Was Catherine the Great an Enlightenment monarch? Kelsey Rubin-Detlev gives us a new set of tools to address this age-old question through the systematic analysis of her voluminous correspondence, confidently answering it in the affirmative. By placing Catherine's letters alongside ones by Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Teresa of Austria, and by situating them in the overall corpus of the Enlightenment “republic of letters,” Rubin-Detlev demonstrates Catherine's adherence to, and play with, the rules and conventions governing that republic. She also uses them to interrogate Catherine's conception of the Enlightenment monarch, analyzing how the empress “fashioned” herself to fit this definition.

A literary historian, Rubin-Detlev's primary aim is to demonstrate that Catherine's “epistolarium,” the entire corpus of her ten thousand letters, should be read as a literary work, indeed, as an “unrecognized literary masterpiece” (10, 14, 33). The sources, drawn from print media and archival holdings, are impressive. Measuring Catherine's letters against the dominant conventions of her time, Rubin-Detlev points to templates, such as the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, an important model for Catherine, and to eighteenth-century French letter-writing manuals. Myriad elements went into the design of each missive, calibrated to the political and social status of the recipient, his or her personality and tastes, the circumstances of writing—diplomatic, political, military, cultural, or intimately personal—and the potential range of third parties to be reached. By adjusting the tone of address, paper size, margins, datelines, postscripts, calligraphy, choice of language, length and construction of sentences, with an admixture of literary, philosophical, and theatrical allusions, Catherine could create trust and intimacy while maintaining her authority (Ch. 4). Detailed analysis renders risible claims by some earlier historians that Catherine could not have written the letters because her French or Russian was too poor (188–89). It was precisely the empress’ mastery and play with epistolary etiquette that drew formidable correspondents, such as Voltaire and Geoffrin, into her ambit and allowed her to “manage” her international reputation.

The image of the “Enlightenment monarch” around whom Catherine fashioned herself was “not just rational…but also refined, sociable” (25). Detlev-Rubin deduces her concept from philosophical and literary sources—especially entries in the Encyclopédie,—secondary literature, and Catherine's own letters. Notions of “heroism” and “the great man,” partly based on Stoic models, dictated a combination of “warlike virtues with moral and political virtues”: constancy, steadfastness, and humanity (153–54, 173, 192). Oddly, however, the enlightened monarch must be both stoical and gregarious. Catherine balanced these qualities in her French and Russian correspondence. Her preferred subgenre, the “gallant letter,” hinged on “wit and mastery of elite sociability.” She often portrayed herself as “laughing,” “gay” and “cheerful,” though the author warns us not to take such statements at face value: they were rhetorical strategies designed alternately to “disarm” her opponents and to “win her servitors’ loyalty” (91–97). Similarly, her prodigious wit, imitating Voltaire's, was designed to show that she understood the philosophes’ writings and could fully participate in their world (101). This was no less a message to the French court: Russia, as emblematized by Catherine, was a civilized country and a force to be reckoned with (277, 280, 289). In casting herself as an Enlightened monarch, Rubin-Detlev argues, it mattered little that Catherine was a woman: as an empress, she stood above “sexual differentiation” (106, 138). Though her gallant letters could be flirtatious, flirtation could be directed at men and women alike. Her famous love letters were the exception, not the rule.

If Catherine was an Enlightenment monarch, was she also an “enlightened” autocrat? Rubin-Detlev provides no clear answer, and historians have remained skeptical, pointing to the last decade of her reign. When Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, Voltaire, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Denis Diderot died, Catherine did not replace them with young luminaries (57). Indeed, after the onset of the French Revolution and the beheading of Louis XVI, she allowed sixty-seven of Voltaire's works to be burnt (302). As she herself suspected, her epistolary techniques, which had always been predicated on the dominance of a cultured elite, were ill-suited to the revolutionary age. Correspondents, and the fate of her letters, also proved more difficult to control. Thus, “she used the same devices as ever to amuse and win over her entourage,” but her foremost addressees of the 1790s were the ones least in need of winning over: her undistinguished favorite, Platon Zubov, and his brother Valerian (320–21). A conclusion: one need not be enlightened to qualify as an Enlightenment monarch.