The Memoirs of Catherine the Great

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

Book: The Memoirs of Catherine the Great by Catherine the Great Read Free Book Online
Authors: Catherine the Great
Tags: Fiction
her mind through the temptations and vicissitudes of court life. Catherine reassured him by ordering the books and writing a character sketch to demonstrate her self-knowledge, “Portrait of the Philosopher at Age Fifteen.” A letter to her mother in 1750 reveals that Catherine took being a philosopher to heart and that to her it meant using her mind and being something of a stoic: “I am as philosophical as possible, no passion makes me act.” 56 In 1766, now a philosopher-queen, she wrote to Gyllenborg that “the desire to accomplish ‘great deeds’ ” had resulted from their conversations. 57 However, in the middle memoir, Catherine writes that she has difficulty getting the books and that they bore her, until two years later she finds and reads Plutarch. In her early memoir, from 1756, she never mentions any reading; instead she traces all the difficulties of her life at court, leading to an aborted suicide attempt. Perhaps, in the two memoirs that Catherine wrote after she was in power, it became important for her both to be, and to be seen to be, well-read, which added depth to her Enlightenment credentials.
    The final memoir therefore carefully describes the path her reading took, from literature to political philosophy and history, as she educated herself. Once married, she reads novels for a year, beginning with the chivalric romance
Tiran the Fair.
She then happens on the letters of Madame de Sévigné (1626–96) to her daughter, considered the epitome of the epistolary art, before discovering Voltaire by the end of 1746. After 1749, when the kindly, learned Ivan Shuvalov (1727–97) became Elizabeth’s favorite, Catherine had use of his excellent library. 58 She polished off the ten-volume
History of Germany
by Father Barre in two months and embarked on Plato. In 1753, she read the four-volume
Historical and Critical Dictionary
by Pierre Bayle, the most popular work among educated readers in the eighteenth century. It was central to the
philosophes’
(and Catherine’s) practice of writing often, about diverse and current subjects, for the general reader, and “for a literary culture focused not on the production of ‘great works’ but on rapid exchange, on provocation and response.” 59 With her foray into English-style satirical journalism in 1769, she encouraged this kind of give-and-take with journalist and publisher Nikolai Novikov. 60 In 1770, in Antidote, she aggressively sparred with Chappe d’Auteroche’s negative portrait of Russia and Russians in his
Voyage in Siberia
(1768). Her plays, too, provided a means for portraying Russians as average, decent people. In their correspondence with one another, Catherine and the
philosophes
share their writings on current events, and she addresses the burning questions of the day. Given this shared Enlightenment practice of lively, frequent writing, it is less surprising that Catherine wrote several memoirs and many autobiographical jottings and letters than that she revised, rewrote, and edited them.
    According to the final memoir, the next formative period of Catherine’s education came in 1754, when she read her way out of postpartum depression after the birth of Paul, and acquired the historical and political cast of mind appropriate for an enlightened ruler. She read Voltaire’s
Essay on Universal History,
Montesquieu’s
Spirit of the Laws,
Tacitus’s Roman history, Baronio’s
Ecclesiastical History,
and more, in French and especially in Russian. She matured intellectually: “I began to see more things with a black outlook and to seek the causes that really underlay and truly shaped the different interests in the affairs that I observed.” This reading proved formative for her
Great Instruction.
At the end of the memoir, in 1759, she is reading the first volumes of
A General History of
Voyages
and the
Encyclopedia
(1751–72) by Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83). Nine days after her coup, on July 6, 1762, she extended to

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