Catherine the Great: autocrat and Empress of all Russia.

Catherine the Great: autocrat and Empress of all Russia.

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Grey, Ian, 1918-1996, author.
Imprint:	Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1962, [©1961]
Description:	254 pages illustrations 22 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Catherine -- II, -- Empress of Russia, -- 1729-1796. Catherine -- II, -- Empress of Russia, -- 1729-1796. Empresses -- Russia -- Biography. Empresses. Russia (Federation) Biographies. Biography. Biographies.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/3417905

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Notes:	Includes index.
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.
Other form:	Online version: Grey, Ian, 1918-1996. Catherine the Great: autocrat and Empress of all Russia. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1962, [©1961]

Table of Contents:

The German princess, 1744
Russia in the reign of Elizabeth
Marriage and the birth of an heir, 1744-54
The time of trial, 1754-62
Elizabeth and Catherine
The empress dies, 1761
The empress consort, 1762
The uneasy empress, 1762-64
Russia, Prussia, and Poland, 1762-68
The enlightened empress, 1766-68
War and revolution, 1768-75
Potemkin, 1774-77
The reign of splendour, 1775-87
The academies
Finance and reforms
The time of triumphs, 1783-92
The ageing empress, 1790-96.