The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (12 page)

Its value continues to lie in his discussion of many historical documents that were burned during Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow in 1812.

W. Gareth Jones, “Biography in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 22 (1989): 70–80.

These historians include Sergei Solov’ev (1820–79), Vasilii Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), and Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943). Mazour,
Modern Russian Historiography,
115, 138, 146.

On the story behind Bil’basov’s history, see Simon Dixon, “Catherine the Great and the Romanov Dynasty: The Case of the Grand Duchess Mariia Pavlovna (1854– 1920),” in
Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of
Anthony G. Cross,
ed. Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes (Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2004), 202.

This biography went through four editions and retranslations, as Castéra unwittingly collaborated with an English translator, William Tooke. David M. Griffiths, “Castéra-Tooke: The First Western Biographer(s) of Catherine II,”
Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter
10 (1982): 50–62.

For example, on Paul’s parentage, Tooke writes: “In the mean time the grand duke cohabited with his spouse; and thenceforward Soltikoff thought he had no longer any danger to prevent; he now tasted without disturbance or remorse those pleasures from the consequences of which he had nothing to dread.” William Tooke,
The Life of
Catharine II, Empress of Russia,
3rd ed. (London, 1799), 1:112.

Simon Dixon, “The Posthumous Reputation of Catherine II in Russia, 1797–1837,”
Slavonic and East European Review
77:4 (October 1999): 656.

Aleksandr Kamenskii, “
Pod seniiu Ekateriny
”:
Vtoraia polovina XVIII veka
(St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1992),
Zhizn’ i sud’ba Imperatritsy Ekateriny Velikoi
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Znanie, 1997), and
Rossiiskaia imperiia v XVIII veke: traditsii i modernizatsii
(Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999); P. V. Stegnii, Razdely Pol’shi i diplomatiia Ekateriny
II: 1772, 1793, 1795
(Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2002); Lopatin,
Ekaterina
II i G. A. Potemkin;
and Smith,
Love and Conquest.

Claus Scharf,
Katharina II: Deutschland und die Deutschen
(Mainz, Germany: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1995); M. Fainshtein and F. Göpfert, eds.,
Katharina II: Eine russische
Schriftstellerin, FrauenLiteraturGeschichte, vol. 5 (Wilhelmshorst, Germany: Verlag F. K. Göpfert, 1996); Hans Ottomeyer and Susan Tipton, eds., Katharina die Grosse (Eurasburg, Germany: Edition Minerva, 1997); Piotrovsky,
Treasures of Catherine the
Great; Lurana Donnels O’Malley, ed., Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Rus
sia
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998).

N. I. Pavlenko,
Ekaterina Velikaia
(Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003); Hélène Carrère d’Encausse,
Catherine II: Un âge d’or pour la Russie
(Paris: Fayard, 2002); and Alexander,
Catherine the Great.

Dena Goodman, ed.,
Marie-Antoinette: Writing on the Body of a Queen
(New York: Routledge, 2003); Jo Burr Margadant, ed.,
The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

A first attempt was made by Mary Hays, “Catherine II,” in
Female Biography; or, Memoirs
of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (London, 1803), 2:247–404, 3:1–271. She recycles Tooke’s
Life
and Masson’s
Secret Memoirs.
She justifies Catherine’s love life as no worse than Elizabeth’s (her paraphrase of the above Tooke quotation leaves out that Catherine was sleeping with both her husband and her lover when Paul was conceived [2:266]) and like Masson, emphasizes her writings. On Hays, see Anthony Cross, “Catherine the Great: Views from the Distaff Side,” in
Russia in the Age
of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel de Madariaga,
ed. Roger Bartlett and Janet Hartley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 203–21.

Nobles, particularly those of the mostly minor German states, needed the entrée of French to arrange the international royal marriages they aspired to. For example, in addition to Russian and French, Empress Elizabeth knew German and Italian. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Russian court functioned in German and French as well as Russian, while government business was in Russian.

For example, for their betrothal: “The ring the Grand Duke gave me was worth 12,000 rubles, and the one he received from me, 14,000.” Later: “From my betrothal to our departure, there was not a day when I did not receive presents from the Empress, of which the least was worth from 10,000 to 15,000 rubles, in jewels, money, fabrics, etc., everything that one could imagine. In sum, she manifested great tenderness” (452– 53). These monetary details, less evident in the final memoir, were printed in the newspapers.

Dixon,
Catherine the Great,
26.

Madariaga,
Catherine the Great,
5.

Smith,
Love and Conquest,
xxxi.

Barbara Heldt,
Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature
(Bloomington, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

Katherina II in ihren Memoiren,
ed. Dr. Erich Böhme (1920; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972).

The last memoir really ends in 1758, because toward the end, Catherine was off by a year for such things as the birth of her daughter and Bestuzhev-Riumin’s arrest. On the dating of this memoir, see also O. Kornilovich, “Zapiski Imperatritsy Ekateriny II,”
Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia
37 ( January 1912): 37–74.

The editors note that in the middle memoir Catherine does not know the end of the Baturin affair (1749), but that a letter from her to the Procurator General in late 1773 makes clear that she has followed the matter closely and by then knows how it has ended; she recounts the entire matter in the final memoir (viii–ix). Monika Greenleaf ’s dating of Catherine’s middle memoir is at variance with Pypin’s dating; she dates part 1 to 1771 and parts 2 and 3 to 1791. The chronology of the memoirs is central to her argument that Catherine “refashioned her narrative images in response to the shifting literary practices, currents of political ideology, and attitudes to gender that prevailed in each decade” (425). “Performing Autobiography: The Multiple Memoirs of Catherine the Great (1756–96),”
The Russian Review
63 ( July 2004): 407–26.

“The princess Catherine d’Anhalt-Zerbst passed her earlier years in rather a middling condition. Her father, the sovereign of a petty state, and a general in the service of the King of Prussia, resided in a frontier town, in which, from infancy upward, she was accustomed to the military homages of a garrison; and if, now and then, on her ceasing to be a child, her mother carried her to court, to attract a transient smile from some one of the royal family, an ordinary eye could not have distinguished her amidst the crowd which attend on such occasions.” Rulhière,
A History, or Anecdotes of the Revolution
in Russia,
3.

SIRIO,
13:332–36.

Ibid., 23:77. She modeled her epitaph on one for her English greyhound, Sir Tom Anderson (Pekarskii,
Materialy dlia istorii,
70–72).

In this memoir, Countess Bruce is mentioned only twice, as her friend and as a recipient of her gifts, and thus a cause of her debts.

Catherine to Grimm, April 14, 1785,
SIRIO,
23:330.

“Mémoires commencés le 21 d’Avril 1771,” fond 1 (Secret Packet), opis’ 1, delo 21, fols. 73v–74, Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (RGADA), Moscow.

Smith,
Love and Conquest,
9–11.

Catherine had no celebration for Paul’s majority; she further distracted him by arranging a marriage to Princess Wilhelmina of Hessen-Darmstadt on September 29, 1773, but then not giving the couple a separate court, which she knew from personal experience could be used to meddle against her. Alexander,
Catherine the Great,
138, 166.

Safonov argues that by means of the surprisingly intimate ending of part 1 of the middle memoir, where Catherine writes that her marriage was unconsummated for nine years, she justifies depriving Paul of his inheritance and questions his right to rule by hinting that he is a bastard. However, it was common knowledge that her son might be illegitimate, and she had made the same point in her early memoir, and would make it again in the final memoir. Like Greenleaf (2004), Safonov overlooks the conclusion of the editors of the Academy edition that the middle memoir in its entirety dates to 1771–73, while the revisions date to 1790–91. When we redate the middle memoir, the ending of part 3 (about Holstein) nicely supports Safonov’s argument that this memoir certainly relates to Paul’s majority. Moreover, Catherine does not mention the Holstein issue in the first memoir, a further indication that the circumstances in which she wrote the middle and final memoirs raised the issue. M. M. Safonov, “’Seksual’nye otkroveniia’ Ekateriny II i proiskhozhdenie Pavla I,” in
Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century,
ed. Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon, and Maarten Fraanje (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 96–111.

She concludes, “Two of the group will die from pleasure, but one does not say their names nor whether they are men or women” (654).

Later, she mentions that a secretary has prepared another such examination for her. Catherine to Grimm, July 5, 1779,
SIRIO,
23:148.

Catherine to Grimm, August 24, 1778,
SIRIO,
23:100.

Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II kak pisatel’nitsa,” Zaria 9 (1869): 84–101.

Mémoires complets et authentiques du Duc de Saint-Simon sur le siècle de Louis XIV et la régence
(Paris: Hachette, 1882), 1:xxxv.

Catherine to Grimm, June 22, 1790,
SIRIO,
23:484. François Ambrose Didot (1730– 1804) was a well-known printer in France. The editors of the Academy edition cite this passage too, but in an unusual mistake, claim it is Diderot, who had, however, died in 1784 (ix).

Alexander,
Catherine the Great,
352. He was favorite from 1776 to 1777.

“Imagine the passion for writing about ancient events that no one cares about and that no one will read.” Catherine to Grimm, January 12, 1794,
SIRIO,
23:589.

“Histoire de la Russie au 18-me siècle,”
Sochineniia,
11:521–22. Catherine’s response, “Réflexions sur le projet d’une histoire de Russia au 18-ième siècle,”
Sochineniia,
11:560–71. Sénac de Meilhan even compared Catherine to a building in his published booklet, “Comparaison de St. Pierre de Rome avec Catherine II. St. Petersbourg, 1791,” Sochineniia, 11:543–44.

Frederick’s first memoir,
Memoirs on the House of Brandenburg
(1751), goes up through the reign of his grandfather Frederick I (1657–1713).

Catherine to Grimm, January 23, 1789,
SIRIO,
23:470.

Frederick II, L’Histoire de mon temps, vol. 1 of Oeuvres posthumes de Frédéric II, Roi de Prusse (Berlin, 1788), 25.

In English, Anthony,
Memoirs,
299–307. Catherine concludes this memoir with her
Instruction
in 1767. Frederick wrote: “I will speak of myself only when necessity obliges me, and if one will allow it, as Caesar did, in the third person, to avoid the horror of egoism.” In his opinion, Commentaries on the Gallic War (about 50 B.C.) by Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.) was the last accurate history, in that it agreed with contemporary sources and “contained neither panegyrics nor satires.” Frederick II, L’Histoire de mon
temps,
10, 6.

Frederick II, L’Histoire de mon temps, 24.

Catherine to Grimm, February 13, 1794,
SIRIO,
23:595–96. This letter and her financial memoir help date the beginning of the final memoir.

Numa ruled Rome by religion and culture, which disappeared with his death, while Lycurgus of Sparta ruled by laws that provided a model for Plato’s
Republic;
on the
philosophes’
views, see Dixon,
Catherine the Great,
75–77.

For example, Catherine may have read Brantôme’s
Les vies des dames illustres de France
de son tems
(1665),
Les vies des Dames galantes
(1666), and
Les vies des hommes illustres et
grands capitaines étrangers
(1666).

On the political implications of pairing Catherine and Peter the Great, see Dixon, “The Posthumous Reputation of Catherine II in Russia.”

July 31, 1789. A. V. Khrapovitskii, Dnevnik A. V. Khrapovitskogo, 1782–1793 (St. Petersburg, 1874), 300.

Khrapovitskii, April 27, 1790,
Dnevnik,
331. In 1790, Khrapovitskii copied her translation of Alcibiades on January 21–22, she thanked him on January 23, she gave him more to copy on February 2, and she was reading the companion life of Coriolanus on February 18, when she called in Khrapovitskii to discuss the use of the expression
hoc
age. Dnevnik,
323–25. This suggests that she may have been translating from a Latin translation of the original Greek into French.

Khrapovitskii, January 28, 1790,
Dnevnik,
324.

Khrapovitskii, April 27, 1790,
Dnevnik,
331.

Plutarch’s Lives,
trans. John Dryden (New York: Random House, 2001), 2:139.

Plutarch’s Lives,
1:202.

Carol S. Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993).

Catherine to Hanbury-Williams, August 12, 1756,
Correspondance de Catherine,
25. In 1755, the King of Sweden and his wife, Queen Luise, sister of Frederick the Great, had unsuccessfully attempted to seize more power for the Swedish throne from the Diet.

d’Encausse, L’Impératrice et l’Abbé, 436.

Here she contradicts Rulhière’s assessment about the root of the problem, but not the mixed result: “The care of his childhood had been committed to two men of very uncommon merit, but who fell into a great mistake in attempting to form their pupil after the grandest models, attending rather to his fortune than to his capacity.” Rulhière,
A History, or Anecdotes of the Revolution in Russia,
19–20.