The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great. By Kelsey Rubin-Detlev,. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University, 2019. xix, 391 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $99.99, paper.

The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great. By Kelsey Rubin-Detlev. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University, 2019. xix, 391 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $99.99, paper.

Was Catherine the Great an Enlightenment monarch? Kelsey Rubin-Detlev gives us a new set of tools to address this age-old question through the systematic analysis of her voluminous correspondence, confidently answering it in the affirmative. By placing Catherine's letters alongside ones by Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Teresa of Austria, and by situating them in the overall corpus of the Enlightenment “republic of letters,” Rubin-Detlev demonstrates Catherine's adherence to, and play with, the rules and conventions governing that republic. She also uses them to interrogate Catherine's conception of the Enlightenment monarch, analyzing how the empress “fashioned” herself to fit this definition.

A literary historian, Rubin-Detlev's primary aim is to demonstrate that Catherine's “epistolarium,” the entire corpus of her ten thousand letters, should be read as a literary work, indeed, as an “unrecognized literary masterpiece” (10, 14, 33). The sources, drawn from print media and archival holdings, are impressive. Measuring Catherine's letters against the dominant conventions of her time, Rubin-Detlev points...