Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

I had a goal to read five biographies in the last year or two, and this is the fifth since I started. I loved the other Massie book I read (Nicholas and Alexandra) so I decided to continue the Russian theme and read his book about Catherine the Great. I knew literally nothing about her; her name sounded vaguely familiar but I didn't even know which century she'd lived in. It was really interesting to learn more about Russia in the eighteenth century--I feel like I have read so much about England and France and America in that time period but I'd never once thought about Russia back then. I am surprised that I didn't know that Catherine was the empress at the time when the American and French Revolutions happened.

I found the beginning of the book fascinating, learning about Catherine's youth and her life in her marriage. That part was well-written and easy to follow, and I found it easy to relate to Catherine in some ways. But it was almost unbelievable that Catherine could have been so patient and forbearing through the insanity that she had to live through. Her husband sounded seriously insane, with an obsession for playing with toy soldiers (even in his twenties and thirties), and was incapable of consummating their marriage so for nine years Catherine was never touched by him, and the Empress Elizabeth was extremely hard to deal with--yet according to Massie, Catherine was always patient and dealt with this craziness appropriately.

The later part of the book about Catherine's reign as Empress was a little harder to follow, since the author no longer was writing chronologically but more thematically. I understand why he had to do that, since Catherine as Empress had so many more facets and responsibilities than she did in her life before, but it made it harder for me to place when things were happening and to feel like I really grasped it. He wrote quite a lot about her revolving door of lovers, which were quite accepted in the Russian court, but also a lot about her attempts to modernize and liberalize Russia because of her acceptance of Enlightenment principles and correspondence with philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot.

Catherine had a ton of ambition and had her eye on the prize of gaining full power as the empress, and she didn't intend to share any of that power, even with her son. I feel like I would have had a hard time relating to her ambition--because of the things she willingly gave up in order to achieve her goals. Some of her experiences were so heartbreaking, like when she finally gave birth to her son Paul and then he was effectively kidnapped by the reigning empress immediately, so Catherine literally never bonded with her son. After all the reading I've done about how important the bonding that a mother and child do in the first few years, it makes sense how twisted that made her relationship with her son. It seemed like Catherine and her son were both shaped by their rejections by their own mothers and that affected their relationships for the rest of their lives.

There was so much I had never considered or learned about before in this book, and I'm glad to have read it. But I think I'll take a break on the heavy, long biographies for now. I liked Nicholas and Alexandra much more than this one, although it was still a worthwhile read.