Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The third sister was Varvara, twenty, who charmed her way through life. ‘Plenira aux chevaux d’or’ – ‘the fascinatress with the golden hair’ – was what the poet Derzhavin called her; she was celebrated for her radiant blondeness. Even in middle age, she kept her slender figure, and her features were described by the memoirist Wiegel as ‘perfect…with the freshness of a twenty-year-old girl’. No statesman liked her sister Alexandra, she was excitable, flirtatious, capricious, hot-tempered and incessantly demanding. No one could criticize her ill-temper and bad manners when the Prince was alive, but on one occasion she pulled a friend by the hair; on another she whipped one of her estate managers. She was harsh to the pompous or corrupt but very kind to her servants⁵ – though not necessarily to her serfs. Years later, force was required to suppress a peasant revolt on her estates.

Nadezhda, fifteen, contrived to be both ginger and swarthy and must have suffered from being the ugly duckling in a family of swans, but Potemkin made her a maid-of-honour like the others. She was headstrong and irritating: Nadezhda means ‘hope’ in Russian so Potemkin, who coined nicknames for everyone, cruelly called her ‘bez-nadezhnaya’ – or Hopeless. The fifth sister was the placid and passive Ekaterina, who was already the physical paragon of the family: her portrait by Vigée Lebrun, painted in 1790, shows her seraphic face surrounded by bright auburn-blonde curls, looking into a mirror. Ekaterina, wrote Ségur, the French envoy, might ‘have served as a model for an artist to paint the head of Venus’. Lastly, Tatiana was the youngest – aged seven in 1776 – but she grew up as good-looking and intelligent as Alexandra. After Potemkin withdrew from Catherine’s alcove, he fell in love with Varvara.⁶

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‘Little Mother, Varenka, my soul, my life,’ wrote Potemkin to Varvara. ‘You slept, little fool, and didn’t remember anything. I, leaving you, kissed you and covered you with the quilt and with a gown and crossed you.’ It is just possible to claim that this was the letter of an uncle who has simply kissed his niece good night and tucked her in, though it really reads as if he is leaving in the morning after spending the night with her.

‘My angel, your caress is so pleasurable so lovable, count my love to you and you’ll see you are my life, my joy, my angel; I’m kissing you innumerable times and I think about you even more…’. Even in the age of sensibilité and written by an emotional and uninhibited Prince, these sentiments were not those of a conventional uncle. Often he called her ‘my honey’ or ‘my treasure’, ‘my soul, my tender lover’, ‘my sweetheart goddess’ and ‘lovable lips’ and frequently signed off. ‘I am kissing you from head to foot.’ The letters are shamelessly sensual – and yet familial too: ‘My honey, Varenka, my soul…Goodbye, sweet lips, come over to dinner. I have invited your sisters…’. In one letter, he told her: ‘Tomorrow I’m going to the banya.’ Recalling his rendezvous in the Winter Palace banya with Catherine, was he arranging to meet his niece there too?

The Prince was now thirty-seven, seventeen years older than Varvara, so, in age at least, there was nothing remarkable in their love affair. The sisters and their hulking brother, Vasily, were now at Court every day and in Potemkin’s homes – the Shepilev house, the Anichkov – every evening. They attended his dinners and watched him playing cards with the Empress in her Little Hermitage. They were his most precious ornaments as well as his friends, family, entourage. As far as we know, he had no children: they were his heirs too. It was no coincidence that it was Varvara who became his mistress, for she was the family flirt, he the family hero.

The letters are clearly those of an older man and a younger woman; for example, when Potemkin told her that the Empress had invited her to a dinner, he added, ‘My dear, dress yourself very well and try to be kind and beautiful,’ telling to watch her ‘ps and qs’. From outside town, possibly Tsarskoe Selo, he asked: ‘I’m planning to come into town tomorrow…Write to me where you plan to visit me – at the Anichkov or the Palace?’ Varenka frequently saw the Empress and Serenissimus together. ‘The Empress was bled today so there’s no need to bother her,’ he told her. ‘I’m off to the Empress and then I’ll come and see you.’