Correspondances russes by Charles-Joseph de Ligne (review)

The Belgian prince de Ligne, general, writer, and socialite, first visited Russia in 1780 and swiftly entered Catherine the Great’s inner circle; he returned to Russia in 1787 to accompany the empress on her Crimean tour, before spending the first year of the Russo-Turkish War of 1787 – 92 as an Austrian agent in the Russian armies. He exchanged letters and verses with the most illustrious individuals of the Catherinian Age, such as the empress’s former lover and trusted advisor Grigory Potemkin, generals like Petr Rumiantsev and Aleksandr Suvorov, and her long-time correspondent Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the letters discuss events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period with French émigrés in Russian service and with sometimes little-known Russian writers and salon hostesses. Because de Ligne extensively altered, and sometimes fabricated, letters for publication, later editors and readers have found it difficult to reconstruct even the correspondence with Catherine. The present editors have accomplished the valuable task of publishing the prince’s letters on the basis of manuscripts scattered across Europe: the collection, supplemented by explanatory extracts from related correspondences and from the prince’s other works, provides a fascinating picture of the complex political and social events, as well as the changing literary and intellectual styles and epistolary practices of this tumultuous age. Unfortunately, the editors have not been well served by their publishers: the edition suffers from a large number of misprints, some of which compelled this reader to check their version against original sources. Other editorial decisions also provoke some doubt. For instance, two extraneous letters, previously published as addressed to the prince, have been left in the correspondence with Catherine: a letter tentatively dated February 1789 (pp. 155–56) and a fragment published under ‘Doutes’ (pp. 291–92) are, in reality, partial drafts of letters sent to the German doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann. (These were published, from the autograph letters received by Zimmermann, in Der Briefwechsel zwischen der Kaiserin Katharina II. von Russland und Joh. Georg Zimmermann, ed. by Eduard Bodemann (Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1906), pp. 90–91, 120–21.) As a result, while some letters between Catherine and the prince are undoubtedly lost, that of 16 January 1789, deduced from a mention in the first of these misattributed letters and identified in the introduction as missing (p. 21), never existed. Additionally, two ‘anonymous’ poems included in the ‘Annexe’ to the exchanges with Ekaterina Fedorovna Dolgorukaia (pp. 335–36) are actually extracts, with a few variants, from Jacques Delille’s ‘Ode à l’immortalité’ (in Le Malheur et la pitié, poème en quatre chants (London: A. Dulau, 1803), p. xxvii) and from the dedicatory ‘Épître à Madame Delille’ in his L’Imagination, poème ((Paris: Giguet et Michaud, 1806), I, pp. xii–xiii). Nonetheless, the editors are to be commended for opening up a vast field of research covering not only the prince de Ligne, but also the francophone Russian authors and letter-writers in his pan-European epistolary network, who deserve study as actors on the European literary scene at the end of the Enlightenment.