Check the meaning of the highlighted words in a dictionary.
Unit 2 Text 1 The Enlightenment of Catherine II
Study the vocabulary to a text. Find these words in the text below and translate them into Russian using a dictionary. Mind the context.
| Encyclopedia | a noteworthy historical figure | internal reforms | contemporary |
| reign | be recognized worldwide as | nonnoble classes | dignitary |
| sobriquet | be compared to | timing | plotter |
| ruthless | to be put smb on the throne | to beautify | proponent |
| to gush | the essence of her / his rule | suburbs | philosophes |
| construction projects | to correspond in | masterpiece | merchant |
| a school for noble girls | to lavish attention on | the Russian court | court intriguers |
| to overthrow from throne | palace сoups | to gaine the throne | successor |
A process which is known today as Westernization started and continued on throughout the century. European influence on Russia was growing rapidly. The two monarchs, Peter the Great (May 7, 1682 – February 8, 1725) and Catherine the Great (July 9, 1762 - November 17, 1796), are with good reason associated with that process. The two rulers with the sobriquet “the Great” had a lot in common. Both of them saw expansion abroad. Their reigns were eras of internal reform mostly based on European models.
Peter I founded the new capital of St. Petersburg, Catherine lavished attention on it and made it a showpiece. Recognized worldwide as a noteworthy historical figure, Catherine was often compared to Peter the Great. One of the contemporaries, Ivan Betskoy, a prominent dignitary of the period, described the essence of her rule, saying that Peter the Great created people in Russia and Catherine put her heart into them.
A period of Russian history between the reign of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great defined by rulers overthrowing each other from the throne with the help of elite palace guard. It is said to be one of the most difficult periods for the Russian throne - the era of palace сoups. Catherine II came into throne being a foreigner and a woman involved in the world of court intriguers and plotters. However, she was highly intelligent, had keen political skills and was good at timing. At the same time she could be ruthless and if necessary exercise self-control/ She knew how to manipulate people and how to take advice.
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Catherine the Great considered herself an intellectual proponent of the Enlightenment. She spoke German, French and Russian. She corresponded in French with Voltaire, Diderot, and other philosophes and helped several of them financially, especially Diderot. Perhaps that is why after visiting her in 1773 the publisher of the Encyclopédie gushed that Catherine combined “the soul of Brutus with the charms of Cleopatra” (Quoted in Florinsky, vol. 1, 506).
The empress wrote plays, built a theater (at the Winter Palace), and published her own literary magazine, to which she was the main contributor. She sent agents to Europe to buy entire art collections and eventually accumulating a private collection of 4,000 paintings and 10,000 drawings that became the basis of the magnificent Russian state collection visitors can see today at the Hermitage Museum. She also beautified St. Petersburg and its suburbs with her construction projects, including additions to the Winter Palace and the construction of the Tauride Palace, a neoclassical structure considered the masterpiece of the distinguished Russian architect I. E. Starov.
Catherine established schools, including a teacher’s college and a school for noble girls (“well-born young ladies”) called the Smolny Institute. Late in her reign the government established a network of high schools in 26 provincial capitals and built nearly 170 elementary schools for children of merchants and other nonnoble classes (excluding serfs). In her early years as empress Catherine made a great show of encouraging not only literature and the arts but journalism and the free exchange of ideas. The philosophes loved her, as did the Russian nobility. Russian patriots were thrilled by the territorial gains she won for the empire, and European visitors were impressed by what she had done to enhance the grandeur of St. Petersburg and the Russian court. [1]
Text 2
Historians often have different opinions concerning any historic figure. Read some views about Catherine the Great of the reflections written by western historians. Search and study the source of the extract. Is it authoritative? Whose opinion do you support?
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Check the meaning of the highlighted words in a dictionary.
| Russians, even Soviet Russians, continue to admire Catherine, the German, the usurper and profligate, and regard her as a source of national pride. Non-Russian opinion of Catherine is less favourable. Because Russia under her rule grew strong enough to threaten the other great powers, and because she was in fact a harsh and unscrupulous ruler, she figured in the Western imagination as the incarnation of the immense, backward, yet forbidding country she ruled. One of Catherine’s principal glories is to have been a woman who, just as Elizabeth I of England and Queen Victoria gave their names to periods of history, became synonymous with a decisive epoch in the development of her country Zoé Oldenbourg-Idalie // www.britannica.com |
[1] Adopted from http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/the-romanov-dynasty/catherine-ii-the-great
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