SOURCE: Gukovskii, Grigorii A. “The Empress as Writer.” In Catherine the Great: A Profile, edited by Marc Raeff, pp. 64-89. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

[In this essay, first published in Russian in 1947, Gukovskii focuses on Catherine's literary works, particularly her dramas. Gukovskii stresses Catherine's conservatism and didacticism, suggesting that her aptitude for creative writing was minimal and that her understanding of Russian history and culture was superficial at best. For Gukovskii, the sole value of Catherine's literary output rests in the political stature of the author.]

Catherine was an active writer for about a quarter of a century, and an extremely prolific one, too, more prolific than Frederick II, whom she regarded as her competitor as “philosopher on the throne” and writer-monarch. In that competition she undoubtedly had the advantage, both because, unlike Frederick, she did her writing herself, in the main without substantial outside help, and because she wrote mostly in the language of her subjects, whereas the Prussian king, a native-born German, had nothing but contempt for German culture and the German language, and wrote in French. In her lifetime Catherine covered literally reams of paper with her writing. As a matter of fact, she referred to her writing mania herself, not without a touch of boastful coquetry.

Apropos of this, mention must be made of the huge number of official documents and papers, as well as private letters, which came from Catherine's pen. Catherine wrote laws, very lengthy ones at that, entire volumes of legislation. She wrote the rescripts to the nobles, generals, and clergy herself. In her own hand she wrote innumerable letters to members of her staff, to friends, lovers, and many, many others. Most of the letters she wrote to Russians, she wrote in the Russian language. To her acquaintances and correspondents abroad, she wrote in French and sometimes, though rarely, in German. Of these languages, she knew German best, of course. Though she lived in Russia for over fifty years and spoke and wrote in Russian all that time, she never learned to express herself in the language correctly. Not only was she basically illiterate in the Russian language (she misspelled the simplest words), but she never learned to decline Russian names or to follow the rules of grammatical agreement, and she confused the genders of nouns. Yet she undertook with a great deal of self-assurance to discuss the Russian language and did not even hesitate to correct the style of Russian writers, such as, for example, Vasilii Petrov. This should not, however, be attributed entirely to her infatuation with her own power. Actually, Catherine had a taste and a lively feeling for the spoken language. She knew Russian colloquial speech very well. She remembered and used correctly a multitude of Russian proverbs, sayings, idioms, and characteristic local words and expressions. Consequently, her Russian was a strange mixture of top-heavy, incorrect constructions and forms, on the one hand, and lively, colorful colloquialisms, on the other.

It goes without saying that the most glaring errors of grammar and spelling were corrected before publication (as were the rescripts and other official documents she composed) by her secretaries, who helped her in her literary work generally. Among Catherine's editors and aides were I. P. Yelagin and G. V. Kozitskii, at first, then A. V. Khrapovitskii, all three of whom were distinguished Russian writers. Her French texts were corrected by her courtier Count A. P. Shuvalov, whose own poetry, which he wrote in French, was highly appreciated even in Paris. However, none of this assistance ever took the place of the work of the author herself. It never went beyond correction of manuscripts (and the corrections were exclusively of grammar), selection of materials for her quasi-scholarly works, and excerpts from other people's poetry for inclusion in her operas.

Extremely varied in genre, Catherine's writings were uniform in their ideological direction and clearly expressed political tendency. They included articles and feuilletons for magazines that were published more or less under her direct tutelage. She also wrote for outside magazines, as, for example, an article and a letter to N. I. Novikov's Zhivopisets [Painter], a magazine that was hostile to her. She wrote a voluminous quasi-scholarly opus on the history of Russia. She wrote stories for children and pedagogical essays, intended for use in the education of her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, but which, naturally, had a broader aim in view and were addressed to the general reader. She wrote a large number of comedies, historical dramas, comic operas, and other dramatic works. Dramaturgy constitutes a very important part of Catherine's literary heritage, both in quantity and in the significance she herself attached to it. A total of twenty-five completed or nearly completed stage plays and excerpts from seven other plays have come down to us. In addition we know that she wrote several plays, which have not survived. Catherine did not write poetry—was unable to write it—but she had a passion for writing prose.

In all of the above genres, Catherine wrote in Russian. Of her writings in French, the best known, both in western Europe and in Russia, are her letters to the philosophes, above all, to Voltaire, then to Diderot and Grimm, and to others. Catherine's letters were not merely private correspondence, but constitute a body of literature of a sort. They were sketches and feuilletons, presented in the form of private letters. They expressed opinions on current political events and cultural developments; they gave autobiographical sketches and descriptions of Russian life, primarily at court. They contained lively chatter about this and that, witticisms, tableaux, and so forth. Catherine's correspondence with Voltaire has been published many times since the death of the correspondents, both in the original French and in Russian translation.

Catherine also wrote and published several polemical works in French, among them a long work, entitled Antidote, and a pamphlet, called The Secret of the Anti-Absurd Society. Antidote is a lengthy polemical exposé of the French astronomer Abbé Chappe d'Auteroche's book Journey to Siberia (1768), which contained cutting, unjust attacks on Russia, Russian society, and the Russian people, as well as just criticism of serfdom and Russia's despotic form of government. By refuting him, Catherine was defending both the Russian people and herself. In her book she combined abundant and interesting information about Russian life, customs, geography, economy, and culture with blatantly false claims that Russia was very well off under her monarch's scepter and enjoyed all kinds of freedom. Antidote was published anonymously in 1770 (and again in 1771-1772).

The Secret of the Anti-Absurd Society, Discovered by an Outsider is a satire on freemasonry and Masonic organizations and parodies Masonic rituals, emblems, and doctrine. It appeared in 1780 not only in French but also in German and Russian. The Russian translation from the French original was done by A. V. Khrapovitskii and published under the false date of 1759.

Finally, Catherine's unfinished memoirs, as well as numerous reminiscences, were also written in French. Her memoirs cover the period up to her accession to the throne, are written in a lively style, and show real powers of observation. They are probably the most interesting thing she ever wrote. The memoirs were not intended for publication, at least not during her lifetime or soon after her death, and Catherine is more natural and truthful in them than in her other works.

Actually, Catherine II's French writings do not belong to the history of Russian literature. As a matter of fact her Russian writings would not be at all noteworthy if their author had not been the Empress. Catherine's passion for writing was not accompanied by the requisite talent. There can be no two opinions about that. Not only was she not gifted, she did not even have great ability. Extensive practice enabled her, in the end, to write a tolerable playlet, no more. Her work rarely meets the standard even of the average literary output of the time.

Nevertheless, Catherine's writings are not devoid of interest, both for the history of Russian literature and the history of Russian society. They are interesting precisely because they were written by the Empress, because they express the real and official literary policy of the government, because they constitute a body of literature that gives expression, so to speak, to royal directives of a general ideological as well as of a special literary nature. This is why Catherine's contemporaries found her work so significant and relevant and why the reading and theater-going public and the literati of the 1760's through the 1790's showed such a great interest in it. Supporters of the government hung upon the Empress' every word, interpreting everything she wrote as instructions and guidelines. The progressive elements of society, those opposed to the government, read everything she wrote very carefully, studying the enemy, as it were, and sharpening their weapons for attack. But everybody was interested in everything the Empress wrote and published. It should be pointed out that although all of Catherine's writings for the press and for the stage were anonymous, her contemporaries knew very well who their author was. Generally speaking, though the custom of publishing anonymously was very widespread in the eighteenth century, this did not in the least prevent the public from being informed as to who the authors of the anonymous works were. Besides, except in a few instances, Catherine never tried to conceal her authorship. On the contrary, she paraded it, which only intensified the interest among the public.

As for her plays, their popularity was enhanced by the magnificent staging, the excellent music in the operas and historical dramas, and the splendid performances of the casts, who, naturally, exerted themselves to lend artistic depth to the mediocre text. The result was that Catherine herself came to believe that her plays were truly very successful. Ordinarily, she did not require much for self-delusion. She was surrounded at every step by such shameless flattery that she became firmly convinced that she was a genius in all fields. With complete equanimity and not the slightest fear of seeming boastful she wrote in her letters that her works were universally admired, praised them to the skies herself, and glibly compared herself to Molière.

Another reason for the historical and literary interest in Catherine's works is their polemical sharpness. They present a picture of the literary, and even the ideological, battles of the period, some of which were major combats indeed, politically meaningful and of state significance.

Finally, still another reason for the interest in Catherine's writings is the fact that they were so typical of the artistic styles of the period. The Empress may not have been a talented writer, but she was a careful observer and very responsive to all literary developments in the West and in Russia. She noticed and quickly grasped the latest literary trends and news and reacted to them immediately. Furthermore, she not only noticed them but tried to use them for her own ideological purposes, i.e., to adapt them to advocacy of the Russian landowner—and police-based autocracy and court culture, and to have them serve as an apologia for the existing regime. Consequently, the chief literary trends from the 1760's to the 1790's appear consecutively in Catherine's writings, albeit in a distorted, oversimplified, and internally reorganized form. In Catherine's literary works one can see the evolution of styles and artistic techniques, from classicism through early sentimentalism of various shades to the first pre-romanticist trends of the period. And, what is more, the evolution is seen through the prism of official government reaction to those literary processes. In this sense, Catherine's literary heritage is not only an expressive image of a period of eighteenth-century literary history, but also fills what would have been a gap in our knowledge had we not known the government orientation against which progressive writers of the period were struggling.

II

Catherine's first published work appeared in 1767-1768; it was the Instruction [Nakaz], an official act of state rather than a literary work. The Instruction was purely declaratory, not practical, but still not an individual literary expression.

During her Volga trip in 1767, Catherine organized the collective translation of Marmontel's Belisarius, which had just been published in France and condemned by the French authorities. Catherine's purpose was to demonstrate to all of Europe that the “Semiramis of the North” was enlightened and freedom-loving. The translators of Belisarius included high dignitaries, such as Count Z. G. Chernyshev, Count G. G. Orlov, S. Kozmin, A. I. Biblikov, Count V. G. Orlov, and others, and the writers, I. P. Yelagin, A. V. Naryshkin, and G. V. Kozitskii, who were close to the court and all pupils and friends of Sumarokov. Catherine personally translated the ninth chapter of the book. The translation was published in 1768; the title page read “Belisarius, by M. Marmontel, Member of the French Academy, translated on the Volga” and was dedicated to the Bishop of Tver, Gavril (the dedication was written by Count A. P. Shuvalov). The dedication of a disapproved book to such a dignitary was meant to demonstrate to all Europe the religious tolerance of Russia's government and the enlightened freethinking of its church in contrast to the French ecclesiastical authorities, who had attacked Belisarius and its author. The book appeared in successive editions.

Catherine's entry into Russian literature came a little later, precisely at the time when she felt the need to exert influence on the nation's thinking and to guide public opinion,¹ both by administrative pressure and by persuasion, persuasion being the printed word. Thus came about the publication in 1769 of a weekly magazine, called Vsiakaia vsiachina [Potpourri], under her editorship and carrying her contributions. Her technical assistant on this magazine was her secretary, the writer and philologist G. V. Kozitskii. Vsiakaia vsiachina was planned as a sort of literary continuation of the debates in the Commission on Codification. It had become clear to Catherine after a year and a half of the commission's work that ideas that were dangerous to her regime were firmly entrenched in the minds of her subjects. She resolved to influence public opinion—with a view to “sobering” it—through the printed word. She decided to tackle the matter herself and by her own example to direct the criticism of reality into a channel that would be acceptable to the government and at the same time to put the presumptuous freethinkers “in their place.”²

Catherine made no secret of the official nature of her magazine. The reader was given sufficiently transparent hints of this in the materials it carried. Besides, the magazine was exceedingly boastful, and it carried very many shamelessly laudatory, servile letters to the publisher. In its declared aim Vsiakaia vsiachina was conceived as a satirical magazine, but Catherine had her own concept of satire. She had to wage a struggle against malcontents and, in her judgment, there were two ways to do this: by impugning the undesirable claims of the opposition, and by providing a model of “respectable” satire.

The magazine propounded respectable and moderate ethical notions and had a penchant for moralizing “in general.” It avoided political and social issues, except when defending the government or attacking malcontents. For example, it carried a caustic attack on freethinking women who engaged in literature and science, clearly referring to the hostesses of the salons that served as a kind of committees of opposition. It attacked the “old men,” detractors of present-day life, who, it contended, clung to everything obsolete and past. It poured ridicule on the “dreamers” and “chatterboxes” in Moscow, by whom it meant the liberals, who were concentrated in Moscow, far from the government eye. Here are some examples of what it carried about the projects of such people: “One project is to turn the city of Romny into a port. Another wants to abolish the capitation and proposes to raise an income of 70 million rubles to take its place by sending a secret squadron of 2,000 ships to conquer unknown islands in the Pacific, kill all the black foxes there, and sell them to foreigners every year for silver. Another writer, in pursuit of the good of all, wants to teach the public how to double the number of kernels in the various grains and asks for villages, peasants, and money so that he may carry out his useful experiment. I inquired who had thought of these projects. I was told: sharp-witted men. But who, precisely? It turned out that most of them were bankrupt merchants. Who was asking for money and villages? A young man who had squandered all his father's estate.” In this manner, Catherine (who probably wrote that article herself) tried to discredit the opposition's social background and objectives.

At the same time Vsiakaia vsiachina zealously defended existing authority. It came blithely to the defense of the office clerks, that is, the bureaucracy, against attacks in progressive literature, and placed all the blame for the defects in the administrative and judicial machinery on the subjects themselves. “Clerks cannot and should not be abolished. It is not the clerks or their functions that are harmful. … Is it not a fact that if there were fewer tempters around them, there might be fewer complaints against them?” How could the “clerks” be prevented from “harassing the people”? “This is very easy: do not offend anyone, make your peace with those who have offended you by mutual agreement without resorting to the clerks. Keep your word and avoid getting involved in any kind of troubles.”

The magazine abhorred progressive satirists, such as Novikov,³ whom it attacked violently, declaring that to condemn social vices was itself an even greater vice, an indication of hatred of mankind, impertinence, impudence, and the like. It did not hold with liberalism. It sternly condemned mildness in treatment of house serfs, unambiguously recommending strictness (even to the point of whippings), for it considered them all scoundrels. Extremely respectful, even servile, to the courtiers and all authorities, it also advised its readers to be submissive in all things. “It is our duty as Christians and citizens to have confidence and respect for governments, for they have been set up for our good, and not to make unfair complaints or to abuse them for deeds which, in any case, I have never known to have been committed deliberately.” The conclusion was: “Kind fellow citizens, let us cease to be malicious and then we shall have no reason to complain of unjust treatment.” In defending “governments,” the government-sponsored magazine was at the same time refuting the criticism directed against the Empress' favorites; for example, it published a story glorifying and denying the “slander” against a certain “vizier,” easily recognizable as G. G. Orlov.

When Vsiakaia vsiachina was not concerned with the main enemy—sedition—its satire was vague, conciliatory, and spineless, touching chiefly on the petty details of everyday life in the highest circles of society. Typical “satirical” topics were: overcrowding rooms with too much furniture, too loud voices among the women, too much drinking of coffee, tea, lemonade at costume balls, and the like.

Vsiakaia vsiachina drew a great deal of its material from foreign moralistic-satirical journalism, particularly from Addison and Steele's renowned Spectator, which served as a model for numerous magazines published in western Europe. A number of the articles in Catherine's magazine, purporting to describe Russian customs, turn out on closer inspection to be adaptations or translations (more or less free) from The Spectator. The magazine's moralism also stemmed from Addison. Its manner (and Catherine's literary manner in 1769) was based on the poetics of early Russian classicism, filtered through the government ideology. Its exposition was dry, abstract, and devoid of living, concrete colors. Its language was bureaucratic and formal. While its didacticism derived from The Spectator, it was not expressed in the English magazine's friendly conversational style, [which was] suffused with the sense of bourgeois virtues, but was couched in a tone of command in a doctrinaire and authoritarian style, derived from the dogma of feudal hierarchal thought.

The rebuff administered the government-sponsored magazine by Novikov and other journalists in 1769 quickly cooled Catherine's journalistic ardor, and by the end of the year she started a campaign against a number of the magazines that had been founded on her initiative or with her encouragement. Nearly all of them, including Vsiakaia vsiachina, ceased publication in 1769. Several articles that had been prepared for publication in Vsiakaia vsiachina but not yet printed appeared in 1770 in anthologies, under the title Vsiakaia Vsiachina's Dividend, and this marked the end of the first stage of Catherine's journalistic activities.

The year 1770 saw the publication of Catherine's Antidote, and in 1772 the first series of her comedies appeared in print and on the stage.

III

By the time Catherine made her entry into the field of dramaturgy, the Russian comedy had already traveled a short but creatively innovative road, which began in 1750 with Sumarokov's trenchant pamphleteering and satirical plays. Sumarokov's plays had nothing in common with the general run of drama, which portrayed the petty everyday round of life; it painted a gallery of grotesque caricatures, not held together closely by a story line. After Sumarokov's came the comedies of Kheraskov (The Atheist, 1761) and A. Volkov, which also showed little interest in the mores, were symbolic in form, and elaborated the techniques of Russian classicism—those of the ancient Russian theater and popular farces. At the same time, the Yelagin group became active in trying to bring the techniques of the newest comedies of morals and early sentimentalism to the Russian stage. The work of Yelagin himself and of the young Fonvizin (Korion), who adapted Western plays to Russian customs, developed along these lines. The same trend gave rise to the portrayal of Russian national customs on the stage. Lukin, who had close ties with Yelagin and his circle, worked in this vein. This trend's highest achievement was Fonvizin's Brigadier, the first play to consolidate the distinctively Russian type of comedy by realistically portraying everyday life yet closely relating to the genre tradition of Sumarokov's early plays with their very weak story line that only symbolically linked a number of grotesque scenes and caustic satirical portraits. Fonvizin's new techniques of portraying everyday life were quickly adopted by his contemporaries, including Sumarokov in his late comedies of 1768-1772.

Of the various types of comedies known to Russian literature by 1772, Catherine's plays of that year were closest to Sumarokov's early works. Their settings were symbolic, schematic, exaggerated; they had weak plots or none at all; characterization took the form of oversimplified, grotesque masquelike types. Only in one respect did Catherine utilize the experience of the Yelagin group. She learned their technique of adapting foreign plays “to our customs.” Her first comedy, Oh, the Times! is an adaptation of Gellert's Die Betschwester. Catherine transferred the action to Moscow and tried to give the text local color and some of the features of contemporary Muscovite life.

In addition to this comedy, Catherine published in 1772 Mme. Vorchalkina's Birthday, The Vestibule in a Noble Boyar's House, and Mme. Vestnikova and Her Family. Apparently, that same year she also wrote a comedy, entitled The Questioner, which was incorrectly called The Invisible Bride when it was published in 1786 (in the collection The Russian Theater) and in subsequent nineteenth-century reprints. (The correct title was only restored in 1901 in the Academic edition of Catherine's works, edited by A. N. Pypin.)

Catherine's early comedies, as well as the majority of her later plays, were concerned not so much with the portrayal of characters and customs as with politics, namely, advocacy of the government's program and policy and condemnation of all who were dissatisfied with the Empress' regime. In her first comedies, Catherine directed her ridicule primarily at human shortcomings: bigotry, slander, cowardice, rudeness, even stupidity, and so forth. She wished thereby to direct contemporary satirists away from concern with acute social problems and to give them examples of peaceable moralization, intending it as a reproach to “malicious” satirists like Fonvizin and the later Sumarokov. Discarding the moral abstractions of satire for this purpose, she included a number of characters, dialogues, and scattered hints about the times that were clearly meant to support government policy.

Oh, the Times! is about ignorant old Moscow gossips, malicious, stupid, and dissatisfied with the government, who keep forecasting trouble, complain about everything under the sun, and constantly abuse the authorities for inefficiency. The bigoted Khanzhankina, for example, treats her serf-domestics very cruelly and won't permit them to get married because she is miserly and does not want to provide them with dowries. She says: “The government ought to set up an institution to dower our serfs when they get married instead of our having to do it. But to tell the truth, the state ought to see to everything. We've had enough of its not concerning itself with anything any more.” Naturally, the play's ideal raisonneur, Nepustov, comes to the government's defense immediately. In another episode, Khanzhankina complains: “I don't know why the government doesn't prohibit such poor people from getting married. Nobody looks after anything now! There is nobody to do anything.”

The gossip Vestnikova complains that the police are not doing their job, as a result of which “the streets are so slippery and so bad that it is impossible to drive in them,” whereupon the clever servant, Mavra, explains to the audience: “We're not mentioning that the horses are not shod, the wheels have no linchpins, and the harness is of poor quality.” Vestnikova generalizes: “Nobody looks after anything. Oh, what times! What will come of it all!” She spreads rumors that a flood has destroyed St. Petersburg, that people are dying of hunger there, that “there is a shortage of everything, and neither the government nor the police are thinking of anything. I know a few worse things, too. There's lots of news from there: and none of it is good. Anyhow, one shouldn't tell everything.” She even hints at the expectation of serious political upheavals. Another character, the superstitious old woman Chudikhina, expresses dissatisfaction with the way girls are educated in the institute at the Smolny monastery. It is no accident that Moscow is depicted in the comedies as the center of opposition to the government and of all kinds of freethinking.

Catherine portrays her enemies as complaining old women, whereas those who defend the honor of the government are shown as intelligent, positive individuals. The subject of Mme. Vorchalkina's Birthday is the same, but it is presented more sharply. Vorchalkina, an old troublemaker, is in the habit of abusing and criticizing everyone and everything. Likeminded people—idlers, in Catherine's view—gather in her home. One typical member of the company is Nekopeikov, a merchant who has squandered his fortune and is now bombarding the government with ridiculous suggestions for enriching the state. He offers proposals for transportation, the fleet, rat-catching, the manufacture of ropes from rat-tails, etc. Nekopeikov, among other things, declares: “I have also discovered a way to improve the functioning of the courts and the judges,” apparently agreeing with Novikov and his followers in their attacks on the clerks. He says: “What our government has come to! Everyone does as he pleases. Everyone expects to obtain judgment and punishment by means of the ancient law of muscle. It is absolutely necessary that I draft a project to avert such disorder.” Other typical characters are the rude, bad-mannered noblemen Gerkulov and the vain aristocrat Spesov, who spreads stupid gossip about the government's plans. This company is critical of the actions of the police, of the opening of a home for foundlings, of taxes. Vorchalkina says, “The Treasury robs us all the time. I don't want to have anything to do with it.”

In giving such an unattractive picture of all these people “who want to remake the whole world,” Catherine was not only ridiculing people dissatisfied with her rule, but was also asserting that they were all fools, chatterboxes, and scoundrels, that in reality her police were good, the judicial system and the judges did not require “improvement,” and that all was well in the country. Through the lips of another intelligent servant girl, Praskovia, Catherine tells the dreamer Nekopeikov: “We would be in a very sad plight indeed, and very unfortunate, too, if the general welfare depended on your brainless head, which couldn't even manage to carry on a proper trade in a market row.”

This was intended for the edification of subjects who ventured to poke their noses into politics and affairs of state. The same topics surface in the plays Mme. Vestnikova and Her Family and The Vestibule in a Noble Boyar's House. The latter is a one-act play without any plot whatever, depicting a crowd of petitioners at the door of an all-powerful favorite. They have all come to him with allegedly very important matters. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that all the petitioners are parasites or knaves, who are only wasting the powerful favorite's time with their complaints and proposals. The audience sees a poor woman who has come to the capital to ask for assistance. Don't believe what you see, Catherine explains. She is hiding the fact that she owns a small village that feeds her and, besides, she drinks. The other petitioners are no better. Yet they dare to judge and to censure the government, to condemn the war with Turkey, to criticize the military leadership. The conclusion to be drawn is that the complaints that the government is not paying attention to the needs of its citizens have no basis in fact. On the contrary, Catherine finds that the complainers and the petitioners are very suspicious characters. One of the petitioners in the nobleman's vestibule is of special interest. He is a Frenchman, named Oranbar. He, too, is a project maker, and he has come from France to teach the Russian government what to do. Oranbar has a very high opinion of himself and a very low opinion of the actions of the Russian authorities. “I have brought a pocketful of good with me. There is no good without me. The whole world is stupid. I alone know everything,” he says. Oranbar is easily recognizable as the French Enlightener, economist, and statesman Mercier de la Rivière, who came to Russia in 1765 at Catherine's invitation, hoping that the Empress-philosopher would give him the opportunity to carry out broad reforms in her country. Nothing came of his plans, however. Catherine saw him once and sent him home. In defending her action, Catherine had no scruples about heaping ridicule on the enlightened and learned man.

Between 1772 and 1785 there was an interval in Catherine's output of comedies. During that period she was absorbed in her “legislomania,” a passion for drafting laws. But in the early 1780's she turned to writing historical, journalistic, and pedagogical works. Her major work of that period was Notes on Russian History, an extensive and clumsy compilation of excerpts from chronicles, of no value whatever either as scholarship or as literature. These Notes did not avoid politics. They glorified the autocracy as a force that always and inevitably saved the Russian state and as the only possible form of government for Russia. They were published in serial form in Conversations for Admirers of Russian Literature, a monthly magazine published in 1783 and 1784 by the Russian Academy under the editorship of Princess E. R. Dashkov but carefully watched over by Catherine herself. There is reason to believe that the Notes, which filled a sizable portion of each issue, were one of the main reasons for the establishment of the magazine in the first place.

In 1783 a series of feuilletons by Catherine, entitled “Facts and Fictions,” appeared in the issues of Conversations. They were held together by the same characters and the same imaginary author—a wit, jester, and acute observer. “Facts and Fictions” is the least successful of all Catherine's writings and did not achieve its purpose. Though Catherine tried hard to be witty, the writing is obtuse, flat, and gloomily boring; the style is very poor, and the author's self-praise for profundity and stylistic elegance in the complete absence of both is extremely depressing.

Incidentally, “Facts and Fictions” tried to reflect the newest trend in European literature. It imitated Sterne's Tristram Shandy, with its casual chatter about this and that, its intimate, homey conversational tone, inconsistency in movement of themes and thoughts. But the profound ideological content of Sterne's writing was alien to Catherine, whose work did not express the cult of the free individual, but the monstrous arbitrariness of a despot, and is not concerned with the intimate life of the common man, but with court gossip. “Facts and Fictions” is a graphic illustration of the adaptation of so progressive an aesthetic phenomenon as Sterne's work to the objectives and tastes of the conservative groups that supported the serf-based autocracy.

The majority of the Empress' feuilletons reiterated the motifs of her other writings: abstract moralization and venomous attacks on malcontents and persons who thought differently from her. Catherine again castigated the satirists, such as Novikov, who, in her opinion, were angry at the whole world. She portrayed a “strange man, whose personality inclines him to be angry in circumstances that would cause other people to be filled with pity and compassion.” Furthermore, she added significantly, this man should not be sought “among the living.” To someone's alleged request that she “portray a tattle and bribe-taker,” Catherine replied that she was “excluding everything vile and revolting from ‘Facts and Fictions’, everything that was not in a smiling vein.” She assailed a person who “continues to complain of the unfairness of the governors [voyevoda] and their staffs, though they no longer exist any more” and who is dissatisfied with other things that have been eliminated by the concerned government. The “mentality” of such a person is “backward,” Catherine declared, “and he does not realize how incongruous this is” because he is obstinate in his complaining.

Through another positive character in her feuilletons, the imaginary author's grandfather, Catherine defends and praises her rule, argues that this is a time of freedom, that “all the existing short-comings have no significance now” because they are only the manifestation of society's rapid progress and that it is a good sign of the “general mood” that citizens so frequently appeal to the arbitration of courts in equity that Catherine has established rather than to ordinary courts. In fact, the courts in equity played no serious role at all.

Actually, Catherine's world outlook was expressed not in favorable pictures, such as the above, but by her portrayal of the great majority of people as “half-witted,” frivolous, and obstinate creatures. Unlike the progressive sentimentalists, who affirmed the cult of man, Catherine had nothing but contempt for men, who, she felt, had to be treated as children or lunatics. …

Earlier, before the appearance of Conversations, Catherine wrote a series of pedagogical works. They included instructions for the upbringing of her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, based on pedagogical theories that were progressive for those times; Elementary Civic Education; Selected Russian Proverbs; and two stories for children.

Elementary Civic Education was a pamphlet, containing over 200 maxims, sayings, and homilies, purporting to provide a child with basic information on morality, life, and the world. Besides giving the names of the months, days of the week, the seasons, etc., it contained such gems as: “Virtue is its own reward” and “There is nothing perfect in the world.”

Selected Russian Proverbs had nothing in common with folklore but consisted of sayings Catherine made up herself, such as: “Ever new, rarely right,” “People should not quarrel,” “Money can accomplish a great deal, but truth wins out,” and the like. The outward trappings of popular proverbs could not conceal the work's artificiality and bias, nor did the inclusion of a few genuine folk sayings alter the picture.

The two stories for children—“The Story of Crown Prince Fevei” and “The Story of Crown Prince Khlor”—are noteworthy if only because they were the first works written specially for children ever published in Russia. In these, too, Catherine took into account and utilized the experience of advanced literary theory of the period, but again, she used it in her own way. Written in allegorical fairy-tale form, the stories were intended for her young grandsons and therefore their moral admonitions were primarily addressed to princes. Thus Catherine took the new theory from the West that contended that a special psychological approach is needed for children and that literature for children must have its own content and style, but she not only narrowed the scope of this theory, she also gave it a specifically court character since its ideas on education and aesthetics were applicable chiefly to children of royalty. The story about Fevei describes a model offspring of the royal family, a prince endowed with all the virtues that in the role are attributed to Catherine's own grandsons. The story about Khlor tells how an ideal prince searches for a rose without thorns—i.e., virtue—with the help of Reason, Honesty, and Truth, resisting all the temptations he encounters, and how he is helped by the princess Felicia. The characters of this story have gone down in Russian literature for all time because Derzhavin used them in his celebrated “Ode to Felicia.”

IV

Catherine began to write plays again in 1785. In the following four years she wrote, or began to write, about twenty plays, not counting her French playlets—“proverbs.” Her writing for the theater during this period was extremely varied in genre, sources of influence, and stylistic exploration.

By 1785 the Russian comedy, as well as Russian drama in general, had long since emerged from infancy and embarked on its own distinctively Russian path. The Russian theater had produced many plays by many playwrights. Numerous ideological and artistic trends had found embodiment in a variety of theaters and dramaturgical systems. The comic opera with its more or less democratic subject matter and mood had won an honored place. Psychological analysis and “descriptions of the ways” of ordinary people in Russian society had found expression in early Russian sentimentalism. The classical division into tragedy and comedy had been replaced by a middle genre: the drama of fictionalized adventure or of mores that tended to depict everyday life with a certain measure of realism. Incisive political subject matter and serious criticism of serfdom had made their way onto the stage. All the progressive explorations of Russian dramaturgy were epitomized in the immortal Nedorosl' [The Minor], a play that opened the way to a development of the Russian national theater which led to Gogol.

Catherine assimilated the lessons of the turbulent development of Russian drama in the 1770's. She mastered the technique of dramatic construction that Russian playwrights had evolved and she responded to Western trends in the theater. But she wrote her apologist and reactionary writing in opposition to the progressive critical trend of the finest Russian dramatists of the time—Fonvizin, Kniazhnin, Nikolev, and others.

The comedy continued to interest Catherine, and even when she turned to the new dramaturgical forms she retained her earlier style and even subject matter. In 1787, for example, she started two plays, never completed, which, like her comedies of 1772, dealt with “gossips,” “rumors,” “fabrications,” spread by persons who were dissatisfied with her rule. These plays were The Liar and The Woman Is Delirious, Does the Devil Believe Her, subtitled Tales (the second play is a variation of the first). Catherine also used her earlier style in three anti-Masonic comedies she wrote; she attached great political importance to them and publicized these plays energetically, not only in Russia, but abroad. The plays were entitled The Deceiver (1785), Tempted (1785), and The Siberian Shaman (1786), and depicted Freemasons as swindlers, deliberately linking them with international adventurers such as Cagliostro. The Freemasons are portrayed either as scoundrels who take advantage of the gullibility of wealthy fools, or wealthy fools under the influence of the mystical ravings of scoundrels. The anti-Masonic plays are malicious and aggressive. Catherine regarded Freemasonry—not without reason—as a force dangerous to her personally and to her regime; and before taking police action against it, she wanted to prepare public opinion with the help of comedies and, perhaps, win over some of the Masons, or at least frighten them.

The other comedies Catherine wrote between 1785 and 1788 were not sharply political. Most were comedies of intrigue and “harmless” jests and constituted an attempt by Catherine to bring the nonpolitical, “smiling” comedy to the Russian stage in opposition to the satirical and “engagé” dramas of a Fonvizin or a Kniazhnin. Catherine mastered the technique of linking the material by means of a plot. She based her plots on misunderstandings and errors and strove (in vain) to write lively, acute, realistic dialogue in the French manner, imitating writers like Marivaux or Beaumarchais. In these mostly domestic plays the Empress stood for good morals, partly under the influence of Western bourgeois-sentimental literature, but even more so because she wanted to uphold all traditional patriarchalism. They contained some very moderate “satire,” directed against inoffensive “foibles.” The sharpest satire to be found in this group of plays is in A Family Broken Up by Intrigue and Suspicion (1787) and is directed against gossip, but the satire is entirely of an abstract moralistic nature. Another comedy in this group was entitled The Misunderstanding (1788).

Catherine sought to portray psychological details, to analyze the intimate experiences of the soul which she combines with an attempt at depicting mores and everyday life on the stage. In this she revealed the influence of sentimentalist drama, not only of Marivaux and La Chaussée, but of Diderot, Mercier, and Beaumarchais. It is also obvious that she was trying to defeat Fonvizin with his own weapons. What Kind of Jokes Are These? (not published until 1901) and An Unexpected Adventure are examples of her attempts at psychological portrayal. The latter is adapted, if not actually translated “with application to our customs,” from the French.

Along with psychological analysis in the sentimental vein, Catherine also began to introduce lyrical tension and external “romanticism” à la Kotzebue into her plays. One play was about a melancholy widow and her secret lover, flitting about among the trees in a red cape and broad-brimmed hat that concealed his face. The settings were of a new type, too—the wing of a house, situated in a garden or orchard, an open window with a heroine in it. Thinking One Way and Acting Another, a play she wrote in 1785 and containing all these elements, is an attempt to imitate Fonvizin by drawing an exaggerated picture of the life of a provincial landowner.

Needless to say, not only the absence of talent, but also inner emptiness and ideological obtuseness made her plays artistically as well as ideologically weak. They are poorly organized, poorly written, and confused. The characterization is dull and the protagonists inexpressive. Though Catherine's plays of those years are more skillfully constructed than her plays of 1772, they appear pretty wretched against the background of the improved techniques and greater depth of Russian drama in the 1780's. Russian drama was developing much more rapidly and vigorously than the Empress' literary style, try as she might to keep up with the aesthetic level of the time.

It was in the attempt to keep up with the newest artistic developments, the interest in pre-romanticism, that Catherine turned to Shakespeare and even to Calderón, who was already highly appreciated by the young writers of Europe. But whereas Herder, Radishchev, and even the young Karamzin regarded Shakespeare as a special world to be discovered and assimilated, Catherine was interested in Shakespeare, first, as a fashionable name, second, as a source of subject matter, and third, as justification for rejection of the three unities, long since done, incidentally, without reference to Shakespeare, in opera and drama in the West as well as in Russia (see Kheraskov's plays of the 1770's).

In 1786 Catherine published and produced a play which she entitled: A Free but Slight Adaptation from Shakespeare, the Comedy: This Is the Kind of Laundry and Laundry Basket to Have. It was an adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare has disappeared from it entirely. Not only was the action transferred to St. Petersburg, but it was ironed out and smoothed over in every possible way. The play was reduced to a didactic story of retribution overtaking a conceited Don Juan—Yakov Vlasevich Polkladov, the traditional fop of eighteenth-century Russian comedy, into whom Falstaff had been transformed. Except for the masquerade scene in the fifth act with witches and sorcerers, Catherine's play was more like a comedy by Sumarokov rather than anything by Shakespeare.

In much the same way Catherine adapted Timon of Athens. She called it: The Wastrel, a Comedy, a Free Adaptation from Shakespeare (1786). (The play has not survived in its entirety, or it may not have been completed.) Catherine turned it into a didactic play, admonishing Russian nobles (its hero is a Russian nobleman, named Tratov) not to spend too much money, especially not to dispense charity too lightly. The philosophical content of Shakespeare's work has vanished from it completely. Actually, it imitated Destouches' The Wastrel rather than Shakespeare.

Only insignificant excerpts of a “free adaptation” by Catherine of one of Calderón's comedies have come down to us. In this instance, too, the fact that Catherine found Calderón worth adapting is of more interest and of greater historical significance than anything she may have derived from that dramatist.

Catherine invoked Shakespeare's name in connection with her “historical representations,” or “chronicles of ancient Russian history.” These plays did not respect the three unities and other rules of classicism, an approach that Catherine presented as her own innovation. They did not have a single theme either; they were a mixed genre, resembled faeries with music, choruses, ballet, and processions, and were intended for lavish stage productions and the sumptuousness of theater festivals at court. At the same time they had a strong political intent, glorifying the Russian autocracy.

The first chronicle—An Imitation of Shakespeare, a Historical Spectacle Without Observance of the Usual Theatrical Rules, from the Life of Rurik (1786)—lauded the wisdom of the ancient Russian autocrat who, according to the play, had a legitimate right to the crown because he was the grandson of Gostomysl, prince of Novgorod. The action is based on the legend of Vadim and his rebellion, a legend which subsequently inspired a number of freedom-loving works of Russian literature (by Kniazhnin, Ryleev, Pushkin, Lermontov). Catherine made Vadim a prince, too, a cousin of Rurik. According to her version, Vadim was not a republican at all, not an ideological adversary of Rurik, but merely an ambitious man who organized a conspiracy in order to usurp his cousin's power. In so doing, he took malicious advantage of the Russian people's traditional and unthinking obedience to their princes. Rurik defeats Vadim and offers him a position as his assistant. Vadim repents and is eager to atone for his guilt and prove his loyalty to his sovereign. The play's crudely reactionary message is made even more apparent by its complete absence of literary merit.

The second chronicle was entitled: The Beginning of Oleg's Rule: An Imitation of Shakespeare Without Observance of the Usual Theatrical Rules (1786) and is along the same ideological lines. The third play, not completed, is called Igor (1786) and turned out a lyrical drama. It is the story of a Bulgarian princess and her fiancé, separated by the wars and reunited through the generosity and kindness of the Russian Prince Igor.

In 1786 Catherine began work on a series of comic operas in which she tried to utilize folklore. This was a response to the preromantic trend that had reached Russian literature by then. In keeping with the spirit of this trend, her operas took the form of theatrical fairy tales, with fantastic and grotesque elements, and had pretensions to imagination and colorful, inventive variety. They do not contain any genuine folklore. They do contain a political message, which comes through the jesting very clearly. For example, the opera Fevei (1786), which is based on a fairy story Catherine wrote herself, advises Pavel Petrovich [Grand Duke Paul] to obey his mother and not to try to escape from her domination or to travel abroad. In other words, this opera was a tactical move on Catherine's part in her struggle with her son. The opera Bogatyr Boeslavich of Novgorod (1786), referring to Vasilii Buslaevich, gives its own interpretation of the well-known epic. It depicts Vasilii, prince of Novgorod, as using force to teach the impudent people of Novgorod a lesson when they dare to disobey him and refuse to submit to him slavishly. Vasilii compels them to bow obsequiously to what is presented as the redeeming harshness of the autocracy. An opera about the ill-starred bogatyr Kosometovich, also based on a fairy tale by Catherine (1789), was a satire directed against the Swedish king Gustav III, who launched an unsuccessful war against Russia. It may also have been directed against Pavel Petrovich, who tried to join in the military operations against the Swedes but whom his mother quickly removed, fearing he would gain influence in the army.

The opera The Brave and Bold Knight Akhrideich (Crown Prince Ivan) (1786) and the comic opera Fedul and His Children (1790) are more “innocent.” A large number of arias and choruses, many taken from poems by Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov, some composed by the Empress' secretary, A. V. Khrapovitsky, and some assembled by Khrapovitsky from folk songs, were inserted into the text of Catherine's operas and historical dramas. Fedul and His Children, which consists entirely of poems by other poets and required hardly any work on Catherine's part, was her last work for the stage, in fact, her last literary effort altogether. Hard times had come for the monarchs of Europe. The French Revolution had shaken thrones. Catherine finally perceived the futility of her hope that her subjects would obediently follow the moral and political precepts she offered them in palace-written feuilletons, comedies, and operas. She gave up her writing, in which she was always more a monarch lecturing her subjects than a genuinely creative artist.

Notes

1. Public opinion is used here to translate obshchestvennoe dvizhenie. The Russian expression actually refers to the persons—and their ideas—who acted as the intellectual élite and spearheaded the drive for the liberalization of the political and social systems of the empire. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this élite made its influence felt through informal groupings (circles, literary societies, Masonic lodges) and a select periodical press.

2. See selections: “Voices of the Land and the Autocrat,” p. 113, and “The Autocrat and the Open Critic,” p. 156.

3. Nikolai I. Novikov, 1744-1818, prominent publisher, satirical author, and journalist. He was a leading figure of the Masonic movement which he directed toward philanthropic and educational activities. Catherine II had him arrested and imprisoned in the Shlisselburg Fortress (1792); he was freed in 1796 by Paul I and retired to his estate near Moscow.

Grigorii A. Gukovskii, “Ekaterina II,” in Literatura XVIII veka, Istoriia russkoi literatury, edited by G. A. Gukovskii and V. A. Desnitskii (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Institut literatury Pushkinskii Dom, 1947), IV, part 2, 364-380. Translated by Mary Mackler.