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The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure young German princess who traveled to Russia at fourteen and rose to become one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history.
Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into Empress of Russia by sheer determination. Possessing a brilliant mind and an insatiable curiosity as a young woman, she devoured the works of Enlightenment philosophers and, when she reached the throne, attempted to use their principles to guide her rule of the vast and backward Russian empire. She knew or corresponded with the preeminent historical figures of her time: Voltaire, Diderot, Frederick the Great, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Marie Antoinette, and, surprisingly, the American naval hero, John Paul Jones.
Reaching the throne fired by Enlightenment philosophy and determined to become the embodiment of the “benevolent despot” idealized by Montesquieu, she found herself always contending with the deeply ingrained realities of Russian life, including serfdom. She persevered, and for thirty-four years the government, foreign policy, cultural development, and welfare of the Russian people were in her hands. She dealt with domestic rebellion, foreign wars, and the tidal wave of political change and violence churned up by the French Revolution that swept across Europe. Her reputation depended entirely on the perspective of the speaker. She was praised by Voltaire as the equal of the greatest of classical philosophers; she was condemned by her enemies, mostly foreign, as “the Messalina of the north.”
Catherine’s family, friends, ministers, generals, lovers, and enemies—all are here, vividly described. These included her ambitious, perpetually scheming mother; her weak, bullying husband, Peter (who left her lying untouched beside him for nine years after their marriage); her unhappy son and heir, Paul; her beloved grandchildren; and her “favorites”—the parade of young men from whom she sought companionship and the recapture of youth as well as sex. Here, too, is the giant figure of Gregory Potemkin, her most significant lover and possible husband, with whom she shared a passionate correspondence of love and separation, followed by seventeen years of unparalleled mutual achievement.
The story is superbly told. All the special qualities that Robert K. Massie brought to Nicholas and Alexandra and Peter the Great are present here: historical accuracy, depth of understanding, felicity of style, mastery of detail, ability to shatter myth, and a rare genius for finding and expressing the human drama in extraordinary lives.
History offers few stories richer in drama than that of Catherine the Great. In this book, this eternally fascinating woman is returned to life.
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Editorial Review
Once upon a time, there was a minor German princess named Sophia. She went on to become the world’s richest and most powerful woman, ruler of its then-largest empire, revered as “Catherine the Great.” Her accomplishments and shortcomings as an autocrat and a woman make for a remarkable saga, and though many have tried, there may be no better author to take on the daunting task of chronicling than Robert K. Massie, a seasoned biographer of the 400-year Romanov dynasty, most notably with Peter the Great: His Life and World, which won a 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Massie situates Catherine’s early life and three-decade reign amidst the tumult of the European Enlightenment, enriching his own narrative with telling excerpts of her letters and rich discussions of her political environment and personal motivations. The result is an utterly memorable book, a towering accomplishment, one of the year’s best in any genre. –Jason Kirk, Amazon.Com Review
Catherine The Great: First She Read, Then She Ruled
NPR Book Review – November 5, 2011 (Excerpt)
How did a German princess from a minor noble family become the empress of Russia, and win the praise of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and other giants of The Enlightenment? In Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, Robert Massie explains the story of Catherine II, who ruled Russia for 34 years.
So how does a German teenager become the empress of Russia?
“That is what makes this such a great story,” Massie tells NPR’s Scott Simon. Empress Elizabeth — daughter of Peter the Great — couldn’t have children. Her nephew, who became Peter III, was raised in Germany, so Elizabeth reached out to his distant cousin — young, German Catherine — to be Peter’s wife, Massie explains.
The marriage wasn’t a happy one. “Peter was a very strange man, to put it mildly,” Massie says. “He was childish into his late adolescence, and he was strange throughout his life.”
Peter played with little toy soldiers all the time — and wasn’t particularly interested in his wife. “He was glad to see her, because she was German and he was German,” Massie says. “But he had no romantic or sexual interest in her at all.”
For the nearly two decades before she became empress, Catherine endured a miserable marriage; her husband didn’t pay attention to her, and she was under constant pressure from the empress to produce a child. To escape, she began to read. [Read the full article...]
Separating Royal Myth From Fact
The New York Times Book Review – November 9, 2011 (Excerpt)
Robert K. Massie’s new book, a biography of Catherine the Great, is out this week, and although Mr. Massie is 82, he is already thinking ahead to his next one. “There are all these things I want to do when I don’t have to finish a book,” he said last week, sitting in the upstairs study at his home here in Westchester County. “But I have to keep writing because I keep having children.”
There are six in all, from two marriages. The two youngest, 11 and 13, still live at home and are being home-schooled by Mr. Massie’s second wife, Deborah Karl, a former literary agent. That arrangement can probably not continue indefinitely, however. “We can’t count on scholarships,” Mr. Massie said with resignation.
Mr. Massie was born in Kentucky and grew up in Tennessee, and traces of the South linger in his accent, his courtly manners, his love of storytelling, his attachment to place, even in the North. He lives next door to the house where he lived for 28 years with his first wife, Suzanne, and across the street from an octagonal mansion whose domelike roof reminds him of Russia.
Mr. Massie is probably most famous for “Nicholas and Alexandra,” his book about the last of the Romanovs, which became an international best seller when it came out in 1969, and for his biography of Peter the Great, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. But in many ways he is an unlikely Russophile. [Read the full article...]
Empress of All the Russias
The New York Times Book Review – November 16, 2011 (Excerpt)
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.
It’s an elegantly simple and effective strategy, one familiar to Massie’s admirers, who will find his latest work as juicy and suspenseful as the book that thrust him into celebrity when it was published in 1967, smack in the middle of the cold war. The genius of “Nicholas and Alexandra” was that it recreated the tragedy of the last Romanov rulers from the inside out, intimately enough to challenge even a Bolshevik to insist on the decadence and inhumanity of monarchs whose first of many misfortunes was an accident of timing, as czarism was defunct if not yet dead when Nicholas inherited the crown. [Read the full article...]
“Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman,” by Robert K. Massie
The Washington Post Book Review – November 18, 2011 (Excerpt)
She was pen pals with Voltaire , a hard-working single mother who always kept a lover — 12 of them over the years. She rewrote Russia’s laws, expanded its borders and powers, made America’s John Paul Jones briefly an admiral in her navy and became Europe’s greatest art collector. A gown in the Kremlin Armory testifies to her amazing waist — whisper-thin when she was young.
Catherine the Great ascended to the Russian throne when her husband, Peter III, was removed in a coup in 1762. She herself led 14,000 soldiers to arrest him, charging along on a white horse, in uniform, a sword at her side. She ruled for 34 years, going to bed at 10 p.m., rising at 6 a.m., drinking black coffee and getting to work, running her empire until she died of a stroke on Nov. 6, 1796, at age 67.
She wrote diligently, to her lovers, to her diplomats, to friends, and left detailed memoirs, all put to good use by Robert K. Massie, biographer of the tsars, who brings great authority to this sweeping account of Catherine and her times. His story of this epic life is warm, sure and confiding, even when plowing through yet another war with the Turks.
Catherine was a 14-year-old small-town German princess named Sophia when she was summoned to Russia by Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, who was looking for a wife for her nephew, Peter’s grandson, Peter III. [Read the full article...]
Book review: An engaging portrait of ‘Catherine the Great’
The Chicago Tribune Book Review – November 27, 2011 (Excerpt)
She rejected the title by which posterity knows her, preferring always to conceal her steely ambition and regal pride under a mask of modesty and service. Yet “Catherine the Great” was indeed an apt sobriquet for the subject of Robert K. Massie’s latest foray into imperial biography (following the bestselling “Nicholas and Alexandra” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning ”Peter the Great”).
Born into the provincial German nobility, Catherine rose to seize the Russian crown from an unpopular husband and rule her adopted homeland for 34 years, confirming it as a major European power with victories over the Ottoman Empire and three ruthless partitions of Poland.
“A majestic figure in the age of monarchy,” as Massie rightly puts it, Catherine was also a proto-modern politician who understood the value of good publicity. She cultivated it by patronizing French Enlightenmentphilosophes Voltaire and Diderot, who viewed her as a model of the kind of benevolent autocrat they hoped would rationalize and reform the 18th century’s ossified, oppressive kingdoms. Catherine shared some of these hopes, but she was able to promulgate only limited change in the face of opposition from the Russian nobility, whose support was imperative for a foreign-born usurper plagued by revolts aiming to restore a male Romanov to the throne. [Read the full article...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.
