A Detox From China
So, in case this tidbit went unnoticed, for two years my reading was not quite but almost exclusively "all China all the time."
Well, now that I am finally free of that country, I decided "the time has come," as the walrus would say, "to read of other things." The most obvious place to start seemed to be the country that has always held a mystical charm in my eyes: Russia. And since the name Екатерина (Ekaterina or Yekaterina, depending how you want to Romanize it) has been on my lips for quite some time now, Екатерина Второй (Catherine II) seemed like a good place to start. Enter, Virginia Rounding, a British author with an affinity for all things Russian.
An Unfortunate Subtitle
"Love," "sex," and "power" may indeed be the first three words that come to mind when one with a cursory knowledge of 19th century Europe thinks of Catherine the Great, but considering that the book spends its entire 511 page lifespan going out of its way to prove that the empress was more complex than that, it seems an odd choice for a subtitle. I suppose one could shrug and say "the subtitle is a hook," but given that the book is both heavily academic in substance and a bit feminist in tone, a hook that seems aimed at the reader bases of Maxim and Cosmopolitan seems a bit out of place.
Though I will admit, it does serve to make the book easier to look up amid an ocean of other biographies of the same woman, having no more original titles than "Catherine the Great," by (insert author here).
There's Just So Much Book in This Book!
As I already mentioned in my more abbreviated review on Goodreads, " I would probably have given this book a higher rating if I had gone into it having already read some lighter and chewier books about Catherine." The book throws names of important 19th century European statesman, philosophers and courtiers around like doubloons at the end of a Mardi Gras parade, and the author never quite manages to get over a sort of assumption that the reader is already familiar with everyone she mentions. I came away from the book with a bit of a sense that the target audience is university-level European History majors.
Though I will say once one acknowledges that the book is doing that, it does it well. For those who ARE a bit more familiar with the life and times of Catherine II, then this book excels at supplying one rich, 'information-dense' chapter after another. Once you slow down to absorb the fast-and-furious flow of facts, it's a tasty read. Information is stuffed into this book in a manner liken to your grandmother's attic: everything you can possibly imagine is there somewhere, if you know where. The lack of space between one thing and the next makes it almost impossible for the uninitiated to lay hands on what you're looking for, but who knows what else you'll find while looking for it?
Here is an example.
The botik was (and still is) one of the most revered symbols of Peter the great and the transformation he wrought on his country, in particular his creation of its naval fleet and the beginnings of its career as a maritime power. Various legends accrued around this boat, the so-called 'grandfather of the Russian Navy', which Peter had discovered in 1688 in an outhouse when he was 16 years old and which inspired his first dreams of building a fleet. One of the legends was that the boat was originally the gift of Elizabeth I of England to Ivan the Terrible; it is now believed to have been constructed in the 1640's either in England or by Dutch craftsmen in Russia following an 'English-type' design. Having first learnt to sail in this little boat, Peter stored it for safekeeping in the Kremlin in 1701; it was later removed to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where it was kept on a plinth inscribed; 'From the amusement of the child came the triumph of the man.' (p. 59)
That entire paragraph is an aside in the chapter describing Catherine's wedding ceremony to the ill-fated (and ill-suited to rule) Peter III (not to be confused with Peter the Great). It's entire purpose is to explain the symbolism of the boat that carried the Grand Ducal couple on the aquatic leg of the parade that celebrated their union. Nothing about the origin of the boat has direct relevance to the ceremony. And yet, packed into that aside we have...
- literary foreshadowing of later parallels between Catherine the Great (who completed Russia's transformation into a world power) and Peter the Great (who began it).
- further parallelism between Catherine and Peter in that the boat's discovery in an outhouse reminds the reader of Catherine's humble birth in a remote German province.
- foreshadowing of Catherine's rise to prominence on the world stage in a role thought at the time to be reserved for men (head of state) in the allusion to Elizabeth I.
- foreshadowing of Catherine's later ambitions of putting the Russian fleet on par with the British Navy by the constant allusions to the boat's "Englishness."
- foreshadowing of Peter III's post-coup fate from the reference to the botik being moved to a fortress "for safekeeping."
- hints at the impending transition from the reign of the "childlike" Peter III to the "triumphant" Catherine.
- hints of the origin of Catherine's later obsession with building monuments to Peter the Great, by noting that the inscription on the botik, which holds a similar structure to Catherine's dedication inscription on Peter's statue: "to Peter I, from Catherine II."
That is a hell of a lot of symbolism and foreshadowing packed into a single paragraph about something most biographers would have considered an unimportant detail (which boat she rode on in her wedding procession). And the book keeps up in that manner for 511 pages. It's heavy.
Easy to Follow, Easy to Miss
Thankfully, the author's decision to arrange the book in purely chronological order makes it easy to tell what happened and when. This stands in stark contrast to Henri Troyat's often-confusing biography of the same ruler (which I will get to in later review) which puts the Pugachev rebellion and the waning years of Catherine's relationship with Grigory Orlov in separate chapters, giving the illusion that they happened one after the other. Rounding puts everything in timeline order, and each chapter's title includes a parenthetical notation of what years are covered.
However, this too leads to the 'good-news-bad-news' issue I have already mentioned. Those who already know something about Catherine's life will be able to nod and follow along, saying "now I see" and recognizing details that will become important later. Those who, like me, dove into this book knowing nothing about Catherine the Great other than "she was the Russian queen with the sultry manner and buxom avatar in 'Civilization 5,' " will find themselves flipping back through pages for things they did not know they should have highlighted earlier. For instance, on page 268 the author mentions how Grigory Potemkin "had been waiting in the wings" of Catherine's life for the moment to emerge as a source of stability for her. I found myself snapping my fingers going "wait, wait... Potemkin, Potemkin... I heard that name earlier in the book. Where was it?"
The answer turned out to be 125 pages earlier, on page 143.
A young and striking-looking guardsman noticed that she had forgotten to attach a sword-knot to her sabre and, galloping across to her, handed her his own. This was the first encounter between Catherine and Grigory Potemkin, who in years to come would be the most important man in her life. (emphasis added by reviewer)
And due to the 'information-dense' writing style I mentioned above, the part I have emboldened here escaped my notice during the first reading, so I neglected to mark this paragraph as being of any importance until later.
While this makes it easy to lose where an important detail was earlier, it does serve to drive home the point of just how many years passed between Catherine's first chance meeting with the man who would later become her de-facto husband, and the moment when Orlov finally stepped out of the way so he could assume that role (and probably save Catherine's empire in the process).
History's Most Powerful Damsel in Distress
To be perfectly blunt, when I opened up a biography of one of history's most iconic female rulers (famous not just for managing to rule a country no one thought she could rule but for actually dramatically increasing that country's power and prestige), written by an author who has more than a bit of a feminist streak, I braced myself to sit through about 100 pages of a level of feminist dogma bordering on (and frequently crossing straight into) outright misandry. I actually found myself musing "how many times per chapter am I going to be browbeaten with reminders of 'Catherine the Great didn't need a man'?"
The author, however, was quite frank in her statements that Catherine herself thought nothing of the sort. Without trying to whitewash the empress's colorful sex-life (not only did she have in her time as empress nearly a dozen "favorites," a title roughly equivalent to the masculine form of "mistresses," but indeed her beloved Potemkin supplied her with most of them to keep her amused while he was away fighting for the empire), Rounding points out on multiple occasions how Catherine considered herself lost without her "Prince Charming."
She refers to him [Potemkin] as a Hero or Knight (bogatyr in Russian, the mythical hero of the medieval Russian epic songs, defending ancient Russia against all her enemies), implying perhaps that she thought of both herself and her Empire as damsels in distress, needing to be rescued by a knight in shining armor (emphasis added by reviewer). (p. 272)
And later on the same page, she cites a sentence from Catherine's own memoirs to reinforce this view.
She freely admits the crux of the matter, her constant need to have someone to love and be loved by: 'The trouble is that my heart is loath to remain even one hour without love.'
Examples are sprinkled throughout the book, but contrary to my expectations, the author seems to have no qualms about admitting that this Czarina, one of the most powerful women in history, considered herself absolutely incapable of running her empire (and even with Potemkin she made plain it was just that; her empire) without the will and the sword-arm of a male champion. In fact, the author even seems somewhat sympathetic to that, treating it not as a "tragic flaw" or an "unfortunate artifact of a male-dominated era," but merely as a rather humanizing character trait of a ruler whose impressive story could far-too-easily be framed as someone larger-than-life.
In short, Rounding has no problem admitting that Catherine, who for her litany of accomplishments is quite rightly called "the Great," was not Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman.
So Who Should Read It?
Well, I think I have answered this above. This book is great for those who are already passingly familiar with its subject matter, not for novices. This book is rich in detail, and the author mercifully limits the interjection of opinion, usually preferring to simply state the facts and let the reader draw their own conclusions. I have no doubt that as I further my studies of Russia's history and customs, I will refer back to this book many times. Indeed, I went through an entire pack of highlighters and four pens making notes in the margins, and my next six book purchases (including a biography of Grigory Potemkin and a collection of Catherine and Grigory's personal correspondence) were made for the express purpose of following up this book and making cross-references.
Yet, while I certainly do not regret reading it, I do regret not reading up on the subject matter elsewhere before tackling such a beast of a book. At least once per page I found myself either flipping back through previous pages or consulting Professor Google for clarification. For the academic or the serious historian, Rounding's biography is a treasure trove. However, for the casual reader (or the reader branching out into this subject for the first time) there are certainly more approachable biographies of Catherine to start with.
