The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (8 page)

In this memoir, Catherine defends herself abroad implicitly as enlightened and worldly, and at home explicitly. In her domestic self-defense, she includes a self-portrait with her resolutions to perform her job to the best of her abilities; it comes on the heels of a reprimand from the Empress for her debts. She resolved to please (1) the Grand Duke, (2) the Empress, and (3) the nation. “I admit that when I despaired of succeeding on the first point, I redoubled my care to fulfill the last two, I thought I succeeded more than once on the second, and I succeeded on the third point to the fullest extent and without any reservations at any time, and therefore I believed that I had attained my goal sufficiently” (58). She later recycled this resolution for her epitaph. The end of the memoir restates her defense in the previous memoir against the Empress’s accusation that she was at fault for not producing an heir: on their wedding night, her husband went to sleep, and this was “the state in which things remained for nine consecutive years without the least change.”
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She protests her innocence against rumors of her sexual appetite: “I knew nothing.” At the time that Catherine was writing this memoir, she was between the two most important relationships of her life and career, having broken with Grigory Orlov in the fall of 1772 and moving toward making Potemkin her favorite, a process she put in motion with a letter in December 1773. On February 21, 1774, she wrote one of her autobiographical letters, “a sincere confession” of her love life to an often jealous Potemkin, defending herself against gossip of having had fifteen, rather than five, lovers.
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Thus her autobiographical writings accomplished many purposes, only some related to her coup in 1762.

In fact, the complete middle memoir, dated to 1771–73, addresses an immediate threat to Catherine. During this period, aside from war, plague, and an armed revolt, Catherine had problems at home. This memoir ends with the arrival, on February 7, 1750, of the Ambassador from Denmark, Count Rochus Friedrich Lynar (1708–81), to negotiate for the exchange of the Grand Duke’s territory of Holstein for Denmark’s Oldenburg and Delmenhorst. This issue was relevant to Catherine’s struggle with the threat to her legitimacy presented by the majority of her son, Grand Duke Paul, on September 20, 1772. His majority pitted Paul, the Panin party, and the Vorontsovs against the Orlovs and Chernyshevs, Catherine’s supporters, in a last attempt to remove Catherine from the throne in favor of her son.
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The Grand Duke’s territory in Holstein, which he inherited from his father, Peter III, created an important potential foreign base for the power of both men at court. The restoration of Holstein to its former glory formed the whole of Peter’s existence, as it had his father’s; both men had allied themselves with Russia for this purpose. In her final memoir, Catherine says that she fills in for Peter to run Holstein because he cannot be bothered, but it is very much her problem, too.

Catherine took as great an interest in Holstein before as after her coup for the same reason: the external leverage and power it gave the two men with whom her political survival was inextricably linked. Before the coup, she wanted Peter to keep Holstein, and after the coup, she took steps to deprive her son of the territory. In 1767, Catherine made a preliminary agreement with Denmark to exchange Paul’s inheritance, Holstein-Gottorp, for Oldenburg and Delmenhorst. Paul agreed on May 21, 1773, and then on July 14, 1773, signed these over to Catherine’s maternal uncle Duke August Friedrich (1711–85) in exchange for a Russian treaty with Denmark against Sweden, effectively eliminating any foreign power base for himself. At the end of the middle memoir, Catherine promises a fourth part on this issue, but returns to it only at the opening of part 2 of her final memoir, which she begins with a monologue that shows her to be a brilliant politician. In effect, she argues that in 1751, Peter (like Paul in 1773) should keep Holstein and bargain it away only for the glory of Russia and his reputation. Thus her monologue in the final memoir that she will leave her son in effect justifies her actions against him as for his benefit.

Historians have only recently begun to appreciate the political significance of Catherine’s actions in this situation. It was especially delicate for Catherine because at the very time she needed the support of the Orlovs, she had learned on April 25, 1772, that her longtime favorite, Grigory Orlov, had been unfaithful. She replaced him as favorite with Alexander Vasilchikov on September 2, 1772, whereupon Orlov returned from negotiations with Turkey in early September, apparently at Catherine’s secret request. Mikhail Safonov argues that Catherine, far from being just the hurt lover, used her break with Orlov to distract Panin (and Paul) with the potential real gain for Paul of greatly reducing Orlov’s influence at court from the distant possibility of installing Paul as Emperor. To satisfy Panin and Paul, Catherine deprived Orlov of his honors; as soon as they signed away Holstein, she restored Orlov’s honors to him.
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The middle memoir has a second dedication that pleasantly masks another of Catherine’s important problems in the early 1770s: the plague in Moscow. Like her dedication to Countess Bruce at the beginning of part 1, this dedication, at the beginning of part 2, evokes an atmosphere of easy conversation among friends. “To Monsieur Baron Alexander Cherkasov, from whose body I pledge by my honor to extract at least one burst of laughter daily or else to argue with him from morning until evening because these two pleasures are the same for him, and I love to give pleasure to my friends” (73). Catherine had made a list of humorous causes of death of her friends: she would die trying to please others, Countess Bruce would die shuffling cards, and Cherkasov would die from suffocation by speech (653–54).
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As with the previous dedication, Catherine creates a friendly, easy sphere that stands in vivid contrast to her withering attack on the stupidity and dangers of life at a court under Elizabeth.

High stakes card games . . . were necessary in a court where there was no conversation, where people cordially hated one another, where slander passed for wit, and where the least mention of scandal was considered a crime of lèse-majesté. Secret intrigues passed for cleverness; one carefully avoided speaking of art or science because everyone was ignorant; one could wager that half the group could barely read, and I am not quite sure that a third knew how to write. [89]

In contrast with this picture of ignorance, Baron Alexander Ivanovich Cherkasov (1728–88) had studied at Cambridge University, spoke English perfectly, and enjoyed the pleasures of life, especially food and drink. She does not mention him in this memoir, and indeed he appears just once in all the memoirs, as the future husband of the Princess of Courland in the final memoir. His importance lies in her present, not the past, as she strove with his help to control a devastating outbreak of plague in Moscow. He founded and presided over the Medical Collegium (1763–75), which Catherine used to institute reform of medical education and public health and, more important, to train Russian doctors (rather than import German ones), especially for the military. As with her dedication to Countess Bruce, Catherine added this dedication to the memoir later; it is in a different color and thickness of ink on the first page in the column she used for additions. While Gyllenborg and probably Hanbury-Williams read the autobiographical pieces she wrote for them, there is no record that either dedicatee ever saw this memoir.

Beginning in the 1770s, Catherine appears to have circulated some autobiographical writings among her inner circle. In 1778, she wrote in Russian what she called a “sixteen year examination” of her reign since 1762.
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She sent it to Grimm, and she mentions other readers, including Potemkin, Orlov, and Shuvalov, who found it a “chef d’oeuvre,” “very nice,” and “academic,” respectively.
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In 1789, she composed another epistolary self-portrait, this one for Dr. Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728–95), Swiss royal doctor and author of
On Melancholy
(1756), with whom she corresponded about literature and politics (1785–95).
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It begins with a now familiar theme: “I have always thought that others have slandered me because they have not understood me.” She concludes her portrait with a humorous change of tone that shows her sensitivity to her reader as a listener: “Here ends the dialogue of the dead, let us return to the living” (595). However, no surviving documents of her time contain any mention of her memoirs. Perhaps she followed the advice of an illustrious predecessor, the Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), who in his
Memoirs
(1743) of the reign of Louis XIV warns that “he who writes the history of his times . . . would therefore have had to lose his mind even to let people suspect that he is writing. His work should ripen under the surest lock and key, thus to pass to his heirs.”
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In a letter to Grimm in 1790, she denies writing memoirs: “I do not know what Didot has heard about my memoirs, but one can be sure that I have never written any, and if it is a sin not to have done this, then I must admit my guilt.”
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The explicit expectation in France that she would write her memoirs may have spurred Catherine on to try again in the 1790s. In addition, Catherine found reading and writing psychologically therapeutic in difficult times. For example, her dedication to Cherkasov in the middle memoir sounds like a prescription. In 1777, in a final letter to her anxious, jealous favorite Peter Zavadovsky (1739–1812), Catherine ends things on a dry note: “Most of all, calm your spirit and be healthy and merry, and I advise you to follow the advice of SRV [Semen Romanovich Vorontsov] to translate Tacitus or to practice Russian history.”
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After the untimely death of her favorite, Alexander Lanskoi (1758–84, favorite as of 1778), she embarked on her comparative linguistic project to allay her grief. Likewise, Potemkin’s death, in 1791, reverberated, and Catherine took her own advice. Aside from writing her letters to Grimm and the memoirs, during this period Catherine was also composing her Russian history and corresponding (1790–92) with the French historian Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan (1736–1803), who had approached her to write a history of eighteenth-century Russia and her reign.
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Sénac de Meilhan concludes an outline for his history of her with a comparison between Catherine and the one other enlightened European monarch with whom she was often compared, Frederick the Great.
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In the year before she began to revise her memoirs, Catherine read and responded to writings about and by Frederick, especially his posthumous memoir,
History of My Times
(1788), which helped shape her new conception for the final memoir.
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Their writings are comparable, for like Catherine, Frederick was a voluminous writer, excelling in the one genre that eluded Catherine, namely poetry; he too corresponded extensively with Voltaire, Grimm, and others. In early 1789, Catherine wrote to Grimm about her “27 notes” on the first thirty pages of Frederick’s works, which begin with his preface to his
History,
and concludes that “the witty bon mot often wins out over an exact account of the event, but there are many very good things in it.”
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In April 1789, she made critical notes in Abbé Denina’s
Essay on the Life and Reign of Frederick II, King of Prussia
(1788). According to Denina, Bayle’s dictionary was Frederick’s favorite book, though his wife found it improper for a noblewoman; Catherine writes that she thinks it is “very philosophical,” and mentions her own reading of this important work for the first time in her final memoir (675). Frederick’s
History
begins with the state of Prussia at the beginning of his reign in 1740: “With the death of Frederick William, King of Prussia, the revenues of the state did not exceed 7,400,000 ecus.”
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Similarly, in 1794 Catherine began a largely financial memoir in Russian, though she dispensed with Frederick’s classical use of the third person for himself: “In 1762, upon my ascension to the throne, I found a land army in Prussia of which two-thirds had not been paid” (517).
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Frederick concludes his introduction to his
History
with a lesson in successful rule that sounds like his early study of Machiavelli (1740): “History is the school of Princes; it is up to them to instruct themselves in the mistakes of past centuries so as to avoid them, and to learn that one must design a plan and follow it step-by-step, and that only he who has best calculated his conduct can prevail over those who act less rationally.”
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Catherine begins her final memoir with an unusual rhetorical maxim that hints at a moral reproach to Frederick and provides a further lesson in Enlightenment ideals and logic:

Fortune is not as blind as people imagine. It is often the result of a long series of precise and well-chosen steps that precede events and are not perceived by the common herd. In people it is also more specifically the result of qualities, of character, and of individual conduct. To make this more concrete, I will make the following syllogism of it:

Qualities and character will be the major premise.
Conduct, the minor.
Fortune or misfortune, the conclusion.
Here are two striking examples.
Catherine II.
Peter III.

In 1794, in a letter to Grimm, Catherine echoes both this maxim and Frederick’s lesson: “The good fortune and misfortune of each is in his character; this character lies in the principles that the person embraces; success resides in the soundness of the measures that he employs to arrive at his ends; if he wavers in his principles, if he errs in the measures that he adopts, his projects come to nothing.”
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During her reign, Catherine compared herself as a Russian ruler to Peter the Great; on the European stage, she vied for power with Frederick. In contrast to such worthy historical comparisons, in her final memoir Catherine instead draws an explicit comparison between herself and the inept Peter III.