Catherine the Great
The daughter of an impoverished aristocrat, Catherine was married aged 16 to Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne of all the Russias, a feckless teenager with a weakness for drink. Catherine was only able to give him an heir by passing off her lover's son as his own. In 1762, Catherine rode out of St Petersburg at the head of an army to arrest her husband. Three months later she became sole empress of the largest empire on earth. She was 33 years old. She ruled Russia as a benevolent autocrat for 34 years,fighting the Turks abroad and rebellion at home, and shepherding her people through the upheavals of the French Revolution. She took on many lovers but gave her heart to General Potemkin, the foremost statesman of her time. She died in 1796 aged 67, revered by her people as 'our mother', praised by Voltaire as a philosopher, reviled by her enemies as the Messalina of the North and remembered in history as Catherine the Great.
3.5 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, History |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
656 |
| RRP |
|
| Date of Publication |
July 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1908800008 |
| Publisher |
Head of Zeus |
| |
The daughter of an impoverished aristocrat, Catherine was married aged 16 to Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne of all the Russias, a feckless teenager with a weakness for drink. Catherine was only able to give him an heir by passing off her lover's son as his own. In 1762, Catherine rode out of St Petersburg at the head of an army to arrest her husband. Three months later she became sole empress of the largest empire on earth. She was 33 years old. She ruled Russia as a benevolent autocrat for 34 years,fighting the Turks abroad and rebellion at home, and shepherding her people through the upheavals of the French Revolution. She took on many lovers but gave her heart to General Potemkin, the foremost statesman of her time. She died in 1796 aged 67, revered by her people as 'our mother', praised by Voltaire as a philosopher, reviled by her enemies as the Messalina of the North and remembered in history as Catherine the Great.
Reviews
The New York Times
Kathryn Harrison
“How delightful to discover that Robert K. Massie, 82 years old, hasn’t lost his mojo. At a heft befitting its subject, his long-awaited Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman is a consistently nimble and buoyant performance, defying what might in a lesser writer’s hands prove a deadly undertow of exhaustively researched historical facts. Of course, Massie, who has spent almost half a century studying czarist Russia, has always been a biographer with the instincts of a novelist. He understands plot — fate — as a function of character, and the narrative perspective he establishes and maintains, a vision tightly aligned with that of his subject, convinces a reader he’s not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes.”
16/11/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Frances Wilson
“Hugely entertaining ... The life of Catherine the Great has the pace of a good thriller, but Massie instead tells the story as a leisurely 19th-century novel in which no detail is considered too small. Few biographies contain so accurate an account of the number of contractions experienced during childbirth or declare with such confidence which man gave his subject the most sexual pleasure (the muscular Orlov). The book would be improved by the addition of a chronology and cast list, and the illustrations are on the slender side, but it is otherwise an unforgettable picture of the last woman to rule Russia.”
03/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
Dominic Sandbrook
“Splendidly observed … though Massie’s old-fashioned life and times breaks little new ground, it is nevertheless tremendously enjoyable … He does, however, puncture one of European history’s great myths. Catherine did not die while having sex with a horse, but dropped dead of a stroke in her bathroom”
08/07/2012
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The Washington Post
Kathy Lally
“Today, 215 years later, the authorities are still promising Enlightenment — now they call it modernization — and their people are still accusing them of building Potemkin villages. Catherine’s life is as instructive as ever, and Massie has made it into a compelling read. ”
18/11/2011
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The Daily Express
Duncan Fallowell
“Her own memoirs written in French are superb and concise, unlike her latest biography here. Robert Massie has specialised in big, traditional books on Romanovs, so it comes as a surprise to see that he doesn’t appear to have gone to primary sources in Russian or French. What we have instead is an overview drawn from English language publications. He writes externally rather than analytically which produces some strange effects, chief of which is that the Catherine before and after the seizure of power seems to be two different women.”
29/06/2012
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The Financial Times
Virginia Rounding
“Massie, whose particular strengths are his readability and the way in which he places the events of Catherine’s life in their national and international context, deals rather cursorily with the empress’s relationships with her favourites, as well as with her grandchildren, to whom she was devoted. His sources are limited to Catherine’s own memoirs, a few diaries and some letters (those, for instance, written by her mother Johanna to her spouse back in Zerbst); otherwise he relies heavily on the work of other scholars.”
29/06/2012
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The Literary Review
Donald Rayfield
“This biography should be read for its enthralling account of Catherine’s youth, a lesson to historians on writing for non-specialists. But as the life of an empress and as a professional history, Robert K Massie’s book is no match for Isabel de Madariaga’s Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great or Simon Dixon’s Catherine the Great.”
01/07/2012
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The New Yorker
Books Briefly Noted
“Massie's portrait is lively and sympathetic, but his judgments sometimes seem overly subjective. He asserts that she promoted smallpox inoculation because she "took seriously the responsibility of maternal care for her people." He interweaves deeply researched accounts of military conquests with speculation about Catherine's infamous but under-documented love life. During one affair, Massie imagines, she was torn "between drawn-out, draining sexual pleasure and her duties as a ruler."”
21/11/2011
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