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Rulhière as well as Chappe d’Auteroche. Her autobiographical mode of writing continued in her lifelong literary, political correspondence (1774–96) with Grimm; the letters contain numerous autobiographical passages that echo her middle and final memoirs. Other later French works that aroused Catherine’s ire included
History of
the Two Indies
(1781) by Abbé Raynal (1713–96), an indictment of slavery and despotism that influenced
A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
(1790) by Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802), for which the author was exiled. 78 Catherine’s constant vigilance against French historiography of Russia shaped the polemical subtext of many of her writing projects, including the memoirs.
    At the same time, these foreigners’ criticisms spurred Catherine on with an enormous cultural and scientific agenda. With her eye on Voltaire, France, and Europe, Catherine laid the institutional foundation for Russia’s extraordinary cultural leap forward in the nineteenth century in literature, art, architecture, music, and theater. The memoirs often mention the cultural amusements at Elizabeth’s court, but Catherine aimed much higher, and beginning with her coronation ceremonies, she immediately established and publicized a brilliant court life as the center for Russian culture. 79 While she rejected Chappe d’Auteroche’s opinion that the levels of Russian science, scholarship, and letters were low, in 1768 she ordered the Academy of Sciences to make expeditions, reports, illustrations, and maps in a survey of Russia. 80 Surveys brought back accounts of different languages, and in the 1780s, when the British discovery of Sanskrit made comparative linguistics fashionable, Catherine established a research project to assemble a comparative dictionary of all the languages, not only in the Russian empire but worldwide, which she published. 81
    At home, historical debates coalesced against German historiography of Russia. In response, Catherine first supported, and later wrote, Russian history herself. While Catherine’s historical writing has been uniformly dismissed as naïve plagiarism, her activity as a historian promoted the development of Russian historiography, in its infancy in the eighteenth century, and shaped the writing of her final memoir as a historical document. As
Antidote
makes clear, most eighteenth-century foreigners had little direct knowledge of Russia and relied on the accounts of travelers who spoke no Russian. Yet Russia had few scholars, and most of these were German. Their so-called Norman theory about the foreign origin of the Russian state provoked a nationalist backlash against the Germans and galvanized Russians to take up their history, which Catherine fully supported. 82 Under Catherine, publications included Peter the Great’s correspondence, the chronicles of Russia’s early history (1767–92), the first modern historical narrative of Russian history by a Russian,
Russian History from the Earliest Times
(1768) by Vasily Tatishchev (1686–1750), and more than eighty historical works that created the first public forum for Russian historiography. She bought historians’ collections of books and documents; she ordered the systematic, statistical description of the Russian empire; and she had documents collected for an account of Russia’s diplomatic history. 83
    Catherine was of course personally interested in Russian history, and her transition to writing history in the 1780s and subsequent return to her memoirs reflect that concern. In a letter to Grimm in 1778, she had written, “Who is this best poet or best historian of my empire? It is certainly not me, as I have never written either verse or history.” 84 But as if to rectify this omission in her writing, in 1779 she created a commission to gather documents and prepare notes for her own use. 85 Catherine got no further than the fourteenth century; in letters to Grimm in 1794, for example, she mentions that “I’ve