The Private Correspondence of Catherine the Great and G.A. Potemkin, 1769-1791

One of Dostoyevsky's characters used to pray for the Comtesse du Barry, executed in Paris during the Reign of Terror, because "no one ever crossed himself for her sake". In this respect, Catherine the Great is highly similar; nobody has ever prayed for the "Semiramis du Nord," as Voltaire called her. Horace Walpole (as Anthony Cross recently reminded me) wished she had been beheaded instead of Marie-Antoinette, let alone du Barry. Catherine did have her devotees as well as her enemies, to be fair, though the line separating the two was a thin or rather an arbitrary one: where as her devotees spoke flatteringly of her wit, her social adaptability, her clever diplomacy, her enemies anathematized the same qualities with the same conviction. Nowadays, arguably, we lack that conviction; personal and public virtues and shortcomings that were once proverbial are now seen, darkly, through the glass of two centuries and an intervening host of psychopathic tyrants.

Yet if time and political extremism have robbed Catherine the Great's image of much of its vividness, historical novelists and popular historians have been kept busy enough. Time, moreover, has also brought its usual clarifications, even some revelations. We know more about the drama of her early years in Russia and about her ill-fated marriage, for example, as of the once shadowed relations between Catherine and her son. And central to this restored and to some extent revalued portrait has been Catherine's correspondence, a vital source of information not just about the empress herself, of course, but also about global politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Catherine knew enough of the curiosity of the future to have attempted to forestall its disrespectful clarifications and revelations by burning some of the intimate letters written to her by Prince Potemkin, her "special lover," if in Catherine's case that does not sound too precious. In the interests of historical accuracy, on the other hand, and no doubt for other reasons closer to home, Potemkin kept all the notes and letters he received from the Royal patron and paramour who in a secret ceremony became his wife--at least according to Viacheslav Lopatin, whose Lichnaja perepiska, first published in Moscow earlier this year, is the first complete edition of their surviving correspondence. Many of the 1162 letters and notes contained in this volume first appeared in what are now rare Russian editions published between 1859 and 1917, some in emigré Parisian editions of 1934. Of particular interest, however, are the 320 as yet unpublished letters--250 of Potemkin's and 70 of Catherine's--which were supposed to have been destroyed a century ago but, thanks to the perseverance of Moscow historian and film-director Viacheslav Lopatin, have been salvaged from archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Indeed, the book represents twenty years of Lopatin's scrupulous and courageous archival work, 1978 to 1998, "courageous" insofar as the search for royal private papers in the Soviet era was a dangerous enterprise. According to the account he wrote for this edition, Lopatin owes part of his success to his status as a film-director. His status as "an entertainer" made his research appear harmless in the eyes of Soviet authorities distrustful of the potentially subversive investigations of writers and scholars. This bizarre political axiom, it seems, opened doors that had been locked to most of Russia's historians. Certainly, we can believe and sympathize when Lopatin writes of the discovery of Potemkin's private letters in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of the more rewarding moments of his life.

The body of the book is divided into three main sections: first, the correspondence (pp. 5-470); second, Lopatin's account of his editorial adventures "Pis'ma bez kotoryh istorija stanovits'a mifom" (pp. 473-540); finally, twenty pages comprising notes to the letters and an index to people mentioned (pp. 965-986). The paradoxicality of this editorial strategy of Lopatin's might fruitfully be compared with the narrative (un)method of Laurence Sterne, who perversely placed the preface of his Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, "Gentleman" in the middle of the book, provoking his readers to an almost immediate active independence. Similarly, Lopatin's edition launches into the correspondence without any pre-emptive explanation, introduction, or orientation.

Because their correspondence is framed by Potemkin's letters to Catherine, moreover, one gets an impression of the Prince playing first fiddle in what Lopatin rightly calls "a political duet unique in World History"--a duet that, with major and minor variations, lasted from a first letter of Potemkin's signed "your obedient slave" and posted to "Your Highness" from Field-marshal Prosorovskii's military camp in 1769 until a last message of Potemkin's written in a trembling hand from his death bed at Yassy in 1791. Lopatin puts particular emphasis on the private nature of the correspondence: "although it is sometimes impossible strictly to distinguish private from official correspondence (for personal and state matters are interwoven), it should be stressed that the present publication is based on private letters. Because of the importance of their contents, few official documents (not more than twenty to twenty-five) have been enclosed." It is on Catherine's and Potemkin's intimacy, therefore, that their editor has lavished all his industry and concern, assiduously tracing in and through different archives every familiar letter and note that passed between them. He has also painstakingly organized the material into chronological order, having identified and dated all the notes written during those periods when the correspondents lived close enough to each other in Petersburg or in Tsarskoje Selo to dispense with the formality of place and date.

Lopatin, currently the sole expert in Potemkin's handwriting, has returned to decipher the original for each and every letter, even when a published version was extant. Only with the few exceptions where originals could not be located did he rely on earlier publications. And the conviction of dealing throughout with material transcribed directly from autograph manuscripts in private and public archives in turn underwrites the authenticity of Lopatin's enterprise for the reader.

From reading physically to reading critically, Lopatin also takes time out from his discussion of the cultural significance of the correspondence to reflect upon the literary merits of Catherine's and Potemkin's respective styles, and to confront the historical cliché of the Empress's poor ability in Russian grammar: We should remember that Catherine only came to Russia at the age of fifteen, when she was obliged to learn Russian. On the evidence of her letters she has indeed mastered the language, expressing her thoughts and feelings in Russian with facility. The orthography and syntax of her letters are, admittedly, far from perfect, but still the structure of her language is clear and easy to understand. Catherine's and Potemkin's letters, written as a rule without any drafts and crossings out, convey their vivid, spoken Russian. Potemkin's speech . . . is clear, refined and fluent. . . His style is at once energetic and precise. From these stylistic observations, Lopatin characteristically moves to the almost Platonic idea of Catherine and Potemkin as complementing one another in essential and occult ways: "the methodical, intensely focussed Empress on the one hand and, on the other, the Russian nobleman speculating and imagining on a grand scale."

This complementarity of Lopatin's two lovers and the intimacy between them that he assumes are to some extent contingent upon the revolutionary piece of 'evidence' he has to offer of Catherine's and Potemkin's marriage. In a hypothetical reconstruction based on Catherine's addressing Potemkin as "Mon mari", "Mon cher et bien aime Epoux", and "Cher Epoux" (letters 430, 434) and on her mention of "the sacred bonds" that linked them forever (letter 434), Lopatin envisages this secret marriage between the two having taken place on the 8 July 1774, in the Church of St. Samsonii. There are also other revisionary gestures: Lopatin reconstructs a dramatic story of solitude and betrayal darkening Catherine's younger days, for example, one sketched in a confessional letter to Potemkin, where Lopatin concludes that while her first child, the future Paul I, was undoubtedly fathered by by Count Saltykov, her last child, Elizabeth Kalageorgi née Temkina (1775), was born into wedlock with Potemkin.

The revision of Catherine's and Potemkin's epistolary heritage that together with a comprehensive critical apparatus plays the part of an epilogue, for example, reflects a depth and extent of historical, literary, and genealogical resources. His command of the detail of Catherine's life and milieu is impressive and his knowledge of--not to say devotion to--eighteenth-century history and art, and of and to Russian genealogy in particular, shines out of his writing.

This knowledge and devotion were no doubt encouraged by his companion for many years, the Moscow art collector and genealogist Jurii Borisovich Shmarov (1898-1990), whom Lopatin figured in his documentary film on Suvorov with a copy of Novikov's Barhatnaja kniga (the massive study of eighteenth-century Russian genealogy) in his hand. Shmarov was one of the illuminati of the "keepers of antiquity", a small circle of enthusiastic archivists in Moscow to which the two belonged, and an expert in rare, pre-revolutionary editions on Russian history and genealogy--editions like Russkaja Portretnaja Galereja (A Gallery of Russian Portraits), 1887, and Russkii Portrety (Russian Portraits), published in 1905-1909 by Grand Duke Nickolay Mikhailovich in collaboration with the leading Russian genealogist Chulkov, to mention only two--all of which could be found in his library.

Not surprisingly, then, the illustrations Lopatin has used in this book are also impressive, including portraits of the young Catherine, her children, and members of the Empress's and Potemkin's inner circle; of her courtiers and fellow European monarchs and politicians. Some of the images of this vast collection of Catherineana are well enough known, admittedly, but some are genuine rarities, like the portrait of the Princess Dashkov as Director of St. Petersburg Academy of Arts painted by Levitskii in 1784 from a private collection in Moscow.

Lopatin claims that he is not trying to solve dynastic riddles or encourage historical scandal; however, his supposition on Catherine's marriage to Potemkin gives a new perspective, not only on Catherine herself, but also on her persona as sole Empress of Russia and on her reign as a political phenomenon. More than on any other issue of serious Russian and European scholarship, it is on the question of whether or not Potemkin was Catherine's effective co-regent that Lopatin's study has the potential to effect a radical reinterpretation. For whatever interested or disinterested reasons, his own money is on the Empress's "Cher Epoux": "These letters provide evidence that Potemkin's 'friend and mentor' deferred to his authority when she sought her husband's and co-ruler's advice in situations that were difficult for Russia." Not a fashionable or "politically correct" conclusion when scholars are busy rewriting women back into history, perhaps, but even if we refuse to accept any radical attenuation of her power, Lopatin's romantic, humanizing revision of Catherine the Great should give us pause.