Lady in Waiting

THE MEMOIRS OF CATHERINE THE GREAT (400 pp.)--Edited by Dominique Moroger, with an introduction by Dr. G. P. Gooch--Macmillan ($5).

At seven, Sophia Augusta Frederica, the penniless daughter of a petty German princeling, found "this idea of a crown . . . running in my head then like a tune, and [it] has been running . . . ever since." The music never stopped. Little Sophia of Stettin became Catherine the Great of Russia, one of the most brilliant women ever to mount a throne. Her Memoirs, published for the first time in an unexpurgated English-language edition, take Catherine only to the threshold of the throne. Nonetheless, her chronicle tells in candid detail how uneasy sleeps the head that even waits for a crown.

In 1744 Russia's Empress Elizabeth summoned 14-year-old Sophia to Moscow to marry Grand Duke Peter (later Tsar Peter III), Elizabeth's nephew and heir. Peter, a German-born second cousin of his bride-to-be, at 16 was a pockmarked, childish lad who prattled only of soldiers and toys, and in the next 18 years expanded his interests to include mistresses, hounds and drinking. Catherine, as Sophia was rechristened when she entered the Russian Orthodox Church, soon sized him up: "I believe that the Crown of Russia attracted me more than his person."

Susceptible Skin. In the 16 years of waiting for the aging Empress Elizabeth to die. Catherine had ample time for self-study. Isolated by sycophants and informers, the young Duchess had no friends to turn to in the Russian court, which, for all its Frenchified airs, was a bear pit of intrigue and malevolence. "One could lay a wager that half the court could hardly read, and I would be surprised if more than a third could write," noted Catherine, who was soon wading through the classics of courtcraft (Tacitus, Plutarch, Montesquieu) and such French philosophers as Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot. To Encyclopedist Diderot, after her accession, she once wrote: "You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper, and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings."

Catherine learned to preserve her own susceptible skin through "meticulous honesty and good will." Her maxim: "Behave so that the kind love you. the evil fear you, and all respect you." Of her conduct during those years, she writes: "I would say about myself that I was every inch a gentleman with a mind much more male than female."

Planned Parenthood. Catherine's self-portrait is in demure contrast to the pic ture drawn by historians, who characterize her as a Messalina. with a reputed score of 55 lovers. She was the first to concede her womanly charms, admitted -- in a passage expurgated from the 1907 Russian edition -- that these were "the halfway house to temptation." But she intimates strongly that Peter never consummated their marriage, and that her first affairs during the years of waiting were instigated, apparently by the Empress, to perpetuate the dynasty.

Her first lover. Courtier Serge Saltikov, was "handsome as the dawn; there was no one to compete with him in that." But as soon as the required heir, the future Tsar Paul II, was born, Saltikov was snatched away by Empress Elizabeth and discreetly dispatched to Sweden.

Catherine's next fling at planned parenthood was with dashing Count (later Polish King) Stanislas Poniatovski; and "this one." she wrote later, "was both loving and loved from 1755 till 1761." Although, according to Poniatovski, Peter encouraged this affair, the Grand Duke was dumfounded by the end product. "Heaven alone knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant!" he exclaimed.

The Memoirs come to an end before Catherine's years of waiting. Thus, she does not defend herself against history's presumption that she was responsible for Peter's murder, ten days after the army made Catherine Empress of Russia. The narrative is nevertheless a disarmingly intimate conversation, across cultures and continents, by a woman of sense and sensibility who lived more than 50 years in Russia in the awareness that "fundamentally no Russian really likes a foreigner."

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