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

edited them.
    In Russia, the private circulation of memoir manuscripts, practiced until quite recently, assured the influence of these works among the political, social, and literary elite without publication. 53 In fact, the impossibility of publishing these memoirs, combined with the identity of their author, made them even more important. Upon Catherine’s death in 1796, the last memoir was found in an envelope addressed in Russian: “To his Imperial Highness, Tsesarevich and Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, to my beloved son.” Although the other memoirs were found in her bureau, Emperor Paul I showed the memoir addressed to him to only one other person, his friend Vice Chancellor Prince Alexander Kurakin (1752–1818), who made himself a copy. In 1818, Alexander Turgenev (1785–1845) made a second copy from Kurakin’s, from which all subsequent copies were made. In 1824, at least two more copies were made, and Kurakin’s brother gave his copy to Paul I’s widow, Empress Maria Fedorovna (1759–1828). With Alexander I’s death, in 1825, a small group of the elite attempted a coup, the Decembrist Rebellion, and upon his succession, Nicholas I instituted a repressive era lasting thirty years. He read and resealed the memoirs, and had all copies confiscated. Yet somehow Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) himself managed to make a copy (in 1831–32), which Nicholas sealed upon the poet’s death. 54 With his ascension in 1855, Alexander II read the memoirs, and again a couple of copies began to circulate. Their publication in London in 1859 was a major political coup for the radical writer and publisher Alexander Herzen, himself the author of the great nineteenth-century Russian memoir
My Past and Thoughts
(1852–68). For nearly fifty years, Russian scholars on Catherine quoted the memoirs from Herzen’s edition as extensively as censors allowed, that Russians might at least taste some of this forbidden fruit, until after the 1905 revolution, when censorship was eased and all her memoirs were published. Yet Catherine had a larger audience in mind than just her elite Russian circle that read French, for in the final memoir, she writes Russian phrases and then translates them into French, one indication that she imagined her future audience as foreign.
    Catherine had at her disposal an unusual array of genres, means, and opportunities to manage her reputation, from emissaries to salons to letters to publication, informal and formal, unsigned and signed, abroad and at home, in Russian, French, and German. But as with her memoirs, she also looked beyond her place and time. Central to her writing practice was an understanding of herself as making history, which made everything she did significant. Yet her daily schedule, conversations, and collective authorship could be appreciated by future historians only if written down. Publication was less important because historians would eventually find her manuscripts. Catherine’s desire to leave a carefully designed personal record explains her great concern both with burning letters and papers and with preserving them.
    Catherine was a prodigious writer in life, but in the middle and especially the final memoirs, she develops her reputation as a serious reader. The path her early reading took had important implications for the later variety, subjects, and genres of her writings. These memoirs contain several portentous scenes in her youth that predict Catherine’s destiny, which is a standard feature of professional memoirs. 55 In her final memoir, Catherine constructs a striking and partially apocryphal prophetic moment when at the age of fifteen, in 1745, in St. Petersburg, for the first time everything—writing, reading, thinking, and ruling—comes together for her. Thus the Swedish Count Gyllenborg had recognized her talent and “very philosophical turn of mind,” and recommended that she read the classics—Plutarch’s
Lives,
Montesquieu, and especially Cicero—to steer