From Paris to St. Petersburg: Voltaire's Library in Russia

Abstract

For nearly all of her forty-nine years Catherine II, empress of Russia, had known about Voltaire, the most famous writer of her age. Serious about her education in her youth, she had enjoyed works by French writers, but among them, she later said, Voltaire so amused her dur ing a long, sad period of her life that he became her favorite author. As she wrote him in 1763, By chance your works fell into my hands; and since then I have never stopped reading them, have not wished to have anything to do with books which were not written as well and from which the same profit could not be derived.1 So admiring of Voltaire was she that, following his death in 1778, she set about to acquire his personal library. French writers and French fashion had come into vogue among the Russian nobility a generation earlier, when in 1741 Elizabeth Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I who had hoped to marry the French king, Louis XV, or at least a French duke, came to power. On the Russian throne the new tsarina habitually looked to Paris for style and inspiration and maintained her French ways. As a result, Russian aristocracy scrupulously copied French fashion, took on French manners, and adopted French interior designs for their palaces. French theater, under the direction of Serigny, opened its doors in St. Petersburg. French language, literature, and philosophy became integral elements in the education of the Russian upper class. In January 1762 Peter III succeeded his aunt Elizabeth but ruled only a few months before, on July 9, 1762, the Imperial Guards, helped by court aristocrats, overthrew him and placed his thirty-three-year-old wife, Catherine, on the throne. The new empress of Russia, who admired Voltaire so deeply, had been born in 1729 in the German city of Stettin (Szczecin, Poland, today). The daughter of Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, she had been christened Sophie d'Anhalt-Zerbst. In 1744 Russian empress Elizabeth Petrovna, who had no children, invited the