The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Read Free Page A

Edizioni, 1996), 293–98.
    A. M. Gribovskii,
Zapiski o imperatritse Ekaterine Velikoi polkovnika, sostoivshago pri ee osobie stats-sekretarem, Adriana Moiseevicha Gribovskogo
(Moscow, 1847), 41, quoted in Pekarskii,
Materialy dlia istorii,
36.
    Smith,
Love and Conquest,
lii.
    P. K. Shchebal’skii, “Ekaterina II kak pisatel’nitsa,” Zaria 2 (1869): 101–2. “One can name many French statesmen (even at the end of the previous century) who knew nothing, and apparently did not want to know anything, about French grammar” (102). “Until her death, [Catherine] did not know Russian grammar (like nearly all her contemporaries, incidentally), but she knew Russian well, especially in the second half of her reign, though incorrectly, yet completely fluently. Catherine’s most common mistakes are incorrect use of cases and of perfective and imperfective verb aspects” (119).
    SIRIO,
1:253–91. Pekarskii retains the original orthography for her epitaph.
Materialy
dlia istorii,
70–72.

NOTE ON NOBLE FAMILIES
    In the memoirs, Catherine often mentions a person’s relatives to draw a quick portrait, to indicate his or her significance, and to explain a situation. These connections constitute the warp and woof of the Russian court, the government, and the military in the eighteenth century, and they are often unspoken because everyone knew them and took their importance for granted. While the index presents individuals, this note provides some background on the history of the complex interrelationships of noble families, which provides an essential window into the world of Catherine’s memoirs.
    In this memoir Catherine makes particular mention of the importance of Mme. Vladislavova, appointed by Empress Elizabeth in 1748 as head of Catherine’s personal court.
    Her name was Praskovia Nikitichna. She got off to a very good start; she was sociable, loved to talk, spoke and told stories with intelligence, knew all the anecdotes of past and present times by heart, knew four or five generations of all the families, had the genealogies of everyone’s fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and paternal and maternal great-grandparents fixed in her memory, and no one informed me more about what had happened in Russia over the past hundred years than she.
    The essential lore of the history of kinship relations of noble families at the Russian court proved invaluable to Catherine, who was an outsider. Armed with this information, she could better understand and use the women and men around her.
    Individual families formed noble patronage networks through marriage, especially with the czars. Through their marriages and official and unofficial positions, families fought for prestige and power, or access to the ruler and to the distribution of patronage. Most important for Catherine’s purposes, they intrigued in succession struggles to promote their candidates and bring down their opponents. Thus in this memoir, Catherine takes a great personal interest in Mme. Vladislavova’s knowledge.
    The wives of the seventeenth-century czars created two major extended families, the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs. Peter the Great’s mother was Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina (1651–94), and the extended Naryshkin clan included the Streshnevs (Peter’s grandmother) and the Lopukhins (Peter’s first wife), and came to include the Golitsyns and the Trubetskois. Peter the Great’s half brother and co-ruler, Ivan V, married Praskovia Fedorovna Saltykova (1664–1723); their daughter Anna, Duchess of Courland, became Empress. The Saltykov clan included the Dolgorukovs and Apraksins. 1 As Catherine writes in this memoir, “the Saltykov family was one of the oldest and most noble of this empire. It was related to the Imperial house itself by the mother of Empress Anna, who was a Saltykov.” When Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth succeeded Anna in a coup in 1741, the Naryshkins defeated the Saltykovs by adding several members to