| Summary: | Catherine II of Russia was the most remarkable of the Enlightened Autocrats of the eighteenth century. She was a woman of compelling charm and elegance, a personality both enigmatic and fascinating. She had a prodigious appetite for work, great intellectual curiosity, boundless ambition and vanity, and at a time of license she was notorious for the number of her lovers. Her prodigal expenditure and her patronage of the arts made her reign an era of splendor, while her foreign policy and conquests carried Russian power and prestige to new heights. She cast a spell over most of her contemporaries in Russia and in Western Europe, and the spell has lingered: indeed, Voltaire's apostrophe -- "Happy the writer who a century hence will produce the history of Catherine II"--Well reflects the approach of most historians to her. But Catherine and her reign need to be examined afresh. - Preface.
|
|---|
