by Simon Dixon
The most important (and appropriately weighty) study of Catherine’s reign in any language remains Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), which has been reprinted several times. My debts to this book and its author are profound. No less incisive are the essays collected in Isabel de Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (London: Longman, 1998). John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) ranks as the first modern scholarly biography, particularly interesting on medical matters and also strong on social history. Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia 1754–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) explores the troubled life of Catherine’s son. Like its subject, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London, 2000) is scintillating, wayward and occasionally overblown: but it is packed with insight on the fluctuations of Court politics and remains obligatory reading on the 1780s. The need for a modern scholarly biography of Princess Dashkova is only partly fulfilled by A. Woronzoff-Dashkoff, Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 97, 3 (2008)). The best starting-point in English is Sue Ann Prince, ed., The Princess and the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin, and the Age of Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2006).
Having celebrated its tricentenary in 2003, Catherine’s capital city is famous primarily as a glittering icon of secular cosmopolitanism. It is not always easy to recall that much of it was a building site in the eighteenth century. For a helpful reminder, see Christopher Marsden, Palmyra of the North: The First Days of St Petersburg (London: Faber and Faber, 1942), which wears its learning lightly. W. Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight: St Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia (Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001) offers a more up-to-date treatment, as do the contributors to Anthony Cross, ed., St Petersburg, 1703–1825 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Dmitry Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996) brings together in a single, beautifully illustrated volume the author’s outstanding essays on Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk. Though it is full of fascinating information about the fate of Pavlovsk in Soviet times, Suzanne Massie’s tantalising Pavlovsk: The Life of a Palace (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990) never quite tells you what you want to know about its early history. An exhaustive and very well-illustrated study of Falconet’s monument is provided by Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), though he makes the fractious sculptor seem more saintly than he was by needlessly blackening the reputation of Ivan Betskoy. Geraldine Norman, The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) breathes life into a unique institution, and very engagingly too.
Although the religious side of Catherine’s Court is harder to penetrate, there are helpful essays in Michael Schaich, ed., Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Exhibition catalogues tell us a great deal about this and almost every other aspect of the empress’s life and reign. Among the informative English-language editions published in recent years is Catherine the Great: Treasures of Imperial Russia from the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1990). Fuller still are Treasures of Catherine the Great (London: Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, 2000) and Catherine the Great & Gustav III (Helsingborg: Nationalmuseum, 1999). Both Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed., Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (London: Merrell, 2003) have plenty to say about Catherine. So does British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage, eds. Brian Allen and Larissa Dukelskaya (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Among permanent exhibits, Hillwood Museum stands out: anyone within reach of Washington D.C. should make the pilgrimage and purchase the exemplary catalogue by Ann Odom and Liana Paredes Arend, A Taste for Splendor: Russian Imperial and European Treasures from the Hillwood Museum (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1998).
Although books written for scholars can sometimes seem hard going, even to the initiated, the best work on Catherine’s Russia is stylish and penetrating. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) is a brilliant study of the ways in which the ritual presentation of the monarchy inspired the loyalty of its leading subjects. Whereas Wortman emphasises the secularising influence of classical Roman models, Gary Marker, Imperial Saint: The Cult of St Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), reveals the persistence of religious symbolism in Court culture, focusing on Catherine I in an interpretation which carries broader implications for the remainder of the eighteenth century. John LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) is a powerful study of patronage. David L. Ransel explores a key interest group in The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). Complementary studies of the nobility are offered by Robert E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), and Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility: A Study Based on the Materials of the Legislative Commission of 1767 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). One gets a good sense of the ways in which nobles assimilated and imitated Court culture from Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), and from Douglas Smith, The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great’s Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), an imaginative recreation of Count Nikolay Sheremetev’s marriage to a serf actress, particularly good on the setting in which they lived. John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) is a first-class social history of Moscow in the early 1770s. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) offers a brilliant (and often very funny) way into the history of Russian manners. Rafaella Faggionato, A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Masonic Circle of N.I. Novikov (Amsterdam: Springer, 2005) is the most significant recent study of Freemasonry, though the English translation is inelegant. W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov: Enlightener of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) remains the single most important study of the Enlightenment in Russia, a subject which awaits a full-scale treatment. See also Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays in Honour of Isabel de Madariaga (London: Macmillan, 1990) and my own essay ‘“Prosveshchenie”: Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Peripheries of the Enlightenment, eds. Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel Sanchez-Espinoza, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2008:01. On the wider context, try Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), a clever book which may overestimate the extent to which the Poles and Russians needed the philosophes to alert them to the problem of their own backwardness. Foreign policy is expertly covered by H. M. Scott, The Emergence of the Eastern Powers 1756–1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia and the Armed Neutrality of 1780: Sir James Harris’s Mission to St Petersburg during the American Revolution (London: Hollis and Carter, 1962), which ranges much more widely than its title might imply. I have commented on some of these scholars’ conclusions in two earlier attempts to set Catherine and her reign in the broader context of the history of
eighteenth-century Europe: The Modernisation of Russia, 1696–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Catherine the Great: Profile in Power (Harlow: Longman, 2001). Both these books give lists of further reading.
Readers of Russian will learn much from attractively written books by Evgenii Anisimov, Zhenshchiny na rossiiskom prestole (St Petersburg: Norint, 1998), and Aleksandr Kamenskii, Pod seniiu Ekateriny: Vtoraia polovina XVIII veka (Moscow: 1992), the first study of Catherine’s reign to be published in Russia since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Despite its title, V. S. Lopatin, Potemkin i Suvorov (Moscow: Nauka, 1992) has just as much to say about Catherine: this book’s rehabilitation of Potëmkin, based on the author’s excellent editions of the correspondence of the two men, underpins the argument of Montefiore’s English biography. More specialised are the work of the legal scholar, O. A. Omel’chenko, ‘Zakonnaia monarkhiia’ Ekateriny II: Prosveschennyi absoliutizm v Rossii (Moscow, 1993), and two studies of the relationship between literature and politics by Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla: Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII—pervoi treti XIX vek (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), and Vera Proskurina, Mify imperii: literatura i vlast’ v epokhu Ekateriny II (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005), who is not always quite so convincing. In the late 1880s, V. A. Bilbasov completed only two volumes of what promised to be a massive biography before running into trouble with the censors. His Istoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi, 2 vols (SPb-Berlin, 1890–91), remains the most detailed study of Catherine’s life before 1763. The troubled relationship between Catherine and her husband is explored in unprecedented detail by O. A. Ivanov, Ekaterina II i Petr III: istoriia tragicheskogo konflikta (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2007), a book which reached me just as my own went to press. Ekaterina II: Annotirovannaia bibliografiia publikatsii, eds. I. V. Babich, M. V. Babich and T. A. Lapteva (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), is an invaluable guide to the voluminous published sources on Catherine and her reign. Students of St Petersburg will find a very helpful bibliography of Russian work by A. M. Konechnyi in Europa Orientalis (1997, no. 1). No less crucial for the history of eighteenth-century Russian painting is the illustrated catalogue of the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg—Gosudarstvennyi russkii muzei, Zhivopis’: XVIII vek, ed. Grigorii Goldovskii (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1998)—which carries a limited amount of summary information in English.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It may never be possible to acknowledge all the influences which lie behind the publication of a book such as this. I certainly cannot do so here. But I should never have begun it without help from Jon Jackson and Sam Johnson, and I could not have finished it without support from Catherine Beaumont. Much of it was written while I was chairman of the School of History at the University of Leeds, and I am deeply indebted to all my former colleagues there for their tolerance and encouragement. In particular, I received invaluable bibliographical advice from Simon Burrows, John Chartres, Emilia Jamroziak and Phil Withington (now of Christ’s College, Cambridge), and unstinting support from John Childs, Gordon Forster, John Gooch, Katrina Honeyman, Kevin Linch, Graham Loud, Angela Softley, Edward Spiers, Andrew Thompson, Ian Wood and Anthony Wright. Richard Davies is an incomparable fount of wisdom in the Special Collections Department of the Brotherton Library, which boasts some of the most impressive Russian holdings in the United Kingdom. Among friends and colleagues in the international Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Paul Keenan generously permitted me to quote from his unpublished doctoral thesis, and I owe a continuing and mounting debt to Roger Bartlett, Anthony Cross, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Joachim Klein, Isabel de Madariaga, Gary Marker, Gareth Jones, Patrick O’Meara, Viktor Zhivov and Andrei Zorin. For all its imperfections, this book would have been much the weaker without their help and example.
Though I have made regular journeys to Moscow and St Petersburg in recent years, much of the reading for this book was done in the Cambridge University Library, the British Library and the National Library of Finland on visits made possible by the University of Leeds. In Helsinki, I owe a profound debt to Marina Vituhnovskaja, Timo Vihavainen, Irina Lukka and her colleagues. In Cambridge, my friends Derek Beales and Tim Blanning still inspire just as much awe and respect as they did when they taught me thirty years ago. In London, my late friend Lindsey Hughes and her husband Jim Cutshall gave me some of the most memorable evenings of my life and much more besides. If there were any justice in the world, Lindsey would occupy the chair I now hold.
Three special obligations remain. Peter Carson has been an unfailingly patient publisher, even when he had grounds to be apoplectic. At home, Stephanie, Oliver and Rachel have been equally uncomplaining, even when the writing took longer than they had any reason to expect. The dedication acknowledges a debt that I shall never be able to repay, to two people who have sustained me for as long as I can remember. I owe them everything.
Simon Dixon
London, October 2008
SEARCHABLE TERMS
Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.
A
Ablesimov, Alexander: The Miller-Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker 256, 279
Académie des inscriptions 210
Academy of Dijon 154
Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, 264
Adams, John Quincy 324
Addison, Joseph 198
Admiralty, St Petersburg 43, 44, 127, 258
Admiralty College, St Petersburg 75, 128
Adodurov, Vasily 51, 105
Adolf Friedrich, Prince Bishop of
Lübeck, King of Sweden 35, 56, 57, 59, 60
Aepinus, Professor Franz 197, 248
Alcibiades 306
Aleksey Mikhailovich, Tsar of Russia 13, 19, 62, 157, 165
Alekseyev, Archpriest Peter 277
Alexander I, Tsar of Russia 134, 273, 284, 299, 317, 320, 320–21, 329
birth (1777) 246
C’s love for him 247, 249, 268, 323
education 248, 249
personality 249
marries Princess Louise 313
promises to rule according to C’s
‘heart and laws’ 321, 325
portraits of 331
Alexander II, Tsar of Russia 323, 329, 330
Alexander III, Tsar of Russia 2, 329, 331, 332
Alexander Nevsky monastery, St
Petersburg 44, 45, 100, 125, 127, 221, 244, 253, 294, 313, 314, 317
Church of the Annunciation 319
Alexander of Macedon 246
Alexandra, Grand Duchess 313, 314
Algarotti, Francesco 42–3
All Sorts (journal) 198–9
Amsterdam 82, 195
Amvrosy, Archbishop 207, 208, 212
Amvrosy, Metropolitan see Podobedov
Ancelin, Nicolas 319
Andrew, St, Apostle 17, 247
Angiolini, Gasparo 191
Anglo-Russian trade treaty (1734, renewed 1766) 187
Anhalt, Count 327
Anhalt-Dessau, Prince Leopold of 26
Anhalt-Dessau, Leopold III Friedrich Franz of 32
Anhalt-Dessau, princes of 33
Anhalt-Köthen, Leopold, Prince of 32
Anhalt-Zerbst, Auguste Christine Charlotte, Princess of (C’s sister) 26
Anhalt-Zerbst, Christian August, Prince of (C’s father) 220
marries Johanna Elisabeth (1727) 29
military service 23, 25, 35
birth of C 23
personality 25
representational display 32
private apartments at Zerbst 33–4
separation from C 37
exhorts C to keep her religious beliefs 38
death (1747) 66
Anhalt-Zerbst, Elisabeth, Princess of (C’s sister
) 26
Anhalt-Zerbst, Friedrich August, Prince of (C’s brother) 26, 33
Anhalt-Zerbst, Johanna Elisabeth, Princess of (née Holstein-Gottorp; C’s mother) 44–5, 46, 88, 105
marries Christian August (1727) 29
birth of C 23
her other children 26
visits her relatives 28–9, 30
match-making for C 34–5
travels with C to Russia 39–40
meets Empress Elizabeth 47
behaviour during C’s illness 49, 50
Bestuzhev affair 50
