The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 7 (of 7) — A Closer Reading

Compression and Moral Framing

Malkin’s method is to reduce a life to its turning points, often within a single paragraph. The memoir of Gustavus Adolphus, for example, covers his education, military campaigns, and death in a few hundred words, with the narrative driven by verbs of action: “raised,” “established,” “forbade,” “set aside.” The language is efficient, but it also carries implicit judgment. When describing Catherine II’s coup, Malkin writes that she “organized the revolution which conducted him to a prison and a grave,” then adds that “the only extenuation … is the probability … that a similar fate would otherwise have befallen herself.” This technique—presenting facts and then offering a moral calculus—appears throughout the volume. The reader is given not just events but a running assessment of the subject’s character, often in the same sentence.

Shifts in Pace and Perspective

The tempo of the memoirs varies noticeably. Some entries, like that of Gustavus Adolphus, move at a steady, almost martial rhythm, with short declarative sentences: “He spoke the Latin language … with uncommon energy and precision; he conversed fluently in French, Italian, and German.” Others, such as the account of Catherine II, slow down for dramatic set pieces. The coup narrative is drawn out over several paragraphs, with direct speech (“that her danger had driven her to the necessity of coming to ask their assistance”) and vivid details like the “15,000 picked soldiers.” This change of pace signals a shift from summary to scene, and it is used sparingly, making those moments stand out. The effect is to give the reader a sense of witnessing history rather than merely reading a digest.

Recurring Patterns in Structure and Voice

Several structural habits recur across the volume. Malkin often begins with a subject’s ancestry or early education, then introduces a crisis or turning point, and concludes with an assessment of their legacy. The voice is consistently authoritative, using phrases like “no doubt” and “we might almost say certainty” to assert interpretation. In the Catherine memoir, he notes that “the common people reverenced the blood of Peter the Great” and that “the priests … were disappointed and indignant”—a technique of summarizing public opinion to contextualize the subject’s actions. The memoirs also share a tendency to compare figures to classical or historical precedents: Catherine’s guards are likened to “the Prætorian troops of Rome.” These patterns give the collection a cohesive, essayistic quality, even as the subjects range widely in time and place.

Readers approaching this volume should be aware that Malkin’s biographies are not neutral records but arguments shaped by a clear moral framework. The prose rewards attention to its shifts in pace and its moments of direct quotation, which often carry the weight of the narrative. Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full arc of each memoir—and the cumulative effect of the collection—remains to be discovered. The volume is best read as a series of compressed judgments, each entry a miniature essay on power, ambition, and character.

I remember shelving old Malkin’s seventh volume, his stern judgments on Catherine’s ambition. Something in that fierce weighing of a life against its deeds calls to mind the quieter, more slippery account in The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Volume 05: Milan and Mantua — Key Ideas to Explore—where a man merely lets his days unfold, and posterity must decide which portrait holds truth.