The popular image of Catherine the Great, a portly nymphomaniac cursed with flatulence and venereal disease, has overshadowed her unique place in Russian history. She was an outsider, a minor German princess whose reign began unpromisingly in 1762 with her likely involvement in the murder of her feckless husband, Tsar Peter III. His grandfather, Peter the Great, had almost single-handedly dragged Russia into modern times, building the new capital of St. Petersburg and touting for Teutonic expertise. Russia's enlightenment under Catherine was the logical outcome. It was also, strangely, a return to first principles. In the words of Alexander Pushkin's friend, Pyotr Vyazemsky, "many things in our history can be explained by the fact that a Russian, Peter the Great, sought to make us Germans, while a German, Catherine the Great, wished to make us Russians."
If not exactly beautiful, Catherine had at least a certain allure, being unpretentious and full of wit, and Virginia Rounding is not the only biographer, to put it mildly, who has succumbed to her charms. The first accounts of Catherine's life appeared around the time of her death in 1796. Lord Byron titillated readers of "Don Juan" with intimate details of her sex life, which have been a staple of publishers' lists ever since. Since 1975, eight biographies have been published in English alone, from the scholarly to the prurient. The standard work remains Isabel de Madariaga's magisterial 1981 biography, although the post-Soviet opening of the archives has produced two wonderful studies by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Simon Dixon, both published in the first year of this century.
Revisiting his earlier insightful study, Dixon is shortly to publish a long-awaited full-length biography of Catherine. In the meantime we have Rounding's entertaining version, which is based on already published sources. The subtitle hits the wrong note, or perhaps the right note if you subscribe to a Byronic view of history, and the prose is sometimes too workmanlike. Yet the story itself is fun and familiar, and Rounding is a keen observer of what Vladimir Nabokov called a "brutal and dull world of political intrigue, favoritism, Germanic regimentation, old-fashioned Russian misery, and fat-breasted empresses on despicable thrones." Love, sex and power indeed!
"Little Figchen" was the nickname of the young German princess Sophie Frederica August of Anhalt-Zerbst before she became Catherine the Great and the subject of lurid jokes. She was plucked from obscurity by Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth and betrothed to the Grand Duke Peter in the hope that marriage would cure him of his infantile tendencies. It didn't. The wedding night was a disaster, and the marriage probably remained unconsummated. Bewildered and lonely after Peter abandoned her at court, while he was off playing soldiers with his Prussian cronies, Catherine sought solace in literature, reading Voltaire and Montesquieu and the other great works of the French Enlightenment. It was the beginning of a remarkable intellectual journey.
One of the strengths of Rounding's book is its use of Catherine's own memoirs, letters, notes, memoranda and other scribblings as a source. No tyrant has ever written as much or as well as Catherine, and her own words speak volumes about the overlap between her public and private lives. Sometimes the effect of Catherine's journalism was to incriminate herself. Within months, even weeks, of Peter's accession, a conspiracy had begun to form among a hodgepodge of disaffected courtiers. It gathered pace during the first half of 1762 as Peter alienated more and more of his subjects with his unsuitable conduct and ill-advised policies. He refused to declare Catherine's 7-year-old son Paul his heir because her former lover Sergei Saltykov would not admit that he was the boy's father, and thus provide Peter with grounds for divorcing his wife. Having seized the throne by colluding in the murder of Peter, the last true Romanov tsar, Catherine silenced the opposition rumormongers. The atmosphere of political repression during the early years of her reign was not favorable to speaking out of turn. Nevertheless the letters between Catherine and her fellow plotters reveal the murderous nature of her coup d'etat.
One of those plotters was the young Grigory Potemkin -- the subject of Sebag Montefiore's book -- who later helped Catherine to defeat the Turks, obtain access to the Black Sea and incorporate the vast steppes of present-day southern Ukraine, where the Russians founded the new cities of Odessa, Yekaterinoslav and Kherson. Potemkin also became Catherine's most celebrated lover, though Rounding hedges her bets on the question of whether they were actually married. "The trouble is that my heart is loath to remain even one hour without love," Catherine wrote to Potemkin.
Yet love was often deceptive, and may have blinded Catherine to the failure of her policies and to the corruption that surrounded her rule. The very model of an "enlightened despot," she started out as a reformer and a defender of the serfs, but her intolerance grew in the wake of the battles against the Turks, the suppression of the Pugachev peasant rebellion, and the exile of the dissident writer Alexander Radishchev. These were examples of Catherine's "power," as opposed to her "love" or "sex," though Rounding is understandably more interested in the first two aspects of her subtitle.
The private life overshadows Catherine's public achievements, not least her patronage of the arts, literature and education, which, inadvertently perhaps, enabled the very idea of the "private" individual to develop in Russia and led to the cultural flowering of the 19th century, to the poetry of Pushkin and the novels of Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. The empress regarded herself as a "philosopher on the throne" and corresponded with Voltaire until his death in 1778. The French writer praised her as the "Semiramis of the North" (a reference to the legendary Queen of Babylon), but his friends were not so sure. In 1773, after completing his 28-volume Encyclopedie, Denis Diderot found himself without a source of income. "I am responsible for one of the most glorious achievements of the age [of Enlightenment], yet I am quite ruined," he wrote sourly. In order to relieve Diderot of financial worry, Catherine bought the Frenchman's library through an agent in Paris. She paid him a librarian's pension of 1,000 livres a year in a lump-sum advance.
The following year the 60-year-old philosopher made the arduous trek to Petersburg to thank his fairy godmother for her support. At first Catherine received Diderot with great honor and warmth three afternoons a week. In her private apartments in the Winter Palace she would sit on the imperial sofa, with a piece of needlework in her hands, while the foreigner explained his views on education, politics and the law. Soon, however, she began to consider the philosopher's ideas too impractical for real life. "You only work on paper, where anything is possible," she complained, "whereas I, a poor empress, have to work on human skin." Diderot wrote to his fellow philosophes Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Claude Adrien Helvetius that the fairy godmother had turned into a witch.
www.amazon.com/Catherine-Great-Love-Sex-Power/dp/0312328877/themoscowtimes
Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power
By Virginia Rounding
St. Martin's Press
592 Pages. $29.95
Hugh Barnes' "The Stolen Prince," the story of Pushkin's African great-grandfather, was published last year.
If not exactly beautiful, Catherine had at least a certain allure, being unpretentious and full of wit, and Virginia Rounding is not the only biographer, to put it mildly, who has succumbed to her charms. The first accounts of Catherine's life appeared around the time of her death in 1796. Lord Byron titillated readers of "Don Juan" with intimate details of her sex life, which have been a staple of publishers' lists ever since. Since 1975, eight biographies have been published in English alone, from the scholarly to the prurient. The standard work remains Isabel de Madariaga's magisterial 1981 biography, although the post-Soviet opening of the archives has produced two wonderful studies by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Simon Dixon, both published in the first year of this century.
Revisiting his earlier insightful study, Dixon is shortly to publish a long-awaited full-length biography of Catherine. In the meantime we have Rounding's entertaining version, which is based on already published sources. The subtitle hits the wrong note, or perhaps the right note if you subscribe to a Byronic view of history, and the prose is sometimes too workmanlike. Yet the story itself is fun and familiar, and Rounding is a keen observer of what Vladimir Nabokov called a "brutal and dull world of political intrigue, favoritism, Germanic regimentation, old-fashioned Russian misery, and fat-breasted empresses on despicable thrones." Love, sex and power indeed!
"Little Figchen" was the nickname of the young German princess Sophie Frederica August of Anhalt-Zerbst before she became Catherine the Great and the subject of lurid jokes. She was plucked from obscurity by Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth and betrothed to the Grand Duke Peter in the hope that marriage would cure him of his infantile tendencies. It didn't. The wedding night was a disaster, and the marriage probably remained unconsummated. Bewildered and lonely after Peter abandoned her at court, while he was off playing soldiers with his Prussian cronies, Catherine sought solace in literature, reading Voltaire and Montesquieu and the other great works of the French Enlightenment. It was the beginning of a remarkable intellectual journey.
One of the strengths of Rounding's book is its use of Catherine's own memoirs, letters, notes, memoranda and other scribblings as a source. No tyrant has ever written as much or as well as Catherine, and her own words speak volumes about the overlap between her public and private lives. Sometimes the effect of Catherine's journalism was to incriminate herself. Within months, even weeks, of Peter's accession, a conspiracy had begun to form among a hodgepodge of disaffected courtiers. It gathered pace during the first half of 1762 as Peter alienated more and more of his subjects with his unsuitable conduct and ill-advised policies. He refused to declare Catherine's 7-year-old son Paul his heir because her former lover Sergei Saltykov would not admit that he was the boy's father, and thus provide Peter with grounds for divorcing his wife. Having seized the throne by colluding in the murder of Peter, the last true Romanov tsar, Catherine silenced the opposition rumormongers. The atmosphere of political repression during the early years of her reign was not favorable to speaking out of turn. Nevertheless the letters between Catherine and her fellow plotters reveal the murderous nature of her coup d'etat.
One of those plotters was the young Grigory Potemkin -- the subject of Sebag Montefiore's book -- who later helped Catherine to defeat the Turks, obtain access to the Black Sea and incorporate the vast steppes of present-day southern Ukraine, where the Russians founded the new cities of Odessa, Yekaterinoslav and Kherson. Potemkin also became Catherine's most celebrated lover, though Rounding hedges her bets on the question of whether they were actually married. "The trouble is that my heart is loath to remain even one hour without love," Catherine wrote to Potemkin.
Yet love was often deceptive, and may have blinded Catherine to the failure of her policies and to the corruption that surrounded her rule. The very model of an "enlightened despot," she started out as a reformer and a defender of the serfs, but her intolerance grew in the wake of the battles against the Turks, the suppression of the Pugachev peasant rebellion, and the exile of the dissident writer Alexander Radishchev. These were examples of Catherine's "power," as opposed to her "love" or "sex," though Rounding is understandably more interested in the first two aspects of her subtitle.
The private life overshadows Catherine's public achievements, not least her patronage of the arts, literature and education, which, inadvertently perhaps, enabled the very idea of the "private" individual to develop in Russia and led to the cultural flowering of the 19th century, to the poetry of Pushkin and the novels of Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. The empress regarded herself as a "philosopher on the throne" and corresponded with Voltaire until his death in 1778. The French writer praised her as the "Semiramis of the North" (a reference to the legendary Queen of Babylon), but his friends were not so sure. In 1773, after completing his 28-volume Encyclopedie, Denis Diderot found himself without a source of income. "I am responsible for one of the most glorious achievements of the age [of Enlightenment], yet I am quite ruined," he wrote sourly. In order to relieve Diderot of financial worry, Catherine bought the Frenchman's library through an agent in Paris. She paid him a librarian's pension of 1,000 livres a year in a lump-sum advance.
The following year the 60-year-old philosopher made the arduous trek to Petersburg to thank his fairy godmother for her support. At first Catherine received Diderot with great honor and warmth three afternoons a week. In her private apartments in the Winter Palace she would sit on the imperial sofa, with a piece of needlework in her hands, while the foreigner explained his views on education, politics and the law. Soon, however, she began to consider the philosopher's ideas too impractical for real life. "You only work on paper, where anything is possible," she complained, "whereas I, a poor empress, have to work on human skin." Diderot wrote to his fellow philosophes Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Claude Adrien Helvetius that the fairy godmother had turned into a witch.
www.amazon.com/Catherine-Great-Love-Sex-Power/dp/0312328877/themoscowtimes
Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power
By Virginia Rounding
St. Martin's Press
592 Pages. $29.95
Hugh Barnes' "The Stolen Prince," the story of Pushkin's African great-grandfather, was published last year.
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