Overview

Princess Catherine Radziwill (1858-1941) was a Polish-Russian aristocrat, born in Russia into the Polish-Lituanian House of Rzewuski. On her maternal side was the Russian Dashkov-Vorontsov family, and her mother, who died giving birth to Catherine, was the daughter of writer Dmitry Vasilyevich Dashkov who served as Nicholas I's minister of justice. There were other literary connections within the family, among them her great-great-grandfather Waclaw Rzewuski, a noted writer, her aunt Ewelina, wife of Balzac, and her half-brother Stanislaw Rzewuski who became a novelist and literary critic. Aged 15 in 1873 Catherine married Polish-Lithuanian Prince Wilhelm Radziwill, an officer in the Prussian army, with whom she had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood. She made her own literary debut in 1884 under the pseudonym Count Paul Vasili, with a series of articles later collected in book form as Berlin Society. In 1888 Catherine moved to St Petersburg where she held a prominent position at the Russian court and began an affair with Cherevin, the court commandant, a trusted friend of Alexander III. Her situation took a downturn in the mid-1890s with the deaths of both her lover and the Tsar, and, now estranged from her husband and children, she acquired debts which could not be covered by the magazine articles she produced. In 1899 she left for South Africa in pursuit of Cecil Rhodes who settled her debts but avoided a romantic entanglement, and Catherine later published a biography of Rhodes. A scandal surrounding an attempt to clear her son's debts in London led to her return to South Africa where she had a son out of wedlock with an associate of Rhodes, and was later iimprisoned for forging bills in Rhodes's name. During her time in jail she wrote a memoir, My Recollections (1904), and, finally divorced in 1906, she married again in 1909, settling once more in St Petersburg. Here she published two more books, Behind the Veil of the Russian Court (1913), again under her pen-name Paul Vasili, which drew on her intimate knowledge of court affairs, and a second autobiographical work. During WWI she moved to Stockholm, publishing a dozen books over a four-year span, and when later, on a visit to New York, she learned of her husband's death, she decided to remain in the US, spending the rest of her life in New York.

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