That spring, Catherine immersed herself in a new building project. The idea for a public library had been suggested to her nearly three decades earlier by art patron Count Alexander Stroganov. Since then, the personal library she’d originally started as a grand duchess had mushroomed into an encyclopedic 44,000 volumes. Catherine saw the Imperial Public Library, like her art collection, as a symbol of enlightened Russia. Like Europe’s finest libraries, she envisioned a repository for Russian and foreign language books with borrowing privileges for courtiers.
The chosen site was Nevsky Prospect near the Winter Palace. Catherine approved Yegor Sokolov’s design featuring a curving Ionic colonnade. Inside, six columns topped with statues support a quarter-circle peristyle. A vast rotunda housed the manuscripts; some 6,000 incunabula were housed in a neo-Gothic cabinet. In her customary fashion, Catherine took a hands-on approach, receiving regular progress reports and weighing in on what one report called “Catherine’s library.”1 The empress’s Cabinet, the office that administered her purse and property, provided construction funds on her verbal order, later confirmed in writing.
As Dimitri Ozerkov explains, Catherine modeled her Hermitage Library after the Vatican’s, and symbolically moved her growing collection below the Raphael Loggia.2 As she did with paintings and cameos, Catherine bought entire libraries en masse. These included the libraries of French mathematician and encyclopedist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and some 1,000 books in 1776 assembled by archeologist Bernardo Galiani. After Alexander Lanskoy’s death in 1784, Catherine added his art history titles to her shelves. In 1791, Catherine expanded Russian history holdings with historian Prince M. M. Scherbatov’s library. A year later, she incorporated 4,500 military titles belonging to her late husband Peter III, covering weapons, knights’ tournaments, and wars and battles.
Of the many genres she collected, it is no surprise that Catherine especially prized art and architecture books. “I am passionately interested in books on architecture. They fill my room and even that is not enough,” Catherine wrote about the richly illustrated trove featuring works by Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Piranesi, and Giovanni Volpato. Installed at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine’s architecture collection proved an invaluable resource for architects Cameron and Quarenghi. In spring 1778, she described her plans to Grimm: “. . . there is in Tsarskoe selo a horrible set of rooms. . . . The grand staircase is moved to a small wing which looks towards Gatchina. Here she [Catherine] has ten rooms for the decoration of which her entire favorite library will be used; and her imagination is given a free reign. . . .”3
Catherine’s collection of drawings and engravings would inspire many commissions over the decades, including Chesme Palace, the Green Frog Service, and the Raphael Loggia. In 1773, Charles de Wailly sent the empress eleven drawings in album for a proposed Pavilion of the Sciences and Arts for Tsarskoe Selo. In 1780, she bought some 1,120 sheets by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, including monuments and picturesque spots in Italy, architectural fantasies, and studies for the Palace of the Roman emperors. With Grimm’s help, Catherine added 264 watercolor and gouache landscape drawings by Jean Houel in 1782. Catherine framed Clérisseau’s works and hung them in her private apartments. “The arrival of the paintings of Clérisseau is most opportune,” she wrote Grimm, “since I have decorated my boudoir in St. Petersburg with his drawings under glass.”4 Like other collections, drawings were initially considered Catherine’s personal property. Kept in the library, some remaining in crates, sheets were brought to Catherine upon her request.
The Hermitage Library also included Catherine’s own publications. Between plagues and fires, wars and rebellions, she wrote poems, chronicles, memoirs, plays, opera librettos, magazine articles, fairy tales, a treatise on Siberia, history of the Roman emperors, and six-volume Notes on Russian History as a textbook for Alexander and Constantine. As source material, Catherine collected some 150 ancient Russian manuscripts. Catherine drew on this knowledge to author plays based on ancient Russian history, performed at the Hermitage Theatre.
Catherine mastered French as a child in Germany and learned Russian as a teenager during the first years of her marriage. Though she spoke Russian with a heavy German accent, she became a champion of the language. Thanks to the translator’s society Catherine founded, one in four books published in Russian during her reign was translated from French. In 1783, Catherine established the Russian Academy to compile a Russian Dictionary and systemize the language’s rules. She also assembled a dictionary of comparative languages. In 1786, Catherine wrote Thomas Jefferson for help translating several hundred words in the Shawnee and Delaware Indian languages; George Washington contributed a translation of Cherokee and Chocktaw words. “. . . [T]he breadth of her [Catherine’s] ability and range of her interests are reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson . . . ,” writes Jay Winik.5
Of Catherine’s library deals, the most prestigious were those of Voltaire and Diderot. After Voltaire’s niece and heir Madame Denis rejected two German offers for her uncle’s library, Melchior Grimm began the delicate negotiations on Catherine’s behalf. Catherine finally sealed the deal for 30,000 rubles, throwing in diamonds, furs, and a small jeweled box with her portrait.6 To house Voltaire’s library, Catherine originally intended to build a replica of his Swiss château at Tsarskoe Selo. But either due to financial constraints or diplomatic issues with France (which had talked about confiscating the library), this plan did not materialize. In early October 1779, coachmen helped Voltaire’s secretary Jean-Louis Wagnière unpack twelve large crates by Catherine’s study in the Oval Room of the Winter Palace. With the 6,760 volumes, Catherine installed Houdon’s portrait bust of Voltaire and a model of Ferney.
Denis Diderot died in July 1784, six years after Voltaire. The following November, his 2,904-volume library also arrived at the palace, where it was installed next to that of Voltaire. Two decades earlier, facing great financial difficulties, Diderot had sold his library to Catherine for 16,000 livres. By letting Diderot keep his books until his death, and paying him another 50,000 livres to be her librarian (1,000 livres per year paid fifty years in advance), Catherine earned his unwavering loyalty. “Great Princess, I bow down at your feet,” a grateful Diderot gushed. “I stretch my arms towards you but my mind has contracted, my brain is confused, my ideas jumbled, I am as emotional as a child, and the true expression of the feeling with which I am filled dies on my lips. . . . Oh, Catherine! Remain sure that you rule as powerfully in Paris as you do in St. Petersburg.”7
With Diderot’s library in her fold, Catherine acquired the only uncensored copy of his masterpiece, Encyclopédie, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. According to Diderot, the mammoth work was intended “to assemble the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth; to explain its general plan to the men with whom we live, and to transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the labors of past centuries may not be useless to future times. . . .” “Indispensable” is how Catherine described the two-decade effort. “Catherine could not be without her copy,” writes Frank T. Brechka. “Constantly quoting its wisdom, always thumbing through it . . .”8
Ironically, by 1792, the philosophes whose libraries Catherine coveted were now personae non gratae due to the heightened political paranoia. “Do you remember how the late King of Prussia claimed that Helvetius had confessed to him that the project of the philosophes was to overturn all thrones and that the Encyclopédie had been made with no other aim than the destruction of all kings and all relations?” Catherine asked Grimm. “Do you also remember that you never wanted to be counted among the philosophes? Well, you are right never to have wanted to be included among the illuminati, the enlightened ones, or the philosophes, for their only objective is destruction, as experience has shown.”9
Catherine’s personal volumes, some 4,000 with red morocco bindings and gold edges, along with those of Voltaire and Diderot, were featured in Alexander Luzhkov’s catalogue of the Hermitage Library. The titles reflected the bibliophile empress’s broad intellectual interests—from ancient and modern history, philosophy and politics to science, atlases, and travel guides. Before Catherine’s reign, publishing in Russia had been a state monopoly. In the quarter century before Catherine’s censorship decree in 1795, the number of independent Russian presses multiplied and published some 8,000 titles—more than three times the total created in the previous two centuries.
The newest addition to Catherine’s Imperial Russian Library was not an acquisition, but war booty. After the Kościuszko Uprising in 1794, Russian troops executed her order to confiscate the Załuski Library in Warsaw.10 Founded earlier in the century over four decades by aristocratic brothers Joseph and Andrew Załuski, both Roman Catholic bishops, the famed library was located in the 17th-century Daniłowicz Palace. One of Europe’s earliest public libraries, it was also one of the largest with some 260,000 volumes and 10,000 manuscripts. That summer and fall, Catherine ordered the Załuski holdings transported from Warsaw to St. Petersburg—by cart as far as Riga and then by ship to the capital.11 En route, parts of the collection were damaged, destroyed, or stolen.
In July 1796, Catherine took a second look at Sokolov’s design for the library. She decided to add an observatory and donated a telescope previously owned by British astronomer Sir William Herschel. To relieve tensions of its users, the library also featured “a most pleasant garden” with a pool, recalled librarian and publisher Mikhail Antonovsky. In October 1796, Catherine issued funding instructions.
Newly arrived in St. Petersburg, Italian stage designer and architect Pietro Gonzaga wrote home about Russia’s capital: “The city is big and beautiful: construction continues hurriedly, despite all the wars, and the buildings grow like mushrooms. . . . most of the buildings are in good taste, and among the best are those of Quarenghi.”12