Frederick the Great post links

[cahn]

More Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and surrounding spinoffs history! Clearly my purpose in life is now revealed: it is to encourage mildred_of_midgard and selenak to talk to me about Frederick the Great and associated/tangential European history. I am having such a great time here! Collating some links in this post:

* selenak's post on Frederick the Great as a TV show with associated fandom; a great place to start for the general history

* I have given up indexing all posts, here is the tag of discussion posts. Someday when I actually have time maybe I'll do a "best of."


Some links that have come up in the course of this discussion (and which I am putting here partially for my own benefit because in particular I haven't had time to watch the movies because still mainlining Nirvana in Fire):
Fritz' sister Wilhelmine's tell-all tabloidy memoirs (English translation); this is Part I; the text options have been imperfectly OCR'd so be aware of that (NOTE 11-6-19: THIS IS A BOWDLERIZED TEXT, I WILL COME BACK WITH A BETTER LINK)
Part II of Wilhelmine's memoirs (English translation)
A dramatization of Frederick the Great's story, English subtitles
Mein Name ist Bach, Movie of Frederick the Great and J.S. Bach, with subtitles Some discussion of the subtitles in the thread here (also scroll down)
2017 miniseries about Maria Theresia, with subtitles and better translation of one scene in comments

ETA:
Miniseries of Peter the Great, IN ENGLISH, apparently reasonably historically solid
ETA 10-22-19
Website with letters from and to Wilhelmine during her 1754/1755 journey through France and Italy, as well as a few letters about Wilhelmine, in the original French, in a German translation, and in facsimile
University of Trier site where the full works of Friedrich in the original French and German have been transcribed, digitized, and uploaded:
30 volumes of writings and personal correspondence
46 volumes of political correspondence
Fritz and Wilhelmine's correspondence (vol 27_1)
ETA 10-28-19
Der Thronfolger (German, no subtitles; explanation of action in the comment here)
ETA 11-6-19
Memoirs of Stanisław August Poniatowski, dual Polish and French translation
ETA 1-14-20
Our Royal Librarian Mildred has collated some documentation, including google translate versions of the Trier letters above (see the "Correspondence" folder)!

Comments

Re: Peter

[taelle]

My favorite Peter anecdote is the letter of the London owner of the house that Peter and friends rented while visiting England. It was directed to the Parliament, iirc, and was roughly "those rowdy Russians broke everything including the walls, now who's going to pay for this?"
(they were _really_ rowdy. Not just in London. Everywhere. Now Peter was no introvert, loved having bunches of guys around and playing rough jokes with them.
(also was maybe bisexual. Or pansexual. Or "will try anything". And had a bestest bff Menshikov, a groom's son he made a prince. They called each other Mein Herz, but Peter was not above beating Menshikov up if he thought he was stealing from the treasury too much).

Erm, sorry for intruding, but you linked these posts and I've been reading them for the last couple of days.

Re: Peter

[selenak]

Intrude away, it's a welcome contribution as far as I'm concerned! :)

Re: Peter

[mildred_of_midgard]

What selenak said!

Peter was not above beating Menshikov up if he thought he was stealing from the treasury too much

But if he stole just the right amount, that was okay?

Re: Peter

[taelle]

I suspect the right amount of stealing was flying under radar and was a bit like salary - I think Russian economy at that time was in a certain sense included that into the system, like, an official sent to manage a region would _of course_ "feed" from that region.

Also, I strongly suspect Peter was more like "do not create problems for my projects" than "do not break any laws".

Re: Peter

[mildred_of_midgard]

That all makes perfect sense!

Re: Peter

[cahn]

YES SUCCESS

...that is to say, glad you are here, glad you are liking the posts (aren't selenak and mildred_of_midgard great??), and enjoying your wacky Peter stories :D

Re: Peter

[taelle]

Yes they are)

The wackiest stories are not completely canonical (also, a lot of things _everyone_ knows about Peter comes from Alexei Tolstoy's novel about him, which, I think, was translated into English).
Buuut... there are stories that he loved kissing his orderlies a lot (I mean, doing like a hundred kisses in a row) and also slept with an orderly in the sense of using him as a pillow.

More seriously, Peter's arrival to the throne was a bit wacky (and his response to this was to make the inheritance issues even wackier - he insisted the emperor can choose his own heir (yes, he set himself up as an emperor) and the whole 18th century became completely off-kilter as for inheritance (until Paul I who really disliked his mother Catherine II set it up so women could not rule. Which was then a factor in the Russian revolution in 1917, as in, if Nicholas II stopped at, say, two or three daughters and never had a hemophilic son, maybe the monarchy would not become so off-kilter).

Back to Peter, sorry. His elder brother inherited after their dad and died in about 5 years without leaving issue. There were then two remaining princes: Peter, aged about 10, healthy and intelligent boy, son of his father's second wife, and his older brother Ivan, aged about 15, son of the first wife, sickly and generally considered to be unfit for rule (I don't know what was wrong with him - he was ill a lot but also was very passive and not very bright. He did have kids though! His daughter Anna Ioannovna ruled Russia from 1730 to 1740). So... the solution was to crown both Peter and Ivan (and let the fractions centered around their mothers' families fight it out) and have the oldest sister Sofia as a regent. So Peter had a co-ruler for about 10 years or so, and also saw a lot of political infighting and also outright violence.

Re: Peter

[cahn]

This is amazing! I... would not have thought crowning TWO monarchs would be a good solution to this. At all. I am not surprised at all there was a lot of political infighting!

if Nicholas II stopped at, say, two or three daughters and never had a hemophilic son, maybe the monarchy would not become so off-kilter

Wait, what did this have to do with the monarchy becoming off-kilter? Is it because of Rasputin?

Re: Peter

[taelle]

Yes, Rasputin and also the general isolation of the royal family from everyone who could possibly help/support/advise them (like, even relatives did not know about Alexey). Mind you, very possibly the regime would still collapse, just... maybe in a less extreme way.