The Memoirs of Catherine the Great by Catherine the Great Read Free Book Online

was in 1785 in France, in 1797 in Russia, and thereafter in many editions and translations. 44 Letters were closely allied with conversation and thus resembled a performance. 45 Catherine continues to project a somewhat protean, ambiguous image because she wrote in an era that valued the nuances of addressing an audience appropriately, as in the art of conversation, a topic of her memoirs. Catherine’s real success as a writer in French and in Russian to addressees ranging from Voltaire, whom she never met, to Potemkin, in all his different roles, to future unknown readers of her memoirs reflects her reputed talent for both judging and pleasing her audience.
    In the eighteenth century, many things were written and read without being published, but this did not diminish their importance or influence. 46 On the contrary, the aristocratic elite could substantially aid the careers of professional writers, who were usually of a lower social class, by admitting them to salons where their works could circulate socially. In this intimate literary life, writers might publish anonymously, as Catherine did, or under pseudonyms, and still generally be known as the authors of their works. Writers also worked collaboratively, and salons could produce novels. In 1767, while traveling on the Volga, Catherine translated into Russian Chapter 9 (“On the Ruler”) of Jean-François Marmontel’s
Bélisaire
(1766), which was dedicated to her and banned in France. She wrote Marmontel a description of the translation process that underscores its informal, unprofessional, and social aspects: who translated which chapters, that Count Shuvalov arrived too late and therefore had to write the dedication, and that they decided to keep the unevenness of the translation to indicate the desire to translate
Bélisaire,
even in “those who had never in their life worked as professional translators.” 47 Her Great In
struction
(1767) and
Antidote
(1770) were collaborative, as were her operas and her historical and her linguistic projects, and many of her writings were meant to be both read and heard. 48
    Even without an audience in her lifetime for her memoirs, Catherine wrote them in French for a future readership that she imagined as part of the literary tradition in which she worked. Catherine followed a French tradition of worldly writing of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, by women as well as men, for educated readers in society. 49 At the same time, she recognized the classical hierarchy, articulated in Nicolas Boileau-Depréaux’s
The Art of Poetry
(1674), which ranked poetry as more serious than prose and praised the imitation of the classics and translations. For this reason, she tried hard, unsuccessfully, to learn to write poetry. 50 In the eighteenth century and earlier, literature was a more capacious concept than it is today; it embraced such nonfiction genres as speeches, sermons, and pamphlets. For example, Catherine’s
Great Instruction,
a compilation of political theory by others that includes almost exact copies of 294 of Montesquieu’s 526 articles in his
Spirit of the Laws,
was long considered her greatest literary achievement. 51 In a remarkably fluid and dynamic literary era, Catherine wrote constantly in many genres, and paradoxically claimed not to take her writing seriously, even though she greatly valued her time. In a letter in 1789 that serves as one of her several verbal self-portraits, she manages both to emphasize and dismiss her writings: “As for my writings, I consider them trifles, I enjoyed attempting different genres, it seems to me that all I have done is rather mediocre, moreover I have never attached any importance to them, except as amusement.” 52 In the social context of worldly writing for which she wrote, it would have been unseemly to appear to take herself seriously. Thus the memoirs entertain as they instruct, and hide the fact that Catherine planned, researched, wrote, revised, rewrote, and