The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (4 page)

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
Instruction
went 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 In
struction
(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 of
Voyages
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.