Princess Dashkova

by Barbara Krasner

Princess Ekaterina Dashkova was perhaps the most accomplished Russian woman of her time. By the age of 16, she had read her entire library of 600 books, including those by the French philosophers. At 17, she came to Catherine's court and immediately attached herself to the empress. Catherine wrote of Dashkova, "Though she pretended to be the intermediary through whom everything reached me, everybody had been in touch with me for six months before she even knew their names. It is true that she is intelligent but she behaves ostentatiously and is an intriguer and disliked by our officers; only the heedless and the rash told her what they knew, which was not much more than a few details."

Dashkova loved intrigue. A Prussian diplomat once said of her, "She is the kind of woman to attempt a new revolution every week, just for the pleasure of it." But Dashkova, better educated than most of the women at Catherine's court, was above all else, an intellectual. Catherine asked her to become both the director of the Academy of Sciences, which Peter the Great had founded in 1724, and the president of a Russian Academy. At first, Dashkova refused Catherine's appointment, but she soon found herself liking the work. Under Dashkova's guidance, the academy developed the first comprehensive dictionary of the Russian language.