The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (9 page)

In this memoir, the principle of comparison serves another larger historical purpose for Catherine. From the very beginning, Catherine’s last memoir declares itself to be a biography in the tradition of Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
(100 A.D.). Plutarch pairs twenty-five individual biographies of illustrious Greek men with those of Romans, and for most pairs provides a summary comparison. Not only was Plutarch among the first serious works recommended to her by Count Gyllenborg, but he was very much a part of the vocabulary of ideas that Rousseau and Montesquieu used to discuss the merits of the legislator versus the monarch.
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Until the end of the nineteenth century, Plutarch was standard reading for educated people, and many biographies of illustrious women as well as men use his comparative format.
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Histories of monarchs have paired together Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I, Voltaire’s Charles XII and Peter the Great, as well as, more immediately, Catherine and Peter the Great, and Catherine and Frederick the Great.
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Catherine has also been compared with Princess Dashkova (1743–1810). Though not a monarch, Dashkova was the most accomplished Russian woman on the international stage, and from a young age her fate was everywhere intertwined with Catherine’s political and literary life, beginning with the coup. She was Catherine’s editor at the journal
The Companion of Lovers of the Russian Word
(1783–84), and in 1783 Catherine appointed her director of the Russian Academy of Sciences and president of the new Russian Academy of Language. In 1789, Catherine resorts to Plutarch to compare herself to Dashkova, who apparently did not get along with people: “I can adapt myself to all people. I am like Alcibiades in Sparta and in Athens.”
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In 1790, Catherine appears to have been preoccupied with Plutarch while revising her middle memoir. She translated Plutarch’s pair of Alcibiades and Coriolanus.
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Catherine commented, upon reading several current biographical works in the style of Plutarch, that “one must never do that, because writers today are incapable of the ancients’ tact,” adding that “it resembles fake antiques.”
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Later that year, after the death of Prince Viktor Amadeus of Anhalt-Bernburg-Schaumburg in battle against the Swedes, she translated Plutarch and said, “This is such a comfort, this fortifies my soul.”
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Catherine, in fact, began her final memoir with her comparative maxim, which unlike her two dedications in the middle memoir, was not added later. Thus her thinking about Plutarch significantly shaped her memoir.

Catherine’s new conception of this memoir as a classical biography explains some of the real differences, aside from the maxim, with her previous memoirs. She begins with a biography of Peter III, which integrates his genealogy. Thus, unlike the early and middle memoirs, which start with her birth in Stettin, the final memoir presents Catherine as she meets Peter for the first time, in 1739, at age ten. As in the beginning of Plutarch’s biographies, Peter and Catherine are identified through their family. She eliminates her childhood, and her wedding happens in one sentence; her life does not begin until she arrives in Russia and starts her political career. Like Frederick the Great, she makes several references to herself in the third person, which is typical for autobiographies that imitate classical biography. Even at the semantic level, her conception holds. The phrase Catherine repeats most is contrastive, serving to distinguish her thoughts and behavior from those of another: “as for me” (pour moi).

An inveterate, eclectic, and opportunistic borrower, Catherine frames her revised court memoir with Plutarch’s biographical structure to add historical weight, classical substance, and judicious distance. His biographical method allows her to generalize from part of Elizabeth’s reign to the whole of Elizabeth’s, Peter’s, and her own reigns. He outlines his method in his biography of Alexander the Great:

It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, and the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.
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Everything that happens under Elizabeth’s reign and the details of Peter and Catherine’s stewardship of Holstein presage their different styles of rule and their relative merits as rulers. Thus Catherine’s final conversation with Elizabeth, about Holstein and Peter, is meant to predict Peter’s failure and Catherine’s success as rulers. The final comparison is less between Catherine and Peter than between their respective good and bad relationships with Elizabeth. By implication, Elizabeth should prefer Catherine to Peter as her successor.

Catherine both applies and modifies Plutarch’s principles of biography. Like Plutarch, who claims that “moral good is a practical stimulus,” Catherine is a moralist, concerned with personal virtue.
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Moreover, she shares Plutarch’s view of character as static rather than evolving. Plutarch’s great men combine good and bad qualities, none more than Alcibiades. Catherine depicts herself as fairly good, while Peter and Elizabeth are portrayed as having decidedly mixed qualities. In Plutarch’s world, however, life often interferes with the best intentions. Catherine seems to agree with this in regard to her personal life alone. Here Catherine is purposefully inconsistent. In her maxim, Catherine transforms
la
fortune,
the blind goddess Fortuna (the secular version of Providence), into carefully planned personal fortune, which the ancients thought depended as much on luck as virtue. Thus, in Catherine’s interpretation, the virtuous individual ruler can transform fortune by the force of her personality.

Catherine’s use of the Plutarchian framework of judicious comparison tempers her portrait of Peter III in the final memoir. The self-serving nature of Catherine’s increasingly negative portrayal of her husband troubles scholars. Some even accuse her of destroying Peter’s reputation posthumously in the memoirs and during her lifetime with her manifestos and the repression of any mention of him that might allow future historians a more balanced portrait.
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The early memoir is in fact neutral on Peter, but, of course, it was written before Peter became Emperor and threatened to divorce her, when everything still hinged on Catherine’s succeeding through Peter. After the coup, Catherine began to attack Peter in her manifestos, which reiterate that he acted against Russia’s interests in the Seven Years’ War, scorned the Russian Orthodox Church, and preferred Holstein to Russia.

The black portrait of Peter in the final memoir in fact appears consistently throughout her writings, thanks in part to Catherine’s habit of repeating herself. There are various earlier permutations of the conclusion to her outline, written around 1794, “that it was necessary to perish with him, by him, or else to try to save oneself.” Already in 1756, in a letter to Hanbury-Williams, she writes that after Elizabeth’s death, “be assured that I will not play the quiet and weak role of the King of Sweden, and that I will perish or rule.”
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In Antidote, in 1770, she wrote: “Thus, seeing that she had only two paths before her, that of sharing the misfortunes of a husband who hated her, who was incapable of following good advice, and who had no greater enemy than himself, or of saving the Empire, the Grand Duke’s son, age seven, and herself, Catherine no longer hesitated, she saved that Empire.”
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In her marginalia for Denina’s Essay on the Life
and Reign of Frederick II
(1789), she writes: “Peter III had no greater enemy than himself; all his actions bordered on insanity. . . . He took pleasure in beating men and animals. . . . By ascending to the throne, Empress Catherine saved the empire, herself, and her son from the hands of a madman” (680–81). In the final memoir, by comparison, Catherine has “three paths” and is less explicit about his failings: “But to speak more clearly, it was a matter of perishing with him, or by him, or else of saving myself, my children, and perhaps the state from the disaster that all this Prince’s moral and physical faculties promised” (399).

For the final memoir, using Plutarch’s model, Catherine has developed a larger historical perspective that helps to moderate her individual assessment of Peter. By the 1790s, with the execution of Louis XVI and the destabilizing effects of the French Revolution on monarchs throughout Europe, and fearing Paul as a successor, Catherine more generally had hardened her feelings toward any further instability in the rule of Russia. For example, in the manuscripts of the middle memoir, Catherine later added one significant sentence about his inclination to drink. “It was there that I saw the Prince, who later would be my spouse, for the first time: he seemed then well raised and witty.
Meanwhile they already noticed his liking
for wine and great irritation at everything that annoyed him;
he liked my mother, but could not stand me; he was jealous of the freedom I then enjoyed, while he was surrounded by teachers and all his steps were set and accounted for” (20, emphasis added). Nevertheless, if in the middle memoir Catherine urges pity for him, in the final memoir Peter himself is immune to this emotion, which Rousseau had praised as the greatest human feeling (118). Still, even in the final memoir, her biographical assessment of Peter makes quite clear that his education, “a clash of unfortunate circumstances,” did him great harm, and that Elizabeth’s unenlightened oversight made things worse.
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Overall, Catherine’s treatment of Peter is contradictory. Over time, she adopted a moralizing tone, especially evident in her portraits, that interrupts rather than meshes with the flow of her tale, which chronicles the ups and downs of the royal couple. In particular, her descriptions of the Grand Duke’s escapades, from drilling holes in the walls of Elizabeth’s suite and setting up benches for the voyeurs, to his military games with pretend soldiers, dolls, and rats, constitute some of the liveliest, most memorable episodes. Catherine ultimately finished the memoir differently than planned, ending with Elizabeth rather than Peter. Something happens between her and the Grand Duke to trigger her permanent mistrust, which in the memoir she places before the birth of her daughter, but in the outline, after their relations improve, her daughter is born, and Poniatowski leaves.
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This was to have been the ending of the memoir, according to her outline. Contradictions in her approach toward Peter in the memoir mirror those in life, when, on June 26, 1795, Catherine combined a requiem service in honor of Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava in 1709 with, for the first time, one for Peter III.
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Catherine’s use of Plutarch as a frame for the final memoir illustrates the increased importance of history and history writing for her. More immediate, the differences between Catherine’s middle and final memoirs reflect two contrasting emphases for memoirs in French historiography at the time. The eyewitness account of her place and time, the
histoire particulière,
in the earlier memoir gives way in the later memoir to the admixture of the larger national and historical scope of the
histoire
générale.
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Particular history simply relates what happened, while general history argues why things happened as they did. Thus Frederick calls his memoir a history, which was the more prestigious genre.
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While Catherine’s memoirs are eyewitness accounts with many overlaps, the final memoir contains conspicuous changes that make it more historical and general. Catherine summarizes her main points in the margins, frequently at first and then minimally, mainly noting a new year, a practice she developed in her writings on Russian history. The maxim provides a large general context and argument for the whole memoir, and like Frederick, she mentions documents in her archives. In particular, her account of Peter’s childhood is not an eyewitness account, and she very likely researched it. In 1745, Elizabeth apparently instructed her ambassador to Denmark, Nikolai Korf, to learn about Peter’s childhood, and Catherine may have used his report.
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Her approach to her final memoir thus represents a significant shift in her autobiographical consciousness, from viewing her years as Grand Duchess as life at court to viewing that time as history. Catherine displays those larger historical ambitions elsewhere in 1794, in a sketch she commissioned by Johann-Baptist Lampi (1751–1830), titled “Portrait of Catherine II with Allegorical Figures of Saturn and History.”
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Taken together, Catherine’s various memoirs are sui generis. Catherine’s concern for facts, her unpretentious frankness, and her difficult position as Grand Duchess under Empress Elizabeth make it possible to forget that the person writing the memoir was the most powerful woman in the world. Rulers’ autobiographical writings, in various genres, were rare, and they tended toward military history and philosophy.
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The only women who were rulers and writers were Queen Christina of Sweden and Queen Elizabeth of England (1533–1603), both more learned than Catherine.
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Around 1681, Queen Christina wrote an unfinished autobiography that is sixty-nine pages and in French; it was published in 1759 in a collection of her works, about which Catherine had read d’Alembert’s review essay, Mémoires.
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While Catherine’s reign coincided with the first significant amount of Russian memoir writing, much of this writing, including her own memoirs, remained unpublished (though rarely unread) until the nineteenth century.
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In contrast, the publication of French memoir writing was well established by the latter half of the eighteenth century; by the seventeenth century, the number of published French memoirs already exceeded the number of Russian memoirs— published or unpublished—by 1800. Nevertheless, as the memoirs of a ruler, Catherine’s work obviously has few peers; as those of a female autocrat, her memoirs stand alone.