Have you read the biography of Catherine the Great? It's fascinating, and completely memorable. Now some of Catherine's letters have been published in a book entitled Love and Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin.
The TLS, bless them, have given us a peek at the book. This is from their article, That fornicatress Catherine.
Posted on December 23, 2004 11:35 AM. Filed under: history & archaeology.On February 21, 1774, Catherine II of Russia wrote what has been described as one of the most revealing letters ever penned by a European monarch. In it she listed her lovers (just four in addition to her unsatisfactory late husband) and confessed: "The trouble is that my heart is loath to be without love even for a single hour . . . . If you want to keep me forever, then show me as much friendship as love, and more than anything else, love me and tell me the truth". The recipient, the dashing Guards officer Grigory Potemkin, was installed as official favourite forthwith. He relinquished the post in 1776, but continued to love Catherine, and mostly to tell her the truth, until his death in 1791.
Love and Conquest chronicles their relationship in 464 annotated letters, originally in Russian interspersed with French and ranging from a few scribbled, undated lines ("You naughty little thing, are you going to pout for long?"), to long discussions of politics. The texts in this, the most comprehensive and scholarly English-language edition to date, are drawn from Viacheslav Lopatin’s landmark publication (Moscow, 1997) of 1,162 items of personal correspondence. The fate of the letters after their authors’ deaths deserves a book in its own right. Those that survived (Catherine burned most of Potemkin’s early billets-doux) were locked away, then subjected to both tsarist and Soviet censorship, the latter on the grounds that the writings of the "great fornicatress" were of no historical or literary value. [continue]