[In the excerpt below, Cronin provides an overview of Catherine's literary career, relating her works to events in both her private and public life, and tracing her influence on other authors.]

The improvements in government, growing prosperity and a sense of security which began to make themselves felt by the middle of Catherine's reign had their counterparts in intellectual and artistic achievements. A new spirit of confident experiment stirred, nowhere more strikingly than in literature. Almost all genres of fiction and nonfiction showed new activity and some produced distinguished results. It is possible to speak of a literary flowering at the centre of which, as patron and writer, stood Catherine herself.

It is first necessary to look, once again, at Russia on Catherine's arrival. In the preceding six hundred years only one Russian book of undisputed merit had appeared: the Autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum. As an Old Believer, Avvakum is persecuted mercilessly, exiled to Siberia, flung into prison, shipwrecked on river journeys; he is reviled and half-starved; his friends have their tongues cut out, and in one of the big scenes the archpriest is obliged to drive the Devil out of a fellow-prisoner by lashing him with his heavy-beaded rosary. One part xenophobia and three parts masochism, Avvakum's Autobiography is typical of the literary tradition Catherine found on her arrival. Apart from Church service books, about twenty books were published annually. When she wanted to read Plutarch's Lives, Catherine found that no Russian translation existed, and foreign books were so scarce it took her two years to get hold of a copy of Amyot's French translation. Ivan Shuvalov's literary patronage centred on persuading Voltaire—against his better judgment, after he learned that Peter had murdered his son—to write a History of Peter the Great; as for Empress Elizabeth, she considered reading bad for the health.

The most striking thing about the Russian literary scene was that the Greek and Roman classics were virtually unknown. Russia had never had a Renaissance, and it was part of the secret of her backwardness. So one of the first things Catherine did was to found, with a capital of 5000 roubles, a society for translating the classics, and other key books. It is an act that attracted little attention at the time, or indeed since, but it is of the first importance.

Homer and Plato now arrived in Russia, Virgil, translated by Catherine's librarian Petrov, Horace and Ovid and Cicero. Three centuries after Italy, under the impulse of one woman, Russia underwent the ferment of the Renaissance.

This in itself was an event of the first importance. But it occurred at the same time as a second event of equal importance—the Enlightenment. This too was made available to Russians by Catherine. It was she who sponsored translations of the leading champions of human rights, such as Montesquieu and Beccaria and the Encyclopédie, in a special three-volume Russian edition. While awaiting a Russian translation of Voltaire's Portable Philosophic Dictionary, Catherine imported 3000 copies of that work, which sold in a week. On a journey down the Volga in 1767 Catherine took along copies of Marmontel's Belisarius—conversations between General Belisarius, old and blind, Emperor Justinian and Justinian's son—and invited members of her suite each to translate a chapter, she herself translating chapter 9, which teaches that the only absolute power in a State is that of the laws.

Finally, Catherine's reign saw translations of modern works of literature: among those which met with success were Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise and Goethe's Werther, the poetry of John Milton, James Thomson and Edward Young. In the decade ending 1778 no fewer than 173 books, ancient and modern, were published in translation, bringing Russia at a single throw the accumulated pool of Europe's literary riches.

But in the field of literature Catherine did not wish just to Europeanize Russia. It would be nearer the truth to say that she wished to Russianize Europe, in the sense that she believed in the literary powers of the Russian people, and she told Princess Dashkova that ‘our Russian language, uniting as it does the strength, richness and energy of German with the sweetness of Italian, will one day become the standard language of the world.’

Catherine's attitude and the translations themselves stimulated a new generation of Russian writers. The novel got going with A Russian Pamela, the story of a young nobleman's love for a beautiful peasant girl, modelled on Richardson's classic. Russian poets, influenced by Young's Night Thoughts, gave voice to a deep strain of melancholy in the national character. But perhaps the best poet of the reign is Gabriel Derzhavin who, freeing himself from youthful bombast, celebrated the Russia of his day and its notable men, including Potemkin, whom he compared to a mighty waterfall. Catherine honoured Derzhavin by appointing him one of her secretaries, but the Empress and the self-important poet were temperamentally unsuited, as Catherine found one day when, having asked him for a concise report on a certain subject, Derzhavin arrived in her study with two sacks of papers. After that she let him give all his time to poetry.

As her gift for mimicry and her liking of Potemkin's impersonation of herself would suggest, Catherine was very fond of the theatre and did a lot to encourage it. When a touring English company managed by a Mr Fisher performed Home's Tragedy of Douglas in an old barn, she went to see it, thought well of the actors and lent them a proper theatre. She founded a school of dramatic art for fifteen young men and fifteen young women of any class, including serfs. She had the best new plays produced at her Court theatre, stimulating the gentry to similar patronage, so that by 1793 St Petersburg had eight private theatres. Catherine particularly liked satirical comedies and encouraged two playwrights in this genre: Alexander Sumarokov and Denis Fonvizin. Both excelled at plays ridiculing dandies, misers and Frenchified aristocrats, Fonvizin producing in The Adolescent a minor masterpiece.

In the field of history, her favourite non-fiction subject, Catherine opened the imperial archives, where she herself sometimes worked, to scholars of all political persuasions, including a man she knew to be her enemy, Prince Michael Shcherbatov, the champion of serfdom. Drawing on manuscript sources, Shcherbatov wrote a seven-volume History of Russia to 1610, in which he painted Court favourites in the darkest tones—the nearest he got to openly criticizing Orlov and Potemkin, whom he detested.

The origin of political institutions in Russia was a question then very much in the air. According to some they originated with a group of Vikings who came from a place known as Russ somewhere in Scandinavia, probably Sweden. According to others the Vikings merely developed existing institutions. Leipzig-educated Gerhard Müller had upheld the first view; Lomonosov, expressing a national Slav consciousness, the second.

In this version of the old Europe-Asia conflict, Catherine stepped warily. She showed her appreciation of Müller's scholarship by making him superintendent of the imperial archives, but she ordered the publication, at government expense, of a two-volume historical study by Ivan Boltin, in which he attacks the theory of Scandinavian origins and also—incorrectly—equates Russian serfdom with European feudalism.

If there was much to discover and publish in early Russian history, even more remained to be done regarding contemporary Russia, where Catherine found herself almost in the position of a fairy-tale character: sending out explorers to tell her about, or actually to discover, territories that were unknown yet belonged to her. She sent Goldenstadt and Reinegg to study the Caucasus and Georgia, Johann Georgi the flora and fauna of the Urals, Dr Samuel Gmelin of Tübingen to explore the lands bordering Persia, Peter Simon Pallas, the brilliant Professor of Natural History in St Petersburg, to study the flora and fauna of Siberia as far as Lake Baikal and Kyakhta. Pallas found a wide distribution of mammoth and rhinoceros fossils, including some with their hairy hides preserved in the Siberian ice: these and other new species he described in a pioneer book, Journey Through Various Provinces of the Russian Empire.

Catherine pushed the search for new knowledge beyond the Russian mainland when she sent Captain Khrenitsin and Lieutenant Levashev to explore the Aleutians and coast of Alaska. She passed to William Robertson, principal of Edinburgh University, via Dr Rogerson, a new chart of their discoveries prepared by the Academy which showed that they were the first Russians to visit the American continent, and she gave Admiral Knowles the original journals of the expedition. Shelekov followed up by establishing a fur station on the mainland of Alaska, at Cook Inlet, the first permanent Russian settlement of Alaska. From the reports of these travellers and of a later expedition sponsored by Catherine and led by Joseph Billings, the Aleutian Islanders emerged from the Arctic mists that had hitherto enveloped them: a brave people who made fire by rubbing sticks together, needles from bones of birds and thread from whale sinews; who warmed themselves by burning whale fat in shells, and hunted in leather boats, firing from hand-boards stone-pointed six-foot harpoons.

Catherine's literary activities extended also to journalism. In 1769 she started Russia's first weekly magazine, modelled on The Spectator and called All Sorts and Sundries. The aim of the articles was to correct social defects by kindly humour. Catherine herself wrote articles for the magazine, which sold well and became ‘the grandmother’—Catherine's term—for many other satirical magazines with a strong social purpose. The most outspoken of these was started by a young, well-educated, intellectual gentleman, Nicholas Novikov. The Drone, as Novikov's magazine was called, ran a famous article showing up a nobleman who orders his bailiff to punish a famine-stricken village in arrears with its obrok, mainly by flogging and fines.

The satirical magazines allowed Russians to express themselves freely on social issues for the first time. The Drone ran for fifty-two issues; it was not, as is usually said, closed by Catherine, but appears to have died a natural death of failing circulation. Other magazines continued to appear down to 1774. In that year the Pugachev revolt, which cost the lives of so many landowners, caused Catherine to re-consider her policy and she ended the publication of all magazines.

Catherine allowed Russians more freedom of expression than previous rulers, but she limited it to moral and social questions. She had learned from reading history that in Russia political opposition usually culminated in a change of ruler—indeed the structure of government was such that adverse political comment could hardly be other than revolutionary—so Catherine declined to allow freedom of expression in political matters.

In Catherine's reign, as in the past, the police censored books, but somewhat laxly, while plays were often referred to the Sovereign. When Nikolev's Sorena and Zemir was performed in Moscow, it was denounced to the Moscow commandant, who forwarded a copy to Catherine, saying that he found it unfit for the stage and marking certain lines, including these:

For ever vanish thou, that fatal law
That is derived from the imperial frown.
Can bliss be sought where pride does wear the crown,
Where hearts are chained with just the whim of one?

Catherine replied: ‘I am surprised, Count Yakov Aleksendrovich, at the fact that you suspended the performance of the tragedy which, I understand, was well received by the public. The meaning of the verses you have noted has no bearing upon your Empress. The author challenges the despotism of the tyrants, whereas you call Catherine a mother.’

On the other hand, when Princess Dashkova printed in the Academy of Arts Bulletin Knyazhnin's play Vadim, which contains the lines:

Around the throne the censors of dishonest guile
Exalt those gods with flatt'ring words and cunning smile,
Comparing culprits crown'd with all that is divine,
And drown their slaves in blood to make their glory shine.

Catherine evidently found ‘culprits crown'd’ too near the knuckle, for she informed the Senate, who had all copies of the offending Bulletin destroyed.

Catherine incidentally could be displeased with a play for a non-political reason. In 1777 she attended a private performance of Le Médecin par occasion, in which one of the actors, speaking of women in love, has the line: ‘A woman of thirty falling in love—well and good; but a woman of sixty, that's intolerable.’ The forty-eight-year-old Empress rose from her seat, saying, ‘This play is stupid and boring.’ She left the theatre, whereupon the performance stopped and was not repeated.

In the sphere of freedom of expression one of the most important movements Catherine had to deal with was Freemasonry. Though condemned by the Catholic Church, it was widespread in Europe, where it filled a vacuum left by declining religious belief, and it had swept into Russia mainly from Germany and Sweden. It was a multifarious movement, ranging from groups that combined secret passwords and medieval trappings with a quest for social justice and self-improvement, to the Rosicrucians who dabbled in occultism and alchemy.

As a girl Catherine had believed in fortune-tellers, such as the monk at Brunswick who had ‘seen’ three crowns on her brow, but her reading of Voltaire had made her ashamed of such credulity. Later she had seen the damage it could do, when her mother, in Paris, dabbled in alchemy, then became a prey to it, and finally lost what little gold she possessed trying to manufacture gold.

The latent streak of credulity in herself and her mother's ruin help to explain the extremely forceful critical stand Catherine adopted to Freemasonry. In a letter to Grimm she called it ‘one of the greatest aberrations to which the human race has succumbed. I had the patience to plod through both published and manuscript sources of all the tedious nonsense with which they busy themselves. In disgust I came to the conclusion that, though they make fun of others, they are neither more enlightened nor any wiser than the rest of us … When they meet, how can they keep from splitting their sides with laughter?’

Catherine knew that the four thousand Freemasons in Russia—half of them foreigners—were more dangerous than her letter to Grimm suggests: for instance, the Berlin-appointed supremo of the Rosicrucians, Schwarz, confessed on his deathbed that the Order's secret purpose was subversion of the Orthodox faith. But Catherine did not ban Freemasonry, as the Kings of France had done. She allowed Masons to meet and express themselves freely, thus remaining true to her principle of toleration on social and religious issues. When Novikov joined the Rosicrucians, Catherine granted him a lease of the University of Moscow press, on which he printed Masonic books. Only at the end of the reign, in a changed political climate, was Catherine to harden her attitude to Freemasonry.

Catherine believed in the power of laughter to correct human folly, Masonic or otherwise, hence her admiration for Voltaire. The sage of Ferney remained her literary hero, his bust stood in her library, and she many times invited him to St Petersburg, but Voltaire recoiled from the long journey, and Catherine had to content herself with a lesser French writer and champion of Justice, Denis Diderot.

Diderot paid a six-month visit to St Petersburg as Catherine's guest in 1773. He had about sixty conversations with the Empress, ranging over politics, law, education and literature. Diderot urged the setting up of an English-style Parliament; Catherine replied that it was easy for him to reform on paper that did not answer back; as for her, she had to deal with human beings, with all their traditions and susceptibilities. On this point they eventually agreed to differ, and Catherine showed her respect for Diderot the writer, if not the politician, by having him elected to the Academy of Sciences.

Catherine bought Diderot's library, when financial difficulties obliged him to put it up for sale; her very generous terms allowed him to keep the books during his lifetime and to be paid for this ‘curatorship’. She also bought Voltaire's books after his death. These two acquisitions and her private purchases increased the imperial library from a few hundred volumes to 38,000.

Catherine had parted company with Princess Dashkova after the coup, annoyed because the Princess wanted to claim more credit than Catherine thought was her due. Widowed at twenty-one, the blue-stocking Princess travelled in Europe and enlarged her views. Returning to St Petersburg in 1783, she met Catherine at a Court ball. Their differences now forgotten, Catherine invited this very able lady to become first Director of the Academy of Sciences, then President of a Russian Academy, whose interests would be literary and philological. The double appointment is important, for it marks the first occasion anywhere on which a woman held such influential posts. The Princess began compiling a Russian dictionary, to the first volume of which Catherine contributed notes on the language, so that their originally political collaboration continued at the level of lexicography.

Catherine brought to the literary scene the intuitive understanding of one who was herself an author. Some of her works are very slight, such as those she wrote for her grandchildren, the elder sons of Grand Duke Paul. The Grandmother's ABC Book teaches the alphabet through simple Russian sayings and proverbs, of which Catherine was very fond, particular emphasis being placed on the need to work hard and to be concerned for one's fellow creatures. It is the first children's textbook in Russian.

Catherine also wrote two fairy-tales for her grandsons, both about heirs to the throne. They are simple, and for present-day taste rather too didactic. ‘Ivan Tsarevich, or the Rose without Thorns’ goes like this: The Tsar's young son is kidnapped by the Khan of the Kirgiz who, wishing to test whether the boy is as wise as he is said to be, commands him to find, within three days, a rose without thorns. Guided by a young man, Rassudok, meaning Reason, the boy sets out on his quest. Resisting various blandishments and traps, he eventually learns from a wise teacher that the flower in question is virtue, and is to be found at the top of a steep hill, reached by a straight road. Supplied with staffs by Honesty and Truth, the boy and his guide Rassudok climb the hill, find the rose, pick it, and all ends happily.

More important than these writings for her grandsons, but animated by a similar didactic purpose, are Catherine's plays. She began, in the early 1770s, with five comedies satirizing failings in contemporary society. A Prominent Boyar's Anteroom brings on stage a medley of sycophants, French, German and Russian, who attend an influential nobleman's reception, hoping, with his help, to live off the Treasury. The best of this group of plays, O, the Times! is set in Moscow. Madame Khanzhakhina—the name means a specific type of Hypocrisy—is a Tartuffe-like figure who borrows at 6 per cent while lending at 16 per cent and who, when her creditors arrive with their bills, informs them that she is deep in prayer and cannot be disturbed. Other characters are Madame Vestnikova, a gossip forever telling exaggerated stories against the government, and Madame Chudikhina, who ties amulets into her handkerchief and has a morbid fear of crickets. The plot turns on Madame Khanzhakhina's attempt to marry off her grandchild without giving her a dowry, but the play's real purpose is to scoff at the vanity and prejudices of certain of the middle gentry.

Catherine found a new theme for plays with the arrival in 1779 of the Sicilian charlatan Cagliostro, self-styled son of Enoch, who conducted seances and alchemical experiments, and claimed to perform miraculous cures. At one of his public appearances Cagliostro proposed to cure a man of gout by bathing the affected foot in water and then draining off mercury from the foot, but was caught surreptiously introducing a spoonful of mercury into the water. This discredited him with some, but not with the Freemasons, who feted him and believed his claim that he could travel, angel-like, through the air and also back and forth between the centuries.

Catherine satirized Cagliostro, and the Freemasons who swallowed that sort of nonsense, in three plays, The Impostor, The Victim of Delusion and The Siberian Shaman. The latter Catherine described as ‘a body-blow at enthusiasts. Imagine a man who has risen through 140 different grades, and achieved such a degree of intellectual beatitude that instead of replying rationally to people's questions he utters extraordinary phrases, miaows like a cat, crows like a cock, barks like a dog and so on. Yet underneath he's just a knavish pimp.’

Catherine's plays were performed and enjoyed a certain success. In most the characters' foibles or vices are too often described, too seldom conveyed through action. But the plays show a sense of fun and a considerable gift for satire.

For the sake of completeness, it is necessary to mention three lesser dramatic works by Catherine. One, a dramatic sketch portraying the monarchs of Europe, contains the following amusing exchange between the pious Empress of Austria and her free-thinking son:

MARIA Theresa:
I have always placed all my hopes in Jesus Christ.
JOSEPH II:
Yes, Mama. With that we have lost Silesia. Now we must have troops, money and a good general to work the miracle so that we can get it back.

The other two plays are adaptations of Shakespeare, whose works Catherine read in Eschenburg's German. With her liking for outré character, she chose to adapt The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff becomes a Frenchified Don Juan just back from Paris, and Timon of Athens. The last act of Catherine's Timon is unfinished, but she evidently intended that he should marry and regain his place in society.

The next group of Catherine's writings are those which display her love of Russia. The first is Notes on Russian History, Parts I and II, a brief account of the period from 862 to 1161, when Russia was a small principality centred on Kiev and Novgorod. With a German appetite for even the dullest chronicles, Catherine drew on early annals, some in manuscript, for this history, in which she stressed the important role of Russia's rulers, from Ruric to Izyaslav III, and, with less justification, depicted the people as being at a stage of development equal to their contemporaries in Europe.

In the late 1760s Catherine read Voyage en Sibérie, fait … en 1761; contenant les mœurs, les usages des russes, by Abbé Jean Chappe d'Auteroche, published in Paris, as the title page explained, with the approval of the French Academy of Sciences. The abbé, an astronomer, had visited northern Siberia to observe the passage of Venus across the sun, and on his return written one more volume in the long series of French books damning Russia. It presented, as Samuel Bentham says, an unfair picture, and of course it made Catherine very angry indeed. So angry, in fact, that she answered the abbé's ‘poisonous’ book by writing a 300-page Antidote, or refutation.

One of the least read of her writings, the Antidote is very revealing of Catherine's character. It shows her love of Russia and her desire that Russia should be fairly understood abroad; it shows her impatience with factual errors and her desire to put the record straight; it shows the strong tendency to ridicule charlatans, found in her anti-Masonic plays.

Catherine argues that the abbé has missed the point about Russia. He has failed to perceive the fraternal spirit of the Russian people, the cooperativeness that keeps the country ticking over at village level in the absence of those sophisticated organs of government found for instance in France. That is one part of her criticism. The other is the singling out of particular errors. The abbé had fallen into the trap of supposing that Siberia embodied every imaginable evil. In Tobolsk, for instance, he writes of ‘the difficulty of finding manual workers in this country where everyone is a serf obliged me to turn to the Governor.’ ‘How,’ asks Catherine, pouncing, ‘do you arrive at such odd conclusions? In all Siberia east of Solikamsk there are no estates belonging to gentry. Siberia is a domain of the crown, so the peasants can earn their living as they wish and as they can. Once they have paid their polltax, they can do as they wish with what they own, and should they decide to move they can obtain a passport valid for years.’

When the abbé argues that because Russia is a vast plain the people are stupid, Catherine rounds on him: ‘Let it be known that the author has flattened my intelligence and pronounces me stupid because there are few mountains in Russia. This reasoning by the Lord d’ Auteroche gives me boundless respect for the Swiss and the Savoyards. I am already fully convinced that they are Europe's most wonderful geniuses because they have been lucky enough to open their new-born eyes on high mountains. However, I am deeply saddened to find that in several countries these great geniuses are employed as janitors and boot-boys.’

The third in the group of Catherine's works relating to Russia is both the most ambitious and the most limited by virtue of its typically eighteenth-century belief that the babel of world languages has a common ancestry.

Catherine, who could speak four languages and understand two more, noticed the large number of words and place-names that seemed to her to have a Slav root. She decided to find out whether other languages showed a similar pattern and drew up a list of common words, as samples to be tested.

Though Professor Pallas said he did not believe in her theory, Catherine pushed ahead and sought information from foreign governments. Some such as Spain offered little help, while others, such as the United States, proved cooperative. For when Catherine approached Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris, asking him if he could kindly procure a translation of 300 important words ranging from God to grapes into the languages of the Shawnee and the Delaware Indians, Jefferson passed her word-list to George Washington with a letter dated 10th February 1786. In November Washington asked General Richard Butler to prepare the translation. Butler, a thorough man, did as he was asked, save for certain words such as eyebrow and eyelid, which did not exist in Shawnee. He also sent a complete vocabulary of the Shawnee language, and a list of important words in Cherokee and Chocktaw. These were forwarded to Jefferson on 10th January 1788, and by Jefferson passed to Catherine, who would have been well pleased with so full an answer to her questionnaire.

‘I've got hold of as many dictionaries as I could find,’ Catherine wrote to a friend, ‘including a Finnish, a Mari and a Votic [Finno-Ugric languages]; from these I compile my word-lists. Also, I have collected a lot of information about the ancient Slavs, and I shall soon be able to prove that the Slavs named the majority of rivers, mountains, valleys and regions of France, Spain, Scotland and elsewhere.’

Catherine's comparative dictionary is typical of her wide range of interests and her desire to find Russian links with Europe. Though its basic principle is now known to be incorrect, the comparison of a great variety of words from three continents was something not hitherto attempted.

The last category of Catherine's literary works are her personal writings: her Memoirs, written at the end of her life, which will be considered in a later chapter, and her private correspondence. Certain letters, for instance to her father, to Voltaire and to Potemkin, have been quoted in part, and there remains the correspondence with Grimm, begun in April 1774 and continuing to October 1796, comprising 273 letters, filling 695 quarto pages and totalling 300,000 words.

Frederick Melchior Grimm was a poor Bavarian burgher's son who made his name by starting, in Paris, a private news-letter for foreigners to which Catherine subscribed. It printed reviews of books and plays, news of Paris and even current bons mots, such as Sophie Arnould's ‘Divorce is the sacrament of adultery.’

Catherine met Grimm when he visited Russia in 1774. A bachelor of fifty-one, he was by no means handsome, having big protruding eyes and a red complexion which he tried to tone down with ceruse. But he possessed an infectious enthusiasm for all the arts, a homely German common sense and a liking for jokes, qualities that endeared him to Catherine. The two became friends, and Catherine, who felt a need to tease all friends, teased Grimm about his predilection for the German aristocracy, and about his ceruse, nicknaming him Tiran le Blanc.

Catherine's correspondence with Grimm is, after Madame de Sévigné's, perhaps the most sustained and revealing ever written by a woman. It is remarkable for its range—upset stomachs to upset governments, latest lover to latest play—and for its buoyancy. The letters are shot through with playful humour, and sometimes with made-up words: ‘Voilà mon dernier dernierissime mot’; my ‘epistle to the Grimmalians’. Re-reading a three-page letter Catherine finds she has forgotten to put ‘Monsieur’; she thereupon adds a batch of ‘Monsieurs’ for Grimm to distribute as needed.

The letters reflect Catherine as she was: energetic, positive, on the whole happy. But the fact that they were written at all, and sustained for twenty-two years, points to something in Catherine which she probably did not even admit to herself. Surrounded by friends, collaborators and an admiring Court, the Empress of Russia nevertheless sometimes felt lonely.

A woman autocrat tends to feel lonely, because the woman longs to lean and the autocrat cannot. Catherine felt lonely too because her parents were dead, and she never saw her German family, because her relations with Paul were unsatisfactory, and because, from 1776, Potemkin toiled a thousand miles from her. She was lonely because, though she loved Russia, she was by heredity, instinct and upbringing European. From Grimm she got news of Europe; with Grimm she could behave naturally, as a European.

In this long series of letters Catherine revealed her literary tastes. She had a particular liking for Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and she liked too books of homespun philosophy such as Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. She liked Cinna, Corneille's drama of a monarch's clemency which was also to be the favourite play of Napoleon. She disliked mannered writing of any kind and she particularly disliked tragedy.

Catherine's attitude to tragedy is interesting. It is true that most of her contemporaries disliked tragedy, and Catherine's Timon with a happy ending has a counterpart in Ducis's Macbeth with the Thane of Cawdor killing Duncan in self-defence. But her contemporaries disliked tragedy because they believed in the natural goodness of man, and that was a belief Catherine did not share.

Catherine's dislike of tragedy probably reflects a wish to forget her unhappy marriage and the murder of Peter, and its obverse is a very noticeable need to be surrounded by happy faces. Catherine keeps saying how gay she is—rather too often to be convincing: when seeking a wife for Paul she insists on a happy person: ‘At the Russian Court we set high store by gaiety … I am by nature very gay and my son also.’ All the evidence suggests that the last part of her statement is untrue. Paul in fact was a sombre young man, haunted by suspicions he termed ‘black butterflies’. Catherine has altered the truth to suit her deep need for the reassurance of happy faces. This need has already been seen in her taking as lovers Alexander Vasilchikov and Peter Zavadovsky. Insofar as it embodies a refusal to face the realities of her life it was, in Catherine's otherwise healthy moral character, a potentially dangerous symptom.

Catherine did not intend her letters to Grimm for publication, and near the end of her life was to ask him to destroy them. Grimm declined to do so, and they found their way to Moscow, where they are today.

Catherine's other writings, combined with her literary patronage, acted both as example and stimulus. Seventy other women began to write in her reign, while the number of books published, other than Church service books, rose from 918 in the first half of the century to 8696 in the second half. Quite as remarkable as these figures is Catherine's prophetic belief in the coming greatness of Russian literature. Commenting to Grimm on a mannered French play ‘as cold as ice’, Catherine said: ‘The scrupulously careful age of Laharpe and company will fade, and the star of the East will rise. Yes, yes, it is from that side that light will return, for here, in the embers, there is more intelligence and more vigour than anywhere else.’

Sources and Notes

Catherine and discoveries in the East: according to Rogerson, ‘she knew more about the subject than any person whatever’. Letter to W. Robertson 12 September 1773, National Library of Scotland MS 3943. Details of expeditions in H. Chevigny, Russian America (New York 1965). On a document concerning the Aleutians addressed to the governor-general at Irkutsk, Catherine added in her own hand the order to ‘impress upon the hunters the necessity of treating their new brethren and countrymen, the inhabitants of our newly acquired islands, with greatest kindness’.

The development of history-writing: A. G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (Princeton 1958).

K. A. Papmehl, Freedom of Expression in Eighteenth-Century Russia (The Hague 1971); W. Gareth Jones, ‘The Closure of Novikov's Truten’, Slavonic Review, 50 (1972).

I. F. Martynov, ‘English Literature and Eighteenth-Century Russian Reviewers’, in Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 4 (1971). B. V. Varneke, History of the Russian Theatre (New York 1951). Catherine's reactions to Le Médecin par occasion: Corberon, op. cit. 12 October 1777.

Catherine's writings: A. G. Cross, ‘A Royal Bluestocking’ in A Garland of Essays Offered to E. M. Hall (Cambridge 1970). Catherine's comparative dictionary: Sbornik 23, 9 September 1784. A second copy of the vocabulary prepared for Catherine by Butler and sent to Washington is among the George Washington Papers, Series 8D, in the Library of Congress.

G. H. McArthur, ‘Catherine II and the Masonic Circle of N. I. Novikov’, Canadian Slavic Studies iv, 3 (1970). Johanna's alchemy: ‘I made the tree of perfection,’ says Casanova, ‘in the house of the Marquise de Pontcarré d'Urfé, the vegetation of which, calculated by the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, gave an augmentation of fifty in the hundred.’

Catherine's search for a cheerful daughter-in-law: letter of 16 January 1772, in [A. F. von der Asseburg, Denkwürdigkeiten, (Berlin 1842)] p. 279.