Free The Memoirs of Catherine the Great by Catherine the Great

plans with Hanbury-Williams and Count Bestuzhev-Riumin, her decisive meeting with Empress Elizabeth after Bestuzhev’s arrest, and Paul’s uncertain parentage, that her unpublished letters and memoirs (to which he did not have access) corroborate. 96 In Russia, Catherine’s posthumous supporters and detractors published biographies, memoirs about her reign, and some of her letters, that together with the circulation of manuscript copies of her final memoir ensured that the “whispering culture” of court life contributed to the consolidation of her reputation in the nineteenth century. 97
    However, already in 1859, when the publication of her papers could finally begin in earnest under Alexander II (reigned 1855–81), Herzen made clear in his introduction to her memoirs that the interest in Catherine would become irrelevant before the tide of history. “In perusing these memoirs, the reader is astonished to find one thing constantly lost sight of, even to the extent of not appearing anywhere—it is
Russia and the People.
” Considered by some an enlightened despot in her time, Catherine was now condemned as a thorough hypocrite who cynically claimed to rule in the best interest of her people while actually expanding the institution of serfdom. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and Alexander II’s reforms began a cycle of disappointed expectations for progressive political change, and an increasingly radicalized Russian intellectual life fomented the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when sixty years of Russian scholarship about Catherine effectively ended. Soviet Marxist historians rejected not only biographies but also the study of individual rulers, the nobility, and the eighteenth century, and instead studied class conflict.
    Recent scholarship on Catherine and her reign has created fertile ground for a reassessment of Catherine’s memoirs as more than the tale of a colorful life at court or an unwitting condemnation of the Russian autocracy. In the West, the publication of ten editions of two translations of the memoirs in English in the 1950s presaged the renewed scholarly interest in Catherine in the 1960s, as Western scholars gained access to Soviet libraries and archives for the first time. Isabel de Madariaga’s
Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great
(1981) is an unsurpassed foundational study, the first in nearly one hundred years; her
Catherine the Great: A Short
History
(1990) is for a general audience. In Russia, only with the fall of communism in the late 1980s did serious work on Catherine and her reign recommence, beginning with the publication of her memoirs in 1989 (last published in 1907), followed by four separate editions in 1990 alone. Drawing on her unpublished archival papers, scholars have written on modernity in the eighteenth century, Catherine’s diplomacy in the Polish partitions, and her correspondence with Potemkin. 98 The international boom in studies of Catherine celebrated the 200th anniversary of her death in 1996 with conferences, essay collections, and performances. 99 Another handful of English translations of her writings, as well as studies of her court, the memoirs, her image and the arts, and an intellectual biography, are in progress. Several scholarly biographies that successfully integrate politics with her life have freed the memoirs from their role in novelized histories. 100 This translation and preface foreground her writing in her life and reign and balance literary and historical approaches to the memoirs. At the very least, these projects have cleared the way to write about the real issues of Catherine’s reign, without reiterating the cynical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ad feminam canards that disputed her command of French, authorship of her writings (especially the letters to Voltaire), her control over her favorites, her political acumen, and the importance of her intellectual life to her policies.
    However, the perception of Catherine is not only