monarchs did, and she kept them, as John Alexander has detailed, at arm’s length
from power. But contemporary English and French press slandered her with
pornography to diminish her reputation, a tactic of Enlightenment political dis-
course also used against Marie Antoinette and Frederick the Great. Meanwhile, in
Russia contemporaries grumbled about her favorites squeezing them out of access,
but a specifically sexual discourse did not develop until late in her reign, itself
inspired by French erotic writing. The future fabulist Ivan Krylov, reeling from
having three journals of political critique shut down between 1789 and 1793,
published in 1792 and 1793 allegorical tales and poems laced with sexual double
entrendres known to anyone familiar with French pornographic literature, and
clearly directed at the ageing Catherine. M. M. Shcherbatov at the same time
criticized the loose morals of Catherine’s court, but not in explicitly sexual terms.
Insulting the Romanov dynasty as illegitimate and immoral through pornography
found some currency among dissidents of the early nineteenth century, but neither
these ideas, nor pornographic images, became common Russian parlance. Rather,
Catherine was extolled in Russian history writing and public opinion for her
achievements, her Enlightenment culture, and complete devotion to Russia, an
image honed by her grandson Alexander I. She is memorialized in a statue in
St. Petersburg that can be read as a celebration of her cultural contributions, as it
surrounds her with the writers, poets, diplomats, and officials that thrived in her
glittering reign.
Returning to Russia’s imperial imaginary: Russia’s eighteenth-century rulers did
not transform the imperial imaginary, but refreshed it. They blended Muscovite
political practice with sweeping claims to absolute power and Enlightenment nods
Figure 13.5Catherine II, like Peter, commissioned myriad portraits of herself to shape her
public image; this by Vigilius Erichsen (painted between 1749 and 1782) emphasizes her
cultured sophistication. With permission of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
278 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801