She began her life on April 21(should have no “the”), 1729, as Sophia Augusta Fredericka, a minor German princess whose 16-year-old (sounds like 60)mother, Johanna, immediately handed her over to a wet nurse. Johanna’s maternal feeling — all of it — was held in reserve for the yet-to-be conceived son she hoped would secure her claim to his father’s princedom. But when the sickly son, born 18 months after Sophia, died at 12, Johanna had no choice but to redirect her energies onto her one remaining ticket to the exalted social position she coveted.
Never underestimate the power of a cold, calculating and unaffectionate mother to inspire ambition in her child. Determined not just to escape but to transcend her unhappy beginnings, Sophia became Johanna’s collaborator. Having discovered that people preferred “to talk about themselves rather than anything else,”(這個句子的重音我覺得應該在themselves上，你的偏talk上) she learned to conceal pride with humility and became a very good listener, both skills that would serve her well as Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias. She wanted power and she wanted what she “couldn’t live for a day without” — love — and she’d get them both, in spades, but not from the hu*****and who awaited her.
He looked good on paper, “the only surviving male descendant of Peter the Great,” enough that Russia’s reigning and childless empress Elizabeth chose her nephew Peter as her successor and had him plucked from his native Holstein and delivered to St. Peter*****urg. But when she saw the “odd little figure” Peter presented at 14, weak in both body and mind, she began hunting for a bride to facilitate her leapfrogging over his incompetence by presenting her a grandson as heir. Each year may have produced “a new crop of eligible（sounds a little off, don’t know why） adolescent European princesses,” but only one had Johanna for a mother. With the persistence of a terrier, Johanna unearthed and exploited any and all connections to the top, and once she’d contrived a means of introducing her 14-year-old daughter, the empress noted Sophia’s “freshness, intelligence and discreet, submissive manner.”
Indeed, Sophia had many virtues, both cultured and innate, to recommend her as an ideal candidate for marriage to the unprepossessing Peter, but it was her immediate and canny pursuit of everything Russian — church, language and customs — that predicted the transformation of a girl who might otherwise have been a historical footnote into “the pre-eminent royal personage in the world.” A zealous student who begged her tutor for more hours to fill with lessons, Sophia slipped out of bed to drill herself on Russian vocabulary while pacing the cold stone floors. Rather than kill her, however, the pneumonia she developed secured her place in the empress’s affections and kindled the first of her many public relations triumphs. “In the space of a few weeks,” reports that Sophia’s love for Russia was so great that she’d risked her life to learn her adoptive nation’s language more quickly seduced a public eternally suspicious of German influences and machinations.
