Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The book is a biography of Prince Potemkin, one of the great characters of the Enlightenment altogether, internationally recognised. [Potemkin] became a minister, and the man who ruled Russia together with [Catherine the Great]: who expanded Russia all the way East – Ukraine, Crimea – and built 140 cities I think, and made Russia great and glorious and the Russia we know already... The book is about a great cocktail of Russia and the Enlightenment, with Catherine the Great as a bartender, mixing.
Your next book?
We move to the age of Enlightenment: a very nice, well-written book by Simon Sebag Montefiore, and it’s called The Life of Potemkin. So what do we have? We’ve had the reforms of Peter the Great, cutting his ‘window on to Europe’, then we had – and the 18th century is a crucial one – Russia meeting the Enlightenment. Catherine the Great comes to power, and that’s where the biggest revolution I think takes place, from the point of view of civilising the country. She has a great court, of which Voltaire was a part, as well as Potemkin, and this is a wonderful book about these times and days: highly entertaining, informative, pleasant and it’s a very important period, it’s when Russia became a great power. The book is a biography of Prince Potemkin, one of the great characters of the Enlightenment altogether, internationally recognised. You meet all the most interesting people of that era: from the Austrian Emperor Josef, to the Prince de Ligne – they’re all characters in this book and this is already not Muscovite Russia, it’s something transformed.
Who was Potemkin? Where did he come from?
He was one of Catherine’s Praetorian Guard, I think, and he became a favourite. Actually he was a husband of Catherine. They most likely married secretly, and he became a minister and the man who ruled Russia together with her: who expanded Russia all the way East – Ukraine, Crimea – and built 140 cities I think, and made Russia great and glorious and the Russia we know already. The 19th century with its great literature –Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol – it all comes out of these liberal days, liberal in a certain way, of Potemkin, Catherine, Voltaire, and the Enlightenment, so definitely worth reading. The book is about a great cocktail of Russia and the Enlightenment, with Catherine the Great as the bartender, mixing.
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Andrei Maylunas is an eminent historian on pre-Soviet Russia with unique access to the Moscow archives. He has edited and compiled several books on the Romanoffs. He says Dostoevsky’s book Demons is about Russia’s future. ‘It’s about what has happened, and what’s going to happen to Russia’s intelligentsia and nobility. It gives you a flavour of the nascent 20th-century Russia with all its ups and downs: the literature, horrors, terrors, revolutions, bloodshed, the peaks, the depths – you already feel it. You smell it and you taste it in Demons.’
