Free The Memoirs of Catherine the Great by Catherine the Great Page A

an issue for scholars, but formed a central organizing focus for Catherine throughout her reign, especially in her writing. Ultimately, the memoirs raise questions about Catherine as a woman, as Empress, and as a writer, and about the problem of her image, which she projected and attempted to control in all the media of her day, from publications, coins, paintings, and her collections, to palaces, gardens, and spectacles. Recent feminist biographical studies of Marie Antoinette and women in nineteenth-century France eschew the story line of traditional biography, organized around defining personal characteristics, in favor of an approach that foregrounds the representations of women, their bodies, and femininity. 101 Catherine’s life seems ideal for such an antinarrative—a rich, active,
    provocative life that refuses to cohere into a single story. 102 In fact, Catherine herself seems to have preempted her biographers by having written several different memoirs over fifty years that reflect her continuous attempts to explain the first half of her life. Just as there is no single memoir, there is no
one
Catherine. The memoirs represent different Catherines years apart. Larger than life, she made her mark in so many areas that any synthesis of Catherine as a woman, as Empress, and as a writer remains incomplete, in part because Catherine herself is elusive, despite, or perhaps because of, all she wrote—especially her memoirs. The urge to find the unguarded Catherine in her memoirs persists, not only because it makes her a more attractive person and less a cunning politician, but also because her pleasant, direct tone invites us to see her as honest and sincere.
    THE VARIOUS MEMOIRS
    As the first biographies of Catherine demonstrate, much in the memoirs was not news, and Catherine surely knew this.
How
she wrote turns out to be as important as
what
she wrote. Although she wrote some autobiographical notes in Russian, Catherine’s decision to write her three main memoirs in French reflects practical and philosophical concerns. She wrote an early character sketch for a Swede and the first memoir for an Englishman; French was their common language. Later, as Empress, she constantly fought against her image in contemporary French historiography and hoped to influence future histories about her reign. French was the European and Enlightenment lingua franca, and the language of the major memoirs and biographies she read. She used French as a European polyglot. 103 Fluent in French, Russian, and German, mixing them for added effect, she adapted herself in language, style, and substance to her audience.
    Aside from the significance of her choice of French, the literary aspects of the memoirs include their organization, especially at the beginning and end, unifying ideas and themes, and her use of autobiographical genres and of language. Each memoir presents a different kind of verbal portrait of Catherine. Over the course of fifty years of writing, she learned to write memoirs, transforming a static character sketch into a chronology of events with short stories and digressions set within an overall long narrative arc. Moreover, through the process of writing, her notions of her self and the memoirs in relation to history continued to evolve. The memoirs thus reflect a highly developed autobiographical consciousness.
    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