by Simon Dixon
In 1897, the teenage poet Alexander Blok declared that Catherine was his favourite heroine in history on a visit to Bad Neuheim during which, by a delicious coincidence, he lost his virginity to a woman more than twice his age, described by his biographer as ‘his type: big, spontaneous, and talented rather than intellectual’.83 Though it was only after the revolution of 1905 that salacious stories of the empress’s ‘intimate life’ could be published in Russia, Catherine’s admirers found their own way of celebrating her memory.84 Thanks to the patronage of Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhaylovich, a circle of antiquarians including the snuffbox connoisseur S. N. Kaznakov, and Grigory Orlov’s biographer, Alexander Golombiyevsky, staged an exhibition of imperial portraits at the Tauride Palace in spring 1905. Between February and May, undeterred by revolutionary unrest, some 45,000 visitors marvelled at forty-four paintings of Catherine, displayed alongside thirty-five of Peter the Great and Alexander I in the palace she had built for Potëmkin. (Shortly afterwards the great colonnade where he had entertained her in April 1791 became the outer hall of Russia’s first national representative assembly, the State Duma.)85 The exhibition’s guiding force was Sergey Dyaghilev, whose collaborators in the predominantly homosexual ‘World of Art’ group experienced their own scandalous frisson by gathering in 1906 to examine what they believed to be a wax model of Potëmkin’s phallus, allegedly commissioned by Catherine ‘for the edification of diminished successors’, and smuggled out of the Hermitage by a curator at the behest of his son, the erotic artist Konstantin Somov.
One reason why the empress continued to have such a profound resonance at the beginning of the twentieth century was the presence at the Court of St Petersburg, throughout the reigns of the last two tsars, of a woman who deliberately modelled herself on Catherine the Great. This was the grand duchess Maria Pavlovna, wife of Alexander III’s brother, Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, born Princess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Gossips claimed that this ‘debauched German’ led a ‘dissolute life’ by holding ‘small orgies’ at her residence along the embankment from the Winter Palace. A scandal at the Cubat Frères restaurant in 1889 prompted rumours that she would be forced to emigrate.86 Shortly afterwards, the customarily humourless Alexander III joked at a fisheries trade fair that a stand featuring semi-naked peasant women dressed as mermaids might inspire Maria Pavlovna’s next costumed ball.87 Recalling Catherine’s own mistreatment under Elizabeth and Peter III, friends of the grand duchess attributed such sniping to envy of her intelligence and beauty.88 To her critics, however, she personified the reasons why Catherine’s reign symbolised not the golden age of the Romanov dynasty, but rather, to quote Richard Wortman, its ‘reprehensible past’ in which the empress herself, ‘possessed by ambition, flagrant in her inconstancy and indifference to the family, seemed threatening to the very notion of nineteenth-century legitimacy’.89 The British ambassador Sir George Buchanan outlined the more attractive characteristics that raised echoes of Catherine the Great:
A grande dame in the best sense of that term, but without any pretensions as regards the strict observation of Court etiquette, the Grand Duchess was admirably fitted to play the part of the hostess and to do the honours of the Court. With great conversational gifts, she was not only herself full of verve and entrain, but possessed the art of inspiring them in others. Her entertainments, no matter what form they took, were never dull, and no one was ever bored. At her dinners and receptions one met many of the younger members of the Imperial family and the elite of Russian society, more especially the ‘smart set’, as well as a sprinkling of the official and artistic worlds.90
While an uninterrupted male line of succession in Prussia permitted successive Hohenzollerns to draw inspiration from the heroic image of Frederick the Great—as, indeed, did Bismarck, Hitler and Goebbels—no nineteenth-century Romanov tsar could comfortably model himself on Catherine. Major General Sir John Hanbury Williams thought he could still detect in 1914 the shadows of that ‘halo of mystery’ attaching to the days when Catherine addressed letters to his ancestor Sir Charles ‘as “Madame” and he to her as “Monsieur”’. But the more historians emphasised Catherine’s contribution to Russia’s great power status, the less likely her latest successor seemed to be able to sustain it. One need only recall Hanbury Williams’ doleful comment after an interview with the tsar at his Mogilëv headquarters in October 1915: ‘Catherine was a wonderful ruler of Russia, but these are not the days of Catherine.’91
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‘True glory cannot be sought,’ General Suvorov reminded Admiral Ribas in November 1790, ‘it comes from the sacrifice that one makes to the utility of the public good.’92 Catherine was aware of the tension. Regularly reaffirming her commitment to the common good, she was nevertheless obsessed with her own posthumous reputation. It would have delighted her to know that, after her death, Academician Peter Pallas re-christened one of the steppe grasses he had discovered ‘Catharinaea sublimis’.93 ‘She loves glory and is assiduous in her pursuit of it,’ Prince Shcherbatov wrote in 1786–7.94 Those were years in which she embarked on a major renovation of the road from St Petersburg to Moscow, recommended to her by Diderot in 1773 as a good way of securing immortality. This, indeed, was one subject on which Catherine was particularly anxious to assure the approbation of the philosophes.95 She offered her own self-assessment to Grimm in 1778:
Here lies Catherine the Second, born at Stettin on 21 April 1729. She came to Russia in 1744 to marry Peter III. At the age of fourteen, she conceived the triple ambition of pleasing her husband, Elizabeth and the nation. She overlooked nothing to achieve this. In eighteen years of boredom and solitude she read many books. Once she had reached the throne of Russia, she wanted only good and sought to procure happiness, freedom and property for her subjects. She forgave with ease and hated no one; indulgent, happy to be alive, cheerful by nature, with a republican soul and a good heart, she had friends; work was easy for her, company and the arts pleased her.96
That was not how contemporary critics saw her. Shcherbatov complained in a treatise written only for the eyes of his family that ‘true friendship never resided in her heart, and she is ready to betray her best friend and servant in order to please her lover’. According to him, the empress’s obsessive quest for immortality had left her vulnerable to a series of cunning flatterers—Betskoy, Yelagin, Vyazemsky and Bezborodko prominent among them. Too many of her projects, founded ostensibly ‘for the good of the nation’ were in fact ‘simply symbols of her love of glory, for if she really had the nation’s interest at heart, she would, after founding them, have also paid attention to their progress’. This was the voice of a scholarly aristocrat who had once enjoyed Catherine’s patronage as an historian but now found himself permanently excluded from her inner circle. Although she had always tried to balance one adviser against another, never allowing anyone to think that his ideas had no prospect of being accepted, this proved an increasingly difficult balance to hold. To those outside her charmed circle, Potëmkin had come to epitomise the corrupting influence of favouritism in the last decade of her reign: ‘love of power, ostentation, pandering to all his desires, gluttony and hence luxury at table, flattery, avarice, rapaciousness, and it may be said, all the other vices known in the world, with which he himself is full and with which he fills his supporters, and so on throughout the empire’. 97
In April 1790, the chief of the St Petersburg police entered Catherine’s inner sanctum to present her with Denis, a four-year-old boy of unknown origin found wandering the streets. Since no one had yet answered advertisements for his parents, the empress adopted him at the Court’s expense and placed him in the care of a courtier living close by the Hermitage.98 She was capable of demonstrative acts of kindness to those who had no right to expect them. Yet she was certainly no saint. Despite her idealised view of the Russian people as a whole, she took a dim view of many of the individuals she met on her travels, reserving some of her cattiest remarks for the earnest merchants’ wives
who served her at table. Though her legislation allowed for a limited degree of social mobility, her policy was always to encourage her subjects to seek satisfaction in the station into which they had been born. As befitted a believer in a rigid social hierarchy, she relaxed only in the privacy of a narrow circle of aristocratic friends which remained remarkably constant throughout her fifty-two years in Russia (Ivan Betskoy, one of her first contacts at Elizabeth’s Court, died at the age of ninety-three in August 1795). Having begun her reign as a usurper, she sought a degree of legitimacy by portraying many of her early edicts as an attempt to complete the work of Peter the Great. But she was never a slavish imitator.99 On the contrary, having sought throughout to exceed the achievements of her glorious predecessor, she ended her life surrounded by images of her own triumphs on the European stage: paintings commemorating the battle of Chesme by the English artist Richard Paton were originally hung in the Hermitage but significantly moved in 1779 to the throne room at Peter’s own summer residence, Peterhof.100 Catherine had presided over the greatest expansion of Russian territory since the mid-sixteenth century and seen her empire’s economy grow in proportion. She had shown at least as great a commitment to the power of ideas as Peter I. But since she had ultimately been unable to trust the Enlightenment’s fundamental belief in self-development, a reign which began by fostering a degree of intellectual independence ended by enveloping some of Russia’s most interesting writers in clouds of suspicion. Catherine had not succeeded in her aim of establishing a firm rule of law, and the rational bureaucratic institutions she had worked so hard to establish never emasculated the informal patronage networks by which Russia has long been governed. Although she had offered her subjects the example of a tolerant and trusting ruler, her gentle methods have rarely been adopted by her successors. For them, the empress’s conduct has most often been an anti-model, not least because it has served as a subtle form of ammunition for their critics for most of the two centuries since her death.
ABBREVIATIONS
AKV: Arkhiv kniaz’ia Vorontsova, ed. P. I. Bartenev, 40 vols. (M, 1870–95).
Beer and Fiedler: A. Beer and J. Ritter von Fiedler, eds, Joseph II. und Graf Ludwig Cobenzl: Ihr Briefwechsel, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1901).
Benois, Tsarskoe selo: Aleksandr Benua, Tsarskoe Selo v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny (SPb, 1910).
Bentham: The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2 (London, 1968), ed. T. L. S. Sprigge; vol. 3 (London, 1971), ed. I. R. Christie; vol. 4 (London, 1981), ed. A. T. Milne.
Bessarabova: N. V. Bessarabova, Puteshestviia Ekateriny II po Rossii (M, 2005).
Best: Voltaire, Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. Theodore Besterman, The Complete Works of Voltaire, vols. 85–135 (Banbury and Oxford, 1968–77).
Bezborodko: ‘Pis’ma A. A. Bezborodka k grafu Petru Aleksandrovichu Rumiantsevu’, Starina i novizna, 3 (1900), 160–370.
Bil’basov: V. A. Bil’basov, Istoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi, 2 vols. (Berlin, n.d.).
British Art Treasures: British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage, eds. B. Allen and L. Dukelskaya (New Haven, CT, 1996).
C.: Catherine II
CASS: Canadian American Slavic Studies
ChIOIDR: Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitete.
Corberon: Un diplomate français à la cour de Catherine II 1775–1780: Journal intime du chevalier de Corberon, chargé d’affaires de France en Russie, ed. L.-H. Labande, 2 vols. (Paris, 1901).
Correspondance: Correspondance de Catherine Alexéievna, Grande-Duchesse de Russie, et de Sir Charles H. Williams, Ambassadeur d’Angleterre, 1756 et 1757, ed. S. Goriaïnow (M, 1909).
Coxe: William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, 2 vols. (London, 1784).
Cross: Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, 1997).
Despatches: The Despatches and Correspondence of John, Second Earl of Buckinghamshire, Ambassador to the Court of Catherine II. Of Russia 1762–1765, ed. A. d’A. Collyer, 2 vols. (London, 1900–01).
Dimsdale: An English Lady at the Court of Catherine the Great: The Journal of Baroness Elizabeth Dimsdale, 1781, ed. A. G. Cross (Cambridge, 1989).
Engelhardt: L. N. Engel’gardt, Zapiski, ed. I. I. Fediukin (M, 1997).
Falconet: Correspondance de Falconet avec Catherine II 1767–1778, ed. Louis Réau (Paris, 1921)
Grimm: ‘Pis’ma Imperatritsy Ekateriny II k Grimmu (1774–1796)’, ed. Ia. Grot, SIRIO, vol. 23 (SPb, 1878).
Harris Diaries: Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury, edited by his grandson, 4 vols. (London, 1844). Harris Papers: Music and Theatre in Handel’s World: The Family Papers of James Harris, 1732–1780, eds. Donald Burrows and Rosemary Dunhill (Oxford, 2002).
KfZh: Kamer-fur’erskie zhurnaly, 1696–1816 (SPb, 1853–1917).
Khrapovitskii: Dnevnik A.V. Khrapovitskago 1782–1793, ed. N. Barsukov (SPb, 1874).
Kutepov, Tsarskaia okhota: Nikolai Kutepov, Tsarskaia i imperatorskaia okhota na Rusi: Konets XVII-go i XVIII-i vek: Istoricheskii ocherk vol. 3 (SPb, 1900)
Lettere: Nikolai Ivanovic, la vostra lettera…: Lettere di Caterina II Romanov a N. I. Saltykov (1773–1793), Catalogo della Mostra 3 Novembre 2005 — 18 Febbraio 2006 (Milan, 2005).
Lopatin: Ekaterina II i G. A. Potemkin: lichnaia perepiska, ed. V. S. Lopatin (M, 1997).
M: Moscow
MP: Muzykal’yni Peterburg: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ XVIII vek, ed. A. L. Porfir’eva, 6 vols. in progress (SPb, 1996–).
McGrew: Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia 1754–1801 (Oxford, 1992).
Madariaga: Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1981).
Madariaga, Short History: Isabel de Madariaga, Catherine the Great: A short history (New Haven, CT, 1990). Montefiore: Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Prince of Princes: A Life of Potemkin (London, 2000).
Omel’chenko: O.A Omel’chenko, ‘Zakonnaia monarkhiia’ Ekateriny II: Prosveschennyi absoliutizm v Rossii (M, 1993).
Opisanie: Obstoiatel’noe opisanie torzhestvennykh poriadkov blagopoluchnago vshestviia v imperatorskuiu drevniuiu rezidentskkiu bogospasaemyi grad Moskvu i osviashchenneishago koronovaniia…Ekateriny Vtoryia, samoderzhitsy vserossiiskiia, materi i izbavitel’nitsy otechestva…1762 goda, published as appendix to KfZh, 1762 (SPb, 1855).
PKNO: Pamiatniki kul’tury: novye otkrytiia.
Parkinson: John Parkinson, A Tour of Russia, Siberia, and the Crimea 1792–1794, ed. W. Collier (London, 1971).
PSZ: Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1st series, 46 vols. (SPb, 1830). Poroshin: S.A. Poroshin, ‘Zapiski’, in Russkii Gamlet, ed. A. Skorobogatov (M, 2004).
Proschwitz: Catherine II et Gustav III: Une correspondence retrouvée, ed. Gunnar von Proschwitz (Stockholm, 1998).
Quarenghi: Giacomo Quarenghi, Architetto a Pietroburgo: Lettere e altri scritti, ed. Vanni Zanella (Venice, 1988).
Richardson: [William Richardson], Anecdotes of the Russian Empire. In a series of letters written, a few years ago, from St Petersburg (London, 1784).
RA: Russkii arkhiv
RBS: Russkii biograficheskii slovar’
RS: Russkaia starina
SK: Svodyni katalog russkoi grazhdanskoi pechati XVIII veka, 1725–1800, 5 vols. (M, 1962–7).
Shcherbatov: Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, trans. and ed. Antony Lentin (Cambridge, 1969).
Ségur: Memoirs and Recollections of Count Segur, Ambassador from France to the Courts of Russia and Prussia &c. &c. Written by himself, 3 vols. (London, 1825–27).
SEER: Slavonic and East European Review.
SIRIO: Sbornik Imperatorskago Russkago Istoricheskago Obshchestva, 148 vols. (SPb, 1867–1916).
Sochineniia: Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, ed. A. N. Pypin, vols. 1–5, 7–12 (SPb, 1901–07).
SPb: St Petersburg
Shtelin, Muzyka: Iakob Shtelin, Muzyka i balet v Rossii XVIII veka (SPb, 2002).
Shtelin, Zapiski: ‘Zapiski Shtelina o Petre Tret’em, Imperatore Vserossiiskom’, ChIOIDR, 1866, bk 4, 67–118.
Starikova: Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhu Elizavety Petrovny: Dokumental’naia khronika 1741–1750, 2 parts (M, 2003–05).
Stedingk: Un ambassadeur de Suède à la cour de Catherine II. Feld-Maréchal Comte de Stedingk: Choix de dépèches diplomatiques, rapports secrets et letters particulières de 1790 à 1796, ed. La Comtesse Brevern de la Gardie, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1919).
Storch: The Picture of Petersburgh, from the German of Henry Storch (London, 1801).
Tooke: [William Tooke], The Life of Catharine II. Empress of Russia, An enlarged translation from the French, 3 vols. (London, 1798).
Zapiski Shtelina: Zapiski Iakoba Shtelina ob iziashchnykh iskusstvakh v Rossii, ed. K. V. Malinovskii, 2 vols. (M, 1990).
Zavadovskii: ‘Pis’ma grafa P. V. Zavadovskago k fel’dmarshalu grafu P. A. Rumiantsevu’, Starina i novizna, vol. 4 (1901), 223–382.
Zimmerman: M. Semevskii, ed., ‘Imperatritsa Ekaterina II v eia neizdannykh ne vpolne pis’makh k I.G. Tsimmermannu’, RS, 55, 3 (1887), 239–79.