SOURCE: Levitt, Marcus C. “An Antidote to Nervous Juice: Catherine the Great's Debate With Chappe d'Auteroche over Russian Culture.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, No. 1 (Fall 1998): 49-63.

In this essay, Levitt examines Catherine's Antidote, her response to Chappe d'Auteroche's attack on Russian culture in his Voyage en Sibérie. Levitt argues that although the work is flawed by ad hominem attacks on Chappe, the Antidote's defense of the Russian people and Russian literature reflects both Catherine's desire to push her country forward through cultural transformation and the complicated status of Russia in the European Enlightenment.

In the age of Enlightenment, when works of philosophy were often oriented toward analyzing specific political problems, travel notes played a significant part in debates over culture and politics, either providing proofs for a given theory or themselves advancing philosophical postulates. At the same time, tendentious histories and travel notes were often written—even commissioned...