Primary Contributors:

Andrew Kahn (University of Oxford), Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (University of Southern California), CatCor: The Digital Correspondence of Catherine the Great Project

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Catherine II of Russia (1729–1796)

Empress Catherine II of Russia, better known as Catherine the Great, led the world’s largest contiguous empire in a period of rapid modernization and integration into Western cultural and political life. The daughter of a minor German prince in Prussian employ, Princess Sophia Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst married her cousin, the future Emperor Peter III of Russia, in 1745. Renamed Ekaterina (Catherine) Alekseevna upon her conversion to Russian Orthodoxy at her engagement, she spent the nearly two decades of her unhappy marriage learning to navigate court life, cutting her teeth in diplomatic intrigue, and educating herself through voracious reading. After overthrowing her husband in a dramatic coup d’état in June 1762, she ruled Russia for thirty-four years, becoming the longest reigning sovereign of the Russian Empire and the most powerful woman of her day. She worked seriously at reforming Russian institutions and governance; oversaw the blossoming of cultural life and book publishing; asserted Russia’s power in the world diplomatic arena; and expanded the empire’s borders through military conquest, the annexation of Crimea, and the partitioning of Poland alongside Prussia and Austria. Promoted as an enlightened sovereign alongside the likes of Frederick the Great of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria, her reign coincided with the flourishing of the High Enlightenment in Russia. She was also the only so-called Enlightened despot to witness the French Revolution from its beginnings through the end of the Terror, and her reactions marked the end of an era. Her reign’s combination of imperial expansion, absolutist rule, and Enlightenment ideals render it both controversial and characteristic of her time. Her life continues to fascinate, attracting countless biographies and adaptations to stage and screen.

Partners and Additional Contributors

CatCor began in 2013 and has been funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Foundation, the John Fell Fund in the Humanities Division at University of Oxford; the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literatures at University of Oxford, and the Potanin Humanities Fund at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. CatCor’s phase one pilot database was built by University of Oxford IT Services (James Cummings, Theodore Koterwas, Andrew Haith, and Martin Filiau); the current database and website are by Huber Digital. We would like to thank all the research assistants who contributed to our dataset: Jessica Allen, Stephen Ashworth, Olivia Colvill, Lucy Dunlop, Olga Grinchenko, Katherine New, Gabriel O’Regan, and Olga Smolyak. We also would like to express our gratitude to Glenn Roe (Sorbonne) for his advice and Andrew Breakspear (St Edmund Hall, Oxford) and Megan Gooch (Centre for Digital Scholarship, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) for their institutional support.

Contents

Catherine the Great’s thousands of letters are the best record of her activities in a wide range of domains: as a legislator and administrator; as a diplomat and commander-in-chief; as a writer, intellectual, and patron of the arts; and as a mother, grandmother, and lover. Her correspondents range from well-known eighteenth-century cultural figures such as Voltaire and Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin to fellow sovereigns like Frederick the Great, socialites like Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne, generals such as Petr Rumiantsev-Zadunaiskii, and lovers and advisors like Grigorii Potemkin. Written in French, Russian, and German, they represent a literary masterpiece of the eighteenth-century art of the letter and are an important source for studying the circulation of ideas among the elite in the Enlightenment.

Catherine’s correspondence has never been edited in a unified scholarly edition, although a large proportion of her letters have been published in hundreds of smaller editions, often in nineteenth-century Russian periodicals. No complete catalogue of Catherine’s correspondence exists, and its creation is one of CatCor’s primary aims. The current catalogue contains a sample designed to illustrate the breadth and variety of Catherine’s correspondences, with a particular focus on the years 1774 and 1789 and on major correspondences like those with Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Friedrich Melchior Grimm. We will be adding new metadata and letters over the coming years.

Launch Catalogue