Paradoxes of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great's Writings for Children

An ‘enlightened despot’ who ruled the Russian empire as an absolute autocrat despite a tenuous claim to the throne, Catherine the Great embodied innumerable paradoxes during her long reign. This article examines the little-known fairy tales Catherine wrote for her grandsons to reveal the possible and impossible child she posits, envisions and instantiates through her writings for a young audience. Placing these works in a broader intellectual and historical context illuminates the paradoxes of the impossible infans she cultivates as part of an Enlightenment project and reveals how Catherine's writings for children (re)enact a kind of repossession of the child. Catherine's treatment of childhood within and without her texts reflects her ideological aims as a writer, ruler and matriarch. In addressing and attempting to instantiate an impossible child, whether an enlightened subject of her empire or an ideal absolute monarch of the future, Catherine reveals paradoxes that contrast with the reality of vulnerable young individuals in the historical record. These real children from the annals of Russian history offer an illuminating contrast for the impossibly idealised child protagonists constructed by Catherine's writings for children and shed light on the ideological context in which her treatment of childhood is embedded.