This volume, the translation into English of Vera Proskurina’s Imperiia pera Ekateriny II: Literatura kak politika (Intellektualˊnaia istoriia) (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017), tackles a series of thorny problems relating to Catherine II’s literary production. The topic is a difficult one, for Catherine’s writing is always entangled with her role as sovereign and, insofar as designed to sustain and promote her views, policies, and programs, requires diverse varieties of expertise to properly unravel. Proskurina very convincingly demonstrates the necessary skills and illustrates the importance of selected literary texts from Catherine’s oeuvre by firmly placing them in cultural and political history. Often couched in the fashionable “humorous guise” of a carefully constructed literary game (x), Catherinian literary texts were instruments of policy and public relations, “directives … delivered on behalf of abstract power” (x), that helped the Empress to cement her position on the Russian throne and to put forward a new image of the empire as “a civilized landscape: … imaginary, mental, with little relationship to real space and time” (xii).

The volume presents six different case studies or topics, all of them useful for better understanding Catherine as both writer and ruler. Ch. 1 explores her authorship of Antidote (1770), part of a network of literary and cultural communications designed to subvert a negative image of Russia abroad. Catherine worked secretly and “intensively” (8) on this endeavor, uncharacteristically maintaining strict anonymity. Her volume was a heated response to the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche’s damaging Journey to Siberia (1770), which slandered the image of Russia for a European readership, blurring the reigns of Elizabeth and Peter III (when Chappe d’Auteroche had visited Russia) with those of “the empress of Anhalt-Zerbst” as he disparagingly referred to the current sovereign (5). Proskurina inserts this controversy into a larger discussion of Russo-French relations, illustrating how Antidote was an important component of the anti-French policy that lasted into 1774 and provided support for Nikolai Novikov’s journalism.

Ch. 2 probes Catherine’s antagonistic relationship with Moscow, a topic addressed in a cycle of six plays (including “O, These Times!”), not all of them staged, dating from 1772 and ostensibly “composed in Yaroslavl” or otherwise linked to it. Written in the aftermath of the Moscow Plague Riots (1771) and on the backdrop of the Russo-Turkish War, these dramas attack Muscovite ignorance and fanaticism—traits that, Proskurina’s quotations implicitly suggest, were largely if not exclusively represented on the stage by female characters. Ch. 3 analyzes the personages and “prototypes” behind Catherine’s “fairy tales” about “Prince Khlor” (1781) and “Prince Fevei” (1782), situating them in a rich tradition of exotic plots and motifs that captivated Europe and Russia in the era, and were famously subjected to further elaboration by Gavriil Derzhavin (“Felitsa,” “To Reshemysl”). Written during her son Paul’s travels in Europe, Catherine’s skazki aimed to unseat his supporters and associates (the Panin party, the Freemasons) and to focus attention on her grandson Alexander.

In Ch. 4, Proskurina probes Catherine’s 1783 conflict with Denis Fonvizin, a representative of the Panin faction who challenged imperial policy with “A Few Questions That Might Excite the Special Attention of Intelligent and Honest People,” published anonymously in The Interlocutor by editor Ekaterina Dashkova. Catherine ably defused the provocative questions of her antagonist, whom she long thought to be Ivan Shuvalov, using The Interlocutor in turn to publicize her own ideas and reframe her rule as modern, enlightened, and independent of Petrine tradition. Ch. 5 shows Catherine buckling down against Freemasonry in three satirical comedies from 1786, including “The Siberian Shaman.” Believing Freemasonry “a serious threat to her entire policy agenda” (121), she used these stage dramas and related texts to lampoon “superstition, mysticism, and pseudoscience” (115), the adventurer Alessandro Cagliostro, and other prominent figures.

In Ch. 6, Catherine unveils her “Greek project” with the aid of various texts and theatrical productions, most notably a lavish opera, “The Initial Administration of Oleg,” which put seven-hundred persons on stage, claimed Kyivan history as the empire’s own, and presented the taking of Crimea and the Black Sea littoral as a “return” to ancient roots. Such “retrospective utopianism,” the “attempt to reconstruct antiquity” (165) and with it Russian history, unfolded in terms that are startlingly familiar today.

Throughout the volume, Catherine’s literary activity is shown to have been produced in conversation with Europe (Voltaire, Grimm, Diderot) and to intertwine with the work of other writers in Russia, most notably Derzhavin, Novikov, and Fonzivin, thus offering material on each of these and on their interrelation. Readers will miss Russian and French glosses for a number of key words cited in English, particularly as the translations are not always clear. The volume also includes a number of errors in spelling and copyediting. That said, The Imperial Script of Catherine the Great contains a wealth of interesting literary and political analyses and contextual detail that will help to make Catherine’s literary production more comprehensible to readers and thus is an important and very welcome resource.