Character Analysis
Catherine the Great
In Don Juan the reader sees only a few aspects of the complex woman who was Catherine the Great. He sees her chiefly as sensualist and as an absolute sovereign who is extravagantly generous to her lovers. He does not see her as the woman who did much to Westernize Russia and who was keenly interested in raising the level of culture in Russia. Nor does he see her as the shrewd and unscrupulous diplomat that she was, nor as the czarina who added thousands of square miles to Russian territory. He does not see her as a foreign woman of obscure family who came to Russia as a czar's wife and who by dint of her talents became one of the greatest sovereigns in the history of Russia.