Our Notes & References

First English edition of Catherine the Great’s prominent and decisive critique of one of the most famous travel accounts of Russia – an interesting piece of 18th-c. State propaganda.

Rare on the market: we could trace only two other copies at auctions worldwide.

“Catherine’s Antidote is a unique and valuable document, presenting […] in an extremely direct way the empress’s response to what she took as an insult to Russia and as a personal challenge to her entire program of political and cultural transformation” (Levitt). Originally written in French, Antidote, ou Examen d’un mauvais livre superbement imprimé, intitulé Voyage en Sibérie (St Petersburg, 1770 and Amsterdam, 1771-72) was a response to Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche’s Voyage en Sibérie fait en 1761 (Paris, 1768) and “its forthright and sometimes provocative descriptions of Russian manners and character” (Hill).

An astronomer of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, Chappe made his journey to the city of Tobolsk in Siberia to observe and describe the passage of Venus across the Sun’s disk in 1761. In the account of his trip, he delved into long discussions of ‘barbaric’ and ‘promiscuous’ customs and manners of all Russians (based on his impressions of peasants in Siberia), the present state of their empire, the local system of education, the level of culture, and the “Level of the Road from Paris to Tobolsk”.

The work fuelled debates about Chappe’s bold statements among various advocates of Russia, including Diderot and Voltaire. Catherine, with “the assistance of the [student of Voltaire] Andrei Shuvalov and [her Cabinet Secretary] Grigorii Kozitskii” (Proskurina), wrote an anonymous response, in which she “demolished Chappe’s book section by section, often sentence by sentence, and even word by word, listing his errors, failings, confusions, lies and biases, mostly in an extremely sarcastic, even abusive, manner” (Levitt).

Notably, Catherine juxtaposes various French and Russian habits with harsh irony and “denied the notion of Russia’s total barbarism before Peter the Great, which was shared by Russia’s detractors and friends alike (including Voltaire). She defended Russia’s “ancient ways” as not only analogous to European historical experience but also worthy of interest in their own, indigenous right (thus some historians even consider her a proto-Slavophile). Yet Catherine not only defended the Russian peasant and traditional Russian culture, but also (and unlike the Slavophiles) Russia’s contemporary high secular culture and its achievements in the arts and sciences (a subject on which even Voltaire was notably silent)” (Levitt).

Antidote is also “significant as one of the first efforts to justify the existence of Russian literature” (Levitt): refuting Chappe’s opinion about the low level of Russian culture, Catherine presents a substantial list of Russia’s most acknowledged writers and briefly describes their work.

The preparation of Antidote was carried out in the utmost secrecy: responding to such an ‘insignificant’ person from the height of the imperial throne could have seemed inappropriate. Catherine concealed the circumstances of the writing and supported different stipulations about the attribution of Antidote’s authorship to the Countess Dashkova, Shuvalov, or the sculptor Etienne Falconet (who created the famous monument to Peter the Great in St. Petersburg).

Catherine’s authorship was however confirmed by multiple scholars in the following centuries and by some of her contemporaries, including the French diplomat in 1785-89 Count Louis-Philippe de Ségur who was “well informed about the Empress’s literary ventures [and] took part in them himself” (Proskurina). Some passages in Antidote are autobiographical and “can only be narrated by the Empress herself, such as the stories, full of personal details, of Elizaveta Petrovna’s death, the first day of Peter III’s reign or Catherine’s trip to Kazan” (Proskurina).

The publication of this English edition was a logical and in many ways necessary response to the translation of Chappe’s work to English in 1770. The female translator who signed her dedication to Catherine as “An Englishwoman” remained anonymous but highlighted her gender and young age: in her preface, she mentions herself as a “translaitress”, “lady” and “young woman” calling her work a “feeble effort of a virgin pen” and noting that “it has been the work of those hours which had otherwise, most probably, been given up to pursuits which young women generally call pleasure”.

In her introduction, the English translaitress also did not miss the opportunity to give her own opinion about the French: “a nation, […] too prone to envy and discord, has, by studied efforts, endeavoured to cast a gloom upon the country which is happy enough to be under your Imperial Majesty’s dominion […] As the ignorant (too many in all nations) are to be biassed by the most absurd accounts, when published by authority, and with approbation, the spirit of an Englishwoman, though at an early period of life, and with a conscious feeling of her inequality to the talk, could not refuse the satisfaction of translating into her mother tongue the Antidote“.

Provenance

National Geographic Society Library (perforation to title, with handwritten number at foot and ‘withdrawn’ stamp).

From the estate of Geoffrey Elliott (1939-2021), banker of Russian descent, author of books on 20th-c. history. Geoffrey and his wife Fay were noted collectors, especially of Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and other literary figures. Russia was also an important theme: Geoffrey’s grandparents were interned in a Siberian tsarist prison camp before the October Revolution, and he focused most of his published works on the Cold War.

The Elliotts donated a significant part of their collection to the library of Leeds University in 2002, but kept the Russia-related items, which we consequently acquired.