In this central task Dixon largely succeeds, at times brilliantly. Petersburg from her native Germany) to 1796 (her death) as gleaned from its verbal but also, to some extent, its visual remains (the book includes 23 contemporary illustrations along with six maps).Īs all historians know, recovering context in a way that is at once faithful to the documents and intelligible to our contemporaries is the essence of our craft.

(3) True to his word, Professor Dixon’s book is much less an account of Catherine’s private life (see Alexander) or a political history of her reign (see de Madariaga) than it is a minutely detailed chronicle of Russian court life of the period 1744 (Catherine’s arrival in St. In so doing he brings to bear the fruits of a substantial recent historiography devoted to court life in early modern Europe and Russia viewed as a crucial component of governance in an age of monarchical absolutism, with works by T. Implying that neither work is truly comprehensive–‘clearly an impossible goal’–his own effort seeks ‘to recover a sense of place, situating Catherine in the context of the Court society in which she grew up in Germany and lived most of her long life in Russia’ (p.

Alexander’s Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (2), ‘the first modern scholarly biography, particularly interesting on medical matters and also strong on social history’ (p. Another biography of Catherine the Great? Simon Dixon locates his new book somewhere between Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great by Isabel de Madariaga (1), which he terms ‘the most important (and appropriately weighty) study of Catherine’s reign in any language,’ and John T.

Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon