It's not about the horse

A review of Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie, along with consideration of The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak: First, the biography:

Only in the bizarre chessboard world of 18th century European monarchy could an obscure princess from the German nation-state of Anhalt-Zerbst rise to become Empress of Russia, the vast and powerful nation that dominates the eastern part of the continent, then and now.

Catherine, writes biographer Robert K. Massie, was the equal of her illustrious predecessor Peter the Great – “his only equal – in vision, strength of purpose and achievement during the centuries that Russia was ruled by tsars, emperors and empresses.”

The story of her reign is fascinating but equally so is the unlikely tale of how it came about. Catherine – born Sophia – was plucked from relative obscurity by Empress Elizabeth, a daughter of Peter the Great.

Elizabeth was childless and had taken her nephew, Peter, also a German, as her heir. For his consort, she chose another German related to Peter’s House of Holstein – little Sophia. As a young teenager, the princess was summoned to St. Petersburg.

While Sophia, soon rebaptized in the Russian Orthodox Church as Catherine, was an eager and willing student of Russian language, religion and culture, her young husband-to-be was not. Whether he was mentally ill or just damaged from a neglected and traumatic childhood, young Peter was certainly strange. He idolized the Prussian emperor Frederick the Great, and he spent most of his waking hours conducting pretend military drills in the Prussian manner. For his “soldiers,” he employed servants and, well into adulthood, dolls.

Young Catherine was left to learn the navigation of Russian imperial court life herself, dealing with the vain and unpredictable Elizabeth as well as her immature and unprepared young fiancé. Even after the pair were married – and Catherine had grown into an attractive young woman – the marriage went unconsummated and the heir Elizabeth had essentially ordered up did not appear.

Finally Catherine was encouraged to take a lover and she bore the first of her three children – fathered by three different men, none of them her husband, according to Massie. It was a boy and the delighted Empress Elizabeth immediately seized custody.

When Elizabeth died, Catherine’s husband Peter ascended the throne. His brief reign was a disaster. He tried to remake the Orthodox Church in the Lutheran image, ordering the destruction of icons and the shaving of the priests’ beards. He tried to remake the Russian Army in the image of his beloved Prussia, putting an uncle from Holstein with no military experience in command. And he embarked on a disastrous war with Denmark, over a territorial dispute that was important to Holstein but had no bearing on Russia. Within a few months “Peter had provoked and insulted the Orthodox Church, infuriated and alienated the army and betrayed his allies,” Massie writes.

Desperate, military and political men in Russia’s top circles turned to Peter’s wife – the mother of his purported son and heir, Paul. For the start of his reign she had been out of commission – pregnant with another child by a dashing Russian officer. Peter, meanwhile, had taken a mistress he much preferred to Catherine and hoped to replace her. But after giving birth, Catherine quickly reasserted her influence and seized the reins.

When a group of soldiers appeared at her residence, she told them “that her life and that of her son had been threatened by the emperor but that it was not for her own sake, but for that of her beloved country and their holy Orthodox religion that she was compelled to throw herself on their protection.”

From there, Catherine consolidated her hold on power -- helped along the way when her allies (including her lover's brother) -- managed to kill the deposed emperor in a dinnertime struggle at his place of confinement. Her regime claimed Peter died of hemorrhoidal colic (!)  but no one really believed it (even if few in Russia would dare to say so) and throughout Europe she was always considered a usurper even as she befriended Enlightenment figures including Diderot and Voltaire and created one of the world's great Western art collections, which survives today at the Hermitage.

Like Elizabeth I before her and Victoria after, Catherine's long and stable reign is a historical anamoly. A woman managing to gain, hold and exercise power and literally rule men is so incredibly unlikely that when it happens it becomes mythic. And unlike English queens, it appears Russian empresses were acknowledged to have sex lives, even outside of marriage. Empress Elizabeth and Catherine both had a series of "favorites" with all-hours access to their private chambers. Catherine eventually installed one as King of Poland (under heavy Russian control). The most famous, Gregory Potemkin, was rumored to be her husband though they never could have acknowledged it and their partnership evolved from romance to administration. Massie matter-of-factly recounts Catherine's lovers (a total of 12) but never brings up the notorious rumors about sexual relations with a horse. Untrue rumors, I should add. Even Snopes says so.

When Catherine died in 1796, her son Paul succeeded her -- but their relationship had always been a difficult one, starting from his birth when the Empress Elizabeth took him away and severely limited Catherine's access to her own son. Peter the Great had changed the law so that a Russian ruler could name his or own successor -- meaning Catherine had tactical power to keep her son under her control. When Paul finally reached the throne he changed it back to primogeniture, or the nearest male heir. "Never again would an heir have to go through what Paul had been through," Massie writes. "And never again would Russia be ruled by a woman."

After reading the biography, it was interesting to see a different perspective on the German princess in Eva Stachniak's novel The Winter Palace. The story is told from the perspective of a Polish girl, a few years older than Catherine, who becomes a ward of Empress Elizabeth when her parents die while living in St. Petersburg. Barbara is recruited as a household spy by the aging Empress, directed to befriend Catherine and report back about the actions and thoughts of the Grand Duchess. Eventually, though, she becomes a sort of double agent, serving Catherine -- and simply seeking to survive the normal intrigues of palace life and then the upheaval after Elizabeth dies, Peter is deposed and Catherine takes over. After having read the biography, I was surprised at the portrait of Peter -- I wouldn't call it sympathetic but in Massie's account, he was far worse, especially in his treatment of Catherine. And his actions upon assuming the throne, both in allying himself with the Prussia, hated by most Russians, and in making enemies of the Orthodox Church, are almost unmentioned. Barbara herself is a fairly sympathetic character though even her developing relationship with her husband is merely hinted at. And this may be a bit of a spoiler but her disillusionment toward the end of the book seems just implausible -- surely someone who had spent so many formative -- and successful -- years at court would have developed a healthy self-protective realism and cynicism about the motives and duplicity of powerful people.

I enjoyed both these books, the biography more than the novel, though I will still read the next in Stachniak's planned series about Catherine. If nothing else, it makes a nice break from the machinations of the English court.

Catherine the Great: A-

The Winter Palace: B

Teaser Tuesdays: The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak

Are the Romanovs the new Tudors? First Robert K. Massie comes out with a blockbuster biography of Catherine the Great -- and it's a damned good book, too. Now Eva Stachniak gives the story the fictional treatment with The Winter Palace, a novel about Catherine's Russia written from the point of view of a Polish servant who becomes a confidant -- and spy -- for the German princess who will become Russia's greatest empress. The Teaser Tuesday rules: open to a random page, pick two sentences and post. If you wish, add your blog post in the comments section of the Should Be Reading blog.

So here's mine:

"Sprawled in her gilded armchair, chewing on a pork-belly slice, the Empress surveyed the scene of her making. Her feet rested on an embroidered footstool; folds of her purple dress framed her like soft drapery." (p. 292)

Yikes! I just started the novel -- but having read the biography I have a good idea what a formidable character Catherine turns out to be. Hope it's an entertaining journey ...

Besties forever

I am unable to resist best book lists of almost any form so I've been keeping an eye on the usual end of the year productions. I'm not as into it as some others, like the blogger Largehearted Boy, who amasses a giant list of best lists, or the librarian/bloggers at the Williamsburg Public Library, who take all those lists and turn them into one mega-list (though that list is broken into different categories, mostly for fiction). Mostly, I keep an eye out for the lists compiled by the sources I rely on most for book reviews -- The New York Times and Salon (which has separate lists for fiction and nonfiction). But I have to admit this year my favorite list came from Lev Grossman at Time magazine (which also had separate fiction and nonfiction lists). Perhaps it's Grossman's unapologetic appreciation of genre fiction -- which was an awful lot of my fiction reading this year. Or, in a related angle, it's his noticing books that are not the usual suspects -- two graphic novels (The Death-Ray and Hark! A Vagrant!) became Christmas gifts in my house this year after I saw them on the list.

My best list consists of books I read this year, whenever they were published -- though a large number were indeed new this year (one of the many benefits of working at a library is access to advanced review copies and awareness of newly published works). I chose my favorites with flat-out enjoyment as my only criterion, realizing that many factors go into that.

Fiction: A Song of Ice & Fire, books 1-3, George R.R. Martin (That's A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords)

Nonfiction: Rin Tin Tin, Susan Orlean.

Why the George R.R. Martin? As so many others already knew, and millions more of us have discovered since HBO started airing the screen adaptation, this is an amazing world Martin has created, full of compelling characters and apparently endless plot possibilities. I've only read the first three books because 1) I'm waiting for a co-worker to finish Book 3 so we can talk about them as we read them and 2) I don't want to catch up to Martin too soon then become of those disgruntled fans who hates him because he's taking so long writing his next book. Grossman has an excellent explanation for why he chose Martin's latest book, A Dance With Dragons, in this Salon compilation of writers naming their favorite books of the year. In case you don't feel like scrolling through 50 writers, here's the meat of Grossman's case:

As for craft: Yeah, on the level of sentence, you couldn’t stack “A Dance With Dragons” up against Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot,” or Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child.” But as a plotter, an orchestrator and pacer of narratives that weave around and resonate with each other, Martin leaves them far, far behind. Is that important? Maybe not to the people who give out Pulitzers. But it’s important to me. It’s why “A Dance With Dragons” is the best book I read this year.

If I were to name the best literary nonfiction I read this year, I'd go with Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber, followed by The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta. Outside of those, my top five were all genre: A Surfeit of Guns, by P.F. Chisholm, part of her entertaining Sir Robert Carey series and The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor, another historical crime novel. Honorable mentions to Heartstone by C.J. Sansom, the latest in his keeps-getting-better Matthew Shardlake series (soon to be on screen portrayed by Kenneth Branagh!) and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, the latest but I hope not the last of Sally Gunning's novels set in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts.

As for nonfiction, I read a lot of good ones this year. Really good books, written by smart people who neither talked down to their readers nor preached to the academic choir. But my favorite came out of journalism: Rin Tin Tin by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean. I'm a dog person for sure, but I am not a big consumer of dog books. I wouldn't even call this a dog book. It's a book about 20th century America, and about how an image can influence a culture. And it's a story about the incredible bond between a lonely man and the puppy he rescued on a World War I battlefield. Many twists and turns, with several side trips into related but separate storylines -- yet Orlean keeps it all together and keeps it moving and coherent. Brilliantly done.

The rest of my top five in nonfiction, in no particular order: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard (who knew James Garfield was such a good guy? Certainly not me). She-Wolves by Helen Castor, about the women who ruled, or tried to rule England before Mary. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, about the rediscovery of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and how that poem helped usher in the modern world. The Magician's Book by Laura Miller -- my favorite kind of literary writing, where she tells the story of the book and of the book's impact on the culture in general and on her, as a reader, in particular. If you were a Narnia kid, and I was, this book feels like it was written just for you. Honorable mentions to Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great and Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm.

With the holiday boost in ereader sales, I expect we will be seeing even more of the essays predicting the death of literature, of reading, of writing, of culture, of life as we know it. Perhaps I am fooling myself, like a newspaper journalist circa 1998, but I don't think so. The modes are changing, the economics are changing and who gets published and what sells may change. But people appear to have a thirst for narrative, for stories in the form of the written word, that is spurring the production of plenty of good (and lots of terrible) books that are now available in all kinds of forms. It's certainly an unnerving time to be a publisher, or an aspiring writer, or, in some ways, a librarian. But as a reader I feel confident that the well is nowhere near running dry. On to 2012!

Falling in love again: the nonfiction tome

Just the other day, I was complaining to a friend about how so many works of nonfiction are obese, topping the 500-page mark, when they would be so much more appealing at, say, 250 to 300 pages. Yet for the last couple weeks I have been happily ensconced in just such a work -- Robert K. Massie's new biography of Catherine the Great, which weighs in at 579 pages before the bibliography and end notes. I used to read these kinds of tomes all the time. This was a time when I lived in a city far from where I'd grown up where I had no friends outside of the workplace -- and I lived two blocks from an excellent independent bookstore and about five blocks from the library. I had a studio apartment that didn't require much upkeep. There was no Internet. So basically I'd do nothing all weekend but read. I'll even admit that this studio apartment and all this free time happened to be on South Beach circa 1989-1991 -- but hey, I'm a dork. I read lots and lots, current fiction and classics, and lots of giant biographical tomes like Carlos Baker on Hemingway and William Manchester on Churchill and whoever was writing about Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth I. I loved diving into a big nonfiction tome. This might be the fault of David Halberstam, whose doorstop about journalism dynasties, The Powers That Be, was one of my favorite books when I was a young and impressionable college journalist.

But in recent years, not so much. Over my journalism career, my nonfiction reading turned more toward works of current narrative nonfiction -- the New Yorker School, I guess you'd call it (Trillin, Frazier, Horwitz, Orlean). And in most recent years, I've been on a sustained run of fiction, mainly genre fiction -- historical for the most part, especially historical mysteries. I can only blame the Key West Literary Seminar's session on historical fiction for jumpstarting that.

But I was surprised and delighted when I saw that Massie, who is in his 80s, has produced another giant tome on a Russian monarch. A little guilty, too -- like almost everyone I know, I had a copy of his Peter the Great on my shelf for years; finally gave in and donated it to the library for the book sale. But I have read him and liked him a lot -- I first read his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, which used DNA findings and the post-Soviet Russian thaw to tell the story about what really happened to the royal family (hint: Anastasia did not make it out). From there, I read his Nicholas and Alexandra and found it to be well-written absorbing history, perfect for the lay reader who doesn't know much about the subjects, the place or the time. And the same, I'm happy to say, goes for Catherine. I've long had a thing for Elizabeth I and Catherine is a similar figure in being a woman ruling in her own right, despite all kinds of odds against her ever reaching, or keeping the throne.

The only problem with inhabiting these giant tomes is that post-book letdown is all the more severe for having lived with the characters for weeks. My mom, after finishing Bob Richardson's biography of William James, said she felt sad and that she'd miss James -- I knew just what she meant.

These are some titles of giant nonfiction tomes I highly recommend if you're looking to dive into the deep end:

Catherine The Great by Peter Massie -- For all the reasons described above. And no, there's nothing about horses at least not of an intimate nature. Turns out the Potemkin Village thing isn't true, either.

The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen -- You may think island biogeography would be a boring subject. In Quammen's hands, you would be very very wrong

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop -- Her letters, edited by her longtime publisher Robert Giroux. The closest thing we'll ever get to a memoir; they are heartbreaking in many ways but an amazing insight into the mind of a great poet

Up In the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell -- Early New Yorker writing at its finest. Yeah, I know, we can argue about the "nonfiction" qualifications of this one.

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee -- A compendium of the modern New Yorker master's books about geology. You know who was surprised to find herself reading 657 pages about geology ... and enjoying it? Me!

Titan by Ron Chernow -- Biography of John D. Rockefeller -- Great book on the influential mogul behind Standard Oil.

Other Powers by Barbara Goldsmith -- Biography of Victoria Woodhull, who was a medium, a suffragette, a financial adviser and all around force of nature -- fascinating look at the nation in the late 19th century, through the lens of a mostly forgotten figure