The Memoirs of Catherine the Great

by Catherine the Great

  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 inaugurate
d 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 the Nakaz.”

  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.