XI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia
10th-14th July 2023
Hilde Hoogenboom (Arizona State University, AZ, USA), "How Catherine Became The Great"
Catherine the Great is in the air again. A four-part BBC series on HBO stars Helen Mirren and covers her reign. A ten-part series on Hulu called The Great, now with a second ten-part season, covers Catherine’s life as she comes Empress in 1762. While the BBC series is good history, The Great proudly claims to be only “occasionally true.” What in Catherine’s unusually intense afterlife in history and the arts – the plays, movies, and television – explains how two such different versions of Catherine’s II’s life could appear at the same time? The answer lies in the history of the documents. Catherine herself prepared her legacy as an enlightened ruler who was a writer. She paid attention to what Europeans wrote about her and Russia, suppressing critical histories abroad. In the nineteenth century her memoirs were a state secret because they indicate that her heir Paul I was illegitimate, and thus the rest of Romanov dynasty. Her reign remained politically controversial because she expanded the Russian Empire around the Black Sea and into Ukraine and Poland, also expanding serfdom. In the twentieth century, the Bolsheviks erased the legacy of the Russian empire. Only since the end of the Soviet empire in 1991 have Russians begun to practice the art of writing the royal biographies of their founding fathers and mothers.
