She began writing about herself for others as an exercise in self-knowledge. The lifelong importance she attached to knowing oneself comes through in her self-portraits and criticisms of Peter III in the three main memoirs. Her first account of herself was her 1745 “Portrait of a Philosopher” written for Count Gyllenborg. In the middle memoir, she titles it “Rough Sketch of the Philosopher’s Character at Age Fifteen,” and explains:
I found this document in 1757 and I confess that I was surprised that at the age of fifteen I already had such a deep understanding of the many facets of my soul, and I saw that this piece was profoundly reflective and that in 1757 I could not find a word to add to it, nor in thirteen years had I made any discovery about myself that I had not already known at age fifteen. [61]
This description is similar to her self-portrait in an undated one-page fragment that still exists. It begins with her birth, parents, governess, and education, and breaks off with the following sentences: “I was instructed in the Lutheran religion, I was horribly curious, quite stubborn, and most ingratiating, I had a good heart, I was very sensitive, I cried easily, I was extremely fickle. I never liked dolls, but quite liked any kind of exercise, there was no boy more daring than I, I was proud to be that and often I hid my fear, shame produced this impulse, I was quite secretive” (473).
In her later memoirs, Catherine incorporates such portraits of herself and others into her narrative. She draws out the central characteristics that motivate an individual’s actions, what in the eighteenth century were called the springs of behavior, or one’s character. Catherine here subscribes to the universalizing ideals of the Enlightenment, with its key words of “qualities,” “character,” and “mind” (
esprit
). Given her idea of human nature as unchanging, at age twenty-eight Catherine can claim to have understood herself fully at age fifteen. This is an Aristotelian notion of the individual who does not change with time and experience, but only reveals herself to be more thoroughly what she has always been. Education could significantly shape, but not change, someone’s nature. This view of human psychology differs significantly from post-Freudian notions, which posit fundamental, erupting, conflicting forces that can be traced back to childhood and continually evolve. In Catherine’s model, a child is in essence already a small adult. Thus in part, Catherine could start over each time she wrote a new memoir because as she understood herself, each memoir was the same portrait, only more so, no matter which particular incidents she chose to recount.
Catherine’s first sustained autobiographical narrative, like her subsequent memoirs, is a political or court memoir. She includes information about Russia that a foreigner might not know, and thus most likely she wrote it for Hanbury-Williams, who arrived at court in June 1755 and left in June 1757; their letters indicate that she trusted him with personal information. Court memoirs revolve around access to the ruler. At the end of this memoir, she explains to Hanbury-Williams: “You will perhaps find it necessary to criticize me, since seeing myself so badly treated, I never spoke with the Empress personally to justify myself against the thousand calumnies, lies, etc. etc. Know then that a thousand thousand times, I have asked to speak with her alone but she has never wanted to consent to it” (467). All the memoirs recount whatever Catherine or Elizabeth say to each other, their meals together, gestures toward each other, presents (including their value) to each other, who notices their contact, and the greatest honor, time alone with Elizabeth.
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Illnesses provide opportunities to show one’s affection and esteem. They exchange compliments—Catherine praising Elizabeth’s impressive appearance, Elizabeth commending Catherine’s religious observance and her Russian. Access was also reflected in physical proximity to the ruler, hence the importance of the relative location of Peter’s, Catherine’s, and her mother’s apartments in Elizabeth’s palaces. For example, Catherine is never closer to Elizabeth’s rooms than when she gives birth, a reflection of the importance of the event, though as Catherine learns, much to her chagrin, not of her own importance. Catherine’s eye for detail not only makes for vivid storytelling, but these details are the heart and soul of court memoirs, representing the language of favor and disfavor at court. Once the reader appreciates the importance of these details, the memoirs become a gripping, timeless tale of the endless rise and fall of political fortunes.
Written before Catherine’s coup, this first memoir, unlike the later ones, cannot be an attempt to justify herself on this question. Still, Catherine here deals with her Achilles’ heel before the coup. In their first conversation alone, the Empress verbally, and nearly physically, assaults Catherine for failing to produce an heir, which Elizabeth imagines as a plot against her at the behest of Catherine’s mother and Frederick the Great. Frustrated in her attempts to defend herself against endless intrigues, in her hasty conclusion Catherine provides the greatest possible self-justification for her existence. The narrative arc of this memoir concludes with the birth of her son, Paul, who finally provides Catherine with the security she desperately needs, and Elizabeth with an heir. Thus Catherine concludes: “It is true that since November 1754, I have changed my attitude. It has become more regal. They have grown more considerate of me and I have more peace than formerly” (468). Catherine’s greatly improved position increases her hopes for her political survival, with or without Peter, after Elizabeth’s death.
Although Catherine wrote her three main memoirs years apart and to make different points, scholars have tended to interpret all her memoirs through the lens of the final memoir as a justification for her coup. Thus the memoirs continue to support historians’ suspicions that Catherine is pulling the wool over their eyes. Simon Dixon suggestively proclaims, “Deafened by such self-justificatory overtones, we shall need something more than the memoirs if we are to penetrate the innermost recesses of her mind.”
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He sees the more vulnerable Catherine in her early correspondence, while Madariaga suggests that her more spontaneous voice can be found in her marginalia.
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In contrast, Smith finds “some of the most honest, revealing glimpses into Catherine’s heart and mind” in her letters to Potemkin.
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Barbara Heldt has dismissed the memoirs because Catherine is too self-confident and unwilling to reveal her doubts, which is apparently unrepresentative of women’s memoirs that are meant to document women’s oppression in their own words.
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Though these judgments actually relate to the final memoir, they have been taken to explain all the memoirs.
Based on the abrupt ending of the final, most comprehensive memoir, scholars have interpreted the earlier memoirs as lesser fragments of an incomplete whole. In fact, the preeminent German translator of her memoirs interpolated all of them together chronologically into one memoir.
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However, the early memoir ends in December 1754, where the addressee (“you”) knows what happens, and thus, unlike the later memoirs, Catherine basically brings them up to the time of writing. It makes the most sense to treat her memoirs together and also as separate and even as distinct subgenres of autobiographical writing. While they all cover her life as Grand Duchess, they end differently and thus really tell different stories. Rhetorically, in conversations, stories, and the memoirs, she tends to sum up her point at the end. While her memoirs are incomplete, they are not unfinished. Though they seem structured by chronology alone, they are also organized rhetorically from the beginning to the end.
The memoirs also seem like parts of a fragmented whole because they contain many similarities. Catherine engaged in self-plagiarism, recycling phrases from margin notes, letters, and published polemics. Although the Academy edition lists 156 parallel passages between the various memoirs and notes, there are no exact parallels (741–50). For the middle and final memoirs, Catherine may have consulted earlier versions, notes, and probably a diary as she made outlines, wrote, and revised. An outline for the middle memoir has two parts written at different times; with some overlap, the first covers 1745–51, and the second is for 1749–50. In her final outline (translated and appended here), which goes from 1756–59, she crossed out events in the outline as she incorporated them in the memoir. And later, after she had experience writing Russian history, Catherine did research, using the newspapers and court journals of the time. The final memoir even contains a footnote to Büsching’s
Magazin.
Later, in the final memoir, in her account of her serious respiratory illness upon arriving in Russia in 1744, she elaborates on the circumstances, explaining that she became ill because of studying Russian at night while underdressed for the cold. This explanation derives from a story in the
St. Petersburg Gazette,
planted by her imperial supporters. These and other subtle textual differences nevertheless serve to distinguish the memoirs from one another as separate documents.
Most important, using similar subject matter, the memoirs tell different stories. Written many years apart, they subtly reflect Catherine’s immediate concerns at the time of writing. However, knowing when the memoirs were written is problematic because most are undated. A. N. Pypin made an extensive description of Catherine’s many autobiographical materials in the State Archives in the order that he found them, not how Catherine left them (731–41). Using dates and internal evidence, Pypin established their probable order. Based on internal evidence, Catherine most likely wrote the early memoir, covering 1729–54, around 1756. She probably began the final memoir around 1794; part 1 covers 1728–50, and part 2 continues with 1751 and ends in 1759.
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The dating of the three parts of the middle memoir, which covers 1728–50, is problematic. Part 1 begins with a heading in her hand on the first page: “Memoirs begun on April 21, 1771.” Catherine’s papers also contain two separate sheets with later dates. On one she wrote, “Memoirs begun in 1790. Part One,” which is followed by blank pages; on another she wrote, “Memoirs continued in 1791. Part Two,” which is followed by part 2 of the middle memoir. Using internal evidence from part 3, the editors of the Academy edition conclude that all three parts of the middle memoir, begun on Catherine’s birthday in 1771, must have been completed before the end of 1773. They suggest that Catherine somewhat revised this memoir in 1790–91, and then began the final memoir in 1794, in which she incorporated the middle memoir into a new part 1.
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Codicology sheds some light on how Catherine edited the memoirs and supports this chronological scenario. For the 1756 memoir, eighteen pages long, Catherine wrote on both sides of inexpensive paper, with a 1½-inch left margin, which was insufficient for additions. For the subsequent memoirs, she wrote on both sides of excellent, heavy gilt-edged English paper that came in bifolio sheets. She folded each folio (31.7 × 19.9 cm wide) in half vertically, then wrote on one half and made additions on the other half, while also making changes to her main text. The margins of the middle memoir contain extensive additions that sometimes cover the entire page in a patchwork of sections. She most likely made these additions in 1790–91. In contrast, the final memoir has few additions, but a number of insertions on smaller pages, usually single folios, and sometimes bifolios. These smaller folios resemble the lower quality paper she used in the 1756 memoir, which suggests that these added episodes had been written years earlier and were the notes from which she had written the middle memoir. The heavy editing of the middle memoir in 1790–91 indicates that Catherine’s conception of the memoir had changed sufficiently to warrant another memoir with a new beginning and ending.
The middle memoir represents an expanded attempt to set the record straight for posterity in response to critical accounts of Russia and of Catherine’s coup by Rulhière and Chappe d’Auteroche in 1768. In particular, she counters Rulhière’s account of her background as a poor relation among German courts.
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Thus part 1, while a court memoir, also contains the fullest description of her youth, family, and especially her brilliant match. It is the life of a successful German Princess, and it concludes with her marriage. She wrote it when she was looking for a similar spouse for her son, and after they had agreed upon Princess Wilhelmina of Hessen-Darmstadt (1755–76), Catherine wrote her a set of maxims about the “job,” based on her own experiences.
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The early memoir has four pages on her youth in Germany, which Catherine greatly expands in the middle memoir. In 1756, Catherine had reason to minimize her German background, given that her husband was too obviously Prussophile, but the return to her German years in 1771 allows her to evoke an alternative vision of court life to the one she had endured as Grand Duchess.
The court of Brunswick was then a truly royal court, in the number of beautiful houses this court occupied and in the decoration of these houses, the order that reigned at court, the many people of all kinds that the court supported, and the crowd of foreigners who constantly came there, and the dignity and magnificence that went into the whole style of life. Balls, operas, concerts, hunting parties, carriage drives, and banquets followed one another daily. This is what I saw for at least three or four months in Brunswick each year, from my eighth to my fifteenth year. [14]
Thus, whereas Rulhière portrays Catherine’s upbringing as poor and provincial, in her middle memoir Catherine counters with her ample experience of grand court life in Germany, which far outshone that of the Russian court. The memoirs are only one of the many ways that she attempted to repair the losses of those years in a dismal Russian court, which she summarizes in her epitaph (1778): “Eighteen years of tedium and solitude led her to read many books.”
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The style in which Catherine wrote her memoirs amplifies her criticisms of Elizabeth’s court and her vision of her own Russian court that combined splendor and familial congeniality. The dedication to part 1 of this memoir evokes the atmosphere of intimate conversation among her trusted inner circle at court. Catherine dedicates it to Countess Praskovia Alexandrovna Bruce (née Rumiantseva) (1729–85), her friend during all those years as Grand Duchess, “to whom I can speak freely without fear of consequences.”
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They had become close when Catherine first arrived in Russia in 1744 and remained thus through 1779, when Catherine learned that her friend was having an affair with her then favorite, Major Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov. Catherine’s words to Grimm noting her death are typical of her gracious practicality. “It is impossible not to miss her when one has known her long, for she was very nice; it would have upset me much more six or seven years ago, but since then we have been somewhat distant and separated.”
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In her life and in her letters, Catherine practiced the art of unpretentious conversation, which she enshrined in her
Rules.
Conversation earns a place in her self-portrait in the final memoir: “My disposition was naturally so accommodating that no one was ever with me a quarter of an hour without falling comfortably into conversation, chatting with me as if they had known me for a long time.” Catherine’s skill at evoking the art of conversation in her writing reflected her early reading of Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter during the opulent reign of Louis XIV, which were widely known and praised for their simplicity and vivid stories of a grand court life.