The epistolary art of Catherine the Great

The Epistolary art of Catherine the Great is the first study to analyse comprehensively the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1762-1796) and to argue that they constitute a masterpiece of eighteenth-century epistolary writing.

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev traces Catherine's development as a letter-writer, her networking strategies and her image-making, demonstrating the centrality of ideas, literary experimentation and manipulation of material form to Catherine's epistolary practice. Through this, Rubin-Detlev illustrates how Catherine's letters reveal her full engagement with the Enlightenment and her original responses to the ideas of her century.

The letter was not merely a means by which the empress promoted Russia and its leader as European powers ; it was a literary genre through which Catherine expressed her identity as a member of the social, political and intellectual elite of her century.