XI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia
10th-14th July 2023
Ruth Dawson (University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA), "What did Catherine II’s foreign general public know of her celebrity sex life, and when did they know it?"
European media makers—newspaper editors, portrait engravers, pamphleteers, and more—quickly made Catherine II a celebrity outside of Russia after she seized the imperial throne. This paper will retrace a strand of the argument I make in my just-published book, Catherine the Great and the Culture of Celebrity in the Eighteenth Century. Publicity about her sex life, a common element of celebrity discourse even in the eighteenth century, followed an uneven path over the course of her long reign. The story started scandalously with papers noting Peter III’s failure to name Paul as his heir and writers speculating, sometimes quite explicitly, what that implied about Catherine. For the next several decades, however, the topic of her sexual behavior popped up only occasionally with oblique hints. Then the tumult of the French Revolution changed the boundaries of public discourse, and lubricious satires deployed fanciful, sometimes indecent images of her sexual activity for political commentary. Finally, in the last years of Catherine II's life and especially in the first years after her death, a flood of details about her lovers appeared in print, reviving her celebrity, and giving her post-celebrity reputation a long-lasting turn.
