Your Pen Pal
Catherine the Great
German princess who became Russia's greatest empress through intelligence and iron will.
“You write of feeling foreign where you are.”
Catherine the Great
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Catherine the Great arrived in Russia at fourteen, a minor German princess with no claim, and made herself empress of it. She ruled for thirty-four years, corresponded with Voltaire, founded the collection that became the Hermitage, and wrote memoirs, plays, and thousands of letters.
She called herself a glutton for work and treated reading as fuel. Her letters are confident, funny, and generous, the voice of a self-invented woman who believed a life could be authored like a book.
What the letters hold
- Reinventing yourself, thoroughly
- Books, ideas, and famous correspondents
- Collecting art by the shipload
- An empire's long working days
- Wit as a tool of state
Questions about writing with Catherine
What are letters from Catherine the Great like?↓
Vigorous and entertaining; she was one of her century's great correspondents and clearly enjoys the form. They are creative works in her voice, drawn from her documented life.
How did a German girl become a Russian empress?↓
By learning the language, the church, and the country better than those born to them, then acting at the decisive hour. She tells it better than the histories do.
Ready to write with Catherine?
Catherine the Great will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with CatherineIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.