Catherine the Great [Hardcover]

Zoe Oldenbourg (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House (January 1965)
• ISBN-10: 0394418697
• ISBN-13: 978-0394418698
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,626,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Historical Biography, August 23, 2003

By 

doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Catherine the Great (Hardcover)

This long-lost study of Catherine the Great is a rather dry but certainly solid historical biography, of a woman who has often been misunderstood by history. The book does not contain very much coverage of Catherine's actual time as Empress of Russia (about half of her life), but that is material better suited to history books, and the personal aspects of her life had apparently gotten monotonous by that point. Instead, most of the book focuses on Catherine's life before her rule, as she worked her way up the ladder of European nobility and usurped the Russian throne. We learn that Catherine was actually a German girl named Sophia, from a family of minor nobles in a backwater German principality. She was used uncaringly by her family to gain influence in noble circles until she ended up in an arranged marriage to the heir to the Russian throne, and then found herself ruling this backward nation. Oldenbourg has a real flair for palace intrigue and the petty political shenanigans among the nobility that first swept Catherine along reluctantly, but which she eventually learned to exploit to her own advantage. We also see the backwardness of Russia during that era, as a disconnected nobility pathetically emulated the cultured houses of Europe with little knowledge of the awful, medieval lives of the common Russians. Catherine gets due credit for bringing culture and modernity to her adopted country, though not without earning a bad reputation as an corrupt seductress and self-obsessed dictator. (Oldenbourg debates such incorrect opinions but fails to tackle the inherent sexism of such historical condemnations.) Ultimately, this book can be a bit of a slog but paints a worthy picture of one of history's most powerful women. [~doomsdayer520~]

3.0 out of 5 stars "Tell Him That Catherine Is Only Worth Seeing From A Distance" - Catherine The Great, January 2, 2012

By 

Don Reed "Don" (Cliffside Park NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Catherine the Great (Women Who Made History) (Hardcover)

Catherine The Great, Zoe Oldenbourg [1916-2002]; Pantheon Books [Random House] (1965)

A history well worth reading despite its liabilities:

1) Random House - so-called white shoe Random House! - went on the cheap & passed on paying for the creation of an indispensible index;

2) Oldenbourg displayed only the faintest interest (or the symptoms of chronological amnesia) in providing the month/years of the major events of CTG's 34-year reign as Empress of Russia (1762-1796).

This is what usually results from this lackadaisical approach: On p. 72, the Marquis de la Chetardie is expelled from Russia. Then, on p. 73, somehow, he's still in the country & at the St. Petersburg court, he "complimented [CTG] on her coiffure." And not by email, either.

Worse: "The day [that] the French Revolution broke out, Catherine was horrified & indignant." Sorry. Television, radio - not even the telegraph existed in 1789 (years later, Napoleon - having invaded Russia in 1812 - was also completely dependent on messengers on horseback for news of events happening elsewhere in his empire).

She couldn't have informed about this event until perhaps two-four weeks after the Bastille had been stormed (July 14, 1789), which, incidentally, is my guess as to which event the author had had in mind (but didn't bother to state).

The back-of-the-book "chronological table" is of some use, but fails to state whether or not the exact dates are from the Julian Old Style or Gregorian New Style calendars (an issue that is also all but ignored in the text itself. In the context of Russian history, these are incredible omissions).

Also note that in the chronological table, the entry of the "storming of the Bastille" is incorrectly listed as having happened in 1788.

3) The insane & incessant instances of boiler-plate writing - the most prominent being the dozens of "in facts," escorted down the aisle by "the like of which had never been seen," the latter phrase having already been seen in countless previous histories - ruined many a paragraph.

The book starts out strongly (especially admired was the chapter providing a synopsis of the reign of Peter The Great); sags & nearly collapses in the middle (with interminable & redundant meanderings about the psychological & sexual derangements of the pathetic Peter III, how CTG could have been secretly in love with Potemkin - without she herself actually knowing of it! etc.); & then finishes quite admirably.

Having come away from this biography with a personal aversion to Catherine The Great, for now, this will suffice.

*****

Weirdly: Just as I was finishing this forgotten book, Robert's Massie's biography of CTG made its debut, on or about 01/01/12.

Maureen Callahan in the NY Post - usually an original, compelling & candid writer - apparently took the publisher's Cliff Notes & rewove them into a book review-lovefest of the regime of an Empress, during which the sadistic system of exploitation of Russia's millions of serfs intensified at the same time that she was hypocritically championing the principles of the Enlightenment.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Catherine The Great, June 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Catherine the Great (Hardcover)

Her contemporaries -- men of the caliber of Volaire and Diderot among them -- called her the Star of the North, Minerva, "admirable autocrat, conqueror, peacemaker, and legislator"; she was the "Mother Tsarina" of all the Russias, mother of her country, mother of her people, Catherine the Wise; she was the friend of the Enlightenment or, more modestly, an "enlightened despot". She was also the Messalina of the North, the gross et vieille Cateau of the revolutionary pamphleteers. To history she will always be Catherine The Great, one of the three of four women who have ruled in their own right, for any length of time, over a great nation and who have left behind them a glorious memory of their reign.

She was more than simply a great ruler, and more than a remarkable woman: already she belongs among the half-legendary figures whose lives have been popularized and vulgarized in films, plays, and novels with little regard for that they were really like.

Catherine has had no lack of chroniclers, and all of them, objective and impartial scholars, dedicated admirers and passionate detractors alike, have found abundant material in the records left by her contemporaries and by Catherine herself. Few historical characters have, in the course of their lives, been so thoroughly observed, judged, and described by their contemporaries, and there are fewer still who have left so much written testimony about themselves.