Catherine the Great

The letter written, Catherine summoned Count Shuvalov. He arrived and announced that her carriage was ready. She handed him her letter, and told him that he could tell the maids of honor who did not wish to accompany her to the theater that they were excused. Leaving her, Shuvalov told Peter that the grand duchess had said that he should decide which women should go with his wife and which should stay with him. As Catherine passed through the antechamber, she found Peter seated with Elizabeth Vorontsova, playing cards. Seeing his wife, Peter rose—something he had never done before—and Countess Vorontsova rose with him. Catherine responded with a curtsy and went to her carriage. That evening, the empress did not appear at the theater, but when Catherine returned home, Count Shuvalov told her that Elizabeth had agreed to grant her another interview.

Catherine’s behavior and her letter to the empress were a gamble. She did not want to leave Russia. She had invested sixteen years, more than half her life, all of her young womanhood, in her ambition to become “a queen.” She knew that her tactics were risky, but she believed they would succeed. She was convinced that if the Shuvalovs had any idea of actually sending her home, or of intimidating her by threatening banishment, her plea that she be allowed to leave was the best method of undermining their plan. Catherine knew that, for Elizabeth, the succession was all-important, and that with the young, deposed tsar Ivan VI still alive, the empress would not wish to see this issue reignited. Catherine also realized that the primary complaint against her was that her marriage had not been a success. She also knew that the empress fully shared her views of Peter. When talking or writing about her nephew privately, Elizabeth either burst into tears at the misfortune of having such an heir or showered him with contempt. After Elizabeth’s death, Catherine discovered among her papers two such comments in the empress’s hand; one addressed to Ivan Shuvalov, the other to Alexis Razumovsky. To the first, she had written, “Today, my damned nephew has greatly irritated me,” and to the other, “My nephew is a fool; the devil take him.”

In constructing her account of this tense, intricate situation, Catherine, as a much older woman, suspended her narrative of events to look at herself, her life, and her character. Whatever happened, she wrote, “I felt myself possessed of sufficient courage either to rise or fall without being carried away by undue pride on the one hand, or being humbled and dispirited on the other.” Her intentions, she told herself, had always been honest. Although she had understood from the beginning that to love a husband who was not lovable and who made no effort to become so was a difficult and probably impossible task, she believed that she had made a sincere effort to devote herself to him and his interests. Her advice had always been the best she could give. If, when she first came to Russia, Peter had been affectionate, she would have opened her heart to him. Now she saw that, among his whole entourage, she was the woman to whom he paid the least attention. She rejected this state of affairs:

My natural pride made the idea of being miserable intolerable to me. I used to say to myself that happiness and misery depend on ourselves. If you feel unhappy, rise above it and act so that your happiness may be independent of all outside events. I had been born with this disposition, and a face that was, at the very least, interesting, and which pleased at first sight without art or pretense. My disposition was naturally so conciliatory that no one ever spent a quarter of an hour with me without feeling perfectly at ease and talking to me as though they had known me for a long time. I easily won the confidence of those who had anything to do with me because everyone felt that I displayed honesty and goodwill. If I may be allowed to be frank, I would say about myself that I was a true gentleman with a mind more male than female, but, together with this, I was anything but masculine and, combined with the mind and character of a man, I possessed the attractions of a loveable woman. May I be pardoned for offering this candid expression of my feelings instead of trying to cover them a veil of false modesty.

This evaluation of her qualities—self-laudatory and self-justifying—led to a general commentary on the conflict between emotion and morality in the lives of human beings. It is a passionate statement—a personal confession, almost—and it brings to Catherine a sympathy and understanding that she is sometimes not given: