Catherine the Great полностью

There were other reasons, beyond political and dynastic, for the love and care Elizabeth lavished on Paul. It was not for reasons of state that she took physical possession of the baby. It was also a matter of love welling up from an emotional, sentimental nature; of bottled-up maternal impulses and a desire for family. Now, forty-four years old and in declining health, Elizabeth meant to be the child’s mother, even if the motherhood was make-believe. It was as a part of her effort to make this role real to herself that she excluded Catherine from the baby’s life. Elizabeth’s extreme possessiveness was more than an expression of thwarted maternal need; it was a form of jealousy. In effect, she simply kidnapped the baby.

What Elizabeth took, Catherine was denied. She was not allowed to care for her infant; indeed, she was scarcely allowed to see him. She missed his first smile and his early growth and development. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, when aristocratic and upper-class women performed little actual child care, leaving most of this work to wet nurses and servants, most mothers still held and fondled their newborn infants. Catherine never forgot the emotional misery attending the birth of her first child. Her son and her lover, the two humans she was closest to, were absent. She was desperate to see them both, but neither of them missed her; one did not know, the other did not care. In those weeks, she was made to understand that, having physically produced the baby, her role in creating an heir to the throne was concluded. Her son, a future emperor, now belonged to the empress and to Russia. The result of these months of separation and suffering was that Catherine’s feelings for Paul were never normal. Through the next forty-two years of their shared existence, she was never able to feel or display toward him the warmth of a mother’s affection.

Catherine refused to rise from her bed or leave her room “until I felt strong enough to overcome my depression.” She remained the entire winter of 1754–55 in this narrow, little room with its ill-fitting windows through which freezing drafts blew in from the icebound Neva River. To shield herself and to make life bearable, she turned again to books. That winter she read the Annals of Tacitus, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws), and Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations).

The Annals, a history of the Roman Empire from the death of the emperor Augustus in A.D. 14, through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, to the death of Nero in A.D. 68, offered Catherine one of the most powerful works of history of the ancient world. Tacitus’s theme is the suppression of liberty by tyrannical despotism. Convinced that strong personalities, good and evil, rather than deep underlying processes, make history, Tacitus painted brilliant character portraits in a spare but telling style. Catherine was struck by his descriptions of people, power, intrigue, and corruption in the early Roman Empire; she saw parallels in people and events surrounding her own life sixteen centuries later. His work, she said, “caused a singular revolution in my brain, to which, perhaps, the melancholy cast of my thoughts at this time contributed. I began to take a gloomier view of things and to look for deeper and more basic causes that really underlay and shaped the different events around me.”

Montesquieu exposed Catherine to an early Enlightenment political philosophy that analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of despotic rule. She studied his thesis that there could be contradictions between a general condemnation of despotism and the conduct of a specific despot. Thereafter, for a number of years, she attributed to herself a “republican soul” of the kind advocated by Montesquieu. Even after she reached the Russian throne—where the autocrat was, by any definition, a despot—she tried to avoid excesses of personal power, and to create a government in which efficiency was guided by intelligence; in short, a benevolent despotism. Later, she declared that L’Esprit des Lois “ought to be the Breviary of every sovereign of common sense.”