Catherine’s cultural projects were numerous. Behind the scenes she was the instigator of the Free Economic Society, a group of noblemen moved by reading Enlightenment literature to form a society for the discussion of economic (especially agricultural) topics. This was an association independent of state institutions although it enjoyed the favor of the empress. The society sponsored an essay contest on the issue of peasant land ownership that inevitably raised the issue of serfdom, and it awarded a prize to a Frenchman’s essay that unambiguously stated that prosperity could only flow from the full property of the peasant in his land. By implication serfdom could not create prosperity. The essay was published in Russian and French for all to read. She continued to support the university, the academies, and the schools with money and encouragement. The first Russian girls’ school, the Smol’nyi Institute in St. Petersburg for young noblewomen was planned by Empress Elizabeth and came into being in 1764, and the empress reorganized and expanded the Cadet Corps. These were elite schools, but with the 1775 provincial reform came a system of schools in the provinces, which was expanded again in 1786 by a decree establishing secondary schools in all provincial capitals and a network of primary schools. Progress was slow, but by 1800 there were already over 300 schools, twice the number in existence in 1786. Later Russian secondary schools had their origin in these laws.
Even the church had its role in the process of enlightenment. At Catherine’s accession most of the bishops were still Ukrainians with a strong, almost Catholic, sense of the importance of the clergy. Empress Elizabeth had begun the process of replacing them with Russians, and under Catherine a whole new generation came into power in the church. Catherine also put into law the secularization of monastic lands formulated under Elizabeth in opposition to the views of the older Ukrainian bishops. The new generation, like Platon Levshin, Metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 to 1812, had been educated on Lutheran religious scholarship and with a strong orientation toward preaching. Their goal was to bring the truths of Orthodox Christianity to the people rather than cultivating an ideal asceticism. This emphasis coincided with Catherine’s, for she saw religion as the foundation of good citizenship, which was another Enlightenment precept.
Figure 7. Catherine the Great with the Goddess Athena. Engraving by Francis Bartolozzi after Michele Benedetti. From a painting by Alexander Roslin.
Catherine’s court kept up the theaters founded by her predecessors, and those theaters remained at the center of the performing arts in Russia. She eased Araya into retirement and replaced him with a series of distinguished musicians starting with the Venetian Baldassare Galuppi. Sumarokov continued to direct the stage and provide plays, and Catherine and the court usually attended one of the theaters several times a week. In 1768 she founded a society for the translation of foreign books, which sponsored a whole series of important translations, learned works, and works of entertainment for the Russian public. She also published her own magazine, Vsiakaia vsiachina (All Sorts of Things), in 1769. The idea was to imitate Addison and Steele’s Spectator, something Sumarokov had tried a few years earlier with mixed success. The journal, like its prototype, was to combine entertainment with edification without heavy-handed moralizing – a type of publication wildly popular in Catherine’s native Germany and other parts of Europe. Catherine kept her role secret, though it was widely known in St. Petersburg.
The most lively response to her journal came from Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), who launched a series of journals of his own, establishing the first important private publishing enterprise in Russia. Better written and bolder than the empress’s journal, Novikov’s publications acquired considerable popularity but not enough to provide much of an income, and he soon turned to publishing books for Moscow University, which assured him an indirect subsidy from the state. In Moscow, Novikov also increasingly joined in with the Freemasons, a group with a wide network and considerable impact on Russian culture at the time. The Masons were not just a social club, but a movement of ideas with defined, if nebulous, aims. Most of them had been reading the European mystical literature that was increasingly popular in the later eighteenth century, and they saw themselves as committed to self-improvement, contemplation of God and his works, and most of all, active philanthropy and the encouragement of progress in the world. Unfortunately for them, the Masons aroused all sorts of suspicions. Conservative churchmen saw them as the propagators of an alternative and pernicious religion, while many enlightened nobles took them for obscurantists. Catherine herself saw them in this way and wrote several short comedies satirizing them. The Masons were also an international society with ties to foreign dynasties in Prussia and Sweden that were unfriendly to Russia, and most serious of all, the Masons had recruited the heir, Tsarevich Paul, as a patron. This last element made them deeply suspect in the mind of Catherine, for Paul was unhappy with his marginal role in court and government and increasingly hostile to his mother as the years passed.
In spite of setbacks, Catherine did not give up sponsoring Russian literature, and in 1782–1783 she appointed her old friend Princess Dashkova to head both the Academy of Sciences and the new Academy of Letters. Dashkova, who had met Benjamin Franklin in Paris, was the first woman member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. From these positions Dashkova was able to publish another series of literary journals and other publications and organize a committee to produce the first Russian dictionary. A decree of 1783 explicitly authorized private printing and publication, subject to censorship of the chiefs of police in the capitals.
The main problem for private publishers was not censorship or the attitude of the state but the lack of a broad audience. Only the gentry and a small body of teachers and scholars had the education to be interested in books and journals, and many of the gentry either lived on remote estates or in provincial towns and preferred French literature to Russian. The writers were less affected by this situation than the publishers, for most of the important writers were noblemen employed in state service of one sort or another, and were not therefore dependent on the sales of their work for their income. Many nobles even looked down on Novikov for trying to live from the profits of literature. State service, however, involved writers in the court factions and in a complex relationship to the empress herself.
Thus the two most important writers of the time, the playwright Denis Fonvizin (1744–1792) and the poet Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) were both enmeshed in a network of personal and political loyalties at the court. Fonvizin spent his early career as a client of count Panin, which meant that toward the end of his life he was part of the patronage network centered on Paul, the heir to the throne. This affiliation made him unpopular with Catherine, but it was she who ordered the first performance of his best play, The Adolescent, at the court theater in 1782. Nevertheless the final resignation of Panin from all offices in 1781 contributed to Fonvizin’s failure to get authorization for a journal in later years.
Fonvizin and Novikov were both graduates of Moscow University, while the poet Derzhavin came from a provincial gentry family and had only finished the Gymnasium in Kazan’. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he never properly learned French, his only foreign language being the German he learned in Kazan’. His early career was in the army, and he played a minor and somewhat inglorious role in fighting Pugachev’s rebels. At that time he came to the attention of Potemkin, and remained the favorite’s client as he pursued a career in civil administration, both in St. Petersburg and the provinces, living long enough to briefly occupy the post of minister of justice under Alexander I. Derzhavin’s poetry made him famous in the 1780s, as he produced odes in honor of Catherine and her victories as well as satires of courtiers and their foibles, following the model of Horace and European classicism. Like Fonvizin, he had a command of language that allowed his work to survive for Russian readers in spite of the eclipse of the eighteenth century genres that he employed.