The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great by Kelsey Rubin-Detlev

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great by Kelsey Rubin-Detlev Alexei Evstratov The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great. By Kelsey Rubin-Detlev. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2020. xx+416 pp. £65. ISBN 978–1–789–62007–8. This monograph is a study of the letters of Catherine II, who was not only Empress of Russia between 1762 and 1796, but also a key Russian author of her time. It follows an edition of Catherine's letters co-edited by Kelsey Rubin-Detlev and Andrew Kahn (Catherine the Great: Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)); this almost simultaneous publication of source material with a separate commentary was once typical practice in classical philology. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one of the starting claims of this study is perhaps somewhat old-fashioned: Catherine's letters are her 'unrecognized literary masterpiece' (p. 14). But Rubin-Detlev's justification of her own thorough and erudite research helps the reader to grasp her argument. She approaches Catherine's several thousand known letters (between six thousand and ten thousand, depending on how restrictively one [End Page 516] defines a 'letter') as 'a unified literary corpus' (p. 9) to be analysed with literary as well as historical tools. (Other recent trends in the humanities are also prominently represented here: for example, the 'Correspondence of Catherine the Great' also exists as a digital database prepared by the same two editors, Rubin-Detlev and Kahn.) A major contention of Rubin-Detlev's study is the constructed nature of the authorial persona of the sovereign. The empress is construed through her letters 'as someone whose self-fashioning as an Enlightenment monarch and cultivated individual reveals the extent of her participation in eighteenth-century intellectual life' (p. 7). From a specialist perspective, such affirmation of Catherine's participation in the cultural processes of her time may not be necessary, for the ruler's involvement with the written word has been studied extensively since the 1990s. In my view, the main contribution of Rubin-Detlev's study is its systematic, material, and situational reconstitution of what sending a letter meant in the second half of the eighteenth century. Private and official correspondence has been considered, implicitly or explicitly, as an invaluable historical source and indeed actively used in history writing for three centuries, but only in recent decades have scholars asked the crucial question: to what exactly do letters provide access? Before the 1950s, they seemed to reveal the hidden reality of social processes, much as video recordings are supposed to do today. But when, after the Second World War, first-person writing, and specifically letters, gained more currency in the discipline of social history, extensive discussion arose as to their documentary value. It has been established, in particular, that like any other written document, letters gave voice to a relatively small group of people: those who were not only literate but lucky enough to have their writings preserved in private or state archives. Moreover, we now observe that the subject is not simply revealed in his or her own words, but also actively constructed by them. Rubin-Detlev's study insists on the importance of this carefully staged self in Catherine's letters, which reflect 'her extraordinary work of self-creation' (p. 34) and her self-fashioning as an enlightened ruler. Catherine's extremely privileged position is an asset, because research on her epistolary strategies can be supported by a large body of secondary literature. This enables Rubin-Detlev to embed her scholarly argument within the existing narratives of Catherine's reign, nuancing some of them. Rubin-Detlev's overall argument, however, provokes further questions. Now that she has shown how Catherine constructed her imperial persona through letter-writing, the idea of 'epistolary agency' (pp. 38–39) could be scrutinized in the broader context of power dynamics. It is instructive to see how exactly the empress deployed her authority within the text, but the social and political efficiency of such text cannot be explained solely by its literary and, more generally, rhetorical qualities. One might ask how this book's claim for the impressive efficiency of Catherine's strategies might be tested or verified. In a...