The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (6 page)

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.
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While 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.
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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.
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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of Russian historiography, in its infancy in the eighteenth century, and shaped the writing of her final memoir as a historical document.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.
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Under 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The international boom in studies of Catherine celebrated the 200th anniversary of her death in 1996 with conferences, essay collections, and performances.
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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.
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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.
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Catherine’s life seems ideal for such an antinarrative—a rich, active,

provocative life that refuses to cohere into a single story.
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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.
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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.