Read The Memoirs of Catherine the Great for Free Online Page B
Authors: Catherine the Great
Tags: Fiction
literary output of the time. . . . But everybody was interested in everything the Empress wrote and published.” 37 The didactic tone of her writings has aged poorly, but in her day, together with most writers in a variety of genres, Catherine actively published in what Cynthia Whittaker has termed the literature of justification and advice between the monarch and her elite. 38 Catherine never claimed to be a literary writer, a position that was socially beneath her. Although she wrote in many genres, her memoirs and letters, especially to Voltaire, are among Catherine’s best writing, lively and polished. The integration of her writings with her life and rule ideally ought to address not only their literary quality and policy significance at the time but also their quantity, variety, and complex political, historical, and cultural functions, the sum of which she meant to transcend her era. 39 However, we still lack a comprehensive account, a complete collection, or even a complete bibliography of her writings. 40
Catherine wrote on politics, Russian history, education, economics, and linguistics; she wrote thousands of letters, more than two dozen plays and operas, the first Russian children’s literature, memoirs, and journalism. Fluent in Russian, French, and German, she published a good deal in Russia and abroad, in French and in translations, often “anonymously.” In this way, Catherine promoted an enlightened Russia and its monarch together, and defended them against their many foreign critics, on a European historical, political, social, cultural, and intellectual stage.
In 1767, in a direct challenge to the largely negative opinions about Russia in Europe, she opened her most influential work, the
Great Instruction,
to the Legislative Commission, with the pronouncement that “Russia is a European power.” By this she meant that she was a monarch subject to natural laws, rather than an absolute, Asiatic despot, as Russia’s critics maintained. For this compilation of her recommendations on the proper government of Russia, she borrowed extensively from her reading of the best and latest in European political thinking:
Spirit of the Laws
(1748) by Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), a comparison of relations between the state and the people in various nations, and
On Crimes and Punishments
(1764) by Cesare Beccaria (1735–93), a critique of penal systems. Like her predecessors, Catherine failed in the long overdue codification of Russia’s laws, last done in 1649. But she published her ideas for all of Europe to read: in Russian and German parallel texts, and also in Russian, Latin, German, and French in one volume, and by 1780, in English, Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Greek translations. In her lifetime, the
Instruction
went through seven Russian editions and eight French editions, though it was banned in France.
The scholarship that exists on her writings places a premium on publication and readership that makes the memoirs, never published or read in her lifetime, marginal to her writing. 41 This is to misunderstand what writing meant to Catherine and her contemporaries in the eighteenth century. Catherine’s writing was as much an activity as a concrete result, as much a verb as a noun. In a letter to her erstwhile correspondent Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1807), she evokes the ambience of the French Enlightenment salon: “I have told you a thousand times that I never write to you, I chat with you.” 42 Catherine wrote in an era that valued informal, as well as formal, writing and also reading aloud as social activities among society’s leading arbiters of literary taste. 43 Thus, the first and second parts of Catherine’s middle memoir begin with dedications that evoke social conversation. In another example, like many such letters between luminaries then and now, her correspondence with Voltaire was meant to be read in private and aloud by others and only eventually published, which it
Catherine wrote on politics, Russian history, education, economics, and linguistics; she wrote thousands of letters, more than two dozen plays and operas, the first Russian children’s literature, memoirs, and journalism. Fluent in Russian, French, and German, she published a good deal in Russia and abroad, in French and in translations, often “anonymously.” In this way, Catherine promoted an enlightened Russia and its monarch together, and defended them against their many foreign critics, on a European historical, political, social, cultural, and intellectual stage.
In 1767, in a direct challenge to the largely negative opinions about Russia in Europe, she opened her most influential work, the
Great Instruction,
to the Legislative Commission, with the pronouncement that “Russia is a European power.” By this she meant that she was a monarch subject to natural laws, rather than an absolute, Asiatic despot, as Russia’s critics maintained. For this compilation of her recommendations on the proper government of Russia, she borrowed extensively from her reading of the best and latest in European political thinking:
Spirit of the Laws
(1748) by Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), a comparison of relations between the state and the people in various nations, and
On Crimes and Punishments
(1764) by Cesare Beccaria (1735–93), a critique of penal systems. Like her predecessors, Catherine failed in the long overdue codification of Russia’s laws, last done in 1649. But she published her ideas for all of Europe to read: in Russian and German parallel texts, and also in Russian, Latin, German, and French in one volume, and by 1780, in English, Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Greek translations. In her lifetime, the
Instruction
went through seven Russian editions and eight French editions, though it was banned in France.
The scholarship that exists on her writings places a premium on publication and readership that makes the memoirs, never published or read in her lifetime, marginal to her writing. 41 This is to misunderstand what writing meant to Catherine and her contemporaries in the eighteenth century. Catherine’s writing was as much an activity as a concrete result, as much a verb as a noun. In a letter to her erstwhile correspondent Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1807), she evokes the ambience of the French Enlightenment salon: “I have told you a thousand times that I never write to you, I chat with you.” 42 Catherine wrote in an era that valued informal, as well as formal, writing and also reading aloud as social activities among society’s leading arbiters of literary taste. 43 Thus, the first and second parts of Catherine’s middle memoir begin with dedications that evoke social conversation. In another example, like many such letters between luminaries then and now, her correspondence with Voltaire was meant to be read in private and aloud by others and only eventually published, which it