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Catherine began her reign as an enlightened despot. She corresponded with Voltaire and Denis Diderot and sponsored the arts. Although her native language was German, she has to her credit a number of plays in Russian as well as a statement of legal principles, Nakaz (Instruction). In 1769 she established a satiric journal, Vsyakaya vsyachina (“All Sorts and Sundries”), which was soon followed by others, including the Truten (“Drone”), founded by Nikolay Novikov. In a curious exchange between journals, Novikov and Catherine disagreed with each other about the nature of satire—like the Kurbsky-Ivan correspondence in the 16th century, it was ...(100 of 10831 words)