The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (2 page)

W. Gareth Jones, “The Russian Language as a Definer of Nobility,” in A Window on Russia: Papers from the V International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century
Russia, Gargnano, 1994,
eds. Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice Edizioni, 1996), 293–98.

A. M. Gribovskii,
Zapiski o imperatritse Ekaterine Velikoi polkovnika, sostoivshago pri ee osobie stats-sekretarem, Adriana Moiseevicha Gribovskogo
(Moscow, 1847), 41, quoted in Pekarskii,
Materialy dlia istorii,
36.

Smith,
Love and Conquest,
lii.

P. K. Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II kak pisatel’nitsa,” Zaria 2 (1869): 101–2. “One can name many French statesmen (even at the end of the previous century) who knew nothing, and apparently did not want to know anything, about French grammar” (102). “Until her death, [Catherine] did not know Russian grammar (like nearly all her contemporaries, incidentally), but she knew Russian well, especially in the second half of her reign, though incorrectly, yet completely fluently. Catherine’s most common mistakes are incorrect use of cases and of perfective and imperfective verb aspects” (119).

SIRIO,
1:253–91. Pekarskii retains the original orthography for her epitaph.
Materialy
dlia istorii,
70–72.

NOTE ON NOBLE FAMILIES

In the memoirs, Catherine often mentions a person’s relatives to draw a quick portrait, to indicate his or her significance, and to explain a situation. These connections constitute the warp and woof of the Russian court, the government, and the military in the eighteenth century, and they are often unspoken because everyone knew them and took their importance for granted. While the index presents individuals, this note provides some background on the history of the complex interrelationships of noble families, which provides an essential window into the world of Catherine’s memoirs.

In this memoir Catherine makes particular mention of the importance of Mme. Vladislavova, appointed by Empress Elizabeth in 1748 as head of Catherine’s personal court.

Her name was Praskovia Nikitichna. She got off to a very good start; she was sociable, loved to talk, spoke and told stories with intelligence, knew all the anecdotes of past and present times by heart, knew four or five generations of all the families, had the genealogies of everyone’s fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and paternal and maternal great-grandparents fixed in her memory, and no one informed me more about what had happened in Russia over the past hundred years than she.

The essential lore of the history of kinship relations of noble families at the Russian court proved invaluable to Catherine, who was an outsider. Armed with this information, she could better understand and use the women and men around her.

Individual families formed noble patronage networks through marriage, especially with the czars. Through their marriages and official and unofficial positions, families fought for prestige and power, or access to the ruler and to the distribution of patronage. Most important for Catherine’s purposes, they intrigued in succession struggles to promote their candidates and bring down their opponents. Thus in this memoir, Catherine takes a great personal interest in Mme. Vladislavova’s knowledge.

The wives of the seventeenth-century czars created two major extended families, the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs. Peter the Great’s mother was Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina (1651–94), and the extended Naryshkin clan included the Streshnevs (Peter’s grandmother) and the Lopukhins (Peter’s first wife), and came to include the Golitsyns and the Trubetskois. Peter the Great’s half brother and co-ruler, Ivan V, married Praskovia Fedorovna Saltykova (1664–1723); their daughter Anna, Duchess of Courland, became Empress. The Saltykov clan included the Dolgorukovs and Apraksins.
¹
As Catherine writes in this memoir, “the Saltykov family was one of the oldest and most noble of this empire. It was related to the Imperial house itself by the mother of Empress Anna, who was a Saltykov.” When Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth succeeded Anna in a coup in 1741, the Naryshkins defeated the Saltykovs by adding several members to Elizabeth’s senate, in particular Vice Chancellor (later Chancellor) Count Bestuzhev-Riumin and Prince Alexander Kurakin (1697–1749).
²
The prestige, power, and collective fortunes of these two clans changed, but they remained the two most powerful groups throughout Catherine’s reign and into the nineteenth century.
³

The ruthless competition between these two families during the succession struggles after Peter the Great’s death abated under Elizabeth.
⁴
The Saltykovs expanded to include the Trubetskois (through three marriages), and the Naryshkins added the Kurakins and the Golitsyns.
⁵
In addition, Elizabeth’s mother’s family, the Skavronskys, provided a way to advance politically and themselves needed to solidify their power with status. Elizabeth married her niece Anna Skavronskaia to Mikhail Vorontsov (from an old noble family). Vorontsov continued his ascent by plotting with the family of Elizabeth’s favorite, the Shuvalovs, against Chancellor Count Bestuzhev-Riumin, and succeeded him after his arrest in 1758, where Catherine’s memoir ends. Two husbands of two other Skavronsky nieces likewise succeeded to important posts at this time, as did relatives of the Naryshkins, thus leaving the Saltykovs in the background.
⁶
Under Peter III, the Vorontsovs placed Elizabeth Vorontsova as his mistress, but Catherine cut short their hopes in 1762 with her coup. However, Vorontsova’s sister, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, was at Catherine’s side during the coup, and the family continued to prosper under Catherine.

To maintain the balance of power between rival clans, Elizabeth went outside Russia to choose her own candidate as a wife for her nephew Grand Duke Peter. However, she turned to the two main families ten years later. Elizabeth responded to Peter and Catherine’s failure to consummate their marriage and have children with a plan so sensitive that it was left out of the Russian Academy edition of Catherine’s final memoir. In 1753, Elizabeth’s niece Mme. Choglokova proposed that Catherine take a lover and offered her “L.N.” or “S.S.” Given the central importance of the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs to the ruling Romanov family, Elizabeth had found a respectable and reasonable, albeit unorthodox, solution to dynastic instability by proposing an affair with either Lev Naryshkin or Sergei Saltykov. Thus Elizabeth could accept Paul as a possibly illegitimate future heir. (Elizabeth herself was illegitimate, which had been an impediment to a royal marriage.) Catherine recalls the affair with Saltykov as a matter of necessity in the account of her lovers that she wrote for Potemkin.
⁷

In this memoir, Catherine demonstrates how she understood and used this system of relationships in which women as well as men played potentially important roles. Thus in 1757 Catherine arranged a marriage that improved her relations with the Razumovskys, the family of Elizabeth’s favorite and secret husband, at the expense of the family of Elizabeth’s other favorite, the Shuvalovs. These two families opposed each other in the succession struggle.

The marriage of Lev Naryshkin linked me more strongly than ever in friendship with the Counts Razumovsky, who were truly grateful to me for having procured such a good and advantageous match for their niece, nor were they at all upset to have gotten the upper hand over the Shuvalovs, who were not even able to complain about it and were obliged to conceal their mortification. This was yet one more advantage that I had obtained for them.

Catherine leaves the obvious unsaid: both the Razumovskys and the Shuvalovs needed to solidify their relatively recent ascents as favorites’ families, and the Razumovskys gained more prestige and power from a connection with the Naryshkins than with almost any other family, thus significantly outdoing their rivals. The Shuvalovs later married into the Saltykovs. Catherine too does not explain that in return for her support, Kirill Razumovsky was instrumental in organizing her coup. Thus, noble family relations provide an essential key to understanding the dramas at court and continuous rise and fall of Catherine’s position in the evolving succession struggle that forms the background for the final memoir.

NOTES

John P. LeDonne, “Ruling Families in the Russian Political Order, 1689–1825,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 28.3–4:233–322 ( July–December 1987). He includes charts of the major families.

Bestuzhev-Riumin’s brother Mikhail was married to Anna Gavrilovna Golovkina (died 1751), whose father, Gavriil Golovkin, was the second cousin of Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina. Kurakin’s mother, Kseniia Fedorovna Lopukhina (1677–98), was the younger sister of Peter the Great’s first wife, Evdokiia. LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 298–99; V. Fedorchenko, Imperatorskii dom: Vydaiushchiesia sanovniki, 2 vols. (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2000).

Neither Elizabeth nor Catherine, once widowed, officially married, but their favorites performed a similar function for the ruling class. John LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics
and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 4.

LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 301.

Ibid.

Ivan Glebov and Nikolai Korf. LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 300.

Catherine to Potemkin, February 21, 1774. Smith,
Love and Conquest,
9–11.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Page xciv:
First page of manuscript of Catherine the Great’s final memoir, 1794,
RGADA, Moscow, Secret Packet, f. 1, d. 1. 1. 1.

INSERT

Portrait of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevma, c. 1745 (oil on canvas), Georg
Christoph Grooth (1716–49). Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.
www.bridgeman.co.uk

Portrait of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna and Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich,
1744–45 (oil on canvas), Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49). Odessa Fine Arts Mu
seum, Ukraine.
www.bridgeman.co.uk

Portrait of Empress Elizabeth (1709–62) in a black masquerade domino, 1748 (oil on
canvas), Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
www.bridgeman.co.uk

Catherine the Great holding her
Instruction,
1765–79 (enamel). Hermitage, St.
Petersburg, Russia. Corbis.

St. Petersburg and Neva River panorama, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail Ivanovich
Makhaev. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.

Peterhof and the Grand Cascade, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail Ivanovich Makhaev.
Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations.

Oranienbaum, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail Ivanovich Makhaev. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

The Summer Palace (Catherine Palace), Tsarskoe Selo (Czar’s Village): View of Her
Imperial Highness’s summer home from the north side, 1753 (engraving), Mikhail
Ivanovich Makhaev. From Vidy S.-Peterburgskikh okrestnostei (St. Petersburg,
1761). Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.

PREFACE

CATHERINE THE GREAT AND HER SEVERAL MEMOIRS

Catherine the Great’s memoirs are exceptional as a literary work and as a historical document. Yet, over the two hundred years since Catherine wrote them, they have been judged both infamous and marginal. While biographers have mined them for details about her sex life and court gossip, historians have dismissed them as blatant self-justification for her seizing the throne. These approaches underestimate the memoirs’ significance. Catherine’s autobiographical writings occupy a central place in her extensive, varied oeuvre, which unquestionably shaped her thinking and reign in fundamental ways.
¹
Catherine ruled as an absolute monarch in a century of growing ambivalence about the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. Well aware of European criticism of Russian rule as innately tyrannical and of herself as an enlightened despot, Catherine used her writings to demonstrate that she was indeed enlightened but not a despot. Through numerous memoirs, Catherine attempted to portray herself as just, wise, and merciful, and thereby justify her use of absolute power.

During some of the most challenging years of her long reign (1762–96), Catherine secretly wrote, revised, and recommenced memoirs about her life under the rule of her predecessor, Empress Elizabeth I (reigned 1741–61). This first half of her life might appear irrelevant to the second half of her life as Empress, but Catherine wrote three such memoirs that all reflect her immediate difficulties in the periods when she was writing. Catherine wrote her first memoir around 1756, before she became Empress, during a period of ruthless court politics in preparation for the succession struggle that would occur when the ailing Elizabeth died. Although she does not write about her role in these politics, her letters from this period to the British Ambassador, her friend and mentor Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams (1709–59), for whom she most likely wrote the memoir, explain her difficult position in the Russian court. She writes:

I would like to feel fear, but I cannot; the invisible hand that has guided me for thirteen years along a very rough road will never allow me to falter, of that I am very firmly and perhaps foolishly convinced. If only you knew all the perils and misfortunes that have threatened me, and that I have overcome. You will have a little more faith in arguments that are too hollow for someone who reasons as solidly as you.
²

Catherine’s sense of her destiny sustained her both as Grand Duchess and later, during her reign. With similar confidence in her ability to successfully confront challenges as Empress, she wrote her middle memoir from 1771 to 1773, while Russia fought a war against Turkey and partitioned Poland, Moscow suffered a serious outbreak of plague, and Catherine overcame two threats to her rule.

In her last decade, during several critical turning points over which she had only limited control, Catherine returned to her memoirs to write about past difficulties overcome. She made revisions to her middle memoir in 1790, and then began her final memoir in 1794, the fiftieth anniversary of her arrival in Russia, a period in which she began to feel old and alone. She had written her epitaph in 1778, and in 1792 she wrote her will. In 1791, Catherine lost her closest confidant, who was for several years her lover and most likely her secret husband, Prince Grigory Potemkin (b. 1739), viceroy for all of Southern Russia and one of Russia’s greatest military statesmen.
³
As she looked to the future, the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 struck fear in the hearts of Europe’s monarchs. Afraid for Russia’s stability after her death, she tried unsuccessfully to bypass the rightful succession of her son Paul in favor of her grandson, Alexander.
⁴
Her final memoir, translated here, indirectly responded to these future challenges to her legacy.

In all her memoirs, but especially in the last memoir, we see the perils of power through the eyes of an intelligent woman who was a consummate political animal. Her fundamental concern—political power— never changed.
⁵
In this final memoir, contemplating her death and place in history, Catherine recounts her brilliant but unhappy marriage to the heir to the Russian throne, and gives the fullest account of the events leading up to the most dangerous year of her career. On December 25, 1761, Empress Elizabeth I died, and her nephew and heir designate, Catherine’s husband, became Emperor Peter III. Pregnant by her lover Count Grigory Orlov (1734–83), Catherine found herself at risk of arrest, exile, or worse, as Peter hinted at plans to install his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova (1739–92), as his consort, and did not declare his and Catherine’s son as his heir. Six months later, Catherine seized the throne and declared herself Empress Catherine II, while Peter abdicated and was killed a week later by members of her political faction, though without her approval. Catherine’s last memoir never explicitly addresses her coup or her husband’s murder, but it has long been understood as an exercise in implicit self-justification. Her unstated premise is that although she had no claim to the throne, by virtue of her character and actions she nevertheless deserved, and was even meant, to rule.

The final memoir builds up to the crisis provoked in 1758 by the arrest and exile of her ally, Chancellor Count Alexei Bestuzhev-Riumin (1693– 1767), who was in charge of foreign affairs.
⁶
This overthrow of Empress Elizabeth’s senior statesman serves as a dress rehearsal for the dangers of Catherine’s coup of 1762. Catherine writes about the day of his arrest: “A flood of ideas, each more unpleasant and sadder than the next, arose in my mind. With a dagger in my heart, so to speak, I got dressed and went to mass.”
⁷
Bestuzhev-Riumin’s arrest implicated her in his plans for the succession after Elizabeth’s death, which were to have Catherine rule either alone or jointly with her husband, Peter. Her enemies hoped to force her into exile abroad instead. Catherine saved herself, her position, and her children through an extended, brilliant appeal in a letter and two conversations with Empress Elizabeth. In a calculated display of humility, she turned her enemies’ threat to her advantage and in fact asked to be sent home to the German state of Anhalt-Zerbst, a dramatic step that Elizabeth, known for her indecisiveness, rejected. With a nod toward her situation four years hence, Catherine concluded her outline for the final memoir with the point of her story: “Things took such a turn that it was necessary to perish with him, by him, or else to try to save oneself from the wreckage and to save my children, and the state.” In the memoir, she placed this conclusion after citing her husband’s remark in 1758: “God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies. I really do not know if this child is mine and if I ought to recognize it.” In 1762, her rights and safety would hinge on precisely the recognition of her son’s, and thus her, legitimacy.

Though the idea that Catherine was a nymphomaniac is pure speculation, one thing is sure: she was a graphomaniac. Catherine wrote about herself from the time she arrived in Russia, in 1744, at the age of fourteen, until her death, in 1796, at age sixty-seven. The memoirs are not one but three main documents in French. She wrote her first full memoir around 1756; her middle memoir (in three parts) dates to 1771–73, a text she revised in 1790–91; and she began the final memoir (in two parts) around 1794. In addition, there are two early, short verbal self-portraits, two extensive outlines for the middle and final memoirs, numerous sketches, notes, and anecdotes for the memoirs, and autobiographical letters. These autobiographical writings in French and Russian add up to seven hundred pages, forming the last and largest of a dozen volumes of her works, which the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences published in 1907, the first time this archival material was made public in Russia.
⁸
Under Catherine’s successors—her son and his male descendants—the memoirs remained a state secret because they indicate that Paul was perhaps illegitimate and thus he and his offspring were not Romanovs. Moreover, Catherine’s unflattering picture of life at court and in the royal family, not to mention her and Peter’s affairs, were an embarrassment to the wholesome image of the nineteenth-century Russian royal family. Before 1907, scholars knew about the existence of only the final memoir, which circulated after her death in several handwritten copies. A copy was used for their first publication, in London in 1859, by the Russian radical Alexander Herzen (1812–70), in English, German, French, Russian, Swedish, and Danish.

This is the fourth English translation of her final and also fullest and longest memoir, and only the second complete translation; moreover, we are the first translators to study Catherine’s original manuscript.
⁹
We also translated her outline for the memoir, noting what she crossed out and added as she was writing. Our goal has been an accurate, readable translation that conveys her voice, which combines a well honed art of plain speaking with a vigorous style of thought. In fact, Catherine tells us that how she writes is essential to her rhetorical purpose: “Besides, this writing itself should prove what I say about my mind, my heart, and my character.”
¹⁰
Catherine appears to have sought and found a profound connection between herself and her writing. For more than fifty years, she used her autobiographical writing to understand herself as a human being, a woman, and an Empress. She wrote to take stock of her life and reign. Catherine also wrote to persuade future readers, for each memoir contains a different overall rhetorical purpose related to her concerns at the time she was writing.

This preface traces Catherine’s autobiographical impulse over the course of an extraordinarily rich, accomplished, and controversial life. She expected her readers to be familiar with the history of her reign, which she does not recount in the memoir. Those eager to encounter Catherine and her memoir directly with no further introduction should have a sufficient overview of her reign and her memoirs from the preceding few pages. The remainder of this preface illuminates in detail the historical context, legacy, and uniqueness of Catherine’s memoirs. It addresses the importance of writing to Catherine’s rule and reputation abroad, the influence of the memoirs on Catherine scholarship since her death, and the genesis and unusual structure of this significant, original document. It brings together literary and historical analyses of the memoirs in a contribution to Catherine scholarship that is meant to be informative for those encountering Catherine for the first time and for experts alike.

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF A GREAT LIFE

Born on April 21, 1729, Princess Sophie Auguste Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst died of a stroke on November 6, 1796, as Empress Catherine II of Russia. The space between her birth and death is divisible into three parts; with each transformation of her identity, Catherine acquired a different title and name to match her new role. From 1729 to 1744, she was Princess Sophie, the daughter of German nobles; from 1745 to 1762, she was Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna, wife of the heir to the Russian throne and mother of his son and successor; and finally, from 1762 to 1796, she was Empress Catherine II. The opening of her last memoir indicates that her mother’s family connections—more than Catherine’s personality, experiences, or desire for glory—paved the way for her marriage to Peter III, who was Catherine’s second cousin. Catherine’s mother, Princess Johanna Elisabeth (1712–60), came from the same German family as Peter III, the house of Holstein-Gottorp (1544 –1773).
¹¹
Peter’s father, Karl Friedrich (1700–39), was Princess Johanna’s paternal first cousin and married Anna Petrovna (1708–28), the eldest daughter of Peter I, “the Great” (1672–1725).
¹²
In addition to her cousin’s marriage, Princess Johanna had another connection to the Russian royal family: her brother Karl August had been engaged to Anna’s sister, the future Empress Elizabeth, but had died before the wedding.
¹³
These ties to the Russian royal family assumed great importance for Catherine when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1741 and brought Anna’s orphaned son Peter to Russia as her heir. A year later, when Elizabeth sought a wife for her nephew and heir, she chose her dead fiancé’s niece Catherine.

According to Catherine’s early and middle memoirs, Princess Johanna performed her job as mother and aristocrat well, and did everything to arrange a prestigious royal match for her daughter. Two presentation portraits of Catherine were sent to Elizabeth.
¹⁴
Elizabeth in turn performed kind gestures for Catherine’s family. In 1742, Elizabeth became the godmother for Catherine’s new sister, Elisabeth (1742–45), named after her, and sent a portrait of herself set in diamonds that were worth 25,000 rubles. She also provided an annual pension to Catherine’s maternal grandmother, Princess Albertine Friederike (1682–1755) of Baden-Durlach.
¹⁵
To please Elizabeth and potentially further his own interests in Russia, the Prussian King Frederick II, “the Great” (1712–86, reigned 1740–86), promoted Catherine’s father to Field Marshal. Frederick the Great and Princess Johanna also intrigued in the Russian court, where other factions favored a French or Saxon bride. Aside from Peter, Princess Sophie’s only other serious suitor was her mother’s brother, Georg Ludwig (1719–63), who proposed and was accepted by the young Princess, but not her parents, who had greater aspirations for her. In late 1743, Elizabeth invited the fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie and her mother, but for reasons unknown, specifically not her father, Prince Christian August (1690–1747), to Moscow.

On February 9, 1744, Princess Sophie arrived in Moscow. As her early and middle memoirs make clear, although Catherine was born into a minor German noble house, her mother had prepared Catherine well for life at a royal court. In fact, Catherine shows her disappointment in the quality of Russian court life. Thanks to her mother’s godmother, the dowager Duchess Elisabeth Sophie Marie of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1683–1767), she and her mother had spent several months each year at one of the most brilliant courts in Germany, where she met and played with some of the future royalty of Europe. While her mother traveled in Europe to keep up family contacts, Princess Sophie stayed with her grandmother in Hamburg and visited, among other places, the Prussian court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. Her governess, Elisabeth Cardel, a French Huguenot and professor’s daughter, introduced her to the customs of French society and to French classical literature. This education allowed her to aspire to a royal marriage.