New on Intellicurean
She Read Tacitus
In the winter after her son was taken from her, the grand duchess who would become Catherine the Great read the Annals of Tacitus and wrote later that it caused “a singular revolution in my brain.” Seven years later she took a throne. What she learned from Tacitus was not how to seize one. It was who writes the record afterward.
In the winter after her son was taken from her, a grand duchess of twenty-five read the Annals and wrote later that it caused “a singular revolution in my brain.” Seven years later she took a throne. What she learned from Tacitus was not how to seize one. It was who writes the record afterward.
Catherine managed three documents about the coup of 1762: a manifesto that said she was compelled, a second that said her husband died of colic, and a long letter to a lover in Warsaw that told him everything, hour by hour, and told him colic too. A fourth document was found in her cabinet thirty-four years later: a note from Alexei Orlov confessing a drunken accident at Ropsha, which clears her of ordering the death, which survives only in a copy made in a quarter of an hour by a courtier of her son’s, and which the archive, when asked directly, cannot find.
The Peterhof road, six in the morning, 28 June 1762, as the essay imagines it. A generated image, not a record.
Why we’re pointing you there
Michael Cummins reads the four documents the way Tacitus taught Catherine to read everything: as records made by parties with reasons. Herzen in 1858, Bain in 1902, a Russian archivist who counted the letters in the folder and found two, and a confession that got drunker with each printing. One guess, graded, about why she wrote her own account first; two readings of the forgery, if it is one; and an ending in a drawer that held either the proof of her innocence or nothing at all.
The reader of Tacitus was read, at the end, by Tacitus’s method. The method cannot tell which.
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