[In this essay, Jones considers the influence of Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois on Catherine's instructions to the legislature, the Nakaz. Jones notes Catherine's direct appropriations from the French philosopher's writings as well as similarities in prose style. More broadly, Jones argues that the widely read Nakaz was part of a long-term Enlightenment trend distinguishing true “literature” from other forms of writing.]

On 14 December 1766 Catherine the Great issued a manifesto summoning deputies representing all communities within her Empire to meet in order to air their problems and to participate in the drafting of a new code of laws. Following elections in the spring of 1767, the proposed Legislative Commission held its inaugural meeting on 30 July 1767. Once it had elected Aleksandr Bibikov as its presiding Marshal, the Commission devoted its first five sessions to a reading of the Nakaz, or Instruction, a document which had been elaborated by Catherine over the previous two years and which was now intended to prompt the deliberations of the deputies. The interpretation of the political content of the Nakaz and the nature of its relationship to the Legislative Commission have remained controversial issues for historians.¹ However they have been in agreement on the established view that Catherine the Great's Nakaz, or Instruction to her Grand Commission of 1767, drew extensively on Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois. That title of ‘Instruction’ has understandably led historians to perceive the work primarily as a manual designed to provide the delegates to the Commission with a check-list of topics to debate. It is this perception that may have prompted Kliuchevskii to the view that: ‘as a literary memorial, it does no more than head a long series of compilations which merely snipped off the topmost leaves of Western civilisation’.² The majority of these snippets were, indeed, garnered by Catherine from her reading of Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois. Her Nakaz, however, is not merely a document of state. It has also long been recognized that this was the first literary work by an Empress who was to have a long and diverse career as a writer.³

In what sense was the Nakaz a literary work? Our conventional late twentieth-century perception of ‘literature’, in the sense of imaginative or creative writing, as a category distinct from forms of factual writings confuses the issue. It is understandable that we should be unsettled by the prospect of a two-sided approach to the Nakaz: as a political treatise, and also as a work of literature. Such a divergence of approaches might not even have been conceivable in 1767. The first point that needs to be made in a discussion of the literary dimension of the Nakaz is that in 1767 that sharp division between political and historical writing on the one hand and imaginative writing (what we now define with the word ‘literature’) had not yet appeared.⁴ It was indeed in a novel of 1763 that Montesquieu's political ideas were first presented in printed form at the beginning of Catherine's reign; Fedor Emin's multi-layered Nepostoiannaia fortuna (Fortune Inconstant) was able to embrace an extensive ‘book of laws’, the format of which reflected L'Esprit des lois.⁵ The separation of works of imagination from writings of a discursive and factual kind, and the placing of the former alone into the discrete category of ‘literature’ lay in the future. The present consensus is that the category of ‘literature’, as we now customarily use the word, only established itself in the second half, or even towards the end, of the eighteenth century.⁶

Before the Romantic period, as Terry Eagleton has argued,⁷ the concept of literature encompassed the whole body of writings valued in society. Indeed, ‘literature’ in the early eighteenth century did not refer to a list of books but generally meant scholarly activity, designed to entrench social values.⁸ Along with this understanding of literature as activity, the sense of literature as denoting a general culture of learning slowly coalesced. For that reason ‘correspondence littéraire’ was the label given to Raynal's exclusive fortnightly report on the cultural scene in Paris that included a review of painting and sculpture and the theatre as well as books, which was taken over by Grimm in 1754. Catherine was one of the earliest subscribers to Grimm's ‘literary’ newsletter circulated exclusively to some fifteen or so sovereigns or princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Another indicator of this new meaning of literature, it has been suggested, was Samuel Johnson's 1756 periodical, entitled Literary Magazine, and intended as a cultural and scholarly review of the productions of a continental learned culture. ‘“Literary” in the title denotes that which pertains to “learned culture” or to “knowledge”, conceived as a social entity rather than an individual attribute.’⁹

Literature then, for Europeans of Catherine's time, was an activity and a social entity encompassing a broad field of discourses including divinity, history, philosophy and science. Catherine's reference, in a letter to d'Alembert in 1765, to Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois as providing her with her ‘prayer book’ is often quoted to indicate merely the high regard in which the French philosophe's literary work was held by the Empress.¹⁰ But the evocation of the prayer book is perhaps more than that. The bréviaire invoked by Catherine was not intended to be read passively with eyes alone by an isolated private individual, but was designed to be recited aloud for a congregation of believers. It too suggested participation in a shared social activity in high culture.

Writers in the early eighteenth century—and Montesquieu must be included among them—were not given to segregate in their minds imaginative from non-imaginative writings. Proof of this is the work that brought Montesquieu his initial fame: his Lettres persanes conflated the imaginative story of the relations between Usbec and his harem with reflections on the workings of politics in the correspondence of Usbec and Rica. Even the romance of the harem—which Usbec had abandoned in seeking wisdom abroad—reflected on philosophical matters. Dealing with love, hatred, plotting and death, these pages provided vivid examples of how mankind is subverted if it sets its face against human nature. It has been argued that the chief object of these passages, however, was to please the ladies who would frequent such salons as Madame de Tencin's, where Montesquieu was a constant visitor.¹¹Les Lettres persanes is not only an example of a work possible because of the all-encompassing understanding of literature of its time. Its audience—and it is right here to speak of a listening audience rather than a readership—signalled the role of literature as an activity for an élite society. It was the habitués of a salon who listened to criticism of existing institutions, appeals for tolerance and proposals for social reform because they were clothed in the beguiling finery of romance.¹²

Lettres persanes touched, however fleetingly, on many themes that would be clarified, developed and made more coherent twenty years later in L'Esprit des lois. By casting progressive and critical ideas of thinkers such as Bayle into the form of belles-lettres (what Russians would later translate as izysnay litiratura), Montesquieu made those ideas accessible to a wider audience. The device of exotic Persian travellers was instrumental in broadening the appeal: it also introduced a relativist outlook into French and European thought and highlighted notions of historical causation.

It was the same author who wrote L'Esprit des lois as had written Lettres persanes. No less than Lettres persanes, the later work appealed to, and was a product of, the salon which provided the society in which Montesquieu moved in Paris. This society of the salons has been described as ‘graceful, polished, artificial, and very seriously devoted to conversation’.¹³ Even if in content it was vastly different, its readers would have been predisposed to find the same literary flair in the new work. They were not disappointed on that account. The first response to L'Esprit des lois came from Madame de Tencin, literary hostess to the luminaries of the Enlightenment; significantly, she recognized the belletristic character of the work. If philosophy, reason and humanity had assembled to compose it, ‘the graces had taken thought to bedeck its erudition’.¹⁴ Even the first critics of Montesquieu paradoxically indicated the captivating nature of L'Esprit des lois. The preface to the first book directed against Montesquieu quoted for the first time the barbed epigram that the work should have been entitled De L'Esprit sur les lois; the apparent nonchalant order of the work created the impression that it was a pleasantry like Lettres persanes.¹⁵

That Montesquieu himself was conscious of the need to dress his arguments in attractive garb was indicated by the ‘Invocation to the Muses’ preceding Book XX, which dealt with commerce, in the second volume of the first Geneva edition of 1749:

Place in my spirit that charm and that sweetness that I once felt and which flees far from me, You are never so divine as when you lead one onwards to wisdom and truth through pleasure.

But, if you have no desire to soften the rigour of my labours, conceal the toil at least; let one be educated, and yet not have the manner of a teacher; let me cogitate, while appearing to feel; and when I shall hold forth on new matters, let it be thought that I knew nothing and that it was you who told me everything.

Charming muses, should you cast but a single glance upon me, then everybody will read my work; and what might not have been an amusement will be a pleasure.

No doubt it was the same concern to sweeten his arguments that prompted him to introduce Book XXIII with a translation by d'Hesnaut of verse by Lucretius: what could be more titillating as a preface to an analysis of population numbers than a verse bearing the epigraph, ‘O Vénus! ô mère de l'Amour!’ Montesquieu's brilliance as a stylist can still astonish as the reaction of a recent translator testifies: ‘Although the De l'Esprit des lois is ostensibly the least literary of Montesquieu's great works, anyone presumptuous enough to attempt its translation finds himself abashed by the delicate structures of meaning, images, and rhythm.’¹⁶

Montesquieu's finesse may well be illustrated by his placing of the invocation to the Muses as a prologue to a portion of L'Esprit des lois that might be expected to be particularly dry and austere, namely the chapters on commerce. It is a portion that Catherine drew upon heavily in composing her Nakaz, in particular for the chapter ‘Of Manufactures and Trade’. However, the passages on commerce also epitomize Montesquieu's literary art. For that reason it is worth taking a close look at Catherine's reworking of Montesquieu here in order to ascertain not only her debt to him for concepts, but also her debt to him as a writer.

A salient feature of L'Esprit des lois is the series of short, staccato chapters, not necessarily linked by a rigorously consecutive argument, but giving the work an urgent rhythm. It is mimicked in the Nakaz's sequence of compact clauses. Kliuchevskii, it is true, ascribed this compositional feature of the Nakaz to the convention of statute writing.¹⁷ Nevertheless the imprint of L'Esprit des lois should not be overlooked. Montesquieu's idiosyncratic composition was essential for his work, mirroring a profound shift in the manner of thinking in his time. It has often been said that the classical, harmonious periods of the previous century had been fissured by Montesquieu's age, and that the pithy, vivid sally had taken the place of sustained eloquence. Gone was the consideration of grand universal principles and universal maxims, to be replaced by a minute examination of myriad natural details.¹⁸ This rhetorical aspect—and inevitably its attendant manner of thought—was reflected in the Nakaz with its series of concise, and discrete clauses.

This most conspicuous feature of Montesquieu's work was described by Hippolyte Taine in a brilliant image:

His order is rigorous, but it is concealed and his discontinuous sentences are strung out, each one on its own, like caskets or jewel cases, sometimes simple and plain in appearance, sometimes magnificently decorated and engraved, but always full. Open them, each one of them is a treasure.¹⁹

Occasionally Catherine might enhance this aspect of her model by dividing one of Montesquieu's short chapters into even shorter clauses.²⁰ For example, clauses 322 and 323 are both taken from the single chapter 13 in Book XX of L'Esprit des lois.²¹ Clause 322—the declaration, ‘Wherever there is Commerce, there are Custom houses’—isolates Montesquieu's characteristically dogmatic first sentence, ‘Là où il y a du commerce, il y a des douanes’; clause 323 continues with a translation of the same chapter.

The following clause 324 is an example of Catherine's tampering with Montesquieu's original. Again Taine's image of a string of separate little boxes enables us to understand why Catherine would have been able to rearrange them without feeling that she had subverted her model. It was Montesquieu's compositional method that allowed Catherine, as in the case of clause 324, to reshuffle occasionally even the contents of his elegant caskets, without detriment to the overall shape of her Nakaz. In its reference to the English practice of varying tariffs with each Parliament, clause 324 goes back to Montesquieu's Chapter 7 for its source. An extreme example of this reshuffling of chapters may be illustrated by the case of clauses 345 and 346 which conclude Chapter 13 (Of Manufactures and Trade) in the Nakaz but are derived from the 29th chapter of L'Esprit des lois Book XXIII (Des Lois dans le rapport qu'elles ont avec le nombre des habitants) despite the fact that the Nakaz itself has a chapter on population. Similarly clauses 297, 298, 299, 300, 301 and 305 are derived from chapters 6-9 of Book XIV (Des Lois dans le rapport qu'elles ont avec la nature du climat).

It is ironic that Catherine even reshuffles the contents of one of Montesquieu's jewel cases when she gets nearest to a formal acknowledgement in the Nakaz of her main source. ‘One of the best Writers upon Law has the following Reflexion’,²² she writes as an introduction to the first of only two passages that appears within quotation marks.²³ Clause 330 which argues that the nobility should not engage in trade is not a translation of the whole of Montesquieu's ‘Réflexion particulière’ in Book XX, chapter 22, but a conflation of the first paragraph of that chapter with the previous chapter 21, ‘Du Commerce de la noblesse dans la monarchie’. Catherine shades Montesquieu's argument in his two chapters by concealing the fact that he refers to two specific examples: to England in the case of chapter 21 and to France in the case of chapter 22. Referring in both cases to ‘quelques états’ in her French version of the Nakaz, she generalizes the case and so makes it more amenable to the Russian situation. Her rendering of the original's term ‘monarchie’ is also of interest. In her French version ‘monarchie’ is retained in all cases except when Montesquieu argues that in England the participation of the nobility in trade had contributed to the weakening of monarchical government. Where Montesquieu had ‘affaiblir le gouvernement monarchique’, Catherine substituted the less specific ‘affaiblir le gouvernement qui y étoit établi’. It may be that the rendering of ‘monarchie’, as was her convention, by ‘samоdirzavnоi pravlinii’²⁴ in the Russian version made it conceptually difficult for her to contemplate any form of its enfeeblement; it would certainly not have been politic in her situation to suggest any such possibility. Hence the modified translation in the French version of the Nakaz, and its Russian equivalent of ‘к prividiniy tamо v bissilii priznigо ucrizdinnоgо pravliniy’. His argument might have been subtly modified in this way by Catherine despite the quotation marks, but Montesquieu's essential rhetoric remained. It was his particular literary art that allowed the Empress to acknowledge him as her model while at the same time permitting her to adapt his thought to her own needs and situation.

If the laconic statements were one aspect of Montesquieu's brilliance, the other was the parade of historical exemplars. The reference to English practice in the case of custom tariffs retold in the Nakaz is just one example of the vast range of historical examples deployed by Montesquieu which, by their profusion alone, carry the idea of relativism into the reader's mind. The Nakaz chapter on Manufactures and Trade certainly mirrors this aspect of the model with its references to the practice of the Chinese Emperor who ‘every year with a pompous Ceremony, holds the Plough in his own hands, and begins to plough the Land himself’ (298); to ‘The People of Achim’ notorious for their pride and indolence (309); to the fact that ‘Women in India esteem it a Shame to learn to read’; to the laws of Solon (318 and 334); to England's beneficial control of commerce (321); to the views of the Emperors Honorius and Theodosius (330); to the exemplary tale of the burning by Theophilus of a ship bearing merchandise for his consort Theodora (332); to the Viceroy of Goa (333), the inhabitants of Rhodes (336), to Xenephon (337), to Plato (339), to Magna Carta (341). All these references, like the originals from which they are borrowed, are diverting in the two senses of the word: they provide amusing diversion for the reader, and they inevitably divert one from the straight railroading of a singular argument.

However clumsily it is done, and one has to admit that the Nakaz does not approach the sophistication of its model, Catherine's recasting was attempting to convey some of these formal literary attributes of L'Esprit des lois. In considering Catherine's imitation of Montesquieu's rhetorical tactics in this way, there is a danger of perceiving and presenting L'Esprit des lois and the Nakaz as a pair of self-contained texts. However, the formal literary attributes of L'Esprit des lois that Catherine chose to follow were precisely those conducive to the ‘literary’ activity of the age. It is worth noting that Chechulin, in a rare purely literary aside, remarked that Montesquieu's laconic style was more suitable to the Nakaz than the contrasting wordiness of the German cameralist writers, Bielefeld and Justi, precisely because the Nakaz was a work intended to be put before an assembly for consideration: ‘Kratкii, sоdirzatilsnyi Φrazy Mоntisкi оtlinо pоdkоdil к tоmu, ctоby vкlycits ik v Naкaz, коtоryj pridnazacalsy dly ctiniy v zasidaniyk коmmissii.’²⁵

If Chechulin recognized the imitation of Montesquieu's laconic wit in the Nakaz, he also comprehended its purpose. The Nakaz attempted to borrow Montesquieu's style since it was a work intended to be read in meetings of the Commission. The Commission was the gathering in which literature, understood by the eighteenth-century philosophes as a social activity, could flourish. The absence of any well developed publishing culture in the Russia of that time meant that ideas could not be expected to have a wide circulation in print: an alternative conduit was, therefore, imperative. And Russia was not alone in requiring a social gathering as a forum for literature. Before the 1760s, even in Montesquieu's homeland, the lack of an open market for books in France compelled philosophe writers to seek their fame and fortune by gaining their patronage in the well-established salons.²⁶

Taine similarly, in considering Montesquieu's method of composition, was aware of its aim. Before comparing Montesquieu's work to an array of jewel caskets, he explained the context in which they were to be displayed, and their purpose:

It seems that he [Montesquieu] always speaks before a small select circle of very shrewd people and in a way that gives them at every moment the opportunity of feeling their shrewdness. There can be no more subtle flattery; we are grateful to him for making us satisfied with our wit. It is needed to read him: for, deliberately, he avoids developments, he omits transitions; it is up to us to provide them, to understand his implications.²⁷

Taine's sense that Montesquieu is addressing a select group of shrewd listeners who are encouraged to be conscious of their own perspicacity and to feel that they are being prompted to draw their own conclusions from the mass of intriguing examples reminds us again that literature in the early part of the eighteenth century was understood as an activity for an élite. A forum for this activity had been provided in France by the salons and private academies such as the Parisian Club de l'Entresol. From the exchanges between members of the Club de l'Entresol came most of the important contributions to the study of political theory in France up to the publication of L'Esprit des lois whose author had probably participated in its debates.²⁸ The initial accolade for L'Esprit des lois, as we have already noted, came from a salon hostess, Madame de Tencin.

With the possible exception of the Free Economic Society founded in 1765, Russia had no private academies, no salons. There was no forum to respond to literary wit. Substitute gatherings were required. One opportunity for such a surrogate was afforded by the slow journey by barge to Kazan´ in the spring of 1767 when her companions were encouraged to form under Catherine's presidency a quasi-salon whose entertainment was their collective translation of Marmontel's newly published Bélisaire. Catherine seems to have been well aware that the concept of literature was not limited to words on a page. Literature was an activity, and Montesquieu's work was a spur to such activity. Her submission of her early drafts of the Nakaz, therefore, to the scrutiny of some of her leading subjects might be seen as an aspect of the literary relationship between Catherine and her mentor. The ‘several persons of widely differing views’ were invited to listen—note that they listened rather than read the drafts—and then ‘debates ensued on every item’.²⁹ We know that the result of these discussions was that some of the original proposals, particularly those concerned with the institution of serfdom, were modified. But it would be anachronistic to see this procedure, as Chechulin and Kliuchevskii did, as a form of ‘censorship’.³⁰ Catherine, may not have been greatly disturbed by these amendments to the imperial drafts. There is no need to ascribe to political reasons alone her toning down of her original statements on serfdom. What mattered in the case of the Nakaz as a product of literature was that it should not fall on the deaf ears of the politically apathetic, but that it should encourage the debates that she apparently welcomed. As she wrote with approval in her memoirs, ‘Every part of it evoked division. I let them erase what they pleased and they struck out more than half of what I had written.’³¹ But she did not turn her back completely on Montesquieu. What remains from his Book XV, carried almost verbatim into the Nakaz, is one of those lapidary, well-crafted, single-sentence chapters so characteristic of his literary art:

CHAPITRE XI

CE QUE LES LOIS DOIVENT FAIRE

PAR RAPPORT A L'ESCLAVAGE

Mais de quelque nature que soit l'esclavage, il faut que les lois civiles cherchent à en ôter, d'un côté, les abus, et, de l'autre, les dangers.

It is transferred to clause 254 of the Nakaz, Chapter on ‘Civil Society’:

De quelque nature que soit la dépendance, il faut que les Loix civiles cherchent à en ôter, d'un côté, les abus, de l'autre les dangers.

Kaкоgо by rоda pокоrstvо ni bylо, nadlizit, ctоb zaкоny grazdansкii s оdnоj stоrоny zlоupоtriblinii rabstva оtvrasali, a s drugоj stоrоny pridоstirigali by оpasnоsti mоgusii оttuda prоizоjti.

Of what kind so ever Subjection be, It is necessary that Civil Laws should prevent the abuse of Slavery on the one hand, and guard against the Dangers which may arise from thence on the other.

She did, of course, slightly adjust the contents of this particular jewel case: the ‘esclavage’ of the original was softened to ‘la dépendance’. Nevertheless, in imitating one of the most striking features of Montesquieu's Book XV in this way, Catherine may have felt that she was preserving the literary essence of her model.

The initial introduction of the Nakaz to an élite group was a prelude to its presentation to the ‘convocation of deputies from the whole empire’. A problem that remains in historiography is: why did she call a Legislative Commission of this kind?³² Political reasons have been adduced: the Commission might serve to deflect opposition to her succession by providing a safe outlet for simmering discontent; it would, if expertly managed, provide a demonstration of support for her reforming instinct; it might present a practical example of her pledge in the manifesto that accompanied her coup d'état, to devote herself to improving the machinery of government. All these reasons might have entered into her calculations. But they should not be allowed to obscure the possibility that the itch of the author who had striven to follow in the steps of Montesquieu was also a decisive factor. Catherine had seen how L'Esprit des lois had been accepted by the Parisian salons, and then had proceeded to enthuse a wider society in Western Europe. She desired the same development in Russia. Her literary relationship with Montesquieu was not limited to using him as a prompt to the composition of the text of the Nakaz. ‘Literature’ before the end of the eighteenth century, let us remind ourselves again, did not merely designate a verbal artefact, but also indicated intellectual activity among society's élite. In examining the literary relationship between Catherine and Montesquieu, the latter understanding must not be ignored. It is significant that among the élite group to which early drafts of the Nakaz were handed for comment was Aleksandr Sumarokov, who had been the first Director of the State Theatre established in 1756 and was a prolific writer of neo-classical plays and poems ranging in genre from the epic to the fable. Unlike others—such as Friedrich von Behmer, V. P. Baskakov, Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov and General Aleksandr Bibikov, who would become Marshal of the Legislative Commission—Sumarokov had no obvious standing in the field of government. If the offer of the draft to Sumarokov was intended to elicit a poet laureate's response to the literary elegance of the Nakaz, then Catherine would be disappointed. In marginal comments on Sumarokov's response, she wrote: ‘Mr Sumarokov is a good poet but is too quick of thought to be a good law-giver.’³³ Her criticism of him, however, was not merely directed against his political acumen but was cast rather in the form of literary criticism: the trouble was, she argued, that he had not considered the whole chain of her composition but had been diverted to an examination of individual links that constituted that chain. Catherine was repeating the attempt made by Montesquieu in his ‘Preface’ to ward off anticipated criticism by demanding that his work should by appraised as a whole and not ‘by some sentences’. Her image of the chain was taken from her mentor who had written, ‘Ici, bien des vérités ne se feront sentir qu'après qu'on aura vu la chaîne qui les lie à d'autres.’ She turned as well for comments to authorities outside Russia, such as Grimm, and, significantly, to Mme Geoffrin at whose salon the established philosophes would seek to maintain their reputation and with whom Catherine maintained a formal epistolary commerce.³⁴ It is indeed in her letter to Mme Geoffrin of 28 March 1765 that we have the first reference by Catherine to her initial work on the Nakaz.

In summoning deputies from all corners of her empire to listen to and debate the clauses of her Nakaz, Catherine sought to recreate the ‘activity’ of literature. If it is admitted that the Commission was summoned as much in answer to these ‘literary’ motives as to political ones, then it becomes easier to understand why Catherine would not have been troubled by the failure of the deputies to come to any firm conclusions. Like the women who presided over the Parisian salons Catherine was no doubt content to enjoy the debates of an audience which, as has been claimed in the case of Mme Tencin's society where Montesquieu was a constant visitor, ‘had no notion of practical or inconvenient remedies’.³⁵ A pointer to Catherine's delight in the prospect of literary activity rather than practical jurisprudence was her substitution of Beccaria's thoughts on criminal justice for the advice of the Encyclopédistes. Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments might have been read by Catherine as it had been by Allan Ramsay, as a speculative utopia akin to Plato's Republic demonstrating the intelligence, humanity and wit of their authors but not pretending to exert any influence on contemporary affairs.³⁶ Chechulin in fact noted that Beccaria had replaced extracts on crime and punishment from the Encyclopédie whose dry jurisprudence might have proved less entertaining to the deputies in the Commission: ‘gоrycо napisannay, glubоко spravidlivay i prоniкnutay gumannоstsy prоpоvids Biккarii byla pоliznii dly diputatоv, cim rassuzdiniy оb “isкi”, “оb aкti nazyvaimоm inΦоrmaцiij” i. t.d., коtоryi pirvоnacalsnо оstanоvili vnimanii impiratriцy pri izucinii Enцiкlоpidii’.³⁷

The Legislative Commission was indeed trained to be an audience for the Nakaz. Catherine arranged for her composition to be read out in toto at the beginning of each month, so that the representatives of Russian society appointed to the Commission would listen to its cadences repeatedly. The audience for the Nakaz was significantly widened by the Senate's decree in 1768 that the Nakaz should be read at least three times a year in every official office. Chechulin rightly stressed the significance of this unprecedented dissemination of philosophe thought throughout Russia.³⁸ What should be acknowledged is that Catherine's actions in this regard may have been prompted above all by the European literary culture as it was understood in her day, rather than by any political imperatives. Montesquieu had presented her not only with novel ideas, but with a work of literature designed to be disseminated and appreciated in a particular way.

For historians of literature the intriguing context of the Nakaz was that it was created at a time when the concept of ‘literature’ was about to undergo a change. It was in the last third of the eighteenth century the modern sense of ‘literature’ as denoting a form of ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing distinct from purely utilitarian works began to establish itself. One of the reasons for the emergence of this distinct category was that literature ceased to be primarily an élite social activity and began to be disseminated through a market in print merchandise. Without being conscious of the process, Catherine, by encouraging the growth of this market in her Empire through her encouraging of periodical journalism and translation in particular, enabled Russia to be part of the European experience of the growth of a publishing industry that separated ‘kudоzistvinnay litiratura’ out from an all-embracing ‘literature’. The printing of the Nakaz itself in eight editions during Catherine's reign and the other printed forms of literature that mediated enlightenment entered into a marketplace that discriminated more decisively between ‘literature’ that appealed to a broad commonality, and narrow, specialized instruction.

That discrimination became more apparent in the 1770s when Catherine, hardened by the experiences of war and the Pugachev rebellion, penned her Statute for the Administration of the Gubernii. Chechulin quoted a number of references in Catherine's correspondence in order to show how Catherine's ‘second attack of legislomania’, as she playfully referred to it in a letter to Grimm of 21 December 1774, had led her to disdain her earlier venture in the Nakaz.³⁹ There is no doubt that political realities had prompted the Empress to stress that her new administrative reforms were to be considered more as serious labour and as toil; ‘besogne’ and ‘travail’ were the words she now chose to describe her drafting. But the European shift in the concept of what constituted ‘literature’ might also have led her to differentiate her present work from her first foray into the literary world. From now on, the writing of state papers would be kept separate from Catherine's ‘kudоzistvinnay litiratura’, her allegorical tales for her grandsons or anti-Masonic plays. But this discrimination was not solely of her personal choice: it was also prompted by the change in the concept of what ‘literature’ should be. When Catherine looked back from the mid-1770s to the Nakaz of the previous decade, she was able to recognize that the ‘Instruction’ for her Grand Commission belonged to a time when it had to encompass elements of the ‘literature’ of that time. She was well aware of that, as her correspondence bears witness. In a letter to Grimm of 29 November 1775 she wrote that, set alongside her present draft on the reforms of local administration, ‘je ne regarde l'instruction pour les lois dans ce moment-ci que comme un bavardage’.⁴⁰ A more clear differentiation is discernible in her letter to Voltaire of 14 October 1776: ‘Je vous avertis d'avance, que cet ouvrage est très sec et ennuyant, et que si l'on y cherchera autre chose que de l'ordre et du sens commun, l'on se trompera. Dans tout ce fatras assurément il n'y a ni génie, ni esprit, mais beaucoup d'utilité.’⁴¹

While disparaging her Nakaz, Catherine at the same time indicated some of the qualities it had assuredly possessed. It was not boring, it was infused with genius and wit. These were attributes that had been preserved in the literary interplay with Montesquieu and which contributed so much to the abiding influence of the Nakaz and of the exchanges in the Commission which it sought to ‘instruct’. Even the dismissive term ‘bavardage’, or ‘garrulous chit-chat’, was a reminder of one of the most positive features of the Nakaz. It had followed Montesquieu in providing a work of literature that aspired to evoke a conversational discourse at a high, sophisticated level.

Notes

1. For a summary of the principal interpretations see Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981, pp. 160-63.

2. Quoted in Catherine the Great's Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, 1767, ed. Paul Dukes, Newtonville, MA, 1977 (hereafter Catherine the Great's Instruction), p. 25.

3. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v vos'mi tomakh, Moscow, 8 vols, 1958, V (hereafter Sochineniia), pp. 31-33.

4. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford, 1983 (hereafter Literary Theory), p. 17.

5. David E. Budgen, ‘Fedor Emin and the Beginnings of the Russian Novel’ in Russian Literature in the Age of Catherine the Great, ed. A. G. Cross, Oxford, 1976, p. 74.

6. Richard Terry, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Invention of English Literature: A Truism Revisited’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 19, 1996, I (hereafter ‘A Truism Revisited’), p. 47.

7. Literary Theory, p. 17.

8. Ibid., p. 206: ‘It (rhetoric) saw speaking and writing not merely as textual objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers, orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded.’

9. ‘A Truism Revisited’, p. 50.

10. See, for example, Sochineniia, V, p. 76 and Catherine the Great's Instruction, p. 11.

11. Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Political Ideas from Bayle to Condorcet, London, 1954, 2nd edn, ed. J. P. Mayer (hereafter French Liberal Thought), p. 91.

12. Ibid., p. 71.

13. Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography, Oxford, 1961, p. 189. See Shackleton's sub-chapter ‘The Great Salons’ (hereafter ‘The Great Salons’), pp. 178-90.

14. Ibid., p. 356.

15. Ibid., p. 358.

16. Melvin Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, Cambridge, 1977, p. ix.

17. Sochineniia, V, p. 76: ‘glavy razdiliny na statsi, кratкii pоlоziniy, кaкimi pisutsy ustavy’.

18. Montesquieu, De l'Esprit des lois, ed. Gonzague Truc, Paris, 1956, p. ix.

19. Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, ed. François Leger, Paris, 1972 (hereafter Les Origines), p. 113.

20. Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, dannyi kommissii o sochinenii proekta novogo ulozheniia, ed. N. D. Chechulin, St Petersburg, 1907 (hereafter Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II), p. lxvi, notes how divisions into clauses were inserted by Catherine's hand in passages copied by Kozitskii, her secretary.

21. Quotations from the Nakaz in English are taken from Dukes, Catherine the Great's Instruction; and in French and Russian from Chechulin, Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II.

22. Ibid., p. 95 notes that the word ‘Niкоtоryj’ was later substituted by a hand other than Catherine's for the words which had appeared in preceding drafts, namely ‘Prizidint Mоntisкsi, lucsij Φranцuzsкij’.

23. The other acknowledged quotation is Clause 358, an excerpt from Betsky's On the Education of the Young of Both Sexes.

24. This is the case in clauses 15, 102, 484, 489, 511, 513 and 631. In clauses 104 and 107 the formula, ‘idinоnacalsnоi pravlinii’ was used to render ‘le gouvernement Monarchique’ and ‘les états Monarchiques’.

25. Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, p. cxxxv.

26. French Liberal Thought, p. 104.

27. Les Origines, p. 113.

28. ‘The Great Salons’, pp. 63-65.

29. Catherine the Great's Instruction, p. 11.

30. Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, p. ii; Sochineniia, V, p. 78.

31. SIRIO, vol. XII, p. 524.

32. De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, 1981, p. 161.

33. Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, p. lxxxi.

34. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment, Ithaca, NY and London, 1994, p. 140, describes the formal nature of this ‘epistolary commerce’.

35. French Liberal Thought, p. 92.

36. Denis Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Georges Roth, V, Paris, 1959, pp. 245-54.

37. Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, p. lxxiv.

38. Ibid., pp. cxlvi-cxlvii.

39. Ibid., p. lxxxvii.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., pp. lxxxvii-lxxxviii.