87. Dnevnik Polovtsova, ii: 203, 31 May 1889.
88. N. Notovich, L’Empereur Alexandre III et son entourage (Paris, 1893), 93.
89. R. Wortman, ‘The Russian empress as mother’, in The family in imperial Russia: New lines of historical research, ed. D. L. Ransel (Urbana, IL, 1978), 61.
90. Sir G. Buchanan, My mission to Russia and other diplomatic memories, 2 vols. (London, 1923), i: 175–6.
91. John Hanbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas II: As I knew him (London, 1922) 58, diary, 4 Oct. 1915.
92. Suvorov, Pis’ma, 204, to I. M. [Jose] Ribas.
93. The plant’s formal name was cardamine nivalis: see A. K. Sytin, ‘P. S. Pallas, P. I. Shangin i Ekaterina Velikaia’, Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 2 (1997), 124.
94. Shcherbatov, 235.
95. Diderot, Memoires pour Catherine II, ed. P. Verniere (Paris, 1966), 197–8; D. Griffiths, ‘To live forever: Catherine II, Voltaire and the pursuit of immortality’, in Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Bartlett, Cross, Rasmussen, 446–68.
96. Grimm, 77, 2 Feb. 1778.
97. Shcherbatov, 255, 241–5, 251–3, (241). Compare Martha Wilmot’s reflections on a present given to Princess Dashkova: ‘It was the first present she ever receiv’d from Katherine the Second, & certainly serv’d to recall the most interesting period of a friendship which then existed assuredly, as Katherine was only a Grand Dutchess; but for which sentiment they say a Crown very very rarely leaves room & I doubt whether the Great Katherine form’d an exception to the general observation.’ Russian Journals, 159, Martha’s Journal, 1 Dec. 1805 NS.
98. KfZh (1790), 160.
99. See K. Rasmussen, ‘Catherine II and the image of Peter I’, Slavic Review, 37 (1978), 51–69.
100. Cross, 322–3.
There is no shortage of primary material in translation to guide the English-speaking reader straight to the heart of Catherine’s sensibility. The latest edition of The Memoirs of Catherine the Great, ed. and trans. Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom (New York: Random House, 2005), also offers a perceptive introduction to the circumstances of their composition. No less entrancing is Love & Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin, ed. and trans. Douglas Smith (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). Correspondence of Catherine the Great when Grand-Duchess, with Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams and Letters from Count Poniatowski, ed. and trans. the Earl of Ilchester and Mrs Langford Brooke (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1928), gives a unique insight into Catherine’s political ambitions at the Court of Empress Elizabeth. Unfortunately it has not been reprinted. Neither is there a modern translation of the empress’s Nakaz, though two contemporary English versions have been published by W. F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), and Paul Dukes, ed., Russia Under Catherine the Great: Volume 2 Catherine the Great’s Instruction (NAKAZ) to the Legislative Commission, 1767 (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977). Diderot’s pungent ‘Observations on the Nakaz’ are translated in Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). While Antony Lentin, ed., Catherine the Great and Voltaire (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners), offers a selection of their correspondence in translation, the French originals are readily available in the magisterial edition by Theodore Besterman, published by the Voltaire Foundation.
Among the few Russian memoirs available in English, one of the most attractive and informative is the Memoirs of Countess Golovine: A Lady at the Court of Catherine II, trans. G. M. Fox- Davies (London: David Nutt, 1910), which covers the latter part of the reign. Far more self-absorbed are The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, trans. and ed. Kyril Fitzlyon, recently reissued with an introduction by Jehanne M. Geith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). A sense of the riches buried in British archives can be gathered from three very different published journals: Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury, ed. Third Earl of Malmesbury, 4 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1844); A Lady at the Court of Catherine the Great: The Journal of Baroness Elizabeth Dimsdale, 1781, ed. Anthony Cross (Cambridge: Crest Publications, 1989); and John Parkinson, A Tour of Russia, Siberia and the Crimea, 1792–1794, ed. William Collier (London: Frank Cass, 1971). Each offers unique insights into Catherine and her times. The Russian experiences of Dimsdale and Parkinson, along with hundreds of others, are explored in Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The same author’s companion volume, By the Banks of the Thames: Russians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980), brings to life the Russians who journeyed in the opposite direction. Much the most sophisticated of these was Nikolai Karamzin, whose Letters of a Russian Traveller has been published in an excellent translation by Andrew Kahn in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2003:04 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003). For the broader context, see Sara Dickinson, Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).
The most important (and appropriately weighty) study of Catherine’s reign in any language remains Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), which has been reprinted several times. My debts to this book and its author are profound. No less incisive are the essays collected in Isabel de Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (London: Longman, 1998). John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) ranks as the first modern scholarly biography, particularly interesting on medical matters and also strong on social history. Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia 1754–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) explores the troubled life of Catherine’s son. Like its subject, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London, 2000) is scintillating, wayward and occasionally overblown: but it is packed with insight on the fluctuations of Court politics and remains obligatory reading on the 1780s. The need for a modern scholarly biography of Princess Dashkova is only partly fulfilled by A. Woronzoff-Dashkoff, Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 97, 3 (2008)). The best starting-point in English is Sue Ann Prince, ed., The Princess and the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin, and the Age of Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2006).
Having celebrated its tricentenary in 2003, Catherine’s capital city is famous primarily as a glittering icon of secular cosmopolitanism. It is not always easy to recall that much of it was a building site in the eighteenth century. For a helpful reminder, see Christopher Marsden, Palmyra of the North: The First Days of St Petersburg (London: Faber and Faber, 1942), which wears its learning lightly. W. Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight: St Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia (Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001) offers a more up-to-date treatment, as do the contributors to Anthony Cross, ed., St Petersburg, 1703–1825 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Dmitry Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996) brings together in a single, beautifully illustrated volume the author’s
