26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
It's all about Catherine!, August 5, 2004
This review is from: Great Catherine: The Life of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (Paperback)
I read Great Catherine as an informal preparation for a class on Russian history. Having finished it, I can't recommend it for anyone interested in her era.
The book does have some strengths. Erickson writes well. She has an abundance of empathy with her subject (which is a strength in a biography but only up to a point). The book does give you a basic timeline of Catherine's life, and may be useful in that regard.
However, the focus of Great Catherine is quite unsatisfactory. The book's central project seems to be redeeming Catherine's reputation from those who claim she was a depraved nymphomaniac. While we've all heard the story involving the horse, I don't think that this is an issue that really has broad historical meaning.
Nonetheless, Great Catherine mires itself in a tiresome recollection of each of Catherine's affairs. Erickson's sympathy for Catherine overrides any inclination she might have had to ask serious and critical questions about how this aspect of Catherine's life may have affected her rule. Whatever she did in the bedchamber, Catherine chose to act in a way that gathered attention and started rumors, making herself the object of ridicule and scorn. The alibi that she was seeking love only holds for her first few flings. The pattern that Erickson sketches is that of someone in the grips of pathological behavior.
Tellingly, Erickson seems to embrace Catherine's explanations for each breakup - which invariably fault the male partner and not the love-starved monarch. Whether or not she was a nymphomaniac, Catherine's behavior was self-destructive. A more inquisitive biography would steer past melodramatic commentary about the monarch's poor impoverished heart and ask how the monarch's personal life impacted her statecraft.
This is a book that is overly obsessed with appearances. Catherine's radiant appearance and demeanor is discussed incessantly. After a while, I was willing to take it on faith that, yes, she was very charming and also happened to look good. Erickson seemingly cannot mention people without mentioning their physical features. The reader is repeatedly reminded how ugly Peter III's mistress was. A similar level of detail is lavished on pageantry, with one dinner or ball only more stunning than its predecessor. Again, the reader - starved of more substantive details - is willing to accept that, yes, the Russian court liked luxurious living.
Very little of the book is devoted to discussions of Catherine's rule as empress and none of that is at all analytical or insightful. As elsewhere, Erickson offers a basic defense of her protagonist. Major acts of policy are not dealt with in detail. Catherine's role in the destruction of the Polish state is covered in a few paragraphs that blandly note that this was commonly approved of at the time. Her policies toward the conquered Poles are not discussed. Nor is the contradiction between her earlier course of seating her favorite on the Polish throne and her later course of outright annexation discussed.
Similarly, the book fails to examine her two wars with the Ottomans in satisfying detail. What glimpses we do get of the wartime Catherine make her seem quite jingoistic and aggressive. How does this reconcile with the tender-hearted reader of philosophy portrayed elsewhere in the book? Moreover, the book never asks hard questions about her war policies - which are particularly important because the second war with the Ottomans dragged on far longer than Catherine would have liked, being complicated by a simultaneous war with Sweden. We do get the detail that bad news from the front impelled Catherine to retreat and read Plutarch in solitude. What a committed, capable monarch!
Another biographer might have at least dealt with Catherine's pivotal decision to confine Jews to the Pale of Settlement - a critical act of policy that set the stage for the pogroms of the following century. Her policy toward minorities is never discussed.
The book's overall examination of Catherine's policies is quite laudatory. This is odd, because it seemed that her efforts to reform the state were constantly frustrated by the nobles and by peasant rebellions. Why nobles and peasants opposed her so much is a question left unanswered. Where Catherine fails, Erickson attributes the failure to all other parties; never to the ambitious empress. If something went wrong, it could only have been the fault of backward peasantry or corrupt nobles. The long term impact of her policies is unexamined.
In sum, I think this is an unsatisfactory biography. It focuses on Catherine's personality at the expense of understanding her actions. At its heart is an unproductive infatuation with its subject that leads the author to skirt around serious questions in favor of endless and repetitive description. I am left convinced that Catherine was indeed a bright, cheery, intelligent woman, but it is left to other authors to determine her real historical significance. Catherine may have been great, but this biography certainly is not.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Footnotes? Bibliography?, March 15, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Great Catherine: The Life of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (Paperback)
I was disappointed by Carolly Erickson's biography of Catherine II of Russia. Erickson's excellent biography of Mary Tudor, "Bloody Mary," led me to expect an equivalent level of research and writing for this opus. But Erickson has not duplicated her earlier success.
We are given few precise citations for any incidents, and the sources mentioned at the end are insultingly lean. Erickson has relied heavily on Catherine's own self-serving memoirs, and the resulting lack of objectivity has resulted in a book that should be filed under the category of 'historical fiction.'
Why does this bother me? Erickson's lax approach to footnotes and references is, to me, symptomatic of a growing trend toward carelessly researched and badly written history and biography. (For example: Ronald Reagan's official biographer wrote himself into the text of "Dutch," and invented non-existent characters.)
The Internet is rife with under-researched and inaccurate info-babble, and one often hears the complaint that modern readers are drowning in an ocean of untrustworthy data.
I think that if our technologically-based information age is to thrive, then we must demand a high standard of scholarship from our authors.
History can be both accurately documented and interesting --- one *can* truly instruct *and* delight, as Sir Philip Sidney suggested. (See Antonia Fraser's moving and well-researched biography, "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," for a prime example of a well-written, popular historical biography.)
So, Ms. Erickson, if you want to write historical fiction --- as is the case with "Great Catherine" --- please require your editor to promote your literature in that category. Don't sell your mushy prose under the moniker of 'history' or 'biography.'
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but not perfect, May 24, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Great Catherine: The Life of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (Paperback)
I became interseted in Russian history in class and especially in Catherine because she is such an amazing figure. I thought the book was written splendidly, and I admired the work, however, it's focus was purely on her life before becoming empress, which is good, but there is very little about her life after becoming empress. This book seemed to be clearly written by a woman and I don't think that it talked enough about her faults. I do like how it is a very interesting to read, shares lots of small stories, and it doesn't dwell on her sex life like many other books do. Overall I think it is an excellent book, telling an excellent story excellently.
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