4 - Catherine II, Polyxene Büsching, and Johanna Charlotte Unzer: A Literary “Community of Practice”

Summary

IN EARLY SUMMER OF 1764, Catherine II, the reigning czarina of the Russian empire, began to seek the companionship and literary assistance of a middle-class German woman who lived nearby. The empress wanted knowledgeable feedback on a handful of texts she had composed and so entered into an informal partnership with the author of two books of poetry, Polyxene Christiane Auguste Büsching, née Dilthey (1728– 77), and through her with another published writer, Johanna Charlotte Unzer (1725–82). Together, I argue, the three became a tenuous collective of women supporting each other in their writing. To analyze their interaction, I am applying two related social science models, one of social networks and the other of communities of practice. Social network analysis treats network participants as “interdependent rather than independent” actors, sees the linkages among them as “channel[ing] information, affection and other resources,” and assumes that “the structures of … ties among actors both constrain and facilitate action.” Of various available accounts of a “community of practice,” the one most helpful for literary-historical purposes describes a group of individuals with a shared attachment to a craft or field of expertise, who, in pursuing their craft or knowledge, “engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, … build relationships,” and are themselves practitioners, not passive observers. By considering the three writers as a very small social network, and specifically as a “community of practice,” it is possible to discern certain less recognized elements of what enabled German women in the eighteenth century to become and remain writers, as well as what constrained them.

It is the emphasis on practitioners that distinguishes the “community of practice” from a “literary group,” such as the one composed of geographically dispersed readers who were united by their responses to Sophie von La Roche's monthly journal Pomona (1783–84). Paying attention to literary groups, I have argued elsewhere, enables us to identify and name certain loosely organized communities that persisted through time and across distance and provided their members, mostly women in the Pomona instance, “at least a small degree of reciprocal communication,” thus nurturing both readers and writers.