Catherine the Great: Coleridge, Byron, and Erotic Politics on the Eastern Front
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Catherine II of Russia, a glamorous, enlightened Romanticist figure in her own right, enraged both Coleridge and Byron. Coleridge, who reported her bloody campaigns in The Watchman, cursed her cruelty at the battle of Ismail in “Ode on the Departing Year” just as she was dying. Twenty-seven years after her death, Byron, in Don Juan cantos 6 to 10, which cover the Russian wars and the St. Petersburg court, attacked her even more vituperatively. Thus, Coleridge’s decision not to be a “Historiographer of Hell” is taken up by Byron in his decision to be that historiographer. The two poets’ responses to Catherine’s brutality and sexuality are intertwined. At the basis of their anger is Catherine’s use of human persons as things. Both show their disgust by reducing the Tzarina to her sexual body, vindictively turning her into a “thing” through rhetorical plays on her body parts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".