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“I Write on Human Skin”: Catherine the Great and the Rule of Law
- ourmandave 9y ago...in a conversation with Denis Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopédie and the Enlightenment’s most original and radical thinker. “While you write on unfeeling paper,” she told the philosophe, “I write on human skin, which is sensitive to the slightest touch.” Metaphorically then.
- Raphmedia 9y agoThere are however historical cases where books were bound using human leather. Edit: vague words
- baldfat 9y agoBy common you mean 18 books have been confirmed worldwide. > Anthropodermic bibliopegy is the practice of binding books in human skin. As of April 2016, The Anthropodermic Book Project "has identified 47 alleged anthropodermic books in the world's libraries and museums. Of those, 30 books have been tested or are in the process of being tested. Seventeen of the books have been confirmed as having human skin bindings and nine were proven to be not of human origin but of sheep, pig, cow, or other animals."[1] (The confirmed figures as of May 2017 have increased to 18 bindings identified as human and 13 disproved. https://anthropodermicbooks.org/ https://anthropodermicbooks.org/
- vonnik 9y agoAnyone interested in an extension of this thought by Catherine should read Kafka's "In the Penal Colony": https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm
- encoderer 9y agoCatherine the great was a Germanic 14 year old when she was summoned to Russia by Peter the Great's daughter, empress Elizabeth, and she went on to learn the language and rule as the greatest czarina in Russian history. Very interesting story, I encourage ppl to learn more about it!
- squozzer 9y agoI really enjoyed the story, then this -- >Two hundred and fifty years later, in a world where autocratic thugs reign at the two extremes of the Western world, oh brother.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoShh. Don't stir up the fanatics, they really enjoy bashing disbelievers. Even good old Lavoisier - an impeccably progressive fellow - got his head chopped off for not being delusional enough.
- kaeluka 9y ago> Don't stir up the fanatics, they really enjoy bashing disbelievers. Weird, that sounds a lot like what you folks are doing, too.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoWell, from the article it seems Catherine did a more-or-less correct job of adjusting liberal principles to the reality of her country. Assuming that's right, the fact is that her time, her place and even her throne didn't put her in a position where she could do much. In that sense Gorbachev was more fortunate, because he did a similar balancing act at a time when everything ended up in flux (partly because of Gorby's on work). And even that, by its nature, has to have unpredictable effects, including the partial about-face that Putin represents.
- thriftwy 9y ago> In that sense Gorbachev was more fortunate In what sense was Gorbachev any fortunate? He saw the desctruction of the country he was trying to fix, then chaos in all the fragments and then the swift undoing of everything that he ever tried.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoYou really have to wonder how Russia's history would have turned out after a while without Catherine's corrective attempts. You know, cultural heritage and all that.
- coldcode 9y agoThe Russians are an interesting people, part Slav and part Viking. The latter I didn't know until I read a book on the Vikings. Rus was the term used for the Viking rulers in the early part of the millennium and the name stuck.