Spectacular
Alex de Jonge
Catherine the Great Henri Troyat Trans. Emily Read (Aldan Ellis 29.50) Henri Troyat's admirers will not be disappointed by his latest offering. It is lively, fast-moving and always out to entertain, The author is best at tuppence coloured stuff, describing large and spectacular set pieces, which come out large and spectacular. There was enough of that kind of thing in Catherine's reign to keep him busy. He is particularly good at describing the rising of Emilian Pugachev, the peasant pretender who, as they say, set the South alight, looting and burning, before being brought to Moscow in an iron cage. He also does justice to two of Catherine's principal lovers, Grigory Orlov and Potemkin; the regicide and the hairy temperamental one-eyed statesman whose favourite mode of dress was a dressing gown and nothing else. Both come across beautifully. Moreover the book is never dull, and deals admirably with the intricate diplomatic history of the time without boring the reader, which is a considerable achievement.
However, this life of Catherine — the third to come out in two years — somehow misses the mark. It may be unfair to M. Troyat, but I can't help feeling that his heart' was not in the job, that he has simply put another famous Russian through the biography machine; because she was there. He has my sympathies. There are not that many subjects available to the Russian biographer, and he must soon be having to face the fact that he will have nobody left except Ivan the Terrible, All this is to say that compared, for example, to Vincent Cronin's biography the book lacks bite and has little insight and feel for Catherine's character, It dwells too much upon her 'uterine passions' as a contemporary put it, upon the long and, on the whole, not very interesting list of her lovers she had them and what of it? But the author fails, for example, to explore the very extraordinary degree of attachment that at least three of them displayed towards her, well above and beyond the call of duty, notably in the case of Poniatowski who continued to love her for some 35 years. The author also underplays her very real sense of dedication to her adopted country, He acknowledges it but does not advance it as the driving force which it very certainly was. He is also rather dismissive about her relationship with Diderot, Voltaire and the philosophes, I suspect because he is cross with her for not liking the French revolution, of which she very sensibly disapproved.
The book is superficial, partly because it draws openly and with disarming honesty almost exclusively upon other biographies. Confidence is not increased by the number of mistakes, many of which must be proof reader's errors — Cobenzl, Bysantinum — while Russian names also give some trouble. We find Bestuzhev and Bestoujev within ten lines of one another, while a distinguished Russian family, the Naryshkins, are variously referred to as Navychkins or Narvishkins. The Granovitaya Palate is properly termed 'the faceted chamber' on one occasion, only to turn into 'a hall of mirrors' some chapters later. This does reduce one's confidence in the book, as does the scene in which we find important 'telegrams' lying unopened on Catherine's table. I assume that they were dispatches in the original.
The translation, however, is first class. Troyat writes in the breathy rhetorical, historic-present laden style into which French biographers lapse so readily in the hope that they are bringing their subject to life. The translator has managed to turn that ghastly kind of French into excellent English, with hardly a hint of gallicism, suggesting that M. Troyat may lose something in the original,
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