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| Friday, March 16, 2007 / Issue 3616. Page 112. Updated Moscow Time |
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The popular image of Catherine the Great, a portly nymphomaniac cursed with flatulence and venereal disease, has overshadowed her unique place in Russian history. She was an outsider, a minor German princess whose reign began unpromisingly in 1762 with her likely involvement in the murder of her feckless husband, Tsar Peter III. His grandfather, Peter the Great, had almost single-handedly dragged Russia into modern times, building the new capital of St. Petersburg and touting for Teutonic expertise. Russia's enlightenment under Catherine was the logical outcome. It was also, strangely, a return to first principles. In the words of Alexander Pushkin's friend, Pyotr Vyazemsky, "many things in our history can be explained by the fact that a Russian, Peter the Great, sought to make us Germans, while a German, Catherine the Great, wished to make us Russians."
Revisiting his earlier insightful study, Dixon is shortly to publish a long-awaited full-length biography of Catherine. In the meantime we have Rounding's entertaining version, which is based on already published sources. The subtitle hits the wrong note, or perhaps the right note if you subscribe to a Byronic view of history, and the prose is sometimes too workmanlike. Yet the story itself is fun and familiar, and Rounding is a keen observer of what Vladimir Nabokov called a "brutal and dull world of political intrigue, favoritism, Germanic regimentation, old-fashioned Russian misery, and fat-breasted empresses on despicable thrones." Love, sex and power indeed!