June 2005?
Catherine the Great, Zoé Oldenbourg, translated by Anne Carter (1965)

I'm determined to persist with my book reports, no matter how belatedly. I think this book may have been the other one I got at the U.U. book sale mentioned in an earlier report. I read it some time early last summer, about half of it in one sitting. I had a problem with my car then, where it wouldn't start if it got too hot. (The problem was in the ignition switch, not the starter.) I learned to be careful to park in the shade and not make unnecessary stops, but one sunny afternoon I slipped up and ended up stranded for about five hours till the sun went down. Fortunately I wasn't in any hurry to be anywhere that day, and I was in a pleasant and civilized part of town, so I took a nice nap in the car and read a couple hundred pages in the one book that happened to be in my bag, which was this one. (Napping and reading! Ah, those were the days!)

When reading biographies, I normally prefer a more "masculine" style that reads more like a narrative history and less like a historical novel. (I just finished one about Catherine's fellow "Great", her husband's grandfather Peter, that meets that description.) The author of this one explains — accurately, no doubt — that with all that has already been written about Catherine's reign, she would have nothing to add in that department. Instead, her express purpose is to provide a fresh and balanced study of Catherine as a person, with little interest in her politics or her place in history. Far more attention is paid to her life before she reached the throne than after.

All of this is explained in a short introduction which briefly surveys the source literature. There, Oldenbourg also briefly discusses the political and literary circumstances that caused Catherine to have such a horrible reputation that for many people the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing her name is various outrageous sexual perversities that have been attributed to her. These stories, it turns out, originated with deliberate slanders circulated throughout Paris literary circles by Polish exiles with a political motive. I would have liked to learn more about that, as that sort of thing fascinates me. (The history of how popular history comes to be written, I mean, not outrageous sexual perversities.)

In case you were unsure, Catherine the Great did not have sex with a horse, nor any of the other freaky things you may have heard. She did have several lovers, mostly later in life. Oldenbourg paints a believable portrait that puts this in a sympathetic context which manages to avoid either condemnation or admiration. That, it seems, is what sets this biography apart. That, and the quality of the narrative. I'm not sure I'd know the difference, but Zoé Oldenbourg, who is a historical novelist first, is reputed to be among the best. I like this sort of history OK, but I think I probably would have appreciated it more if I had read a more traditional biography first.

As the book itself it a fading memory, I'm writing this review mostly from my notes, of which about half are vocabulary. Among the few that aren't, only one that triggers any meaningful recollection. Somewhere in the course of the book, there is some discussion of how royal princes in 18th century Europe were often, for political reasons, raised in peculiar isolation. While they may be treated well in terms of personal luxury, psychologically they are warped by the lack of normal personal contact. Catherine's husband Peter, grandson of Peter the Great from an estranged wing of the family, growing up as Duke of Holstein, was one victim of the phenomenon, and one needn't look far to find many others.

What particularly struck me is how similar the situation in Russia and Germany was to the situation in the Ottoman Empire after the death of Sulayman the Great, when the royal family fell into decadence. I have often read scathing commentary on how disgustingly perverse the Ottoman family was during that era. It certainly was, but somehow the same commenters seem ignorant of the fact that pretty much the same thing was going on in all of Europe. This point was particularly driven home when I read, in Catherine the Great, a passing reference to the "cage" that Peter was raised in. There was never any question that "cage" was, of course, meant metaphorically. Yet in reading about the neurotic Ottoman brothers who served as puppet sultans in the early 1600s, references to them being put into or taken out of the infamous "Golden Cage" are sometimes treated as if they really were kept in a physical cage like an animal. (They weren't.)

Peter III, in spite of his unexpected inheritance of the Russian throne, for the duration of his short life remained more interested in Holstein, and his primary political interest was to wage war on Denmark in order to recover the neighboring province of Schleswig. In discussion of this, there is a brief reference to diplomatic efforts to interest Peter in various other small German domains, including the County of Oldenbourg. The name is spelled in the French style, instead of the more German-looking "Oldenburg", which makes me wonder if someone wasn't unduly influenced by the author's surname.

That in turn caused me to wonder if Zoé Oldenbourg isn't one of those descendants of aristocracy who turned to writing history as a sort of indirect exploration of one's family heritage. ("Zoe" always strikes me as a particularly aristocratic name, as it probably does not for anyone who hasn't studied much Byzantine history.) The short biographical appendix isn't very clear on the point. It says that she "was born in Leningrad among a family of scholars and historians", but it doesn't say anything about that family's heritage nor how they came to be in the Russian capital. Shortly after the Revolution she escaped to Paris. I see no reference of her year of birth, but the blurb does say that she was married in 1947 and had children, so one has to guess she was pretty young when she became an emigree. [Later: I see in a reference online that she was born in 1916.]

Even if it wasn't her first tongue, French was clearly Oldenbourg's primary language growing up, and French is what this book was originally written in. Many of the vocabulary words I made note of are really uses of English words that tickled my fancy in the way they hinted at the French behind them.

I'm pretty sure that is not intended to mean that Frederick [the Great of Prussia] was bad at fighting. Surely, terrible is meant in the older (or more French) sense of inspiring terror, as in "Ivan the Terrible" or "He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword."

Similarly, holocaust is used in a way which hints at the original meaning of a sacrifice consumed by fire rather than at the much more common contemporary association with a certain event of 20th century Europe. In the years before Catherine became Empress, when she was simply the wife of the presumed heir, her position at court was frequently precarious. It was especially so when some of her close allies were arrested and accused of treason.

(The quote is from Catherine's own memoirs.)

I have eight more vocabulary words and five other word-related references in my notes, but it's tedious tracking down the context for them, and my weekly deadline is approaching, so I'll let go of all of them except my favorite.

On the question of whether Catherine ought to abdicate in favor of her son (who, unlike his mother, was royal by blood descent and not just through marriage):

The curiosity here is the typographical error, which I have faithfully copied. Perhaps the missing 's' from "possess" was overlooked in part because posses is also a word. This sentence caused me to pause and reflect on a certain class of words. Most nouns can add an "s" and still make a word. A special few can add one "s" ... and then add another: posse, prince, bra, saltine, timeline, needle....

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