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. 89 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.90 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.91 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.92 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.93 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).94
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. 95 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.96 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.97
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.98 The international boom in studies of Catherine celebrated the 200th anniversary of her death in 1996 with conferences, essay collections, and performances.99 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.100 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.101 Catherine’s life seems ideal for such an antinarrative—a rich, active,
provocative life that refuses to cohere into a single story. 102 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.103 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.
She began writing about herself for others as an exercise in self-knowledge. The lifelong importance she attached to knowing oneself comes through in her self-portraits and criticisms of Peter III in the three main memoirs. Her first account of herself was her 1745 “Portrait of a Philosopher” written for Count Gyllenborg. In the middle memoir, she titles it “Rough Sketch of the Philosopher’s Character at Age Fifteen,” and explains:
I found this document in 1757 and I confess that I was surprised that at the age of fifteen I already had such a deep understanding of the many facets of my soul, and I saw that this piece was profoundly reflective and that in 1757 I could not find a word to add to it, nor in thirteen years had I made any discovery about myself that I had not already known at age fifteen. [61]
This description is similar to her self-portrait in an undated one-page fragment that still exists. It begins with her birth, parents, governess, and education, and breaks off with the following sentences: “I was instructed in the Lutheran religion, I was horribly curious, quite stubborn, and most ingratiating, I had a good heart, I was very sensitive, I cried easily, I was extremely fickle. I never liked dolls, but quite liked any kind of exercise, there was no boy more daring than I, I was proud to be that and often I hid my fear, shame produced this impulse, I was quite secretive” (473).
In her later memoirs, Catherine incorporates such portraits of herself and others into her narrative. She draws out the central characteristics that motivate an individual’s actions, what in the eighteenth century were called the springs of behavior, or one’s character. Catherine here subscribes to the universalizing ideals of the Enlightenment, with its key words of “qualities,” “character,” and “mind” (esprit). Given her idea of human nature as unchanging, at age twenty-eight Catherine can claim to have understood herself fully at age fifteen. This is an Aristotelian notion of the individual who does not change with time and experience, but only reveals herself to be more thoroughly what she has always been. Education could significantly shape, but not change, someone’s nature. This view of human psychology differs significantly from post-Freudian notions, which posit fundamental, erupting, conflicting forces that can be traced back to childhood and continually evolve. In Catherine’s model, a child is in essence already a small adult. Thus in part, Catherine could start over each time she wrote a new memoir because as she understood herself, each memoir was the same portrait, only more so, no matter which particular incidents she chose to recount.
Catherine’s first sustained autobiographical narrative, like her subsequent memoirs, is a political or court memoir. She includes information about Russia that a foreigner might not know, and thus most likely she wrote it for Hanbury-Williams, who arrived at court in June 1755 and left in June 1757; their letters indicate that she trusted him with personal information. Court memoirs revolve around access to the ruler. At the end of this memoir, she explains to Hanbury-Williams: “You will perhaps find it necessary to criticize me, since seeing myself so badly treated, I never spoke with the Empress personally to justify myself against the thousand calumnies, lies, etc. etc. Know then that a thousand thousand times, I have asked to speak with her alone but she has never wanted to consent to it” (467). All the memoirs recount whatever Catherine or Elizabeth say to each other, their meals together, gestures toward each other, presents (including their value) to each other, who notices their contact, and the greatest honor, time alone with Elizabeth.104 Illnesses provide opportunities to show one’s affection and esteem. They exchange compliments—Catherine praising Elizabeth’s impressive appearance, Elizabeth commending Catherine’s religious observance and her Russian. Access was also reflected in physical proximity to the ruler, hence the importance of the relative location of Peter’s, Catherine’s, and her mother’s apartments in Elizabeth’s palaces. For example, Catherine is never closer to Elizabeth’s rooms than when she gives birth, a reflection of the importance of the event, though as Catherine learns, much to her chagrin, not of her own importance. Catherine’s eye for detail not only makes for vivid storytelling, but these details are the heart and soul of court memoirs, representing the language of favor and disfavor at court. Once the reader appreciates the importance of these details, the memoirs become a gripping, timeless tale of the endless rise and fall of political fortunes.
Written before Catherine’s coup, this first memoir, unlike the later ones, cannot be an attempt to justify herself on this question. Still, Catherine here deals with her Achilles’ heel before the coup. In their first conversation alone, the Empress verbally, and nearly physically, assaults Catherine for failing to produce an heir, which Elizabeth imagines as a plot against her at the behest of Catherine’s mother and Frederick the Great. Frustrated in her attempts to defend herself against endless intrigues, in her hasty conclusion Catherine provides the greatest possible self-justification for her existence. The narrative arc of this memoir concludes with the birth of her son, Paul, who finally provides Catherine with the security she desperately needs, and Elizabeth with an heir. Thus Catherine concludes: “It is true that since November 1754, I have changed my attitude. It has become more regal. They have grown more considerate of me and I have more peace than formerly” (468). Catherine’s greatly improved position increases her hopes for her political survival, with or without Peter, after Elizabeth’s death.
Although Catherine wrote her three main memoirs years apart and to make different points, scholars have tended to interpret all her memoirs through the lens of the final memoir as a justification for her coup. Thus the memoirs continue to support historians’ suspicions that Catherine is pulling the wool over their eyes. Simon Dixon suggestively proclaims, “Deafened by such self-justificatory overtones, we shall need something more than the memoirs if we are to penetrate the innermost recesses of her mind.” 105 He sees the more vulnerable Catherine in her early correspondence, while Madariaga suggests that her more spontaneous voice can be found in her marginalia.106 In contrast, Smith finds “some of the most honest, revealing glimpses into Catherine’s heart and mind” in her letters to Potemkin.107 Barbara Heldt has dismissed the memoirs because Catherine is too self-confident and unwilling to reveal her doubts, which is apparently unrepresentative of women’s memoirs that are meant to document women’s oppression in their own words.108 Though these judgments actually relate to the final memoir, they have been taken to explain all the memoirs.
Based on the abrupt ending of the final, most comprehensive memoir
, scholars have interpreted the earlier memoirs as lesser fragments of an incomplete whole. In fact, the preeminent German translator of her memoirs interpolated all of them together chronologically into one memoir.109 However, the early memoir ends in December 1754, where the addressee (“you”) knows what happens, and thus, unlike the later memoirs, Catherine basically brings them up to the time of writing. It makes the most sense to treat her memoirs together and also as separate and even as distinct subgenres of autobiographical writing. While they all cover her life as Grand Duchess, they end differently and thus really tell different stories. Rhetorically, in conversations, stories, and the memoirs, she tends to sum up her point at the end. While her memoirs are incomplete, they are not unfinished. Though they seem structured by chronology alone, they are also organized rhetorically from the beginning to the end.
The memoirs also seem like parts of a fragmented whole because they contain many similarities. Catherine engaged in self-plagiarism, recycling phrases from margin notes, letters, and published polemics. Although the Academy edition lists 156 parallel passages between the various memoirs and notes, there are no exact parallels (741–50). For the middle and final memoirs, Catherine may have consulted earlier versions, notes, and probably a diary as she made outlines, wrote, and revised. An outline for the middle memoir has two parts written at different times; with some overlap, the first covers 1745–51, and the second is for 1749–50. In her final outline (translated and appended here), which goes from 1756–59, she crossed out events in the outline as she incorporated them in the memoir. And later, after she had experience writing Russian history, Catherine did research, using the newspapers and court journals of the time. The final memoir even contains a footnote to Büsching’s Magazin. Later, in the final memoir, in her account of her serious respiratory illness upon arriving in Russia in 1744, she elaborates on the circumstances, explaining that she became ill because of studying Russian at night while underdressed for the cold. This explanation derives from a story in the St. Petersburg Gazette, planted by her imperial supporters. These and other subtle textual differences nevertheless serve to distinguish the memoirs from one another as separate documents.
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Page 6