bil’basov, ii: 146.

  86. I. V. Kurukin, Epokha ‘dvorskikh bur’: Ocherki politicheskoi istorii poslepetrovskoi Rossii, 1725–1762 gg. (Riazan, 2003), 415–7.

  87. Opisanie, 213–9. A second document, perhaps an earlier plan, gives an alternative layout, catering for 358 guests served by 130 lackeys: ibid., 235.

  88. D. A. Rovinskii, Obozrenie ikonopisaniia v Rossii do kontsa XVII veka: opisanie feierverkov i illiuminatsii (SPb, 1903).

  89. SIRIO, xlviii: 13, C. to Keyserling, 25 Sept. 1762.

  90. Opisanie, 157, 291.

  91. Despatches, i: 88, Buckinghamshire to Countess of Suffolk, 9 Nov. 1762 NS.

  92. Plans for the pageant had been laid as early as 10 July 1762: see Iu. A. Dmitriev, ed., F. G. Volkov i Russkii teatr ego vremeni (M, 1953), 149–50. Sumarokov’s text is at p. 188.

  93. Baehr, Paradise Myth, 40.

  94. Sochineniia, xii: 625.

  Chapter 1

  1. W. H. Meyer, Stettin in alter und neuer Zeit (Stettin, 1887), 108–9, 238.

  2. Bil’basov, i: 4–5; Sochineniia, xii: 5.

  3. S. Peller, ‘Births and deaths among Europe’s ruling families since 1500’, in Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), 91, table 2.

  4. T. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London, 2007), 62–3.

  5. SIRIO, xx: 246, C. to Frederick II, 5 Dec. 1768.

  6. Sochineniia, xii: 8.

  7. A Full Account of the Situation, Former State and Late Siege of Stetin (London, 1678), 4–5; J. M. Piskorski, et al, A Short History of Szczecin, trans. K. Wilson (Poznań, 2002), 91–106.

  8. M. Völkel, ‘The Hohenzollern Court 1535–1740’, in Princely Courts of Europe, ed. Adamson, 215.

  9. Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas: Pommern, ed. W. Bucholz (Berlin, 1999), 237–85, 341–52; D. McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815 (London, 1983), 10–14.

  10. On the castle’s changing fortunes through the ages, see E. Cnotliwy, Zamek ksiąęcy w Scecinie (Szczecin, 1992) and J. Kochanowska et al, Zamek Ksiąąt Pomorskich w Scecinie (Szczecin, 2002).

  11. C. M. Clark, ‘When culture meets power: the Prussian coronation of 1701’, in Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. H. Scott and B. Simms (Cambridge, 2007), 17.

  12. V. Bauer, Die höfische Gesellschaft in Deutschland von der Mitte des 17. bis zum Ausgang des 18. ahrhunderts: Versuch einer Typologie (Tübingen, 1993), 69.

  13. Les lettres de Catherine II au Prince de Ligne (1780–1796) (Brussels and Paris, 1924), 104, 2 Dec. 1788.

  14. Grimm, 51, 29 July 1776; Bil’basov, i: 5–6.

  15. C. Scharf, Katharina II.: Deutschland und die Deutschen (Mainz, 1995), 66–7; Sochineniia, xii: 223.

  16. Sochineniia, xii: (6), 11; Scharf, Katharina II, 87–90.

  17. M. Fulbrook, Piety and politics: Religion and the rise of absolutism in England, Württemberg and Prussia (Cambridge, 1983), 9, 167; C. Hinrichs, Preußentum und Pietismus in Brandenburg-Preußen als religiös-soiale Reformbewegung (Göttingen, 1971), 148.

  18. Sochineniia, xii: 9.

  19. Grimm, 88, 16 May 1778.

  20. Fulbrook, Piety and Politics, 31; Sochineniia, xii: 10.

  21. Sochineniia, xii: 6, 11.

  22. Sochineniia, xii: 17; M. Greenleaf, ‘Performing Autobiography: The Multiple Memoirs of Catherine the Great (1756–96)’, Russian Review, 63 (2004), 411–3.

  23. Sochineniia, 8–9, (15).

  24. Lopatin, 14, C. to Potëmkin, undated.

  25. Grimm, 41, 20 Jan. 1776.

  26. Grimm, 361, 22 Aug. 1785; O. I. Eliseeva, Perepiska Ekateriny II i G. A. Potemkina perioda vtoroi Russkoi-Turetskoi voiny (1787–1791): Istochnikovedcheskoe issledovanie (M, 1997), 23.

  27. Grimm, 212, 8 July 1781.

  28. Sochineniia, xii: 19, 6–7. Here C. says her distress was caused by an emotional heroine, whereas in an earlier memoir (p. 441), dating from 1756, she attributes it to a battle scene.

  29. Scharf, Katharina II., 69.

  30. Sochineniia, xii: 442.

  31. The Memoirs of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz, 5 vols. (Dublin, 1738), i: 80.

  32. H. Reuther, ‘Das Gebäude der Herzog August Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel und ihr Oberbibliothekar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’, in Leibniz: sein Leben, sein Wirken, seine Welt, eds. W. Totok and C. Haase (Hanover, 1966), 349–60.

  33. P. Albrecht, et al, Hermann Korb und seine Zeit: Barockes Bauen in Fürstentum Braunschweig-olfenbüttel (Brunswick, 2006), esp. 112–4; H.-H. Grote, Schloss Wolfenbüttel: Residenz der Herzögen zu Braunschweig und Lüneberg (Brunswick, 2005).

  34. E. Vehse, Geschichte der Höfe des Hauses Braunschweig in Deutschland und England, 5 vols. (Hamburg, 1853), v: 227–60.

  35. Bauer, Die höfische Gesellschaft, 75.

  36. Sochineniia, xii: 12–14. In an earlier memoir (p. 442), she claimed to have spent two months of the year in Brunswick.

  37. A. Fauchier-Magnan, The Small German Courts in the Eighteenth Century, trans. M. Savill (London, 1958), 27.

  38. Ibid., 43, 46, 48, 145, 37 and passim.

  39. J. A. Vann, The Making of a State: Württemberg, 1593–1793 (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 190.

  40. R. Wilkinson, Louis XIV (London, 2007), 102.

  41. H. Watanabe O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden: From Renaissance to Baroque (Basingstoke, 2002), 205. See also the magnificent catalogue, Eine gute Figur machen: Kostüm und Fest am Dresdner Hof, eds. C. Schnitzer and P. Hölscher (Dresden, 2000).

  42. Vann, Making of a State, 259.

  43. The indispensable work is J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, 1989).

  44. P. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992), 17–18.

  45. T. C. W. Blanning, The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power (Oxford, 2002), 59, is the essential historical commentary on Habermas (see note 43, above).

  46. Sochineniia, xii: 24.

  47. C. Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Oxford, 2000), 187–235.

  48. M. Umbach, ‘Visual Culture, Scientific Images and German Small-State Politics in the Late Enlightenment’, Past and Present, 158 (1998), 110–45.

  49. H. Dauer, Schloßbaukunst des Barock von Anhalt-Zerbst (Cologne, 1999), 36–95; A. Erdmuter, et al, Anhaltische Schlösser in Geschichte und Kunst (Bindlach, 1994), 88–90.

  50. J. Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003); S. J. Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, Social Life, and Architecture at the Court of Bavaria, 1600–1800 (Chicago, 1993).

  51. Bauer, Die höfische Gesellschaft, 90–1, attempts tabular comparisons of the major German Courts.

  52. A rich cosmopolitan literature can be reached via Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c. 1450–1650, eds. R. G. Asch and A. M. Birke (Oxford, 1991), and Adamson, ‘Making of the ancien-régime Court’, 7–41. See also H. Smith, ‘Court Studies and the Courts of Early Modern Europe’, Historical Journal, 49, 4 (2006), 1229–38.

  53. Sochineniia, xii: 18; Dauer, Schloßbaukunst, 243–50.

  54. Sochineniia, xii: 26.

  55. Sochineniia, xii: 22–3, 443.

  56. Sochineniia, xii: 17–18.

  57. Madariaga, 2–4; Bil’basov, i: 13–22, 30–7.

  58. Sochineniia, xii: 30; ibid., 443, gives 6 Jan.

  59. PCFG, ii: 494–5, Frederick to Johanna Elisabeth, 3
0 Dec. 1743.

  60. Beales, Joseph II, 69–82 (72).

  61. Poroshin, 47, 12 Oct. 1764.

  62. M. Bregnsbo, ‘Danish Absolutism and Queenship: Louisa, Caroline, Matilda, and Juliana Maria’, in Queenship in Europe: The Role of the Consort 1660–1815, ed. C. Campell Orr (Cambridge, 2004), 354–5, 357–9.

  63. C. C. Noel, ‘“Bárbara succeeds Elizabeth…”: The feminisation and domestication of politics in the Spanish Monarchy, 1701–1759’, in Queenship, ed. Campbell Orr, 155–85.

  64. T. Biskup, ‘The Hidden Queen: Elisabeth Christine of Prussia and Hohenzollern Queenship in the Eighteenth Century’, in Queenship, ed. Campbell Orr, 306–9, 313, 315.

  65. Sochineniia, xii: 446.

  66. Bil’basov, i: 45–6.

  67. D. Blackbourn, The conquest of nature: Water, landscape and the making of modern Germany (London, 2006), 22–70 (30).

  68. Sochineniia, xii: 446.

  69. SIRIO, vii: 1–2.

  70. Edward Finch, quoted in J. Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 2003 edn), 68.

  71. Sochineniia, xii: 35; R. J. M. Olson and J. M. Pasachoff, Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science (Cambridge, 1998), 49–51.

  72. ‘A Letter from the Rev. Mr. Joseph Betts M.A. and Fellow of University College Oxon. To Martin Folkes, Esq.’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1683–1775, xliii: 94. See also G. Smith, A Treatise of Comets (London, 1744), and Smith’s letter in The Gentleman’s Magazine, xiv: 86, 14 Feb. 1744.

  73. S. Schaffer, ‘Comets and the world’s end’, in Predicting the Future, eds. L. Howe and A. Wain (Cambridge, 1993), 52–76; Ryan, Bathhouse at Midnight, 374–5.

  74. Correspondance, 1756. The comet of 1757 prompted [F. Aepinus], ‘Razmyshleniia o vozvrate komet, s kratkim izvestiem o nyne iavivsheisia komete’, Ezhemesiachniaia sochineniia (Oct. 1757), 329–48.

  75. Poroshin, 265, 29 Aug. 1765.

  76. SIRIO, vii: 15.

  77. Sochineniia, xii: 36–7; SIRIO, vii: 16–17.

  78. E. C. Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 5, n. 1; Sochineniia, xii: 37.

  Chapter 2

  1. R. Milner-Gulland, ‘16 May 1703: The Petersburg Foundation-Myth’, in Days from the reigns of eighteenth-century Russian rulers, ed. A. Cross (Cambridge, SGECRN, 2007), i: 37–48.