Catherine the Great - Selected Letters

The future Catherine the Second (or Great) was born Princess Sophia Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst in the Prussian port city of Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland). In 1744 she took the name Catherine on her engagement to Grand Duke Peter, heir to the Russian throne. After her husband was deposed in 1762, she became the empress and reigned till her death in 1796. A reformer on the domestic scene and an ardent proponent of an expansive Russian foreign policy abroad, she was an active legislator and military commander and prided herself on her close management of a vast, multi-ethnic empire that enjoyed considerable commercial and industrial growth over the period. After putting down an extensive peasant rebellion in 17734, Catherine implemented an important set of administrative reforms but necessarily stopped short of dismantling serfdom, the basis of the Russian political economy. Even as an absolute ruler, she owed her security on the throne to her ability to balance oligarchic factions. She waged two victorious wars against the Ottomans, annexing Crimea in 1783; she made Russia a leading diplomatic presence in Europe, combating French animosity early in her reign, mediating in European conflicts, and colluding with Austria and Prussia in repeated partitions of Poland. A voracious reader of contemporary literature and philosophical writings, the empress courted the intellectual elite of Europe and used her prestige to project abroad Russias image as a civilized and culturally distinguished land, marked by values of tolerance. At its peak in the 1780s, her reign saw the adoption of free press laws, and she patronized writers of secular literature, overseeing the flourishing of the theatre and the Academy of Sciences. Active herself as a playwright, amateur historian, and philologist, Catherine was a tireless epistolary writer for the sake of recreation as well as business.

A ndrew K ahn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He has edited several volumes for Oxford Worlds Classics, including Pushkins The Queen of Spades and Other Stories and Montesquieus Persian Letters, and for Oxford University Press is the author of Pushkins Lyric Intelligence (2008) and co-author of A History of Russian Literature (2018).

K elsey R ubin -D etlev is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. She was previously the Foote Junior Research Fellow in Russian at The Queens College, Oxford.

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