Love and Conquest - Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)

Buchr�cken / oberer Seitenschnitt schadhaft, sonst guter Zustand. Mit Widmung f�r Joschka Fischer. Of all of history's great romances, few can compare with that of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin. Their turbulent and complicated relationship shocked their contemporaries and continues to intrigue observers of Russia centuries later. Lovers, companions, and, most likely, husband and wife, Catherine and Potemkin were also close political partners, and for a time Potemkin served as Catherine's de facto co-ruler of the Russian Empire. Their letters offer an intimate glimpse into the lovers' unguarded moments, revealing both ecsta-tic expressions of love and candid insights on eighteenth-century politics. In February 1774, the Russian empress took Grigory Potemkin for her lover and, it is now believed, secretly married him a few months later. Particularly in the first two years of their relationship, Catherine was consumed by her passion for Potemkin. The hundreds of letters and notes she dashed off to him between assignations in the Winter Palace during this time attest to the giddy exuberance of the new love that so fully embraced her. Love and Conquest contains the most historically significant and personally revealing of these letters, only a few of which have ever before been translated into English. ISBN 9780875803241