outstanding essays on Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk. Though it is full of fascinating information about the fate of Pavlovsk in Soviet times, Suzanne Massie’s tantalising Pavlovsk: The Life of a Palace (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990) never quite tells you what you want to know about its early history. An exhaustive and very well-illustrated study of Falconet’s monument is provided by Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), though he makes the fractious sculptor seem more saintly than he was by needlessly blackening the reputation of Ivan Betskoy. Geraldine Norman, The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) breathes life into a unique institution, and very engagingly too.
Although the religious side of Catherine’s Court is harder to penetrate, there are helpful essays in Michael Schaich, ed., Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Exhibition catalogues tell us a great deal about this and almost every other aspect of the empress’s life and reign. Among the informative English-language editions published in recent years is Catherine the Great: Treasures of Imperial Russia from the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1990). Fuller still are Treasures of Catherine the Great (London: Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, 2000) and Catherine the Great & Gustav III (Helsingborg: Nationalmuseum, 1999). Both Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed., Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (London: Merrell, 2003) have plenty to say about Catherine. So does British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage, eds. Brian Allen and Larissa Dukelskaya (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Among permanent exhibits, Hillwood Museum stands out: anyone within reach of Washington D.C. should make the pilgrimage and purchase the exemplary catalogue by Ann Odom and Liana Paredes Arend, A Taste for Splendor: Russian Imperial and European Treasures from the Hillwood Museum (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1998).
Although books written for scholars can sometimes seem hard going, even to the initiated, the best work on Catherine’s Russia is stylish and penetrating. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) is a brilliant study of the ways in which the ritual presentation of the monarchy inspired the loyalty of its leading subjects. Whereas Wortman emphasises the secularising influence of classical Roman models, Gary Marker, Imperial Saint: The Cult of St Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), reveals the persistence of religious symbolism in Court culture, focusing on Catherine I in an interpretation which carries broader implications for the remainder of the eighteenth century. John LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) is a powerful study of patronage. David L. Ransel explores a key interest group in The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). Complementary studies of the nobility are offered by Robert E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), and Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility: A Study Based on the Materials of the Legislative Commission of 1767 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). One gets a good sense of the ways in which nobles assimilated and imitated Court culture from Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), and from Douglas Smith, The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great’s Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), an imaginative recreation of Count Nikolay Sheremetev’s marriage to a serf actress, particularly good on the setting in which they lived. John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) is a first-class social history of Moscow in the early 1770s. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) offers a brilliant (and often very funny) way into the history of Russian manners. Rafaella Faggionato, A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Masonic Circle of N.I. Novikov (Amsterdam: Springer, 2005) is the most significant recent study of Freemasonry, though the English translation is inelegant. W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov: Enlightener of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) remains the single most important study of the Enlightenment in Russia, a subject which awaits a full-scale treatment. See also Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays in Honour of Isabel de Madariaga (London: Macmillan, 1990) and my own essay ‘“Prosveshchenie”: Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Peripheries of the Enlightenment, eds. Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel Sanchez-Espinoza, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2008:01. On the wider context, try Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), a clever book which may overestimate the extent to which the Poles and Russians needed the philosophes to alert them to the problem of their own backwardness. Foreign policy is expertly covered by H. M. Scott, The Emergence of the Eastern Powers 1756–1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia and the Armed Neutrality of 1780: Sir James Harris’s Mission to St Petersburg during the American Revolution (London: Hollis and Carter, 1962), which ranges much more widely than its title might imply. I have commented on some of these scholars’ conclusions in two earlier attempts to set Catherine and her reign in the broader context of the history of eighteenth-century Europe: The Modernisation of Russia, 1696–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Catherine the Great: Profile in Power (Harlow: Longman, 2001). Both these books give lists of further reading.
Readers of Russian will learn much from attractively written books by Evgenii Anisimov, Zhenshchiny na rossiiskom prestole (St Petersburg: Norint, 1998), and Aleksandr Kamenskii, Pod seniiu Ekateriny: Vtoraia polovina XVIII veka (Moscow: 1992), the first study of Catherine’s reign to be published in Russia since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Despite its title, V. S. Lopatin, Potemkin i Suvorov (Moscow: Nauka, 1992) has just as much to say about Catherine: this book’s rehabilitation of Potemkin, based on the author’s excellent editions of the correspondence of the two men, underpins the argument of Montefiore’s English biography. More specialised are the work of the legal scholar, O. A. Omel’chenko, ‘Zakonnaia monarkhiia’ Ekateriny II: Prosveschennyi absoliutizm v Rossii (Moscow, 1993), and two studies of the relationship between literature and politics by Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla: Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII —pervoi treti XIX vek (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), and Vera Proskurina, Mify imperii: literatura i vlast’ v epokhu Ekateriny II (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005), who is not always quite so convincing. In the late 1880s, V. A. Bilbasov completed only two volumes of what promised to be a massive biography before running into trouble with the censors. His Istoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi, 2 vols (SPb-Berlin, 1890–91), remains the most detailed study of Catherine’s life before 1763. The troubled relationship between Catherine and her husband is explored in unprecedented detail by O. A. Ivanov, Ekaterina II i Petr III: istoriia tragicheskogo konflikta (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2007), a book which reached me just as my own went to press. Ekaterina II: Annotirovannaia bibliografiia publikatsii, eds. I. V. Babich, M. V. Babich and T. A. Lapteva (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), is an invaluable guide to the voluminous published sources on Catherine and her reign. Students of St Petersburg will find a very helpful bibliography of Russian work by A. M. Konechnyi in Europa Orientalis (1997, no. 1). No less crucial for the history of eighteenth-century Russian painting is the illustrated catalogue of the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg—Gosudarstvennyi russkii muzei, Zhivopis’: XVIII vek, ed. Grigorii Goldovskii (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1998)—which carries a limited amount of summary information in English.
