Catherine the Great полностью

The greater misfortune was Mamonov’s. Somehow, he mistook the empress’s parting generosity for lingering embers of passion. In 1792, tiring of his wife, he began writing the empress from Moscow, pleading for a renewal of the imperial liaison, lamenting his youthful “folly” in precipitating the loss of her favor, a memory, he said, that “constantly tortures my soul.” Catherine did not reply.

What was Catherine seeking in these ornamental young men? She has suggested that it was love. “I couldn’t live for a day without love,” she had written in her Memoirs. Love has many forms, however, and she did not mean sexual love alone, but also companionship, warmth, support, intelligence, and, if possible, humor. And also respect—not just the respect automatically due an empress, but the admiration a man gives an attractive woman. As she grew older, she wanted assurance that she could still attract a man and keep his love. A realist as well as a romantic, she knew and accepted the fact that because she was their sovereign, young men were drawn to her for reasons and with goals different from hers. Desire for love and sex played little part in attracting her lovers to her; they were motivated by ambition, desire for prestige, wealth, and, in some cases, power. Catherine knew this. She asked them for things other than simple sexual congress. She wanted an indication of pleasure in her company, a desire to understand her point of view, a willingness to be instructed by her intelligence and experience, an appreciation of her sense of humor, and an ability to make her laugh. The physical side of her relationships offered only brief distraction. When Catherine dismissed lovers, it was not because they lacked virility but because they bored her. One need not be an empress to find it impossible to talk in the morning to a person with whom one has spent the night.

The history of her youth and young womanhood helps explain her relationships with favorites. She had been a fourteen-year-old stranger brought to a foreign land. At sixteen, she had married a psychologically crippled and physically blemished adolescent. She spent nine years untouched by this man in their marriage bed. She had no family: her mother and father were dead; her three children were spirited away at the moment of birth. As the years passed, she became caught up in a search for the Fountain of Youth. Today, there are various ways of prolonging the illusion of youth, but in Catherine’s day there were not. She attempted to preserve her youth by identifying it with the affection—simulated, if necessary—of young men. When they were unable to prolong that illusion, either they or she ended the charade, and she tried again with someone else.

Catherine had twelve lovers. What shocked her contemporaries was not this number, but the age difference between Catherine and her later favorites. She crafted an explanation: she categorized these young men as students whom she hoped to develop into intellectual companions. If they did not completely measure up—and she did not pretend that one would become another Voltaire or Diderot, or even another Potemkin—then she could at least say that she was helping to train them for future roles in administering the empire.

How severely should her young favorites be judged for allowing themselves to be used; specifically, for submitting to a sexual liaison with someone they did not love? This is not just an eighteenth-century question, nor one to be asked only of young men. Women have always submitted to sexual relationships with men they do not love. Beyond physical force, and arrangements made by family, they usually have reasons similar to those of Catherine’s young men: ambition, a desire for wealth, for some form of power, and possible future independence. Catherine’s young men did not always independently aspire to become favorites. Rising from the lesser nobility, they were frequently urged on by relatives who hoped that the shower of imperial benevolence would also fall on them. Nor was it widely seen as immoral. Indeed, there was no case involving one of Catherine’s favorites in which the young man’s family raised a warning finger and said, “Stop! This is wrong!”