Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700-1825

Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825 Edited by Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi Women in Russian Culture ...

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Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825 Edited by

Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi

Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825

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Edited by

Wendy Rosslyn and

Alessandra Tosi

Editorial matter and selection © Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi 2007. Introduction and Chapter 3 © Alessandra Tosi 2007. Chapter 11 and Appendix © Wendy Rosslyn 2007. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2007. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–55323–1 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–55323–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Tables

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Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction Alessandra Tosi

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Part I Women and the Arts 1 Signs from Empresses and Actresses: Women and Theatre in the Eighteenth Century Lurana Donnels O’Malley 2 Female Serfs in the Performing World Richard Stites 3 Women and Literature, Women in Literature: Female Authors of Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century Alessandra Tosi

9 24

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4 Women’s Travel and Travel Writing in Russia, 1700–1825 Sara Dickinson

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5 The First Russian Women’s Journals and the Construction of the Reader Gitta Hammarberg

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Part II Women and Society 6 ‘Without Going to a Regular Court …’: The Phenomenon of the ‘Divorce Letter’ in Petrine Russia Ol’ga Kosheleva

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7 The Function of Fashion: Women and Clothing at the Russian Court (1700–1762) Paul Keenan

125

v

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Contents

8 Merchant Women in Business in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Galina Ul’ianova

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Part III Femininity and Religious Life 9 Sacralising Female Rule, 1725–1761 Gary Marker 10 Female Orthodox Monasticism in Eighteenth–Century Imperial Russia: The Experience of Nizhnii Novgorod William G. Wagner

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11 Women with a Mission: British Female Evangelicals in the Russian Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century Wendy Rosslyn

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Select Bibliography (2001–2006): Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825 Wendy Rosslyn

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Index

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List of Tables 8.1 Number of enterprises owned by women by branch of industrial activity 8.2 Soap-boiling enterprises in Kazan’ 8.3 Data on women of the merchant estate and the value of their property lost in consequence of the burning of Moscow during the war of 1812–1852 10.1 Convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese (1799 borders), during the eighteenth century

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151 156

160 196

Acknowledgements The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Universities of Exeter and Nottingham in funding preparations for this volume.

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Notes on Contributors Sara Dickinson has degrees in Slavic studies from the University of Chicago, Indiana University, and Harvard. A specialist in eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, she currently teaches at the Università degli Studi di Genova. Her recent publications include the book Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin (2006) and several articles, including ‘Representing Moscow in 1812: Sentimentalist Echoes in Accounts of the Napoleonic Occupation’ (in Moscow and Petersburg: The City in Russian Culture, ed. Ian K. Lilly, 2002) and ‘The Russian Tour of Europe Before Fonvizin: Travel Writing as Literary Endeavor in EighteenthCentury Russia’ (Slavic and East European Journal, 2001). Gitta Hammarberg is Dewitt Wallace Professor at Macalester College, where she has taught Russian literature and language since receiving her PhD at the University of Michigan in 1983. She has published a book From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (1991, 2006) and authored articles on minor sentimentalists, album verse and literary trivia, women’s journals, memoirs, Russian spa culture, and Gogol. She is currently working on a monograph on Karamzin’s heirs and the feminisation of Alexandrine culture (Time of Peter the Great, 2004). Paul Keenan is currently a Tutorial Fellow in the Department of International History in the London School of Economics and Political Science. He recently completed his doctorate (at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London) on the social and cultural development of St Petersburg in the first half of the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the influence of the Imperial court. Ol’ga Kosheleva is Leading Research Fellow in the Department of History, Institute of Theory and History of Russian Pedagogy at the Academy of Education in Moscow. Her recent publications include ‘Episodes from Women’s Lives in the Reign of Peter I’ in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, edited by Wendy Rosslyn (2003) and the volume Liudi Sankt-Peterburgskogo ostrova Petrovskogo vremeni (The People of St Peterburg Island in the Petrine Era). Gary Marker is Professor of Russian History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has published numerous studies of print ix

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culture, literacy, reading, and education during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Over the past several years his work has focused on questions of gender and religion, including the writings of the memoirist, Anna Labzina, and the forthcoming An Imperial Saint: The Veneration of Saint Catherine and the Advent of Female Rule in Russia. His latest project, tentatively entitled Mazepa and the Preachers, examines the role of the Orthodox hierarchs in articulating a new national idea at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Lurana Donnels O’Malley is Professor of Theatre at the University of Hawaii, where she teaches Theatre History and Directing. Her writings about the drama of Catherine II have appeared in such journals as Comparative Drama, Slavic and East European Journal, Essays in Theatre, and Theatre History Studies. She has edited and translated Two Comedies by Catherine the Great (1998). Her newest book is The Dramatic Works of Catherine the Great: Theatre and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2006). Wendy Rosslyn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Nottingham. Her research on Russian women in the eighteenth century includes books and articles on female poets and translators, notably Anna Bunina (1774–1829) and the Origins of Women’s Poetry in Russia (1997) and Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women 1763–1825 (2000). She is also the editor of Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2003). Her most recent research is on women’s philanthropy and voluntary associations (Deeds, not Words: The Origins of Women’s Philanthropy in the Russian Empire, 2007). Richard Stites is Professor of Russian History at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and has written The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (1978), Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Social Experiment in the Russian Revolution (1989), winner of the AAASS Vucinich Prize for 1989, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (1992), History of Russia Since 1800, with Catherine Evtukhov (2004), and Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia (2005). Alessandra Tosi is Lecturer in Russian at Exeter University, Research Associate of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and Harold Hyam Wingate Fellow. Her research focuses on early-nineteenth-century Russian fiction, comparative literature, and gender studies. Her most recent publication is Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801–1825) (2006); she is currently writing a book on Princess Zinaida


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Volkonskaia. Dr Tosi is also co-editor of the Study Group on EighteenthCentury Russia Newsletter. Galina Ul’ianova is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in Russian History of the Nineteenth Century at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. She is also a member of the advisory committee of the journal Russian Studies in History. Her principal publications include Blagotvoritel’nost’ moskovskikh predprinimatelei, 1860–1914 (The Charity of Moscow Entrepreneurs, 1860–1914, 1999) and Blagotvoritel’nost’ v Rossiiskoi imperii: XIX – nachalo XX veka (Charity in the Russian Empire in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 2005). William G. Wagner is Brown Professor of History and chair of the History Department at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, author of Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (1994) and co-compiler and editor of Russian Women, 1698–1917: Experience and Expression: An Anthology of Sources (2002). He has written numerous articles and essays on pre-Revolutionary Russian law, religion, and women. He is currently completing a book entitled Russian Sisters: Monasticism, Modernity, and the Nizhnii Novgorod Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, 1764–1935.


Introduction Alessandra Tosi

This interdisciplinary collection of chapters devoted to Russian women in the long eighteenth century (extending to the reign of Alexander I) offers contributions relating to the least-studied areas of the subject. It focuses on the culture and social history not only of noblewomen, who are most adequately documented, but also of merchant and peasant women, about whom relatively little is known, and who are as yet under-researched. It also sheds light on women living in the provinces of the Russian Empire. A number of contributions relate to gender in the less-studied period before the reign of Catherine II (1762–1796). The book opens with a section on women and the arts (Part I). Four chapters examine women’s active role in the cultural production of the age, in two key spheres of eighteenth-century culture: theatre and writing. Lurana Donnels O’Malley’s chapter ‘Signs from Empresses and Actresses: Women and Theatre in the Eighteenth Century’ investigates the key role played by eighteenth-century empresses such as Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II in the development of a public theatre in Russia. Empresses actively supported women’s involvement as performers on stage, in ballet, and in opera, and their patronage was instrumental in encouraging women’s participation both as audience and as playwrights (following the example of Catherine II herself) and actresses. For the most part, this imperial approval gave actresses a respected status, with the exception of serf actresses, who overall did not enjoy the esteem accorded to other women on stage. These actresses are the subject of Richard Stites’ ‘Female Serfs in the Performing World’. House serfs and sometimes village or field serfs were recruited as actors and actresses by landowners, both in the capital and in the provinces, ambitious to show their European culture. Stites discusses the 1

2


life experience of enserfed women performers, actresses, ballerinas, and singers from the mid-eighteenth century to 1825. Some women achieved distinction and even freedom through their talent. Most serf actresses, however, remained in bondage and were liable to corporal punishment and social prejudice, with many becoming the sexual objects of their masters. Whilst theatre allowed, and even required, the participation of lowerclass women, written literature was the dominion of the gentry. The years between 1760 and 1825 saw a rapid rise in the involvement of Russian noblewomen in the national literature, both as consumers and, increasingly, as active participants. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represent a turning point in this respect: women represented the target readers for a number of publications, while making their presence felt as authors. This presence laid the foundation for women’s writing as a professional activity in the centuries to come. In her essay on noblewomen’s fiction in the early nineteenth century (‘Women and Literature, Women in Literature: Female Authors of Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century’), Alessandra Tosi investigates the first generation of women novelists and places their work in the social and cultural context of the age. In this period, after centuries of marginalisation, Russian noble and elite women were encouraged to write, both in Russian and in French, by two cultural phenomena: sentimental ideals of feminine aesthetics, and women’s role as salon hostesses and arbiters of taste. Yet, as the investigation of a number of key texts demonstrates, notwithstanding women’s increased visibility and acceptance in the literary sphere, patriarchal values remained a significant limitation on the extent and features of women’s artistic output. Sara Dickinson further analyses the work of Russian women writers in her essay ‘Women’s Travel and Travel Writing in Russia, 1700–1825’ in which she discusses women’s experience of travel, the gendered features of travel writing, and compares the work of Ekaterina Dashkova, Natal’ia Stroganova, and Mariia Gladkova in respect of style and self-representation. Women’s increasing participation in Russia’s literary life is further discussed by Gitta Hammarberg. Her chapter ‘The First Russian Women’s Journals and the Construction of the Reader’ analyses the contents of several leading journals and the literary positions of the male editors and shows how the imaginary woman reader of women’s journals was constructed, and how these journals helped to create real readers and to encourage writing by women. She demonstrates how the journals were involved in the literary debates of the day and

Introduction

3

that the constructed woman reader feminised the literary canon by inspiring a distinctive conversational style and a variety of interactive and performative genres. Part II of this book focuses on the social position of women of various ranks and estates. Ol’ga Kosheleva’s chapter ‘ “Without Going to a Regular Court …”: the Phenomenon of the “Divorce Letter” in Petrine Russia’ brings to light the informal procedures used by lower-class women from various parts of Russia at the beginning of the century to circumvent the ban on divorce by the Orthodox Church. Kosheleva reveals bigamy to have been a widespread phenomenon in Russia in the early eighteenth century. The chapter analyses some rare documents: unofficial ‘divorce letters’ written by husbands to wives with the intent of freeing both from their marriage obligations. These letters illuminate marriage strategies and social interactions testifying to disobedience to the official instructions of the Church and state via the creation of an alternative set of rules widely recognised and obeyed by large segments of the Russian population. Paul Keenan’s chapter ‘The Function of Fashion: Women and Clothing at the Russian Court (1700–1762)’ focuses on elite women and investigates the early effect of Westernisation on women’s role at court in the period of Peter I and his successors. Looking at contemporary court records and legislation, Keenan demonstrates the connection between the profound changes in lifestyle and role of women at court and the new requirements in elite clothing inspired by Western European trends. The chapter by Galina Ul’ianova sheds new light on the ‘middle layers’ of Russian society towards the end of the period. ‘Merchant Women in Business in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’ uses archival evidence to reveal the commercial activities of merchant widows, some of them former peasants, who took over their deceased husbands’ businesses. This chapter illustrates the opportunities provided by Russian law, under which women enjoyed substantial property rights, for women from outside the nobility. This research reveals that women from numerous provinces felt confident in various spheres of economic enterprise, both in the production of goods and in trade and real estate transactions. Part III of this book addresses the interface between femininity and the Church. Gary Marker’s ‘Sacralising Female Rule, 1725–1761’ looks at female rule, a distinctive feature of the eighteenth century, and at the justifications advanced for this unprecedented phenomenon in Russian history. The acceptance of crowned female heads reigning in Russia for

4


all but about five years between 1725 and 1796 was achieved though a process of sacralisation that reconciled tradition, faith, and the sensibilities of tsarist subjects who had never imagined an alternative to male rulership. As Marker demonstrates, this process was initiated by the leading clerical authorities of the final years of the reign of Peter I, who managed to make female rule seem consistent with the stated belief that the ruler was chosen by God. This sacralisation of female rulers was achieved through a hastily assembled but indispensable female alternative to the traditional lineage of divine kingship. Biblical stories, authoritative texts and images of cults (such as female name day saints and the virgin and the sacred womb) were brought to the fore of public discourse in order to make this abrupt change appear unproblematic. William G. Wagner’s chapter ‘Female Orthodox Monasticism in Eighteenth-Century Imperial Russia: The Experience of Nizhnii Novgorod’ investigates a further aspect of the relationship between Russian women and the Church. Drawing on previously unused regional as well as central archival sources, Wagner traces the severe contraction and beginnings of revival experienced by female Orthodox monasticism in Imperial Russia during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries after the secularisation legislation of 1764 and shows the impact of monastic reform. He takes as a case study three convents in Nizhnii Novgorod and demonstrates that they were shaped by the economy of the city, their limited wealth, and the less privileged social background of the sisters, who were typically elderly widows and unmarried women from the local population or servants let go after long service. Reform left the communities dependent on the state, but neither the Orthodox hierarchy nor the state were able to impose an organisational regime or require the provision of services for the state. Finally, Wendy Rosslyn’s chapter ‘Women with a Mission: British Female Evangelicals in the Russian Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century’ shows the efforts of some British women to overcome the ban by British churches and missionary societies on missionary activity by women. Circumventing the ban, women worked in the Russian Empire, as missionaries’ wives, as educational missionaries, or as independent women motivated by profound religious concern. There they were able to contribute to the distribution of tracts and Bibles, to the education of girls, and to prison reform, often in close collaboration with Russian women of evangelical faith.

Introduction

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The book closes with a Select Bibliography on women in Russian culture and society in the long eighteenth century. Listing the main publications on this topic since the year 2001, this bibliography updates previous ones. Together with the collected chapters it provides an important research tool for students and scholars of gender studies and Russian eighteenth-century culture.


Part I Women and the Arts


1 Signs from Empresses and Actresses: Women and Theatre in the Eighteenth Century Lurana Donnels O’Malley

If the empress [Elizabeth] was present, of course, the audience had no right to express approval before a sign from the imperial box, and contemporary writers mention several occasions when the sovereign rising from her seat ‘deigned to applaud’ or ‘shed a tear’.1 This chapter treats women in Russian theatre during the eighteenth century, until the death of Catherine II in 1796, in three categories: as patrons, performers, and playwrights. Several of the significant theatre patrons in the eighteenth century were empresses, who dominated Russian politics; these women were key players in the development of public theatre in Russia. Anna, Elizaveta Petrovna, and Catherine II all recognised the important role of theatre both as a hallmark of European courtly sophistication and as a fertile ground for the growth of Russian culture. They actively supported women’s involvement as performers on stage, in ballet, and in opera; their patronage modelled a role for women as audience members. For the most part, this courtly approval gave many actresses a respected status as artists, with the notable exception of serf actresses, who embodied the dual nature of adoration and enslavement so often associated with women on stage. The century also saw a small number of women playwrights, including Catherine herself. Through participation and patronage, women played an active part in the rapid growth of Russia’s nascent theatrical art.

Patrons Traditional histories of Russian theatre’s extraordinary development in the eighteenth century have focused on the key male players who led its 9

10 Women and the Arts

artistic development: Johann Gregory, F. G. Volkov, A. P. Sumarokov, and D. I. Fonvizin. But the enthusiastic patronage of courtly women, including the empresses themselves, nurtured both the growth of theatre in this century and the participation of other women in it. In the seventeenth century, Aleksei Mikhailovich famously banned ‘every form of worldly entertainment’,2 but in the 1670s, under the influence of his second wife, tsarina Natal’ia Naryshkina (1651–1694), he encouraged the German clergyman Johann Gregory to produce spectacular court theatre productions of scripts upholding the glory of both God and monarch. Despite the interest which Natal’ia Naryshkina took in such courtly display, males played all the female roles and even the tsarina was kept out of view, watching the play through a hole in the wall. Iakov Reitenfel’s, a visitor from Courland, noted this arrangement at the Kremlin theatre: ‘For this production the tsar watched, seated in front of the stage on a chair, the tsarina and her children watched through a grille or, rather, through special chinks in the boards of a partitioned-off location.’3 School plays at such institutions as the Slavonic–Greek–Latin Academy were similarly performed by males for males. During the reign of Peter I (1682–1725), the policy of Westernisation changed attitudes toward theatre, but the tsar’s female relatives were the ones who maintained an active theatrical life after the closure in 1706 of Johann Kunst’s German company, brought to Moscow in 1702, and taken over by Otto Fürst in 1703. Peter’s sister Natal’ia Alekseevna (1673–1716), daughter of Natal’ia Naryshkina, with the support of her powerful brother, acquired some of the stage properties and scripts from the German company. Beginning in 1707, she staged plays in two private theatres, one on her Preobrazhenskoe estate, and the other in her palace on Kamennyi Island in St Petersburg from 1711 to her death. Natal’ia Alekseevna was devoted to her theatre and also wrote plays for it. Besides being the first known Russian woman playwright, she is also credited with having the ‘first [theatre] in Russia to put native-born women on the public stage’.4 The entry in the Kamer-fur’erskii zhurnal (court Chamberlain’s journal) for 26 February 1715 says that the Hanoverian ambassador F. C. Weber attended a comedy at Natal’ia’s theatre. According to his account, Natal’ia Alekseevna ‘ordered a big empty house to be prepared and separated it into loges and parterre. The ten actors and actresses were all native Russians, never having been abroad, and by this it’s easy to guess how their art was’.5 Weber adds another piece of information about Natal’ia Alekseevna’s play: he was

Signs from Empresses and Actresses

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told ‘that this play showed, under disguised names, one of the latest rebellions in Russia’.6 Praskov’ia Saltykova (1664–1724), widow of Peter’s co-tsar Ivan V, also used Kunst-Fürst scripts and properties in her private theatre at the Izmailov estate, from 1712 to 1723. Her third daughter, Grand Duchess Ekaterina Ioannovna, the third wife of the Duke of MecklenburgSchwerin, was the driving force behind this theatre. Although privately run, it was open to the public. Female roles were played by female courtiers, although male actors were of a lower status.7 Ekaterina Ioannovna was deeply involved in these productions. Friedrich von Bergholz, a diplomat, reports in his diary for 1722 that Praskov’ia’s ‘theatre was elegantly arranged, but the actors’ costumes were not completely good ones. The Duchess of Mecklenburg [Ekaterina Ioannovna] directed everyone, but all the same the play was bad’.8 The next female ruler, Anna Ioannovna (1693–1740), shifted the theatrical focus from the public to the court. Anna, Praskov’ia’s fourth daughter, had been Duchess of Courland from 1710 to 1730 and may have been familiar with Polish king August II’s sponsorship of an Italian company. When Anna came to the Russian throne in 1730, she shared her mother’s interest in theatre. Under her, numerous foreign companies visited the capital city. Between 1731 and 1735 three Italian troupes visited, including Tommaso Ristori’s company in 1731, brought from the Polish court for Anna’s coronation, and Francesco Araja’s company in 1735. These troupes performed a varied repertoire of commedia dell’arte, ballet, and opera and featured Italian women (usually related to other company members) in female roles. Araja’s company included Giovanna Casanova, mother of the notorious Giacomo Casanova, but she returned to Warsaw in 1738. Araja remained in Russia for almost twenty-five years. In 1739, Anna invited a German company, led by the remarkable Caroline Neuber (1697–1760), one of the most significant female theatre practitioners of the eighteenth century. Neuber had made pioneering changes to the repertory of German theatre and to the organisation of her company. In Germany she had particularly sought to raise the status of actresses, through close offstage supervision.9 While in Russia the troupe performed classical works in both German and French and generally gave an air of dignity and seriousness to the art of non-musical drama. In addition to Neuber, the troupe included a Mademoiselle Büchner and also what Jacob von Stählin (a German art historian and Anna’s fireworks designer) calls ‘several other unformed Saxon girls, whose grimaces and accents were not suitable, and were therefore


displeasing’.10 Upon Anna’s death, however, the troupe returned to Leipzig. Anna also created the first training ground for native performing arts in 1731 when she founded the Land Forces Cadet College in Moscow. The young men were trained in both music and dancing. Seven years later, the College’s ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé offered to found a ballet school where he would teach six males and six females. This school later became the St Petersburg Imperial School of Ballet, and the young women trained there in dance and recitation became the ‘first Russian professional female performers whose names are known’.11 They performed foreign ballets, operas, and plays at court as part of Araja’s company. The subsequent female ruler, Elizaveta Petrovna (1709–1761), created the first professional theatre company in Russia. Importing F. G. Volkov’s troupe from Iaroslavl’ in 1752, she later combined actors from this company with students of the Land Forces Cadet School to form the first state-supported theatre in 1756, under the direction of Sumarokov. This troupe would perform new Russian plays. In her decree of 1756 she particularly noted the need for ‘an appropriate number of actresses’.12 Elizaveta Petrovna also nurtured the early development of native Russian opera. Araja had composed the music for the opera Tsefal i Prokris (Cephalus and Procris), with a libretto by Sumarokov, and in 1755 the opera was presented in St Petersburg with the young harpsichordist Elizaveta Belogradskaia singing the role of Procris in Russian; this gave ‘great pleasure to the Empress’.13 Catherine II was also a theatre enthusiast. Several new theatres were built in St Petersburg during her reign, including her own Hermitage Theatre in the Winter Palace. Catherine also formalised theatrical training in Russia by founding the Imperial Theatrical School for actors, singers, and dancers in 1779. Catherine recognised theatre’s potential to promote her vision of an Enlightened Russia. In 1764, two years after ascending the throne, she founded the Smol’nyi Institute in St Petersburg for the education of young noblewomen. Catherine wished to include drama in the curriculum, and in 1772 she asked her correspondent Voltaire for his advice for her 500 young women: For two winters now, we have started to make them act comedies and tragedies, and they acquit themselves better than the professionals here. I admit, however, that there are only a very few plays that are suitable to them; their superiors would rather avoid their performing any which might arouse the passions too soon.14


13

She goes on, ‘They say there is too much love in most French plays.’15 Voltaire replies in agreement that ‘dramatic recitation, of tragedy or comedy, is an excellent form of education. It lends grace to the mind and body, and trains the voice, deportment, and taste’.16 Voltaire does question how young women might play the parts of old men. In her reply Catherine explains that although the girls are easily able to play young male heroes with the help of ‘a sort of long coat’, ‘the old men’s parts are the most difficult and least successful. A big wig and a stick do not make a young girl look old and wrinkled: these parts have been rather lifeless so far’.17 It is possible that, by providing such theatrical activities as part of the curriculum for a new generation of noblewomen, Catherine sought to ensure that they, like she, appreciated the freedom of taking on different roles.

Performers ‘Needed for the Russian theatre, a Madam for the actresses.’18 This advertisement for a female chaperone or steward appeared in the SanktPeterburgskie vedomosti (St Petersburg News) on 14 March 1757. Only a week before, an advertisement had appeared, seeking ‘several actresses (komediantok)’ for the newly formed state company under the leadership of F. G. Volkov. Within a year and a half, all three of the actresses who joined the troupe were married to actors within the company.19 Mar’ia Anan’ina wed the head of the troupe, Volkov. Her sister, Ol’ga Anan’ina married actor Iakov Shumskii, and Agrafena Musina-Pushkina wed Ivan Dmitrevskii. The immediate need for a ‘Madam’ hints at the confusing nature of this position of komediantka: the female actor is such a rarity that she must be recruited; once found, she must then be protected from any taint of impropriety associated with the stage. The supervision was done first by this Madam, and then by the actor-husband, whose familial bond became a mechanism legitimising the morality of her profession. These provisions were necessary because the notion of a professional actress was completely new. It is likely that throughout the eighteenth century, women participated in a broad range of popular performances, such as those Catriona Kelly has documented from the seventeenth century: round dances and songs done at weddings and other feasts, lament-singing, and participation in ritual games. Kelly details the events of the semik spring festival: ‘women of the village would get dressed up, some in men’s clothing, and ritually “murder” a strawstuffed dummy to signify the end of the old season’.20 Malnick notes the


performative quality of the traditional wedding ceremony; in the ‘siege of the bride’ the bride must ritualistically enact herself, publicly declaring her need for her family’s protection and pity.21 Religious dramas such as the sixteenth-century Peshchnoe deistvo (The Furnace Play) and the later scholastic biblical dramas did not include females as players. The producers of these didactic spectacles were likely wary of the effect of displaying a female body on stage. Even in the eighteenth century, some religious leaders still warned against women’s seductive wiles; one eighteenth-century sermon defined woman as ‘a decorated snare, deceiving men with love of pleasure […] swishing her skirts, dancing with her feet, killing men with her deeds’.22 Aleksei Mikhailovich may have had such demonic pleasures in mind when he instituted his ban of 1648. Peter the Great, cognisant of the role theatre could play in Westernising Russia, brought Kunst’s German company to Russia and with it Kunst’s actress–wife Anna. When Fürst took over after Kunst’s death, Anna remained and trained two local German women residents as performers. When the company disbanded in 1706 the tsar himself issued an order that Anna Kunst remain in Russia, to ‘complete the teaching of the Russian actors’, but she did not.23 The insistence of Elizaveta Petrovna on actresses for the newly formed state theatre in 1757 finally made acting a serious and respected profession for Russian women. In addition to the first recruited actresses mentioned above, in 1761 Tat’iana Troepol’skaia (1744–1774) joined the company at her request. Troepol’skaia, who had acted in an amateur company at the University Theatre in Moscow, was noted for her portrayals of the heroic women in Sumarokov’s classical tragedies. In a list of salaries for the company, she earned 700 roubles a year, the second highest salary in the company, just under lead actor Dmitrevskii’s 860 roubles (the next highest-paid male actor earned 600 roubles).24 Similar star status was accorded to the ballerinas Anna Timofeeva and Anna Berilova. The stories of two famed actresses, Praskov’ia Zhemchugova (1768–1803) and Elizaveta Sandunova (1772–1826), reveal that the acting profession could both enslave and free women. As Richard Stites’s chapter in this book suggests, the former condition was much more common. Zhemchugova was born into a serf family in 1768 as Parasha Kuznetsova. At a young age she was brought to the Sheremetev estate and made her debut as an actress in N. P. Sheremetev’s serf theatre at Kuskovo in 1779. Sheremetev gave gemstone names to his actresses and changed her name to ‘Zhemchugova’ (Pearl) in 1780. She was the


15

leading actress of the theatre for many years and was also Sheremetev’s mistress. He chose to free her from serfdom in 1798 and married her in 1801. She died of tuberculosis shortly after the birth of her son in 1803. A true star of eighteenth-century theatre, Zhemchugova excelled in drama and opera. Her most famous role was that of the warrior-maiden Eliane in Grétry’s opera Les Mariages samnites (The Samnite Marriages). As a serf actress, she was both confined by her enslavement and freed by the attentions of her master and the public. Catherine Schuler calls her ‘a sort of fairy-tale princess’,25 the legendary exception to the rule of serf theatre: while she was singled out, educated, and later freed, other serf actresses remained under their owners’ control, used for harem-like offstage entertainment26 and beaten when unable to perform onstage roles properly. Schuler, drawing on the memoirs of serf actress Nastas’ia Piunova, describes the strict supervision of actresses at Prince N. G. Shakhovskoi’s serf theatre: Kept under lock and key, the girls were supervised by mamushki – middle-aged women who were, in Shakhovskoi’s opinion, completely reliable. Special carriages conveyed the girls to rehearsals and performances; when they arrived at the theatre, new mamushki called the girls to the stage as needed where they rehearsed under the vigilant eye of yet another mamushka.27 These mamushki recall the ‘Madam’ required in 1757 to supervise actresses at the very dawn of Russia’s professional theatre; these chaperones demonstrated the nobility’s control over the female bodies it displayed. The story of Zhemchugova, slave-turned-wife, shares elements with the tale of the professional singer Elizaveta (Uranova) Sandunova, also known as Lizan’ka. Her first stage name, Uranova, was a tribute to the planet Uranus, discovered in 1781. Count A. A. Bezborodko, a senior minister under Catherine II, desired Uranova (a celebrated opera singer who gave singing lessons to Zhemchugova). To please Bezborodko, the co-directors of the Imperial Theatres, A. V. Khrapovitskii (Catherine’s literary secretary) and P. A. Soimonov arranged for Uranova’s beloved, S. N. Sandunov, himself a respected actor, to be sent away to Moscow. Early in 1791 Sandunov made reference to his plight at his benefit performance in a verse speech. The next day, the Empress commented to Khrapovitskii, ‘Voilà ce que fait l’injustice’ (‘Here’s injustice for you’).28 On 11 February Uranova took advantage of her lead role in an opera, Fedul s det’mi (Fedul and his Children), written by the Empress herself, to get


down on her knees to offer Catherine a petition against Khrapovitskii and Soimonov. That evening, the Empress decreed that the two directors be removed from their positions.29 Khrapovitskii’s diary entry for 11 February notes that during the performance of Fedul ‘Lizka gave us a petition’ and that D. P. Troshchinskii, head of Bezborodko’s office, was up with him half the night, conferring with him about the decree. On 14 February he notes simply that ‘in the Malyi court church Lizka and Sandunov were married’.30 In fact Catherine arranged for the wedding, and gave Uranova (now Sandunova) some expensive jewellery. When the married pair later moved to Moscow, they sold the jewellery to purchase land on the bank of the Neglinnaia river and in 1808 founded the famously elegant Sandunov baths. The tales of Zhemchugova, the Pearl, and Sandunova are narratives of enslavement and triumph. Liz’anka defeated her courtly suitor’s advances, by direct appeal to her female monarch’s protection.31 Zhemchugova also made a change in her station through marriage. Although Sandunova was not a serf, the unwanted attentions of Bezborodko are reminiscent of the fate of many serf actresses; the support and patronage of Catherine parallel the attentions Sheremetev paid to Zhemchugova. In each example, the fairy-tale ending of a wedding does not quite erase the trace of abuse. The Sandunovs did not live happily ever after, divorcing in 1814. Although continental European stages featured actresses as early as the sixteenth century, actresses in Russia only became the norm after 1756. Since the Russian repertory itself developed at this time, its female roles were created with this newly emerging female performer in mind (although some comic roles were cross-dressed by men, a tradition carrying into the twentieth century).

Playwrights ‘Her Majesty kindly retired to her bedroom together with me in order to read through my piece of extempore writing which did not, in my estimation, deserve that honour.’32 So wrote Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, née Vorontsova (1743–1810) in her memoirs, describing with expected modesty the process of composing her first play. Her friend Catherine II, herself a prolific playwright, had instigated the writing, but these two were not the first women playwrights in Russia. That honour seems to belong to Peter I’s sister Natal’ia Alekseevna. On visiting her theatre, Weber wrote: ‘The tsarevna herself composed tragedies and comedies in


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the Russian tongue, and took the subjects from the Bible and from secular events.’33 Another diplomat, Count Bassevich, wrote in 1723: Princess Natal’ia, the younger sister of the emperor, and very much his favourite, created, they say, before the end of her life, two or three plays, very well thought-out and not lacking beauty in their details; but because of a shortage of actors these plays were not presented on the stage.34 Simon Karlinsky points out that Natal’ia’s theatre was the first in Russia to present a popular new dramatic genre: the chivalric romance. These plays were ‘dramatic adaptations of translated foreign tales of love and adventure’35 with titles such as Komediia Petra zlatykh kliuchei (The Comedy of Peter of the Golden Keys) and Komediia o prekrasnoi Meliuzine (The Comedy of the Beautiful Melusine).36 Although these plays from Natal’ia’s theatre are not themselves extant except in fragments, Karlinsky analyses other surviving romances of the era, pointing out their popularity in amateur theatres all over Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century. Their typical themes are the obstacles to romantic love, and they usually feature a princess heroine, in love with a knight. Although later neoclassically oriented writers such as Sumarokov would denigrate these early dramas, it is interesting that plays featuring female protagonists were the mainstay in a theatre run by a woman. The theatre historian I. A. Shliapkin posits the following titles as being the creation of Natal’ia Alekseevna: Tsezar’ Otton (Caesar Otton), Sviataia Ekaterina (St Catherine), Khrisanf i Dariia (Chrisanph and Daria), and perhaps also Sviataia Evdokiia velikomuchenitsa (St Eudokia, the Great Martyr), a play about the love of Peter for the tsarina Evdokiia Lopukhina. Shliapkin’s collection of ancient plays37 contains fragments from the last three; the short excerpts are actors’ ‘sides’. These sides give one character’s full lines in a dialogue exchange and provide the very ending cue words for the other character. The next known female playwright is Mavra Shepeleva, Elizabeth’s maid of honour during the reign of Anna, and the wife of Count P. I. Shuvalov. Her Komediia o printsesse Lavre (Comedy of Princess Lavra) was performed by choristers and court ladies in 1730–1731. The noted chorister Ivan Petrov played Jupiter, and princess Lavra appeared in the form of a goddess.38 Later in the century, between 1786 and 1789, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova wrote two plays. The first was at the prompting of Catherine II.


Dashkova published the five-act play Toisiokov, ili Chelovek beskharakternyi (Mr This-and-That, or a Weak-willed Person) in the journal Rossiiskii featr (Russian Theatre),39 and it was performed in March 1786 in the court theatre in St Petersburg and in Moscow in October. The hero appears to be a send-up of Lev Naryshkin, a witty member of Catherine’s inner circle.His stalwart opponent Reshimova (Decisive) clearly reflects the rational Dashkova’s own exasperation with fools. During 1788–1789 Catherine wrote two proverb plays. Proverb plays were short comic sketches that ended with a spoken proverb, providing a witty and sometimes moralistic ending. Her plays, neither of which survives, parody Dashkova. The first, called Za mukhoi s obukhom (After a Fly with an Axe), was described by Khrapovitskii in his diary: ‘the rivalry between Postrelova and Duryndin is about princess Dash[ko]va with Nar[yshkin]’.40 In his diary entry for the next day, 24 October 1788, Khrapovitskii wrote that Catherine had recognised the necessity to ‘soften the severity’ of the names and delete Postrelova’s bragging about her travels (Dashkova had toured Europe in the 1760s). The following year, Khrapovitskii referred to Catherine having composed a different ‘unplayed comedy in which Dashkova is clearly presented’.41 These dramatic depictions reveal the intimacy of Catherine’s inner circle; although the scripts are playfully satirical, these depictions also reveal the nobility’s view of themselves as principal actors on the stage of Russia. This playfulness in 1789, when Dashkova and Catherine were still in close contact, contrasts with the later clash over Vadim Novgorodskii (Vadim of Novgorod), when the power of drama would now seem quite serious to Catherine. In 1783, Catherine had taken the unusual step of appointing Dashkova, kindred spirit as a female intellectual, as the director of the Academy of Sciences. As director, Dashkova edited the massive 43-volume periodical anthology of Russian drama (Rossiiskii featr, 1786–1794). This unprecedented publication gave a new literary status to Russia’s emerging dramatic repertory. Dashkova included 16 plays by the Empress in the compilation. In 1793, Dashkova published I. B. Kniazhnin’s play Vadim Novgorodskii, a historical tragedy set in the ninth century, in which the eponymous character urges revolt against the tyrannical rule of Riurik. Kniazhnin had died in 1791, and the play had never been produced. Catherine, acting on the advice of her current favourite Platon Zubov, ordered that all copies of the play be destroyed. Most scholars attribute her decision to her growing insecurity in the wake of the French Revolution, although Andrew Wachtel makes a strong argument for a motive of literary jealousy.42 When the Chief of


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Police visited her, Dashkova advised him that the play was included in a volume of Rossisskii featr: ‘he could, if he liked, spoil the volume and tear the play out, which would merely make me laugh as it was less dangerous to sovereigns than many a French tragedy acted at the Hermitage’.43 Very soon after this event, Dashkova took a leave of absence from her duties and moved to her estate in Moscow. This rift ended the alliance between the two most influential women in Russian dramatic literature. The composition of Dashkova’s second play came about under quite different circumstances, after the death of Catherine the Great. In 1798 or 1789, at the private theatre of her brother Count A. R. Vorontsov, Dashkova saw a Russian translation of a 1795 play by the German writer August von Kotzebue, called Armuth und Edelsinn (Poverty and Noble-Mindedness). Translated into Russian as Bednost’ i blagorodstvo dushi, the sentimentalist play exposes the folly of the greedy Fabian Stöpsel. According to the nineteenth-century account of the play’s genesis by Metropolitan Evgenii, Dashkova ‘noticed that the writer’s denouement hardly depicted a suitable reward to the noble soul of Tsedestreim [Cederström] and Fabian’s greed for wealth’.44 Dashkova’s immediate response was Svad’ba Fabiana, ili Alchnost’ k bogatstvu nakazannaia (Fabian’s Wedding, or the Greed for Wealth Punished), written in two and a half hours. The script is no longer extant, but the play was produced at her brother’s theatre. Frank Göpfert theorises that Dashkova’s sequel reflected on her troubled relationship with her own children: her son had married the daughter of a rich merchant.45 Whatever the motive, it is clear that an immediate reply, in the form of a sequel to Kotzebue, was an urgent matter to Dashkova.46 As one of Russia’s most prominent women in this period, Dashkova, like Catherine the Great, acknowledged the importance of drama and theatre within the public sphere. Although women writers such as Aleksandra Rzhevskaia (1740–1769) and Elizaveta Kheraskova (1746–1797) were active in other genres such as poetry, only a few other women included dramatic writing amongst their literary endeavours. Pelageia Vel’iasheva-Volyntseva (1773–1810) was known for her play translations.47 She translated from French Louis de Boissy’s comedy Le Français à Londres (The Frenchman in London) and another sentimentalist comedy by Charles Henri de Longueil called L’Orphelin Anglais (The English Orphan, 1787).48 Mar’ia Sushkova née Khrapovitskaia (1752–1803) was also a prolific translator, who created five Russian translations of French comedies and operas for Michael Maddox’s Moscow theatre company, four of which were performed by the company and also published by N. I. Novikov.


But certainly the most famous female playwright of this century was also the most famous woman of this century: Catherine II. In two distinct periods, one in 1772, and the other from 1786 to 1790, Catherine wrote over two dozen dramatic works in many genres: comedies, operas, historical dramas, and proverb plays.49 Neoclassical comedies were her favourite form, and the five comedies of 1772 employ broad caricatures to represent a variety of societal evils, such as false piety, superstition, and ignorance. O vremia! (Oh, These Times!) and Imianiny gospozhi Vorchalkinoi (Mrs. Grumbler’s Nameday) are examples of Catherine’s strategic use of satire as an Enlightenment educational tool. Catherine returned to writing again in 1786. Again using a comic format, she created a trilogy of plays – Obmanshchik (The Deceiver), Obol’shchennyi (The Deceived One), and Shaman sibirskoi (The Siberian Shaman) – that castigated Russian freemasonry, portraying its followers as the victims of devious charlatans. Catherine also turned her attention from contemporary issues to historical Russia. In her trilogy Iz zhizni Riurika (From the Life of Riurik), Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega (The Beginning of Oleg’s Reign), and the unfinished Igor, she treated the foundations of the Russian state and alluded to her own plans to conquer Turkey. With these plays and her comedy Vot kakovo imet’ korzinu i bel’e (This ‘tis to have Linen and Buck-Baskets), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Catherine experimented with a departure from neoclassical style: an imitation of Shakespearean freedoms of time and place. Collaborating with court composers, she also created several operas. These include the serious Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega as well as a series of folk-derived comic operas, such as Fedul s det’mi (Fedul and his Children) and Gorebogatyr’ Kosometovich (Woeful Knight Kosometovich), a satire on her Swedish foe Gustav III. Except for a group of short comic proverb plays in French, Catherine wrote all of these works in Russian, with editorial help from her literary assistants. Catherine clearly invested great amounts of time and energy into her playwriting, and she saw it not as a diversion but as a powerful educational tool: ‘Theatre is a national school … I am the senior teacher in this school.’50 As the number of women playwrights was quite small in this century, it is difficult to generalise about favoured genres or themes. Both Catherine and Dashkova preferred the comic genre for its educational potential. With the exception of Vel’iasheva-Volyntseva, most of these writers were able to see their works performed, although their hands-on involvement with the productions varied according to circumstance. A friend described the activities of Princess Dashkova at her Troitskoe estate in 1805, when Dashkova was in her sixties: ‘she talks out loud in


21

her little Theatre and puts in the Performers when they are out in their parts’.51 As romantic and realistic trends expanded audiences for theatre throughout Russia, many women in the nineteenth century brought their experience as actors to bear in a new and influential role: the professional theatre manager. But the seeds for this profession were sown in the eighteenth century, through women’s involvement in patronage, acting, and playwriting. Russian women, in theatres big and small, were anything but silent players in the development of theatre in the eighteenth century.

Notes 1. Malcolm Burgess, ‘Russian Public Theatre Audiences of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Slavonic and East European Review, 38 (1959), 160–83 (p. 164). 2. Bertha Malnick, ‘The Origin and History of the Early Russian Theatre’, Slavonic and East European Review, 19 (1940), 203–27 (p. 214). 3. Quoted in E. Kholodov, ‘Pervye zriteli russkogo teatra’, Teatr, 8 (1978), 97–112 (p. 102). 4. Wendy Rosslyn, ‘The Prehistory of Russian Actresses: Women on Stage in Russia (1704–1757)’, in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on EighteenthCentury Russia, Wittenberg 2004, ed. Roger Bartlett and Gabriela LehmannCarli (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2007), pp. 69–81. 5. Quoted in I. A. Shliapkin, Tsarevna Natal’ia Alekseevna i teatr ee vremeni, in Pamiatniki drevnei pis’mennosti 128 (1898), xv (my translation). For a contemporary English translation see F[riedrich]. C[hristian]. Weber, The Present State of Russia (London, 1722–1723; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), p. 189. 6. Shliapkin, Tsarevna Natal’ia Alekseevna i teatr ee vremeni, xvi. 7. Rosslyn, ‘The Prehistory of Russian Actresses: Women on Stage in Russia (1704–1757)’, p. 72. 8. Quoted in P. P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom, 2 vols (St Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1862; repr. Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1972), I, 432. 9. Lesley Sharpe, ‘Reform of the German Theatre: Frau Neuber and Frau Gottsched’, Europa, 1.4 (1995), 57–64 (p. 59). 10. Stählin quoted in L. M. Starikova, Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhu Anny Ioannovny: dokumental’naia khronika, 1730–1740 (Moscow: Radiks, 1995), p. 588. My translation from the Russian translation. 11. Rosslyn, ‘The Prehistory of Russian Actresses: Women on Stage in Russia (1704–1757)’. p. 75. 12. Quoted in L. M. Starikova, Teatr v Rossii XVIII veka. Opyt dokumental’nogo issledovaniia (Moscow: GTsTM im. Bakhrushina, 1997), p. 86. 13. Iakob Shtelin, Muzyka i balet v Rossii XVIII veka (St Petersburg: Soiuz khudozhnikov, 2002), p. 134. 14. Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767 in the English Text of 1768, ed. W. F. Reddaway


15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

(Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1931), p. 152. English translation from Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence, trans. and ed. A. Lentin (Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1974), p. 129. Reddaway, p. 152; Lentin, p. 129. Reddaway, p. 156; Lentin, p. 131. Reddaway, p. 160; Lentin, p. 132. Starikova, Teatr v Rossii XVIII veka, p. 95. Starikova, Teatr v Rossii XVIII veka, p. 96. Catriona Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Russian Theatre’, in A History of Russian Theatre, ed. Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999), pp. 18–40 (p. 24). Bertha Malnick, ‘Origin and History of the Early Russian Theatre.’, Slavonic Year-Book, 19 (1941), 203–227, p. 204. ‘On Chastity’ (trans. Jennifer L. Anderson), in Russian Women, 1698–1917: Experience and Expression, an Anthology of Sources, ed. by Robin Bisha (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2002), pp. 21–22 (p. 21). Starikova, Teatr v Rossii XVIII veka, p. 16. Stählin, quoted in Starikova, Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhu Anny Ioannovny, pp. 602–03. Catherine Schuler, ‘The Gender of Russian Serf Theatre and Performance’, in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester and New York: Manchester U P, 2000), pp. 216–35 (p. 229). Laurence Senelick, ‘The Erotic Bondage of Serf Theatre’, Russian Review, 50 (1991), 24–35 (p. 31). Schuler, P. 229. From N. F. Iushkov, K istorii russkoi stseny. Ekaterina Borisovna Piunova-Shmidgov, v svoikh i chuzhikh vospominaniiakh (Kazan’: Tipografiia gubernskogo pravleniia, 1889). Dnevnik A. V. Khrapovitskogo, 1782–1793, ed. N. P. Barsukov (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Bazunova, 1874), p. 354. M. N. Longinov, ‘Dramaticheskie sochineniia Ekateriny II’, in M. N. Longinov, Sochineniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Bukhgeim, 1915), pp. 269–84 (p. 283). This essay is a reprint of a piece from 1857 journal Mol’va. Dnevnik A. V. Khrapovitskogo, p. 358. See Wendy Rosslyn, ‘Female Employees in the Russian Imperial Theatres (1785–1825)’, in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 269–70 for some of the ramifications for Sandunova of this public petition. E. R. Dashkova, The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, trans. and ed. Kyril Fitzlyon; introduction by Jehanne M. Gheith; afterword by A. WoronzoffDashkoff (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 235–36. Quoted in Shliapkin, Tsarevna Natal’ia Alekseevna i teatr ee vremeni, xv. L. M. Starikova, ‘Russkii teatr petrovskogo vremeni. Komedial’naia khramina i domashnie komedii tsarevny Natal’i Alekseevny’, in Pamiatniki kultury. Novye otkrytiia za 1990 god (1992), p. 148. Simon Karlinsky, Russian Drama from its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), p. 49.


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36. V. N. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Ot istokov do kontsa XVIII veka. Istoriia russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra v semi tomakh, ed. E. G. Kholodov, 7 vols (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977), I, pp. 431–42. 37. I. A. Shliapkin, Starinnye deistva i komedii petrovskogo vremeni (Petrograd: Akademicheskaia dvenadtsataia gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1921). 38. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, p. 101. 39. Ekaterina Dashkova, ‘Toisiokov, ili Chelovek beskharakternyi’, Rossiiskii featr, 19 (1788), 239–317. 40. Dnevnik A. V. Khrapovitskogo, p. 178. 41. Dnevnik A. V. Khrapovitskogo, p. 304. 42. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1994), pp. 31–36. 43. Dashkova, Memoirs, p. 238. 44. Mitropolit Evgenii [E. A. Bolkhovitinov], Slovar’ russkikh svetskikh pisatelei, sootechestvennikov i chuzhestrantsev, pisavshikh v Rossii, 2 vols (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1845), I (1845), 159. 45. F. Gëpfert, ‘O dramaturgii E. R. Dashkovoi’, in Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova: Issledovaniia i materialy, ed. A. I. Woronzoff-Dashkov and M. M. Safonov (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1996), pp. 147–51 (p. 150). 46. Teplova notes that Dashkova also wrote the libretto for an opera called Zemir i Azor: V. A. Teplova, ‘Dashkova’, in Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, ed. N. D. Kochetkova (Leningrad: Nauka, 1988), pp. 243–47 (p. 246). 47. M. N. Makarov, ‘Pelageia Ivanovna Vel’iasheva-Volyntseva’, Damskii zhurnal, 29.10 (1830), 149. 48. N. N. Belykh and N. D. Kochetkova, ‘Vel’iasheva-Volyntseva’, in Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, p. 147. 49. See my monograph, The Dramatic Works of Catherine the Great: Theatre and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 50. Quoted in Liubov’ Gurevich, Istoriia russkogo teatral’nogo byta (MoscowLeningrad: Iskusstvo, 1939), p. 97. 51. Martha Wilmot and Catherine Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot; being an account by two Irish ladies of their adventures in Russia as guests of the celebrated Princess Daschkaw, containing vivid descriptions of contemporary court life and society, and lively anecdotes of many interesting historical characters, 1803–1808. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by the Marchioness of Londonderry and H. M. Hyde (London: Macmillan, 1934; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1971), p. 201.

2 Female Serfs in the Performing World Richard Stites

Na krepostnoi balet sognal on mnogikh furakh Ot materei, ottsov ottorzhennykh detei! Sam pogruzhen umom v zefirakh i amurakh, Zastavil vsiu Moskvu divit’sia ikh krase! No dolzhnikov ne soglasil k otsrochke: Amury i zefiry vse Rasprodany poodinochke!!! For his serf ballet, [he] filled up a lot of wagons With children torn away from their mothers and their fathers! His mind on nothing but his Zephyrs and his Cupids, He made all Moscow marvel at their grace; But his creditors would not postpone his payment – The Cupids and the Zephyrs all Were sold off one by one. Aleksandr Griboedov, Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit), Act II1 The above quotation could be read as a tightly compressed version of a commonly encountered drama of Russian serfdom in the long eighteenth century: a Russian landowner recruiting lithe, good-looking adolescent serf girls to perform in a private manorial theatre; casting them as ‘Cupids’ (Amours) and ‘Zephyrs’ in some Anacreontic ballet borrowed from the Imperial Theatre repertoires; spending lavishly on sets, costumes, musicians, and – most of all – the entertainment of neighbours who came to watch and stayed on as guests; suffering eventual insolvency and selling the entire troupe to the Imperial Theatres 24

Female Serfs in the Performing World 25

system, with its houses in Moscow and St Petersburg. To the plot of this mini-narrative should be added the practice of turning the Amours into amours – the noble lord’s personal concubines. Did serf women and girls on stage live under the shadow of triple jeopardy? As bonded persons, they shared the disabilities of all serfs, village or factory, male and female – lack of freedom, absence of legal recourse, and potential subjection to physical punishment and humiliation, forced relocation, and separation from family. As females, in whatever capacity, they could be coerced into sexual relations with their owner. As performers, they bore, along with their male colleagues, the traditional onus of that occupation – the image of a morally inferior being. Like male serfs, actresses became detached from their familiar milieu and alienated from their peers – without, of course, gaining entry into the exalted life of gentry society. Since documentation on the personal lives of the vast majority of female serf performers does not exist, one can draw only limited conclusions from scattered data – mostly from non-serfs – on how they coped with their condition.2 Though a few of the following examples are drawn from the reign of Nicholas I, the institutions and practices discussed took root in the long eighteenth century and were all in place by 1825.

The pall of serfdom How much did serf owners intrude into the lives of their serfs, aside from their latent right to punish miscreants with beatings, reassignment to the army for males, or even exile to Siberia? On the issue of control of marriages, the picture is mixed. One recent study found that nobles tended to free female serfs whose groom resided on a nearby estate. Another concluded that owners did not widely practice matrimonial control of their village serfs.3 Against this picture, we have scattered anecdotal evidence. An ex-serf told of an absentee landowner in the era of Alexander I who forbade his serfs, who had made money in trade, from marrying out of their class.4 A Samara nobleman ‘in his youth’ – probably in the 1820s – had all the hunchback males and females in his district wed to one another.5 Some landowners forced an unwanted marriage as a punishment for servants. A gentry woman of Smolensk Province claimed that even into the 1840s controlling serf marriages was still the rule among her neighbours.6 In another form of control, wealthy and cultivated serf owners deployed serfs in various forms of theatrical play. Ex-army officers drilled them in parade formations for visual effect and the renewed satisfaction of command. On one estate, the lord had serfs costumed as titled aristocrats who


danced at an imitation royal ball.7 From the mid-eighteenth century, urban and provincial nobles launched the enterprise known as serf or manorial theatre, most, though not all, of whose repertoires were borrowed from the imperial houses. Selected household, and even field serfs, were transformed into singers, dancers, and actors. Whether manorial actresses were recruited from village peasants or household serfs, they in effect joined the ranks of the latter in terms of their proximity to and oversight by the master. The average house serf as servant certainly lived more comfortably than soldiers in war and peace, factory serfs, or miners; and the surplus of servants in large manors and palaces allowed a good deal of shirking. Nevertheless, serf actors were subject to the same kinds of physical abuse as were servants – and sometimes more so because of their greater public exposure. In the town of Penza, landowner Grigorii Gladkov ran an urban serf theatre from 1807 to 1821, continued by his son to 1829. In an arrangement unusual for provincial theatres, the male cast comprised freemen – clerks and petty officials from the town – while the female contingent were all serfs. According to the custom of the time, owners did not use the family names of their serfs, and so the prima ballerina was called simply Masha and the prima donna Sasha. The poet Viazemskii considered the latter to be ‘perhaps no worse than’ the singers on the imperial stages.8 Audience members noted Gladkov’s mistreatment of the cast – male and female. One spectator spoke of simultaneous performances: on stage where serfs portrayed monarchs and heroes, and in the front of the house where, from his seat, Gladkov roared at erring actors at the end of an act and then flew backstage to beat them. The punished performers returned to their roles in the next act with burning cheeks and tear-filled eyes.9 Viazemskii observed bruises beneath the actors’ make-up. One recently beaten serf actress who doubled as Gladkov’s mistress was severely disabled.10 A village priest recalled that, a decade or so after the elder Gladkov passed away, an unnamed master in the early years of Nicholas I had his Sasha and Dasha sing at dinner and had them whipped for a discordant note. In the evening, in his serf theatre, one or the other would be lashed between acts by the coachman for not comporting herself with sufficient dignity in her role as a countess. After the beating, she would have to return to play in another piece with the bloody stripes still on her back.11

Theatre of Eros Serf owners regularly seduced female servants. The practice became so common that no eyebrows would be raised when the house maid in


Griboedov’s Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit) spoke of ‘our sorrows, the master’s anger and his love’ (Act I). While manorial seraglios violated accepted custom, some Russian sultans nevertheless enjoyed carnal relations with scores of girls and women from their villages and households. A married landowner of the 1820s, Petr Kashkarov, regularly kept a dozen young girls in his bedroom to attend to his pleasures. The great military hero General Izmailov gained notoriety for abusing his underlings and maintained twice the number of mistresses as Kashkarov. The noted aristocratic radical, Alexander Herzen, spoke of serf harems, including one kept by a relative. When it was discovered that an elderly bachelor kept dozens of serf concubines in a building near his home, the local authorities took his estate in trust.12 But since such legal measures were rarely invoked, male peasants occasionally assaulted and even murdered the offending landowner. In some cases, the parents of a peasant lass would gladly offer her to the lord in the belief that she might live a better life. Sexual exploitation of female performers of the Imperial Theatre system by managers and privileged members of the elite, though common, was limited to a certain extent by the public nature of the institution and the juridically free status of the performers. All former serfs, on being inducted into the Imperial Theatre system, gained automatic and hereditary freedom.13 Sexual imposition in private serf theatre, more widespread than in the imperial houses, faced few constraints. At the Sheremetevs’ sumptuous Ostankino Palace in Moscow, actresses and dancers became available to owner and guests, a habit emulated on provincial estates. In Laurence Senelick’s words, ‘the glamour and sexual licence associated with the actor’ heated up the erotic attraction. Power, hormones, and theatricality mingled in the urges of those who could afford to create and maintain the kind of private harems that monarchs had been enjoying for centuries. The literary historian Iurii Lotman interpreted the gentry’s blend of European secularism and ‘paganism’ as part of a role-playing that combined carnality with a flair for music and theatre.14 A few concrete examples may illuminate the connection between stage and sexual performance. Prince Nikolai Iusupov, owner of 21,000 serfs and one of the wealthiest men in Russia, used both his own theatre and the Imperial Theatres, whose directorate he briefly headed in the 1790s, as a pool of female pulchritude. He was able to have choral singers lodged in one of his Moscow buildings, an arrangement dubbed ‘the Iusupov seraglio.’ At his palatial residential theatre, Iusupov was wont to have serf ballerinas strip naked on stage at the conclusion of a


number.15 An eyewitness recalled a real-life episode at Iusupov’s palace theatre that perfectly enacted the Griboedov scenario cited in the epigraph heading this chapter. After a performance of the ballet Zefir i Flora (Zephyr and Flora) by an all-serf cast, the young girl dancing the role of Flora proceeded from the stage to the loge of her owner to kiss his hand. According to Iusupov’s young son, the host of the witness, serfs girls who refused this homage would be whipped.16 An oft-cited example of seigniorial sexual power, the Kazan’ provincial landowner P. V. Esipov, formed a theatre in 1803 with a troupe from his estate. The sources often claim that he kept his actresses in a harem, but most of them offer as evidence the ubiquitously quoted passage from the memoirs of the gossipy Filipp Vigel’. He asserted that Esipov had no limits to his quest for pleasure. Vigel’ once stayed overnight at the Esipov mansion. He recalled that the estate actresses sat at table with the noble guests – an unheard-of liberty since they were after all the master’s property – and invited the guests to kiss and embrace them. But one of Esipov’s serf actresses (Kuz’mina; see below) later claimed that he was a kind master, and she made no reference to sexual matters. Vigel’ had even less to say about the performance of Martin y Soler’s opera, Una cosa rara (A Rare Thing) which he saw the next day. ‘They played and sang as did all provincial actors of the time – no worse, no better.’ Aside from this fragment, precious little is known about Esipov’s female performers.17 Another poorly documented but famous case, the murder in 1809 of Field Marshal Count Mikhail Kamenskii, is immortalised but freely treated in Nikolai Leskov’s well-known story ‘Tupeinyi khudozhnik’ (‘The Makeup Artist,’ 1883). Kamenskii allegedly had sex with the female performers of his serf theatre. He was murdered in his bed, in one version by his serf mistress and her lover, and in another by serf musicians.18 Again, no details survive on the lives of Kamenskii’s serf women. His son, Sergei Mikhailovich Kamenskii, also a notorious serf-theatre owner, inspired a less bloody literary artefact: Herzen’s short story ‘Soroka-vorovka’ (‘The Thieving Magpie’). Kamenskii the younger, owner of thousands of serfs, maintained jail cells for insubordinate serf performers. Actresses in training had to attend performances and repeat whole speeches word for word without a prompter, or dance numbers step by step from the previous evening. Kamenskii in his loge maintained a book of errors on his lap and a row of whips on the wall behind him. Unlike Gladkov who rushed onto the stage howling, Kamenskii waited for the entr’acte to go backstage and beat those who floundered.19 After the whipping, the actresses returned to the public stage,


often in a comic role. One spectator claimed to see through his opera glasses the dried tears of actresses as they laughed their way through the performance. Off duty, the actresses were forbidden to leave the premises or to communicate with the town’s citizens – especially with men. Count Mikhail Buturlin and a fellow officer of the garrison tried to launch an epistolary intrigue with two sisters who were the premières amoureuses of this theatre. When Kamenskii discovered it, he had one of the sisters lashed.20 The power of serf theatre owners – manorial or commercial – over their performers knew hardly any limits. An episode involving one of Sergei Kamenskii’s female actresses provided Herzen with the plot of his tale. A medieval legend that inspired the French melodrama La pie volante, which in turn Rossini made into the popular opera La gazza ladra, dealt with a maidservant wrongfully accused of pilfering a valuable object which had actually been ‘stolen’ by a magpie, attracted by its glitter. One of Count Kamenskii’s more accomplished performers, known only as Kuz’mina, had been a serf actress in Esipov’s establishment and had been well treated by him. In an account that she gave to the famed actor, Mikhail Shchepkin, Esipov had promised to free Kuz’mina upon his death, but his relatives falsified the will and cheated her of freedom. Instead they sold her to Sergei Kamenskii. Under this new and harsher master, she actually performed the role of the maid in Caigniez’s melodrama La pie volante. When she rejected Kamenskii’s sexual pressures, he accused her falsely of prostitution, just as an unwanted suitor in the play had accused the maidservant of theft. The heaviness of the irony spurred Herzen, who heard the story from Shchepkin, to write ‘Soroka-vorovka’ (‘The Thieving Magpie’), one of his most famous diatribes against serfdom. But unlike the heroine of the literary treatments who was vindicated, Kuz’mina was forced to end her days in the service of a hated master. Thus female serfs played falsely accused women on the Russian stage and endured insults in real life as well – in this case with fantasy and reality welded in the same person.21 Though the operation of manorial serf theatres declined after the long eighteenth century, the associated practice of recruiting serf women and girls into a private theatre for ulterior purposes could still be found on some estates. The provincial actress Liubov’ Nikulina-Kositskaia told in her memoirs of a landowner of Tambov province who enrolled young village women into his theatre and then seduced or forced himself upon them, only to discard them later and induct a new batch onto his stage. This resulted in village tensions, desertions, violence, and at least one murder.22 A long forgotten novel by Prince Grigorii Kugushev tells a


similar story about a superfluous nobleman who ensnares and enslaves a servant girl into his theatre harem.23 Post-emancipation and Soviet stories also took up this theme. Its most elaborate and overheated treatment in the arts, the Soviet ballet Krepostnaia balerina (The Serf Ballerina), appeared in 1927, staged in Leningrad by the experimental choreographer Fedor Lopukhov. Set in the reign of Catherine the Great, it dramatises some of the actual practices of the age connected with serf performers: arbitrary power of the masters, the sending of serfs to Europe for professional training, and the beating of female performers. Surrounding these familiar elements, Lopukhov and his associates built up an ambitious quasi-historical scenario, including the well-known legend of the Potemkin Village and the very real volcanic explosion of the Pugachev Rebellion (1773–1775). During a wedding of the serfs Dushen’ka and Egor, emissaries from St Petersburg arrive to ‘Potemkinise’ their village where Catherine II will stop on one of her journeys. The empress is so impressed by Dushen’ka’s folk dancing that she has her sent off to Italy to transform the peasant lass into a ballet dancer. Upon her return to Russia as an accomplished ballerina, however, Dushe’nka haplessly attracts the flirtation of a handsome young courtier, a favourite of Catherine. In a fit of jealous rage, the empress orders her to the stable to be lashed and then to continue dancing. In the meantime, Russia has become engulfed in the torrential Pugachev uprising. Egor heads off to join the rebellion and Dushen’ka goes insane, bringing the ballet to its tragic dénouement.24 The behaviour of Prince N. G. Shakhovskoi of Nizhnii Novgorod Province offers a contrasting approach to the gender issue. In 1798, he moved his troupe of a hundred or so performers from his estate to the city of Nizhnii Novgorod and converted it into a public theatre where drama, opera, and ballet were offered daily. Shakhovskoi also took his troupe to the nearby Makarov Fair every July up to 1817 when that fair closed down. Shakhovskoi’s house as a rule filled up three times a week in season and every night at fair time with local gentry and their families and servants in boxes, merchants clapping loudly from the stalls, and the lower classes on benches. The proprietor, bewigged and powdered, attended all performances. A number of visitors who left memoirs gave Shakhovskoi’s theatre high marks. But the more frequently cited opinion of Prince I. M. Dolgorukii – amateur librettist, actor, and all-round theatre enthusiast – rendered a largely negative verdict, partly because the Shakhovskoi company butchered his opera which premiered there in 1813.25 Outwardly, the Shakhovskoi troupe resembled other public serf theatres. But in his treatment of females, the prince seems to have diverged


from the norm. On the one hand, he tried to imbue his actors with the sheen of nobility. His wife taught serf actresses the lady-like arts of conversation and needlework. Female stars were permitted to dance with guests at balls. To prepare his actors for upper-class roles, the master took them all the way to Moscow to view performances at the Imperial Theatre and afterwards had them sit in the gallery of a ball at the Noble Assembly ‘in order to learn the manners of the beau monde’. And yet, Shakhovskoi also subjected his crew to the lash and the punishment stool. Evidently a pious – even puritanical – man and a faithful husband, he never touched his charges, but imposed strict monastic discipline through separate dormitories, and forbade romantic relations between actors on threat of punishment. He censored suggestive lines in the scripts and prohibited physical contact between the sexes even when someone fainted in the play. Actresses were forbidden to read and write in order to keep them from passing love notes. Because of the prohibition, they had to learn their lines by rote. Held in check by watchful duennas, the female serf performers were married off at age 25 to other actors and given a dowry.26

Escape hatches Kind serf owners who manumitted serf performers out of the goodness of their hearts were in short supply. Paid redemption by patrons, mass purchase by the Imperial Theatres and discovery on the commercial circuit remained the main highways to freedom. Lord–serf marriage was not only rare, it was illegal. The most famous documented case involved one of the singers in the opulent theatre of the wealthy magnate, Nikolai Sheremetev (1751–1809). In his troupe of about 170 free and serf performers, the women bore names of precious gems and were trained in good manners and social dancing. Sheremetev, who routinely enjoyed their favours, fell in love with one of them – Praskov’ia, nicknamed Zhemchugova, or The Pearl. He freed her, concocted for her a fraudulent noble pedigree, and secretly married her in 1801. Both spouses suffered under the burden of their secret and from the taboos of high society. A few years after the marriage, Praskov’ia died as a result of complications from childbirth and the marriage entered the annals of romantic legend.27 Manorial serfs mostly had to rely on kind masters or patrons and admirers willing to pay the redemption price. All too often the owner, sensing the value of his property, would up the price and the serf would remain in bondage. Some of the more gifted were released by public


subscription to the redemption fee – though only if the owner agreed. One of these, the manorial serf Agaf’ia Guseva, a mezzo soprano and comic actress, performed for the guests of a Saratov provincial landowner. According to her son-in-law, a free actor, she endured a whole set of hardships and earned the enmity of her master who fired her from his theatre but refused to free her. Rather he coerced her into a marriage with his coachman. The owner’s acquaintances persuaded him to let her out on obrok to a public theatre in Saratov. This practice allowed serfs, while remaining enserfed, to earn off-estate money in trade or any other occupation so long as they remitted part of their earnings to the master. Admirers from the town’s society took up a collection for Guseva’s redemption. The master, after long negotiations, accepted the offered price, and she succeeded in winning her freedom. At a benefit performance for her, she publicly received the ultimate benefit – the gift of liberty for herself and her husband.28 This dramatic gesture and its warm reception, occurring before the wholesale emancipation of the serfs in 1861, signalled a growing sentiment among enlightened patrons that people of talent should be released from bondage. While some musicians and many artists were liberated through public patronage and subscription money, it was not so common for serf actors. Another mode of deliverance from serfdom lay in the purchase of bankrupt seigniorial troupes by the Imperial Theatre system, most of whose performing staff originated, in any case, from among the lower ranks of society – including orphans, foundlings, and the children of serfs and soldiers.29 The Griboedov quotation in the epigraph ends with the lines ‘The Cupids and the Zephyrs all / Were sold off one by one.’ When the Imperial Theatres needed experienced personnel, they discovered that some indebted or financially strapped landowners were ready to sell their troupes for the right price. Whole batches of actors, dancers, and singers of both sexes arrived in St Petersburg and Moscow imperial houses in the first quarter of the nineteenth century from the theatres of their bankrupt landlords. One of the last such purchases occurred in 1824 when the Moscow Bol’shoi Theatre purchased a ballet corps of eighteen serf girls from a Riazan’ landowner. Such buyouts fleshed out the staffs of the Imperial Theatres. They also entailed immediate and permanent freedom for the serf performers and their families.30 Although that juridical freedom was welcome to its beneficiaries, many of them had to endure what was called the ‘serfdom of theatre’: punishments, restrictions, social contempt, and sexual exploitation.31 The same held true for those few who made it to the capital stages through their individual talent and lucky discovery on the provincial


circuit. This little-known phenomenon arose when two market forces converged in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. First, enterprising provincial managers, availing themselves of the fact that public theatres were permitted outside the realm of the imperial system everywhere except in Moscow and St Petersburg, began forming troupes early in the century using any actors they could get. Second, landowners who possessed actors – already accomplished or promising – beefed up their income by putting them out on obrok. The whole process was, in a way, a reflection of the growth of provincial public life and the financial decline of the serf-owning gentry. Obrok serf actors joined travelling or stationary troupes and spent years on the stage in a kind of semi-free condition. If they gained fame in public performance, were discovered by talent scouts from the capitals, and secured agreement of their owners, they could be hired into the Imperial Theatres. Such was the happy fate of several provincial serf actors, men and women, in this period. Underpaid and, like serfs in a manor theatre, overworked, obrok serf performers led an unusual existence, constantly playing multiple roles: as free and even noble personages in their on-stage characters, as technically bonded persons when the curtain came down, and as de facto semi-free employees. Unlike manorial serf actors, they travelled across the land, played to ever-changing audiences, and intermixed and interacted daily with their free male and female colleagues. Danger lurked if a serf owner ended the obrok agreement and returned an actor to the manor. A female serf singer in the 1850s, working on obrok in a Nizhnii Novgorod theatre, earned much more than the pittance she had to hand over to her owner. When he died and his heir tried to take her back to his manorial stage, her merchant admirers in the town raised enough money to keep her in Nizhnii.32 Barring such incidents, rare enough, obrok actors could ply their craft, breathe the air of relative freedom, and even hope some day to reach the lofty state of actual freedom. Anna Vysheslavtseva (d. 1895)33 gained freedom in an unusual way. She began her acting career in childhood during the reign of Alexander I as a serf in the theatre of Prince Shakhovskoi of Nizhnii Novgorod. When the theatre was sold to private entrepreneurs after his death, its actors gained their freedom in 1827. But the purchaser made them agree to stay in his theatre for 10 years at low salaries to work off the redemption fee. Vysheslavtseva laboured under this contract and endured the differential wages paid to men and women. When the ten-year period ran out, Vysheslavtseva, now free to move, bargained for a large raise and went on to become a resounding success in towns all over the


Russian Empire in a wide range of underdog roles in tragedies by Shakespeare and Victor Hugo (the dramatisation of Notre Dame de Paris) and in comedy and melodrama. Vysheslavtseva owed her success on the stage to talent, but the freedom she enjoyed resulted from the economic decision of her owners. Though born shortly after the long eighteenth century ended, Liubov’ Nikulina-Kositskaia (1827 or 1829–1868) illustrated in her career the tribulations of a serf-born actress in pre-emancipation Russia, and in her stage representations of the vulnerability of female serfs and other women. In a reverse of the discovery-on-stage narrative, Nikulina moved from serfdom to freedom before entering the theatre. She was born into a family of house serfs whose father was treated violently by his owner. When the master’s peasants murdered the owner, Nikulina’s family was sold to other owners. Eventually her serf father was able to save enough money from outside labour to buy freedom for his family. Liubov’ worked as a servant for a merchant’s wife who took her to the theatre in Nizhnii Novgorod where the ex-serf Vysheslavtseva regularly acted. The little girl became stage-struck by the performance of a play that featured an abused and slandered woman who was eventually exonerated – a variant of the ‘magpie’ theme. Learning of her intentions to go on the stage, her family was scandalised. Sharing a broad prejudice against actors, the religious Nikulins considered the occupation equivalent to mortal sin. After a protracted family drama, Nikulina won out and managed to join a travelling troupe, without, as she recalled, losing her faith in the Orthodox deity.34 It seems incontrovertible that Nikulina’s eventual mastery in roles of misused women was fashioned by personal experience. In her years of performing as a teenager in small towns up and down the Volga circuit, she endured the pain of homesickness, mistreatment, and sexual harassment. Though juridically free, she remained subject to the double jeopardy of her profession and her gender. Male audience members looked upon actresses as fair game and were often surprised at refusal of their advances. A merchant in the town of Rybinsk, a regular stop for her company, told her point blank that actresses were not supposed to possess the ‘honour’ which she defended. Nikulina’s childhood as a serf, her life on the road, and her direct knowledge of familiar melodramas on the theme of persecuted women prepared her psychologically for the roles that gained her nationwide fame in the 1850s: Anna in Aleksandr Ostrovskii’s Bednost’ ne porok (Poverty is Not a Vice, 1854), Kat’ia in his Groza (The Storm, 1859), and the tragic serf woman in Aleksei Pisemskii’s Gor’kaia sudbina (A Bitter Fate).35 What makes Nikulina’s trajectory so


illuminating for the earlier period is that, as one of the last generations of serf actresses, she was able to play roles on the public stage that engaged something like the real lives of peasants – including serfs. This contrasted starkly with most of the roles performed by serf women of the earlier period: classical cupids, historical queens, distressed damsels from faraway lands, humble maidservants, or ‘poor Lizas’ rescued in the end from social menace.

Triple jeopardy? If the evidence of the abuse of performing serf women is impressionistic, all the more so is this true of resistance, especially the kind that ended in victory. Dance teachers were notoriously strict and often cruel, as was the grandest of them all – the French emigré Charles Didelot, ballet master of the Imperial Theatres. One private dance instructor, also a Frenchman, hired to a provincial manorial theatre, apparently went too far in his harshness. One of his pupils, an enraged female serf dancer, assaulted him in 1816, broke a rib, and possibly injured his testicles – the last item suggesting that her attack was prompted by his sexual advances rather than his pedagogical methods.36 Subjugated women could triumph over men only in staged roles. A French ballet, Révolte au Serail, popular at the Imperial Theatres, featured an armed uprising of concubines against their Muslim master, which ends in their success.37 But, unlike that scenario, the reality of serfdom produced no Lysistratas or organised seraglio rebels. When acts of revenge occurred for sexual exploitation, they were usually perpetrated by the victim’s male relatives. The above-cited example of Kuz’mina defying her master can hardly count as genuinely successful resistance, since she remained under the thrall of her master. In the end, one can conclude that all serf actresses suffered in various degrees the rigours of the human yoke of serfdom. It is likely that, in the words of Barbara Engel, ‘most noble landowners refrained from interfering in the everyday life of peasants’ and that some of them succoured their servants in time of distress.38 But there is also no denying that those female ‘peasants’ who lived, served, and performed indoors were much more likely to succumb to the misuse of the master’s power. Many serfs became the mistresses or casual conquests of their seigniorial theatrical entrepreneurs. Those who ended up being bought by the Imperial Theatres began gulping the air of juridical freedom immediately. But like almost all lower-class women in subordinate positions, they remained subject to harassment of all kinds, including sexual use by social superiors.


Given the long history of ‘backstage romance’ before and after this period and the century of Hollywood casting couches, one can hardly be surprised that sexual use or harassment also flourished in the relatively freer atmosphere of the travelling commercial troupes. Indeed, numerous stories about it, other than those noted above, are on record. Those actresses who lived out their lives on the road attracted the attention of managers, owners, and local bigwigs in the towns they visited. Those who made it big time in Moscow and St Petersburg in this era ended up, after all, in one of the Imperial Theatres. There was no other place to go. The era of theatrical divas and stars who could write their own ticket, dictate to impresarios, become rich, acquire and discard lovers, and take their fate into their own hands remained far over the horizon.

Notes 1. Quoted from An Anthology of Russian Plays, trans. and ed. F. D. Reeve, 2 vols (New York: Vintage, 1961), I, p. 117. 2. Some of the following material is drawn from my Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005). 3. Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002), p. 125; John Bushnell, ‘Did Serf Owners Control Serf Marriage: Orlov Serfs and their Neighbors, 1773–1861’, Slavic Review, 52 (1993), 419–45. 4. N. N. Shipov, ‘Istoriia moei zhizni: rasskaz byvshego krepostnogo krest’ianina’, Russkaia starina (May, 1881), 141. 5. Thomas Hodge, A Double Garland: Poetry and Art-Song in Early-NineteenthCentury Russia (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2000), p. 185. 6. Elizaveta Vodovozova, Na zare zhizni, 2 vols (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), I, 159. 7. Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), pp. 105–6; Priscilla Roosevelt, ‘Emerald Thrones and Living Statues: Theater and Theatricality on the Russian Estate’, Russian Review, 50 (1991), 1–23; E. S. Kots, Krepostnaia intelligentsiia (Leningrad: Seiatel’, 1926), p. 20. 8. Istoriia russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra, ed. E. G. Kholodov and others, 7 vols (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977–1987), II, p. 422. 9. M. I. Pyliaev, Staroe zhit’e (St Petersburg, 1892; reprinted St Petersburg: Zhurnal ‘Neva’, 2000), pp. 276–77; Filipp Vigel’, Zapiski (Moscow: Zakharov, 2000), p. 148; V. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Teatr v Rossii v epokhu otechestvennnoi voiny (St Petersburg: Sirius, 1912), pp. 141–42. 10. Viazemskii, cited in Kots, pp. 129–30. 11. [A. I. Rozanov], ‘Zapiski sel’skogo sviashchennika’, Russkaia starina (January, 1880), 67–68. 12. A. S. Griboedov in Reeve, I, p. 94. Among many general treatments, see Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, pp. 183–89; Kots, p. 20; A. I. Herzen [Gertsen], My Past and Thoughts, ed. D. Macdonald (Berkeley: U of


13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

California P, 1982), pp. 13, 15; Avdot’ia Panaeva, Vospominaniia, 2nd edn, rev. by Kornei Chukovskii (Leningrad: Academiia, 1928), pp. 100–1 and note 2. Details on the life of Imperial Theatre actresses in Wendy Rosslyn, ‘Female Employees in the Russian Imperial Theatres, 1785–1825’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 257–77; Wendy Rosslyn, ‘Petersburg Actresses On and Off Stage (1775–1825)’, in St Petersburg, 1703–1825, ed. Anthony Cross (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 119–47. Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, p. 263; Laurence Senelick, ‘The Erotic Bondage of Serf Theater’, Russian Review, 50 (1991), 24–34 (p. 29); Iu. M. Lotman, Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. A. D. and A. S. Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), pp. 57–58. Herzen, p. 67; Kots, p. 20. A. P. Miliukov, Dobroe staroe vremia (St Petersburg: Skariatin 1872), pp. 93–95. Vigel’, pp. 172–74. Nikolai Leskov, ‘The Make-Up Artist’, in The Enchanted Pilgrim and Other Stories, trans. by D. Magarshack (Westport: Hyperion, 1977), pp. 283–303; Hugh McLean, Nikolai Leskov (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1977), pp. 438–41; Kots, p. 41; Orlovskii starozhil [A. K. Iurasovskii], Bylye chudaki v orlovskoi gubernii, 2nd edn (Orel, 1919), pp. 11–12. Gurii Ertaulov, ‘Vospomin[an]iia o nekogda znamenitom teatre grafa S. M. Kamenskogo v g. Orle’, Delo (June, 1873), 202. M. D. Buturlin, ‘Zapiski’, Russkii arkhiv, 5–8 (1897), 191–92. See also M. D. Buturlin, ‘Teatr grafa Kamenskago v Orle’, Russkii arkhiv, 9 (1869), 1707–12; Orlovskii starozhil, pp. 14–15; Kots, pp. 142–45; Pyliaev, pp. 266–72; and Ekaterina Letkova, ‘Krepostnaia intelligentsiia’, Otechestvennye zapiski (November, 1883), 165. For details see Richard Stites, ‘The Misanthrope, the Orphan, and the Magpie: Imported Melodrama in the Twilight of Serfdom’, in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, ed. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), pp. 25–54. Liubov Nikulina-Kositskaia, ‘Notes’, in Russia Through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia, ed. Toby Clyman and Judith Vowles (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), pp. 140–41. Grigory Kugushev, Kornet Otletaev: povest’ (Moscow, 1853). The synopsis is from Mary Grace Swift, The Art of the Ballet in the U.S.S.R. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 65. At least one other ballet on the theme appeared: L. M. Lavrovskii’s Katerina (1935). Kots, p. 139; B. N. Beliakov, V. G. Blinova and N. D. Bordiug, Opernaia i kontsertnaia deiatelnost’ v Nizhnem-Novgorode–gorode Gor’kom (1798–1980) (Gor’kii: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe delo, 1980), pp. 1–16; Gavriil Gerakov, Putevye zapiski po mnogim rossiiskim guberniiam, 1820 (Petrograd: Imperatorskii Vospitatel’nyi dom, 1828), p. 21; A. P. Mel’nikov, Stoletie nizhegorodskoi iarmarki, 1817–1917 (Nizhnii Novgorod: NKTsP, 1917), p. 49; A. S. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr (1798–1867) (Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskoe gubernskoe pravlenie, 1867), pp. 9–19; V. V. Selivanov, Predaniia i vospominaniia (St Petersburg: A. E. Landau, 1881), pp. 165–67; Pyliaev, pp. 258–62. Kots, pp. 136, 138; Gatsiskii, pp. 9–19; Senelick, pp. 30–31. V. N. Sukhodolov, ‘Graf N. P. Sheremetev i Praskov’ia Zhemchugova’, Otechestvo: kraevedcheskii almanakh, 9 (1998), 99–108; Roosevelt, Life on the


28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

Russian Country Estate, pp. 107–09. Douglas Smith is now writing the history of this affair (personal communication). P. M. Medvedev, Vospominaniia (Leningrad: Akademiia, 1929), p. 137. I have not found her dates. Medvedev was born in 1837. Presumably his mother-inlaw was born a generation earlier and may have started singing for her master before 1825. V. N. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Istoriia teatral’nogo obrazovaniia v Rossii (St Petersburg: Direktsiia imperatorskikh teatrov, 1913), pp. 443–52. See also David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), pp. 31–62. E. N. Opochinin, Teatral’naia starina (Moscow: Razvlechenie, 1902), pp. 149–86; V. P. Pogozhev, Stoletie organizatsii imperatorskikh moskovskikh teatrov, 2 vols (St Petersburg: Direktsiia imperatorskikh teatrov, 1906–1908), I/1, pp. 133–34, 313–16; Roosevelt, pp. 263–65; Evgenii Kuznetsov, Iz istorii proshlogo russkoi estrady (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1958), pp. 67–68. Rosslyn, ‘Female Employees in the Russian Imperial Theatres’, pp. 257–77; Rosslyn, ‘Petersburg Actresses On and Off Stage’, pp. 119–47; and Stites, Serfdom, pp. 141–52. Sutherland Edwards, Russians at Home, 2nd edn (London: W. H. Allen, 1861), p. 163. Teatral’naia entsiklopediia, ed. P. A. Markov et al., 5 vols (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1961–1967) I, p. 1052 dates her birth at 1817; Istoriia russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra, III, pp. 201–03 puts it at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nikulina-Kositskaia, pp. 109–57. Nikulina-Kositskaia See also Istoriia russkogo teatra, expanded ed. Boris Varneke (St Petersburg: Sergievskii, 1914), pp. 109–57. Orlovskii starozhil, pp. 108–09. Russkii balet i ego zvezdy, ed. E. Surits (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1998), p. 19; Vera Krasovskaia, Istoriia russkogo baleta (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1978), pp. 64–65. Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), pp. 56–57.

3 Women and Literature, Women in Literature: Female Authors of Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century Alessandra Tosi

This chapter focuses on women authors of fiction in the age of Alexander I (1801–1825), the end of the period considered in this book. I will investigate a number of representative texts in an attempt to map the little-known body of works penned by female authors and to place them in the context of contemporary Russian literature and culture.

The literary context In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after centuries of marginalisation, Russian elite women were indirectly encouraged to write by about two cultural phenomena: sentimental ideals of feminine aesthetics, and women’s role as salon hostesses and arbiters of taste. Moreover, works penned by women increasingly appeared in print in this period. Thus, during Alexander’s reign a niche for women’s literary activity was created within what remained a profoundly patriarchal society. This newly found appreciation for women’s literature served as an important springboard to women’s prose and, more generally, to women’s artistic self-expression. Within this favourable environment prose fiction was undertaken by women for the first time, alongside the two areas of women’s writing, poetry and translations, which had become established slightly earlier.1 Notwithstanding women’s increased visibility and acceptance in the literary sphere, patriarchal values remained a significant limitation on 39


the extent and features of women’s artistic output. The aesthetic and social spheres closely interacted in defining gender values as femininity was defined by men in a variety of cultural spheres, such as conversation and everyday behaviour, conduct manuals, critical writings, and literature.2 The alliance between sentimental aesthetics and patriarchal ideology was especially powerful and long-lasting in Russia. Sentimentalism focused on morality as both a source of artistic inspiration and the subject matter for the work of art. Central to these moral values was the notion of sensitivity and compassion (so/chuvstvitel’nost’) and purity of body and soul – the defining features of the sentimental heroine. Women in general were deemed to be the natural embodiment of sensitivity, morality, and empathy, and female authors in particular were expected to reflect these ideals both in their conduct and in their work. As I will demonstrate, responses to these expectations varied. Some writers generally conformed to the sentimental ideal of the female author: Mariia Pospelova (1780–1805), Ekaterina Puchkova (1792–1867), and Mariia Izvekova (1789?–1830). Others opted for roundabout strategies to achieve a degree of originality without openly antagonising received ideas (Natal’ia Golovkina, 1769–1849). In exceptional cases, such as those of Zinaida Volkonskaia (1789–1862) and the poet Anna Bunina (1774–1829), women chose to break the vicious circle of sentimental femininity and dilettantism to create works original in their conception, message, and style, thus embodying the important archetype of the independent woman writer for the decades to come. However, no matter what their allegiance was, overall early-nineteenth-century women writers viewed their activity as a calling (as opposed to a leisured pastime) and, more importantly, considered publishing as its natural conclusion. It is important to understand the catalysts for, and impediments to, women’s literary activity in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Russia. On the plus side this was the age when myths of femininity acted as a pivotal force in the cultural life of the country. Women, it must be said, served chiefly as objects of discussion and ideal models for men’s creative output,3 but gradually they also emerged as actors in the intellectual sphere, particularly within the salon. At a time when cultural activities of the elite began to shift away from the court and to cluster around aristocratic venues of gentry salons, clubs, and literary societies, salons were shedding their ‘domestic’ connotation to became semi-public, semi-official spheres of intellectual activity.4 During this transitional period salons not only granted women a greater visibility but also carved out a niche for women’s participation in a range of cultural activities – literature included – which they undertook side by side with men. Salons were informal but

Women and Literature, Women in Literature 41

generally sophisticated gatherings that encapsulated the sentimental values of literature as an intimate occupation dealing with feelings conveyed in an emotional tone. This was a sphere of expression deemed congenial to women, and well-to-do ladies naturally fitted in the role of salon hostesses and salon-goers, a participation that entailed a degree of education and engagement in the literary debate. More generally, women’s involvement in literature was boosted (albeit within clear boundaries) by the affirmation of sentimentalism in the late eighteenth century. Opposed to classicism which saw literature as an essentially civic and highly learned endeavour (and therefore out of reach of the majority of ‘irrational’ women), sentimentalism brought to the fore a more intimate approach to the act of writing which was closely linked with some of the main cultural models of the time: the idealisation of the ‘gentle sex’, feminine sensitivity, and ladies’ discourse.5 By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries women (or rather: men’s ideal of them) came to represent a key cultural paradigm permeating both the elite’s personal behaviour and aesthetic values. Polite, ethically and aesthetically sensitive ladies served as a model for both female and male writers, a cultural phenomenon often referred to as the feminisation of Russian culture.6 These developments also affected literary consumption in that, as Gitta Hammarberg demonstrates in this book, a female readership was now explicitly targeted by authors and figured highly in the agenda of some literary journals.7 More importantly, women became active players in the literary world, where their work – appearing both in separate editions and in periodical publications where they were also reviewed – granted them unprecedented exposure. Feminisation opened a window of opportunity for women writers whose numbers, although much lower than that of male authors, slowly increased from the 1770s onwards. This growth is particularly noticeable with women novelists, a group practically non-existent in the pre-Karamzin period.8 With the publication of works by Mar’ia Sushkova (1752–1803), Anna Neelova,9 and Aleksandra Khvostova (1767–1852), and the translation of celebrated foreign prose writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Mme de Genlis, the phenomenon of female authorship in general and of women novelists in particular becomes a topic of discussion in Russian literary circles.10 Thus, in the period 1800–1825 the activity of authors such as Pospelova, Puchkova, Izvekova, Golovkina, and Volkonskaia further consolidated women’s presence in the literary field, even if this presence was far from being unanimously applauded or even, for that matter, universally accepted.


Yet, many of these positive factors also had negative attributes. Sentimentalism, although instrumental to the rise of female authors, at the same time translated patriarchal values into the literary sphere, imposing narrow limits on women’s artistic expression. Direct pressure to conform to the sentimental-patriarchal view of women as Muses, Mothers, and Wives came from literary critics (in the cases of Izvekova and Golovkina), and from relatives and patrons (in the cases of Bunina and Volkonskaia). Both sides were impossible to ignore for women authors, who at this stage invariably belonged to the gentry, and were all part of a small social elite, lacked both the sizeable readership and well-established tradition of female authorship of some Western European countries. Whilst contemporary male authors enjoyed a range of networking venues including journals and literary groups, women’s literary activity mostly revolved around the salon, an environment imbued with sentimental ideals and inherently opposed to professional intents. At a time when honnête homme values heavily influenced male writers,11 female authors had to maintain both aristocratic decorum and female modesty as they attempted to balance writing with social acceptance. These social expectations shape the texts written by women on a number of levels. Introductions to novels and stories, with their conventional expressions of modesty and disavowal of any professional intent, represent the most obvious display of submission to the prescribed norm. Writing was presented as a pastime that would not interfere with family life, even if this claim did not easily justify the decision of actually publishing the outcome of these ‘idle hours’, to quote a common expression of the time. This pattern of excuses is in part due to the fact that women often had to rely on the financial support of male relatives to publish their work, and in part to comply with critics’ expectations voiced in journals and reviews of the time. In this literary context, many women writers also played it safe in their choice of genre, by and large preferring the European eighteenthcentury tradition of lengthy love stories rather than exploring the relatively novel formats of the novella, be it sentimental,12 oriental/exotic, or political. As we will see, Volkonskaia’s preference for the genres of the society and exotic tale provides an exception in this respect. A subtler, but not less pervasive, consequence was the confinement by a number of women writers to the sentimental plots and saccharine heroines of the epigones of N. M. Karamzin (1766–1826) headed by Prince P. I. Shalikov (1768–1852). Overall, male authors tended to span a much wider spectrum of genres and styles, with one important


exception: the representation of women.13 In spite of the experimental drive characterising contemporary prose fiction as a whole and the critique of Karamzin’s imitators emerging in early-nineteenth-century Russia, the representation of women remained surprisingly uniform across narrative genres and literary camps.14 Stereotypical sentimental heroines defined by their maternal and marital virtues continued to serve as the staple diet in the literature of the time to such an extent that such characters are just about the only common denominator in the otherwise diverse corpus of contemporary prose fiction. This apparent contradiction, between experimentation in literary style and the traditional representation of women, testifies to the endurance of the sentimental myths of femininity in literature and, more widely, to the continuing appeal of this cultural topos in a staunchly patriarchal society such as Russia in the long eighteenth century and beyond. Whilst men writers often did not subscribe to sentimental aesthetic beyond the representation of positive heroines, many women authors held fast to an image that alone could warrant a degree of acceptance. The dependence on the sentimental canon by the majority of women writers of the time opened up another set of problems. Whilst attempts to conform to the idealised woman prevented ‘bluestocking’ accusations, women’s allegiance to late-eighteenth-century sentimental models was interpreted as the inability to create original work and reinforced current arguments about women’s inborn lack of artistic talent. As might be expected, sentimental epigones were generally sympathetic to female authorship, a phenomenon that they themselves had done much to promote. Yet, even the sentimentalists’ approval was bestowed with condescension and intended more as an encouragement to women’s irremediably inferior artistic accomplishments than as a judgement among equals.15 Thus, female writers found themselves in a typical ‘catch 22’ situation, for the alignment with the old sentimental guard, which was undertaken to maintain social acceptance, ultimately back-fired in terms of critical response and self-perception as authors. Such a conundrum was well captured by the critic V. G. Belinskii (1811–1848) who, a couple of decades later, remarked on this ongoing phenomenon: ‘Worst of all is that she [the writer] is condemned by public opinion to the most innocuous literary occupations, that is, to repeat eternally tattered old truths, which not even children believe, but which are nevertheless considered to be highly regarded.’16 Perversely, any attempt at formal and thematic innovation – such as by Bunina and Volkonskaia – was seen as incompetence, affectation, or lack of control,


a paradoxical state of affairs that, to some extent, continued into the twentieth century.17

Women’s fiction To illustrate the different strategies employed by women writers at the dawn of the nineteenth century I will give an overview of a number of authors and works in the period, including some works that conformed to sentimental-patriarchal values (by Pospelova, Puchkova, and Izvekova), others that circumvented such cultural parameters (by Golovkina), and a couple that directly challenged the current notions of femininity (by Bunina and Volkonskaia).

Sentimental-patriarchal writing Although in terms of social background the poet and prose writer Mariia Pospelova is somewhat atypical, being self-taught and being one of the first women writers to come from the impoverished provincial gentry, such personal circumstances are not reflected in her work, which both in terms of authorial persona and literary content adheres to the sentimental canon. This is, for example, the case in her collection of prose and poetry Luchshie chasy zhizni moei (The Best Hours of My Life, 1798), which was rewarded by Paul I with a diamond ring, and the short prose pieces Nekotorye cherty prirody i istiny ili Ottenki myslei i chuvstvovanii moikh (Some Features of Nature and Truth, or Nuances of My Thoughts and Feelings, 1801). In this latter volume, which attracted the interest of the poets G. R. Derzhavin and Karamzin, Pospelova’s melancholic and innocent narrator indulges in lyric meditations arising from the idyllic spectacle of nature.18 Ekaterina Puchkova, with her semi-fictional Pervye opyty v proze (First Experiments in Prose) of 1812, also fits into the safe mould of sentimentalism, in her case with a penchant for moralising messages rather than lyric meditations. With a plot line stripped to the bone, each of Puchkova’s pieces deals with a set theme, ranging from contemporary education in ‘Milovzor ili nakazannaia zhadnost’ k bogatstvu. Russkaia povest’ (‘Milovzor or Greed for Riches Punished. A Russian Tale’), to friendship in ‘Otryvok. Druzheskaia progulka’ (‘Fragment. A Friendly Stroll’), women and the sciences in ‘Nuzhny li zhenshchinam nauki i poznaniia’ (‘Are Learning and Knowledge Necessary for Women?’), old versus young generations in ‘Razgovor staroi zhenshchiny s molodoi’ (‘Conversation between an Old Woman and a Young Woman’), Russian


literature in ‘Pis’mo k priiatel’nitse o Russkoi slovesnosti’ (‘Letter to a Female Friend about Russian Literature’) and so on. As the titles reveal, these pieces belong to the ‘grey area’ of semi-fictional prose, that is, short pieces expressing ideas in a narrative format. A variety of genres provides the basic canvas for each piece: the novella, the fragment, the journal article, the dialogue, the letter, and so on, which testify to Puchkova’s eagerness to explore a wider range of narrative formats compared to the majority of her female contemporaries. In this work the author also reflects on a number of gender issues (such as the inborn differences between the sexes which, she argues, arise from education, not nature), although she gives this topic fuller consideration elsewhere.19 Overall, however, the quasi-fictional pieces contained in the Pervye opyty v proze replicate the vocabulary, style, and didactic tone typical of Karamzin’s epigones.20 Her characters, endowed with revealing names such as Milovzor (Mr Kindlook), Dobrov (Mr Good), and Vsemila (Miss Allsweet), are derivative and confined within the sentimental axiom as expressed by the author: ‘you love, you have a friend, you exist, and how sweet your existence is!’21 Didacticism is paired with the usual lack of psychological insights or, for that matter, of any original feature of the characters whose sentimental qualities are conveyed by means of what was by then a well-rehearsed narrative pattern: a wealth of rhetorical addresses to the sensitive reader, stylised language describing the physical manifestations of mental states (sighs, tears, paleness, faintness), and emotive utterances (exclamations, moving monologues, and dialogues): Streams of tears flowed from his eyes; his head inclined on to the lap of the silent Sophia. She spoke not a word; but her tears blended with Edward’s, and he felt his bliss. Sophia! Return my life to me, allow me to hope … Ah! If you knew how much I have suffered […] O you, who have experienced the passion of the heart, who have fed on love’s sweet deception, you can imagine Sophia’s condition.22 Certainly derivative sentimentalism was not the unique domain of women authors, and the young Puchkova is not inferior to more seasoned male epigones of Karamzin; indeed she was recognised by Prince Shalikov, the leading ‘serious sentimentalist’ of the time, as one of the best female writers belonging to his literary camp. Yet, condescension and paternalism are implicit in the praise granted first in Shalikov’s journal Aglaia (Aglaya) and later in his Damskii zhurnal (Ladies’ Journal), where Puchkova’s Pervye opyty v proze were reprinted in the 1820s.23


Mariia Izvekova is another author who played out the conventional persona of the sentimental woman writer and reproduced traditional ideals of femininity in her work. A precocious but short-lived novelist – her first novel came out when she was about 15 years old but she ceased to publish after marrying in 1811, and whatever she wrote after that date remained in manuscript form and has not survived24 – Izvekova favoured the novel format. With titles such as Emiliia, ili pechal’nye sledstviia bezrassudnoi liubvi (Emilia, or the Sad Consequences of Reckless Love, 1806), Torzhestvuiushchaia dobrodetel’ nad kovarstvom i zloboiu (Virtue Triumphant over Perfidy and Malice, 1809), and Milena, ili redkii primer velikodushiia (Milena, or a Rare Example of Magnanimity, 1811),25 her lengthy novels are variations on the theme of edifying feminine virtues inspired by eighteenth-century ‘model’ women writers such as the celebrated Mme Genlis and Sophie Cottin.26 Although in her last novel Milena we glimpse elements of originality, as a whole the writer goes over trite stylistic and thematic conventions, with particular emphasis on the sentimental cult of maternity,27 a feature readily picked up and censured by critics. Gendered attacks against Izvekova were rife; the critic S. P. Zhikharev (1788–1860), for example, playing on the double meaning of the term tolstyi roman (fat novel) brands Emiliia a ‘fat novel written by an even fatter lady’,28 while the poet K. N. Batiushkov (1787–1855) numbered Izvekova among ‘our doleful Russian Sapphos’.29 Belinskii’s comments were no less damning when, two decades later, he was to write about Izvekova’s three main novels in sarcastic terms: ‘What choice of amazing titles – they emanate the purest virtues! As for the content – it is even better, even more virtuous, albeit, one must admit, boring in the extreme.’30 When not outright negative, the remarks of literati on her work were at best condescending, as in M. N. Makarov’s critical biography appearing in Damskii zhurnal: The style of the novel [Emiliia] by Miss Bedriaga [Izvekova’s maiden name] is fairly pure, but its content has nothing Russian about it, even the characters are foreigners. […] In the latest novels by Miss Bedriaga we find that they have taken a better form than her first and their style is much better; the content in some places already boasts a little of its own originality.31 Although perhaps not unjustified, these attacks reveal the inconsistencies in the expectations of male literati relating to women writers – the roles of Muse, Mother, and Wife, translated into literature, were not and could not be a breeding ground for innovation.


Despite these negative restrictions, pre-romantic conceptions of writing as a calling and, more importantly, the implicit belief of publishing as its natural outcome, slowly gained ground among women authors. These views were echoed, for example, by the young Izvekova in the introduction to her first novel, Emiliia, in which she avails herself of the sentimental argument of women’s natural inclination towards literature and of writing as a spontaneous act to pre-empt criticism:32 ‘I am sure that [ … ] the honoured Public will magnanimously forgive the inexperience of a young girl who wrote this novel solely out of a natural inclination to Literature, without the guidance of teachers.’33 The greater importance of readers’ enjoyment as compared to critics’ slander is again mentioned in Izvekova’s later novel Milena, in a clear attempt to circumvent the opinions of literati by appealing directly to an allegedly sympathetic reading public.34 Interestingly, unlike the vast majority of women writers of the time who dedicated their work to male patrons or relatives, Izvekova’s novel is dedicated to her mother, who is presented as an example of ‘modesty, patience and morality’.35 In her cautiously entitled volume Pervye opyty v proze Puchkova too refers to her decision to ‘embark on the writer’s slippery path’ as an inborn avocation arguing that: ‘Since my earliest youth I have had almost no other teachers or advisers than my own inclination and love for literature.’36 Even when abiding by the sentimental model in terms of literary persona, topics, and style, other dangers lurked for women writers, in the form of linguistic predilection. Noblewomen educated by French nannies and tutors were trained to speak French as a mark of ‘politeness’ in both family and social settings, and so often found their proficiency in Russian to be inadequate to literary endeavours. Whilst spoken French was the language of the Russian aristocracy and functioned as a mark of social distinction – a ‘social sign’ (sotsial’nyi znak) in Lotman’s expression37 – the phenomenon of Russian authors writing in French in the early nineteenth century involves almost exclusively women writers, although by no means all female authors of the period followed suit: Bunina, Izvekova, and Pospelova, for example, wrote in Russian, perhaps owing to their less refined upbringing.38 In contrast, male writers alternated the use of French and Russian according to different social requirement and personal preferences (a linguistic versatility reaching its climax with Pushkin’s complex juggling between the two)39 and composed their novels and stories in Russian, confining written French to the intimate sphere of correspondence, memoirs, and diaries.40 By the reign of Alexander the use of French in literature was frowned upon as a mark of dilettantism,41 an attitude exacerbated by patriotic feelings during the Napoleonic wars.


Thus, once again, a number of women writers found themselves in the impossible situation whereby they were required to use French exclusively as a mark of feminine refinement within their social milieu, whilst being frowned upon in literary circles for this same linguistic proficiency.42 Women writers perceived this as a linguistic handicap, or at least a hindrance to their success, and many ensured that their works would be swiftly translated into Russian, as did both Volkonskaia (whose Tableau slave was translated within a year by Shalikov)43 and Golovkina (whose novel Elisaveta de S*** was also translated within months by I. Voeikov as Elisaveta de S***, ili istoriia rossiianki izdannaia v svete odnoiu iz eia sootechestvennits). Incidentally, both authors, probably owing to a combination of social connection and personal wealth, were able to publish their works both in Russia and France. Volkonskaia’s brave attempt to master written Russian later on in life (at the cost of personal disappointments and critics’ slander) stemmed from the recognition that in the pre-romantic age French was no longer a suitable linguistic medium for a Russian author.44

Circumventing cultural parameters Within this general picture of narrow creative options and stifling social conventions some writers such as the unjustly forgotten Countess Natal’ia Golovkina strove to assert themselves as worthy authors via the professional image they conveyed in their work. Golovkina’s major novel, Elisaveta de S***, was published in 1802 and, like Volkonskaia’s, was originally written in French.45 The work adopts the format and the style of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel made popular by Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and followed by a string of male and female authors in the West (Rousseau, Goethe, Genlis, de Staël)46 and by male authors in Russia (N. F. Emin, P. Iu. L’vov, M. D. Chulkov).47 Golovkina was certainly not alone in her conformity with foreign models, for, from its inception in the reign of Catherine II to 1812 and beyond, the Russian version of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel was characterised by its imitative bent.48 In England and France after Richardson, epistolary narratives increasingly bore marks of gender. In particular, the attention to domestic life and romance typical of the genre became closely associated with women as writers, heroines, and readers. Indeed in the second half of the eighteenth century the epistolary novel was female authors’ preferred genre in those two countries, a phenomenon that has been linked with the growing presence of women in the literary marketplace there.49 English


and French epistolary novels are also characterised by the blurred distinction between personal letters and published text, an ambiguity often played with by authors in the editorial frame of their works. This ambiguity between these two spheres accommodates the conception of writing as an individual and unprofessional exercise whilst at the same time meeting emerging market considerations. As observed by Elizabeth Cook, such tension between the private and the public epitomises the transition of eighteenth-century readers to textuality and eases the passage between manuscript and print culture.50 At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Russian literature was slowly becoming a professional undertaking spurred by a thriving literary activity and a growing book-market.51 This was also an era in which female authorship emerged as a visible phenomenon, a combination of factors that contributed to the success of the epistolary novel authored by women.52 As elsewhere, part of the reason for women’s predilection for this genre was that letter-writing, diaries, and memoirs had been practised by gentry women in Russia long before they were ‘appropriated’ as literary frameworks; moreover, as ‘intimate forms’ by definition, these genres were deemed particularly fit for the feminine pen. Russian readers, on their part, showed a healthy appetite for epistolary novels for two main reasons. On the one hand, the comparatively early stages of print culture and the relative inexperience of the reading public allowed assurances of ‘truthfulness’ on the narrator’s part to be to some extent believed, thus increasing the appeal of these novels as ‘true stories’. On the other hand, women novelists were able to exploit this ambiguity between individual experience and fictional work to their own advantage to both enhance the credibility of their novels and to satisfy the ‘voyeuristic’ interest of a literary public not yet used to female authorship. Golovkina’s work encapsulates features of the epistolary novel mentioned above whilst meeting prevailing expectations on what women’s literature should be about: the description of feelings of love and friendship within the ethical framework of patriarchal ideology. Yet, on closer analysis Elisaveta de S*** reveals traits specific to Golovkina’s pen, demonstrating a degree of independence carved within the suitable tradition of the moralising epistolary novel. Elisaveta is built around a long-standing plot scheme which was particularly popular with sentimental writers – the love triangle formed by two innocent and devoted lovers and an evil third party who delays (but is unable to prevent) their blissful marriage. The events leading to the lovers’ final union add up to a rather voluminous novel. Divided into


five parts, it amounts to nearly 500 pages, a length uncommon in the post-Karamzin period when male authors preferred the novella (povest’) and other shorter forms, but in keeping with women writers’ preferences and with the eighteenth-century tradition of the epistolary novel. The Western European orientation, and the influence of the epistolary novel of travel made popular by Karamzin’s Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1791–1792), are also reflected in the international setting of the story, in which the heroes move with ease between St Petersburg, Vienna, London, the English countryside, and Florence. Despite the Russianness of the work being flagged by the author in the title (Elisaveta de S***, ou L’histoire d’une Russe publiée par une de ses compatriotes), but in line with contemporary trends in sentimental and epistolary fiction, Golovkina limits herself to sparse and generic observations on the various locations. Elisaveta is also in line with the genre’s basic conventions in terms of narrative structure. Made up of the correspondence between a wealth of characters participating in ongoing action, the work is nonetheless a female affair centred around the heroine Elisaveta and her female correspondents devitsa (Mlle) Gleben, gospozha (Miss) Stanley, Harvey, and Crawford and others, with the occasional and secondary appearance of some male characters, including Elisaveta’s lover Antoine. As we know, the prominence of female characters in a narrative is in itself no guarantee of a departure from traditional gender attitudes, and overall the work conforms to the patriarchal model. Golovkina does, nonetheless, present innovative elements, first of all in the persona of the narrator. In the introduction, the female author, in keeping with contemporary conventions, voices an ‘apologetic argument’ both typical and expected in women’s fiction of the time.53 Golovkina expresses devotion and gratitude to her husband, anxiety about critics’ reception, a defensive attitude towards her literary undertaking, and an avowed low self-esteem as a writer: To my husband […] I thought it my duty to choose you as the patron of my Elisaveta. The shortcomings of the composition and the just and rational criticism have persuaded me: I hesitated for a while, and finally reflection decided me; not being an Author, not wishing to be celebrated, why should I fear criticism. This weak experiment is the fruit of my isolation, and is nothing other than the sincere gift of my heart […]54


Interestingly, in the novel itself a very different editor/narrator (this time defined using the masculine izdatel’) intervenes in the narrative with a number of remarks and additional details on the story. Some of the letters, for instance, open with a caption by the editor/narrator providing a brief summary of the events to follow.55 The narrator is also behind a number of explanatory footnotes. One of Elisaveta’s letters, for example, is thus annotated: It is impossible to doubt that Sophia wrote very curious letters to Miss Harvey, especially about the things she had seen in Italy. But the editor considers it necessary to exclude these, because we have a multitude of descriptions and journals by travellers, written much better than Sophia can. He considers that everything which does not concern Elisaveta will not engage the reader, and has therefore collected only those letters which have some connection with the story which he wishes to issue to society. Editor’s note.56 Interpolated narratorial remarks have a range of functions in epistolary novels, including providing a moral commentary on the action and reinforcing the novel’s narrative coherence and authenticity by referring to ‘technical’ details of letter writing.57 Crucially in Golovkina’s case interpolated remarks have a specific gendered goal. The woman author whose name is given on the front cover and whose feminine profile is provided in the introduction later takes the shape of a narrator referred to by masculine grammatical markers. This ‘male front’ serves to shape the persona of the woman author as literarily authoritative despite her sex. Up to date with literary trends, as suggested by the quotation above, authoritative on moral issues,58 and confidently offering insights into the characters’ psyches, Golovkina projects throughout the novel an image of professionality and self-confidence. This persona is clearly at odds not only with the customary female narrator adopted by Pospelova, Puchkova, and Izvekova in the works mentioned above, but also with the meek wife and inexperienced author flagged in the novel’s own introduction. Such conflicting images provide an interesting example of heteroglossia as a strategy to affirm one’s professionalism within the ‘feminine’ parameters in terms of genre (love story, epistolary genre) and paratext (introduction). Such self-assurance on Golovkina’s part is also reflected at a stylistic level by the overall fluent and engaging style exemplified in the passages above, a quality escaping most authors of serious sentimental fiction of


the time. Elisaveta de S*** presents further, albeit more embryonic, hints of an original take on writing and the seeds of gender-specific preoccupations. Although on the whole Golovkina’s style is in keeping with the serious sentimental tradition, at times character descriptions and situations are enlivened by ‘coarse’ realistic details. This is particularly noticeable in relation to exchanges between female characters which are often more direct and, overall, more genuine than the sentimental canon would allow for. Miss Stanley, for example, describes her addressee thus: ‘Miss Tilney was asking what you were like. I told her that you were as before: old, fat and lazy. There, my dear, I have described you in three words.’59 The reader is also amused by the heroines’ self-irony (particularly in the case of negative characters traditionally depicted in richer shades than the virtuous sentimental ones)60 and humorous metatextual references to the literary tradition to which the novel itself belongs – all modes extolled by ‘Sternian’ sentimentalism rather than by its more serious and moralising variant: ‘You no longer know me: I am sensitive, pensive, in a word, a perfect romantic heroine’,61 utters the mischievous Aleksandrina, a statement reinforced later on by the theatrical: ‘I play the most sensitive tragic heroine and only a dagger is lacking in order to convey my role; however I forget nothing necessary for this picture.’62 Moreover, unlike the bulk of contemporary epistolary novels centred on love affairs, Elisaveta de S*** sidelines the topic of heterosexual relationships to concentrate on the feelings of friendship between female characters. Whilst sentimentalism nurtured a cult of friendship, arguably in the majority of cases the relationship described is between men or between men and women, and only in the minority of cases is friendship between female characters at the core of the story. This emphasis on female relationships is true even in the last letter of the correspondence describing the denouement of the troubled liaison between Antoine and Elisaveta, culminating in their wedding ceremony. Even conceding that in sentimental narratives the sorrowful events preceding the standard ending constitute the bulk of the plot, whilst the description of the final happiness is characteristically done with in a few formulaic paragraphs, Golovkina’s novel exceeds this convention. Instead of having its usual centrepiece position in the finale, the marriage is described very briefly indeed by Elisaveta’s friend Sophia who squeezes it in between what mattered most all along – the friendship between the heroines: Returning from the church, Elisaveta sighed: this sigh was dedicated to friendship. She is touched that she is not with her true sensitive


friend, with her dear Edoxia, who took part in all her sorrows and was not a witness to her happiness, inexpressible happiness. This happiness can only be conceived if one realizes that Antoine and Elisaveta are united [forever].63

Challenges to current notions of femininity Few women in the early nineteenth century chose to defy expectations openly and break the vicious circle of sentimental femininity and dilettantism to create a work original in its conception, message, and style. Bunina and Volkonskaia represent two such authors, notable both for challenging the male literary hegemony and for their substantial contribution to Russian literature and culture. Bunina, identified by Anna Akhmatova as ‘the first Russian woman poet’, regarded writing as a craft requiring dedication and serious study. Opposing the prescribed role of the lady amateur writer, Bunina spent time and her limited financial resources to perfect her writing skills and literary knowledge. As Mary Delle LeBeau remarks, such non-conformism eventually led to an original body of poetry – her early prose pieces Sel’skie vechera (Country Evenings)64 being conventionally sentimental – which set Bunina apart from her contemporaries. No images of women in the role of wives and mothers or as selfless and submissive pervaded her work as they did that of other female writers of the time. Likewise, in her poems there was no presentation of the idyllic aspects of nature and of personal relationships, characteristic of her contemporaries Pospelova and Anna Volkova.65 Rather, Bunina addressed issues close to her experience as a woman author struggling to affirm herself in a male-dominated literary environment and as a cancer sufferer, describing her rebellion and isolation that (unlike the sentimentalists and romantics) find no consolation either in nature or in afterlife. Bunina was the first woman writer to survive by her pen for most of her professional life, yet she found herself at the mercy of gendered attacks by some critics, although she also had her share of lavish praise by the Shalikov-Blank group (to which she was initially close) and the Karamzinist women’s journal Aglaya.66 The poet’s juggling between self-affirmation as an independent author and the much needed – but precarious – support of patrons, proved an arduous balancing act, a situation that well exemplifies the obstacles met by women writers who contravened the feminine ideal.


Princess Zinaida Volkonskaia presents a different case in terms of social and financial circumstances, a feature that makes the similarities in contemporaries’ reception of Bunina’s and Volkonskaia’s work particularly poignant. The prototypical ‘daughter of an educated man’, in Virginia Woolf’s apt designation, Volkonskaia received a brilliant home education masterminded by her father Prince A. M. Belosel’skiiBelozerskii, the diplomat and refined intellectual of Catherine’s reign.67 Endowed with one of the most illustrious family names in the country and with a substantial personal wealth to match, celebrated in both court circles and high society as the pinnacle of ladies’ beauty and refinement, Zinaida could count on social connections and material security to undertake a career as a writer, without resorting to the interference of patrons. Her position in the glittering society of earlynineteenth-century Russian aristocracy, however, was to cause a subtler, but taxing pressure to conform to the feminine canon both in her societal behaviour and in her cultural activity. Adverse gossip, Alexander I’s intrusive admonitions about her public display of artistic skills, and the scorn of Russian critics represented a constant obstacle to Volkonskaia’s affirmation as a writer.68 Moreover, despite her non-conformism and important innovations in prose narrative, to this day her literary reputation lags far behind her social accomplishments (her activity as salonnière in Russia and abroad)69 and her role at court (the romantic liaison with Alexander). Volkonskaia did, however, achieve a degree of intellectual gratification in a variety of areas – literature, music, languages, and history – well beyond the amateurism deemed befitting to her gender and social position. Similarly to Bunina, Volkonskaia subscribed to a professional approach to intellectual activities still embryonic in Russia at the time, and both authors strove towards intellectual rigour vis-à-vis the flaunted amateurism of sentimentalists. Bunina, inspired by classical poetry, associated herself with the Archaists, the defenders of classical norms and critics of French influence on Russian culture and language, whilst Volkonskaia looked abroad for sources of inspiration to shape her distinctive narrative voice. Eschewing the literary paradigm of Russian female writing of the time, Volkonskaia searched for narrative genres appropriate for plots dealing with contemporary issues and settings, opting out of the sentimental model with its idealised world and timeless dimension. More specifically, much of Volkonskaia’s work in prose boldly explores the condition of women in society, marking the beginnings of a distinctive theme in Russian modern fiction. In addition, as her collection Quatre nouvelles testifies, she promoted important innovations


in the form of the novel and short story towards a clarity of style and psychological realism ahead of her time. Written in French, as is the vast majority of her work, Quatre nouvelles came out in 1819 during a period of withdrawal from social life and represent the author’s first substantial work of fiction. The four stories constituting the collection are set in four different continents: the ‘European story’ Laure,70 Deux tribus du Brésil, set in South America, Les Maris mandingues in West Africa, and L’enfant de Kachemyr in Afghanistan. As I have demonstrated elsewhere,71 in Laure the writer develops themes and styles of the society tale some time before the genre took off in the late 1820s and early 1830s, launching the theme of a woman trapped in social constraints as a particularly novelistic subject and one resonant with social critique. Moreover, this story describes in unusual detail the life of the nobility and, more significantly, provides remarkable insights into the heroine’s personality. As Iurii Lotman points out, the detailed depiction of the heroines in Laure and Quatre nouvelles as a whole is of great historical importance, for it marks the passage from the ‘feminine’ type of literature promoted by Karamzin and his followers to the psychological prose of romanticism.72 Whilst Laure addresses settings and issues ideally close to the contemporary target reader (the cosmopolitan society gathering in a provincial French town), the three tales completing the collection are set in exotic locations and represent one of the most interesting treatments of the theme of the ‘noble savage’ in Russian literature. Volkonskaia’s version of the exotic tale was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an author she greatly admired,73 and by Bernardin de St Pierre, particularly his popular romantic novel Paul et Virginie (1788).74 This latter work (whose numerous Russian translators include Sushkova) left its imprint on, among others, Mme de Staël (Mizra, 1786 and Zulma, 1797) and on the RussianLivonian Iuliia Kriudener (La Cabane des Lataniers, 1800), two writers who were personally acquainted with Volkonskaia and whose work probably influenced her version of the exotic tale.75 Yet, albeit drawing from the cultural myth of the bon sauvage, Volkonskaia’s three stories articulate gender issues rather than focussing on the idealisation of men living in a ‘state of nature’. In Laure Volkonskaia addressed the ill effects of the codes of behaviour of salon society on the young and inexperienced heroine and on society women in general, whereas the three exotic tales demonstrate how an ‘uncivilised’ and supposedly idyllic environment can have similarly harmful repercussions on women’s lives. In Les Maris mandingues, for example, a combination of chauvinism, brute force, and superstition translate into fierce social and


economic exploitation, a situation which has devastating effects not just on women’s lives, but also on the interaction between the sexes and the welfare of society as a whole. This point is brought home by another story of the collection, Deux tribus du Brésil, depicting a reverse social setup in which women are able to follow their naturally good inclinations, a freedom that has positive outcomes at every level of societal interaction, personal relationship, and economic prosperity. In this way Volkonskaia shifts the focus from the critique of superstition underlying the eighteenth-century exotic tale to the condemnation of women’s subordinate role in society and demonstrates that women’s oppression is negative on a number of fronts – ethical, social, and economic. To this end, Volkonskaia adopts a fresh narrative style that eschews the didacticism marring the work of many female contemporaries. As a result Quatre nouvelles is much ahead of its time, not just in thematic terms but also in terms of literary accomplishment. English and French female authors expressed similar ideas, and the novels of the much admired de Staël (Delphine of 1802 and Corinne of 1807) spring to mind. Nevertheless, Volkonskaia’s is the first instance of a proto-feminist take on the theme of women’s oppression in Russian fiction and, with the exception of Bunina, an isolated voice in a literary landscape dominated by few female writers conforming in different degrees to the ideal of the woman author as a charming dilettante needing male guidance in her sentimental outpourings. In Alexander’s Russia the powerful aesthetics and ideological constraints of the age of feminisation explain the near-uniformity in the representation of women according to sentimental prototypes in the work of both male and female writers of the period. Such cultural limitations, as we have seen, proved particularly binding for the first generation of female novelists, accounting for the stylistic, linguistic, and thematic homogeneity of their work in a literary context otherwise highly diverse and dynamic. Yet, with all their drawbacks the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represent a turning point for women writers in that sentimental feminisation made their participation a fact of Russian literary life, even if such participation was limited by ethical and aesthetic constraints and belittled by many. Moreover, the work of unorthodox authors of Alexander’s epoch, such as Bunina and Volkonskaia, for the first time gave voice to gender issues and paved the way for new poetic and narrative avenues of expression in nineteenth-century Russia. The ensuing reign of Nicholas I saw prose writers such as Nadezhda Durova, Elena Gan, Maria Zhukova, and Karolina Pavlova make the critique of women’s subordinate role in Russian society a key theme of their work, whilst establishing a solid tradition of


female writers of prose who slowly eroded gender preconceptions operating in the literary and social fabric of modern Russia. The author would like to thank Gitta Hammarberg and Wendy Rosslyn for their useful comments.

Notes 1. Cf. Wendy Rosslyn, Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women 1763–1825 (Fichtenwalde: Göpfert, 2000). 2. See Judith Vowles, ‘The Inexperienced Muse: Russian Women and Poetry in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 62–84 (pp. 62–68). For an example of conduct manuals of this type see S. Remezov, Schastlivyi vospitannik (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1808). 3. See Joe Andrew, Women in Russian Literature, 1780–1863 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 1–5. See also Wendy Rosslyn, ‘Conflicts Over Gender and Status in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia: The Case of Anna Bunina’s “Padenie Faetona”’, in Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 55–74 (p. 55); W. Gareth Jones, ‘Russian Language as a Definer of Nobility’, in A Window on Russia: Papers from the V International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Gargnano, 1994, ed. Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice, 1996), pp. 293–98. For the broader European context see Keith M. May, Characters of Women in Narrative Literature (London: Macmillan, 1981) and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984), p. xii. 4. See Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), p. 234; Marc Raeff, ‘La jeunesse russe à l’aube du XIX siècle. André Turgenev et ses amis’, in Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 8 (1967), 560–586; M. I. Aronson and S. Reiser, Literaturnye kruzhki i salony, ed. B. M. Eikhenbaum (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929 and 2001); Paul Garde, ‘Les querelles politico-littéraires en Russie au début du XIX siècle’, in Histoire de la littérature russe. Le XIX siècle. L’époque de Pouchkine et de Gogol, ed. E. Etkind and others (Paris: Fayard, 1996), pp. 11–31 (p. 14). 5. See Carolin Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, ‘Feminisation and Functionalisation: The Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimental Man’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 51–71 (p. 59). 6. The term was coined by Viktor Vinogradov in his Iazyk Pushkina (Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia, 1935; repr. Moscow: Nauka, 2000) to become of common usage among literary historians. For an in-depth analysis of this concept and its inherent contradictions, see Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Gender Ambivalence and Genre Anomalies in Late 18th-Early 19th-Century Russian Literature’, Russian Literature, 52 (2002), 299–326. 7. Figures about women readers (and journal readership more generally) are hard to establish: journals usually were circulated among acquaintances of the


8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

subscriber, were read in clubs, and it was common practice for men to subscribe even to women’s journals. Zhukova, however, gives some indication of the increase in women’s readers in this period: for the journal Aglaia, according to the lists of subscribers contained at the end of each year (as was the general practice then), there were 4 women listed out of 20 total subscribers in 1808, while in 1810, just two years later, the numbers were 18 women out of 122 total subscribers; Iu. V. Zhukova, ‘Zhenskaia tema na stranitsakh zhurnala Aglaia (1808–1812 gg.) Kn. P. I. Shalikova’, in O blagorodstve i preimushchestve zhenskogo pola: Iz istorii zhenskogo voprosa, ed. R. Sh. Ganelin (St Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia akademiia kul’tury, 1997), pp. 38–50. Cf. Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing: 1820–1992 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 1–16; 19–33; Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal and Mary Zirin, ‘Introduction: Russian Women Writers 1760–1992’, in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal and Mary Zirin (Westport and London: Greenwood, 1994), pp. xxviii–xli (p. xxix). On Neelova’s story Leinard i Termila (1784) see Kelly, A History, pp. 51–52. On Western women writers see, for example, Orest Somov’s playful ‘Plan romana à la Radcliff’ (Kharkovskii demokrit, 5 (1816), 61) and comments by P. Makarov (in ‘Retsenziia na Monakha’, Moskovskii Merkurii, 3 (1803), 139 and 218–19) and V. Izmailov (in his [signed with the pseudonym ‘O.O.O.’] ‘Vzgliad na povesti ili skazki’, Patriot, 2.2 (1804), 207–13. Cf. William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institution, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1986), Chapters 1 and 2. On the innovative drive of the late eighteenth-century sentimental povest’ see K. Skipina, ‘On the Sentimental Tale’, in Russian Prose, ed. B. Eikhenbaum and Iu. Tynyanov (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), pp. 21–44; Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Puti razvitiia russkoi prozy 1800-kh-1810-kh godov’, Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, 4 (1961), 3–57. Cf. my Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Age of Alexander I (1801–1825) (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006). For an instance of this phenomenon see my ‘Fon Ferel’ts’ Political Travelogue “Puteshestvie kritiki”’, in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy, ed. Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2007), pp. 173–188. See also the case of other opponents of sentimentalism such as Aleksandr Benitskii, Nikolai Gnedich, Nikolai Brusilov, and Aleksandr Izmailov. For exceptions to the rule among male writers see Aleksandr Benitskii’s tales and the anonymous novel Russkaia amazonka, discussed in A. Tosi, ‘ “L’Amazone Russe”: Les traits subversifs d’une héroïne sentimentale’, Revue des Etudes Slaves, 74.4 (2002–2003), 819–34. Cf. P. I. Makarov, ‘Nekotoryia mysli’, in, Sochineniia i perevody, ed. P. I. Makarov, 2 vols (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1817), II (1817), pp. 61–72. On this issue see also Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Women, Critics, and Women Critics in Early Russian Women’s Journals’, in Women and Gender, ed. Rosslyn, pp. 187–207. V. G. Belinskii, ‘Sochineniia Zeneidy R-voi [1843]’, in his Pol’noe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1953–1959), VII (1955), 648–678. On this essay see Kelly, A History, pp. 24–25.

Women and Literature, Women in Literature 59 17. Cf. Katharine Hodgson, ‘Women and Gender in Post-Symbolist Poetry and the Stalin Era’, in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Barker and Gheith, pp. 206–24 (p. 223). 18. See ‘Pospelova, Mar’ia Alekseevna (1780–1805)’, in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, pp. 514–15; Some of her verses (and other texts by early nineteenthcentury women poets) are available online at http://www.sml.ex.ac.uk/ russian/corinna/pospelova/poems_list.htm (accessed 3 August 2006). Articles on Pospelova appeared in the leading journals of the time: Liubitel’ slovesnosti, Otechestvennye zapiski, and Damskii zhurnal. 19. See: Zhukova, pp. 38–50. and also Yael Harussi, ‘Women’s Social Roles as Depicted by Women Writers in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction’, in Issues in Russian Literature Before 1917. Selected Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East-European Studies, ed. J. Douglas Clayton (Columbus: Slavica, 1989), pp. 35–48 (pp. 35–37). Other works by Puchkova include the poem ‘Liubeznoi puteshestvennitse A. P. Buninoi pered ot”ezdom ee v Angliiu’, Syn otechestva, 33. 24 (1815); ‘K odnoi priatel’nitse na vopros ee, kak zhivu ia v Arzamase’, Russkii museum, 1 (1815); ‘Zanke’, Syn otechestva, 38 (1817); ‘Pis’mo k kniaziu Shalikovu’, Damskii zhurnal, 30.16 (1830). 20. In this respect Puchkova is part of a wider early nineteenth-century trend when sentimental devices ‘invaded’ a wide range of non-literary genres, such as correspondence, conduct manuals, journal articles, diaries, and so on. 21. Ekaterina Puchkova, ‘Otryvok. Druzheskaia progulka’, in Puchkova, Pervye opyty v proze (Moscow: S. Selivanovskii, 1812) pp. 112–14 (p. 112). 22. Ekaterina Puchkova, ‘Eduard i Sofiia, ili zhertva strasti i obol’shcheniia’ in Puchkova, Pervye opyty v proze, pp. 25–81 (pp. 42–44). 23. Cf. Hammarberg’s, ‘Women, Critics’, p. 190. See also Hammarber’s chapter in this book. 24. V. P. Stepanov and S. V. Sheshunova, ‘Izvekova’, in Russkie pisateli 1800–1917: biograficheskii slovar’, ed. P. A. Nikolaev and others, 4 vols (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989), II (1989), pp. 400–01. 25. Her work includes patriotic verses and the drama Al’fons i Florestina, ili schastlivyi oborot (Moscow: v tipografii Gippiusa 1807). 26. Parallels are noticeable between Milena and a well-known novel by Mme de Genlis: Adèle et Théodore, ou lettres sur l’éducation (1782). See Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin, chapter IV.3. 27. On Izvekova see Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, pp. 267–68; Harussi, pp. 37–40 and Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin, pp. 216–25. On conceptions of maternity in the period within and outside the sentimental canon see Catriona Kelly, ‘Educating Tat’yana: Manners, Motherhood and Moral Education (Vospitanie), 1760–1840’, in Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. Linda Edmondson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–28. 28. Zhikharev continues his scathing criticism with an epigram: “Baвeкoвoc poма c Baвeкoвoc b cxoдe: / O так жe, кaк oa, дoбpoдe / B тaк жe b к чeмy e гoдe!” See S. P. Zhikharev, Zapiski sovremennika: dnevnik studenta, dnevnik chinovnika, ed. S. Ia. Shtraikh, 2 vols (Moscow: Akademiia, 1934) I (1934), p. 91. 29. K. N. Batiushkov, ‘Videnie na beregakh Lety’ [1809], in K. N. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, ed. V. A. Koshelev, 2 vols (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), I (1989), pp. 374–75.

60 Women and the Arts 30. Belinskii, p. 653. See also Stepanov and Sheshunova, pp. 400–01. 31. [M. N. Makarov], ‘Materialy dlia istorii russkikh zhenshchin-avtorov (Mar’ia Evgrafovna Bedriaga)’, Damskii zhurnal, 51.52 (1830), 117–18. 32. The above quoted article mocks the repeated attempts of Izvekova (pitomtsa muz) to find a publisher, a task she achieves only by canvassing the literary elite (iskat’ sviazei u dvora literaturnogo). ‘Materialy dlia istorii russkikh zhenshchin-avtorov (Mar’ia Evgrafovna Bedriaga)’, p. 117. 33. Mariia Izvekova, Emiliia, ili pechal’nye sledstviia bezrassudnoi liubvy (Moscow: v tipograffi F. Gippiusa1806), pp. i–ii (p. i) (my italics). 34. See Mariia Izvekova, Milena ili redkii primer velikodushiia (St Petersburg: v Meditsinskoi tipografii, 1809), pp. i–iv. 35. See Izvekova, Milena, pp. ii–iii. 36. Ekaterina Puchkova’s ‘K chitateliam’, in Puchkova, Pervye opyty v proze, pp. [i–ii] (p. [i]) (my italics). 37. Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, in Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke XVIII–XIX vekov (La littérature russe d’expression française, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles), ed. Iu. M. Lotman and V. Iu. Rosentsveig (Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 36, 1994), pp. 10–53 (p. 15). 38. See Vowles, p. 63. See also Kelly, A History, p. 53; V. Iu. Rosentsveig, ‘Russkofrantsuzskoe literaturnoe dvuiazychie XVIII-serediny XIX veka’, in Lotman and Rosentsveig, pp. 54–74. 39. Cf. Iu. M. Lotman, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1983), p. 199. 40. Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, in Lotman and Rozentsveig, p. 33 and passim. 41. Cf. for example Iakov Galinkovskii’s remarks in his novel ‘Sidoniia, ili Nevinnoe verolomstvo’, Russkii vestnik, 6 (1808), 354. 42. In his 1802 article ‘O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti’ in N. M. Karamzin, Izbrannye sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), II (1964), p. 286, Karamzin criticises women writers for failing to use Russian. On this issue see Joe Andrew, ‘ “A Crocodile in Flannel or a Dancing Monkey”: The Image of the Russian Woman Writer, 1790–1850’, in Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. Edmondson, pp. 52–72 (pp. 53–54). 43. Cf. the negative review of her Tableau slave du cinquième siècle (1st edn. Paris 1824; 2nd edn. Moscow, 1825–1826) in Russia vis-à-vis the positive reception in France. The critic Saint Jullien wrote: ‘[Volkonskaia] is a worthy rival of the best among our French women writers for the freshness of her style, which is always pure, elegant and harmonious.’ M. A. Jullien, [Review no.] 339: ‘Tableau slave du cinquième siècle’, Revue encyclopédique, 22 (1824), 709–10 (709). Similar appraisals were voiced in Gazette de France and in Drapeau Blanc. 44. See A. Trofimoff, La Princesse Zénaïde Wolkonsky. De la Russie Impériale à la Rome des Papes (Roma: Staderini 1966) and N. Belozerskaia, ‘Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia’, Istoricheskii vestnik. Istoriko-literaturnyi zhurnal, 67 (1897), 939–72. 45. Natal’ia Golovkina, Elisabeth de S., ou l’histoire d’une russe publiée par une de ses compatriotes, 3 vols (Paris: Ducauroy, 1802). Russian translation: Elisaveta de S***, ili istoriia rossiianki izdannaia v svete odnoiu iz eia sootechestvennits in 5 vols (Moscow: v tipograffi f. Gippiusa, 1803–1804). Golovkina also wrote a novel in two volumes Alphonse de Lodève (Moscow, 1807; 2nd edn. Paris: F. Schoell,


46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

1809). See Spravochnyi slovar’ o russkikh pisateliakh i uchenykh, umershikh v XVIII i XIX stoletiiakh: spisok russkikh knig 1725–1825, ed. G. Gennadi and N. Soiko, 3 vols (Berlin, 1876), I (1876–1880; repr. The Hague: Mouton, 1969), pp. 239–40. For a discussion of gender issues in the epistolary novel see Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986). Richardson’s novels appeared in Russia (via France) in the late 1780s: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–1741) was translated into Russian in 1787 and 1796, Clarissa (1747–1748) was translated in 1791–1792, and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754) was translated in 1793–1794. Eighteenth-century Russian works patterned on Richardson’s novel include Nikolai Emin’s Roza (1788), Pavel L’vov’s popular Rossiiskaia Pamela, ili istoriia Marii, dobrodetel’noi poselianki (1789) and Mikhail Chulkov’s Prigozhaia povarikha (1770). On the genre, see M. Fraanje, The Epistolary Novel in Eighteenth-Century Russia (München: Sagner, 2001). April Alliston, Virtue’s Fault: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century English and French Women’s Fiction (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), pp. 4, 11. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the 18th Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), p. 7 and passim. Cf. Todd, chapter 1 and A. Meynieux, La littérature et le métier d’écrivain en Russie avant Pouchkine (Paris: Librarie des cinq continents, 1966). See also Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin, chapters I and II. Another important instance is Iuliia Kriudener’s novel in French Valérie (1801). See E. Grechanaia, ‘Predromanticheskoe mirooshchushchenie i rukopisnaia traditsiia: neizdannye materialy iz arkhiva Iulii Kriudener’, in Rukopis’ skvoz’ veka (Materialy russko-frantsuzskogo kollokviuma), ed T. Balashova and others (Moscow, Paris and Pskov: Izdatel’stvo Pskovskogo oblastnogo instituta usovershenstvovaniia uchitelei, 1994), pp. 70–76 and Kelly, A History, pp. 54–55. Male authors preferred the epistolary travelogue after Sterne’s and Karamzin’s example. Cf. Andrew, ‘A Crocodile in Flannel or a Dancing Monkey’: The Image of the Russian Women Writer, 1790–1850’ pp. 57–58. Golovkina Elisaveta de S***, ili istoriia rossiianki izdannaia v svete odnoiu iz eia sootechestvennits, I, p. [i]. Cf. for example, the last letter of the book headed ‘Elisaveta za muzhem’, Golovkina, V, p. 93. Golovkina, V, pp. 50–51. Cf. Golovkina, V, p. 60. For an example of moral commentary on the characters’ behaviour see Golovkina, V, p. 54. Cf. Golovkina, I, p. 19. On the lively anti-heroes in this work, see also Kelly, A History, p. 54. For an example of a more conventional character portrayal, see Elisaveta’s melancholy heightened by the surrounding nature in part IV (cf. pp. 56–57 and passim), the invocation of death as salvation from earthly sorrows (cf. IV, 80), the widespread use of the sentimental technique of the ‘suspension of communication’ (aposiopesis) which takes place when the heroine’s reaches an emotive highpoint (as in part IV, 83–84), and the description of an emotional climax via its physical manifestation (sighs, tears, paleness, faintness and so on, as in part IV, 89).

62 Women and the Arts 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

Cf. Golovkina, II, p. 2. Cf. Golovkina, II, p. 32. Cf. Golovkina, V, p. 96 (italics in the original). In Anna Bunina, Sobranie stikhotvorenii, 3 vols (St Petersburg : tipografii Rossiiskoi Akademii, 1819–1821). Mary Delle LeBeau, ‘http://www-scf.usc.edu/~mlebeau/illness.htm (accessed 25 September 2006). See Wendy Rosslyn, Anna Bunina (1774–1829) and the Origin of Women’s Poetry in Russia (Lewiston and Lampeter: Mellen, 1997), p. 22 and Zhukova. See my forthcoming ‘Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia’, in A. M. Belosel’skii-Belozerskii i ego mir, ed. T. Artem’eva (St Peterburg: SanktPeterburskii tsentr istorii idei). See the negative reviews of her ‘Pis’ma iz Italii’ in Syn Otechestva, 3 (1825), 307–08. See also Trofimoff, pp. 66–67, 71. On her celebrated Moscow salon from 1824 to 1829, see Natalia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History: from the Tenth to the Twentieth century (London and Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997), pp. 196–97. After the 1819 edition (Z. A. Volkonskaia, Quatre nouvelles (Moscow: A. Semen’, 1819)) Laure was re-published separately: firstly in Naples by the Imprimerie d’Ange Coda in 1828 and later in Volkonskaia’s selected works (Sochineniia kniagini Zinaidy Aleksandrovny Volkonskoi (Paris and Karlsruhe, 1865) and, more recently, in Lotman and Rosentsveig, pp. 384–423. Cf. Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin, pp. 138–48 and my ‘Issues of Gender in Zinaida Volkonskaia’s “Laure” (1819)’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newsletter, 31 (2003), 12–17. Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, in Lotman and Rosentsveig, p. 51. Cf. Trofimoff, pp. 59–60. Saint-Pierre’s Rousseauian beliefs are encapsulated in his preface: ‘Notre bonheur consiste à vivre suivant la nature et la vertu.’ Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, ed. E. Guitton (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1984), p. 78. See F. Ley, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mme de Staël, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant et Mme de Krudener (d’après des documents inédits) (Paris, Éditions Montaigne, 1967), pp. 112–72.

4 Women’s Travel and Travel Writing in Russia, 1700–1825 Sara Dickinson

Women’s travel Women in eighteenth-century Russia engaged in numerous activities that might be defined as ‘travel’, participating in most of the varieties that were available to men, albeit often in more limited measure, and recording their wide range of experiences in letters, memoirs, and other writings.1 Since traditional culture associated women with the home and with the private, domestic sphere, eighteenth-century female travel was often viewed as unseemly and even dangerous. That said, not all types of travel were problematic: domestic life itself often required setting out on the road. Here, women’s experiences differed greatly across the social and economic spectrum, but females from all social estates undertook journeys to be wed or join new families, and to move house; some travelled in the seasonal back-and-forth between urban residence and country estate; some made extended visits to friends and relations.2 Not surprisingly, most of the information available on women’s travel relates to the movements of elite women, who were more often literate and thus able to describe their trips (and more likely to appear in the texts of their male peers). When elite women travelled, their journeys often involved other female household members as well, including serfs and diverse retainers (e.g. nannies, governesses), women who followed the same routes in different roles. Traditional culture did not prevent women from travelling on their own behalf and even of their own volition or initiative, although they 63


usually did so in the performance of traditional feminine roles – as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or other companionate figures. The memoirs of noblewoman Anna Labzina (1756–1828) amply illustrate how she journeyed widely throughout the Russian Empire in the performance of wifely duties, accompanying her husband on professional moves.3 Women also journeyed with spouses and other male relatives into and out of exile (and were sometimes exiled themselves). The memoirs of Natal’ia Dolgorukaia (1714–1771) recount the journey to Siberia that she made with her disgraced husband, his mother, and his two sisters in 1730.4 Aleksandr Radishchev had a female escort when exiled to Ilimsk 60 years later: he was accompanied by Elizaveta Rubanovskaia, his late wife’s sister (who became his legal spouse there), two daughters and female servants; a third daughter was born there. Even military travel, seemingly a quintessentially masculine experience, involved numerous Russian women. The most famous example is Nadezhda Durova (1783–1866), the cross-dressing cavalry officer whose journals of her participation in the Napoleonic Wars might be seen as ‘one long travel account’.5 Women more frequently participated in military life as camp followers – wives, girlfriends, prostitutes, and others who attached their fortunes to soldiers and officers on active duty. One of the more remarkable specimens was the Livonian peasant woman who caught Peter I’s fancy and eventually became Catherine I; after their union was made official she continued to accompany him on military campaigns. Letters and memoir literature bring to light the experiences of other women whose movements were shaped by military affairs as well: ‘leading a life more nomadic than the nomads themselves’, Varvara Bakunina accompanied her officer husband on a military campaign in Iran (‘Persia’) in 1796; Mar’ia Rimskaia-Korsakova was among the Moscow evacuees who moved to Nizhnii Novgorod at Napoleon’s approach in 1812; and Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, the Prussian-born wife of Alexander I, set off with the court in 1813 for an extended sojourn in newly liberated Central Europe, following her husband at a certain remove.6 Leisured touring, another important category of travel, became familiar to members of the Russian elite, many of them women, over the course of the eighteenth century.7 At the beginning of the century, Peter I had apparently hoped to expose women to European culture by sending them abroad to complete their linguistic and social educations, but his project failed when ‘the nobles fiercely opposed such an undertaking on the grounds that their daughters would be led into temptation and their virtue and reputations endangered’.8 Exceptions were made for the

Women’s Travel and Travel Writing in Russia

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spouses of Petrine diplomats (e.g. Mariia Kurakina, Dar’ia Golitsyna), who did go abroad and were thus able to participate in foreign life while fulfilling familial obligations. Many elite women who visited Europe later in the century were also diplomatic wives and daughters.

Women’s travel writing What then constitutes women’s travel writing? If many women were travellers, few were travel writers. In fact, the decision to commit their experiences to paper transgressed yet another model of traditional female behaviour. To quote the travel writing critic Indira Ghose, ‘women’s travel writings assert a female identity in the public sphere in a two-fold way: by producing a public self in print and by locating the traveller’s persona in the public world of travel’.9 In eighteenth-century Russia, even unpublished travel accounts asserted a public or semi-public image, the engrossing subject matter guaranteeing that these would circulate beyond specific addressees. Generally speaking, women’s literary activity in Russia, as in the rest of Europe, was confined to light genres and minor forms that were regarded as belonging to private rather than public discourse and were thus more in keeping with women’s traditional sphere. These included letters, diaries, literary facetiae, lyric poetry, translations, and some varieties of travel writing, particularly those which assumed an epistolary or diurnal form. While the ponderous volumes authored by scientific and informational travel writers – and their conception of travel as educational – had an influence on women’s accounts, these specific approaches were avoided by female writers in favour of ostensibly private records, such as the personal letters. More often than not, their texts were shaped as communications between women and written, at least nominally, for female acquaintances and family members. While the extent to which these texts aimed to participate in the masculine literary world varies considerably, all of those examined here exemplify to some degree the design and exchange of literary production in a female context. In point of fact, women who wrote texts that were designed primarily (or at least secondarily) to describe the experience of travel itself comprise only a handful of highly placed (and often exceptionally elite) figures: the Empress Catherine II (1729–1796), Princess Ekaterina Dashkova (1743–1810), Baroness Natal’ia Stroganova (1743–1819), the colonel’s wife Varvara Bakunina (1773–1840), ‘M.’ (presumably Mar’ia) Gladkova (b. 1794 or 1795), and Princess Zinaida Volkonskaia (1789–1862).10 All of these women were members of the elite’s inner


circles and were not only literate but also familiar with various discursive traditions. Their writings demonstrate a shared conception of travel as a specific and important behaviour worthy of record, a notion of travel that links such texts to diverse traditions of travel description, including grand tour accounts, scientific and informational travelogues, and reports of journeys to exotic locales. Catherine comments on her extensive travels within the Russian Empire in scattered personal letters, a travel sketch, and an unfinished parodic fragment; Bakunina’s account combines travel description with historical memoir; and Volkonskaia’s travel sketches on Italy were printed in various Russian journals over an extended period (from 1825 to the late 1830s).11 I will focus here on the travel writing of Dashkova, Stroganova, and Gladkova, a small but richly diverse sample comprising what are arguably the most ‘proper’ travelogues in this group, that is, a series of self-contained texts that were written during or immediately after the journeys described. This is not an exhaustive survey, then, but represents a first attempt to discuss Russian women’s travel writing as such, and to determine what features – if any – constitute its characteristic specificity in the long eighteenth century. As critics and scholars of women’s travel writing have argued, it is difficult to isolate or even define ‘gendered’ textual features that transcend specific cultures and eras. While ‘there may be negotiations in women’s texts which result in differences which seem to be due to gender’,12 a more productive approach to the study of women’s accounts has been to describe them in terms of the multiple discourses (or cultural influences) that contribute both to the production and reception of female texts, such as ‘discourses of femininity’, ‘discourses of imperialism’, and the generic conventions of travel writing.13 Indeed, the texts examined here both demonstrate the difficulty of establishing characteristic (gendered) features of women’s travel writing and substantiate the view that useful textual analyses (and the identification of relevant discourses) must be firmly rooted in the specificity of a given time and culture. In particular, it is difficult to speak of the ‘discourses of femininity’ as hallmarks of women’s writing in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Russia, since these frequently overlapped with the conventions that defined literary stylisation itself. In the pre-romantic, sentimentalist era, male writers favoured ‘feminine’ genres and cultivated a ‘feminine’ style in their work: to write in a literary fashion, in other words, meant precisely to write ‘like a woman’, that is, not as women actually wrote, but as it was thought that they would or should write.14 Thus, an ostensibly ‘feminine’ style does not necessarily indicate secondary social or artistic


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status, nor difficulty in assuming a commanding narratorial voice: it simply went hand in hand with the selection of genre or even the decision to write at all, and was frequently a masculine choice. Elements associated with feminisation include modest or self-deprecating selfpresentation, justifications for having produced the text in question (often with disclaimers about its interest or literary merit), an emphasis on social relationships as well as others’ approval of or reaction to the narrator, and the development of a narratorial persona that may be sociable, seemly, gracious, spontaneous, light-hearted, and/or ebullient.15 Many of these elements may be found in the texts of male travel writers such as Fonvizin and Karamzin. Still more important, the very fact that feminisation was sanctioned by the male literary establishment encouraged women to adopt it in their work. If the ‘discourses of femininity’ were recommended for male literary production, they were required for women writers who wished to enter the public sphere. Disclaimers and self-deprecatory comments were fashionable stylistic elements that authors incorporated in their work in order to signal literary intent. Pointedly feminine stylisation did not simply help to excuse or compensate for women’s bold, semi-illicit forays into the world of letters, but legitimised their literary endeavours, allowing women to produce, circulate, and sometimes publish texts despite their gender. The analyses that follow will highlight issues of gender raised by examples of women’s travel writing, considering both production – or female context – and specific female content.

Ekaterina Dashkova Ekaterina Dashkova, née Vorontsova, made two extended European tours (1769–1772 and 1775–1782) and described her experiences in three different texts. Her well-known memoirs, written in 1805 and first published in 1840,16 offer a general, if retrospective, overview of her travels, while two shorter pieces provide more immediate detail on specific segments, both of them two-week excursions in Britain. As I have argued elsewhere, both of these relatively obscure travelogues were important milestones in the history of Russian literary travel writing.17 ‘Puteshestvie odnoi Rossiiskoi znatnoi Gospozhi, po nekotorym Aglinskim provintsiiam’ (‘The Journey of a Certain Distinguished Russian Lady through Some English Provinces’), which describes a circuit of southwest England made during Dashkova’s first grand tour, seems to be the earliest published account of leisured touring in Russian tradition; it appeared in the journal of the Free Russian Assembly in


1775.18 Dashkova’s second account, ‘Le Petit tour dans les Highlands’ (‘The Small Tour in the Highlands’), describes her 1777 excursion in Scotland and is arguably Russia’s inaugural example of a full-fledged ‘literary’ travel account. Composed in French and shaped as a private communication to Dashkova’s friend Elizabeth Morgan, this text remained unpublished until 1995.19 To what extent were Dashkova’s travels influenced by her gender? When she departed for her first extended journey, she was 26 years old and had been a widow for five years; she travelled with her children (a son and daughter), their governess, her cousin I. A. Vorontsov, and servants. Dashkova cannot easily be described as a woman acting out circumscribed female roles. Like Catherine II, she enjoyed unusual social prominence both at home and abroad: her close connection with the Empress, her participation in the coup that brought Catherine to power, and her later bureaucratic positions gave Dashkova an unprecedented public and ‘masculine’ status. Dashkova herself advertised a masculine pose, both in her behaviour and writings.20 That she often impressed her contemporaries as ‘masculine’ confirms the obvious fact that her conduct was not always constrained or circumscribed by traditional models of femininity. Dashkova frequently underlines her own importance in her writings as well, suggesting in all three accounts, for example, that she was the head of her travel party and operated on numerous occasions as a separate agent (as when establishing friendships with Diderot and Voltaire). While her link to Catherine made Dashkova the most well-known member of the group, she was escorted on her first trip by an older male, her cousin Vorontsov, who had served at Russian embassies in London and The Hague and was familiar with life abroad.21 To what extent did women who embarked on leisured tours feel obligated to describe their travels in terms of traditional feminine roles?22 Dashkova’s travel writings indicate that there is no single answer to this question: each of her three texts uses a different rhetorical solution to justify its existence. It is only in her memoirs, however, the broad review of her travels drafted twenty-odd years later, that she couches her tours in the rhetoric of conventional feminine discourse, justifying them as acts of maternal devotion: the first was projected ‘in the hope that change of air and the actual travelling would benefit my children who suffered from rickets and had poor health’ (p. 116); and the second was projected to educate her son at the University of Edinburgh. It is also true that when Dashkova wrote her memoirs, she had particularly poor relations with both of her children, and she uses this text in part to justify her own position (selfless, unappreciated) in light of such problems.


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Nonetheless, her maternal assertions also helped to defend her from possible charges of self-indulgence for her long sojourns abroad. Nowhere does this relatively independent, highly placed, and enterprising woman indicate having been inspired to travel by any personal desire to see foreign climes. It is interesting that Dashkova does not mention maternal devotion in her published ‘Puteshestvie’: such sentiments may have usefully justified her actual travels, but they were not relevant for explaining her publication.23 How then does she account for having put pen to paper? Dashkova does what she can to explain the appearance of this text with a lengthy series of modesty topoi and disclaimers, elements, as suggested, that simultaneously reflect both the social pressures conditioning female authorship and Dashkova’s own very real interest in literary stylisation. She wrote, it seems, at the request of a very persistent friend, who finally overcame Dashkova’s own objections (and assurances that her travel notes were worthless) and succeeded in persuading her to publish. Dashkova defends her text from further attack by pointing out that it is incomplete, ‘written simply then as now, not only without any sort of embellishment, but also without corrections’, and often contains only what she was able to jot down after a tiring day of travel (p. 105). She also justifies having even maintained a journal: intending to do so solely ‘for strictly personal reminiscence’, she was urged by friends at departure to keep a record that might be shared with them. Certainly, ‘it was not ambition to be a writer’ that led her to keep a diary. While expressing a wish that a ‘worthier brush’ could have rendered this brief description, she also points out that her own capacity for feeling vindicates her attempt (pp. 106–07). Dashkova closes her preamble in enraptured address to a ‘dear friend’ (echoing the work’s subtitle ‘Letter to a Friend’). While these protestations of modesty might have been intended in part to safeguard a feminine image of the author, similar passages appear in the works of contemporary male writers and in most genres of published writing, facts that helped to legitimise Dashkova’s endeavour, ushering her into the world of print in 1775. More generally, Dashkova’s brief travelogues offer very little in the way of female content apart from a few scattered comments in ‘Le Petit tour’ on maternal concerns (e.g. during her son’s indisposition, p. 247). In general, she embraces the standard forms and feminised (male) voice required for the literary (publishable) texts that she aimed to produce. By carefully selecting those elements of feminisation that had been sanctioned by male writers in their descriptions of the grand tour, she describes a traditional male-dominated social and cultural world. Her


travelogues pay homage to the literary establishment in their selected itineraries as well. In fact, both of the segments that she chose to describe – representing a total of only four weeks from her roughly ten years abroad – were recognised as standard tourist excursions. Limited (modest) and concrete, Dashkova’s brief accounts were also inspired by the fact that once outside of Russia, she was behaving as Western (British) tourists did. The title of Dashkova’s second account – not ‘a small tour’, but ‘the small tour’ of the Highlands – points to the conventionalised cultural practice that structured her excursion through Scottish towns and private estates: this was not one of many possible excursions, but the tour comme il faut. With her decision to report on well-established routes, Dashkova again softens the impact of female authorship and guarantees the success of this attempt to enter literary discourse. Disclaimers notwithstanding, Dashkova has a strong textual voice and its power increases as she passes from a relatively conventional tour account (‘Puteshestvie’) to a more ‘literary’, effusive, and personal record of her travels (‘Le Petit tour’) to her more monumental and comprehensive memoirs, which assert the importance and interest of her larger tours – and entire life – as public history. This development would seem to reflect increasing confidence accrued with age and importance, in part a result of Dashkova’s unusual social and administrative status;24 some credit must be given to her travels as well. While Dashkova journeyed abroad as a mature woman, her travels do appear to have laid the foundation for her subsequent career – as was customary for young Russian noblemen who studied and travelled abroad. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, young elite Russian males adopted the grand tour as a preparatory rite for professional success, with extended foreign sojourns granting them access to important posts in the state service. An example may be found in Vladimir Orlov, the youngest of five brothers ennobled for helping Catherine to the throne. Sent abroad for study in 1763, Orlov returned three years later to assume a position at court and soon became Director of the Academy of Sciences, preceding Dashkova in this post. Dashkova herself portrays her own second tour abroad as a prolonged effort to solidify her son’s professional future – through his formal education, his general exposure to European life and culture, and her concerted attempts to procure him a post in Russia through personal connections. Nonetheless, her travels arguably had a greater influence on her own later career, arguably constituting an unprecedented instance of foreign travel as professional ‘training’ for women. Despite Dashkova’s insistence that she travelled as a mother and educator of her


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children, she returned home from her second grand tour at the age of 39 and was running the Academy of Sciences six months later.

Natal’ia Stroganova Baroness Natal’ia Stroganova (1743–1819), née Princess Belosel’skaia, toured Europe in 1780–1782 and maintained a record of the trip to be shared with her two sisters; written in French, this semi-private account was published in Russian translation only in 1914.25 Stroganova records the journey across northern Europe through Berlin, Potsdam, and Dresden, to Spa; the account breaks off during her subsequent sojourn in Paris. Stroganova travelled with a large group – Count Saltykov and his wife (Stroganova’s ‘cousine’),26 their two daughters, a governess, Stroganova’s nine-year-old son, his tutor, a doctor, and a female servant. It is symptomatic of the account’s elite social concerns that Stroganova’s own person count of ‘nine’ overlooks the servant. Saltykov, an illustrious military figure, served as the party’s experienced male escort; his wife was familiar with Europe as well: as daughter of a diplomat, she had spent most of her childhood abroad. Stroganova travelled in multiple roles – as Russian noblewoman, mother, friend, and family relation (sister, cousin). Unlike Dashkova, Stroganova does not emphasise her maternal function, although the long list of tutors (six) that she hires for her son in Paris (pp. 35–36) indicates that his education was an important focus of the trip. He (and ‘the children’) participates in little of what she describes; however, their presence is sometimes noted as an exception. Stroganova’s primary concerns are conveying information to her sisters about the trip itself (lodgings, transport), sights seen (towns, gardens, galleries, theatres, shops, private homes), and social interactions – these were all standard grand tour themes.27 In addition, Stroganova follows standard feminine parameters in her occasional gestures at self-characterisation. Underlining her sensitive nature, for example, she waxes eloquent on her deep emotional attachment to various family members, particularly her two addressees: ‘I, having a very tender disposition, was so grieved [at departure] that I had no idea how to hold back my tears. It was the first time in my life that I had left my sisters for such a long period and I would not have been able to console myself in any way, had not my best friend been alongside me’ (p. 26). As a traveller, Stroganova is sometimes impatient (expressing frustration with a series of ‘foul’ inns, e.g.); before paintings, gardens, and homes, she assumes the critical stance that was common in grand


tour accounts. The comment that she ‘loves music madly’ (p. 31) suggests a desire to appear (fashionably) impulsive and spontaneous – in a traditionally female arena. Decidedly more unusual are Stroganova’s attentions to social interactions with a feminine layer of the beau monde, and to the issues of women’s health, specifically female topics which stand out against the background of grand tour accounts written by her contemporaries. Stroganova’s rendering of society differs from the more standard description of mixed and masculine company found in Dashkova’s travel writing, for example. To be sure, Dashkova socialised with women as well, but her report of these interactions is only a small part of the rich social world that she is pleased to describe and does not serve as the backbone of her narratives. In Stroganova’s depicted world, strictly female social interactions occupy a significant portion of the text. While men are often present, Stroganova seeks out the society of women, spends most of her time in their company, and eagerly offers her (almost always positive) commentary on these encounters. Her account thus reveals a female stratum of grand tour activity, which illuminates the literary underpinnings of Dashkova’s vision, while providing a valuable source of information on a vibrant world of female social interactions that is poorly represented in the more traditional accounts of both Dashkova and her male contemporaries. The entries relating to Stroganova’s long stay in Berlin, for example, describe how both she and Saltykova are taken by a lady of their acquaintance to pay calls on women, establishing social connections, and obtaining entry into the private (often female) quarters of elite homes. They are presented to the Queen, ‘who gave us an excellent reception, as did the consort of Prince Henry, who seemed quite gracious to me. Princess Friederike was there as well and we were presented to her. A very lovely child. I also met Prince Frederick of Braunschweig, who is very talkative’ (pp. 29–30). Two days later, the travellers visit the summer house of Prince Ferdinand’s wife, who ‘gave us an excellent reception. She is very gracious and graceful. We supped there and I made the acquaintance of many ladies. Prince Frederick was there, too. He’s very gracious’ (p. 30). Two days later, they set off for Potsdam and are well received by the Princess in an impromptu meeting: […] she summoned us and gave us the best possible reception, as a private individual, with extraordinary graciousness. She was alone, since the Prince of Prussia, her consort, was not at home. From there we went to visit two ladies, Herzen and the wife of the Russian


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consul. They gave us a very gracious reception, offered to take us on a walk, and showed us the little princes, very merry and polite. (p. 30) Similar activities await the travellers in Paris, where they also meet the royals and examine their private apartments. When Stroganova provides a list of the homes that she and her cousin frequently visit in the French capital, she identifies 17 out of 19 private residences with the name of the female head of household; she also lists eight diplomatic residences, all of which are designated by male names (pp. 36–37). Female health complaints comprise another of Stroganova’s interests. In Saxony, for example, the travellers stop at a mineral spring reputed to ‘rid one of the complications that prevent a woman from becoming a mother’ – here Stroganova notes that ‘the present Kurfürstin used to come for that reason’ (p. 32). Most of her passages on health issues relate to her cousin Saltykova, who apparently suffered general ‘weakness of her health’ (p. 27) and was perhaps of dramatic temperament as well. Certainly, Stroganova was captivated by the spectacle of her cousin’s ailments; she notes that the party hurried to Spa on the recommendation of Saltykova’s doctor (p. 27). When the others come down with the flu, Saltykova experiences ‘hysterical pains’, she faints during a hail storm, and is later afflicted with ‘spasmodic stomach pains’, causing Stroganova herself much ‘worry and grief’ (pp. 27–30). In Paris, Saltykova lies ill for 15 days, spitting blood and experiencing ‘strong nervous upset’; she is forbidden by her doctor to go out, causing them to miss a first meeting with the Queen (p. 36). While Stroganova’s self-presentation demonstrates an awareness of feminised literary conventions, she does not otherwise attempt to shape this private communication as a literary text (as Dashkova had done in ‘Le Petit tour’); she refrains from stylised disclaimers, for example, and other hallmarks of the literary mode.28 Certainly, Stroganova’s interest in women’s society and health are not the products of the fashionable ‘discourse of femininity’ that would have designated her text a literary one. Her attentions to female society do offer an example of discursive constraints, however, pointing to different orders of feminine stylisation (social, aristocratic, etc.) – and models of femininity – that were valued in the elite circles inhabited by Stroganova and her sisters. Arguably, Stroganova’s remarks on health issues constitute yet another variety of feminine discourse insofar as they suggest a traditionally female nurturing stance. Her preoccupations in this area suggest not only real concern for Saltykova (and the fact that her health was a major factor in the Stroganova’s own experience of travel) but also, in the context of


Stroganova’s emphasis on relationships with other women, a sense of connection and even identification, perhaps unconscious, with her female peers.

Mar’ia Gladkova In August 1810 the 15-year-old Mar’ia Gladkova journeyed from Moscow to Petersburg to join her father, apparently on a permanent move. She travelled with her mother, younger sisters, and a male cousin who had been sent to accompany them, as well as several servants and considerable baggage.29 Gladkova described the trip in an account published in Petersburg that same year, 15-ti Dnevnoe puteshestvie, 15-ti letneiu pisannoe, v ugozhdenie roditeliu i posviashchaemoe 15-ti letnemu drugu (A 15-Day Journey Written by a 15-Year-Old to Please Her Parent and Dedicated to a 15-Year Old Friend). Writing in a fluent and pleasant style, Gladkova amply illustrates both her familiarity with sentimentalist literary norms and a level of talent noteworthy for such an inexperienced writer.30 Not surprising given the author’s gender and age, this bid to enter sentimentalist discourse acknowledges the authority of male social and literary worlds in its framing. The title obscures Gladkova’s own gender to suggest, modestly, that age (‘fifteen-year-old’), friendship, and a daughter’s sense of duty were more useful categories for defining her identity. Moreover, she invokes two authoritative male figures in support of her project. Gladkova’s father, the parent mentioned in her title, looms benevolently over her book and serves as its primary addressee. The text contains frequent emotive apostrophes to ‘Papa’ (Papin’ka): Gladkova praises his benevolence, asks for guidance, affirms her own devotion and obedience (e.g. pp. 29–30), and joyfully anticipates their reunion in Petersburg. Such expectancy provides the counterweight for many of her nostalgic or bleak moments, as in ‘If my soul were not occupied with the idea (voobrazhenie) that we are heading to our most obliging (liubezneishii) parent, then perhaps I would have shed another tear for Moscow even now’ (p. 16). If Gladkova’s father motivates the travelogue, it is the extension of paternal authority embodied in her male cousin that offers practical advice on how to proceed. Finding Gladkova in a paroxysm of writer’s anxiety on the day of departure, her cousin attempts to help by advising that she simply write ‘everything that comes into [her] head’ (pp. 9–10), a suggestion that points to the model of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and to the ‘irrational’ and emotive logic of its textual linkages. Gladkova first rejects this advice


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as unsatisfactory, but, unable to come up with a better approach, accepts it and admonishes herself to ‘write what you feel’ (p. 11). Despite being authorised to enter the world of letters by male figures – her father, her cousin, and (implicitly) Sterne – Gladkova focuses her account, like Stroganova’s, largely on her relations and interactions with women. She dedicates her book to a young female friend and freilina at the imperial court, Countess Mar’ia Saltykova, with standard professions of inexperience and affectionate attachment: Although nature has not rewarded me with a writer’s gift, I have nonetheless decided to describe our trip from Moscow with my weak pen and to dedicate it to you, as my friend, convinced that you, most gracious Countess, will accept it pleasantly (s priiatnost’iu) as the first labour of an inexperienced authoress. (p. 5) Gladkova’s text also contains numerous sentimental invocations to the girlfriends left behind in Moscow and a pointed overture to Ekaterina Pavlovna, the sister of Alexander I, which is inspired by Gladkova’s passage through the city of Tver’ where the Grand Duchess resided, and which is framed in a laudatory discourse on the achievements of her grandmother, Catherine II (pp. 24–28, 35).31 The dedication is followed by a brief preface in which Gladkova expresses the intention to compensate for her lack of literary sophistication with sincerity. Simultaneously apologising for and justifying her text, she characterises it as the ‘composition of my immature mind’: […] which is written with the feeling of a young maiden who, not having read novels, has not been able to embellish her journey with novelistic style (romanicheskim slogom), but has [only] presented everything that she saw, heard, felt, and thought in a sincere and freely described rendering – and not entirely at her leisure (since she was occupied with another responsibility). (p. 6) Gladkova’s disclaimers about novel reading are to be taken with a grain of salt given her obvious familiarity with literary norms and her explicit mention of having read Grandison (pp. 87–88). The ‘responsibility’ that she mentions is that of instructing her younger sisters on the high points of the route as they travel and Gladkova’s text reproduces a portion of the civic and historical information that she organises for these lessons, including details on the history of various towns, commercial activities, and waterways. Her journey thus represents a rare


example of internal travel conceived as an educational exercise for the female traveller – here, in the roles of both teacher and student.32 In reporting her activities, Gladkova describes a separate universe of female interactions. She tends to ignore men encountered en route in favour of women: her mother and sisters, female servants and peasants, the wives and daughters of stationmasters and merchant hosts, and other female travellers. Attention to this female world obviously reflects spheres of social activity that were deemed gender-and-age appropriate for a 15-year-old girl. Of interest here is the fact that Gladkova describes participating in female society largely without parental or other mediation, but as an independent and self-possessed adult. Her didactic role is a case in point. If male authorities (and a lady-in-waiting) buttress the overall structure of her text, Gladkova controls many of the described scenarios herself and fixes their ultimate significance with framing commentary. An example of her independent narratorial stance (and sentimentalist rhetoric) appears in the delighted account of visiting a merchant family that hosted the travellers in Tver’: […] it was here that I saw an old-fashioned merchant dinner. […] Oh! What pleasure I felt gazing at this family circle. It seems to me that everyone in it breathed with simplicity, innocence and tranquillity. I blessed their hospitality (skazala im khleb da sol’) and they responded ‘have some bread’, clearing a place for me. They asked with respectful sincerity that I sit with them at table, which I did without the least sense of constraint and immediately cut myself a piece of pie. This had such an effect on them that they all began to look at me with pleasure, accepting my act with immense pleasantness. (pp. 33–35) While not blind to poverty and distress, Gladkova follows sentimentalist protocol in preferring to depict radiant peasants and satisfied bourgeois families and also in allying herself with social inferiors. Her adoption of sentimentalism’s implicitly male narratorial stance, combined with her gender, adds an odd twist to many clichéd set pieces. When Gladkova blesses the bride at a merchant wedding, for example, or in her encounters with various peasant lasses who sell (or sometimes refuse to sell) their delicacies, the erotic energy that typifies sentimentalist encounters between male travellers and provincial maidens finds itself in an incongruous setting. The limits of Gladkova’s literary and social authority become clear when she and her sisters take a detour on foot, ‘leaving the road


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and heading towards the forest’ (and thus away from the immediate supervision of their mother) in order to drink some fresh milk in a village. Here the young ladies meet ‘three young peasant girls coming out of the forest with baskets full of mushrooms’ who are clad ‘practically in shirts alone’ (p. 50). When one of Gladkova’s sisters laughs at these girls for their indecent dress, a peasant girl retorts, ‘Take care, young misses, the wind is picking up and your hats – or tents – are tied to your heads; take care that the wind doesn’t carry them off and you, too, for you are all so small and light’ (pp. 50–51). Admitting a certain justice in the jibe, Gladkova hopes to right matters by purchasing mushrooms, but they are not for sale. She then attempts to make rhetorical amends, arguing that ‘the simple and light clothing covering these hard-working peasant girls’ ought properly to be considered ‘precious’ insofar as ‘watered by the sweat to which we are obliged for the nutritive plants that enable our continued existence under the sun’ (pp. 52–53). The peasant girl’s taunt also provokes Gladkova to reflect on herself, her sex, and her relationship with other women both implicitly and explicitly. She unconsciously re-enacts this exchange in a later meeting with a group of travelling noblewomen, for example – ‘several maidens (devitsy) in hats that were much larger even than ours’ (p. 91). These Russian ladies ignore Gladkova’s overtures in Russian and German, but respond to her French and invite her to sit with them. Gladkova refuses, however, commenting on their linguistic preferences with distaste in her travelogue. Fashion, she later declares, is nothing but the reflection of a desire ‘that one’s body shape be better than it is in nature’ with the help of useless ornaments ‘like these inordinately large hats’ (p. 95). Gladkova’s male cousin has a very different relationship to the world bordering the highway: her off-road venture ends in sentimentalist delusion – a contretemps with peasant lasses manqué, while he wanders happily through the countryside, armed with a rifle and shooting game (p. 101). Enclosed or interior spaces are more conducive to Gladkova’s own assumption of an authoritative relationship with the surroundings. Even her strolls along the highway lead to sunburn or fatigue, but Gladkova asserts a commanding presence in the various bounded areas that serve as backdrop for many of the narrative’s described interactions: in her carriage as well as in churches, station yards, the women’s quarters of roadside inns, and private homes. Gladkova’s encounter at the edge of the forest illustrates the spatial, social, and literary constraints on the elite female world. Gladkova’s Puteshestvie, like Dashkova’s, was designed for the masculine literary world and reflects the pressures of a broader public audience


in its framing. Despite being nominally beholden to her father, friends, cousin, and Countess Saltykova, Gladkova creates another set of relationships in the elaborated scenarios. Here her account resembles the more private text of Stroganova in revealing specifically female spheres of interaction that were ignored by traditional tour descriptions and constitute a parallel universe. From the perspective of literary convention, Gladkova’s published account is arguably less ‘successful’ than either of Dashkova’s brief records. While Dashkova’s travelogues adopt the literary strategies and emphases used by her male contemporaries, Gladkova’s narratorial voice illustrates a sharper conflict (clash of discourses) between the narratorial stance of the mature male sentimentalist that she attempts to assume and the actual constraints of her gender and age. Published editions of Russian women’s travel writing multiplied in the mid-nineteenth century. Examples include Mar’ia Zhukova’s Ocherki iuzhnoi Frantsii i Nitstsy. Iz dorozhnykh zapisok 1840 i 1842 godov (Sketches of Southern France and Nice: From Travel Notes of 1840 and 1842, 2 vols, 1844), acclaimed by both V. G. Belinskii and N. G. Chernyshevskii, Olimpiada Shishkova’s Puteshestive iz Peterburga v Krym: Zametki i vospominaniia russkoi puteshestvenitsy po Rossii v 1845 godu (Journey from Petersburg to the Crimea: The Notes and Memoirs of a Russian Woman Traveller in Russia in 1845, 2 vols, 1848), and the Crimean letters of Evgeniia Tur (Elizaveta Salias de Turnemir), 1852–1853. This increase in female literary production attests in part to women’s continued strides in donning the public (male) mantle of the writer. The sheer length of both Zhukova’s and Shishkova’s accounts, for example, indicates that women were experimenting with varieties of travel writing that had previously been male enclaves. And the existence of journalistic commentary suggests that we can finally begin in this era to examine critical and public responses to women’s travel writing. How the texts of women travellers continued to elaborate or otherwise express female experience is a topic for further study. What was the fate of literary feminisation or other ostensibly gendered features in mid-century travel writing? Did women’s texts continue to explore specifically female spheres of activity along the lines of Stroganova and Gladkova? It seems perhaps unlikely that mid-century texts, at least those written (like Dashkova’s) for publication and by authors over fifteen, would make similar excursions into strictly female realms, although they undoubtedly respond to issues of gender in new and interesting ways. In any case, the travelogues of Stroganova and Gladkova give us a better idea of what female authors often omitted in writing texts for the male literary establishment. On domestic turf as


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well as abroad, elite women travellers in the long eighteenth century participated in a female world that traditional travel writing tended to neglect or ignore. Both the contemporary accounts of male authors and those that women drafted for publication and/or with ‘literary’ intentions (i.e. Dashkova’s ‘Puteshestvie’ and ‘Le Petit tour’, respectively) focus on social activities and other concerns that were common to masculine and mixed company. As a result, these conventional texts provide plenty of evidence on how masculine discourse and behavioural models shaped both the description of women’s travel and the practice underlying it. It is no surprise that elite female travellers encountered and interacted extensively with other women of diverse social classes. Nor that they often did so in the traditionally ‘female’ spaces where they spent much of their time, such as the designated rooms of women lodgers and various private, domestic settings. What is unexpected in the travel accounts of Stroganova and Gladkova is their detailed portrait of this highly organised and complex female world and a sense of how rich and engaging these travellers felt it to be. Certainly, constraints on female experience and literary production are evident in what these women describe and in how they describe it; it is not at all obvious, however, that they themselves perceived gender to be constraining. The author is indebted to Wendy Rosslyn for her thoughtful comments and to Hilde Hoogenboom, Alessandra Tosi, and Mary Zirin for their generous help and bibliographical support.

Notes 1. ‘Travel’ in its broadest definition might be taken to include virtually any type of movement, ranging from crossing a room to phenomena such as nomadism or migration. For the purposes of this article, travel will be defined as movement requiring at least one night away from home or from some other point of departure. ‘Russian’ travel writing refers to texts written in Russian or French by writers who were either ethnic Russians or who resided in Russia and participated in its cultural traditions, such as Catherine II. 2. Many other examples could be added, such as the compulsory journeys of female serfs (or slaves) or trips made by peasant and merchant women to markets and fairs. Women of different estates were also found among the ranks of pilgrims, itinerant beggars, and other wanderers. 3. Anna Labzina, Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina, 1758–1821, trans. and ed. Gary Marker and Rachel May (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 2001). 4. Natal’ia Dolgorukaia, The Memoirs of Princess Natal’ja Borisovna Dolgorukaja, trans. and ed. Charles E. Townsend (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1977).

80 Women and the Arts 5. Mary Zirin, private communication. See Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars, trans. and ed. Mary F. Zirin (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1988). 6. Varvara Bakunina, ‘Persidskii pokhod v 1796 g. Vospominaniia Varvary Ivanovny Bakuninoi’, trans. (from the French) V. V. Timoshchuk, Russkaia starina 53 (1887), 346–47; on Rimskaia-Korsakova, see M. O. Gershenzon, Griboedovskaia Moskva (Moscow: Gelikon, 1922); Empress Elizaveta’s peregrinations were recorded by her secretary, V. M. Ivanov, and published as Zapiski, vedennye vo vremia puteshestviia Imperatritsy Elizavety Alekseevny po Germanii v 1813, 1814 i 1815 godakh (St Petersburg: v tipografii I. Glazunova, 1833). 7. Although very few Russian women (or men) actually participated in foreign touring, the phenomenon was widely known and discussed; many read travel accounts. 8. F. C. Weber, The Present State of Russia, 2 vols (London: printed for W. Taylor, 1722–1723), I (1723), pp. 147–48, quoted in Lindsey Hughes, ‘ “The Crown of Maidenly Honour and Virtue”: Redefining Femininity in Peter I’s Russia’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), p. 46. 9. Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998), p. 8. 10. It is to be hoped that further study of eighteenth-century women’s memoirs and correspondence (as well as archival materials) will reveal additional examples of female travel writing; at present I am aware only of the texts written by these six women. This list omits memoirs and diaries that recount the author’s bygone trips only in brief outline (Labzina) or describe travel without making it a central focus of the text (Dolgorukaia, Durova). I have also left out the grand tour account of Natal’ia Golitsyna (1741–1837), severely tailored at publication and transformed from a travelogue into a historical memoir on 1789–1790 Paris: V. A. Mil’china, ‘Iz putevogo dnevnika N. P. Golitsynoi’, in Zapiski otdela rukopisei [Gosudarstvennaia biblioteka SSSR im. Lenina], vyp. 46 (Moscow, 1987), pp. 95–136. Another writer worth mentioning in this context is Anna Bunina (1774–1829), who apparently authored some letters on her travels in England that were compared to Karamzin’s Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, but have since been lost: Rebecca Bowman, ‘Anna Petrovna Bunina’, in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin (Westport, Conn and London: Greenwood, 1994), p. 109. 11. Catherine also supervised the official accounts of her tours written by her secretaries and courtiers. On her travel writing, see my ‘Imagining Space and the Self: Russian Travel Writing and Its Narrators, 1762–1825’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1995), pp. 125–61; ‘Russia’s First “Orient”: Catherine in the Crimea, 1787’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3 (2002), 3–25, and Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 66–76. 12. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 6 (emphasis added). 13. Examples of this more productive approach may be found throught Mills; Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); Ghose.


81

14. See Judith Vowles, ‘The ‘Feminization’ of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, Conn and London: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 35–60; Gitta Hammarberg, ‘The Feminine Chronotope and Sentimentalist Canon Formation’, in Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia, ed. A. G. Cross and G. S. Smith (Nottingham: Astra, 1994), pp. 103–20. 15. In fact, note of one’s gracious reception was a generic convention of travel writing, ubiquitous in the accounts of male travellers, while a supposedly feminine dependence on social relationships and a tendency to locate one’s subjective identity in the other are characteristic of sentimentalism in general and, as Andrew Kahn has demonstrated, take dramatic form in the work of Radishchev: ‘Self and Sensibility in Radishchev’s Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu: Dialogism and the Moral Spectator,’ Oxford Slavonic Papers, N. S. 30 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 40–66. 16. Mon histoire: mémoires d’une femme de lettres russe à l’époque des Lumières, ed. Alexandre Woronzoff-Dashkov and others (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). Quotations in this article are taken from an English translation: The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova: Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great, trans. and ed. Kyril Fitzlyon (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1995). 17. ‘The Russian Tour of Europe Before Fonvizin: Travel Writing as Literary Endeavor in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Slavic and East European Journal 45 (2001), 1–29. 18. ‘Puteshestvie odnoi Rossiiskoi znatnoi Gospozhi, po nekotorym Aglinskim provintsiiam: Pis’mo k drugu’, Opyt trudov Vol’nogo rossiiskogo sobraniia 2 (1775), 105–44. The Free Russian Assembly was founded at the University of Moscow with the aim of extending the University’s beneficial influence beyond the walls of academe. 19. Dashkova did not follow through on her intention to append this account to her memoirs and her own copy was lost. On the text’s history, see ‘Le Petit tour dans les highlands’, in A. G. Kross [Cross], ‘Poezdki Kniagini E. R. Dashkovoi v Velikobritaniiu (1770 i 1776–1780 gg.) i ee “Nebol’shoe puteshestvie v gornuiu Shotlandiiu” (1777)’, XVIII vek 19 (1995), pp. 237–38; the account itself appears on pp. 239–68. 20. Alexander Woronzoff-Dashkov speaks of Dashkova’s ‘attempt to act like a man when on the stage of public life’ (‘E. R. Dashkova and the Education of Women’, in A Window on Russia: Papers for the V International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Gargnano, 1994, ed. Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice, 1996), p. 309), while her memoirs repeatedly underline a lack of interest in material wealth and fine clothing as well as the masculine turn of her intellect. On her reception in Britain, see A. G. Cross ‘By the Banks of the Thames’: Russians in EighteenthCentury Britain (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1980), pp. 231–40. 21. On I. A. Vorontsov (1736–1806), see Dashkova, Mon histoire, pp. 288, 329. On her second trip, Dashkova travelled with her son, her daughter, and, initially, her son-in-law. 22. As Barbara Alpern Engel points out, eighteenth-century women ‘who took up their pens were expected to do so as women, by contributing to the


23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

“moral refinement of the nation”, rather than by writing for pleasure or pursuing their own aims, as men were free to do. […] To legitimize their writing, women adopted traditional roles, primarily that of moral educator of family and nation’: Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), p. 19. It is also true that her son was not present during the tour described in ‘Puteshestvie’, having remained in London. As Woronzoff-Dashkov points out, Dashkova tended to ignore her daughter (‘Dashkova and the Education of Women’, pp. 310–12). Dashkova was Director of the Imperial Academy of Sciences as well as the Russian Academy, an institution intended to develop the Russian language, which she also founded. ‘Zapiski baronessy N. M. Stroganovoi’, Russkii bibliofil 4 (1914), 26–40. I identify these figures as Field Marshal Count I. P. Saltykov (1730–1805) and Dar’ia Petrovna (née Chernysheva), who was Stroganova’s first cousin and sister of the travel writer Natal’ia Golitsyna. Shopping or the acquisition of goods abroad was a favourite pastime that Stroganova shared with many travellers, both male and female. See my ‘Before Fonvizin’ for a fuller description of these literary features. I identify Gladkova’s father as General-Lieutenant I. V. Gladkov, who was Chief of Police in Moscow from 1808 to 1811 and in Petersburg from 1821 to 1825; he then became a senator and served as a judge at the Decembrists’ trial. If Gladkova was not an unusually young female writer (girls as young as nine produced published translations), her ‘Puteshestvie’ is the only published example, to my knowledge, of a sustained (monograph-length) effort in prose. Gladkova’s kind words for her Moscow teachers suggest that they were a possible audience for her book as well. Male members of the imperial family frequently undertook internal tours at the conclusion of their formal education; these were intended to familiarise them with the empire while rallying support among their family’s subjects. Examples include Catherine’s illegitimate son A. G. Bobrinskii, her grandson Nikolai Pavlovich (Nicholas II), and his son Aleksandr (Alexander II) (see my Breaking Ground, pp. 68–69, 165–66, 218–29). Catherine’s own internal tours, designed with similar goals, might arguably be considered a prior example of educational travel for women.

5 The First Russian Women’s Journals and the Construction of the Reader Gitta Hammarberg

For most of the eighteenth century the central cultural debate in Russia concerned the definition of the literary language. Around the turn of the century this Russian rendition of the Italian Renaissance Questione della lingua and the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes crystallised into a polemic between Karamzinists and Shishkovites. To the Shishkovite insistence on a diachronically conceived emphasis on normative SlavonicRussian (slavenorossiiskii) language based on traditional written texts, the Karamzinists contrasted a synchronic-functional dynamic view of language as conversational Russian, guided by the usage and taste of educated society, especially its women. Reading gained prestige as a literary activity in the Karamzinist paradigm and the feminised conversational model it espoused.1 The woman reader was especially empowered. Karamzin’s ‘Poslanie k zhenshchinam’ (‘Epistle to Women’, 1796) and his foreword to Aonidy (The Aonides, 1797) lead the way. They define the woman reader, show her signal importance, her beneficial influence on male authors, and the opportunities for rewards that she provides for the Karamzinist pisatel’ dlia dam (writer for women).2 An unsigned letter to the editor (Karamzin) introducing the journal Vestnik Evropy (The Herald of Europe, 1802) addresses the spread of reading, sees reading as the main fashion in Europe, and features women prominently.3 In 1815, Konstantin Batiushkov provided the most succinct rallying cry for the Karamzinists, defining the good feminised author: Kto pishet tak, kak govoriat,/Kogo chitaiut damy! (Who writes as people speak,/Whom ladies read!).4 Foregrounding the conversational model for literature, he forcefully emphasises women’s reading. The importance of reading is also evident from the numerous accounts of how people read.5 83


Reading was redefined as an active enterprise that should ideally define authorship and in this emphasis lies the real power of the woman reader. Reading was no longer restricted to professional male forums. Recognised authors and amateurs alike were encouraged to read their own and others’ works at domestic gatherings and received praise, suggestions for improvement, and opportunities to publish their texts. Reading or co-authorship became a common approach to writing, and reader-based activities such as translation gained popularity not only among men, but also among women.6 Both genders were involved as authors and readers. Official publication was not the most important result. Texts intended for, or instigated by, women readers gained literary sanction. Women’s albums were the most graphic case in point.7 A woman (and occasionally a man) was the owner, main reader, and addressee of an album; she determined who inscribed and read it and when, and her social context both produced it and was reproduced in it; she ‘edited’ it by erasure or commentary. Here a woman reader determined all aspects of literature.8 Women’s journals can be seen as print versions of albums, and emerged around the same time. They first appeared during the early stages of the feminisation process. Nikolai Novikov’s Modnoe ezhemesiachnoe izdanie, ili Biblioteka dlia damskogo tualeta (Fashion Monthly, or Library for Women’s Toilette, hereafter MEI) appeared in 1779, before Karamzin’s leadership was established and before the popularity of albums peaked.9 It received little notice and did not inspire other women’s journals until over a decade later, but Novikov’s pattern proved surprisingly tenacious. Novikov emphasises his own publishing as a pleasurable leisure-time activity and he hopes that ‘our Ladies will devote a few minutes, minutes sometimes idle during their toilettes, to read our pages’. Mutual pleasure is his aim. Women readers have the power to make the journal fashionable and determine the content, the editor tells us. He invites submissions that ‘are not unpleasant to the delicate taste of our Women Readers’. At the end of the first issue he specifies ‘heroides, eclogues, elegies, idylls, songs, epigrams, riddles, and other kinds of minor verse’, as well as short tales (skazochki), anecdotes and novellas (povesti), and engravings ‘with the very latest Paris fashions’. While the woman reader’s (stated in the singular) taste was decisive, the male editor defines it, down to specific genres, simultaneously giving readers power and taking it away. Similar definitions were to characterise all women’s journals. The readers’ power was, if not entirely illusory, at least ambivalent, and

First Russian Women’s Journals 85

the editors engaged in fashionable posing (and misogyny by today’s standards), if not direct courtship. Both editors and readers were cultural constructs. But cultural constructs have a way of becoming entrenched in their cultures and being perceived as reality. Thus, by constructing an imaginary woman reader, the women’s journals helped to create actual women readers, and women writers contributed in increasing numbers. The journals played an active role in defining Karamzinism by anticipating and implementing its literary principles and participating in the culture wars against the Shishkovites. I will look closer at the constructed (and less at the actual) ‘woman reader’, the texts she favoured, and the men who constructed her and themselves in her image. While Novikov set the pattern, his successors highlighted different aspects of it. P. I. Makarov, editor of Moskovskii Merkurii (The Moscow Mercury, hereafter MM, 1803–1804),10 produced the best rhetorical representation of the woman reader and played a signal role in articulating the tenets of Karamzinism. P. I. Shalikov, editor of Moskovskii zritel’ (The Moscow Observer, hereafter MZ, 1806) and Aglaia (Aglaya, 1808–1812; oneyear hiatus in 1811), was her most fervent worshipper. M. N. Makarov, editor of Zhurnal dlia milykh (Journal for the Darlings, hereafter ZhDM, 1804), was her most immoral, yet successful embodiment.11

Modnoe ezhemesiachnoe izdanie The content of MEI characterises the woman reader: her reading is determined by her toilette; the 82 pages of the first issue include 10 short items, to be read while coiffures and cosmetics are applied.12 Engravings of Parisian toilettes present her as a consumer of fashion. The absence of full-length solemn odes, epics, historical narratives, pieces on science or learned topics, and criticism, indicates her short attention span between tresses and dresses, and her lack of curiosity for larger ‘masculine’ issues. Original and translated items (some by famous authors) are published without signatures, with the exception of a piece by ‘the student Dmitrii Strokin’. In his emphasis on minor genres and on a student writer, Novikov reflects women’s presumed demand for light readings by unestablished amateur writers. The idylls, eclogues, heroides, and songs place unhappy or happy love in bucolic settings against the responsive background of nature’s cycles. They describe innocent love, chaste love, marital love, and love-friendship, and express wistful longings for a golden age. The dominance of ‘feminine’ idyllic and elegiac tonalities and middle-range minor genres heralds the


onset of Sentimentalism.13 Novikov’s constructed woman reader was attracted to a narrow register of styles, genres, and themes; she favoured melodramatic plots with love-deaths, monastic seclusions, elopements, cross-dressing, mistaken identity, and so on, all centred on a love plot. Her range is further circumscribed by didactic content aimed at preserving traditional gender roles: she is taught to avoid erotic temptation, to preserve her chastity, to select a husband, and act as mother and child-rearer. She is offered a classical and cosmopolitan education through mythological or exotic settings and personages (from the fashionable ‘Orient’ to Huron Indians, Swedish miners, Spanish adventurers, or Scottish damsels), but this broad agenda is narrowed by a stereotypical ‘exotic’ aura, and most, if not all, of these pieces follow Karamzin’s dictum that ‘even peasant women [Huron maidens, Scottish lassies, etc.] know how to love’.14 Because the constructed woman is modest, chaste, faithful, sensitive, and humble, most erotically inclined women in the texts are mythological or foreign, and authors frame their behaviour in moralising rhetoric. Two cantos (pesni) – ‘Liubov’ Dianny’ (‘Diana’s Love’) and ‘Revnost’ Iunony’ (‘Juno’s Jealousy’), the former attributed to V. I. Maikov – stand out for their overt eroticism.15 ‘Liubov’ Dianny’ depicts female erotic initiative: the shepherd Endymion is the object of desire for peeping, stalking, stripping, seductive nymphs who spend their nights with him, and Eros infects a resistant and guilt-ridden Diana with the same desires, as passion wins over reason. The introduction illustrates the ambiguous message to women: while featuring women as sex toys for men and love as their raison d’être, the poet denies doing precisely what he is in the process of doing – giving women examples of voluptuous sexuality, Venus’s immodesty, and so on. The poet protests too much! In the second canto he offers marriage advice and again practises what he is preaching against. Juno’s jealous wrath sends Zeus on extramarital heterosexual and homosexual amorous escapades (with Leda, Ganymede and others), while Juno herself becomes morally depraved. Most pieces provide sounder role models.16 Kniazhnin highlights female fidelity in a truly cautionary tale about a woman who swears an oath of fidelity only to retract it once her handsome beloved loses his nose in war.17 In an oriental allegory Abdel-Buk Ezer has a vision of the Goddess Truth and changes his immoral ways.18 Most erotically inclined women are either ‘othered’ or chastised. Instructional pieces show weak women in need of male guidance.


Chaste love is reinforced in performative salon genres and games, the second major type of item designed for women in MEI. As Iurii Tynianov has shown, ‘minor’ genres became ‘literary fact’ for the Karamzinists and replaced ‘major’ genres, such as the ode.19 The predominance of minor genres illustrates women’s active readerly power and their taste for play. Jokes, anecdotes, puns, impromptus, and epigrams were designed to amuse and provide women with portable ‘spontaneous’ humour. Light wit, rhetorical ingenuity, and frivolity replaced the ‘masculine’ emphasis on importance, learnedness, or pedantry. MEI anticipated what was to become an obsession in Karamzinist journals: trifles were popular by the 1810s in all journals, peaking in 1819 in Blagonamerennyi (The Well-Intentioned) with a special section for charades and some fifty verse trifles.20 Many of these genres (conversations, epistles) are by definition interactive. Epigrams, acrostics, and anagrams require that the reader figure out the pointe, the solution, or a secondary message, using both brain and eyes. Like songs and fashion plates, they combine the written word with other media (musical, visual), and women’s senses and sensibilities were deemed more developed than those of men.21 Questions (‘What is the difference between …’), and riddles (enigmas, logogryphs, charades, homonyms, rebuses) were particularly interactive, drawing women readers into reflection and response, and often keeping them engaged until the correct solutions appeared in the next issue. Readers became co-writers. Challenging and witty questions reinforce the love message or the misogynistic tone. The response to: ‘What is the difference between wine and a woman?’ is: ‘wine ages better’.22 Bouts rimés give even more direct power to women: women co-write them by setting words or expressions for others’ compositions, the set words to be used in the order given, as rhymes or in other positions.23 Speech acts such as repetition (especially sound repetition in puns and tongue twisters), listing and ordering (‘On Monday … On Tuesday’), or contrasting (‘I like … I do not like’) structured the corresponding literary forms. These genres are frequent in the early issues of MEI. Most women’s journals featured them and M. N. Makarov gives them special prominence by opening each issue of ZhDM with a rebus pictograph. Fashion plates were another trendsetting feature of MEI. Designed both for viewing and for application as seamstresses’ patterns, they too connected literature directly with society. Songs, arias, and romances, together with the musical notes that some journals appended on heavier paper, were also intended both for reading and performance by women readers.


Moskovskii Merkurii P. I. Makarov’s journal MM was from his introductory ‘Thoughts from the Editors’ onwards a forum for stimulating Russian women to emulate French salon hostesses and influential Greek, Roman, and ‘Asiatic’ women. Their ‘houses were the best schools for enlightenment’ and attracted ‘first-class Scholars’. They ‘gave practical instruction in delicate civility, in intelligent, thoughtful gaiety, in the art of using knowledge without pedantry’. Makarov wants Russian women to follow their example. Praising their capacity for civilising and softening male ‘pedantry’, he articulates the feminising Karamzinist line, emphasising conversational language, refined taste, and pleasant amusement. Makarov’s praise of women is, however, ambivalent. Women are both prime educators and eroticised objects of adulation. Men will kiss ‘a delicate, white and beautiful hand’ that writes, and uncritically worship what it writes. The ‘very weaknesses of an enlightened woman always take on a hue of intellect and delicacy and have some special character that makes them lovely’, he says. His women role models include, besides writers like Sappho and Corinna, courtesans like Aspasia and Ninon Lanclos.24 Makarov expresses his Karamzinist views most eloquently in his rebuttal of A. S. Shishkov’s virulent anti-Karamzinist tract that precipitated the most active phase of the culture wars.25 In his critique, he shows how reading spreads enlightenment. Readers prefer the new style and do not tolerate expressions that grate on their ears, he says. Enlightenment will not spread if people who have not been educated, ‘and especially women’, are given inaccessible works. Readers determine literary evolution and without their help Karamzin could not have created ‘an epoch in the History of the Russian language’.26 Makarov, too, emphasises the woman reader and the reciprocity between woman reader and author. He notes that contemporary French women ‘attend Lyceums, watch Museums, listen to professors, read, translate, and themselves write’.27 ‘Readerly’ acts of intellectual and artistic perception dominate over ‘writerly’ acts of production, but the power lies with women. He states his own aim: ‘We wish primarily to please you, lovely (women) readers; your approval is our sole laurels and happiness.’ He looks forward to the day when he can say that ‘women enlightened Russia’.28 With MM he aims to speed up that process: he elucidates the Karamzinist model theoretically, pioneers literary criticism for women, and keeps them abreast of current books, teaching them to read critically. Makarov’s criticism ranges from substantial essays to simple announcements of new books and evaluative plot summaries. He avoids


scholarly, spiritual, and economic books.29 He aims to reach the reader: ‘our criticism is not for Authors and translators but solely for the benefit of those lovers of reading who have no other guidance for choosing books than journal announcements’.30 His flippantly humorous book reviews implement the ‘feminine’ conversational chit-chat with the reader that he advocates in his more theoretical pieces. His review of a ‘Russian work’ is typical: ‘The Author wrote because he felt like writing; published because he felt like publishing: what can one say against this? Anyone has the right to devote himself to pleasures that are harmless to society. The content of this book consists in the following: someone got married and his wife died’.31 He ends a more substantial review with a triple exclamation: ‘The reader at times finds things clever … and pleasant … and sensitive … – But may God give him patience!!!’32 Makarov finds Ann Radcliffe’s horrors neither pleasant nor useful and knows women who lose sleep because of them.33 In his reviews he defends women’s education.34 A novel by an ‘anonymous Russian woman’, Elisaveta de S***, ili istoriia Rossiianki, Izdannaia v svet odnoiu ee sootechestvennits, (Elisabeth de S***, or the History of a Russian Woman, Published by One of her Fellow Russian Women) (translated from the French and revealed by Makarov not to be Russian at all, despite its title), in keeping with Makarov’s woman-friendly critical credo gets a gentle, though not entirely positive review.35 Though he praises women writers for their perceptive abilities, he does not praise everything they write. In this he differs from Shalikov and M. N. Makarov. P. I. Makarov invents a feminine approach to criticism that mirrors his feminising message: he is a reluctant critic and concedes that ‘criticism is an utterly unpleasant business’ because one risks offending good honourable people. Criticism, especially critical criticism, was regarded as ‘masculine’ and Makarov ultimately closed down his journal with a sigh of relief.36 Makarov’s fashion pieces detail clothing, accessories, interior decoration, and furniture and exude light-hearted boudoir eroticism connecting women with divans and beds, anticipating Shalikov’s obsession with interiors. They reveal his libertine preferences in literature and his passion for women.37 He echoes Novikov’s content, but differs in including criticism; unlike other women’s journals, MM contains little verse and virtually no games. Every piece is presented in a tasteful feminine bavardage de la fièvre, and points to a self-feminisation (by his own male recipe) that was to become increasingly pronounced in subsequent women’s journals.38


Moskovskii zritel’ and Aglaia P. I. Shalikov, who contributed to P. I. Makarov’s journal, ‘served the Graces’ even more ardently in his own women’s journals MZ and Aglaia (named for the Grace of Innocence and Karamzin’s almanach and ideal reader ‘Aglaia’).39 He was as committed to Karamzinism as was P. I. Makarov but he had none of Makarov’s critical acumen. His collaborators were Boris Blank, M. N. Makarov, and other, mostly second- or third-tier writers, many very young (M. N. Makarov and I. I. Lazhechnikov were teenagers in 1808). Shalikov lived the life of a dandy who insistently read his madrigals in salons and whose behaviour was as theatrical as it was tearful in celebrating El’viras, Aglaias, and Temiras, all replicating gentle mythological Graces. These poetic monikers accurately reflect their ‘constructedness’. The milye Gratsii also defined the style that made Shalikov in/famous. He adds a supremely melancholy layer to the emerging feminine style.40 Shalikov engages his women readers in constant editorial liubeznichanie (‘refined banter’) and most pieces address specific women readers, with references to their shared social context, celebrating the ‘women’s world’ they lived and breathed. Charles Baudelaire was later to adapt a legal concept to literary creation in a way that his Karamzinist forerunners would have approved: ‘the precocious taste for the feminine world, mundi muliebris, for all the undulating, scintillating, and perfumed display, makes superior geniuses’.41 Feminised writing blurs the distinction between a woman and her ‘ornamental’ world. Clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, jewellery, furniture, interior decorations, gardens, and pets are worthy of adoration by association and represent women metonymically. By celebrating the mundus muliebris, Shalikov implements a literal interpretation of the Karamzinist credo of imitating women’s conversational language. He turns the live world of women into published literature: his journals are salons in print, they are gallant society conversations between the milye Graces and duly feminised men. This fixation on mundus muliebris is the signal feature of Shalikov’s journals. Shalikov’s epigraph for MZ, Voltaire’s S’occuper, c’est savoir jouir, indicates that he, like Novikov, considers work as play, and parlour games fill his pages. Gifts become poetically productive. Men thank women for an embroidered urn, two honeycombs, a bullfinch, two Amors, a phial of scents with a French inscription, and a birch branch.42 Women receive verses with gifts of flowers or crow’s feathers for the harpsichord.43 Women inspire or initiate these verses. Objects become signs of flattery and courtship in mundus muliebris. Flowers connected to women are celebrated: ‘the


Narcissus flower picked by my El’vira’ or ‘a wild flower preserved in Melina’s booklet’.44 Others contemplate jewellery, such as ‘a golden pin in the shape of a forget-me-not’.45 Delphira’s fan and a ridicule shaped like a pineapple attract poetic attention.46 Interiors inspire apartment travelogues and verses on a mirror or on Aglaia’s portrait.47 Delphira’s lapdog gets a collar inscription, while Blank grieves over the passing of Aglaia’s squirrel and M. N. Makarov mourns the death of his canary.48 The words uttered and the actions that take place in the mundus muliebris are reflected in the journals. Women’s words set off extended conversations. Poems respond to women’s questions, such as: ‘What should one do to live happily?’, ‘Why is spring a sad time?’, and ‘When do [you] fast?’.49 Men react when women say that ‘men are inconstant, frivolous’.50 Verses inscribed in women’s albums are made accessible to a larger public and album etiquette is recorded (the impossibility of refusing, the chore of producing on the spot, and so forth).51 Shalikov and his collaborators published lyrics and music for songs, as well as plays for domestic theatres. Several poems relate to these activities on a metalevel.52 Other verses indicate that women did read what the authors wrote, albeit sometimes took a long time doing so.53 A woman is flattered in verse for having flattered the author, and Shalikov thanks Emiliia for reading MZ.54 There is no reason to believe that all these women or objects, places, words, and behaviours that constitute their world were invented, though their identities were masked. The difference between real and constructed women was not always clear to readers, such as Mme N, who asked the author whether El’vira was a real or imaginary woman.55 Shalikov publishes women writers, discusses their publications, both past (Sappho, Corinna, Aspasia, Mme de Staël, Mme de Genlis) and present (Mariia Izvekova, Anna Bunina, Ekaterina Puchkova), and supports women’s education. While Shalikov’s journals implement the Karamzinist paradigm, they also defend it, indulging in blatant Karamzinolatry.56 They constantly cite Karamzin and keep his texts alive in ‘sequels’, such as D. P. Glebov’s poem ‘Erast na mogile bednoi Lizy’ (‘Erast at Poor Liza’s Grave’).57 Shalikov presents Karamzin as the model for his ‘Grace’ jargon and puts his own adoring spin on P. I. Makarov’s points. The Graces guided Karamzin’s pen and Karamzin increased the number of readers and authors, he tells us.58 He assures his Graces that Karamzin’s language on their lips is as pleasant as French.59 Shalikov’s concluding address to the readers of MZ is characteristic of his self-feminisation. In keeping with the modesty topos, especially important for women, he apologises for perhaps not satisfying his


readers, for not including anything important, for his own weak gifts, and his inexperience. The opening address to the readers of Aglaia justifies his return to journalism after MZ by the readers’ approbation, which also determines the continuation of Aglaia after 1808.60 He is consistently deferential to the woman reader and sees his journal as a reader initiative. That he celebrates women in the name of his own mediocre talent may not seem like a flattering evaluation of women, but it worked, judging by women’s increasing participation in his journals. Anna Bunina, who started her literary career in the Blank–Shalikov circles, is one of the most frequent women contributors. Her poems rarely go without an ensuing verse dialogue as the poets present themselves as her readers. She receives a return-poem appended to a symbolic seal with a French motto.61 Another poet sends her birthday congratulations, greeting her as a new Sappho, which she declines with refreshing selfassurance, to which the editor insists that her latest poem has proved him right.62 Even after she became famous and came under Shishkovite mentorship, clichéd praise as ‘Sappho’ and ‘Russian Grace’ took the place of substantial discussion of her considerable achievements. No submission by a woman went without flattering editorialising. A translation by a woman signing herself Lbv’ Lkshina provoked the editor’s wish to see more works by the Graces in his journal named for a Grace.63 He flatters an anonymous woman contributor in verse for ‘caressing my daughter Aglaia’64 and thanks ‘the Russian Grace’ Puchkova for her piece – with apologies for correcting her grammar.65 He adheres to a principle he articulated in MZ: to publish weak submissions by women (who presumably were less educated and hence did not always master the rules for grammar or spelling) with his own corrections.66 Women’s works are received with simultaneous flattery and condescension.67 However, feminised men’s submissions were subjected to the same treatment.68 Like Karamzin and P. I. Makarov, Shalikov professed dislike for critical criticism, but unlike them, he published sharp personal attacks on his opponents, masked, however, by elegantly flattering verbiage and lacking in substance.69 In some cases, he served as a proxy for I. I. Dmitrev.70 Shalikov’s extended polemic with Sergei Glinka largely paraphrases P. I. Makarov, and he manages to invoke the Graces even to redefine patriotism.71

Zhurnal dlia milykh In ZhDM, M. N. Makarov implemented all the feminising features we have seen above in 1804, that is before he joined Shalikov’s journals. I


conclude my analysis non-chronologically because ZhDM takes some aspects of women’s journals to their extreme limits: it represents the least successful judgement of what is appropriate for a woman reader, the most successful editorial self-feminisation and ‘professionalisation’ of woman by making her a publishing critic. ZhDM is a peculiar double double entendre: sexual titillation by professing feminine modesty and chastity (seduction by non-seduction) and non-critical criticism. Space allows only an outline of a complex argument. M. N. Makarov (together with the student I. V. Smirnov and two sisters, Elizaveta Trubèska or Trubetskaia and Anna Beznina) started ZhDM as a youthful amateur enterprise. Critics were soon alarmed over the explicitly erotic texts in the journal. But, as we have seen, other women’s journals which also contained eroticism were not taken to task. Why then were the critics now so incensed? I will first examine the ‘inappropriate’ erotic pieces and then turn to another explanation. As noted by A. P. Piatkovskii in a subsequent survey, M. N. Makarov persistently focuses on the minutiae of mundus muliebris, Frenchified fops, and eroticism.72 Piatkovskii singles out a voyeuristic rococo stanza with an escalating seduction sequence that leads to Lizetta’s rape and the rapist’s subsequent suicide.73 It silently invites the milye to fill in the erotic ellipses as active reader-authors. Voyeurism enhances the eroticism and occurs elsewhere as well. A. I. Klushin’s ‘Neschastnyi M-v’ (‘Unfortunate M-v’) relates the ill-fated love of a multi-talented teacher for his female pupil, who arouses him erotically both in portrait form and in person – with graphic descriptions of erogenous zones, seductive gazes, and phallic paintbrushes.74 Any object in the mundus muliebris has the potential of metonymic titillation. The voyeurisim in ZhDM was, however, nothing new. Mythology was another sanctioned cover-up for erotic content, to judge by MEI, but a rustic idyll in ZhDM, ‘Pobeda nad Nimfami’ (‘Victory over the Nymphs’) was, however, angrily attacked. Here the nymph Iris and her girlfriends try to crown a sleeping Amor with a rose wreath.75 He jumps up, winds his arms around Iris’s ‘alabaster neck’, steadies his legs against her body, and with his ‘rosy lips he sucked the purest nectar from her’. After a tussle, Iris falls down on ‘the balsamic meadow’, whereupon Amor ‘luxuriates’ in wondrous sights, further enhanced on Aglaia’s knees. The Nymphs flog him with forget-me-nots. Amor has his revenge: as a butterfly he invades Iris’s clothing. She swoons and moans – from an orgasmic ‘Edenic sweetness’. The plot seems like kinky gang sex with a minor male, but the nymphs’ behaviour is celebrated as healthy sex concluded in the birth of little Amors. Yet, eroticism is hardly greater here than in the MEI cantos.


Piatkovskii also considered a non-mythological story ‘Annushka, sel’skaia povest’ (‘Annie, a Village Tale’) inappropriate for women readers, though, ironically, the story is precisely about the dangers of reading.76 M. N. Makarov could therefore defend himself by professing to teach through a bad example, a sanctioned cover-up, as we saw in MEI. Women readers are simultaneously warned against erotic reading and subjected to erotic titillation. The critics saw only the latter. Annushka is a full-bosomed thirteen-year-old milushka77 who (while her father is asleep) peruses libertine novels, including their illustrations, instead of reading the escapades of Bova on her father’s reading list for her.78 She spots a sixteen-year-old ‘Amor’ bathing in the nude, and, in a reversal of an Acteon-Diana scene, she lies in the thick grass carefully comparing his charms with those in her books.79 She strips to join him in the waves and the two ‘swam in the flowing rivulet, dived, splashed, and maybe something else also happened between them: – But novelists cover up such adventures for five minutes, with a fine mist and are silent [two lines of ellipsis dots]’. The dots, repeated elsewhere, invite the milye to ponder the ‘something else’.80 The rhetorical mist does not shield the young bathers, but prolongs the titillation, extended yet further as the story breaks off, to be continued later. Annushka, we then find out, is pregnant (which confirms readers’ erotic speculations?) and her father’s tirades are interrupted by a swoon and the birth of a golden-haired ‘Cupidikin’ (kupidonchik). The two lovebirds are happily married, and darkness shields the readers’ eyes from … . The plot, if not the outcome, replicates what befell poor Liza, Lizetta, and the idyllic nymphs. Piatkovskii sees Karamzinism turned into a ‘monstrosity’ and poor Liza’s name profaned in ZhDM.81 Other critics were also irate. Severnyi vestnik (The Northern Herald) had already pointed out the disjunction between title and content in ZhDM and now advised that the milye readers not pick it up, as it offends their primary adornments: modesty and chastity.82 D. I. Iazykov (signed Ia.) pans the journal for its ‘utterly corrupt pictures which not only a woman but not even a man could stand looking at for long’. He is dismayed at Annushka’s reading, and reading is considered to be as harmful as sex, the one leading to the other – a negative confirmation of the importance of reading.83 The offended editor printed an appendix to the June issue, where L-w (signed in Latin form) justifies the content by the censors’ approval and the reasoning about bad examples that we saw in MEI. In the same appendix M. N. Makarov defends his inclusion of criticism despite earlier promises to the contrary (according to the Karamzinist model): the critics were women, and the editorial policy to


publish whatever women submitted took precedence. In retrospect it seems that gender was both a calculated defence mechanism against others’ criticism and a disguise for the editor’s own criticism. ZhDM started out with hopes that ‘the charms of our darling women readers will defend us against the evil mockery of criticism’ and that their own imperfections might be rectified by the delicate emotions and charms of their readers. Feminine charms proved ineffective. The different approaches to criticism in Severnyi vestnik – ruthlessly sharp – and ZhDM – gentle, feminine – seem at least as important grounds for disagreement as the erotic content, and contributed no less to the journal’s downfall. This brings me to the second double entendre: non-critical criticism and a successful gender prank, where men actually appropriated women’s identity and life. Two sisters, Elizaveta Trubetskaia and Anna Beznina, contributed signed critical pieces and provided the best illustration of the constructed[-real] woman. Their writing was published, poems were addressed to them, obituaries were composed on their deaths, and they were included in scholarly accounts at least until 2001.84 Makarov himself would ‘at times admit his acquaintance with them’, at times emphasise his full ignorance of their identity, and contemporaries such as F. F. Vigel’ and S. P. Zhikharev also gave contradictory information about them.85 When ZhDM folded, the ‘Croatian’ women were said to have returned to ‘their part of the world, not to Croatia but to Bohemia’ – a geographical conundrum?86 But at the same time they continued to be productive in Russia! Moskovskii kur’er (The Moscow Courier, 1805) received contributions both from ‘Princess T.’ and a descendant, the eight-year-old Ruth Beznina from Murom, the location previously connected to Anna Beznina.87 Nobody seriously questioned their existence until recently M. P. Lepekhin suggested an editorial hoax.88 This is even more credible since the editors admittedly perpetrated similar hoaxes in Moskovskii kur’er.89 They also followed successful European models of cross-dressing: The Tatler’s Jenny Dickstaff (1709), the ‘Mahlerinnen’ in Die Discourse der Mahler (1722), and several men in drag in Die vernünfftigen Tadlerinnen (1725–1726).90 All these ‘women’ aimed at modelling a feminine literary language, at educating women, and engaging in ‘feminine’ playfulness. ZhDM had the same aims and continued the spirit of play by both rejecting and practising drag.91 But none of these reasons seems to be the main reason for Makarov’s donning drag. I have suggested elsewhere that the gender hoax in ZhDM was perpetrated to allow men to engage in feminised Karamzinist criticism.92 I now suggest that Makarov donned drag to participate in the


Karamzinist–Shishkovite polemic. This suggestion is supported by the timing, the specific targets, the sympathies expressed, and the critical style. In fact M. N. Makarov later admitted that the aim of ZhDM (which commenced right after Shishkov’s key 1803 piece) was not only to please the milye, but also to ‘topple the barbaric armament of Shishkov against Karamzin’.93 I believe that the editors were entirely serious: they donned drag to mask a vitriolic polemic in gentle feminine garb. Their approach was in keeping with the polemical tactics in other venues. In the larger cultural picture their cross-dressing is a clear indication that the criticism they developed was perceived as feminised, and that the most feminine stance towards criticism was no criticism at all. On the other hand, by constructing women critics, ZhDM also ‘professionalised’ the constructed woman reader by having her engage in a readerbased activity: criticism, like translating, means reading and reacting ‘professionally’ to texts in published form. The Karamzinists thus feminised the very institution of literature (rather than just texts) by appeal to reading.94 Karamzin himself refrained from debating, and Shishkov in key passages of his attack cited not Karamzin, but the second-rate arch-sentimental A. P. Orlov, the author of Utekhi melankholii (Consolations of Melancholy), a collection much ridiculed even by Karamzinists.95 As Proskurin shows, Shishkov created a Karamzinist scapegoat out of a text not accepted as their own by the Karamzinists. Shishkov’s polemical strategy was to force the reader to merge the real Karamzin with the pseudo-Karamzinist Orlov. Neither did Shishkov launch a direct attack against I. I. Dmitriev, the other leading Karamzinist; Dmitriev’s rebuttal was equally indirect. It, too, must be read ‘through’ the texts of less talented Karamzinists, mainly Shalikov.96 I suggest that the pattern is applicable even further down the rungs of Karamzinizm: M. N. Makarov, a teenage would-be-Karamzinist, has to be read ‘through’ the texts of the women critics he invented. Makarov’s women critics were another Orlov and ZhDM another Utekhi melankholii. Women writers (albeit imaginary) ranked low in the critical hierarchy. Dmitriev’s influence, his critical tactics, his proxy’s feminised flattery-cum-criticism, and his targets figured already in 1804 in ZhDM, that is, before Dmitriev’s alliance with Shalikov and MZ in 1806. The timing is not unlikely since polemics were in the air and the content of literary journals was often widely known (and even rebuttals penned) before publication.97 M. N. Makarov’s precocious literary career started in Karamzinist circles. He sought their company, and idealised Dmitriev. He mentions that ‘Ivan Ivanovich’s pranks on some literateurs, antagonists to Karamzin,


were at the time [right after 1801, GH] our common conversation topic’.98 While Shalikov was the butt of fellow-Karamzinists’ jesting, Makarov was the butt even of Shalikov’s jesting. Shalikov reputedly did not want to die for fear that Makarov might write his epitaph, and Batiushkov quips that Makarov was kept by ‘the Georgian vestal virgin, Aglaia’.99 From Batiushkov we descend to Shalikov in (Batiushkov’s) drag, then to Makarov ‘kept’ by a feminised Shalikov, and lowest, to the women Makarov invented.100 ZhDM implements Dmitriev’s critical tactics. L-w’s above-mentioned response to Iazykov in Severnyi vestnik, the same journal that was to become an adversary of Dmitriev and Shalikov, is characteristic.101 L-w thanks and compliments him, emphasising the usefulness of constructive criticism. He then accuses Iazykov of slander (bran’), and considers it ill-conceived to criticise budding talents in a country that still has few writers, and to fail to balance criticism with praise.102 He resents the moral dimensions of Iazykov’s attacks, anticipating the Shishkovite turn to attacks on morals (rather than language) after P. I. Makarov’s successful response to Shishkov’s stylistic arguments. I. I. Golenishev-Kutuzov had already started attacks on Karamzin’s morals shortly after Karamzin returned from Europe, but such attacks became especially belligerent after P. I. Makarov’s death in pieces such as Semen Bobrov’s ‘Proisshestvie v tsarstve tenei, ili Sud’bina rossiiskogo iazyka’ (An Event in the Kingdom of Shadows, or the Fate ot the Russian Language’), dated 1805. Numerous mutual attacks on morals ensued in both oral and published form as biting epigrams, satires, and pamphlets, that involved the Shishkovite Beseda group and mostly Dmitriev and the ‘younger Karamzinist’ members of Arzamas.103 ZhDM’s counter-criticism (e.g. by L-w) of Severnyi vestnik also anticipates Dmitriev’s animosity towards that journal. In 1804 A. A. Pisarev published negative surveys in Severnyi vestnik of Karamzin’s reviews in Moskovskii zhurnal (The Moscow Journal) and P. I. Makarov’s rebuttal to Shishkov. Dmitriev terminated his subscription to Severnyi vestnik, circulated biting epigrams, and made verbal insinuations about Shishkovite journals, most of which date from 1805.104 Makarov was privy to these activities, and in his youthful exuberance ‘jumped the gun’ before Dmitriev went public. Dmitriev’s sarcastic irony is refracted by the women critics on ZhDM into a feminised, exaggeratedly ‘Karamzinist’ jargon (not unlike Utekhi melankholii). Their criticism anticipates Pisarev’s reviews of journals (rather than individual works) and Dmitriev’s dislike for Vestnik Evropy105 and Drug prosveshcheniia (The Friend of Enlightenment). They lament Karamzin’s


absence from Vestnik Evropy, engage in fashionable Karamzinolatry,106 make Karamzinist stylistic comments – a verse is described as ‘larded with [excessive] Slavonicisms’ (nashpigovannoe Slavianshchinoiu)107 – and implement a conversation with apostrophes to Karamzin and Shalikov. They single out Shalikov’s travelogue for special praise and anticipate both the Shishkovite–Karamzinist travelogue polemics and Dmitriev’s poet-scribbler sparring with the poetaster Khvostov in Drug prosveshcheniia.108 Trubetskaia and Beznina use the ironical and sarcastic flattery-cumcriticism that Dmitriev and his proxies perfected, what Vatsuro labels ‘polite ambiguity’.109 Dmitriev’s procedure was to single out particularly archaic or absurd phrases or verses and then praise them relative to some other obvious absurdity. The sisters tried the same approach, but had neither the talent nor the name recognition required for both praise and ridicule to be heard. Most likely, readers of ZhDM took their praise at face value, as did, for instance, M-’ia Ap-l-va in a letter to the editors, where she disagrees with the criticism from ‘a learned journal’ [Severnyi vestnik]. The editors thank her and conclude: ‘Farewell dear (female) readers! – Rejoice, Editors of The Learned Journal’. They link the polemic and the closing of ZhDM directly as cause and effect, which lends support to my argument.110 M. A. Dmitriev (I. I. Dmitriev’s nephew) dismissed the polemical pieces simply as bad women’s writing. For the most part, however, the women’s praise was read as outright slander. In the end the editors make a special apology for Trubetskaia’s piece about Khvostov, which they published because of her (ironical) note: ‘Publish [this piece], there is no Irony, but pure heartfelt praise’.111 The women’s targets, their polemical stance, and their Dmitrievian tactics led to the journal’s demise. Drag can fool people for over 200 years, but debating in drag with ulterior motives is not always safe. The polemic between Severnyi vestnik and ZhDM was one of many critical battles in the culture wars in which women’s journals participated, and a rare victory for the Shishkovites: in its aftermath ZhDM closed with a whimper.112 The constructed woman reader was successful in inspiring journals that played a vital role in the most important intellectual polemic of the era: P. I. Makarov’s criticism of Shishkov in his journal precipitated the wars, despite his feminised dislike for criticism. Though Shalikov’s feminine criticism at times turned into a personal vendetta, his pose as a gentle critic served major players (such as I. I. Dmitriev) well, and his self-feminisation was popular enough to sustain a subsequent journal for (and about) real women. The constructed woman reader was perhaps most successful in feminising the literary canon (for better or worse), by inspiring a distinct conversational style and a variety of inter-


active and performative genres, making literature come alive even beyond the covers of the journals for real readers, including real women.

Notes 1. My definition of the Karamzinist-Shishkovite debate follows B. A. Uspenskii, Iz istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVIII – nachala XIX veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo moskovskogo universiteta, 1985). On feminisation, see also Judith Vowles, ‘The “Feminization” of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 35–60; Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Gender Ambivalence and Genre Anomalies in Late 18th- Early 19th-century Russian Literature’, Russian Literature, 52 (2002), 299–326; Carolin Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, ‘Feminisation and Functionalisation: The Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 51–71. 2. N. M. Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. Iu. M. Lotman, 2nd edn (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966), pp. 169–79 and Aonidy, ili sobranie raznykh novykh stikhotvorenii, 3 vols (Moscow: V universitetskoi tipografii u Ridigera i Klaudiia, 1796–99), II (1797), v–xi. 3. Vestnik Evropy, 1 (1802), 3–8. 4. K. N. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, ed. L. N. Maikov and V. I. Saitov, 3 vols (St Petersburg: Tipografiia V. S. Balasheva, 1885–1887), I, p.174; my emphasis. 5. N. D. Kochetkova, Literatura russkogo sentimentalizma (Esteticheskie i khudozhestvennye iskaniia) (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), pp. 156–89 (pp. 158–59); Olga Glagoleva, ‘Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provincial Noblewomen (1750–1825)’, in Women and Gender, ed. Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 129–46; Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Reading à la Mode: The First Russian Women’s Journals’, in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon, and Maarten Fraanje (Weimar: Böhlau, 2001), pp. 218–32. 6. See Wendy Rosslyn, Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women 1763–1825 (Fichtenwalde: Göpfert, 2000), p. 33. 7. Iu. M. Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina (Moscow: Kniga, 1987), pp. 249–50, even coins the term al’bomnost’ (‘albumness’) to characterise the new intimate literary scene. 8. On albums, see L. Petina, ‘Khudozhestvennaia priroda literaturnogo al’boma pervoi poloviny XIX veka’ (Avtoreferat dissertatsii, Tartuskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1988); Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Flirting with Words: Domestic Albums, 1770–1840’, in Russia. Women. Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U P, 1996), pp. 297–320; Justyna Beinek, ‘The Album in the Age of Russian and Polish Romanticism: Memory, Nation, Authorship’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2001). 9. Karamzin became a literary leader in the 1790s. Albums entered Russia in the 1770s to 1780s, became the genre described here around the turn of the century, and peaked in the 1820s to 1830s. M. P. Alekseev, ‘Iz istorii russkikh rukopisnykh sobranii’, in Neizdannye pis’ma inostrannykh pisatelei


10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

XVIII–XIX vekov iz leningradskikh rukopisnykh sobranii, ed. M. P. Alekseev (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii dom), 1960), pp. 7–122. The editorial rhetoric shows that women were the intended readers. Other women’s journals were: Magazin aglinskikh, frantsuzskikh i nemetskikh novykh mod, 1791; Damskii zhurnal (four issues, 1806), reproduced in V. Pokrovskii, Damskoi zhurnal (1806–1906 gg.) s predisloviem (Moscow: Tipografiia O-va rasp. polezn. knig, 1906); see Svodnyi katalog serial’nykh izdanii Rossii (1801–1825), ed. E. K. Sokolinskii (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo rossiiskoi natsional’noi biblioteki, 1997), II, 7–9; Kabinet Aspazii (1815), and Modnyi vestnik (1816). They replicate Novikov’s content and I will not consider them here. Shalikov’s Damskii zhurnal (Ladies’ Journal, 1823–1833) requires special investigation. For the contents of its first years, see Svodnyi katalog serial’nykh izdanii, II, 10–44. Similar reading habits are documented elsewhere, see, for example, Kochetkova, p. 188. On the idyll in Sentimentalism, see Gitta Hammarberg, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1991). For example, 2 (1779), pp. 120–52; 3 (1779), pp. 81–95, and 4 (1779), pp. 34–39. 1.2 (1779), pp. 111–26 and 1.3 (1779), pp.189–212. ‘Liubov’ Dianny’ is a posthumously published poem (Svodnyi katalog russkoi knigi grazhdanskoi pechati XVIII veka 1725–1800, ed. I. P. Kondakov and others, 5 vols (Moscow: Kniga, 1963–1967) IV, p. 149). Based on internal evidence both pesni seem penned by the same author (Maikov or not). Other erotic pieces describe courtesans, for example, 2 (1779), pp. 186–209 and 4 (1779), pp. 39–57, the latter a Moll Flanders double. 1 (1779), pp. 26–29. 1 (1779), pp. 59–67. Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad: 1929, repr. Munich: Fink, 1967), pp. 5–86. Literaturnye skandaly pushkinskoi epokhi (Moscow: O.G.I., 2000), pp. 200–01. Many critics emphasised women’s ears, see Uspenskii, pp. 53–60. 1 (1779), pp. 238. See Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Women, Wit, and Wordplay: Bouts-rimés and the Subversive Feminization of Culture’, in Vieldeutiges Nicht-zu-Ende-Sprechen: Thesen und Momentaufnahmen aus der Geschichte russischer Dichterinnen, ed. Arja Rosenholm and Frank Göpfert (Fichtenwalde: Göpfert, 2002), pp. 61–77. ‘Nekotorye mysli Izdatelei Merkuriia’, 1 (1803), pp. 4–18. ‘Kritika na knigu pod nazvaniem: Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge Rossiiskogo iazyka – napechatannogo v Peterburge, 1803 goda’, 4 (1804), pp. 155–99. ‘Kritika na knigu’, pp. 162, 178–79, 182, 190. ‘Nekotorye mysli’, p. 8 (italics original). ‘Nekotorye mysli’, p. 18. 1.1 (1803), pp. 54, 70. Exceptions are Segur’s ‘Ob ume i vkuse’ in 1.2 (1803), pp. 131–42, ‘O vysokom Longina’ (3.2 (1803), pp. 128–48), and a review of a book on agriculture (1.1 (1803), p. 54). Cited in G. Gennadi, ‘Makarov i ego zhurnal “Moskovskii Merkurii” ’, Sovremennik 47.10, section 3 (1854), 65–94 (p. 77). Gennadi considers Makarov fair-minded and his critique of Shishkov exemplary.

First Russian Women’s Journals 101 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

1.3 (1803), p. 228. 1.2 (1803), p. 156. 1.3 (1803), pp. 218–19. For example, his review of Nikolai Ostolopov, ‘Evgeniia, ili nyneshnee vospitanie’, MM 1.3 (1803), 29–32. 2.4 (1803), pp. 43–45. He tells us that his desk is flooded with new books and that he has published 50 reviews and read 108 volumes in the course of a year. 5.14, (1804), p. 139. He likes the libertine novel by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrais and his imitators, see, for example, 4.11 (1803), p. 139. Gennadi (p. 66) comments on this passion for women. V. V. Sipovskii, Ocherki iz istorii russkogo romana (St Petersburg: Trud, 1909–1910, 1.2, 438) applies the French description to early Russian epistolary prose; Gennadi, p. 94 considers it ‘zhenstvennym’. For the content of Aglaia and attributions of unsigned items, see Svodnyi katalog serial’nykh izdanii, I, pp. 3–27. On women in Aglaia, especially Puchkova, see Iu. V. Zhukova, ‘ “Zhenskaia tema” na stranitsakh zhurnala “Aglaia” (1808–1812 gg.) Kn. P. I. Shalikova’, in O blagorodstve i preimushchestve zhenskogo pola. Iz istorii zhenskogo voprosa, ed. R. Sh. Ganelin (St Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia akademiia kul’tury, 1997), pp. 38–50. On Shalikov’s antics, see Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Karamzin after Karamzin: The Case of Prince Shalikov’, in A Window on Russia, ed. by Maria di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice, 1996), pp. 275–83. On the word milaia and Grace jargon, see Hammarberg, ‘Reading à la Mode’, pp. 227–28 and Heyder and Rosenholm, pp. 51–63. Jessica R. Feldman, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1993), p. 137–38. MZ 3.2 (1806), p. 40; Aglaia, 12.3 (1810), pp. 82–83 and 4.3 (1808), p. 54; MZ, 3.2 (1806), p. 39; Aglaia, 4.3 (1808), p. 70 and 11.2 (1810), p. 77, respectively. MZ 4.1 (1806), pp. 66–67 and 4.2 (1806), pp. 60–61. MZ 3.1 (1806), p. 64; Aglaia, 11.2 (1810), pp. 74–75. Aglaia 2.3 (1808), p. 39 and 8.3 (1809), pp. 13–15. MZ 4.1(1806), p. 62; Aglaia, 13.3 (1812), pp. 58–59. MZ 4.1(1806), pp. 5–19; Aglaia, 8.1 (1809), pp. 25–26; MZ, 3.1 (1806), p. 62. MZ 4.1 (1806), p. 39; Aglaia, 6.1 (1809), p. 30 and 12.1 (1810), pp. 65–66. MZ 4.1 (1806), p. 68; Aglaia, 2.2 (1808), pp. 83–85 and 6.1 (1809), pp. 60–62. Aglaia 2.3 (1808), pp. 41–43. See Hammarberg, ‘Flirting with Words,’ pp. 313–14. Aglaia 2.2 (1808), p. 82; 41 (1808), p. 37 and 12.3 (1810), pp. 84–85. Gennadi notes that women memorised Dolgorukov’s songs (which had appeared in MM) and still loved and sang them in the 1850s. Aglaia 2.1 (1808), pp. 74–78. Aglaia 12.1 (1810), p. 72; MZ, 1.2 (1806), p. 44. Aglaia 12.3 (1810), p. 86. See Hammarberg, ‘Karamzin after Karamzin’, pp. 275–83. Aglaia 10.1 (1810), pp. 40–43. Lazhechnikov’s ‘Spasskaia luzhaika’ (‘Spasskaia Glade’) adapts the incest theme song of Karamzin’s ‘Ostrov Borngol’m’ (‘Bornholm Island’); 13.3 (1812), pp. 3–22. The Karamzinolatry in ZhDM is


58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

even more extreme: ‘Liza! Gde tvoi kliatvy?’ in 1.1 (1804), pp. 9–12, is reminiscent of Karamzin’s ‘Sierra-Morena’; ‘Poteria spokoistviia’ in 1.1 (1804), pp. 20–28 and ‘Dom moei miloi’ in 2.1 (1804), pp. 11–27 evoke ‘Bednaia Liza’. Aglaia 2.2 (1808), pp. 54–59. Aglaia 1.1 (1808), pp. 35–36. Aglaia 4.2 (1808), pp. 52–53. Aglaia 9.3 (1810), p. 75, cf. 1.2 (1808), pp. 56–63. MZ 3.1 (1806), pp. 34–35. Aglaia 2.2 (1808), p. 81. Aglaia 9.1 (1810), p. 76. Aglaia 8.1 (1809), pp. 21, 17. MZ 4.2 (1806), pp. 30–31. See for example, reviews of Bunina in Aglaia 3.3 (1808), pp. 66–67; 8.1 (1809), pp. 62–63; 10.1 (1810), pp. 23–26. For example, Lazhechnikov in Aglaia, 14.2 (1812), p. 55. On Shalikov’s belligerence, see Hammarberg, ‘Karamzin after Karamzin’, p. 280. M. G. Al’tshuller, ‘Neizvestnyi episod zhurnal’noi polemiki nachala XIX veka. (“Drug prosveshcheniia” i “Moskovskii zritel’ “)’, in XVIII vek, 10 (1975), pp. 98–106. Aglaia 3.2 (1808), pp. 45–60. See also 2.1 (1808), pp. 56–60. Iz istorii nashego literaturnogo i obshchestvennogo razvitiia, 2 vols, 2nd edn, (St Petersburg: A. Transhel’, 1888), II, esp. pp. 98–182. Cf. Heyder and Rosenholm, pp. 61, 70. Cf. [N. P. Koliupanov], Biografiia Aleksandra Ivanovicha Kosheleva, I: Molodye gody Aleksandra Ivanovicha, ed. O. F. Kosheleva (Moscow: Tipo-litografiia Kushnereva, 1889), p. 275 and M. A. Dmitriev, Melochi iz zapasa moei pamiati (Moscow: Tipografiia Gracheva i Koni, 1869), pp. 78–80. ‘Osenniaia vecherniaia progulka’, ZhDM 1.2 (1804), p. 48. ‘Neschastnyi M-v’ appears without Klushin’s name as a translation by Evf. Liutsenko in 1.6 (1804), pp. 306–52; 2.8 (1804), pp. 84–123; and 2.9 (1804), pp. 149–166. V. P. Stepanov, ‘Klushin, A. I.’, in Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, ed. N. D. Kochetkova and others (Leningrad: Nauka, 1988), II, 63–64, regards its republication as a joke on the editors. 2.4 (1804), pp. 96–105. Cf. 2.11 (1804), pp. 266–79. 3.5 (1804), pp. 140–46 and 5.10 (1804), pp. 277–89. A sexualised variant of the milaia, as pointed out by Heyder and Rosenholm, p. 61. Women readers were similarly self-assertive at least since 1780, when another woman reader preferred novels to her father’s Cheti Minei, Solomonovy mudrosti, and Feofan Prokopovich’s sermons. V. V. Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkogo romana i povesti (materialy po bibliografii, istorii i teorii russkogo romana), Vol 1, XVIII vek, 2nd edn (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk, 1903), p. 237. Acteon-Diana scenes were common in Sentimentalism, see Hammarberg, From the Idyll, pp. 167–81. The conventionality of erotic ellipsis is illustrated in Neonila (1794): ‘Blagopristoinost’ prikazala ostanovit’ vo mnogikh mestakh pero ot iasnogo izobrazheniia sodelannykh porokov’, cited in Sipovskii, Iz istorii, p. 229. Piatkovskii, p. 102. 2.4 (1804), p. 136.

First Russian Women’s Journals 103 83. 3.8 (1804), pp. 259–61. 84. An Improper Profession. Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith (Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2001), pp. 285, 306. 85. V. P. Stepanov, ‘Makarov, Mikhail Nikolaevich’, in Russkie pisateli 1800–1917, ed. P. A. Nikolaev and others (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1994), III, pp. 468–70 (p. 469). 86. Dmitriev, p. 80. 87. Stepanov, ‘Makarov’, p. 469. 88. M. P. Lepekhin, ‘Beznina, Anna Aleksandrovna’, in Russkie pisateli, I, 197–98. See also Carolin Heyder, ‘Vom Journal für die Lieben zur Sache der Frau. Zum Frauenbild in den russischen literarischen Frauenzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Frauenbilder und Weiblichkeitsentwürfe in der russischen Frauenprosa. ed. by Christina Parnell (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 63–74 (pp. 65–66); Hammarberg, ‘Gender Ambivalence’, pp. 311–13, and Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Women, Critics, and Women Critics in Early Russian Women’s Journals’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate,2003), pp. 187–207 (pp. 201–02). 89. Stepanov, ‘Makarov’, p. 469. 90. See Hammarberg, ‘Gender Ambivalence’, pp. 311–13. 91. ‘O liubvi **’ is rejected because ‘the Author under the false guise of a woman showered praise on our journal’, 2.9 (1804), pp. 198–99 (my italics) – the editors who themselves appear in drag reject drag in potential contributors. 92. Hammarberg, ‘Women, Critics’, pp. 199–202. 93. Dmitriev, p. 79. Dmitriev attributes the lack of polemical acumen to the gender of the critics. 94. M. N. Makarov (in drag), while editor of Dramaticheskii zhurnal, continued ridiculing Shishkovites in ‘Obrashchennyi slavianofil, soch. R-a-t-a’. See Batiushkov, III, pp. 165 and 678–79. 95. T. Newlin, ‘Orlov, Aleksandr Petrovich’, in Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, II, pp. 387–88 identifies the author of Utekhi as Orlov, while others attribute it to A. F. Obrezkov (see Proskurin, pp. 21–46). 96. See Al’tshuller, p. 98–106; V. E. Vatsuro, ‘I. I. Dmitriev v literaturnykh polemikakh nachala XIX veka’, in Pushkinskaia pora (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), pp. 9–53 and ‘V preddverii pushkinskoi epokhi’, in Arzamas, ed. V. E. Vatsuro and A. L. Ospovat, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1994), I, pp. 5–27. 97. Al’tshuller, p. 106; Vatsuro, ‘I. I. Dmitriev’, p. 28. 98. Stepanov, ‘Makarov’, pp. 468–69; M. Makarov, ‘O znakomstve moem s Dmitrievym’, in Galateia, zhurnal nauk, iskusstv, literatury, novostei i mod, 1.5 (1839), pp. 359–71. 99. Stepanov, ‘Makarov’, p. 468. 100. Cf. Batiushkov, III, 697. 101. L-w (whose precise function on ZhDM is unclear) be the fictitious Sergei Matveevich L’vov, purported publisher of Moskovskii kur’er? 102. Many of L-w’s points were discussed in Drug prosveshcheniia 3.5 (1804), pp. 154–67; 3.9 (1805), pp. 210–20 and 4.10 (1805), pp. 36–39. 103. These complex battles are described in detail in, for example, Vatsuro, ‘I. I. Dmitriev’, pp. 39–49 and Proskurin, pp. 95–115.

104 Women and the Arts 104. Vatsuro ‘I. I. Dmitriev’, p. 18. 105. Dmitriev felt that the new Vestnik Evropy (after Karamzin stepped down as its editor) was ‘neither his friend nor his brother’. M. A. Dmitriev, cited in Vatsuro, ‘I. I. Dmitriev’, p. 36, italics M. A. Dmitriev’s. 106. For example 4 (1804), pp. 241–48; 5 (1804), pp. 296–99, and 7 (1804), pp. 75–77. 107. 7 (1804), p. 77. 108. Shalikov is featured in 5 (1804), pp. 296–97 and 7 (1804), p. 69, 75–76; Khvostov in 6 (1804), pp. 358–62. Vatsuro, ‘I. I. Dmitriev’, pp. 27–28. 109. Vatsuro, ‘I. Dmitriev’, p. 40. 110. 12 (1804), pp. 369–73 (p. 374). 111. 12 (1804), pp. 374–80. 112. M. Makarov, ‘Khudaia uchast’ damskikh zhurnalov v Rossii’, in Syn otechestva, 32 (1817), pp. 219–25 (p. 220); cf. [Koliupanov], p. 292.

Part II Women and Society


6 ‘Without Going to a Regular Court …’: The Phenomenon of the ‘Divorce Letter’ in Petrine Russia Ol’ga Kosheleva Translated by Roger Bartlett

Bigamy: what complicated and multifarious collisions have been caused by this phenomenon, when it has turned out that one person has two (or sometimes more) living spouses! Suffice it to recall the history of Martin Guerre, the subject of the striking study by Natalie Zemon Davies.1 Entering into marriage when a spouse was still alive was not uncommon in many early-modern societies, but it was not recognised as a norm since it was forbidden by the Christian Church. It can therefore be classed as a so-called ‘normal exception’, a phenomenon incorporating both typical and atypical features. Many aspects of Russian family life in the eighteenth century, including bigamy, have been illuminated by research on the sphere of daily living, the behavioural practices of ordinary people. This research has replaced (or rather, complemented) the Russian tradition of studying the sphere of marital relationships on the basis of legal texts.2 The change in point of view and in the type of sources used has allowed us to see – as has been convincingly demonstrated by Robin Bisha’s recent article3 – that the practice of bigamy was widespread in eighteenth-century St Petersburg. The frequency of its occurrence is shown in the records of the Spiritual Consistory which Bisha used, and in documents of the Alexander Nevskii Monastery,4 the Synod, the law-courts, and other institutions. Bigamy (dvoebrachie) for present purposes means specifically the illegal contracting of a second marriage while a spouse is still alive and in the absence of permission for divorce. Strictly speaking, in Old Russian 107

108 Women and Society

the terms for ‘bigamy’ (dvoebrachie, dvoezhenstvo) implied something else: contraction of a second marriage after divorce or the death of the spouse,5 which was legal but not always approved of by the Church. Russian had no specific term for people marrying illegally while their spouse was alive: it was indicated descriptively, for example ‘woman with a living husband’ (ot zhiva muzha zhena), and the second husband was sometimes called ‘newly-wed’ (novozhen). The papers of Feodosii Ianovskii (d. 1726), Archimandrite of the Nevskii Monastery in Petersburg and de facto head of the Church in the Imperial capital, include petitions from several townspeople for divorce on the grounds of infidelity and flight from home of one of the spouses. The motivation for such a petition was the necessity of entering into a further marriage. In response Feodosii would instruct the parish priest to conduct an examination on the spot and ascertain whether witnesses confirmed the situation described in the petition and which justified divorce. Confirmation could also be supplied by the petitioner’s secular superior. The witness statements were sent to the Nevskii Monastery and Feodosii gave a ruling on this basis. Usually he gave permission for divorce and second marriage.6 The legal underpinning for his decisions was provided by references to the Kormchaia Kniga (Book of the Helmsman), which for centuries had been the principal legislative codex for family affairs, including divorce matters.7 However, by no means all townsfolk who wished to break their marital fetters brought their problem to a Church court. There was another way of resolving it, which in the final analysis contributed significantly to the common occurrence of bigamy, since it placed no limits on the reasons for divorce. It is this procedure which forms the subject of the present article. Among the petitions to Feodosii mentioned above is one from a joiner, Salkov, who describes in detail his unhappy relations with his wife and declares that she ‘asked him to let her go and to give her a letter’; but he, ‘fearing some cause [ prichina, here ‘bad or illegal action’: O.K.] on her part, gave her some household stuff (rukhliad’) and let her go, but did not give her a letter’.8 What was the ‘letter’ referred to here? It must be explained that the term ‘letter’ (pis’mo) in the seventeenth and eighteenth century designated a document of private law, whereas a letter in the modern sense was called an ‘epistle’ (gramotka). In other words, Salkov was talking about a document whose purpose was to confirm the fact that his wife had been voluntarily released by her husband. But he did not trust his wife and so did not give her the

The Phenomenon of the ‘Divorce Letter’ 109

document; however, he gave verbal permission and even provided her with material help for her journey (for which reason she was not accused of secret flight and theft of belongings, which was very usual in cases of fugitive wives). Salkov mentioned the ‘letter’ as if it was a well known document not requiring further explanation. But further explanation is essential for the modern historian, as such ‘letters’ are not to be found among the categories of documents well known to present-day researchers.9 What was the content and intended application of the aforementioned document? This question can only be answered on the basis of the texts themselves. Investigation has revealed three such ‘divorce letters’ (razvodnye pis’ma) written in the Petrine period. It is very likely that further examples will be discovered in due course, including some dating to earlier times. The first ‘letter’ forms part of a case presented for Archimandrite Feodosii’s consideration in 1718. The plaintiff, Agaf’ia, wife of the sailor Kolesnikov, accused her husband of having two other wives besides herself. She had discovered that before he married her, her husband had been married in Kazan’ and in Tver’; but now he had abandoned her, squandered her possessions on drink, and was living ‘in a disorderly manner’ in Reval. On this basis the woman asked for a divorce. The documents of the case include a ‘letter’ from Agaf’ia’s husband which says: ‘I, Kuz’ma son of Ivan Kolesnikov, have given this letter to my wife Agaf’ia Elisei’s daughter, in case she should wish to marry someone else, I, Kuz’ma son of Ivan Kolesnikov, give this letter to that effect to the four corners of the earth (na vse chetyre storony) and the witnesses to this letter are [… .].’10 The document is dated February 1718, that is, the same month in which Agaf’ia presented her petition. Her husband’s letter appended to the dossier is not mentioned in any of its other documents, so it is not clear how and why it got there. Possibly, it was the letter which prompted Agafia’s petition, since with this paper her husband rejected her; possibly, it was written specially in connection with her petition. Kolesnikov in his statement said that six years previously he had ‘married the maiden Agaf’ia for love (poliubovno), not with another wife living, … and lived with her in love and harmony (v liubve) about seven weeks’, after which Agaf’ia ‘fled from him without trace’.11 Agaf’ia for her part claimed that it was her husband who had gone off and did not live with her. The case of husband and wife Kolesnikov had no resolution, apparently because the testimony of all those involved was very contradictory and led the enquiry to a dead end.


The second ‘divorce letter’ is also preserved in a divorce case initiated by the wife. The merchant’s wife Praskov’ia Rybnikova, whose husband Ivan had landed in gaol and been condemned to penal labour,12 applied to the Synod for divorce. In her petition Praskov’ia wrote: ‘ and that husband gave me the undernamed a free letter [my italics: O. K.] in his own hand, permitting me to marry, because there is nothing to eat or drink’. A copy of this letter is appended to the petition (Praskov’ia prudently kept the original): On 1 August 1720 I the St Petersburg resident, formerly Vologda townsman, Ivan son of Aleksei Rybnikov, acknowledging my sin before God and my sovereign during my residence in Vologda, appeared under accusation of robbery (po ogovoru v tat’be) and am now held under arrest in the court (v Nadvornom sude), and have no daily subsistence; therefore in conscience I confess that I am not free to live with my wife as I should, and our daughter who lives with her, my last belongings are with her, my wife should not take them from my daughter, to whit, four images of God’s mercy in a frame (na oklade) and gilded. And because of my evil deed I release my wife Praskov’ia daughter of Vasilii from cohabitation and she may live where she desires, and if she wishes once more to take the path of entering upon lawful marriage (i ezheli pozhelaet paki vospriiati zakonnogo braka dattsa), with this autograph letter I bind myself to agree to it. And for greater assurance Ivan son of Aleksei Rybnikov wrote this letter in his own hand.13 A new decree by the monarch gave Praskov’ia a favourable opportunity to initiate her divorce proceedings. On 16 August 1720, Peter I established a previously non-existent ground for divorce, namely, that the wives of those ‘who have been exiled to eternal penal labour’ should be given their freedom, ‘since their husbands are separated from them for ever, just as if they had died’.14 The reaction of the wives concerned, as we can see, was swift: in the very same month Praskov’ia submitted her request for divorce. However, Ivan had not been exiled ‘eternally’, only for ten years, so that his case did not quite fit the decree. There is no resolution on Praskov’ia’s case, but it was evidently being prepared for a hearing in 1721, since it contains extracts from ‘appropriate’ (‘prilichnykh’) articles from the Book of the Helmsman and from City Law (Zakona Gradskogo) concerning ‘those in captivity’. This was the ecclesiastical court’s analogy for those at hard labour. On 30 August 1721 the Treaty of Nystadt was concluded, ending the Northern War between


Russia and Sweden, and in the amnesty granted to celebrate it Praskov’ia’s husband was set free. In documents of 1726 another woman is named as the wife of Ivan Rybnikov: the Muscovite Anna daughter of Andrei.15 It is not known whether Ivan had become a bigamist or a widower. The third ‘letter of dissolution’, giving a wife her freedom, was written in 1722 by a resident of the town of Tambov, the ecclesiastical clerk (tserkovnyi d”iachok) Stepan (later tonsured Samuil) Vymorkov: ‘I, Stepan son of Osip Vymorkov, give my wife her freedom (otpushchaiu zhenu svoiu na voliu), to live as she pleases, and even to get married; I make no claims, I wish to live like this, and the all-seeing eye is my witness.’16 Vymorkov was prompted to act in this way towards his wholly blameless wife by his own constant religious strivings, which had proved to be incompatible with family life. Vymorkov’s wife was fearful of the extravagant behaviour of her husband, who refused to go to church, and he consequently gave her permission to seek another spouse. The wife showed the ‘letter of dissolution’ to her spiritual father and no longer considered Stepan to be her husband, even though they continued to live under one roof. A few years later Stepan decided to go away and enter a monastery, and now it was he who needed his wife to give her agreement to the dissolving of the marriage. According to the law, without the spouse’s agreement the tonsuring of a married man or veiling of a married woman was impossible. This annulment of marital obligations was called to separate ‘by promise’ (‘po obeshchaniiu’).17 Vymorkov followed this custom. The abbot of the monastery which wished to receive Stepan personally asked the latter’s wife to give him a ‘letter of dissolution’. The letter was received: in it the wife confirmed that she would neither oppose his tonsuring nor in the future seek his detonsuring.18 The letter was certified by her spiritual father. Then the abbot personally questioned Stepan’s wife and mother, and also several neighbours as witnesses, as to whether the ‘dissolution letter’ had been written voluntarily, and whether in truth the spiritual father had certified it at their request.19 As a final proof of the voluntary nature of her release of her husband to enter the monastery, Stepan’s wife stretched out her hand to the spiritual father, a gesture confirming her good intentions. She also stated her own wish to enter into a new marriage in due course. A few years passed; the monk Samuil (formerly Stepan) was in Moscow and met there a fellow-countryman from Tambov. The latter told him that his wife had indeed married again. Neighbours and acquaintances in Tambov had been completely unconcerned by her ‘bigamy’. However,


Vymorkov himself reacted to the news quite differently: it drove him to the brink of insanity. Despite the wholly voluntary and amicable nature of the dissolution of the marriage, to which both sides had agreed so that each could go his and her own way, Vymorkov suddenly saw his wife’s bigamy as an unpardonable sin. He now considered that his wife should enter a monastery, since marriage in the lifetime of a husband was a great transgression. The only obstacle to this was the new legislation governing Church affairs, the Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi reglament) of 1721, which Vymorkov loathed: the Regulation finally and irrevocably forbade the tonsuring or veiling of married persons.20 Vymorkov, raging in his grief and pain, came to the conclusion that guilt for the coming perdition of the soul of his wife (whom he evidently loved very much) lay not with him and his decision to abandon her, but with the new Church authorities who had barred to her the proper path of pious action. In this condition and state of mind he began to curse and defame the authorities, as a result of which he found himself in the Preobrazhenskii Chancellery, which dealt with political investigations, and in which he gave a detailed account of his story. Now, on the basis of these three letters and the contexts in which they were created, we can analyse the phenomenon of the ‘dissolution’ (‘rospusknogo’) letter21 – or as it was alternatively called, ‘free’ letter. The essence of this document was the voluntary permission given to a spouse to contract another marriage or enter a monastery, or to go as Ivan Kolesnikov metaphorically wrote ‘to the four corners of the earth’, and the undertaking to make no claims one upon the other thereafter. The release of a wife by her husband was an action just as serious as the manumission of a courtyard serf, since both were thought of as not capable of independent existence. Simply to release them ‘back the way they came’ (‘vozvoiasi’), without finding them another master, was shameful and illegal. The state had long protected slaves from being released (in actual fact, driven out) by their masters in famine years, which would leave them with no means of subsistence. In the same way a husband might want to rid himself of a sick, feckless or unloved wife by giving her liberty. Already in the sixteenth century parish priests were reproached for marrying people who were in ‘legal dissolutions (v zakonnykh rospuskekh): husbands let their blameless lawful wives go and take others’.22 The Book of the Helmsman forbade the ‘release’ (‘otpusk’) of ‘blameless’ (‘nepovinnykh’) wives. A responsible husband who wished to part from his wife had to show concern for her future existence and give her the possibility to contract another marriage or go into a convent.


In all three of the above cases the ‘letters’ were composed by the husbands (apart from the fourth, written by Vymorkova about her husband’s entry into the monastery, whose exact contents are unknown). However, their composition was initiated by the wives, who wished to start a new marriage because the first was unsuccessful. The ‘release’ was given so that the wife could put her life in order. The mutual relationship between the Kolesnikovs was conflictual, as was that between the Rybnikovs, and they were not in fact living together; and while Vymorkov’s wife remained under his roof, he himself spent more time travelling than at home. The ‘letter’ was composed by the husband in order to resolve a difficult situation in the wife’s favour, to give her the opportunity to remarry. It actually performed the role of a contract between spouses in conflict, a contract set up to take account of the wife’s interests. Neither Kolesnikov nor Vymorkov thought it necessary to state in the ‘letter’ the reasons for their release of their wives. Ivan Rybnikov explained his reason: having been gaoled, he could no longer support his family. His letter includes some conditions regarding the inheritance of his young daughter, who remained to be looked after by his wife. Whereas Kolesnikov’s letter was certified by two witnesses, Stepan Vymorkov took as his sole witness ‘the all-seeing eye’, that is, he made himself subject only to divine judgment if he should break his promise. However, his wife immediately showed the ‘letter’ to her spiritual father, who apparently blessed this solution. Ivan Rybnikov wrote his letter ‘in his own hand’ and also took neither witnesses nor sureties. He motivated the release of his wife by reference to his conscience, which would not allow him to leave her without means of subsistence. Thus these documents, composed without participation of witnesses and guarantors, were based on ‘word of honour’, on trust. Their foundation lay in the ‘mutual agreement’ referred to in the Spiritual Regulation.23 The ‘letter’ given by Vymorkov’s wife, allowing him to enter the monastery, constitutes a special case. It followed an existing tradition and the texts of two similar letters are known, dating to the seventeenth century. In one the wife confirms that she is entering a nunnery ‘voluntarily, of her own free will, and not because of her husband’s rejection (izgonki) … in consultation with her husband because of her enfeeblement and dolour (dlia svoei nemoshchi i skorbnosti)’. In the other the wife, having taken the veil, permits her husband ‘to marry another wife by lawful marriage’.24 In the Vymorkov case, in contrast, we do not have the text of the letter itself, but against that the dossier gives an interesting description of the whole procedure of their divorce. The Church


authorities conducted it with the greatest care: as in the other cases the family’s spiritual father took part in the affair, and relatives and neighbours were questioned as witnesses to the voluntary nature of the decision. But all this was done purely to satisfy the authorities: the Vymorkovs had already divorced themselves independently long before. It is entirely probable that the tradition of drawing up a divorce ‘letter’ was first created by cases where the spouses entered a monastery and gave each other a ‘free’ letter. The Spiritual Regulation, in defining who should be accepted into the monastic condition and how, specifically refers to such a case: ‘… . there is a custom by which a man and wife reach mutual agreement that the husband should be tonsured and the wife should be free to marry another. This [form of] divorce seems to simple [people] to be correct, but it is greatly contrary to the word of God …’25 These words of the Regulation are eloquent proof of the fact that simple folk found the taking of such independent decisions extremely natural and the Church had to work very hard to change such opinions. Thus ‘dissolution letters’ show that besides flight from the family and ‘illegal’ freedom from family bonds there was another way: an agreement to part made between the spouses and embodied in a document which they themselves drew up. In the cases of the Kolesnikovs and the Rybnikovs, the couples sought to legalise their home-made divorce and obtain Church sanction for it, because their circumstances fell within existing legislative categories for divorce (Kolesnikov’s polygamy and Rybnikov’s penal labour). It is remarkable that the petitioners attached the ‘letters’ to the official petition which they presented to the ecclesiastical court, unconcerned about any possible reprimand because of it. There was indeed no reprimand in either case. The existence of the practice of unofficial civil divorce goes far to explain the prevalence of the phenomenon of bigamy. However, bigamy created a multitude of serious problems for those who went down this path. After a legal divorce, it was possible to regulate any problems which arose. How this was done is shown in a rare document of 1687: a contract stipulating how the husband, the nobleman Nikifor Islen’ev, was to behave after his divorce from his wife, Solomonida, née Kozhina, also of noble birth. The document does not state clearly the causes of the divorce, nevertheless the spouses evidently expected the Patriarch to give his consent to it (possibly Solomonida was entering a nunnery). It is clear, however, that the wife’s interests were being vigilantly guarded by her relatives (‘srodniki’). The husband gave them an undertaking, first, that after the divorce he would never ‘verbally abuse or dishonour’


his former wife, ‘nor reproach or in any way defame her’. Evidently the divorce had been scandalous, hence Solomonida’s relatives felt it essential on the conclusion of the affair to take this obligation from her former husband and to end his rowing with his wife. Secondly, the former husband promised never to demand the annulment of the divorce (‘chto zhit’ s neiu ne bit’ chelom’); and thirdly Nikifor promised to give his three young daughters in marriage in due course and to provide them with dowries. Failure by Islen’ev to keep to his obligations, even in trifles, was to be punished by payment of 300 roubles (a sum equal to the dowries he was promising his three daughters). This undertaking was signed by five witnesses and guarantors.26 In this way, the consequences brought by a divorce were spelled out and confirmed by agreements on the level of inter-personal relations. If the agreement was broken, it could be taken before a court. However, if the divorce was not legal, then court intervention was excluded. Family difficulties were exacerbated further, and their solution through court action were blocked, by independent dissolution of a marriage and entry into an illegal new one. Children appeared, who were thus proved to be illegitimate, and questions of inheritance arose, along with problems with dowries and property, as well as conflicts with relatives. Consequently, people who readily decided to use the method of civil divorce and bigamy were primarily those with little to lose – the poor, and people without family. A particular and frequent problem in bigamy was the existence of a living first spouse, which gave rise to the danger of his or her sudden reappearance and making of demands. A ‘divorce letter’ was to some extent a guarantee against this, since it was an ‘oath’, the breaking of which dishonoured a person in the eyes of those around him and also constituted a sin in the face of Divine judgment, especially if the surety was ‘the all-seeing eye’. There were no such guarantees for women if they fled their family and contracted a second marriage, or in cases when a husband’s absence became so long as to make the likelihood of his return highly problematic. Robin Bisha begins her article with a text which is in essence a further variation on the ‘divorce letter’. This is an agreement, not between a married couple, but between two husbands, in which the first cedes his wife to the second: Not having waited for my return from [military] service, my wife married Ivan and had children with him. Because of her defilement it is impossible for me to live as her spouse. Ivan and I have reconciled without going to interrogation. We decided that I, most humble,


shall have nothing further to do with her, my wife Irina, and their children. I give her, my wife, to him, the most humble soldier Ivan. I beg your imperial majesty to take this petition of mine and record it in the book.27 The author of this document, like the authors of the letters discussed above, felt it necessary to inform the authorities about it, considering his actions not only rational but also legal. Another case of bigamy, involving a similar agreement between two husbands, came not before an ecclesiastical court, but before the secular Nadvornyi court in St Petersburg. The soldier Ivan Zelenin was serving in Petersburg, in the Belozerskii regiment. In 1714 his widowed mother, Mar’ia daughter of Boris, his sister Akulina, by marriage Matveeva, and his cousin Aksin’ia, by marriage Iakovleva, all fled from the estate of their landlord, where they lived as courtyard serfs. They set off to find their kinsman Ivan in St Petersburg. Ivan succeeded in finding both younger fugitive women a secure home: he married them off, while their husbands were still living. Aksin’ia he married to his fellow Belozerskii private Triapitsyn, declaring her to be a widow, ‘and concealed the fact that her husband, the above-mentioned Andrei Iakovlev, was still alive’.28 At the wedding, in front of witnesses, Ivan Zelenin twice gave a false assurance that she was neither married nor a fugitive. Aksin’ia lived with Triapitsyn for four years and bore him a son and a daughter. Her cousin Akulina was married off to the stone-mason Zaitsev, who lived in the house of a corporal of the Belozerskii regiment, Boris Bychkov. Both Zaitsev and the corporal knew before the wedding that Akulina was a fugitive. In 1716, Zelenin told the court that Akulina’s first husband, Nikita Matveev, appeared ‘and he did not take her, Akulina, away from Zaitsev, but took her after Zaitsev’s death, and at present he is living with the said Akulina’.29 In this instance there is no evidence of any written contract between the two husbands, nevertheless it is clear that they had been able to come to an agreement. And the infringement of the sacrament of marriage was not a cause of concern either to the three fugitive women or to their relative Ivan, nor did it worry stone-mason Zaitsev and Corporal Bychkov, both of whom knew that Akulina was not a widow. Equally unperturbed was her first husband, who took her back after the death of Zaitsev. It may be supposed that the practical daily necessities of arranging one’s personal life and security proved more important than Church decrees. From the point of view of the Orthodox Church the unofficial independent dissolution of a marriage was illegal – marriage was a union


sanctified by the Church, and only the Church could sunder it.30 Nevertheless, as we have seen, it turns out that in ordinary life the extraecclesiastical tradition of ‘civil’ divorce continued to operate, supported by customary law. It is remarkable that a constant actor in all these cases was the parish priest, the spiritual father of his flock. The priest not only blessed divorce ‘by letter’, and certified such documents, but could also on the same basis perform the wedding service with a new spouse. All this is confirmed not only by the ‘divorce letters’ themselves, but also by legislative texts. It should be noted that the various legislative enactments and unwritten customs which existed in this area in the mediaeval society of the Muscovite state were not always consistent with one another. Daniel Kaiser has used a case of divorce from a sick spouse to highlight the contradictory provisions of marriage legislation which had Byzantine roots, and Russian enactments based on Russian customary law.31 Peter I thrust his way into the sphere of marriage legislation which hitherto had not formed part of the secular jurisdiction, and made some efforts to modernise traditional Russian marriage procedures and change them in the direction of liberalisation (for instance, requiring agreement to marriage on the part of young brides and grooms).32 He intervened likewise in questions of divorce, as we have seen in the case of the wives of those sentenced to penal servitude. In 1722, the AllRussian Emperor listed for the Synod the causes justifying divorce. In this way he subjected to revision the provisions of the Book of the Helmsman, which by now had become too far removed from contemporary life. Causes for divorce were the following: 1. reasons of adultery, and petition on that score of the spouses against each other; 2. considerations of their flight and deliberate absences one from another; 3. concerning wives who in the absence of their husbands have sought to marry others (posiagnuvshikh za drugikh), and concerning the return of such wives to their previous husbands; 4. concerning husbands found in similar misdemeanours.33 Points 3 and 4 indicate precisely bigamy during the lifetime of existing spouses, which had attracted Peter I’s attention because this phenomenon was becoming extremely obvious, especially in St Petersburg. Point 2, ‘concerning flight’, is also a reaction of Peter’s to contemporary reality, in which flight from places to which the state sought to bind


people was extremely widespread, and it was better to set off ‘on the run’ alone, and not with a family. The impression is strong that in the period of Petrine reforms the secular power also tried to liberalise divorce, by widening its accessibility. It is at least striking, for instance, that almost all the divorce petitions directed to Feodosii Ianovskii were granted by him. But as time went on the Church made divorce procedure more and more complex, making marriage difficult to dissolve,34 although in the nineteenth century too exceptional cases are known of divorce ‘by mutual amicable consent’.35 The struggle against ‘superstition’, the category covering many actions which had been carried on for centuries on the basis of customary law, led in time to intensifying Synod opposition to the signature of ‘letters of dissolution’ by the clergy. But it was only in 1730 that the Synod issued the first decree which stated: ‘Should any persons and their wives, without going to a regular court, make a divorce wilfully between themselves, then henceforward their spiritual fathers are under no circumstances to give their signature to any sort of divorce letters in such divorces, on pain of heavy fines and punishment, and on pain of unfrocking.’36 It is striking that it was not the extra-ecclesiastical divorce itself which was prohibited here, only the participation in it of the clergy. In 1767 the Synod repeated its prohibition to church ministers, who ‘should under no pretext draft divorce letters nor on the basis of them [my italics: O.K.] …. marry husbands with living wives or wives with living husbands, and if anyone is caught in any criminal breach of this obligation, they shall be tried and cast out of their office immediately, and they are all to be obliged to this by the most binding signatures’.37 This text lays bare the important fact that a ‘divorce letter’ not only guaranteed the non-interference of a husband in the subsequent life of his wife, but was also presented to the priest as a document which permitted the remarriage of a woman ‘freed’ from her husband (or man, from his wife). The fact that Church regulations forbade ‘divorce letters’, on the one hand, but on the other parish priests signed them, leads M. K. Tsaturova to conclude that this represents an evident contradiction in the clergy’s attitude to ‘do-it-yourself’ divorce. ‘The parish priest …,’ she writes, ‘undermined the strength of the Church, which stigmatised those taking part in the composition of divorce letters.’38 It seems to me that right up until the 1730s not only parish priests but also the ecclesiastical authorities had of necessity to take into account the practice of divorce by ‘letter of dissolution’. As Tsaturova correctly remarks, ‘divorce letters were not examined by the ecclesiastical authorities’; however, as we saw


in the cases examined above, they were presented together with the petition for divorce by persons who turned to the highest ecclesiastical court. Apparently the petitioners did not expect any punishment for proffering their ‘divorce letters’ to the Church authorities. We must concur with Robin Bisha’s assertion: ‘The evidence provided by this sample of marital separation cases suggests that the Church did not completely control the marital arrangements made by the Russian population, a highly mobile group. It also strongly suggests that Russian society tolerated, and even encouraged adults to remarry, regardless of the legality of the pairing.’39 ‘Divorce letters’ lay bare the ‘mechanism’ of people’s autonomous actions in the sphere of marital strategies, which they carried out on the basis of their own interests, not of rules laid down by the Church. Actions of this type are rarely reflected in sources, often they are not very legal, and consequently researchers have difficulty in finding and analysing them. In contrast, the behavioural norms reflected in monuments of legislation have been exactly and frequently described. This sort of disproportion in the source base creates a corresponding slippage also in our conceptions of the past: after all, in everyday life people usually act on the basis of real current necessity, not legal enactments. Pierre Bourdieu was pointing exactly to this perspective on [rather than WGJ’s ‘point of view’?] marital practices when he wrote: Indeed, we must break away from the legalistic kind of thinking which, to this day, haunts the entire anthropological tradition and tends to treat every practice as an act of execution. Adherents to straightforward legalism regard practices as the execution of an order or a plan, as if practices could be directly deduced from expressly constituted or legally sanctioned rules or from customary prescriptions coupled with moral or religious sanctions.40 There is an instructive contradiction between Russian legislation and court materials and the contemporary accounts of foreign visitors: whereas the official documents show the extreme complexity involved in the dissolution of marriage, the travel-writers gained the impression that divorce in Russia was an extremely easy matter.41 One may view the information provided by these foreigners simply as erroneous, as does for instance N. L. Pushkareva, who writes: ‘in this particular case the travellers passing through simply thought they saw (im pomereshchilas’): sic–RB frequently dissolved marriages’.42 However, in my view the foreign accounts deserve greater trust. Thus, Jacob Reutenfels, a Pole who


visited Russia in the service of the Duke of Tuscany in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, wrote specifically of the customary practice of divorce by ‘marriage-dissolving certificates’ (‘brakorasvodnym gramotam’) signed by the priest.43 Evidently the documents in question here are precisely ‘divorce letters’. If even passing strangers got to know of such personal matters, that is a direct confirmation that they were widespread in the daily practice of Imperial subjects. The stated contradiction thus proves to be imaginary: both the one and the other corresponded to a reality, and they speak for the fact that a given social phenomenon (such as divorce) may have a multiplicity of dimensions. What other ways did people of our period find to escape their situation, if they could neither live together nor had the possibility of divorce? They made use of sorcery, putting the evil eye on their spouse or accusing him or her of doing the same to them. Correlation between noble divorce cases and sorcery cases has been convincingly demonstrated by A. C. Lavrov.44 As can be seen from the court case of gentleman of the bedchamber (kamerger) Petr Saltykov, he sought out and hired skilful wizards to help him to somehow get rid of his wife.45 The case between the College of Foreign Affairs clerk Kirill Kavyrshin and his wife, which lasted from 1715 to 1739, shows that during this long period Kavyrshin tried everything he could think of to free himself from his wife Agrippina. He accused her of drunkenness: allegedly she squandered all their possessions to pay for drink and often when drunk passed the night in some unknown place. Agrippina countered with accusations that her husband beat her and did not support her materially. Kovyrshin (sic) came back home from a trip abroad to find his household in ruins, and drove his wife out of the door (‘sent her from the homestead without violence, so as no longer to bear the shame and the ruin’). She asserted that he ‘wants to send her in chains to the country and starve her to death in the forest, hanging her from a tree by her plaits’ and she sought a divorce,46 which was refused. Kavyrshin gave a large sum of money to his wife’s brother to place her in a nunnery or take her to live in his house, but nothing came of this. Then Kavyrshin went off to a distant family estate where, Agrippina claimed, he married a working woman with whom he had previously lived in sin (bludno) – but this also could not be proved. Agrippina, the mother of four children, countered all the actions which her husband took against her with complaints to the court, and each time the court protected her, compelling the husband to sign an agreement to treat her well. But then their quarrelling broke out again and in the end the Synod resolved that


both spouses should be sent to monasteries for correction. This couple did not succeed in finding a peaceful resolution to their conflicts, turning each time to the Church authorities for help in ensuring peace in the family home. Thus, divorce by means of a mutual agreement between the spouses formulated in a ‘divorce letter’, although illegal, was nevertheless the most ‘civilised’ solution to the problem of family breakdown. Close scrutiny of the practice of writing ‘divorce letters’ casts light on several important social phenomena. With regard to the functioning of juridical norms, they provide clear evidence that written ecclesiastical law defining the reasons for which divorce could be granted by no means comprehensively regulated the actions of people in this area.47 This was the case in the eighteenth century, and in earlier periods a similar situation was probably not less but even more common. With regard to court practice, the presence of ‘divorce letters’ in trial dossiers, and their certification by priests, suggests that Church authorities as a whole took the ‘letters’ into account, even though they tried to combat this particular practice. With regard to the organisation of family life, the writing of the ‘letters’ testifies to the responsibility which a husband could feel when he left his wife alone, by herself. By writing this document, he increased her chances of marrying again. Although the freedom which a husband’s ‘divorce letter’ conferred on his wife was doubtful, her situation was certainly better and clearer than that of wives who were simply abandoned, or whose husbands’ whereabouts were simply unknown. With regard to the functioning in society of mechanisms for conflict resolution, the practice of writing ‘divorce letters’ gives evidence of a special type of agreement. In the sphere of marriage relations there existed many ‘technologies’ of deceit. It is well known that at the contracting of a marriage the bride’s defects might be concealed, trickery might be used over the dowry, the officiating priest might be led into error through concealment of the existence of a living spouse. In family life husbands and wives also deceived each other for the most various reasons, which are difficult to enumerate but easy to imagine. The fear of deceit in the sphere of marriage, as in other social arenas, provoked defensive measures, including such things as the concluding of formal agreements certified by witnesses and guarantors. These agreements, if broken, could be taken before a court. However, of special interest are the agreements made on the basis of trust and moral obligations. Two of the three letters examined have these features. If officially compiled agreements ended up in the courts, were preserved in their records and finally became accessible to historians, those agreements not intended


for possible public use remained in personal archives and were lost when their owners departed this life. Only individual examples have been preserved, mainly such as found their way by chance into court papers. This is true of the three ‘divorce letters’ examined above. They are not new finds: the ‘letters’ of Kolesnikov, Rybnikov and Vymorkov have been cited in various publications. However, the true significance of the phenomenon of divorce letters has not hitherto been properly appreciated by any of those who have published them, including the author of this chapter. The exceptional significance of these letters is exposed only in the light of the history of daily life, which interrogates the active actions of simple people, investigates how they autonomously – and not at the command of the authorities – lay out their life strategies, and how they construct mutual relations with one another. The ability to structure life on consensual principles, on trust, and not on enmity and deceit, testifies to the character of the society’s development. How far this was typical of the daily life of the Imperial Russian population in the eighteenth century we can judge only from an insignificant number of pieces of evidence. ‘Divorce letters’ unquestionably belong among this number.

Notes 1. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard U P, 1983). 2. See A. Zagorovskii, O razvode po russkomu pravu (Khar’kov, St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. F. Zil’berberga, 1884); N. O. Sposobin, O razvode v Rossii (Moscow: Tipografiia M. N. Lavrova i Ko., 1881); M. K. Tsaturova, Russkoe semeinoe pravo XVI–XVIII vv. (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1994), pp. 65–98. 3. Robin Bisha, ‘Marriage, Church and Community in 18th-Century St Petersburg’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 227–42. 4. See L. N. Semenova, Ocherki istorii byta i kul’turnoi zhizni Rossii. Pervaia polovina XVIII v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), p. 15. 5. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–XVII vv., ed. S. G. Barkhudarov and others (Moscow: Nauka, 1975, 26 fascicles to date), Vyp. IV (1977), pp. 184, 185. Translator’s note: In much of this chapter dvoebrachie, dvoezhenstvo are used in this Old Russian sense. However, for convenience the terms will be rendered throughout by the etymologically correct equivalent ‘bigamy’. 6. Opisanie arkhiva Aleksandro-Nevskoi lavry vo vremia tsarstvovaniia Petra Velikogo, 3 vols (St Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tipografiia, 1903–1916). 7. The earliest (Efremovskii) redaction of the Book of the Helmsman dates back to the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. See Svodnyi katalog slaviano-russkikh rukopisnykh knig, khraniashchikhsia v SSSR. (XI–XIII vv.), ed. L. P. Zhukovskaia, B. N. Tikhomirov, N. B. Shelamanovaia (Moscow: Nauka, 1884), pp.116–17. 8. Opisanie arkhiva Aleksandro-Nevskoi lavry, II, col. 1087.

The Phenomenon of the ‘Divorce Letter’ 123 9. ‘Divorce letter’ as a category of document is found only in Tsaturova, see pp. 88–89. 10. Opisanie arkhiva Aleksandro-Nevskoi lavry, II, col. 397. The phrase na vse chetyre storony expresses some irritation or anger on the writer’s part. 11. Ibid. 12. Further on Ivan Rybnikov see O. E. Kosheleva, ‘Odin iz Ivanov v epokhu Petra (Opyt personal’noi istorii)’, in Kazus-2002: Individual’noe i personal’noe v istorii, ed. by Iu. L. Bessmertnyi and others (Moscow: O.G.I., 2002), pp. 305–28. 13. RGIA, f. 796, op. 1, d. 139, l. 2. 14. Zakonodatel’stvo Petra I, ed. by A. A. Preobrazhenskii and T. E. Novitskaia (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1997), p. 719. 15. RGADA, f. 371, 1725 g., d. 3208, ll.20 et al. 16. M. I. Semevskii, Tainyi sysk Petra I (repr. Smolensk: Rusich, 2000), p. 312. 17. Cf: ‘… mat’ ego Evdokiia Ivanova s muzhem svoim po obeshchaniiu rasstalas’ i postriglas’ v Voznesenskom monastyre …’ Opisanie arkhiva AleksandroNevskoi lavry, I, col. 777. 18. Semevskii, p. 317. 19. This was a customary procedure which replaced notarial certification of a document and was also used, for instance, in the certification of wills. 20. Zakonodatel’stvo Petra I, pp. 594–95. Vymorkov had no contact with his former wife at this time, and she was ignorant of and in no way affected by his unhappy thoughts. 21. Rospusk in Old Russian meant ‘dissolution of marriage’, ‘divorce’. Cf. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–XVII vv., Vyp. 22, ed. A. N. Shalamov and K. A. Maksimovich (1977), p. 217. 22. Akty istoricheskie, sobrannye i izdannye Arkheograficheskoiu kommissieiu, 5 vols (St Petersburg, 1841–1842), I (1841), p. 543. 23. Zakonodatel’stvo Petra I, p. 594. 24. Akty iuridicheskie, ili Sobranie form starinnogo deloproizvodstva (St Petersburg: Tipografiia II otdeleniia sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Kantseliarii, 1838), p. 425. 25. Zakonodatel’stvo Petra I, p. 594. 26. ‘Razvodnaia zapis’ XVII veka. Predislovie i publikatsiia N. Boshkovskoi i B. Morozova’, Rodina, 10 (1992), 96. 27. Bisha, p. 227. 28. RGADA, f. 285, op.1, chast’ 2, kn. 1553, ll.1ob.-2. 29. Ibid. 30. Among the common people there also existed another view of the Church sacrament of marriage, which was rejected by (for example) the seventeenthcentury Old Believer sect of the Fedoseevtsy. This view may have been more widespread. 31. Daniel Kaiser, ‘Razvod, ser’eznaia bolezn’ i supruzheskaia liubov’ v Rossii v XVII v.’, in Ot Drevnei Rusi k novoi Rossii. Iubileinyi sbornik, posviashchennyi chl.-korr. RAN Ia. N. Shchapovu, ed. A. N. Sakharov and others (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, Palomnicheskii tsentr Moskovskogo patriarkhata, 2005), pp. 260–67. 32. Zakonodatel’stvo Petra I, pp. 710–14. 33. Ibid., p. 715.

124 Women and Society 34. Gregory Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760–1860’, Journal of Modern History, 62.4 (1990), 709–46 (pp. 724–25). 35. For instance, Princess M. G. Golitsyna divorced her husband amicably and married L. K. Razumovskii; Countess Saltykova (née Kurakina) married P. A. Chicherin during the lifetime of her husband: E. Lavrent’eva, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ dvorianstva pushkinskoi pory. Etiket. (Moscow: Olma Press, 2005), pp. 296–97. 36. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, 45 vols (Tipografiia II otdeleniia sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Kantseliarii, 1831), VIII (1831), no. 5655. 37. Ibid., XVIII (1831), no. 12935. 38. Tsaturova, p. 88. 39. Bisha, p. 239. 40. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction’, in Family and Society. Selections from Annales, ed. R. Forster and O. Ranum (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins U P, 1976), pp. 117–44 (pp. 117–18). 41. Semenova, p. 52. 42. N. L. Pushkareva, Chastnaia zhizn’ russkoi zhenshchiny: nevesta, zhena, liubovnitsa (X. – nach. XIX vv.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1997), p. 238. 43. Iakov Reitenfels, ‘Skazanie svetleishemu gertsogu Toskanskomu Koz’me Tret’emu o Rossii’, Chteniia v Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh, 3 (1905), 1–137 (p. 176). [From Jacob Reutenfels, De rebus Muschoviticis ad serenissimum Magnum Hetruriae Ducem Cosmum tertium (Patavium, 1680).] 44. A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii. 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2000), pp. 337–40. 45. See E. B. Smilianskaia, Volshebniki. Bogokhul’niki. Eretiki. Narodnaia religioznost’ i ‘dukhovnye prestupleniia’ v Rossii XVIII v. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo gumanitarnogo universiteta, 2003). 46. RGADA, f. 1183, 1736 g., op. 1, d. 205, ll. 7, 10ob. 47. On the parallel existence of Russian and Church Slavonic law, see V. M. Zhivov, ‘Istoriia russkogo prava kak lingvosemioticheskaia problema’, in Semiotics and the History of Culture. In Honor of Jurij Lotman. Studies in Russian, ed. Morris Halle and others (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988), pp. 46–128 (p. 47).

7 The Function of Fashion: Women and Clothing at the Russian Court (1700–1762) Paul Keenan

The concerted effort to introduce European-style clothing by Peter I (1682–1725), beginning in January 1700, has been analysed by a number of historians, who have generally located them within the wider reorientation of Russia during his reign.1 The developments relating to clothing and appearance were significant for a range of reasons. In part, they played an important role in shaping foreign perceptions of Russia and of its place within a wider European cultural sphere, which was firmly established by the second half of the eighteenth century. They also had a major impact on the self-perception of the various groups within Russian society which were affected by the reforms, not least noblewomen, who were included in the newly emerging social life in Moscow and St Petersburg. Whilst there have been a number of excellent discussions of the importance of developments in clothing and fashion in eighteenth-century Russia, the role of elite dress within these social forums has not been adequately examined, and will form the basis of this chapter.2 There will be three major areas for discussion here. First, the changes to women’s clothing introduced during Peter I’s reign need to be placed in a wider context. Second, the elements of continuity with Muscovite fashions must be considered alongside the different nature of European clothing, which required new skills of its wearers. A key testing ground for these skills was the Imperial Russian court which, as distinct from its Muscovite predecessor, provided the focal point for the social life of the elite during this period, through the celebrations and other events organised as part of the Court calendar. It also increasingly furnished 125


models for the Russian elite; the emphasis on the need to wear ‘appropriate’ garments for participation in certain exclusive social spaces played an important role in ‘refining’ elite female clothing in this period. However, the cross-dressing masquerades which occurred during the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna (1741–1761) stressed the wearing of ‘inappropriate’ clothing, and this development, related to the previous one, raises some interesting questions about the changed nature of clothing and gender roles for the Russian elite. The final section will look at the perceived ‘costs’ of these developments in both financial and moral terms.

Introduction, negotiation, and acceptance The cosmetic nature of the reforms has led to questions about the extent to which the Russians understood the ‘meaning’ of their new clothing, or whether for them it was simply an external symbol of compliance with the tsar’s new laws. Given the undoubted resentment and discomfort caused by the process, which will be discussed below, it is important to consider the reasons why European dress became firmly entrenched as the dominant elite fashion in Russia by the end of Peter I’s reign. First, this is due to the fact that there was the same blend of financial and physical coercion, combined with an element of shame, that underscored a number of other Petrine reforms.3 Second, in Russia, especially in the seventeenth century, proximity to the tsar was essential to gain influence and favour at court and to a considerable degree during Peter I’s reign, but increasingly so after his death, this access depended largely on adhering to the regulations on dress and grooming. As a result, the established nobility were keen to maintain their position in relation to the ruler, whilst the less-established nobility were provided with the opportunity to advance their position.4 To begin this discussion of women’s clothing in this period, it is important to note briefly the background to the Petrine reforms. The Russian elite was already familiar with elements of European dress owing to the presence of an increasing number of foreigners in Moscow from the early seventeenth century onwards. However, in the latter half of the century there were official concerns, in part influenced by the hostile attitude of the Church, about the spread of such clothing as a symbol of other, more insidious elements of Western culture.5 As a result, laws were issued in the late seventeenth century outlawing the adoption of such Western fashions by members of the Muscovite elite.6 Although these laws did not make specific mention of female clothing, the relatively secluded lives of elite Muscovite women

The Function of Fashion 127

during this period meant there was little need for legal discussion of their apparel.7 The regency of Sophia Alekseevna (1682–1689) saw a gradual relaxation of attitudes toward Western fashions in general, and her favourite, Prince Vasilii V. Golitsyn, was known to dress in the contemporary Polish style when entertaining guests at his palace.8 The regent herself contributed to what has been described as the gradual ‘emergence’ of women by sitting for a European-style portrait, albeit wearing traditional Muscovite dress. Some of the developments of this period can be seen in a portrait (parsuna) of tsar Fedor Alekseevich’s widow, Marfa Apraksina (1664–1715). The identity of the artist and the date of composition are unknown (although the late 1680s seems most likely), but the manner in which she is dressed gives a useful indication of typical elite women’s clothing in this period. She wears long, formal robes with gold decorative embroidery in a number of layers. Her head is covered with a formal head-dress (kokoshnik), a decorated band intended to cover the hair, and only her face and hands are exposed. However, she is holding a small dog and a closed fan, both of which were already common features of Western elite female portraits. This is their first known appearance in a Russian portrait, which leads to questions about the familiarity of the Russian elite with such symbols of Western culture.9 Peter I’s interest in European clothing has been linked to his early exposure to it in the Foreign Quarter in Moscow and then again during the Grand Embassy in 1697–1698. In terms of official legislation, his reform of everyday clothing began on 4 January 1700, forcing members of the elite and Russia’s urban population to adopt initially ‘Hungarian’ dress.10 This regulation was reissued on 30 December 1701, with the emphasis instead on German and French dress and with the explicit inclusion of the wives and daughters of the groups affected.11 These regulations were subsequently extended on 28 February 1702 to include the clothing worn on ceremonial occasions.12 There is a question about how the changes in clothing were demonstrated to the affected groups. I. A. Zheliabuzhskii (b. 1638), a member of the Russian elite, describes how dummies (chuchely) were set up by the gates of Moscow to display the new manner of dress publicly, but there is no indication whether this applied to both male and female clothing.13 However, it could be argued that this practice persisted in a slightly different form for the rest of this period, with merchants using small mannequins known as pandory, particularly from Paris, to show their Russian customers designs for dresses and types of material.14


Commenting on the (admittedly limited) evidence from contemporary art, Kirsanova suggests that there was a necessary period of adjustment, during which Russian women had to come to terms both with their new appearance and the manner in which they conducted themselves in such clothing. The fact that there were elements in common between the traditional Muscovite and the newer European styles aided the process of transition, although there were often important differences in intent. For example, the French fontange head-dress, which was a ribboned frame worn at the front of the head, could be worn in a similar manner to the traditional Russian kokoshnik. This might appeal to women wishing to cling to the practice of covering their heads in public, even though its function was fashionable, rather than preservation of modesty.15 Given that clothing was an important reflection of rank in Muscovite Russia, the reform of female dress meant re-evaluating how status could be reflected through the new European fashions.16 Whereas the expensive foreign materials purchased to make clothing for the women of the tsar’s family and other leading boiar families, such as silk and brocade, had been imported from the Ottoman and Persian empires during the seventeenth century,17 the Petrine reforms shifted the emphasis to Western Europe, with Paris and London becoming the important influences on female clothing. This was not merely in terms of the designs for the dresses, but also the cloth and the related accessories, such as shoes, fans, and headgear. Another important indicator of wealth, jewellery, also highlights the transition from Muscovite to European, with the recasting of older pieces into more modern designs.18 In other areas relating to female appearance traditional Muscovite fashion persisted. For example, cosmetics were used by Muscovite women to ensure the requisite pale skin and red cheeks, which were traditionally considered the signs of feminine beauty.19 This practice continued into the eighteenth century when such heavy make-up drew comment from several contemporaries. For example, both Peter Henry Bruce (1692–1757), a Scottish officer in the Russian army, and Friedrich Christian Weber (dates unknown), a member of the Hanoverian embassy, noted this ongoing tendency amongst Petrine women, with the former commenting on ‘that preposterous custom of painting their faces’.20 However, the indications are that, as with clothing, this was another area where a process of ‘refinement’ was taking place. Evidence from the 1740s suggests that the women of the Russian elite were keen to emulate European cosmetic fashions, specifically in relation to rouge, and that techniques for applying them were developed and spread


amongst court circles.21 The English fashion for beauty spots (or patches), which were small pieces of silk or velvet used at first to cover blemishes on the skin, became popular in Russia in this period.22 The unfamiliar of their use can be seen in a mid-eighteenth century woodcut (lubok), which set out their potential locations and meanings.23 Despite these links with existing Muscovite fashions, the sheer physical nature of European clothing was different. For Muscovite women who were accustomed to long, layered and relatively loose shifts and dresses, the introduction of corsets was the cause of some discomfort. Such corsets were essentially cloth bodices with strips of metal or whalebone sewn in to shape the figure and specifically to flatten the chest. As a result, a woman with a developed bust would find this squeezed upwards by the pressure of the corset. In this case, an additional bodice was worn under the dress, which was laced at the side to ensure that everything was kept in place and the ideal shape was maintained.24 Two main types of corsets were found in Russia: the English, which was laced down the front, and the French, laced down the back and generally tighter, allowing for a waist of only forty centimetres.25 This ideal of a flattened chest and a compressed waistline can be seen in the portraits of women wearing European dress from the first half of the eighteenth century.26 Such corsetry could make it difficult to breathe and move normally, requiring the wearers to alter their posture and bearing accordingly. The process of transition was complicated further with the emergence of French-style paniers after 1718, more commonly referred to as a fizhma or fizhbein (from the German fischbein). The latter was a round (and later oval) birch-strip or whale-bone framework worn around the waist over an underskirt, on top of which an outer skirt would sit, giving the overall dress a conical shape.27 This had a number of consequences for the wearer’s posture and movement. It was no longer possible to stand with one’s hands by one’s sides, meaning that they were usually bent at the elbow and held in front. Also, the sheer size of the frame (which could be varied according to the social occasion) made any lateral movement difficult and previously simple manoeuvres, such as walking around a room, sitting down or passing through a doorway, became an exercise in themselves.28 This was not an issue confined to Russia: for example, there were calls to ban such ‘hoops’ in early seventeenth-century England, following incidents in 1613 and 1616 when they were held responsible for blocking the entrances to ‘masquing halls’.29 This latter point highlights an important issue: women in Russia had not merely to deal with the new fashions on their own terms but they


were required to participate in newly created social events. Peter I’s intentions were made clear at a reception held in the Lefort palace in 1699. Although the women were in a separate room for most of the evening, their very participation was unusual enough to draw comment from Johannes Korb (dates unknown), secretary to the Habsburg envoy who was present at the event. ‘This day, too, beheld a great departure from Russian manners, which up to this forbade the female sex from appearing at public assemblies of men, and from festive gaieties, for some were not only allowed to be at the dinner, but also at the dancing afterwards.’30 This unfamiliar nature of this social environment involved a number of different considerations for elite women, not least the need to interact with the opposite sex in a non-domestic setting and the altered nature of personal comportment in the new clothing. However, one of the features of these social gatherings was to provide the means to tackle both of these problems – dancing. Its introduction into Russian social life was complicated by the fact that the Russian elite considered such activities beneath their dignity, given the traditional association of dancing with peasant festivities.31 Moreover, the process of learning the skills necessary for even the most basic dances was conducted in a hurried and haphazard manner. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that Peter himself was not formally taught to dance, and proceedings were dominated by his personal authority, rather than by formal instruction.32 However, the sheer necessity to acquire these skills, not least in view of the degree of Petrine compulsion involved in elite social life, meant that dancing became an important element in noble education. Foreigners were soon employed to teach dancing, which included not only trained dancing tutors but also Swedish officers captured during the Great Northern War.33 One of these early ‘dance masters’ in Russia was the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Landé (d. 1747), who was employed at the Russian court during Peter I’s reign. He was responsible for teaching several members of the Imperial family to dance, including the young Elizaveta Petrovna.34 Therefore, although women were undoubtedly affected by the constrictive nature of their new clothing and had to contend with an increased social profile, the emergence of dancing as a desirable accomplishment for young noblewomen reflects its importance as part of this process of change. It should be stressed that Russian women were not alone in facing these issues during the early eighteenth century. The emphasis on proper dance instruction and application of these skills in the appropriate social settings that can be seen in Russia was mirrored in contemporary England and France.35 The key difference lies in the fact


that women in Western European countries had enjoyed a much longer period of familiarisation with both the style of dress and the type of dances, drawing on developments in both areas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In contrast, Russian women were forced to deal with these developments being imposed by the tsar’s authority in a relatively short space of time. Yet, for all the difficulties that Petrine women faced in making the transition to the new style of dress, there were successes, especially amongst the younger women. For example, in 1721 the French ambassador, Jacques de Campredon (dates unknown), noted the grace and charm of the president of the Justice College Andrei A. Matveev’s daughter, Mar’ia, both of which he took as evidence of a good education.36 Friedrich von Bergholz (1699–1765) made similar comments on the young Princess Varvara A. Cherkasskaia (1711–1767), adding that she could have passed as having been educated in France.37 The Imperial family also led by example. Although tsaritsa Praskov’ia Fedorovna (1664–1723), widow of tsar Ivan Alekseevich, was allowed to continue to dress in the old Muscovite manner, her three daughters, including the future monarch Anna Ivanovna (1730–1740), dressed in German fashion ‘in public’, as noted by Cornelius de Bruyn, who painted their portraits during his visit to Moscow in 1702.38 Similarly, Peter I’s half-sister Natal’ia Alekseevna (1673–1716) owned eleven corsets, four fontanges and seven fans, as well as a large number of mirrors. This wardrobe was reflected in a portrait of her by Ivan Nikitin (c. 1688–1741), painted in 1715, which shows her dressed and styled in a European manner.39 However, the reforms faced resistance in a number of areas, some of which have already been touched on. For example, in the period 1701–1724, there were seventeen different decrees dealing with clothing, which calls into question the effectiveness and enforceability of the Petrine legislation.40 As with a number of the Petrine reforms, there were practical limitations to enforcing such changes, especially outside the major cities, but also occasionally within them, when official attention was directed elsewhere. For example, Weber noted that women were prone to revert to more traditional clothing when at home in Moscow or on their estates.41 In a similar period, a Russian informant to the Secret Chancery, one of the main ‘policing’ institutions, alleged that noblewomen in Moscow were dressing in the traditional manner and mocking ladies in ‘German’ dress. This had serious implications, since the women named in the letter (such as the wives of Petr Dolgorukii and Ivan MusinPushkin) were from well-established influential noble families.42


Although by 1725 such cases were very much a minority, it is interesting to note that laws prohibiting old-style Russian clothes continued to be issued during the reigns of Catherine I (1725–1727) and Elizaveta Petrovna; the latter reigned forty years after the first clothing reform was issued.43 Nevertheless, by Peter I’s death, European clothing was firmly established as the dominant fashion for the Russian social and urban elite. The decades that followed saw a period of consolidation and ‘refinement’ in relation to elite clothing. This process was bound up with the Russian court.

The ‘refining’ influence of court social life Although the origins of the reform of the Russian court date to Peter I’s reign, it was only in the period following his death in 1725 that the court began to emerge as a European-style institution in line with its foreign equivalents.44 This process began in earnest in the reign of Anna Ivanovna (1730–1740), with an expanded roster of Court officials, a more regular calendar of entertainments, and a corresponding increase in spending.45 The court continued to function as an important model for members of the elite and the wider nobility in terms of their appearance and social life. Similarly, female rulers who dominated the period 1725–1762 influenced the appearance and activities of the elite, not least women. The personal tastes of the empresses, in terms of dress, accessories, and entertainments, had a lasting impact on the social lives of the highest social echelons in St Petersburg and Moscow. There was an increased emphasis on the ‘appropriate’ clothing required by elite women in order to participate in a variety of social events and to be considered ‘refined’. An important source for the post-Petrine period are the court journals (kamer-fur’erskie zhurnaly). These journals were compiled by the court chamberlains to record the day-to-day conduct of the court. As such, they include orders from the Court Office and summaries of the major events which, although often brief, provide important details about the clothing expected on such occasions. The influence of German and subsequently French court fashions on the clothing and grooming of Russian ladies is clear from these entries. For example, during the reign of Anna Ivanovna, the most commonly required clothing for women at major court celebrations was the samara, which had its origins in the Dutch word samaar (dress), although the dress itself more likely resembled the style of the French contouche.46 This was essentially a loose overdress with a pleated back, which was worn over the usual corset and


decorated underskirt, supported by a panier.47 This style evolved into the more refined and formal robe à la française (roba in Russian), principally with the incorporation of a more defined waistline, and this became the dominant style of dress for court occasions during the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna.48 From the mid-1740s her court ladies were allowed to attend the regular court days (kurtagi) in shlafroki, from the German word schlafrock. These dresses were similar to the type of informal morning dress worn in England.49 Another important source, the wedding inventories of several leading court ladies of this period, mentions a number of other styles, notably the mantua (from the French manteuil) which had been the dominant style of formal court dress in late seventeenthcentury Europe.50 During the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna, wider access to certain court events led to a number of regulations on what constituted ‘appropriate’ dress for such occasions. The required dress for the series of ‘public’ masquerades, which were open to the wider nobility (rather than simply members of the court elite), in 1751 was described in the order issued by the Court Office as ‘appropriate’ (prilichnyi) and in the entry in the court journal as ‘decent’ (pristoinyi). Anyone dressed in pilgrim, ‘harlequin’ or ‘indecent’ (nepristoinyi) rural costumes was prohibited from attending these events. Similarly, cheap or tawdry fripperies and glass jewellery were not allowed.51 The importance of these regulations lies in the fact that they would exclude anyone who could not afford to dress in a suitable fashion for what was an elite social forum. The prohibited costumes are all variations on peasant or everyday clothing, with ‘harlequin’ referring to the popular theatrical character, rather than a proper, and frequently expensive, masquerade costume. Similarly, the stipulations on jewellery and accessories for women were intended to stress wealth and therefore status. ‘Inappropriate’ clothing could also take other forms. An order issued in May 1755, shortly before a ‘public’ masquerade held during the visit of an Ottoman embassy, specifically forbade anyone to wear a Turkish costume.52 Although this step was probably taken to avoid causing offence, it is worth noting that in contemporary Western Europe ‘Turkish’ dress for women (usually meaning dancing costumes) was frowned upon because of its loose, translucent nature.53 The same process of defining ‘appropriate’ dress can be seen in relation to the theatre. Although performances became an established part of the court calendar under Anna Ivanovna, no specific dress regulations for women appear before the 1750s. Small audiences for court theatre prompted Elizaveta Petrovna to order in June 1751 that wealthy merchants and their wives should be allowed to attend performances, and,


importantly, the order ends with the proviso that their clothing should not be ‘objectionable’ (tol’ko b odety byli ne gnusno).54 The order was issued by the Court Office at the end of the month, with the emphasis now on the need for the audience to dress ‘decently’ (v pristoinom ubranstve).55 An order of the following year, which allowed officers’ wives to attend, made a more specific reference to shlafroki (discussed above) as the preferred form of dress.56 Interestingly, the announcements for theatrical performances by Giovanni Battista Locatelli’s company in St Petersburg in the late 1750s included a similar requirement for their paying audience to be ‘well-dressed’.57 The Summer Gardens were another social space that was opened to wider access during Elizaveta Petrovna’s reign and clothing regulations were introduced for it as a result. In a law issued by the Court Office to the Main Police Chancellery in May 1752, a number of social groups, including the nobility, various military and naval ranks, and wealthy merchants, were allowed to ‘stroll’ in the gardens on certain days. Importantly, their wives and daughters were included in the law as well. However, women were not allowed to enter if they wore clothing considered ‘inappropriate’ for their status (v pristoinykh s ikh zvaniem plat’iakh). Prohibited items included domestic headwear (v chepchikakh) or dresses without hooped underskirts (ne v fizhmennykh iupkakh).58 One suggestion regarding these clothing stipulations was that they were intended to prevent not only urban peasant women from accessing the gardens, but also prostitutes.59 A further order on the subject from 1755 further mentions that ‘Russian’ and ‘simple’ dresses were not to be worn either, with the latter defined in a subsequent order to the sentries for the gardens as dresses without the hooped underskirts, as noted above.60 Finally, the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna saw the introduction of an element of court social life which specifically undermined the accepted conventions of the new fashions: the cross-dressing masquerades (metamorfozy, ‘transformations’). The inspiration for and origins of these masquerades is not clear from the available evidence since, as will be discussed below, such behaviour was very unusual in the Russian context. However, their importance for this discussion lies in the fact that they serve as a mirror image to the Petrine reforms of women’s clothing, which were instead applied to men in this case. As a result, they highlight the extent of the changes that Russian women were forced to deal with in the first half of the eighteenth century. The metamorfozy were first mentioned in the court journals during the Empress’s stay in Moscow in 1744, which make clear the transgender costume for the occasion. Although the future Catherine II noted in an early draft of her Mémoires


that masquerades took place every Tuesday, it is not clear from her description whether cross-dressing was a regular feature. Her inclusion of a comment that Elizaveta Petrovna invited only ‘those whom she herself selected’ is indicative of the limited nature of this phenomenon, even when it came to the involvement of the court elite.61 Even with this selective approach, it is clear from Catherine’s description that most of the guests at these masquerades were far from enthusiastic participants, again highlighting the importance of the ruler’s tastes and preferences for the social life of the elite. In part, their attitude was the result of the fact that neither sex was flattered by the transformation. The gentlemen of the court felt ashamed of their ‘hideous’ (hideux) appearance, and were in a foul mood for the evening. The ladies present were only slightly better off, since they plainly did not suit the cut of their masculine clothing and consequently appeared unattractive: ‘Most of the women resembled stunted little boys, and the eldest had fat, short legs that hardly flattered them.’62 Whilst Catherine expresses her enjoyment of such events, albeit pointing out that she was only fifteen at the time, the only other person who seems to have enjoyed dressing in the manner of the opposite sex was the Empress, who apparently had the build to carry off such an outfit convincingly. In both instances when she mentions the cross-dressing masquerades in her Mémoires, Catherine notes how well Elizaveta Petrovna suited this manner of dress and that she was able to dance with her usual grace.63 The other factor which contributed to the general discomfort of those present was the difficulty of manoeuvring in such unaccustomed clothing. Given the importance of dance as part of a noble education, and its role in conditioning a person’s movement, discussed above, the reversal of both clothing and gender roles led to considerable confusion. For men, it meant having to negotiate the wide hooped underskirts of their clothing. For women, there was more freedom of movement, but they had to manoeuvre around their partners, whilst fulfilling an unfamiliar leading role in proceedings.64 To illustrate this point, Catherine describes the tangle that she gets into with her partner, Count Karl Sievers, during the dancing of a polonaise, a dance in which the man usually takes the lead. ‘Countess Hendrikof, who was dancing behind me, was knocked over by Monsieur Sievers’s panier, as he gave me his hand in turning [as part of the dance], and, in falling, she hit me in such a fashion that I fell underneath the panier which had lifted in front of me.’65 Although it is intended to be an amusing anecdote, it nevertheless highlights the physical problems that such clothing could create for inexperienced wearers.


These masquerades appeared again in the calendar of court entertainments only in 1750, when the court was in its more usual residence in St Petersburg. As a result, this second occasion is recorded not only in the official court journals but also in the order to the palace sentries, which uses the term metamorfoza and notes that participants are not required to wear masks.66 Participants on this occasion included the various court office-holders and the top two ranks of the Generalitet with their wives. The male participants were not required to be especially discerning in their choice of evening wear this time: ‘for [gentlemen] the following is available: samaras, women’s caftans or shlafory’.67 Catherine’s discussion of this second instance of the metamorfozy in her Mémoires makes more specific reference to the manner of dress expected of male participants: ‘large hoop skirts’ (grandes jupes de baleine), dresses, and feminine court hairstyles (coeffés comme les dames l’étoient les jours de cour).68 The official entry makes specific mention of the Chief Lady-inWaiting (Ober-Gofmeisterina) Golitsyna, who was to dress in male masquerade dress, including a ‘domino’, although no explanation was given for this stipulation.69 For all their subsequent infamy, these cross-dressing masquerades remained an isolated phenomenon in Russia. Although an established part of contemporary Western masquerades, such gender reversal was very rare in Russian culture, even at Peter I’s ‘All-Drunken Synod’.70 They were relatively short-lived and it has been suggested that Elizaveta Petrovna simply lost interest when her attention shifted to the theatre.71 However, they provide an interesting balance to the other examples of court social life in this period. They confirmed the importance of the ruler’s authority in establishing such clothing at the Russian court, albeit in this inverted form. Similarly, the reversal of clothing stressed the associated skills necessary to carry off the new fashions successfully. Whilst for women this was certainly uncomfortable and embarrassing, their male counterparts had to deal with considerably more practical problems and to learn how to walk, dance, and otherwise conduct themselves in their unfamiliar, wide dresses, in short to confront the very same issues that women had been forced to deal with decades earlier. However, with the exception of the descriptions provided by Catherine’s Mémoires, we have little direct evidence of the reactions of those affected.

Counting the costs of change In this final section the reaction of contemporaries to the role of both women and clothing in the expanded court social calendar will be


discussed. This reaction centred on two sets of concerns. First, there were the issues of gender and morality raised by European fashions. As discussed in the first section, traditional dress for most Muscovite women had been multi-layered, and effectively concealed the outline of the figure. Clothing was intended to leave the face as the only exposed area, thereby ensuring that the Orthodox ideal of modesty was upheld. This meant that, for all but unmarried girls, a form of head covering was essential, such as a headscarf or the kokoshnik.72 In contrast, the new Western style of dress had a defined waistline, visible décolletage, and bare forearms; hair was worn uncovered and dressed in an unfamiliar manner, with curls, powder, and other accessories introduced during this period.73 The discomfort and moral concerns that the new clothing represented for women was noted by several contemporaries. For example, on several occasions in his account of Russia, Weber notes their physical unease at the new mixed social gatherings. For example, at a court celebration in 1714, he commented ‘they were already at that time in the French dress, but it seemed to sit very uneasy upon them, particularly the hoop-petticoats.’74 The sense of exposure felt by Russian women was still of some concern by the early 1730s. According to Mrs Vigor (1700–1783), then wife of the English Resident Claudius Rondeau, Anna Ivanovna was impressed by her English dress because it was ‘much more decent than any she had seen’, which was linked to the fact that ‘it did not show the neck so much’.75 It seems likely that this was a reference to the stays worn by English women, which were tighter and provided more coverage than their French equivalents, which emphasised the décolletage.76 Yet, despite moral concerns within Russia about European clothing in general, there were certain moral standards associated with clothing in common between Russia and Western Europe. For example, Anna Leopol’dovna (1718–1746), later regent for the infant Ivan VI (1740–1741), apparently disregarded the established fashion for court ladies, which drew comment from contemporaries. Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich (1683–1767) commented that she was ‘untidy’ by nature, by which he meant her habit of wearing a white headscarf and no hooped underskirt (panier), whether attending Church, appearing at public functions, or playing cards with a select circle of her friends.77 General Christoph Manstein (1711–1757), a Baltic German officer in the Russian army during the same period, makes very similar points, attributing this informality in her dress to the baleful influence of her chief lady-inwaiting, Juliana Mengden (1719–1786), with whom she was believed to


be having an affair.78 These accounts were undoubtedly influenced by political considerations, since both men make it clear that they considered that Anna was by nature lazy and unsuitable for any position of serious responsibility. However, the fact that this is linked to the inappropriate state of her dress in both formal and informal settings sheds light on the importance attached to clothing as a reflection of character. Loose clothing, as typified by the déshabillé style, was thought to suggest immoral behaviour, hence its association with courtesans and prostitutes in this period.79 The second set of concerns raised by the new clothing related to the potential cost of a new European wardrobe. Although, as noted above, the Muscovite elite had traditionally imported expensive cloth and other materials, the need to follow wider European trends complicated clothing, as it did other aspects of elite lifestyle.80 Although the wealthier sections of society continued to purchase clothing and accessories of sufficient quality to reflect their status, there was an increased emphasis on rich clothing in the period 1725–1762. The various types of dresses, discussed above, increased the expense in relation to elite women as it was important to have the required style for a given court event. The evidence from both Catherine’s Mémoires and the wedding lists of court ladies highlight the emphasis on an extensive wardrobe and the associated cost.81 The new fashions also required a range of supplementary services, for cleaning and maintenance, as well as dressing hair, making them much more expensive. Contemporaries commented on the implications of this sort of expenditure. For example, Ivan Pososhkov (1652–1726), writing on economic matters during Peter I’s reign, sought to minimise what in his view was a needless expense for certain groups, particularly the merchantry. He proposed a new system for regulating dress within society, which reflected income and seniority. Only the nobility were to be entitled to wear expensive, imported materials and those who dressed above or below their means were to be reported, assessed, judged, and punished accordingly.82 Although such restrictions were not introduced, broadly similar concerns over the amount of money spent on clothing at the Russian court were expressed by several commentators, in part influenced by the wider European debate on the nature of luxury. For example, Francesco Algarotti (1712/13–1764) highlights the potential danger for the Russian economy in spending its capital on importing French fashions. His proposed solution was to introduce sumptuary laws, except for furs, which Russia could provide domestically.83 Similarly, General Manstein, whose account may have influenced Algarotti’s views,


noted the elite’s spending, as well as caustically pointing out that this was no guarantee of taste.84 Similar concerns about excessive spending had prompted other European states, such as Prussia and the Habsburg empire, to introduce sumptuary laws in the same period, although there was also a related issue of ensuring that people did not dress above their social station. These met with only limited success and had been largely abandoned by the 1750s.85 The reason for this failure, as in Russia, was due to the desire amongst the elite for rich clothing as a display of status and wealth. Prince M. M. Shcherbatov (1733–1790), albeit a later commentator, dealt with similar issues relating to the growth of excessive luxury at the Russian court and its harmful effects on morality, principally amongst the nobility. This was explicitly linked to the impact of female rule in Russia, since the empresses allegedly lacked the the self-discipline regarding spending that Peter I demonstrated during his reign. Clothing was clearly identified as a symbol of these problems, with the nobility forced to invest heavily in expensive clothing and accessories by the court.86 He acknowledges an attempt to limit such spending, although he misattributes the sumptuary law to Anna Ivanovna, when it was in fact issued during the regency of Anna Leopol’dovna in late 1740.87 He also fails to note that similar restrictions were introduced during the first year of Elizaveta Petrovna’s reign in 1742, but there is no indication that, in either case, the central problem of excessive spending was tackled.88 Interestingly, for someone concerned with the corrupting of moral values, he makes no mention of the ‘cross-dressing’ masquerades. Shcherbatov acknowledges because it explicitly linked the earlier moral concerns expressed by both women and male commentators to the question of financial cost and the impact that this had on Russian society. Nevertheless, in spite of the concerns raised by some contemporaries, by the end of this period, the changes that the Petrine clothing reforms embodied for elite women had been consolidated. In part, this was related to the strong central authority of the ruler in imposing the new fashions, and the dominance of empresses during the period 1725–1762 was certainly significant. However, the extent of the change in a short period of time should also be highlighted. As a result, once the initial impact of the reforms had been absorbed and the role of dress was established within the emerging European-style Russian court, elite women were able to assimilate the new fashion. This period saw a gradual restraint on some of the excesses associated with Russian dress by foreign observers, notably in relation to cosmetics, and recognition of the


relationship between certain types of dress and social settings. However, the importance of conspicuous wealth in elite clothing remained a feature which drew comment from foreign visitors, as well as providing an ongoing link to the Muscovite past.

Notes 1. See for example, Lidiia N. Semenova, Ocherki istorii byta i kul’turnoi zhizni Rossii: pervaia polovina XVIII v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), pp. 126–40 and Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale U P, 1998), pp. 280–88. 2. For a general overview of the period, see Raisa M. Kirsanova, Russkii kostium i byt XVIII-XIX vekov (Moscow and St Petersburg: Slovo, 2002). A very useful discussion, covering more than its title might suggest and with some excellent illustrations, can be found in Helena Goscilo, ‘Cosmetics – or Dying to Overcome Nature in an Age of Art and Artifice’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 73–104. 3. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, p. 281. 4. Iurii M. Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture: byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII – nachalo XIX veka) (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2002), p. 15. 5. Lindsey Hughes, ‘Attitudes Towards Foreigners in Early Modern Russia’, in Russia and the World in Historical Perspective: Essays for Paul Dukes, ed. Cathryn Brennan and Murray Frame (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 1–23. 6. See for example, Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii. Sobranie pervoe s 1649 po 12 dekabria 1825 (St Petersburg: Tipografiia II Otd. Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1830) [hereafter PSZ], I (6 August 1675), p. 607. 7. Nancy Shields Kollmann, ‘The Seclusion of Muscovite Women’, Russian History, 10 (1983), 170–87. 8. Lindsey Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 (New Haven, CT: Yale U P, 1990), p. 177. 9. Lindsey Hughes, ‘Women and the Arts at the Russian Court from the 16th to the 18th Century’, in An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum, ed. Jordana Pomeroy (Washington DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2003), pp. 19–49. 10. PSZ, IV (4 January 1700), p. 1741. 11. PSZ, IV (30 December 1701), p. 1887. 12. PSZ, IV (28 February 1702), p. 1898. 13. Ivan A. Zheliabuzhskii, ‘Dnevnye zapiski’, in Rozhdenie imperii, ed. A. Liberman and S. Shokarev (Moscow: Fond Sergeia Dubova, 1997), p. 325. 14. Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVIII veka. Chast’ pervaia, edited B. A. Rybakov, (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1985), p. 347. 15. Raisa M. Kirsanova, p. 33. 16. Semenova, p. 138. 17. Kirsanova, p. 15.

The Function of Fashion 141 18. Natal’ia L. Pushkareva, Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, trans. Eve Levin (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997), pp. 119–20. 19. Pushkareva, pp. 115–16. 20. Peter Henry Bruce, Memoirs of Peter Henry Bruce, Esq. (London: Cass, 1970), p. 100 and Friedrich Christian Weber, The Present State of Russia, 2 vols (London: Cass, 1968), I, p. 149. 21. Konstantin A. Pisarenko, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo dvora v tsarstvovanie Elizavety Petrovny (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003), pp. 72–74. 22. Mikhail I. Pyliaev, Staroe zhit’e (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), p. 73. 23. ‘Reestr v mushkakh prochitaite a nashi znaki osobo pimechaite’, Lubok: russkie narodnye kartinki, XVII-XVIII vv. Al’bom, ed. and comp. Iurii Ovsiannikov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1968), plate 46. 24. Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT and London: Yale U P, 2001), pp. 6–13. 25. Kostium v russkoi khudozhestvennoi kul’ture 18 – pervoi poloviny 20 vv. Opyt entsiklopedii, ed. and comp. Raisa M. Kirsanova, T. G. Morozova and V. D. Siniukov (Moscow: Bol’shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1995), pp. 137–38. 26. This ideal was reflected in Louis Caravaque’s portrait of Anna Ivanovna (1730) and Ivan Vishniakov’s portrait of Elizaveta Petrovna (1742), since neither woman was naturally of slight build: Kirsanova, pp. 16–17. 27. Kostium v russkoi khudozhestvennoi kul’ture, p. 297. 28. Kirsanova, p. 39. 29. Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 78. 30. Johannes Georg Korb, Diary of an Austrian Secretary of Legation at the Court of Czar Peter the Great, 2 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1968), I, pp. 264–65. 31. Sergei N. Shubinskii, Istoricheskie ocherki i rasskazy (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1995), p. 21. 32. Dmitri Zakharine, ‘Tanz- und Körperverhalten im kommunikativen Alltagsverkehr des 17.–19. Jh. Russland und Westeuropa im Vergleich’, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 47 (2001), 153–55. 33. Bruce, pp. 99–100. 34. Landé was later hired as the dancing master (tantsmeister) for the main educational institution for the Russian nobility, the Cadet Corps, in 1734 and went on to play a leading role in establishing ballet at the Russian court: Galina N. Dobrovol’skaia, ‘Landé’, in Muzykal’nyi Peterburg. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’: Tom 1. XVIII vek. Kniga 2: K-P, ed. A. L. Porfir’ev, 2 vols (St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 1996–2000), II (2000), p. 124. 35. Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale U P, 2002), p. 174. 36. ‘Diplomaticheskaia perepiska frantsuzskikh poslov i poslannikov pri russkom dvore (1719–1722)’, ed. G. F. Shtendman, Sbornik Imperatorskogo Rossiiskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, XL (St Petersburg, 1884), p. 390. 37. Friedrich W. von Bergholz, ‘Dnevnik kamer-iunkera Fridrikha-Vil’gel’ma Berkhgol’tsa, 1721–1725 (ch. 1 and 2)’, in Neistovyi reformator, ed. Viktor Naumov (Moscow: Fond Sergeia Dubova, 2000), p. 139. 38. Cornelius de Bruyn, Travels into Muscovy, Persia, and Part of the East-Indies: Containing an Accurate Description of Whatever is Most Remarkable in those Countries, 2 vols (London: Bettesworth and Hitch, 1737), I, p. 30.

142 Women and Society 39. Lindsey Hughes, ‘Between Two Worlds: Tsarevna Natal’ia Alekseevna and the Emancipation of Petrine Women’, in A Window on Russia: Papers from the V International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia: Gargnano, 1994, ed. Maria di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice, 1996), p. 31. 40. Kirsanova, p. 11. 41. Weber, I, p. 148. 42. Grigorii V. Esipov, Raskol’nich’i dela XVIII stolietiia: izvlechennye iz del Preobrazhenskogo Prikaza i tainoi rozysknykh del kantseliarii, 2 vols (St Petersburg: D. E. Kozhanchikova, 1863), II, p. 176. 43. PSZ, VI (5 July 1726), p. 4944; PSZ, IX (19 February 1743), p. 8707. 44. The standard starting point on the early eighteenth-century court remains Nikolai E. Volkov, Dvor russkikh imperatorov v ego proshlom i nastoiashchem, v 4-kh chastiakh (St Petersburg: R. Golike, 1900). See also John T. Alexander, ‘Catherine I, her Court and Courtiers’, in Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives, ed. Lindsey Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 227–49. 45. John T. Alexander, ‘The Courts of the Russian Empresses in the Eighteenth Century’, The Court Historian, 4 (1999), 141–50. 46. Pisarenko, p. 67. See, for example, Kamer-fur’erskie zhurnaly, 1695–1817 (St Petersburg: [private], 1853–1916) [hereafter KFZh], (1734), 9 [30 August] and (1736), 6 [19 January] and (1736), 12 [3 February]. 47. Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, p. 35. 48. Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 37–38. 49. Kostium v russkoi khudozhestvennoi kul’ture, p. 330. See, for example, KFZh (1748), 61 [25 October] and (1755), 26 [12 March]. 50. A typical example would be Elena A. Naryshkina, who got married in 1752. The clothing and other material she received amounted to 10,735 rubles: RGADA, f. 14, op. 1, d. 98 [Concerning the engagement gifts to ladies-inwaiting from the Empress, 1747–1765], ll. 18–25. On the mantua see Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, p. 34. 51. KFZh (1751), 15 [18 January]; RGIA, f. 466, op. 1, d. 84, l. 6 (15 January 1751). 52. Note that the order was issued on 17 May, although it was only included in the entry for the masquerade: KFZh (21 May 1755), p. 57. 53. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, p. 105. 54. KFZh (1751), pp. 67–68 [25 June]. 55. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv hereafter RGIA, f. 466, op. 1, d. 84 [Personal Orders issued by the Court Office, 1751], l. 76 (27 June). 56. RGIA, f. 466, op. 1, d. 87 [Personal Orders issued by the Court Office, 1752], l. 99 (11 September). 57. See for example, the notices carried in Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti, 97 (5 December 1757), 7 and 101 (19 December 1757), 8. 58. RGIA, f. 1329, op. 2, d. 44 [Orders issued by the Main Police Chancellery, 1752], ll. 13–13ob (25 May). Note that this law is not included in the PSZ for this year. 59. I am grateful to Manfred Schruba for this suggestion. 60. RGIA, f. 439, op. 1, d. 10 [Journal of the Duty General-Adjutant, 1755], l. 37ob-38 (10 May). 61. Sochineniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II, na osnovanii podlinnykh rukopisei, ed. A. N. Pypin, 12 vols (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1901-1907), XII, p. 55. 62. Sochineniia, XII, p. 296.

The Function of Fashion 143 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

Sochineniia, XII, pp. 296–97. Sochineniia, XII, pp. 55–56. Sochineniia, XII, p. 56. Zhurnal dezhurnykh general-ad”iutantov. Tsarstvovanie imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny, comp. L. V. Evdokimov (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1897), 218 (23 October 1750). KFZh (1750), 118 [23 October]. Sochineniia, XII, p. 296. KFZh (1750), 118 [23 October]. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 40. For a stimulating discussion of the activities of the ‘All-Drunken Synod’, see Ernest A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 2004). Pisarenko, pp. 157–59. Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1999), p. 79. Hughes, ‘From Caftans to Corsets’, pp. 25–26. Weber, I, 27. Mrs William Vigor, Letters From a Lady, Who Resided Some Years in Russia, to Her Friend in England (London: Dodsley, 1775), p. 48. Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 44–45. Burkhard-Khristofor Minikh, ‘Ocherk upravleniia rossiiskoi imperii’, in Perevoroty i voiny, ed. Viktor Naumov (Moscow: Fonda Sergeia Dubova, 1997), p. 307. Christoph H. von Manstein, Contemporary Memoirs of Russia from the Year 1727 to 1744 (London: Cass, 1968), p. 276. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, p. 90. Arcadius Kahan, ‘The Costs of “Westernisation” in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, Slavic Review, 25 (1966), 40–66. See for example, Sochineniia, XII, pp. 219, 299–300; RGADA, f. 14, op. 1, d. 98 [Concerning the engagement gifts to ladies-in-waiting from the Empress, 1747–1765], ll. 1–140. Ivan Pososhkov, The Book of Poverty and Wealth, ed. and trans. A. P. Vlasto and L. R. Lewitter (London: Athlone, 1987), pp. 262–64. Francesco Algarotti, Letters from Count Algarotti to Lord Hervey and the Marquis Scipio Maffei containing the state of the trade, marine, revenues, and forces of the Russian Empire (London: Johnson and Payne, 1769), pp. 81–84. Manstein, p. 255. Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 92–97. M. M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, ed. and trans. Anthony Lentin (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1969), pp. 159–61, 191–93 and 223–25. Shcherbatov, p. 193; PSZ, XI (17 December 1740), p. 8301. PSZ, XI (11 December 1742), p. 8680.

8 Merchant Women in Business in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Galina Ul’ianova Translated by Roger Bartlett

This chapter offers an investigation of the problem of female entrepreneurship in Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This topic has not yet become a focus of attention for research in relation to the Russian Empire, although it has attracted increasing interest during the past decade.1 Commercial activity by women was provided for in the legislation of the Russian Empire: according to the laws concerning persons of the merchant estate, on the death of an owner the management of his business was to pass to his widow. Very often, even when the son or sons were commercially very experienced and active, family businesses were formally and in actual fact headed by the widow. Another, slightly less frequent, variant was to bequeath the management of the firm to the daughters if there were no male heirs. According to Russian law, women enjoyed the same property rights as men. The principle of separate property in marriage made it possible for a woman to be independent in property matters.2 Thus the Vedomost’ o manufakturakh v Rossii za 1813 i 1814 gody (Register of Factories in Russia for the Years 1813 and 1814) contains information on eleven Moscow factories, including seven textile factories, belonging to nine women. Among the nine owners of those enterprises, seven women had continued their husbands’ business, one was a daughter inheriting her enterprise from her merchant father, and one was a townswoman (meshchanka). This study examines the statistics on female merchants, their family and marital status, and the effectiveness of their management. It also addresses questions of property. The latter aspect will be studied using a particular source: petitions to the Moscow Governor-General written by female owners such as merchant widows, daughters, and daughters-in-law. 144

Merchant Women in Business

145

Female entrepreneurship in the legislation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries According to the laws of the Russian Empire, women had equal rights with men to engage in commerce. In the reign of Catherine II, on 25 May 1775, the Senate issued a decree ‘Concerning the levy from merchants of one per cent of declared capital, instead of the soul tax, and concerning their division into guilds’.3 This stated among other things: ‘Persons of the female sex are assigned to guilds on exactly the same basis as men: unmarried women according to the estate into which they were born, married and widowed women according to the status acquired through their marriage.’ The same document repeated this proposition in different words: ‘The regulations concerning [male] merchants are also to be applied to widows who carry on the trade of deceased merchants, their husbands, or who conduct commerce independently with their own capital.’ In this way the legislation reflected the actual situation in the sphere of female entrepreneurship, in which in Russia (as indeed in other countries too) three groups of persons of female sex, defined by their marital status, carried on their activities. These were merchants’ widows (the most numerous group both in Russia and in other European countries), married female merchants, and unmarried daughters of merchants. The division of merchants into guilds had first taken place in Russia in 1720, under Peter I. A clear definition of the rights of the so-called ‘town inhabitants’ (gorodovye obyvateli), of whom the merchantry constituted the highest social stratum, was given in the Charter to the Towns of 1785.4 Thus freedom of entrepreneurship was enshrined in law. The Charter divided the merchantry into three guilds in accordance with the amount of the individual’s declared capital and the extent of his or her commercial activity. In the first guild were registered persons with a declared capital of 10,000–50,000 roubles. According to the Urban Statute (part of the Charter to the Towns) they were ‘not only allowed, but also encouraged to conduct all sorts of trade both within and outside the Empire, to import and export goods, to sell, exchange and purchase them both wholesale and retail’. Members of the second guild, with declared capital of 5,000–10,000 roubles, were permitted to ‘conduct all sorts of trade within the Empire, and to convey goods both by land and by water, to towns and fairs, and there to sell, exchange and purchase items necessary for their trade both wholesale and retail’. Third-guild merchants, with capital of 1,000–5,000 roubles, were permitted to conduct ‘petty trade in towns and districts, to sell small articles in the town


and its surroundings, and to convey that petty trade by land and water to villages, settlements and rural trading points, and there to sell, exchange and purchase items necessary for their petty trade wholesale or separately’.5 Besides members of the merchantry, townspeople (members of the meshchanstvo, the lowest stratum of the urban population in Russia)6 were also allowed to engage in entrepreneurial activity on a small scale: ‘A townsman is free to set up looms and workbenches of all sorts and to produce on them all sorts of handicrafts.’7 Evidence for the wide extent of female entrepreneurship by the time of Alexander I can be found in another document, the draft Commercial Code of the Russian Empire drawn up in 1814 by the Commission for the Compilation of Laws. The draft code contained a separate, if brief, chapter entitled ‘Concerning persons of the female sex engaged in merchant activities’. It included two important clauses, the first of which stated that ‘a woman, on reaching her majority, acquires the right to engage in commerce’; the second declared that ‘on receipt of permission from the appropriate government office to engage in commerce, she [the woman] is endowed with all merchant prerogatives, according to the branch of commerce she pursues’.8 Although, as is well known, the draft Commercial Code was not passed into law, its significance in the historical context is that the inclusion in it of a special chapter on women reflected already-existing real phenomena and demonstrates the presence of female entrepreneurship in the period studied.

How women acquired merchant status In terms of social mobility, women had several possible ways of entering the merchantry. As already noted, the most common variant was through inheritance: merchant widows inherited the business on their husband’s death or unmarried daughters on the death of their father. Transfer to the merchant estate from the peasantry or petty townsfolk (meshchanstvo) was more complicated. It was regulated by the provisions of the Urban Statute included in the 1785 charter. Thus, article 79 of the charter, citing Catherine’s Manifesto of 17 March 1775, article 46, declared that serfs manumitted by their masters had the right to settle in towns. A law of 1804 stated that at the tax-census they were to declare ‘what branch of Our service, either the townspeople’s or the merchant estate, they wish to enter into in the towns; and whichever they voluntarily select for themselves, they must be granted equality in that estate with other as concerns state requisitions, or freed from the latter’.9


147

The bureaucratic procedure of transfer from one estate to another involved a) obtaining the agreement of the merchant corporation of the town in which the female ‘candidate merchant’ wished to settle, and b) getting the transfer duly registered in the Fiscal Chamber (the office responsible for financial matters) of the province in question – the Chamber was obliged to report the transfer to the Senate.10 Should transfer from the peasantry to an urban estate meet obstacles which could not be resolved ‘by means of the general law’, then in these exceptional cases the Fiscal Chamber had to seek a review by means of ‘representations through the Minister of Finances to the Governing Senate’.11 Representatives of all the basic subdivisions of the peasantry were recruited into the merchant estate: (a) servile landlords’ peasants, (b) treasury or state peasants, and (c) appanage peasants.12 State peasants were allowed to transfer into the merchantry if they were already actively engaged in commercial enterprise and had moved to a town. The official procedure required them to submit the following documents to the Fiscal Chamber: (a) a declaration of desire to join the merchantry, (b) details of family and property, (c) certification from the village commune that the would-be merchant had ‘no arrears outstanding in either taxes or service obligations’, and that when he moved to the town his land allocation in the village would revert to the commune (‘after his departure his land, which previously he farmed, will not be left waste’), and (d) an undertaking to pay in to the merchant corporation which he was joining a monetary deposit equal to three years’ taxes due from him in his new station.13 Appanage peasants wishing to transfer had to receive a ‘certificate of release’ from the Appanage Department: for this they were to present evidence of the possession of suitable capital. The law stated: ‘Peasants (poseliane) who on inspection of their property are found to be capable of presenting significant (znatnye) capital in the merchant calling shall be released on payment.’ Under the terms of the 1798 decree, the amount of the ‘release payment’ was to be determined by a resolution of the applicant’s native commune, confirmed by the Appanage Department. Under this arrangement 7/8 of the payment went to ‘Appanage revenues’ and 1/8 to the charitable needs of the commune (‘assistance to peasants in a distressed condition’).14 The ‘Appanage Department Statute’ promulgated on 15 May 1808 confirmed the right of appanage peasants to be released into the merchantry.15 The state sought to maximise its fiscal advantage in such cases. Despite having formally moved from one estate to another, merchants of recent peasant origin were obliged under article 139 of the Urban


Statute to pay taxes in both estates until the next tax census, which finally confirmed their new social status.16 The procedure of transfer into the merchantry became the same for landlords’ serfs and appanage peasants in 1821.17 To illustrate these legislative prescriptions we will examine several cases whose records have come to light in the Central Historical Archive of the City of Moscow. The first case: in 1814 the ‘peasant woman widow’ (krest’ianskaia zhenka vdova) Dar’ia Andreeva, from the village of Belkovo in Moscow Province, declared her wish to enter the third guild of the Moscow merchantry. Dari’a’s family consisted of 12 persons in addition to herself, including three sons (Karp, Ivan, and Ignatii) and their wives (respectively Irina, Akulina and Tat’iana) and six grandchildren, two by each son (Akulina, Dar’ia, Andrei, Fedor, Domna and Luker’ia). The Moscow Fiscal Chamber enquired of the Ministry of Finances in Petersburg about registering such a large number of people in the merchantry, and the question went further, to the Senate. The latter gave permission on condition that all peasant dues had been paid. Thereupon Dar’ia Andreeva gave the Fiscal Chamber a signed undertaking, promising to pay all required state taxes and to observe the law (‘not to do anything unworthy or contrary to the laws’).18 ‘Because of her illiteracy’, at Dar’ia Andreeva’s request the undertaking was signed by her son Karp. Her sureties were three members of the Moscow merchantry: second-guild merchant Osip Goriunov, a ‘fish trader’, member of the third guild Semen Safronov, who dealt in horses, and silk-merchant Egor Il’in, also of the third guild. Information from census returns shows that all three sureties were former neighbours of Andreeva from her previous place of residence, all originating from neighbouring villages of Vokhna volost’ in Bogorodsk district of Moscow province. The population of Vokhna volost’ were Old Believers, among whom mutual support was particularly strongly developed. It is not impossible that Dar’ia was related to one or more of her sureties. Our second case is similar to the first, but the ‘candidate-merchant’ came not from the metropolitan Moscow area, but from the more distant Vladimir province. The widow Avdot’ia Matveeva was admitted to the Moscow merchantry in 1814 from the economic-peasant ‘settlement (sel’tso) of Krasnoe, also called Boroviki Chervlenye’, together with her three sons Dmitrii, Koz’ma, and Vasilii, her daughters-in-law Dar’ia and Natal’ia, and grandsons Afanasii and Efim.19 Her son Dmitrii signed the transfer application for his illiterate mother. Avdot’ia Matveeva’s sureties were second-guild merchant Petr Silin, member of the third guild Filipp


149

Shatrov and Moscow third-guild merchant Nikita Ukhanov; all three specialised in trade in ‘iron goods’. Other information found in the archive concerning admission to the merchantry shows that women recruits to the merchant estate came from various social groups. Here follows a brief survey of the persons concerned. In 1814 the Moscow third guild received into membership the economic peasant Akulina Burmakina of Bol’shoe Besovo village in Iaroslavl’ province. Burmakina, a 60-year-old widow, brought with her two adult sons and their wives (Paramon, aged 35, with Mavra, and Evstrat, 32, with Fedora), daughter Pelageia and grandson Arsenii. Burmakina was illiterate; Paramon signed her documents. Uniquely among the known petitions for admission to the merchantry, Burmakina’s file includes a statement of her physical features: she was ‘of middle height, with hazel eyes and dark brown hair’.20 In the same year of 1814 the following were admitted into the Moscow merchantry: merchant’s widow Irina Khlebnikova (illiterate) from the town of Kaluga, with five sons; the young woman (devka) Mar’ia Podobedova, a literate manumitted household serf of landowner Miasoedova (place of residence unknown); a merchant’s widow from the town of Toropets in Tver’ province, Anna Aksenova, literate, with two children; the Moscow artisan-guild member Mariia Diulu [Marie Dulout], literate; economic peasant widow Avdot’ia Gornostaeva, illiterate, from the village of Denisovo in Kaluga province, with three sons, five daughters and their families, in all nine persons; and the unmarried Varvara Gracheva, daughter of a member of the Moscow first guild.21 The case of Gracheva is particularly interesting, and somewhat atypical. As a rule unmarried daughters entered the merchantry after the death of their parents. But Gracheva decided to apply for merchant status during the lifetime of her father, who had his own separate certificate as a member of the first guild – he died two years later, in 1816. In 1814 Varvara’s father Efim Grachev was 73; his wife Praskov’ia, daughter of Kornoukhov, a major merchant from Suzdal’ (Vladimir Province),22 was aged 77. At the end of the eighteenth century the Grachev family belonged among the first-rank (pervostateinoe) merchantry, the highest category of richest entrepreneurs. It is known that in the early eighteenth century the Grachevs’ forebears were serfs of Count N. P. Sheremetev in the industrial village of Ivanovo in Vladimir Province which in the nineteenth century grew into the textile centre of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and they conducted considerable trade in Novgorod.23 The Grachevs joined the first guild of Moscow merchants in 1795, on their release from servile status. Father Efim and son


Dmitrii Grachev possessed ‘a particularly powerful grasp of business’ and together with two merchant members of the Kornoukhov family they owned a major cotton textile factory in Moscow (the production of which, for example, was worth 244,190 roubles in 1799).24 In 1814 the Grachev factory in Moscow had 648 free hired (vol’nykh) and 318 purchased workers.25 Dmitrii Grachev died in 1808 at the age of 43, leaving two young sons. In 1814 Varvara was 41, an old maid.26 Explaining her reasons for entering the merchantry, she wrote in her application: ‘Through a certain conjuncture I have obtained on my own account the sum of twenty thousand roubles, and therefore humbly request that this my petition be accepted, since I have capital to declare sufficient for the second guild.’27 Varvara was illiterate; at her request, her petition was signed for her by Moscow merchant of the second guild Lavrentii Osipov.

The statistics of female industrial entrepreneurship Unfortunately, there is no accurate statistical information on women entrepreneurs for the end of the eighteenth century, although it is known that already in the early stages of industrial development, in the mid-eighteenth century, a number of major enterprises belonged to women. For instance, in Moscow the merchant’s widow Natal’ia Babkina was co-owner of the Kadashevo linen mill.28 But the earliest full set of data available relates to 1814. It was published by the Ministry of Finances in the Vedomost’ o manufakturakh v Rossii za 1813 i 1814 gody.29 According to this register, in 1814 business women owned 165 light and heavy industrial enterprises out of a total of 3,731 undertakings, that is 4.4 per cent. But in some branches of industry the proportion of ‘female business’ was relatively high – 13.5 per cent in paper-making, 12.3 per cent in cloth manufacture, and 12.0 per cent in metal-working (iron and steel). The leading branch in terms of the actual number of femaleowned enterprises was tanning: women owned 31 tanneries out of a total of 1,530, or 2.03 per cent. Women owned 29 cloth mills and 22 linen mills (10.23 per cent), 19 soap-boiling and candle-making works (5.01 per cent), and 15 glass and crystal manufactures (9.68 per cent). Aggregate figures for the number of female-owned enterprises, the social status of the owners and the labour force are given in Table 8.1. The data in Table 8.1 show that the number of female merchants among 165 female factory owners was 63 (38 per cent); noblewomen numbered 76 (46 per cent) and townswomen 20 (12 per cent). The remaining six (4 per cent) included peasant women, a soldier’s wife,30

Table 8.1 Number of enterprises owned by women by branch of industrial activity Branch

Tanning

Total enterprises

Number of enterprises owned by women

As % of total

Social estate of owner (persons in %)

Composition of workforce by estate (persons in %)

1,530

31

2.03

Noblewomen 4 (12.9%), women merchants 16 (51.6%), townswomen (meshchanki) 11 (35.5%)

Serfs 9 (2.8%), purchased and ascribed 51 (15.8%), free 263 (81.4%)

Cloth-making (woollens)

235

29

12.34

Noblewomen 26 (89.6%), women merchants 3 (10.4%)

Serfs 1,487 (12.4%), purchased and ascribed 9,510 (79.2%), free 1,009 (8.4%)

Linen

215

22

10.23

Noblewomen 15 (68.2%), women merchants 7 (31.8%)

Serfs 110 (5.9%), purchased and ascribed 118 (6.3%), free 1,640 (87.8%) No data for 4 enterprises

Soap-boiling, tallow candlemaking, wax production

379

19

5.01

Women merchants 12 (63.1%), townswomen 5 (26.3%), soldier’s wife 1 (5.3%), Cossack woman 1 (5.3%)

Free 108 at 18 enterprises (100%)

Glass and crystal production

155

15

9.68

Noblewomen 13 (86.6%), women merchants 1 (6.8%), peasant woman 1 (6.8%)

Serfs 206 (57.4%), purchased and ascribed 18 (5.0%), free 135 (37.6%)

79

10

13.51

Noblewomen 8 (80%), Women merchants

Serfs 269 (26.1%), purchased and ascribed

Paper

Continued

Table 8.1 Continued Branch

Cotton

Total enterprises

Number of enterprises owned by women

As % of Social estate total of owner (persons in %) 2 (20%)

709 (68.8%), free 53 (5.1%)

Noblewoman 1 (10%), Women merchants 8 (80%), peasant woman 1 (10%)

Serfs 3 (0.6%), free 529 (99.4%)

Noblewomen 5 (55.5%), women merchants 3 (33.3%), townswoman 1 (10.2%)

Serfs 293 (19.5%), purchased and ascribed 1,155 (76.9%), free 54 (3.6%)

423

10

75

9

Silk

158

5

3.16

Women merchants 2 townswoman 1, peasant women 2

Free 46 at 4 factories (100%)

Rope-making

102

3

2.94

Women merchants 2 townswoman 1

Free 159 (100%)

Potash

31

3

9.68

Noblewomen 2, townswoman 1

Serfs 18 (100%)

China and pottery

30

2

6.7

Women merchants 2

Serfs 22 (5.6%), ascribed 47 (12.1%), free 321 (82.3%)

Copper (brass) and buttonmaking

59

2

3.4

Noblewoman 1, Woman merchant 1

Free 61 (100%)

Hats

41

1

2.4

Woman merchant 1

Free 2

Iron and steel goods

Lacquering

2.36

Composition of workforce by estate (persons in %)

12.0

5

1

20

Noblewoman 1

Free 3

Sugar

51

1

20.0

Woman merchant 1

Free 11

Paint production

27

1

3.7

Woman merchant 1

Free 6

Vitriol and sulphur production

22

1

4.5

Woman merchant 1

Free 6


153

and a Cossack woman. Female industrial enterprise was characterised by socially mixed ownership. Therefore, our further discussion, while focused on female merchants, will of necessity (though to a lesser degree) also deal with noblewomen, townswomen, and peasant and Cossack women who owned industrial enterprises. We will now examine more closely those branches where women owners were numerous, beginning with cloth-making, which had the oldest enterprises and was also subject to official protectionism. In cloth-making, women were the owners of 12.34 per cent of all enterprises, 29 out of 235. As regards geographical distribution, the largest number of female-owned enterprises was to be found in Moscow and Simbirsk provinces (five in each). These two provinces were leaders in the whole Russian Empire in terms of numbers of cloth mills: Moscow province had 28 and Simbirsk 25, together 53 or nearly one quarter of the Russian total. The social composition of female ownership was heavily weighted towards noblewomen – 89.6 per cent of female owners (26 out of 29 persons), whereas only 10.4 per cent belonged to the merchantry. A large proportion of noblewomens’ mills operated on their owners’ estates. Noblewoman owners included Princess (kniazhna, unmarried) Varvara Shakhovskaia (mill in Moscow province), Countess Stepanida Tolstaia (Nizhnii-Novgorod Province), Princess (kniaginia, married) Varvara Dolgorukova (Penza Province), and Countess Aleksandra Laval’ (Penza province), Princess (kniazhna) Aleksandra Volkonskaia (Saratov Province], Countess Natal’ia Zubova (Simbirsk Province), Countess Praskov’ia Potemkina (Kursk Province). As a rule, noble factories used serf labour. This very significant predominance of noblewoman-owners is to be explained by the historical development of the Russian cloth industry. From the outset this branch of industry was developed to meet the army’s need of cloth for uniforms. For this purpose laws of 1721 and 1744 allowed nobles and merchants to purchase peasants for their factories by whole villages.31 (From 1797 this category of labour received the special title of ‘possessional’ peasants.)32 But since merchants rarely possessed the large capital which would have allowed such purchases, it was mainly nobles who took advantage of this opportunity. Together with such purchased peasants nobles used so-called ‘ascribed’ peasants: state peasants who could be ‘ascribed’ to work out their state quit-rent in the enterprises of private owners if the latter were fulfilling state contracts. Under Catherine II a law was passed in 1769 which allowed all those so wishing to establish looms (on payment of one rouble per loom),33 an indication of a trend towards greater freedom of enterprise. Merchant enterprises began to appear producing cloth for


sale on the open market. However, a shortage of army cloth in the 1790s compelled the authorities to return to the system of production for the government. Consequently the number of ‘old’ noble cloth mills was still considerable even in 1814. The largest of the female-owned enterprises was the mill producing soldier cloth belonging to Countess Praskov’ia Potemkina, situated in the village of Glushkovo in Kursk Province. The labour force consisted of 9,413 purchased and ascribed workers servicing 553 looms, and in 1814 cloth production totalled 552,731 arshins (392,439 metres), of which 76 per cent was soldier cloth.34 Apart from such large operations, the majority were smaller enterprises with a workforce of from 10 to 60 serfs. Of the 29 female-owned cloth mills only six used free (hired) labour: four with exclusively free labour and two with mixed labour – free and servile. Exclusively free labour was to be found in the enterprises belonging to the above-mentioned Countess Stepanida Tolstaia, to starostina35 Agata Linkiewicz (a mill in the village of Gushcha in Volhynia Province, with 66 workers and 4 looms), to the ‘merchant wife’ (or ‘merchant woman’, kupetskaia zhena) Anna Kumanina (mill in Moscow, 26 workers on 3 looms), and to the ‘merchant wife/woman’ Bulgakova (an enterprise in Moscow jointly owned with Bulgakova’s brother, the townsman Kaletin, 59 workers on 17 looms).36 The two operations using mixed free and servile labour were the soldier-cloth factory of Lt General’s wife (or widow, generalleitenantsha) Anna Panova in Krotovka in Simbirsk Province, and the factory of shliakhtianka Guebner near the village of Ksaverovo in Volhynia Province. In the cloth industry the correlation between owners’ merchant status and the use of free labour is very evident. The merchant enterprises were exceptional islands of free-market activity in the ocean of mills working in accordance with the rules of state-regulated cloth production. The next area to be looked at is tanning, where the proportion of women entrepreneurs was also high: 31 enterprises in 1814. Unlike the cloth industry, tanning was not subject to state protectionism. This is reflected in the incidence of free labour: 28 enterprises employed hired workers and only three tanneries used unfree workers (purchased and ascribed) – these belonged to the female heirs of Count Saltykov in Simbirsk Province, to landowner Shostakova of Mogilev Province, and to Princess (kniaginia) Golitsyna of Orel Province.37 The question of the social status of the owners is of particular interest here. In this respect the tanning industry was very different from clothmaking. Only four enterprises (12.9 per cent) belonged to noblewomen: Princess (kniaginia) Elizaveta Glebova-Streshneva in Moscow Province,


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and Saltykov’s heirs mentioned above, Shostakova, and Golitsyna. Thus, the great majority of tanning enterprises (27 out of 31, 87 per cent) belonged to women of unprivileged status, from the merchantry and townsfolk (meshchanstvo). Merchant wives and widows and independent women merchants owned 16 enterprises (51.5 per cent), and townswomen owned 11 (35.5 per cent). While tanneries belonging to merchant women had workforces of from 2 to 23 workers (the average for all 16 tanneries was 9.2), the figures for townswomen’s enterprises were from 2 to 10, with an average of 4.8. A similar correlation is obtained in regard to volume of production: the merchant enterprises had an annual production of 500–7,000 hides (average 2,971), and the townswomen produced 70–3,200 hides, with an average of 1,073. In terms of geographical distribution, the high density of tanneries in Pskov Province (six enterprises) and Kazan’ Province (four enterprises) is notable. Three tanneries, all owned by merchants, were located in Saransk in Penza Province, where leather production became such a popular business that one of the merchant families owned two tanneries simultaneously, one belonging to the husband, Safon Korovin, the other to his wife, Domna Korovina. The formation of such ‘nests’ of industry was evidently connected with the availability of necessary raw materials, and also with the ‘imitation principle’, when one woman’s business success became a stimulus to other local women who had capital and wished to go into commerce. The tanning industry also attracted some non-Russian women: two Tatars from Kazan’ Province and a German in Volhynia Province. The tannery of merchant’s wife Ziuliukha (probably: Zuleikha) Abdulova, which produced soft leather (iuft’) in the village of Novye Mengery in Kazan’ Province, employed 12 hired workers. Townswoman Vakhrama Sabimova used ten hired workers to produce goats’ hides in Kazan’ itself. And in Zhitomir in Volhynia Province, four hired workers laboured for the German female merchant Anna Albrecht, producing shoe sole and soft leathers.38 A high proportion of female merchant enterprises was also to be found in the soap and candle trade, producing soap and tallow and wax candles. Here 12 enterprises out of 19 (63.1 per cent) belonged to female merchants, and five (26.3 per cent) to townswomen;39 there were no noblewomen among the owners. One enterprise was owned by the Cossack woman Praskov’ia Shirabardina in Saratov and another by the soldier’s wife Tat’iana Fedotova in Kursk. The latter two businesses should more accurately be termed workshops: for the boiling of Fedotova’s soap, which the mistress evidently undertook herself, one worker had been hired and production amounted to 15 poods (240 kg.)


per annum. Shirabardina likewise had one worker and her workshop produced 30 poods (480 kg.) of tallow candles annually. The largest number of workers in this group was to be found in four soap-boiling enterprises in Kazan’. Two of these belonged to female merchants of Russian descent, two to Tatars (see Table 8.2). In paper-making, 10 out of 74 enterprises belonged to women (13.5 per cent). Of the nine owners (State Counsellor’s wife Anna Poltoratskaia had two enterprises in St Petersburg Province) only two came from the merchant estate: Mar’ia Kopteva, whose wallpaper factory was located in Moscow, and the Tatar Sagida Mamatova, who produced writing paper in the village of Paranga in Viatka Province. Kopteva’s factory had four hired workers and produced 10,000 sheets of wallpaper in the year 1814; Mamatova’s employed 39 hired workers and turned out 3,175 reams of writing paper in the same period.40 The remaining eight paper mills belonged to noblewomen and employed serf labour. The highest proportion of female merchant owners was concentrated in the cotton textile industry, which is eight out of ten (80 per cent). The two remaining female owners were a noblewoman and a peasant. This branch of industry also had an extremely high level of hired labour – 99.4 per cent, while serfs made up a mere 0.6 per cent. Three of the ten merchant enterprises were located in Moscow, and we will say a little about the biographies of the owners of these mills, Avdot’ia Medvedeva, Nastas’ia Sichkova, and Avdot’ia Vlas’eva. Avdot’ia Medvedeva’s mill employed 76 weavers working 50 looms; in 1814 production was 62,750 pieces of cloth for headscarves.41 According to the census returns for

Table 8.2

Soap-boiling enterprises in Kazan’

Name and social Ethnic status of female origin owner

Number of Number of Volume of soap workers cauldrons for production in 1814 (all hired) boiling soap (poods/kg.)

Aleksandra Koniukhova, merchant

Russian

12

3

6,600/105,600

Gadiba Kitaeva, merchant

Tatar

11

6

10,000/160,000

Katerina Ivoilova, Russian merchant

7

4

11,000/176,000

Zuleika Iskakova, merchant

7

2

3,000/48,000

Tatar


157

1811 and 1815, Avdot’ia had come to Moscow with her husband Mikhail Nikolaev on 30 March 1800; they were former treasury peasants from the village of Afin’evo in Vladimir Province. The husband entered the third guild of Moscow merchants. On her arrival Avdot’ia was 44; a year later, aged 45, she gave birth to her only son, Fedor. Her husband died in 1803, and Avdot’ia took out a guild certificate in her own name. In 1814 she owned her own house in Khamovniki, a district of Moscow. On 12 February 1817 Avdot’ia and her son received permission to take the family name of Medvedev.42 Nastas’ia Sichkova employed 104 workers on 96 looms; in 1814 they produced 54,075 arshins of nankeen (thick cotton fabric) and 5,000 headscarves. According to the 1811 census returns, the 23-year-old Nastas’ia was the second wife of secondguild merchant Koz’ma Ivanov, aged 44, who on 9 November 1798 had gained the right to use the family name Sichkov. Koz’ma had entered the Moscow merchantry in 1787 together with his parents and brother from the economic-peasant village of Prokunino in Vokhna volost’ in Moscow Province. Koz’ma Sichkov had a son Ivan and daughter Elena from his first marriage, and from the second with Nastas’ia he had a son Mikhail, born in 1810. The Sichkovs lived in their own house in the Taganka district of Moscow.43 Nastas’ia became owner of the mill on the death of her husband. Avdot’ia Vlas’eva’s operation had a workforce of 18 weavers servicing 15 looms, who in 1814 produced 15,500 arshins of calico. Further biographical details on Vlas’eva are given in the section below concerning property. In conclusion, we can say that there was a clear predominance of the merchant element among women owners of industrial enterprises in such branches as cotton textiles (80 per cent), soap, tallow and candle production (63.1 per cent), and tanning (51.6 per cent). These enterprises produced goods for mass consumption, and thus stimulated the development of production in their particular field as well as widening the circle of persons who wished to engage in it, including women.

The structure of immovable and movable property Study of the question of immovable property belonging to women of the merchant stratum is greatly complicated by lack of suitable data. For our study information has been derived from two basic sources. The first is documentary evidence on contracts for the sale and purchase of houses, shops, and plots of land, which provide information about immovable property and its mobilisation. Second, we have a very valuable source that we discovered in the archives, connected with the


events of the war against Napoleon in 1812. As is well known, the Russian commander Kutuzov surrendered Moscow to the French. On the eve of the enemy’s entry into the city, the majority of its inhabitants left for Russia’s eastern provinces, taking with them only a minimum of essentials. During the French occupation a fierce fire destroyed 6,500 houses and churches, two thirds of the total.44 After the war a Commission was set up by the order of the tsar ‘for the consideration of petitions from the inhabitants of Moscow City and Province who have suffered ruin from the enemy’. The petitions submitted to this Commission, addressed to the Governor-General of Moscow Count Saltykov and requesting financial compensation for losses sustained, contain information on movable and immovable property. The contracts of property transactions preserved in the archives show women from merchant families engaged in deals of three sorts: sales, purchases, and deeds of gift (peredacha po darstvennoi). Some contracts preserved for the year 1805 are presented here. Thus, on 2 January 1805 a purchase agreement was registered between the ‘merchant wife’ Praskov’ia Ignat’eva and Second Lt’s wife Elizaveta Purgusova, whereby Ignat’eva bought from Purgusova a house and land (dvor) in the parish of the Church of the Ascension in the Serpukhov district of Moscow for 1,000 roubles.45 On the same day another transaction was registered: merchant’s wife Anna Kozlova sold to Registrar (registrator) Timofei Prikaznyi a house and land with wooden outbuildings in the parish of the Church of Khariton the Confessor in the Iauza district of Moscow, also for 1,000 roubles. Kozlova had previously bought a house and the land where it stood (domovladenie) from the nobleman Aleksandr Iakovlev on 13 November 1802.46 On 11 November 1803 the merchant’s wife Feodora Kondrat’eva sold to Avdot’ia Stepanova, wife of a College Secretary, a house and land in the parish of the Church of Nicholas the Miracleworker in the Prechistenka district of Moscow. The purchase price is not shown, but it is known that 14 months later Stepanova sold ownership of the house for 14,000 roubles.47 On 9 January 1805, the merchant’s wife Praskov’ia Egorova sold for 5,000 roubles to the Moscow merchant Mikhail Moskvenkov a stone-built shop in the Fresh Fish Trade Row (Zhivorybnyi riad) ‘on the banks of the Moscow river at the Moskvoretskii Gates’;48 she had bought it in 1804 from the townsman Fedor Ivanov. The plot of land on which the shop stood measured approximately nine sazhens square.49 As Praskov’ia could not write, the purchase agreement was signed ‘at her request’ by her husband Stepan Egorov. Nine merchants appended their signatures to the document as witnesses. On 25 January 1805, Elizaveta Arakelova, ‘wife of an Armenian


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merchant’, bought from College Assessor Fedor Ardalionov ‘a stone house with land and all kinds of brick and wooden buildings, in Moscow, between Pokrovka and Miasnitskaia Streets’ in the parish of the Church of Nicholas the Miracleworker, for 9,000 roubles. Arakelova was literate and signed the contract herself.50 On 31 January 1805 Moscow merchant Prokofii Chilikin registered his transfer by deed of gift to his daughter Nastas’ia of five stone shops in the Chandlery (Moskatelnyi) and Old Needle Rows. Chilikin had previously bought the shops from the merchants Mikhail Moskvenkov and Mikhail Zabelin. Four of them stood together forming a terrace, above which a single ‘tent’ (canvas awning) had been erected. The fifth shop, which was detached, had a cellar. The value of all five shops, declared ‘according to conscience’, was 200 roubles, but it is likely that Chilikin deliberately declared a low value in order to pay the minimum duty on the transaction (immovable property transactions attracted a duty of 5 per cent). The plot on which each shop stood was of standard size, the façade 4.2 m. wide and the depth of the building about 12 m.51 We turn now to the information gleaned from female merchants’ petitions for compensation for property destroyed in the 1812 fire. The archive contains seven files containing merchant wives’ petitions. However, only three files include a detailed list of property – items of personal use and goods intended for sale. Table 8.3 provides aggregated data concerning persons who suffered loss of property. In some cases, the combination of archival material with census returns makes it possible to reconstruct the biographies of women entrepreneurs. Anis’ia Blokhina was the only daughter of third-guild merchant Tikhon Borisov. She was a late child, born when her father was 43 and her mother 39.53 She married the son of merchant Blokhin (first name unknown) and bore three children. Anis’ia characterised her husband’s situation with regard to property as follows: ‘As to my husband, he is a son who has not separated from his father and has nothing whatsoever that is his own property.’54 The basic source of income for Anis’ia’s family was probably the letting of their big stone house. It was built on a plot of land (60 m. long by 55 m. wide) which Anis’ia had inherited on the death of her father. In her petition for compensation, Anis’ia declared that ‘at the time of the universal fire caused by the enemy in Moscow’ the house had burned down, ‘so that I suffered total ruin to the cost of 87,711 roubles and 80 kopecks’. She presented confirmation, signed by the Moscow Chief of Police (oberpolitsmeister), that the house had indeed been ‘totally consumed by fire’.

Table 8.3 Data on women of the merchant estate and the value of their property lost in consequence of the burning of Moscow during the war of 181252 Name of female owner, her social status, and literacy

Composition and ages of family in 1814

Commercial specialisation

Ownership of immovable property and place of residence before the fire

Valuation of Amount of loss suffered compensation received, (roubles) place of residence after fire

Anisi’ia Blokhina, wife of the son of a Moscow merchant, daughter of Moscow third-guild merchant Tikhon Borisov; literate

5 persons: Blokhina, aged 33, her husband and three young children

Renting out of house. Her father, who died in 1797, served ‘as a watchman in the Butter and Caftan Row’

Her own stone house worth 40,000 roubles in the Piatnitskii district, inherited from her father, and which was rented out. The Blokhin family rented accommodation in the house of townsman Shavardin in the Iauza district

87,711 roubles 80 kopecks

8,000 roubles; temporary accommodation in Moscow, with relatives in the Iauza district

Elena Bartel’ts, widow of a Moscow third-guild merchant who originally came from Narva; literate

2 persons: Bartel’ts herself (age unknown) and her young daughter; husband died in 1812

Trade in various goods (fabrics, clothing, china, and glassware from Britain, Austria, and Poland)

No immovable property of her own, rented accommodation and a shop in the house of Countess Razumovskaia in the Miasnitskii district

26,980 roubles

Amount of compensation unknown; rented accommodation in the same place as before

Avdot’ia Vlas’eva, female merchant of the

6 persons: Vlas’eva herself, aged 49, two sons Aleksei

Calico-printing factory in her own house

Own wooden house on a stone foundation, with

20,967 roubles 90

4,000 roubles; temporarily rented accommodation in

third guild, widow, daughter of Moscow merchant Fedor Gorskii; illiterate

(28) and Andrei (21), three daughters Elisaveta (26), Mariia (23), and Anna (19); husband died in 1793

wings (s fligeliami), at a value of 18,000 roubles, in Piatnitskii district

kopecks

house of townsman Mamyrdov in Serpukhov district

Matrena Zezina, widow 4 persons: Zezina herself of a third-guild Moscow (38), her son Nikolai (14) merchant; illiterate and two daughters, Tat’iana (16), Natal’ia (14); husband died in 1805

No information found

Own house (ground floor – stone, first floor wooden) with 4 wings on stone foundations, at a value of 20,000 roubles, in the Iauza district

25,897 roubles

4,000 roubles. Place of residence after fire unknown

Matrena Protopopova, widow of a third-guild Moscow merchant; illiterate

5 persons: Protopopova herself (51), five sons – Nikolai, Ivan, Iakov, Mikhaila, and Pavel; husband died in 1802

Trade in textile fabrics (panskoi tovar) in a rented booth in the Gostinyi Dvor

No immovable property of her own, rented accommodation in the house of a priest in the Serpukhov district

9,527 roubles 74 kopecks

2,000 roubles; resided at the Znamenskii Convent in Ostashkov in Tver’ Province

Akulina Strukova, widow of a Moscow third-guild merchant; illiterate

Trade in iron goods 4 persons: Strukova herself (33), two sons – Ivan (9), Aleksandr (7) – and a daughter Anna (13); husband died in 1812

Own wooden house in the Iauza district, inherited from her husband; rented a shop in the Tver’ district from merchant Pashkov

69,086 roubles

8,000 roubles; rented temporary accommodation in Moscow

Varvara Shelepova, wife of a Tula thirdguild merchant; literate

4 persons: Shelepova herself No information found and three sons – Sergei and two young sons (names unknown)

Own wooden house in the 23,965 Iakimanskii district, bought roubles in 1797 for 1,000 roubles and a stone house built on this plot in 1808 valued at 12,000 roubles. Son rented a storage facility in the Gostinyi Dvor to keep goods

2,000 roubles; rented temporary accommodation in Moscow


Three of the seven files containing petitions for compensation include registers of lost property, for the merchant women Protopopova, Zezina, and Vlas’eva. The ‘Register of Property and Goods Burnt and Looted’ presented by Matrena Protopopova lists only movable property: items of personal use and the goods in which Matrena traded.55 Matrena had no immovable property of her own: she rented both the accommodation in which her family lived and the shop in which she conducted her business together with her son. After her husband’s death in 1802 Matrena Protopopova’s family had dropped for three years (1803–1805) into the townsman’s estate (meshchanstvo); they returned to the merchantry in 1806.56 While they were townspeople the Protopopov family lost the right to immunity from the recruit levy, and consequently in 1806 17-year-old Iakov was ‘surrendered to military service’. On the eve of the French occupation, Matrena and her children left Moscow for the town of Murom in Vladimir Province, 300 km. to the north-east of the old capital. Matrena left her furniture and tableware in the apartment which they rented, but took her icons for safe-keeping to her acquaintances the merchants Petr Nakhodkin and Stepan Solodovnikov. Her goods were sealed in the shop in Gostinyi Dvor. Among the personal items on Protopopova’s list there was a large quantity of furniture which had been in her home before the fire: four tables (two oaken, two ordinary), 17 chairs (‘six new ones, covered in leather’ and 11 ‘oaken ones, somewhat worn’), an oak bed-stead, a ‘leather-covered sofa’, and ‘one worn woollen Turkish carpet’. The total value of the furniture was 73 roubles. Besides that, the apartment had been graced by two portraits (‘two painted portraits, one of me, the other of my husband’) and 15 ‘various pictures’. The portraits were valued at 27 roubles the pair, and the pictures at 20 roubles. Two liturgical books were mentioned: a ‘psalter printed in Moscow’ and a ‘prayer-book printed in Kiev’. The list also included china crockery valued at 97 roubles, silver tableware (kept in a separate chest) worth 55 roubles, brassware (15 roubles and 50 kopecks), and pewter (46 roubles and 50 kopecks). The most valuable items were the icons: three icons of the Deisis painted ‘in the old style’ were valued at 250 roubles, a mahogany and bronze iconostasis at 24 roubles, and another four icons with silver rizas at 225 roubles 89 kopecks. A further list of goods lost gives an idea of Protopopova’s stock. With her middle son Nikolai she traded in Chinese pearls (she had had 2,509 roubles’ worth in her shop), Chinese silk (450 roubles), Kalmyk sheepskin coats (2,677 roubles 50 kopecks), and textiles (muslin, dimity, chintz, canvas: 1,968 roubles 90 kopecks). Clothes off the peg also made up a considerable part of the trade of mother and son Protopopov: among items for


163

sale was ‘one new frock-coat of dark English cloth’, ‘one new dark-grey greatcoat of Dutch cloth’, six waistcoats, eight linen men’s shirts, 11 silken neck-cloths, ‘one beaver hat with a green velvet crown’, and other things. Matrena Protopopova estimated her total loss at 9,527 roubles 74 kopecks. Another female Moscow merchant, Matrena Zezina, calculated her losses during the war at 25,927 roubles – 20,000 roubles in immovable and 5,927 in movable property.57 Zezina had become the owner of a two-storey house on the death of her husband. The latter, merchant of the third guild Andrei Zezin, had entered the Moscow merchantry in 1795 from the economic peasantry of the village of Pupki in Vladimir Province. At the age of 29 he had married the 17-year-old Matrena Tolchevskaia, a native of Pupki, and took his young wife to Moscow. Andrei Zezin himself had a business in Petersburg, but his family – at least four children were born – was resident in Moscow.58 When Zezin died in 1805 at the age of 42, Matrena became the head of the family and took out a guild certificate in her own name. Her ‘Register’ indicates the wealthy life-style of this merchant family. It lists 38 pieces of expensive furniture (not counting chairs and armchairs), principally mahogany, and including: cupboards worth 500, 150, and 150 roubles, a bureau at 80 roubles, and two mirrors in gold frames at 50 roubles each. Also included were a dozen mahogany chairs ‘covered with morocco’ (100 roubles); half a dozen armchairs ‘covered in black leather, mahogany’ (75 roubles); and half a dozen ‘simple armchairs’ (30 roubles). Zezina claimed to have lost china crockery to the value of 125 roubles, glass tableware worth 30, pottery worth 30, and wooden ware worth 200 roubles. And also listed were two four-wheeled carriages: a ‘sprung’ droshky and a ‘simple’ droshky. Like female merchant Protopopova, female merchant Zezina’s family had valuable icons, framed in mahogany iconostases, and together worth 625 roubles. Zezina also mentioned in her register some ‘small pictures’ which had adorned her home and which she valued at 2,000 roubles. Our third female merchant, Avdot’ia Vlas’eva, listed in her register along with her house and personal movable property the trade goods which had been burnt in the fire, so (as with Protopopova) we can form an impression of her commercial activity.59 Before the war of 1812 Vlas’eva had had a calico-printing factory in her own house, which was ‘built of wood on stone foundations’. The original house had been bought by her husband in 1787 from the Moscow merchant Sergei Skorgin for 1,000 roubles. Left a widow in 1793, with five small children, the 27-year-old Vlas’eva dismantled the old house and in its place


erected a new one, with two wings built on to the principal building, together with a carriage shed, cellar, and stables in the yard. The area of this urban estate was about 127 square metres. Vlas’eva reckoned the value of the buildings after reconstruction at 18,000 roubles. It is possible that the money for the rebuilding came from Vlas’eva’s father, the Moscow merchant Fedor Gorskii, from whom she may also have inherited her business. Vlas’eva’s enterprise worked on orders from Moscow textile manufacturers, taking uncoloured calico and carrying out printing and dyeing. Among the clients from whom she received calico and cloth for headscarves (platki) for processing (to a total value of 8,241 roubles 90 kopecks) were the Moscow merchants Pavel and Ivan Torochkov, Nikolai Kaftannikov, Vasilii Abramov, Nikolai Remezov, Petr Miakishev, and Grigorii Alekseev. Besides taking orders, Vlas’eva also printed calico on her own account for resale (production worth 8,000 roubles). The value of equipment and materials at her enterprise (‘various items for the factory – colours [dyes], tables, vessels’) was placed at 3,850 roubles. The list of personal movable items shows that Vlas’eva’s home did not enjoy such luxury as Zezina’s. Furniture mentioned includes two mahogany commodes (50 roubles), a mahogany cupboard (40 roubles), two mahogany tables (together, 40 roubles), 18 ‘oaken chairs with leather seats’ (together, 20 roubles), three oaken bedsteads (together, 34 roubles), two mirrors in mahogany frames (together, 30 roubles), and so on. The register includes some items not found in the possession of others: a small harp (gusli) made of alder wood (25 roubles) and ‘a Norton silver pocket watch’ (150 roubles). Unlike our other cases, the fate of Avdot’ia Vlas’eva can be followed beyond 1814. She succeeded in restoring her enterprise to working order after the destruction of the war. Its profile changed: instead of calico printing, she turned to making cotton textiles, employing 18 hired workers on 18 looms and achieving annual production of 15,500 arshins (about 11,000 m.) of calico.60 The panorama of female entrepreneurial activity reveals a wide spectrum of industrial interests – textiles, soap-boiling, paper production (mainly wallpaper), production of wax and tallow candles, and other activities. Women felt confident in all spheres of enterprise: in industry as well as in trade and property transactions.

Notes 1. Patricia Cleary, ‘ “She Will Be In The Shop”: Women’s Sphere of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia and New York’, Pennsylvania Magazine of


2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

165

History and Biography, 119 (1995), pp. 181–202; Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston: Northeastern U P, 1998); Zorina B. Khan, ‘Married Women’s Property Laws and Female Commercial Activity: Evidence from United States Patent Records, 1790–1895’, Journal of Economic History, 56 (1996), 356–88; Jeannette M. Oppedisano, Historical Encyclopedia of American Women Entrepreneurs: 1776 to the Present (Westport, CN: Greenwood P, 2000); ‘Special Section: Gender and Business History’, Business History Review, 72 (1998), 185–249; Alastair Owens, ‘Property, Gender and the Life Course: Inheritance and Family Welfare Provision in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Social History, 26 (2001), 297–315; Alastair Owens, ‘Inheritance and the Life-cycle of Firms in the Early Industrial Revolution’, Business History, 44 (2002), 21–46; David R. Green and Alastair Owens, ‘Gentlewomanly Capitalism? Spinsters, Widows and Wealth Holding in England and Wales, c. 1800–1860’, Economic History Review, 56 (2003), 510–36; and especially: Women, Business, and Finance in Nineteenthcentury Europe. Rethinking Separate Spheres, ed. by Robert Beachy, Béatrice Craig, and Alastair Owens (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005). On women’s control of property, see Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca and London: Cornell U P, 2002); Russian Women, 1698–1917: Experience and Expression, An Anthology of Sources, compiled by William G. Wagner and others (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2002). Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii […]. Sobranie I, 45 vols (St Petersburg: Tipografiia II Otd. Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1830–1843, hereafter PSZI), XX, no. 14327. PSZI, XXII, no. 16188; ‘Charter on the Rights and Benefits for the Towns of the Russian Empire’, bi-lingual text in Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns, ed. by D. Griffiths and G. E. Munro, The Laws of Russia Series II: vol. 289 (Bakersfield, CA: Schlacks Publishers, 1991), pp. 22–60. PSZI, XXII, no. 16188, arts 104, 110, 116. The criteria and capital levels governing division between guilds could vary. Thus in 1794, because of inflation, the government raised the financial threshold for the merchant guilds: required capital now became 16,000–50,000 roubles for the first guild, 8,000–16,000 for the second, 2,000–8,000 for the third. See A. V. Koval’chuk, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost’ Moskvy vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), p. 33. ‘In the eighteenth century the term meshchane in Russia was used in two senses: either it meant the entire commercial-artisan class in the towns and cities [… .]; or, in a limited sense, it designated only the lower groups of the city population, the petty tradesmen, craftsmen and the like. In the nineteenth century it had only the latter meaning.’ Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917, comp. Sergei Pushkarev, ed. George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher Jr. (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 60. PSZI, XXII, no. 16188, art. 90. See Proekt torgovogo ulozheniia Rossiiskoi imperii (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Komissii Sostavleniia Zakonov, 1814), pp. 9–11. PSZI, XXVIII, no. 21484 (decree of 24 October 1804 ‘Concerning the rules for registration of peasants in the merchantry’).

166 Women and Society 10. PSZI, XXVIII, nos. 21484 and 21811 (‘Concerning the registration of the children of church servants and migrants according to their wishes in the merchantry and meshchanstvo’). 11. PSZI, XXVIII, no. 21811. 12. ‘Treasury’ peasants belonged to the state and paid a quit-rent to the Treasury. In 1765 their ranks were enlarged by merger with them of the ‘Economic’ peasants, previously the property of monasteries, who had been placed under the control of the state College of Economy in 1764 after the dissolution of the monasteries. Appanage peasants belonged to members of the Imperial family (decree of 5 April 1797, ‘Statute concerning the Imperial family’). See Otechestvennaia istoriia. Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do 1917 goda. Entsiklopediia v piati tomakh, ed. by V. L. Ianin, 3 vols to date (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1994), III, pp. 135, 138, 140; Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms, pp. 46–48. 13. PSZI, XXVIII, no. 21484. 14. PSZI, XXV, no. 18714 (decree of 22 October 1798 ‘Concerning the release of settlers under the jurisdiction of the Appanage Department into the townspeople and merchantry’). 15. PSZI, XXX, no. 23020, para. 2, art. 7. 16. PSZI, XXVI, no. 19576 (‘Concerning the duty of Fiscal Chambers to exact from peasants and persons of other estates who register in the merchantry and the meshchanstvo all lawful taxes due from them, until a new tax census, according to the requirements of both estates’). 17. PSZI, XXXVII, no. 28855 (decree of 31 December 1821 ‘Concerning the registration of Appanage peasants in the merchantry and meshchanstvo on the same basis as that on which manumitted landlords’ peasants enter these callings’). 18. Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM), f.2, Kupecheskoe otdelenie Doma Moskovskogo gradskogo obshchestva, op.1, d.123, l. 2. 19. TsIAM, f. 2, op. 1, d.114, l.1, 4. 20. TsIAM, f. 2, op. 1, d. 87, l.1–4. 21. TsIAM, f. 2, op. 1, d. 137, l.1–4; d.140, l.1–2; d.148, l.1–2; d.170, l.1–2; d.176, l.1–4; d. 204, l.1. 22. A. Aksenov, Genealogiia Moskovskogo kupechestva XVIII veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), p. 94. 23. Aksenov, p. 64. 24. Koval’chuk, pp. 91–94. 25. Vedomost’ o manufakturakh v Rossii za 1813 i 1814 gody (St Petersburg: 1816), p. 226. 26. Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva. Revizskie skazki, 9 vols (Moscow: Tipo-lit. T-va I. N. Kushnereva, 1883–1889), VI (1887): Skazki, podannye kupecheskim sosloviem k 7-oi Revizii, p. 196. 27. TsIAM, f. 2, op.1, d. 20 4, l.1. 28. Koval’chuk, p. 100. 29. See Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, pp. 2–454. 30. The wives of army conscripts (commonly called soldatki) were usually left behind when their husbands were taken into military service, which lasted many years. Their social position thereafter was often precarious, and they might have to find means of livelihood outside of ordinary peasant roles.


31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

167

See P. P. Shcherbinin, Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII-nachale XIX vv. (Tambov: Iulis, 2004), p. 26. PSZI, VI, no. 3711 (decree of 18 January 1721 ‘Concerning the purchase of villages for factories’); XII, no. 9004 (decree of 27 July 1744 ‘Concerning permission for manufacturers to buy villages for factories’). See V. I. Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, 2 vols (St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1901–1903), I, pp. 540–47. PSZI, XVIII, no. 13374 (decree of 13 October 1769 ‘Concerning permission to all who so wish to set up weaving looms’). Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, p. 6. Starosta and shliakhtich, shliakhta (below) were Polish designations of (male) noble social status (translator’s note). Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, pp. 11–13. Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, pp.100, 106, 136. Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, pp. 66, 93, 95. Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, pp. 65–80. Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, pp.114, 119. Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, p. 87. Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva, V (1887): Skazki, podannye kupecheskim sosloviem k 6-oi revizii, p. 350; Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva, VI, p. 243. Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva, IV (1886), returns for 1794, p. 400. R. G. Eimontova, ‘Dvenadtsatyi god. Nashestvie’ in Istoriia Moskvy s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, 3 vols (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1997–2000), II, p. 34. TsIAM, f. 50, Moskovskaia Palata grazhdanskogo i ugolovnogo suda, op. 14, d. 423, l.1. TsIAM, f. 50, op. 14, d. 423, l. 2. TsIAM, f. 50, op. 14, d. 423, l. 4. TsIAM, f. 50, op. 14, d. 423, l. 8. In conversion to metric measure the plot was 6.5 m. long and wide and had an area of 42.25 square metres. TsIAM, f. 50, op. 14, d. 423, l. 25. TsIAM, f. 50, op. 14, d. 423, l. 29. TsIAM, f. 51, Moskovskaia Kazennaia Palata, op. 22, dd. 23, 33, 46, 85, 196, 231, 284; Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva, IV, Skazki, podannye k 5-oi revizii ot kupecheskogo i meshchanskogo soslovii, pp. 595, 290, 74; V, pp. 327, 139, 21. Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva, IV, p. 595. TsIAM, f. 51, op. 22, d. 23, l.1. TsIAM, f. 51, op. 22, d. 196, ll. 1–5. Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva, V, p. 139. TsIAM, f. 51, op. 22, d. 85, ll.1–34. Materialy dlia istorii moskovskogo kupechestva, IV, p. 74; V, p.21. TsIAM, f. 51, op. 22, d. 46, ll.1–5. Vedomost’ o manufakturakh, p. 230.


Part III Femininity and Religious Life


9 Sacralising Female Rule, 1725–1761 Gary Marker

By the end of January 1725 female rule had become a fait accompli, a new reality for Russian politics and political culture to which the court, church, state, and society had to adjust – and adjust immediately – if the realm were to avoid turmoil. Female rule ultimately became commonplace during the eighteenth century, with empresses reigning in Russia for all but about five years between 1725 and 1796. But that subsequent normalisation of crowned female heads in no way diminishes the abrupt discontinuity constituted by the ascension of Peter the Great’s widow, Catherine I. Russian Chronicles recorded only one prior female monarch, the ninth-century Princess Ol’ga, the grandmother of Vladimir and the famously first convert to Christianity. In the intervening centuries Russia had seen two female regencies, Elena Glinskaia, the mother of the young Ivan IV, and Sof’ia Alekseevna, Peter the Great’s half-sister. But, their power notwithstanding, neither reigned in any formal sense, neither underwent a coronation, and neither had received the unction (pomazanie) that signified divine sanction and blessing. Sof’ia was forced from power in 1689 by Peter himself, and she came to be interpreted at court as the embodiment of the folly of female political authority, a symbolic basis for assailing the mere possibility of bringing women to power. That is, until the 1720s. Only Marina Mniszek, consort of both the first and second false Dmitriis, had undergone a coronation ceremony, and it went without saying that no one wanted to follow in those footsteps. How, then, was female rule to be explained during the first half of the century? How was it reconciled to tradition, to faith, and to the sensibilities of tsarist subjects who had never imagined an alternative to kingship, that is, male rulership? In particular, how did the realm’s primary 171

172 Femininity and Religious Life

ideologists, the leading clerical authorities of Peter’s final years, manage to make female rule seem divinely sanctioned, consistent with the stated belief that the ruler was chosen by God, and consistent with the Christian precedents set forth across generations? What images, whether from Biblical or secular histories did they mobilise, what arguments or authoritative texts did they bring to bear in order to make this abrupt change appear unproblematic? Peter’s death on 28 January had hardly come as a surprise, but it nevertheless discomfited the remnants of Peter’s inner circle, the embodiments of his reforms and those with the most to lose if the reforms were undone. Their very survival, as well as the future of the still fragile Petrine order, depended on a quick and reasonably peaceful succession, which would need to be manufactured without any template or accepted precedence. By the new rules, the monarch alone would choose his successor. But Peter had not done so, and prior to his death no one had claimed to know his intention. The questions these insiders faced were, first, who would be their choice, and, second, how best to announce the resolution to make it conform to the law and public sensibilities. Our only accounts of the fraught discussions that brought Catherine I to power come from the diplomatic rumour mill, dubious anecdotes collected decades after the fact, and official explanations intended for public consumption. It may be that in the weeks or days leading up to Peter’s death the most prominent loyalists had caucused and resolved the matter privately. Equally plausible is the scenario described later in Feofan Prokopovich’s official account that suggested that the consensus was reached quickly, but only after Peter died. In any case, the list of choices was short, and none would have been especially appealing. Other than Catherine, there were Peter’s daughters and his grandson, Peter Alekseevich, whose elevation risked returning his grandmother Evdokiia, Peter the Great’s first wife who had long since been banished to a distant convent, and her anti-Petrine associates to positions of influence. Otherwise, no male candidates loomed on the horizon. Neither of the two sons from Peter’s marriage with Catherine had survived beyond early childhood. His half brother Ivan V, long since deceased, had two daughters, Anna and Ekaterina, and his sisters had not produced any available sons. In a practical sense, Peter’s men had only two choices: anointing Peter Alekseevich with Catherine as regent, or accepting some form of female rule. In the end they chose Catherine, presumably as the safest and least disruptive option, and the one that afforded Peter’s men their best chance of holding on to their collective authority. How, then, were they

Sacralising Female Rule 173

to present to the empire this rupture in the chain of patrilineal authority traced retrospectively through Vladimir, Constantine, David, and ultimately to God the father? The available evidence gives no reason to imagine that Peter saw the valorisation of his spouse, including the coronation, as a prelude to her succession. Indeed, her iconography in the years preceding Peter’s death continued to valorise her spousal and intercessory role, the helpmate Christian warrior. By 1724 Catherine did have a highly visible and formally revered persona of her own, however, and one clearly distinct from (if inclusive of) those represented in the idealised Muscovite tsaritsa. This persona exalted her individual accomplishments along with those derived from her spousal position. The decision to elevate Catherine from consort to ruler demanded a deft and immediate adjustment of the persona that brought to the fore her heavenly links, both as the living image of her name-day saint, St Catherine of Alexandria and, with Peter now dead, as the metaphorical transposition of the bride of Christ on to the throne of St Petersburg. The theoretical possibility and subsequent necessity of female rule in Russia were addressed in two works by Feofan, Pravda voli monarshei (‘The Justice of the Monarch’s Right’) of 1722, which famously explained and defended Peter’s new law of succession, and his Kratkaia povest’ o smerti Petra Velikogo (‘Brief Account of the Death of Peter the Great’), which recorded the official version of Peter’s final days and Catherine’s succession.1 Feofan devoted most of Pravda voli monarshei to criticising the principle of primogeniture in the succession in favour of the unfettered will of the reigning monarch. ‘Now if we have understood thus, we understand beyond a doubt and must unreservedly acknowledge, that every sovereign, in all his other deeds as in that which is our present subject, namely the appointment of the heir to the throne, is absolutely free to act as he chooses.’2 And: It must be understood, however, that when the jurists say that the supreme power called majesty is not subject to any other power, they mean any human power, for it is subject to God’s power, and it must obey the laws of God, both those which he has written in [human] hearts and those which he has handed down in the Decalogue […] it is subject to God’s law only in the sense that it is answerable for transgressing it to God’s judgment alone, and not to man’s.3 Feofan here was conveying in clear and accessible language the irreducible fatherhood of God and the obligation of all earthly beings, including the monarch, to obey His immutable laws and submit to his


eternal judgment. The political constitution that elevated the ruler above all man-made laws and institutions that might mediate between himself and God, what some have termed the emperor’s charisma,4 was both just and feasible, the archbishop explained, because of the irreducibility of grace and the inevitability of the Day of Judgment. Hardly original, to be sure, and not explicitly Orthodox, but the argument was incomprehensible outside of a cosmology that placed the desire for eternal salvation at the centre of all earthly endeavour. Still, Feofan assumed in Pravda voli monarshei that the heir would almost always come from among the monarch’s sons. In those rare and exceptional cases when ‘a monarch should be so unfortunate in his sons that he could not see even one fit and able to rule, then, before God, to whom he is accountable for his stewardship, he must seek out a fit and virtuous stranger and appoint [that person] as his successor’.5 In 1722, when Peter had no sons living from whom to choose, this reference to ‘a fit and virtuous stranger’ must have sent minds racing, perhaps toward the Hohenzollern princes to whom Peter had tried to marry his daughters. What, then, of the current situation, when most of the likely candidates were women? The text allowed for the theoretical possibility of female rule, and in language that reflected Russia’s current dilemma. ‘These considerations concerning a monarch’s sons should also be understood to apply, in the absence of sons, to his daughters (where female rule is not excluded, as in France), and to his brothers and other immediate members of his family if the monarch dies intestate.’6 This phraseology hardly constituted an endorsement of any variant of female rule, except perhaps for France. True, it did not explicitly exclude wives, sisters, or nieces, but it made no effort to include them either, and the phrase ‘other members of the immediate family’ appeared to rule out distant relatives or individuals utterly unrelated to the monarch. The language implied that the heir would in almost all cases be male, which turned out not to be the case just three years later. Everyone at court, as well as the entire foreign diplomatic corps, knew whose names would be on the shortlist, but the formulation in Pravda voli monarshei offered only vague directions of how the looming dilemma of Peter’s latter years might play out in the absence of an obvious heir. In earlier writings Feofan had expressed himself differently, and he had dwelled on the desirability of an inherited crown, with the heir coming from the immediate family. The monarch’s will notwithstanding, more than one of his orations from the middle of Peter’s reign had tied God’s will, a well-ordered state, and orderly transitions explicitly to the royal blood line. A vivid example comes from the thanksgiving


homily at the birth of Peter Petrovich, the first male issue of tsaritsa Catherine, in 1715. As was his wont, Feofan anchored his hosannas to the new tsarevich in history, arguing for the virtue of an inherited throne over a chosen, or elected one. Monarchy, he insisted, had almost always functioned as an act of inheritance within a single family. The ancient Assyrian state was that way from the time of Nimrod. So too were the ancient lands of Medea and Persia. God imposed the same order on Israel, and even the ancient Egyptian pharaohs accepted this rule. Spain, France, England, Denmark, Sweden, and other strong European states followed the same rule. Even in Africa (Tunis, Ethiopia, etc.) and Asia (India, China, Japan) inherited monarchy was the rule. The only exception to this rule of inherited monarchy was Poland, ‘and we should not envy them that’ (‘da i ne v zavist’!’).7 An inherited throne allowed the sovereign to concern himself with the well-being of the entire realm, just as he would in his own household. But in monarchies where the ruler is selected, factions tend to form that struggle against each other for the throne and at the expense of the common good. The interregnum is the most dangerous moment in these states, Feofan warned, a time when the risk of a general conflagration becomes palpable, especially when the claims and power of the rivals are more or less equal. Russian history since the Time of Troubles had assuredly confirmed him in this view. To its good fortune, he wrote at that time, Russia has an inherited monarchy, and, thus, a new son, a second heir, was at hand. ‘And so we observe, ye who hear me, what joy we derive, having received from God a royal son: Russia shall preserve its well-being through the inheritance of the sceptre of monarchy, and may this good fortune be long lasting.’8 Or so it seemed in 1715. The Biblical passages that Feofan selected to verify what otherwise had been a statement of pragmatic and secular politics came from three Psalms, 71:11, 98:3, and 78:65–66 (70, 97, and 77 in the Slavonic Old Testament) which he stitched together in a single paragraph. All dealt with establishing the house of David as the rulers of Israel. The first of these Psalms, applied to the despair of the Rus’ at the death of Vladimir the Great lest his ruling house come to an end, proclaimed, ‘They say, “God has forsaken him [David]; pursue him and seize him, for no one will rescue him”.’ The second, interposed by Feofan as a rejoinder to the first, reassured, ‘He [the Lord] has remembered his love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel (The Russian text adds ‘and his mercy to Jacob’ after ‘his love’). The third amplified further, ‘Then the Lord awoke as from sleep, as a man wakes from the stupor of wine. He beat back his enemies; he put them to everlasting shame.’9 Once again, Biblical kingship


linked the house of David with the house of Vladimir, and then both with the house of Romanov, the new Israel. And just as God had chosen Jacob’s line, from which David descended to inherit Israel’s throne, so too he chose the Romanov line, from which Peter, the latter-day David, descended to establish Russia’s Imperial inherited line. ‘And David shepherded them with integrity of heart; with skilful hands he led them.’10 God’s love and mercy brought this to pass both then and now, Feofan declaimed. It was God’s plan (at least in 1715) and Russia’s blessing that this inheritance of the house of Romanov would continue, ideally from father to son. That good fortune proved to be fleeting. Aleksei, Peter’s adult son from his first marriage, was disgraced and eliminated from succession in 1718, and Peter Petrovich, his only other surviving male issue, died the next year. Feofan was nothing if not adaptable, however. When Peter did die, the remote hypothetical scenarios raised in Pravda voli monarshei became urgent reality. Feofan and Peter’s long-time confidant and aide de camp, Alexander Menshikov, according to most accounts, were rumoured to have played the critical role in orchestrating Catherine’s succession in the immediate aftermath of Peter’s death. The French envoy Jacques de Campredon, for example, emphasised Menshikov’s role in winning over the guards’ regiments to Catherine’s side during Peter’s last days, and thus forestalling the risk of civil war.11 Once the emperor had expired, he claimed, the regiments proved their loyalty by declaring that they would cut off the heads of anyone opposing granting complete sovereignty to the empress.12 For the sake of legality, the intentions of the deceased emperor were paramount, and Feofan’s Kratkaia povest’ addressed this matter explicitly. On 27 January, with Peter’s death seemingly imminent, the Synod and Senate resolved to convene as soon as he expired. The Senate and four members of the Synod held an all-night vigil at the Winter Palace, along with several members of the nobility. The talk was all about the succession.13 One group insisted that the sceptre could only go to the empress, since she had been so recently crowned. Others demurred, pointing out that elsewhere the coronation of a queen did not automatically convey the right to rule, a proposition that was fully consistent with everything that Feofan had written and preached on the subject up until this time. At that moment an unnamed person recalled that Peter had expressed his intentions just prior to the Persian campaign, that he had specifically told four of his ministers and two persons from the Synod [here unnamed] that he was crowning his spouse, ‘a custom which previously


did not exist in Russia’, so that the throne would not be left without a successor. With this choice, the empire would be spared the risk of disorders and troubles inherent in an interregnum. The unnamed herald, Feofan explained, carried the day, and all present agreed that the empress should inherit the Russian throne. A public declaration was composed, and the assembled party went to convey the news to the empress, still sitting beside Peter’s body. The supplicants asked the empress to accept the mantle of rulership, ‘which God and her spouse had placed upon her’. Tearful in time-honoured and virtually obligatory fashion, Catherine initially refused but then relented and agreed to become the sovereign head of state, Russia’s first formally chosen female ruler until her death in May 1727. Feofan’s text held true to his principles of kingly discretion and the will of God as the only sources of divinely guided authority left available. Catherine would now rule as sovereign because this was what Peter intended and what God had ordained. Much more would be needed than a mere pamphlet, however, before the legal fact of female rule, especially the rule of this particular female, became natural. God’s will, however mysterious, had to be displayed in every manner possible, and insisted upon as often as possible, if the non-noble, non-Russian, nonmale Catherine were to reign as pomazanitsa with at least a semblance of legitimacy. Ultimately Gavriil Buzhinskii, the influential Archimandrite of the Trinity Monastery in Kostroma, provided the spiritual message that enabled the transition to present the illusion of seamlessness. In a remarkable sermon preached on the first anniversary of Peter’s death, Buzhinskii reprised a theme made common in the panegyrics of 1725: the emperor’s two bodies, the body natural and the body politic.14 Peter was dead in the flesh, his body lay in the sarcophagus, and yet he remained alive in the deeds and structures he left behind. This premise, so fundamental to Christian kingship since the late middle ages, especially in Britain, was less familiar in Russia, where the older dualism of God in heaven and tsar on earth had prevailed, side by side with the allegorical reincarnation (the living Constantine et al.) of sacred kingship. Nevertheless, the idea that the political body of Peter lived on through his good works reverberated in Russian churches and academies throughout the eighteenth century, and beyond. In the presence of the empress who was adorned with both the crown and the St Catherine’s cross, he intoned, ‘Peter the Great is alive: I am the resurrection and the life … and whoever believes in me will live forever. This knowledge should be a salve to your heart’s wound, Russia’,15 Peter was ‘for ever more our guide and teacher’.16


Peter, Buzhinskii continued, left behind his wife, Catherine, through whom he lived on as well. His spirit had ascended to Christ in heaven, but his bride, the bride of the now celestial Peter, remains on earth. Here, the ruling Empress Catherine was transformed metaphorically into the bride of Christ, like her name-day saint, Catherine of Alexandria. Like her angel before her, she was adorned with her queenly crown, while her husband now dwelt in heaven. The mystical marriage of Christ and St Catherine was reproduced as the union of Catherine and Peter. The living Catherine now ruled, however briefly, as the chosen both of Peter and Christ, the complete incarnation of her angel, St Catherine. This particular conflation of the ruler and name-day saint provided an essential basis for sacralising female rule, a heavenly link that verbally and visually conveyed God’s blessing of the new arrangement. Catherine and her entourage embraced and reproduced the identification with the regal angel wholeheartedly. On 15 June 1725 she ordered a second bulwark to be built by the harbour, to be named after St Catherine. On 7 August she dedicated the private church at the Summer Palace to St Catherine and, as the daily entries of the kamerfur’er, the keeper of the court calendar, confirm, she made it a point to attend liturgy there quite often.17 In March of the next year she gave a portrait of St Catherine, apparently painted by Peter himself, to the Lithuanian hetman Sapeho.18 Lockets also were made of Catherine in the pose of St Catherine, with her prototypical crown and studded wheel. A panageia or religious medallion, typically worn around the neck, of her reign in the form of a crown included a picture of the empress in the pose of St Catherine. Panageiai symbolised the rank of a bishop, but they had been worn by members of the tsarist family since the sixteenth century. They were thus emblems of the mythical continuity of Russian rulership under God and the church, Catherine’s sacred bond with holy Rus’.19 The state of official mourning obliged Catherine to celebrate her name day in a subdued manner in 1725, primarily with a court service and a sermon by Feofilakt Lopatinskii, the Archimandrite of the Chudov Monastery in Moscow, even though homes in St Petersburg remained illuminated throughout the evening.20 Her name day that year also was chosen for the official opening of the Academy of Sciences, with St Catherine’s blessing replacing the invocation to the pagan gods who had adorned the academy of ancient Rome, so the official proclamation explained.21 At the banquet that evening the Academy’s president, Blumentrost, toasted the empress and recognised her as the Academy’s patron. The next year the name day was celebrated lavishly over a two-day


period, with a mixture of church services, parades, feasts, dancing, and fireworks.22 Greetings came from all corners of the empire, and with little of the mournfulness of the previous year.23 Recognising the political dimension of the St Catherine persona, several individuals and parishes petitioned to construct St Catherine churches and chapels on their land. The French envoy commented in his report that the entire month preceding the name day had been taken up with preparations for the festivities.24 In 1726 this event outshone every other public festivity in the capital, a clear indication of the political importance the empress’s entourage placed on her saint. There was also a brief effort to construct a female parallel to princely resurrection, as in a well-known 1725 engraving by Aleksei Zubov commissioned by the Synod in which Catherine is surrounded by 56 Russian rulers (all of whom were men) from Riurik to Peter. The inscription, which spoke of Catherine’s loyalty to Peter’s legacy, included the phrase, ‘Russia’s second Ol’ga, the worthy descendent of a great monarch’.25 But for whatever reason, this imagery of a second Ol’ga was unsustained. In the end Catherine’s heavenly blessings, the only base upon which sacral legitimacy could possibly rest, were cast almost entirely as her saint’s living image, the allegorical bride of Christ, and as the chosen one of her heavenly spouse. On 10 July 1725 Catherine, dressed in her cloak of mourning, attended a service of thanksgiving at the capital’s Trinity Church to celebrate the anniversary of Peter’s liberation at Pruth, the iconic foundational moment of Catherine’s special designation by Peter. At the first anniversary of Peter’s death, as one more ritual enactment of her selection as the spouse of a heavenly tsar, she attended memorial service at the Church of Peter and Paul, and two days later marked the end of official mourning with a service at the Church of St Catherine.26 In this way Catherine I became, in turn, both the model and the bodily vessel through which the divine sanction of female rule would be ritually reaffirmed over the rest of the century. A model, in that subsequent female rulers went to considerable lengths to publicise their own nameday saints, and themselves as living images, often at the expense of the name-day saints of their predecessors. A vessel, in that hers was the sacred womb that produced Elizabeth and in that through Catherine’s precedence Sophie of Zerbst was rechristened as the new Ekaterina Alekseevna, a second Catherine for the new Peter. It was thus fitting that Catherine chose the closing of the liturgy for Elizabeth’s name day as the moment to inscribe her in the Order of St Catherine, thereby making her daughter (and her daughter’s angel) only the second woman of the royal family to become a Knight of Ransom and guardian of Christian empire.27


Blessing Anna Anna Ioannovna’s ascent to the throne in the wake of the 1730 succession crisis constituted a triumph for unfettered monarchy, male or female. Having narrowly avoided a potentially ruinous stalemate of competing interests, relieved clergy and courtiers were unlikely to raise gender as a potentially disabling issue. Nevertheless, the sacralisation of Anna’s rule required, in its own way, as much finesse as did the explanations for Catherine. Sacred wombs and celestial husbands had no relevance for a long-time widow of a German duke with few, if any, personal affinities to Moscow’s consecrated sites. She did not come from the Petrine line and there was little about her deceased husband or her long-deceased father Ivan V that could be used in her behalf. Nor was it clear whether she wished to be associated with the legacy of Peter, a fact that left the court panegyrists with few clear directions as to the representation of Anna’s legitimacy. Just as Peter II had posthumously restored the standing of his father, Aleksei, and that of his still-living grandmother, Evdokiia, it seemed plausible that Anna would seek to resurrect her own father’s legacy at court. In any case, no one knew what to expect. This quandary comes through in Feofan’s panegyrics to Anna, both in his sermons and in his poetry. These texts make almost no mention of Peter the Great, and they struggle to find a clearly recognised Scriptural figure with whom to identify the new empress. For example, a verse written to commemorate Anna’s arrival in Moscow on 25 February 1730 praised her for preserving sovereignty against those who would introduce a duplicitous order (stroi obmannyi). It thanked God that Anna preserved Russia against the hellish political order (grazhdanskii ad) that malefactors (i.e. the Supreme Privy Council) sought to impose. But it offered no celestial intercessors or antecedents for Anna herself.28 And it said nothing about Peter. Another poem of 1730 called her ‘Augusta’ and ‘divinely crowned,’ but again offers her no heavenly intercession.29 Feofan’s sermon orated at the coronation in April 1731 was strangely devoid of praise – or even any mention – of the new empress. The text contained no expressions of joy at her selection, and, more tellingly, it made no effort to connect her to Peter, whose name was nowhere to be found in the text.30 Ultimately he and others resorted to Anna’s saintly namesakes: her name-day saint, Anna the Prophetess; Anna, the mother of Mary; and Anna, the mother of the Prophet Samuel. These figures had previously been little celebrated in Russian Orthodoxy; none had vitae in Dimitrii Rostovskii’s Chet’i minei, the twelve-volume book of saints’ lives produced at the end of the previous century, and they do not


appear in Prolog, the abbreviated volume of saints’ lives and religious holidays. During the 1730s, however, they constituted Empress Anna’s link to the Kingdom of Heaven and were temporarily elevated to political and spiritual prominence, an unmistakable sign that the role of female saints in the sacralisation of female rule was now broadly understood. Feofan’s verse from early in the decade celebrating Anna’s visit to the village of Vladykino endows her with the mercy of her angel, her communion with heaven’s light.31 A second coronation-day oration by Feofan offering public thanksgiving wished Anna a long life, and it compared her to Anna the Prophetess. Married at 14 and widowed at 21, the prophet Anna lived the rest of her life as a widow. Mentioned in the Gospel of Luke as having been entrusted, at the age of 72, with raising the three-year-old virgin Mary until Mary’s betrothal to Joseph, she was present at the temple when Mary and Joseph presented the baby Jesus. Feofan embroidered the Scriptural version somewhat, and intoned that the years of widowhood that had been their shared misfortune32 demonstrated that she would emulate her saint not just in name, but in deed.33 This not quite scriptural passage brought the female saint directly into the service of legitimising female rule. In fact, any day of celebration linked to the name Anna found its way on to state calendars and court ceremonials, almost as if the court were relying upon a larger number of heavenly Annas to substantiate heaven’s gaze in spite of the relative insignificance of any of them. These included the empress’s birthday (28 January), her name day (3 February), her coronation day (28 April), the birthday of Anna Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great (8 December) and Anna Petrovna’s name day (9 December), as well as that of the empress’s niece, the daughter of Ekaterina Ioannovna.34 Equally tellingly, other name days associated with Romanov women were diminished in public stature, including St Catherine’s day, which was dropped as a state holiday during Anna’s reign, in spite of the fact that she had also been the saint of Anna’s own sister, Ekaterina Ioannovna.35 Anna made the Order of St Catherine less visible, preferring instead to celebrate the Polish Order of the White Eagle, of which her late husband had been an inductee.36 November 24 remained a feast day on the church calendar, of course, but without the lavish celebration of it generated in the 1720s.

The daughter of Catherine I A recent scholar has contended that ‘Peter’s daughter had been preparing herself for 25 November 1741 […] for more than ten years’.37 This


may be an exaggeration, but the larger point is certainly true: Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne had been carefully planned and choreographed. On the evening of 24 November she attended a St Catherine’s Day mass, knowing that, as she knelt in prayer to her late mother’s angel, a coup was under way that would bring her to the throne on the following day.38 Elizabeth, of course, was renowned for patronising church institutions, and she relied heavily on religious imagery to establish her political identity.39 Iconography of St Elizabeth abounded during her 20-year reign, in particular in the capital. The iconostasis of the church of the Saviour, dedicated in 1737, depicted Christ and Alexander Nevskii together on the right side, and Mary and St Elizabeth on the left40 A decade later, on 2 September 1747 the new church of Sts Zachariah and Elizabeth was consecrated in honour of the empress’s name-day saint.41 Then in September 1756 the empress dedicated yet another church of this name on Voskresenskii Prospect.42 Each of these gestures – and there were many others, associating St Elizabeth simultaneously with the Holy Family and with Nevskii (whose holiday was elaborately reinstated in 1743) – reproduced in great and visible detail the symbolic politics of female name-day saints.43 Elizabeth also sought to derive her legitimacy in large part from her mother’s testament. Although it is rarely mentioned in the literature, she went to considerable lengths throughout her reign to reassert the matrilineal link and to honour her mother’s memory. Her very first manifesto of 25 November emphasised her blood link (blizost’ po krovi) to Peter the Great and Catherine I, as did the sermon of thanksgiving for her enthronement delivered by Dmitrii Sechenov, the Metropolitan of Novgorod.44 A homily orated on Elizabeth’s name day in 1742 by Archbishop Arsenii Matveevich in the presence of the empress and her newly-named heir, the young Peter, praised her for pursuing her faith through good deeds. It went on at some length about Biblical prophets, remarking that while every prophet’s father had been a prophet himself, this was not true of most of their mothers. The exception was John the Baptist, both of whose parents [Sts Elizabeth and Zachariah]45 achieved recognition as prophets. ‘And we observe a comparable example in you [Empress]. For you are a monarch [born] of monarchs, an empress from emperors.’46 This was quite a family romance that Matveevich had painted: the virgin queen, an echo of the Mother of God, affiliated simultaneously with John the Baptist and, through her name-day saint, John the Baptist’s mother! Matveevich was not alone in combining the living image of St Elizabeth with family metaphors from the early church so as to exalt


a ruler whom the upper clergy fervently believed to be its ardent supporter. Elizabeth’s coronation sermon, composed by Archbishop Amvrosii of Novgorod, went to great lengths to associate the new monarch with all manner of figures from the birth of Christianity. Christ himself had chosen Elizabeth for the throne as God’s instrument to protect the realm from false teachings, as the apostles had preached and the female martyrs had exemplified in their lives. In the spirit of the living image, Amvrosii spoke of how the Virgin Mother of God had from time to time visited the home of Zachariah and Elizabeth, congratulating them on the birth of John. And now, through the blessing of the son [a reference to Jesus, John the Baptist, or both] Russia had received its own Elizabeth on to the throne of her parents, whose spirit lived on within her. If Peter I was a second Solomon, Elizabeth was the new Judith. ‘We see in her chaste (devicheskoi) spirit God’s long-term design, we see an indomitable bravery (muzhestvo), a heroic heart, a high divine wisdom, a fearless strength (khrabrost’), a love and mercy for the fatherland without artifice.’47 The free intermingling of masculine traits (‘bravery’, ‘heroic’, ‘fearless strength’) with signifiers of feminine purity (‘chaste spirit’, ‘love and mercy’, ‘heart’) is especially noteworthy here. Clearly, in their acquisition of the strengths of men while maintaining those of women, female rulers were being cast as both male and female, not exactly bigendered, but something quite close. The passage also demonstrates the value of well-chosen Biblical and saintly antecedents, in particular the vitae that had defined their saintly personae in Russian Orthodox book culture. For it was the sainted female martyr (velikomuchenitsa) who was endowed with these otherwise masculine traits, as prescribed by the General Menaion (Mineia obshchaia), a widely circulated Slavonic text that set forth the templates by which the varying types of saints were to be praised. Although Amvrosii never mentioned Catherine I or St Catherine directly, he did reprise a theme that had been central to the legitimation of Catherine’s reign by reminding the congregants that the Orthodox Church was the bride of Christ (nevesta khristova tserkov’ pravoslavnaia), so as to reveal the divine foreshadowing of Elizabeth’s ascent to power. But in a transparent echo of Matthew 16:18, Amvrosii declared that the Petrine rock on which the throne rested was Peter’s beloved daughter (kamennoe Petra Velikogo osnovanie, to est’ Dshcher’ Ego vseliubezneishuiu). Even in this rough paraphrase, the literary licence of these two sermons is apparent. Formally, however, the orations followed the old model of Bible-centred commentary. Within a few years this would change as leading court preachers began to experiment with language and thematic


structure. Departing from church, Slavonic and the scholastic formulae upon which Russian sermons had long relied, some Elizabethan hierarchs began to preach and write in Russian and to experiment with literary flourishes designed to win the approval of the increasingly Europeanised noble congregants. As Viktor Zhivov has pointed out, these modifications are associated largely with Archimandrite Gedeon Krinovskii (1730–1763) of the Trinity St. Sergius monastery, who ‘strove to attract his listeners’ attention not so much by moral pathos as by sensitivity to the tastes of his upper-class audience’,48 and introduced literary references and stories into his homilies, as much to amuse his audience as to edify them. The leading panegyrists, including Elizabeth’s preferred preachers, Amvrosii Iushkevich, the bishop of Vologda (1690–1745), Matseevich, Metropolitan of Rostov (1709–1780), and Sechenov, Metropolitan of Novgorod (1709–1767), witnessed these changes and some endeavoured to adapt to them.49 In so doing they sustained the Catherinian theme by anointing her as the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I.50 Three weeks after the coup, Amvrosii pronounced, ‘with a great diligence Peter obtained [his achievements]; and in all these matters Catherine was also present and similarly achieved’.51 Kiril, the Archimandrite of Zaikonospasskii Monastery, reiterated this theme: ‘The Lord gave her a brave/manly [muzhestvennoe] heart, the spirit of Peter, the courage of Judith […] Do you know, children, who I am? And whose daughter I am? My magnanimous parents, Peter the Great and Catherine toiled, commanded rectitude, created a magnificent treasure with their mighty labours.’52 A printed description of a 1742 fireworks display in honour of the future Peter III refers to him as ‘the worthy grandson of His Imperial Majesty, Peter the Great, and the Empress Catherine’.53 A panegyric on Elizabeth’s birthday, 18 December 1741, praised her for recognising and abjuring the vanity of striving for greatness without the handiwork of God. Who could have harboured any doubts that she, this most worthy daughter of Peter the Great and the praiseworthy Empress Catherine, in her ascent to the throne [occupied by] these glorious parents, would be endowed by nature both with the heroic bravery of her great father and the magnanimous virtues of her mother?54 This same birthday, celebrated literally days after the coup, included a massive display of fireworks whose centrepiece was a great fire wheel, a universally recognised symbol of the Catherine/St Catherine persona.55 The event had other visual displays of the new empress flanked by both


her parents. Sechenov orated a sermon on 25 March 1742 extolling Elizabeth for reviving the pious zeal of her mother, Catherine, who had converted to Orthodoxy when asked to by her spouse. (Ekaterina, sobliudi pravoslavnuiu veru).56 One month later Amvrosii delivered his coronation sermon, cited above, that valorised the piety of the virgin as an attribute of female rulers.57 A verse celebrating the treaty with Sweden in 1743 continued this theme of dual parentage. Praising Elizabeth as the securer of peace (utverzhditel’nitsa mira), the paean marvels at her success at securing victory so quickly, and it terms Elizabeth the daughter of heroes and glorious monarchs.58 The formal proclamation of ascendancy published three days after Sechenov’s sermon explained that her right to rule derived from a clause in Catherine’s testament allegedly prescribing that, if Peter II were to die childless, he should be succeeded by Elizabeth, assuming, of course, that Peter II predeceased her.59 As Anisimov has shown, however, the testament said no such thing, and instead delineated a different order of preference, albeit one that accepted female rule. Upon the death of Peter II the throne would pass to Anna Petrovna, Elizabeth’s sister, and Anna Petrovna’s heirs. Only if Anna Petrovna died childless, the testament prescribed, would Elizabeth become empress.60 Once again the right of the monarch’s will was being honoured in the breach, yet nominally confirmed in the official record. Still, the clause asserting Anna’s precedence did establish the distinct possibility, if not desirability, that female rule would recur, perhaps indefinitely: 8. If the Grand Duke [Peter II] were to expire without heirs, then tsesarevna Anna Petrovna and her descendents would succeed him. After her, tsesarevna Elizabeth and her descendents, and then the Grand Duchess and her descendents. However, heirs of the male sex take precedence over those of the female sex, and under no circumstances shall anyone occupy the Russian throne who does not follow Greek [Orthodox] Law or who holds another crown.61 Perhaps because of this documentary sleight of hand, Elizabeth went to considerable lengths to return the memory of her mother to public consciousness and to official memorialisation. At stake, after all, was the ascendancy not just of the Petrine line of the family, but also of the Catherinian branch of that line, of which she was the offspring, as against the branch of Evdokiia which had produced the second Peter. These images of devotion and filial piety competed with and complemented a


much wider assortment of media and visual representations of female power than had been the case in her mother’s day. As the court records show, the pious and officially unwed Elizabeth was more than willing to be represented as pagan or mythological goddesses in secular art, balls, and public spectacles. But public piety occupied a very prominent place in her persona, and a central affirmation of that piety was the blessing of her mother’s angel, whose name day now served the added role of initiating the annual celebration of Elizabeth’s rise to power, each celebration now reinforcing the other. The feast day of St Catherine returned to state calendars, and Elizabeth is recorded as having observed it regularly with a mass and court ceremony, feasts, and balls well into the night.62 As if to carve the date permanently into the state calendar, 24 November was further inscribed as the annual day of the St Catherine Order.63 When her future daughterin-law, Sophie, converted to Orthodoxy shortly after her arrival on Russian soil in 1744, Elizabeth gave her the name of Ekaterina Alekseevna in memory of her mother. This act, rich in symbolic possibilities, ritually reincarnated the first Catherine so that she could wed the new Peter, a reconstitution of the marriage that had generated both the empire and Elizabeth herself. Lacking an official husband or legitimate offspring, she ritually reproduced her own progenitors instead, thereby symbolically re-enacting the virgin birth. It was this unity of husband and wife, imperator and imperatritsa, Peter and Catherine, from which Elizabeth repeatedly drew her own heritage and her fitness to rule, and which she restaged in the marriage of her nephew, the new Peter (rather than Karl, his first name), to the newly renamed Catherine. Perhaps aware of this iconic link between the intercessor saint and the living empress, the Swedish Lutheran congregation in St Petersburg received permission to construct a stone church of St Catherine on Malaia Koniushennaia almost immediately after the arrival of the heir’s new bride, the second Catherine.64 To explore in full the rich and multivalent Elizabethan imagery of the triumphant virgin daughter and the metaphoric rebirth of the celestial parents deserves far more discussion than is possible here. Let us instead conclude with a visual example of the revived cult, an icon of St Catherine painted by the court artist S. I. Poliakov in 1759.65 An inscription on the icon reveals that the scene was painted on the commission of Princess Elena Vasil’evna Dolgorukaia in memory of her daughter Catherine. Standing erect with sword in her left hand and sheath in her right, she wears both the corona of heaven and the crown of royalty. As the Archangel observes her from heaven, two cherubs place the wedding


wreath on her head. To one side is a prayer to St Catherine on behalf of the empress. It calls upon the holy martyr – brave, beautiful, wise, virginal, and so on – to employ her mercy to pray for the empress and to intercede on her behalf in the Kingdom of Heaven so that Elizabeth too may use bravery, piety, and wisdom to protect Russia from its enemies and to pass on to her successor [i.e. the reborn Peter] the same heavenly blessings through the ages. As earlier scholars have remarked, the Russian court adjusted remarkably well to female rule, against which no coups or back-room assaults took place. The insistence upon treating it as something unremarkable to tradition and faith were surely deliberate strategies, at least through the first three female reigns. Silence in this instance was bursting with meaning. The determination to find divine and heavenly affinities, however, makes it clear that there was indeed much to explain if the unction on female crowned heads was to be accepted. Female name-day saints, the cult of the virgin, and the sacred womb, thus, mattered greatly, and they collectively provided a hastily assembled but indispensable female alternative to the patrilocal Tree of Jesse and the lineage of divine kingship.

Notes 1. The account originally appeared in 1726. The citations here come from the 1831 edition: Feofan Prokopovich, Kratkaia povest’ o smerti Petra Velikogo (St Petersburg: Tipografiia I. Glazunova, 1831). 2. ‘The Justice of the Monarch’s Right’, in Peter the Great, ed. and trans. by Anthony Lentin (Oxford: Headstart History, 1996), p. 195. 3. ‘The Justice of the Monarch’s Right’, p. 187. 4. Ernest A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), pp. 4–5. 5. ‘The Justice of the Monarch’s Right’, p. 203. 6. ‘The Justice of the Monarch’s Right’, p. 209. 7. Feofan Prokopovich, ‘Slovo pokhval’noe blagorodneishago gosudaria tsarevicha i velikogo kniazia Petra Petrovicha’, in his Sochineniia (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1961), pp. 39–40. The entire panegyric runs from pp. 38–48. 8. ‘Slovo pokhval’noe’, p. 47. 9. ‘Slovo pokhval’noe’, p. 43. 10. Taken from the New International Version of the Bible, p. 540. 11. ‘Memorandum of Campredon to de Morville, February 1725’, in Sbornik Imperatorskogo Rossiiskogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva, 42 (1882), pp. 428–40. 12. ‘Memorandum of Campredon to de Morville, February 1725’, p. 430. Focusing entirely on Realpolitik, Campredon made no mention in this memorandum of Prokopovich or rituals of legitimation. His only reference to the clergy cynically observed that they had been pacified by the promise of lower taxes. Otherwise, his concern lay with the powerful men of the Senate and the potentially more powerful men in arms.

188 Femininity and Religious Life 13. This account comes entirely from Prokopovich, Kratkaia povest’, pp. 15–18. 14. ‘Slovo v den’ godishchnogo pominoveniia vo blazhennoi pamiati prestavlenogosia blagochestiveishogo velikogo Gosudaria Petra Velikogo’, in Gavriil Buzhinskii, Propovedi Gavriila Buzhinskago (1717–1727), ed. E. V. Petukhov (Iur’ev: [n. pub.], 1898), pp. 578–95. 15. This passage has been cited before, albeit in passing. See Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1961), p. 86. Cherniavsky’s source was E. F. Shmurlo, ‘Petr Velikii v otsenke sovremennikov i potomstva’, Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 35 (1911), 315–40; 36 (1911) 1–37, 201–73; 39 (1912), 1–40, 193–259. 16. Buzhinskii, p. 581. 17. Pokhodnyi zhurnal, 1725 (St Petersburg: Ministerstvo imperatorskogo dvora, 1858), p. 26. 18. Pokhodnyi zhurnal, 1726, p. 10. (The entry refers to the portrait as ‘rabota gosudarevaia’). 19. Iu. A. Piatnitsky, Sinai, Byzantium, Russia: Orthodox Art from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century (London: Saint Catherine Foundation, 2000), p. 325. 20. Pokhodnyi zhurnal, 1725, pp. 39–40. 21. Elena Pogosian, Petr I – arkhitektor rossiiskoi istorii (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2001), p. 312. 22. Pokhodnyi zhurnal, 1726, pp. 33–35. 23. See for example, the congratulatory letter of V. Gennin, director of mining in Ekaterinburg, from 18 December 1726: V. Gennin, Ural’skaia perepiska s Petrom i Ekaterinoi I (Ekaterinburg: RAN, 1995), p. 368. 24. As quoted in Pogosian, p. 318. 25. D. A. Rovinskii, Slovar’ russkikh gravirovannykh portretov. Zapiski Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 75 vols (1862–1895), XXI (1872), p. 46. 26. Pokhodnyi zhurnal, 1726, pp. 3–4. 27. Pokhodnyi zhurnal, 1725, p. 42. 28. ‘Na den’ 25 fevralia’, in Feofan Prokopovich, Sochineniia, p. 217. 29. ‘Proch’ ustupai,’ proch’’, in Prokopovich, Sochineniia, p. 218. 30. Feofan Prokopovich, ‘Slovo v den’ koronatsii Gosudaryni Imperatritsy Anny Ioannovny v Moskve’, 4 vols ((St Petersburg: pri Sukhoputnom shliakhetnom kadetskom korpuse, 1761-1774), III (1765), 73–81. 31. ‘Anna milosti tezoimenita/ i samim delom imeni soglasna;/Sushchi vyshniago prichastnitsa sveta,/ sushchi i telom i dukhom prekrasno.’ Prokopovich, Sochineniia, p. 218. 32. ‘There was also a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshipped night and day, fasting and praying. Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.’ Luke 2: 36–38 (New International Edition). Another more distant reference to widowhood would refer to Anna, the mother of Mary. The text for this Anna’s widowhood comes from the Apocrypha of Saint James, the only early Christian writing that mentions her: ‘And [Joachim’s] wife mourned in two mournings, and lamented in two lamentations, saying: I shall bewail my


33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

widowhood; I shall bewail my childlessness.’ According to some legends Anna survived Joachim and, after her widowhood, remarried. ‘Rech’ kotoroiu Gos. Imperatritsa Anna i po koronatsii ot vsekh chinov pozdravlena im vuspeniem’, in Prokopovich, Slova i rechi (St Petersburg: pri Sukhoputnom shliakhetnom kadetskom korpuse), pp. 47–51. Zhurnal pridvornoi kontory 1734-go godu (St Petersburg, n.d.), p. 10. See for example, the official calendar of 1738 in which St Catherine’s Day is listed as a saint’s day but not as a day of official state celebration. Sanktpeterburgskii kalendar’ na leto ot rozhdestva Khristova 1738, kotoroe est’ prostoe leto, soderzhashche 365 dnei, sochinennyi na znatneishiia mesta rossiiskogo gosudarstva (St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1737). Anna’s court records indicate that she hosted an annual banquet for the Order of the White Eagle on 23 July, often in the company of the Polish Ambassador. See, for example, Zhurnal pridvornoi kantory 1734-go goda, p. 7, 1736-go goda, p. 27, and 1737-go goda, p. 28. Konstantin Pisarenko, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo dvora v tsarstvovanie Elizavety Petrovny (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003), p. 609. N. N. Firsov, Vstuplenie na prestol Imperatritsy Elizavety Petrovny (Kazan’: Universitetskaia Tipografiia, 1888), pp. 146–48; P. Pekarskii, Markiz de-la Shetardi v Rossii 1740–1742 godov (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Isafata Ogritzko, 1862), pp. 393–97. For example, during the late 1720s and 1730s she spent a great deal of time at the Dormition Convent on her estate in Aleksandrovskaia sloboda, praying, subsidising, and cultivating relations with the nuns there lest she be confined to a convent at some future date: N. S. Stromilov, Tsesarevna Elisaveta Petrovna v Aleksandrovoi slobode i Uspenskii devichii monastyr’ v to zhe vremia (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1874), pp. 13–24. I. I. Pushkarev, Opisanie Sanktpeterburga (St Petersburg: Tipografiia N. Grecha, 1839), p. 207 Pushkarev, p. 208. Pushkarev, p. 279. S. G. Runkevich, Aleksandro-Nevskaia lavra, 1713–1913 (St Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tipografiia, 1913), pp. 743–44. E. V. Anisimov, Zhenshchiny na rossiiskom prestole (St Petersburg: Norint, 1997), p. 222 and Elizaveta Petrovna (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1999), p. 97. The association between Elizabeth and the service of Saints Zachariah and Elizabeth was long standing. As early as 1722 Peter had expressed disapproval at the failure of some parishes to observe Elizabeth’s name day, and he ordered a new printing. In response, the Nevskii Monastery Press published 1200 copies and the Synodal Press in Moscow printed nearly 16,000 copies: P. P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre I-om, 2 vols (St Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1862), II (1862), p. 561. The use of the plural ‘emperors’ (‘imperatorov’) clearly refers to Peter and Catherine: M. S. Popov, Arsenii Matveevich i ego delo (St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. Fronovoi, 1912), p. 255. The discussion of the coronation sermon is based on the text as reprinted in the Kamerfur’erskii zhurnal for 1742. The sermon is reproduced on pp. 14–29, and a brief word of greeting (‘kratkoe pozdravlenie’) is on pp. 80–87. Victor M. Zhivov, ‘Gedeon (Georgii Andreevich Krinovsky)’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 150: Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and


49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

Eighteenth Centuries, ed. by Marcus C. Levitt (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1995), p. 112. See also Lennart Kjellberg, La langue de Gedeon Krinovskij, predicateur russe du XVIIIe siècle (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksells, 1957), pp. 12–13. Several of his sermons were published in a collection of 1760, Gedeon Krinovskii, Sobranie raznykh pouchitel’nykh slov (Moscow, 1760). On this group of preachers see P. Zavedeev, Istoriia russkogo propovednichestva ot XVII veka do nastoiashchego vremeni (Tula: Tipografiia N. A. Sokalova, 1879), pp. 72–81. Amvrosii arrived in St Petersburg in 1734 and served for several years as an instructor at the Nevskii Monastery, during which time Elizabeth got to know him. In 1742 she arranged for him to become the seminary’s prefect and Archimandrite of the New Jerusalem (stauropigial) monastery, as well as her court sermoniser: Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamenskii, Zhizn’ Preosviashchennogo Amvrosiia, Arkhiepiskopa moskovskogo i kaluzhskogo (Moscow: Gubernskaia tipografiia, 1813), pp. 6–11; Popov, pp. 255–57. Quoted in N. Popov, ‘Pridvornye propovedi v tsarstvovanie Elisavety Petrovny,’ in Letopisi russkoi literatury i drevnosti, ed. by Nikolai Tikhonravov, 5 vols (Moscow: Grachev and Company, 1853), II, pp. 3–4. Popov, pp. 4–7. Italics added. RGADA f. 17, op. 1, no. 165, p. 2. RGADA f. 17, op. 1, no. 165, p. 7. RGADA f. 17, op. 1, no. 165, p. 9. Popov, p. 12 Popov, p. 15. Popov, p. 14 P. N. Petrov, Istoriia Sankt-Peterburga s osnovaniia goroda do vvedeniia v deistvie vybornogo gorodskogo upravleniia (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Glazunova, 1885), p. 450. See also comments by C. H. von Manstein that confirm the general understanding that Catherine’s will had named Elizabeth. C. H. von Manstein, Contemporary Memoirs of Russia from the Years 1727 to 1744 (reprint London: Frank Cass and Co., 1968), pp. 316–26. Anisimov, Elizaveta Petrovna, p. 97. Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, 8, no. 5070. May 7, 1727. ‘Manifest o konchine Imperatritsy Ekateriny I i o vozshestvii na prestol Imperatora Petra II. Prilozhenie: Testament blazhennyia pamiati Imperatritsy Ekateriny I’, p. 790. See the entries in Kamerfur’erskii zhurnal for 1743, pp. 14–15; 1744, pp. 103–108; 1745, pp. 126–30; 1746, pp. 105–06; etc. See for example, Zhurnaly tseremonial’nye, banketnye i pokhodnye 1743 goda (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Imperatorskogo dvora, 1863), pp. 14–15. Pushkarev, p. 298; Herman Kajanus, St Katarina svenska fo"rsamlings i St Petersburg (Ekenäs: Ekenäs Tryckeri Aktiebolag, 1980), pp. 11–15. Ekaterina Velikaia i Moskva. Katalog-vystavka 850-letiiu Moskvy posviashchaetsia iiun’-sentiabr’ 1997 (Moscow: Tret’iakovskaia galereia, 1997), p. 25: no. 64.

10 Female Orthodox Monasticism in Eighteenth–Century Imperial Russia: The Experience of Nizhnii Novgorod William G. Wagner

The eighteenth century was a turbulent period in the history of Russian Orthodox monasticism. During this century monastic communities were merged, dissolved, stripped of their land and peasants, and subjected to closer regulation, with the result that their number, membership, and wealth declined sharply. The main impetus for these developments arose from the expanding imperial state. But they also reflect the complex relationship between the state and the Orthodox Church that emerged during the imperial period.1 While the efforts of state officials to direct monastic wealth and the monastic clergy toward purposes deemed useful to the state and society led to tension with church leaders, both state officials and the Orthodox hierarchy shared a desire to regularise and assert greater control over monastic communities.2 Although scholars have explored several aspects of this process of monastic reform, its impact on female monasticism has received little scholarly attention.3 This chapter seeks to help fill this gap by tracing the development of female Orthodox monasticism in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod during the eighteenth century. Such an examination demonstrates that while female monastic communities were indeed reshaped significantly by state reform during the early imperial period, they were shaped no less powerfully by their institutional structure and their social, economic, and cultural environment. At the beginning of the century, three convents existed in Nizhnii Novgorod.4 The Resurrection Convent occupied a site in the city kremlin, while the Conception and the Procession Convents lay just outside 191


the kremlin walls, in the lower town and along the upper embankment respectively. Even though founded at different times and in different circumstances, by the early eighteenth century the three convents had come to exhibit similar traits that reflected the character of Nizhnii Novgorod.5 The city served as an important strongpoint for protecting trade along the middle Volga as well as for promoting Russian colonisation of the region and the political subjugation and religious conversion of its indigenous peoples. After the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church of 1654, it also became a bastion for the defence of the official faith. These roles were recognised by its designation in 1672 as the seat of the new diocese of Nizhnii Novgorod and Alatyr, and by the prominent position assigned to it in the reorganisations of provincial administration carried out by the state during the eighteenth century, with the city eventually becoming the administrative centre of Nizhnii Novgorod province. At the same time, the city’s location on several major trade routes made it a commercial and shipping centre. Trade and shipping increased substantially during the seventeenth century, providing – together with the sizeable military garrison and administrative and ecclesiastical presence – a stimulus to handicraft, artisanal, and manufacturing production. By the late seventeenth century much of the population of the city and surrounding settlements engaged chiefly in trade, craftwork, brewing, distilling, and similar occupations. The composition of the city’s population reflected these multiple roles and remained relatively stable between the early seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, with nearly half consisting of noble and other civil and military servitors, soldiers, and clergy, and the remaining inhabitants being primarily merchants, traders, craftsmen, artisans, and servile labour.6 The imprint of these characteristics on the Conception, Resurrection, and Procession Convents is evident. The economies of the three convents, for example, were strongly influenced by that of the city. Although during the seventeenth century the reigning tsar or patriarch had granted each a modest annual subvention (ruga) consisting of money and kind, the cash subventions actually were paid from customs and other duties on trade collected locally. The Resurrection and the Conception Convents also received income from shops in Nizhnii Novgorod that had been donated to them, probably by merchants and traders, and all three convents owned hay meadows that provided for their own needs as well as producing some rental income. None of the convents, however, possessed any arable land or peasant households.7 The modesty of these resources suggests that most women at the convents lived fairly frugal lives, a conclusion reinforced by a report

Female Orthodox Monasticism 193

prepared in 1723 by Archbishop Pitirim of Nizhnii Novgorod and Alatyr. According to Pitirim, the meagre resources of the convents compelled their members to support themselves through handicraft work and trade, begging, and charity.8 This necessity reinforced the idiorrhythmic organisation of the Resurrection and Procession Convents. Under this form of organisation, the members enjoyed considerable control over their own lives, with each woman owning or renting her own cell, receiving a share of the state-assigned subvention, and otherwise providing for herself through the activities described by Pitirim, any property she brought with her, and perhaps support from relatives. Initially organised communally, the Conception Convent too had become effectively idiorrhythmic by at least 1743. As Pitirim’s report also makes clear, the reliance of the members of the three convents on their own labour and on begging precluded their living a strictly enclosed life. These economic conditions appear to have both influenced and been shaped by the social composition of the convents. All three were composed of women who either could be expected to have modest independent means or were accustomed to personal labour. Hence, although for a time after its foundation the Conception Convent attracted women from prominent princely, boiar, and other elite families, by the early eighteenth century the membership of all three convents consisted mainly of elderly widows or unmarried daughters of state civil and military servitors, members of the clergy, and the city tax-paying population (posadskie liudi), with a significant number of equally elderly freed household serfs. This social composition – which closely mirrored that of the city as a whole – suggests the possibility of a division between ‘choir’ and serving sisters, although surviving records make no mention of this distinction.9 In any case, the demographic characteristics of the three convents indicate that they served primarily as a refuge or place of retirement for elderly women from privileged servitor and military groups, the urban tax-paying population, and the clergy, and to a lesser extent also for former servants. Frustratingly, available sources reveal little about the religious dimension of the three convents in the first half of the eighteenth century. Reflecting the absence of a literary tradition in female Russian Orthodox monasticism, none of the women has left a written record of her religious life or spiritual reflections.10 Nor has a written rule for any of the convents survived, if any ever existed. Hence it is difficult to determine how life was lived or was meant to be structured. Presumably the lives of the women living at the convents were shaped significantly by daily


liturgical services, the annual fasts and festivals in the Orthodox calendar, and regular confession and participation in the sacraments, although the need of most of the women to support themselves by their own labour and other activities would have limited the time for religious observances and their spiritual lives. But in the end we simply do not know the character and rhythm of life at the convents or the religious mentalities of their members during this period. Nor do we know much about the role of the convents in the religious and cultural life of Nizhnii Novgorod at this time. Religious rituals, celebrations, and festivals strongly influenced both household life and social and cultural life in the city as a whole during the early modern period.11 Presumably the convents played some role in this life, although its nature and extent is unknown. Since, however, the main church of each convent served as the parish church for a number of nearby households, all three were integrated to some degree into the lives of members of lay society. Moreover, although none of the convents possessed any of the venerated icons and relics to which inhabitants of the city turned most frequently for comfort and divine intercession in their affairs, each enjoyed sufficient respect and patronage to be able to rebuild its main church in stone during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in some cases several times as a result of fires.12 The three convents nonetheless were overshadowed by the five monasteries in the city, which generally were much wealthier and benefited from close association with the local or central ecclesiastical leadership and, in several cases, from the possession of reputedly miracle-working icons and relics. The Monastery of the Caves and the Annunciation Monastery in particular were major monastic centres and pilgrimage sites that possessed great wealth, enjoyed high patronage, and played a prominent role in the economic, religious, and cultural life of the city.

Female Orthodox monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese prior to 1764 These differences between female and male monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod during the first half of the eighteenth century were typical for Orthodox monasticism in the diocese at this time.13 As in the city, convents constituted only a minority of the total monastic communities in the diocese, both before and after the reforms enacted by Catherine II in 1764. A total of 18 (or 17) convents existed at some point in the eighteenth century before the reforms; the comparable number of monasteries


was 37. Unfortunately, the number of people living in most of these communities is unknown, although the total number of male monastics appears to have exceeded that of female monastics.14 The majority of convents were located in cities, in nearby settlements, or in villages where most of the population engaged primarily in handicraft production and trade. At most, only three convents were located in more isolated rural areas. In contrast, a higher percentage of monasteries were located in such areas or in small villages. Although the wealth of both male and female communities varied considerably, the wealthiest communities were male. While only 2 convents owned land inhabited by servile peasants, at least 13 monasteries did so, with substantial holdings in five or six cases. This difference in the extent of land and peasant ownership among monastic communities resulted in significant differences not only in the resources available to them, but also in their character. Monastic peasants provided income and labour services, on a monastery’s lands, at the monastery itself, and for its other economic activities. Monasteries in the diocese that possessed land and peasants, for example, conducted agricultural operations, exploited fisheries, operated mills, brewed and sold alcoholic beverages, and engaged in salt boiling or ore-mining and marketing operations. The Makar’ev-Zheltye Vody Trinity Monastery also hosted one of the largest annual trade fairs in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russia.15 Such monastic communities consequently acquired many characteristics of lay estates and became involved extensively in civil affairs, including frequent conflicts with their own peasants, and also with neighbouring landowners, suppliers, customers, and state officials.16 In contrast, not possessing land or peasants, the majority of convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese were not affected structurally by these aspects of the servile order. The differences in the nature and extent of the wealth possessed by female in comparison with male monastic communities stemmed in part from the limited ability of women in early modern Russia, even those belonging to regional elites, to control property. While expanding significantly in the eighteenth century, the right of women to acquire and dispose of property, especially land and peasant households or obligations, was severely restricted during the period when most monastic wealth was being accumulated.17 The subordinate familial and social position of women at this time, moreover, further diminished – though did not preclude – their ability to found and endow monastic communities. As a result, none of the monasteries and only two of the convents in the diocese for which this information is known, the Conception

Table 10.1 Convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese (1799 borders), during the eighteenth century

Remaining after 1764 N. Novgorod Procession/Exaltation of the Cross Arzamas St Nicholas Dissolved in 1764 N. Novgorod Conception

Location

When and by whom founded

Peasants (no. of adult males) or subventiona

City

About 1621, unknown

Subvention

City

1580, local priest

Subvention (to 1724)

City

1355–1365, Gr. Prss. Anastasiia Ivanovna Unknown (may refer to the Procession Convent) 1634, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich By mid-sixteenth century, Ivan IV Mid-sixteenth century, Ivan IV Unknown By seventeenth century, unknown By 1624–1626, unknown Second half of sixteenth century, pr. Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynskii First half of seventeenth century, Agafiia (became abbess) 1713, Archimandrite (later Archbishop) Pitirim After 1720, Archbishop Pitirim

Subvention

N. Novgorod St Basil

City

Arzamas Aleksei, Man of God Balakhna Nativity of Christ St Nicholas, Sakma

City

Settlement

Vasil’evo Anastasiia Vasil’evo Archangel

Settlement Settlement

Lyskovo Nativity of the Birthgiver of God Kniaginino Archangel

Village

Murashkino Trinity

Village

Keze Saviour-Raevskii

Rural

Sanakhtin’e Nativity

Unknown

Dissolved prior to 1764 N. Novgorod

City

City

Village

Early seventeenth

Subvention Subvention (to 1729)

196–210

Subvention

252–445

Subventionb


Location

Resurrection Pavlovo Holy Veil

Village

Katunki Forerunner

Unknown

Unknown Lyskovo St Vladimir

Village

When and by whom founded

century, unknown First half of seventeenth century, pr. Boris Cherkasskii First half of seventeenth century, unknown

Peasants (no. of adult males) or subventiona

Subvention

unknown

a Peasant households and subventions consisting of payments in money and kind granted by either the state or the patriarch constituted the main forms of endowed wealth for convents at this time. b Listed by Vodarskii as possessing 13 peasant households in 1653–1661 and 1700, but none in 1678; Makarii, Verkhovskoi, and other sources indicate no peasants were owned in the eighteenth century. Sources: RGADA, f. 280, op. 3, dd. 319, 490, 562, TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1763 g., d. 54, za 1765 g., d. 66, and op. 555 za 1773 g., d. 29. V. V. Zverinskii (Tip. V. Bezobrazova i Ko.), Material dlia istoriko-topograficheskogo issledovaniia o pravoslavnykh monastyriakh v Rossiiskoi Imperii, 3 vols (St Petersburg, 1890–1897), II, III. Ia. E. Vodarskii, ‘Tserkovnye organizatsii i ikh krepostnye krest’iane vo vtoroi polovine XVII-nachale XVIII v.’, in Istoricheskaia geografiia Rossii XIInachalo XX v. Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu professora Liubomira Grigorevicha Beskrovnogo (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 70–96. P. Chudetskii (Tip. V. Davidenko), Opyt istoricheskogo issledovaniia o chisle monastyrei russkikh, zakrytykh v XVIII i XIX vekakh (Kiev, 1877). P. V. Verkhovskoi (Tip. Uchilishcha glukhonemykh), Naselennye nedvizhimye imeniia Sv. Sinoda, arkhiereiskikh domov i monastyrei pri blizhaishikh preemnikakh Petra Velikogo. Kollegiia Ekonomii i Kantseliariia Sinodal’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Pravleniia (15 iiulia 1726 g.-12 maia 1763 g.) (St Petersburg, 1909), Tables III, IV, VI–XI. A. Zav’ialov (Tip. A. P. Lopukhina), Vopros o tserkovnykh imeniiakh pri imperatritse Ekaterine II (St Petersburg, 1900), Tables I, IV. I. M. Pokrovskii (Tipolit. Universiteta), Russkie eparkhii v XVI–XIX vv., ikh otkrytie, sostav i predely. Opyt tserkovno-istoricheskogo, statisticheskogo i geograficheskogo issledovaniia, 2 vols (Kazan’, 1897, 1913), I, Table II, and II, Table I. S. I. Arkhangel’skii (Gor'kovskoe oblastnoe gosudarstvenno izdatel'stvo), Ocherki po istorii promyshlennogo proletariata Nizhnego Novgoroda i Nizhegorodskoi oblasti XVIIXIX vv. (Gor’kii, 1950), pp. 82–7. Arkhimandrit Makarii, Pamiatniki tserkovnykh drevnostei (repr. ed., Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskaia Iarmarka, 1999), pp. 552, 557–61. Ieromonakh Makarii, ‘Voskresenskii zhenskii monastyr’ v Nizhnem Novgorode. Zachateiskii zhenskii monastyr’ v Nizhnem Novgorode. Proiskhozhdenskii zhenskii monastyr’ v Nizhnem Novgorode’, Nizhegorodskie gubernskie vedomosti, 1849 no. 11, ch. neof., pp. 42–4, and no. 12, ch. neof., pp. 46–8. A. S. Petriashin, Arzamasskie monastyri. Istoriia. Arkhitektura. Khoziaistvennaia deiatel’nost’. XVI–XX vv. (Arzamas, 2003).

Convent in Nizhnii Novgorod and the Trinity Convent in Murashkino, were established by women (see Table 10.1). In each case, the woman belonged to the privileged strata of society and later served as abbess of the convent she founded, suggesting that both had intended eventually to retire to a monastic life. Hence throughout the early modern period


the foundation of monastic communities in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese was predominantly a male activity. Nonetheless, women in Muscovy did make substantial donations to monastic communities, and women in the Nizhnii Novgorod region must have done so as well, although available records make this difficult to determine. The considerable disparity in wealth between a handful of monasteries in the diocese and the remaining monastic communities, including all convents but one, suggests that monasteries benefited disproportionately from such donations.18 To some degree, this disparity reflected the relative standing of monastic communities in the spiritual economy of the region. Donors made gifts to monastic communities for a variety of religious, social, and political purposes. For example, they sought to obtain or give thanks for divine intercession in their personal lives and affairs or those of relatives, to commemorate and obtain divine mercy after death for themselves and their relatives, or to secure a place for themselves or family members within the monastic community in old age or in the event of need. Donations also served to demonstrate the social prestige and power of the donor and his or her family, or to procure political support from the recipient. The perceived ability of monastic communities to deliver these benefits depended on their status and spiritual authority. Status and authority derived from a variety of sources, including the circumstances of a community’s foundation, the identity and influence of its chief patrons, its association with revered holy men, and, especially, the presence of venerated relics and icons, particularly those believed to be capable of working miracles. To a significant degree the disparities in wealth between monastic communities reflected the unequal flow of donations arising from differences in their perceived spiritual, social, and political efficacy. From this perspective, the relative lack of wealth of convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese at this time indicates that none attained a spiritual and social standing comparable to the wealthiest monasteries in the diocese.19 Until more extensive research has been done, the reasons for the differences between male and female monasticism in the diocese at this time must remain speculative.20 Certainly part of the explanation, as noted above, lies in the dependent familial and social position and the limited property rights of women in late Muscovite and early Imperial Russia. The demographic profile of convents in the diocese, however, particularly those located in or near cities, provides another clue. As the composition of these convents indicates, whatever the motives for their original foundation, by the late Muscovite and early imperial period


convents had come to serve as a refuge or place of retirement for women in widowhood and old age. In other words, at least in urban areas, women generally entered convents after their family obligations had been fulfilled or involuntarily terminated. The seventeenth-century Zhitie sviatoi Iulianii Lazarevskoi (Life of Iulianiia Lazarevskaia) idealises this practice, praising its protagonist for repeatedly subordinating her desire to undertake a monastic life to the fulfilment of her marital, family, and domestic duties.21 Further supporting this conclusion, the majority of convents existing in 1700, both in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese and in the Russian Empire as a whole, were established during the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a period marked not only by imperial expansion and, after the early seventeenth century, commercial growth, but also by civil war, foreign invasion, famine, and social unrest. These conditions may have contributed to the growth of female monasticism at this time by increasing both the number of communities able to support a convent and the need to provide for husbandless women, particularly those from servitor and urban social groups.22

The process of monastic reform If Orthodox convents in early modern Nizhnii Novgorod were strongly shaped by their institutional structure, social roles, and cultural and economic environment, however, during the eighteenth century they were equally powerfully influenced by state-initiated attempts to reform and restrict monasticism in general. This reform process represented in part a continuation of efforts to regulate monasticism and limit monastic wealth made in the preceding century. On the one hand, concerned that a number of long-established practices among the monastic clergy, including itinerancy and self-tonsuring, begging, and engagement in economic activities such as paid labour, handicraft production, and trade, contravened the nature and purposes of monastic life and undermined monastic discipline, during the seventeenth century both the Muscovite state and the Orthodox hierarchy attempted to impose a more comprehensive and regularised body of rules on monastic communities. These efforts intensified after the schism of 1654, which appeared to threaten the spread of heresy and disloyalty to the state by undisciplined monastic clergy and unregulated communities.23 On the other hand, seeking to limit the loss of needed resources as well as of jurisdictional control over subjects and territory, Muscovite rulers and


governmental authorities had since the early sixteenth century attempted to restrict the transfer of land and peasant households and the granting of economic and judicial privileges to monastic communities. With similar objectives, the state established the Monastery Chancellery in 1649 to oversee the collection of taxes and other duties from non-exempt monastic properties and to resolve disputes between monastic communities and their peasants or other members of lay society. Although the chancellery was abolished in 1677, many of its duties were transferred to other state bodies.24 Petrine legislation built on these measures but broke sharply with the past in ways that reflected the ethos of the evolving service state. Hence, invoking a conventional ascetic ideal of monasticism, through a series of acts beginning in 1694 and culminating in the Pribavlenie k Dukhovnomu reglamentu (Supplement to the Spiritual Regulation, 1722) Petrine legislation attempted to strengthen monastic discipline by imposing more rigorous rules on monastic communities, including strict enclosure, permanency of residence, communal organisation, regular personal labour, daily liturgical observance and prayer, and frequent fasting. Simultaneously, however, and somewhat contradictorily advancing a utilitarian justification for monastic wealth and the monastic life, Petrine legislation also directed monastic communities to undertake activities deemed useful by the state, and thus a social role that went far beyond the charitable functions traditionally performed by these communities. These activities were often meant to benefit especially military servitors and their widows and orphaned children and included the maintenance of almshouses, hospitals, and schools. In addition, to limit the loss of population to a vocation now frequently characterised as parasitic and unproductive, Petrine legislation attempted to reduce the number of monastic communities, to restrain the formation of new communities, and to restrict membership, for example by prohibiting women from taking monastic vows prior to age 50.25 Petrine legislation also attempted to limit and gain access to monastic wealth. Hence to help finance its military campaigns, beginning in 1696, the state enacted measures to limit monastic expenditures and to extract ad hoc ‘donations’ from wealthy monastic communities. The reestablishment of the Monastery Chancellery in 1701 represented an attempt to achieve these objectives more systematically through state management of monastic property and peasants, but this goal proved administratively unattainable except with respect to the sixty or so wealthiest monastic communities (only three of which were female).


With the promulgation of the Dukhovnyi reglament in 1721, however, which reorganised the administrative structure of the Orthodox Church and established the Holy Synod as its main governing body, government officials again sought to introduce a comprehensive system for managing monastic possessions. The Dukhovnyi reglament, and the supplement to it enacted the following year, more firmly subordinated monastic communities to diocesan bishops, and through them to the Holy Synod, and empowered diocesan bishops to use ‘surplus’ monastic income for a variety of needs. Oversight of monastic properties was through the Monastery Chancellery, which although subordinated to the Holy Synod was staffed by secular officials. Peter’s intention of establishing a system of state management under which the number and size of monastic communities would be fixed statutorily and monastic clergy assigned an annual salary was cut short by his death in 1725.26 Peter’s successors continued his policies with varying degrees of intensity and consistency.27 But already by the accession of Catherine II in 1762 the policies pursued by the state during the eighteenth century had sharply reduced the number of monastic communities and, especially, monastic clergy. According to official figures, whose reliability admittedly is suspect, between 1700 and 1762 the number of monastic communities had declined from 1153–1201 (924–965 male and 229–236 female) to 881–1046 (678–834 male and 185–212 female), and between 1724 and 1762 the number of monastic clergy had fallen from 25,207 (14,534 male and 10,673 female) to 12,392 (7,659 male and 4,733 female).28 Catherine’s reforms consequently represented the culmination of a process begun under Peter I. They strictly limited the number of monastic communities and clergy and sequestered monastic property, redistributing its income between the state, diocesan authorities, and the remaining monastic communities. The total number of monastic communities was reduced from 881–1046 to 386, with convents being disproportionately affected: the number of monasteries was reduced by 53–60%, and the number of convents by 64–68%, from 185–212 to 67.29 The remaining monastic communities, apart from the Trinity-St Sergius and the Alexander Nevskii Lavras, were divided into three classes, which determined the number of members allowed, the annual subvention, and the salaries to be paid to the community as a whole and to its members individually.30 Likewise following Petrine precedents, Catherine’s reforms attempted uniformly to impose the rules of monastic organisation and discipline contained in the Pribavlenie k Dukhovnomu reglamentu, repeated earlier age restrictions on the taking of monastic


vows, enjoined monastic communities to undertake socially useful activities, and prohibited the formation of new communities without state approval. In addition, by strengthening the administrative subordination of monastic communities to diocesan authorities and, through them, to the Holy Synod and the government, the reforms completed the integration of these communities – in principle if not fully in fact – into the emerging bureaucratic structures of the Orthodox Church and the imperial state.31

The impact of reform on female monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod These attempts by the state to reform monasticism had a dramatic, if uneven, impact in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese. Although only the Monastery of the Caves had its lands and peasants placed under state management for extended periods, several other monasteries had a share of their peasants assigned to the state or were required to pay part of their income to the state, and a number were compelled to accommodate infirm and retired military servitors and soldiers.32 Even prior to Catherine’s reforms, the subventions received by several convents had been reduced significantly or eliminated, and several female and male communities had disappeared (see Table 10.1).33 In some cases these communities were dissolved, while in others – for example the Resurrection Convent in 1723 – smaller communities were merged with larger ones in an effort to make them more viable economically.34 Catherine’s reforms reduced the number of monastic communities in the diocese, with only 2 of 13 or 14 convents and 8 of 25 monasteries surviving (see Table 10.1). Among convents, only the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross in Nizhnii Novgorod, formed by the merger of the Procession and the Conception Convents, and the St Nicholas Convent in the city of Arzamas remained.35 The number of places available for nuns was severely limited, sharply restricting the opportunity for women to pursue a monastic vocation. While the total number of nuns in the diocese at the time of the reforms is difficult to determine, there appear to have been roughly 200, with perhaps an equal number of novices and other women also living at the convents. Henceforward, as third-class convents, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and the St Nicholas Convent were each assigned only 17 places, although as a transitional measure approximately 130 additional nuns from these and the dissolved communities were permitted to live out their lives at the convents.36


The economic impact of Catherine’s reforms on the two remaining convents was less dramatic than on those monasteries that previously had possessed land and peasants, whose income and labour force contracted sharply.37 As described above, prior to 1764 most women living at convents in the diocese had maintained themselves primarily by some combination of dowry and other personal property, their own labour, charity and begging, and possibly support from local patrons, relatives, or parish households, with some also receiving a modest state stipend. Apart from limiting the possibility of local patronage and adding a small state salary for stipendiary (shtatnye) nuns, Catherine’s reforms did not alter this situation much. In fact, in the case of the Arzamas St Nicholas Convent, the reforms apparently improved its economic situation by eliminating competition from the Aleksei, Man of God Convent for donations, the performance of religious services, and so on.38 In contrast, the impact of the reforms on women not assigned a stipendiary place, or allowed to live out their lives on a stipend at one of the two remaining convents, often was devastating. While a number of the novices at the former Aleksei, Man of God Convent continued to live together informally in their old cells, supporting themselves by their own labour, many other women from dissolved convents became destitute vagabonds.39 In the case of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, however, the conventual economy resulting from Catherine’s reforms nonetheless did have significant effects. Information on the economy and finances of the convent for the last third of the eighteenth century is limited and its reliability is uncertain.40 But the evidence available suggests that in the decades following the reforms the convent became highly dependent economically on the state. Even as late as 1799, the subvention from the state constituted slightly over half of its income and paid for nearly two-thirds of its expenses, shares that probably were lower than those during most of the immediate post-reform period. In the last half of the 1790s the convent received substantial donations for, and expended significant sums on, two major building projects.41 If these donations and expenditures are deducted, for 1799 the state subvention provided 84% of the convent’s income and covered 83% of its expenses. The convent’s reported budget, of course, did not include the income received by members of the convent from their own property and labour or the expenditures on personal needs they made from this income. Given the meagre common resources remaining after the payment of mandated salaries and expenditures on building maintenance and liturgical and similar needs, members of the convent clearly required


independent income in order to survive. It therefore is likely that most members of the convent continued to devote considerable time to such activities as handicraft production and begging, which in turn precluded both strict enclosure and an extensive regime of obediences (tasks assigned by the abbess). The significance of such independent income and activities also helps to explain why, despite the attempts of both state and ecclesiastical authorities to reorganise monastic communities on a communal basis, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross retained the idiorrhythmic organisation inherited from the Procession Convent.42 This form of organisation was further reinforced by the practices of paying state salaries to stipendiary nuns individually and of individual ownership of cells. Typically, one to three other women also lived in each cell, perhaps serving its owner in some way or helping to form a small artel.43 While common refectory was available for stipendiary nuns, they could supplement the fare from their own resources or choose not to participate.44 Hence, the financial and economic arrangements at the convent had the effect of weakening the authority of the abbess and, quite likely, of creating inequalities among its members. As in the first half of the century so too after 1764, the idiorrhythmic organisation of the convent was closely interrelated with its social and demographic complexion and its social roles. When in 1764 the Procession and the Conception Convents were merged to form the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, the nuns at the two convents were elderly for the time – in their sixties or older – and two-thirds or more were widows. Most of the widows, moreover, had taken their vows in their fifties or later and most unmarried women had done so in their forties, that is, after they had fulfilled their family obligations. Although the novices and the women living at the Conception Convent without having taken vows – overwhelmingly widows – generally were younger, few were younger than forty, except for daughters or other relatives living with members of the convent. The majority of women at both the Conception and the Procession Convents for whom this information is known had been registered in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod before undertaking a monastic life, with most of the remainder having been registered in Nizhnii Novgorod district (uezd). Most likely reflecting its original location in the lower town, which was inhabited predominantly by merchants, artisans, craftsmen, and traders, the Conception Convent was dominated by women from the town’s tax-paying population, whereas the social composition of the Procession Convent reflected more closely the population of the upper town where it was situated. The membership of both convents, however, included a significant number of


former house servants and serfs.45 These characteristics suggest that at the time of Catherine’s reforms both convents still served primarily as a place of retirement or refuge for elderly widows and unmarried women from the local population and as a reward to or refuge for servants after long service. The age profile of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross in 1792 and the significant number of widows living at the convent as late as 1802, as well as the volume of correspondence from this period in the convent’s archive concerned with the placement of widows, indicate that at least the former role persisted into the early nineteenth century. Since these women generally had to live at the convent at their own expense until a stipendiary place became available, they required sufficient property to maintain themselves or the ability to support themselves through their own labour.46 This necessity restricted the number and social background of women able to enter the convent, thereby limiting the opportunity for women to follow a monastic vocation. While in the decades after Catherine’s reforms the social profile and role of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross exhibited considerable continuity with the first half of the century, the reforms nonetheless led to subtle changes in both. These stemmed, at least initially, from the dissolution of all but one of the other convents in the diocese. As a result, a large number of nuns from seven dissolved convents were transferred to the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and allowed to live out their lives there, with these women eventually being assigned a state salary for maintenance.47 There were 90 such ‘supernumerary’ (zashtatnye) nuns in 1767, with the number gradually declining as the women died, to 18–19 in 1777. In addition to creating severe congestion for several years at the convent, the influx of these supernumerary nuns altered its social complexion. Most of the women were former serfs and other peasants (an admittedly broad category that included village traders and craftsmen) from noble estates and villages in Nizhnii Novgorod district, a reflection of the locations of the dissolved convents. The majority of the women, moreover, were unmarried and in many cases had taken their vows at a younger age than had the nuns at either the Conception or the Procession Convents.48 Some of these women were converts to official Orthodoxy from Old Belief.49 But the social and demographic characteristics of supernumerary nuns also suggest that prior to their dissolution the convents in the more rural areas of the diocese had been shaped by a somewhat different mix of social conventions and roles than had those located in the cities of Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas.


This apparent difference in the mix of social roles and conventions shaping urban and rural convents in the diocese prior to Catherine’s reforms points to the second reason why the reforms eventually began to alter the social composition and function of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross. As one of only two convents now existing in the diocese, the convent had to absorb women who in the past would have entered one of the dissolved convents and therefore also to incorporate the practices that these convents previously had reflected. As a result, the percentage of women at the convent from the city quickly declined while the percentage of members from the surrounding district rose sharply. In addition, the number of women from the clerical estate at the convent also rose during the last part of the eighteenth century, with women from this social group disproportionately receiving stipendiary places, an imbalance that may help to explain the apparent decline in the appeal of a monastic life to women from the urban taxpaying population.50 In any case, this imbalance suggests that already by the late eighteenth century, as the clerical estate grew more rigidified and closed, diocesan bishops had begun to view convents in part as a vehicle for providing welfare to women from this estate, particularly the widows of ordained clergy.51 Finally, partly reflecting state preferences, the number of widows of military servitors and common soldiers remained significant.52 It should be added, moreover, that archival records contain no examples supporting the claim commonly made that husbands at this time frequently confined their wives involuntarily in a convent to end an undesirable marriage, although in one case parents enrolled their daughter as a novice at the convent to prevent a marriage that they considered undesirable.53 Despite the shifts in social composition and in the mix of social roles being performed by the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, however, until the early years of the nineteenth century the women at the convent remained predominantly elderly, with at least half being widows. These women came mostly from families of the clergy, state civil or military servitors, and common soldiers. Despite the efforts of state and ecclesiastical authorities to reshape monastic life during the eighteenth century, from a social perspective the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross therefore continued – as did the Arzamas St Nicholas Convent – to serve the needs primarily of elderly women, particularly those with some independent means, from the clerical estate and state service groups.54 Unfortunately, available sources reveal little more about religious life at the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross or about the religious beliefs or spirituality of its members than they do about those of its


predecessors earlier in the century. No member of the convent left a written record of her daily life or spiritual reflections, and the correspondence regarding entry into the convent preserved in its archive and that of the Spiritual Consistory, reflecting the institutional concerns of the latter, relate mainly to questions of legality and financial support.55 Nonetheless, some tentative conclusions can be drawn from the few sources available. There seems little doubt, for example, that religious life at the convent revolved chiefly around its church. Following what had become Orthodox monastic convention, the church was located in the centre of the convent, symbolising both the role of God in divine creation and His place in the divine order and the centrality of the church in the life of the convent and the collective as well as individual salvation of its members. The church provided a symbolically decorated space for daily liturgical observances and for celebration of church festivals.56 Presumably members of the convent participated in the daily liturgical services and in the fasts and services for annual festivals, although there are no records indicating how conscientiously they did so. Yet, even though it is difficult to conclude much about the religiosity or spirituality of the women at the convent at this time, one can at least say that the physical, visual, and aural world they inhabited was shaped by Orthodox beliefs, symbols, rituals, and conceptions of history, time, and the cosmos. Insight into the religious mentality and spirituality of members of the convent is offered, however, by an inventory of the convent’s property compiled originally in 1775 and updated later in the century at least twice.57 Not surprisingly, it lists a large number of icons (94), with those venerating the Mother of God predominating, as well as other objects related to liturgical and devotional practice (160). Significantly, most of these objects, including vestments, robes, shrouds, veils, altar cloths, and many of the icons, were decorated with gold and silver embroidery work, a skill for which the members of the convent were well known. It seems likely, therefore, that much of this decorative work was done by women at the convent. The inventory, moreover, also lists 97 books, all but 6 of which were used principally for liturgical purposes.58 These books included altar copies of the Gospels and the Book of the Apostles, various prayer and service books, and numerous collections of liturgical music. The overwhelming predominance of such works in the collection suggests the importance to its members of liturgical observances and festival celebrations and, conversely, the relative unimportance – at least on the institutional level – of other types of Orthodox literature. Hence it would appear that, reflecting long-standing tradition within female


Russian Orthodox monasticism, the members of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross at this time expressed their spirituality chiefly through liturgical participation and the production of artistically creative work. Through their creative work and liturgical and devotional practices, moreover, the members of the convent did much to construct the visual, symbolic, and aural world in which they lived and worshipped. In this way, at the least, a monastic life provided them with an opportunity for spiritual and creative self-expression and fulfilment as well as a secure and respectable alternative to life as a widow or spinster within the family that otherwise would have been their lot. A similar lack of evidence makes it equally difficult to assess the religious and cultural role of the convent in the life of Nizhnii Novgorod during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Certainly, as they had earlier in the century, religious celebrations and festivals continued to shape the cultural and social calendar of the inhabitants, even though particularly among the social elite new secular forms of cultural expression and entertainment offered competition.59 It is likely that the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross played a role in some of these celebrations and festivals, although this role is unclear. Similarly, while the annual income derived in the latter part of the century by the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross from candle sales, collections at its church, and the provision of religious services indicates that lay members of society regularly used it for religious purposes, the extent to which they did so is uncertain. The total income from these sources in fact seems modest, although it was increasing steadily in the 1790s.60 As noted earlier, however, substantial lay support was provided for building projects at the convent in the 1790s, with approximately 4,000 roubles being donated between 1794 and 1799. About 25 donations for this purpose were made per year, with the amounts ranging from a few kopeks to as much as 200 roubles, suggesting that donors came from a variety of social groups although unfortunately only one – the wealthy Nizhnii Novgorod merchant Iakov Steshev – is named.61 Since only a few years later merchants also provided substantial material and political support for the relocation and reconstruction of the convent, it seems likely that members of this social group constituted an important source of support in general for the convent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the convent in turn serving their social as well as religious needs. While such a conclusion is consistent with the character, self-identity, and practices of the Russian merchantry at this time, however, firm evidence to support it is lacking.62


There is no lack of evidence, by In contrast, on the evolving relationship between the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and diocesan, central ecclesiastical, and state authorities during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Archival records reveal a steady advance of bureaucratic regulation, as the Spiritual Consistory, the Holy Synod, and state agencies demanded more and more information, to be presented increasingly on a regular basis in a standardised format employing uniform terminology.63 Numerous decisions, moreover, ranging from the admission of new members and permission to take monastic vows to expenditures on buildings, contracts for the lease of benefices, the solicitation of donations for special projects, permission for extended trips by members of the convent, and so on, required approval by the Spiritual Consistory and diocesan bishop and, often, also by the Holy Synod and relevant state agencies. Obtaining such approval was frequently a time-consuming process requiring multiple reports and petitions. Through such regularised processes and oversight both the state and the Orthodox hierarchy sought to shape and control monastic life in Imperial Russia. As the experience of Nizhnii Novgorod attests, during the latter part of the eighteenth century they achieved considerable success. Through a series of reforms initiated chiefly by the state, and variously supported, tolerated, or not openly resisted by the Orthodox hierarchy, the number of convents and female monastics was sharply reduced and limited by law. Conventual economies and financing were restructured, leaving female monastic communities dependent on the state. Even the physical space occupied by these communities was affected, as all significant repairs, construction, and decoration of buildings required approval from local and central ecclesiastical and state authorities. In addition, monastic communities were deprived of their land and peasants, a measure that affected male more than female communities and that diminished the autonomy of previously wealthy monasteries. But if by the end of the eighteenth century the Nizhnii Novgorod Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross had been reshaped significantly by and subjected to the increasingly centralised power of both ecclesiastical and state authorities, this power remained limited. Despite their desire to do so, for example, neither the Orthodox hierarchy nor the state proved able to impose a communal organisation or strict enclosure on the convent. Nor did the convent at any time in the century maintain a hospital, school, or similar type of foundation, as periodically required by the state in its effort to render monastic communities more


useful from its perspective. To be sure, as the state desired, the convent did provide support for widows and other elderly women, including those from the families of military servitors, but this was nothing new. Indeed, the social roles and composition of the convent exhibited considerable continuity throughout the eighteenth century, as it and its predecessors responded to the desires and expectations of the local and regional population. That there was a demand among the population for the alternative provided by conventual life is indicated by the significant number of elderly women who chose to live at the convent at their own expense, waiting for a stipendiary place – which brought with it the right to take monastic vows – to become available. That their motivation was not merely the material security that such a place afforded is suggested by the case of an aged peasant widow living at the convent who in 1794, near death, was granted permission to take monastic vows even though no stipendiary place was open.64 As it entered the nineteenth century, then, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross remained a complex social and religious community shaped by its external environment, state and ecclesiastical authority, its idiorrhythmic structure, and the women who composed it. As I have shown elsewhere, however, the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic transformation in the character and fortunes of the convent that formed part of a process of fundamental change in monastic and religious life in both Eastern and Western Christianity.65

Notes 1. On this relationship, see especially Gregory Freeze, ‘Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), 82–102. 2. In this regard, efforts to reform monasticism in eighteenth-century Imperial Russia were very similar to those undertaken at the same time in Catholic Europe. On the latter, see Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder. European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. For works on the impact of reform on female monasticism, see Brenda Meehan, ‘Russian Convents and the Secularization of Monastic Property’, in Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. P. Bartlett, A. G. Cross, and Karen Rasmussen (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1986), pp. 112–124, E. B. Emchenko, ‘Zhenskie monastyri v Rossii’, in Monashestvo i monastyri v Rossii XI–XX veka, ed. N. V. Sinitsyna (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), pp. 245–84, E. B. Emchenko, ‘Gosudarstvennoe zakonodatel’stvo i zhenskie monastyri v XVIII-nachale XX veka’, Tserkov’ v istorii Rossii, 5 (2003), 171–221, Claire Louise Claus, ‘Die russischen Frauenklöster um die Wende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ihre karitative Tätigkeit und religiöse Bedeutung’, Kirche im Osten, 4 (1961), 37–60, and Carolynn Burbee, ‘Catherine and the Convents. The 1764 Secularization

Female Orthodox Monasticism 211 of the Church Lands and its Effect on the Lives of Russian Nuns’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000). 4. Although in his compendium on Russian Orthodox monasticism V. V. Zverinskii (Tip. V. Bezobrazova i Ko), lists a fourth convent, St Basil’s, as existing in Nizhnii Novgorod at this time, I have not been able to find any other printed or archival reference to it, and this may in fact refer to one of the chapels at the Procession Convent. See Material dlia istoriko-topograficheskago issledovaniia o pravoslavnykh monastyriakh v Rossiiskoi Imperii, 3 vols (St Petersburg, 1890–1897), I, no. 102, p. 111. 5. Grand Princess Anastasiia Ivanovna, the wife of Grand Prince Andrei Konstantinovich of Suzdal’ and Nizhnii Novgorod, had founded the Conception Convent between 1355–1365 and, taking the monastic name of Vassa, had become its abbess after her husband’s death in 1369. Both the Procession and, apparently, the Resurrection Convents were founded in the early seventeenth century, the former most likely in recognition of the role played by forces from Nizhnii Novgorod in liberating Moscow from foreign occupation and putting Mikhail Romanov on the Muscovite throne. The earliest archival records relating to the three convents date from the eighteenth century. Histories of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, into which the three convents eventually merged, composed in the nineteenth century by some of its members that include brief descriptions of this earlier period can be found in Tsentral’nyi Arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi Oblasti [hereafter abbreviated as TsANO], f. 582, op. 1, dd. 86, 250, 335. For published histories of the convent that also discuss this period, see P. Al’bitskii (Protoierei) and N. Mamontov (Sviashchennik) (Tip. Gubernskogo pravleniia), Krestovozdvizhenskii pervoklassnyi zhenskii monastyr’ v gorode Nizhnem-Novgorode. Stoletie ego sushchestvovaniia (1813–1913 g.g.). Istorikostatisticheskii ocherk (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1913), I. Solov’ev (Sviashchennik), ‘Nizhegorodskii Krestovozdvizhenskii pervoklassnyi zhenskii monastyr”, Nizhegorodskiia eparkhial’nyia vedomosti [hereafter abbreviated as NEV], 1887, no. 15, ch. neoff., pp. 759–73, no. 16, ch. neoff., pp. 839–65, and no. 17, ch. neoff., pp. 898–913, and Ieromonakh Makarii, ‘Voskresenskii zhenskii monastyr’ v Nizhnem Novgorode. Zachateiskii zhenskii monastyr’ v Nizhnem Novgorode. Proiskhozhdenskii zhenskii monastyr’ v Nizhnem Novgorode’, Nizhegorodskiia gubernskiia vedomosti [hereafter abbreviated as NGV], 1849 no. 11, ch. neoff., pp. 42–4, and no. 12, ch. neoff., pp. 46–8. 6. On the history of Nizhnii Novgorod during this period, see Istoriia goroda Gor’kogo. Kratkii ocherk (Gor’kii: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1971), N. Khramtsovskii, ‘Kratkii ocherk istorii i opisanie Nizhnego Novgoroda. Chast’ 1-aia. Ocherk istorii’, reprinted in Istoriia i opisanie Nizhnego Novgoroda (Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskaia Iarmarka, 1998), pp. 15–172, the essays of A. Gatsiskii reprinted in Nizhegorodskii letopisets (Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskaia Iarmarka, 2001), D. Smirnov, ‘Ocherki zhizni i byta nizhegorodtsev XVII veka’ and ‘Ocherki zhizni i byta nizhegorodtsev XVIII veka’, both reprinted in Nizhegorodskaia starina (Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskaia Iarmarka, 1995), S. I. Arkhangel’skii (Gor'kovskoe oblastnoe gosudarstvenno izdatel'stvo), Ocherki po istorii promyshlennogo proletariata Nizhnego Novgoroda i Nizhegorodskoi oblasti XVII–XIX vv. (Gor’kii, 1950), and Iu. R. Klokman, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia istoriia russkogo goroda. Vtoraia polovina XVIII veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), pp. 32–8, 183–90, 266–91, 311, 317.

212 Femininity and Religious Life 7. Ieromonakh Makarii, ‘Voskresenskii zhenskii monastyr’, N. Khramtsovskii, ‘Kratkii ocherk istorii i opisanie Nizhnego Novgoroda. Chast’ 2-aia. Opisanie goroda’, reprinted in Istoriia i opisanie Nizhnego Novgoroda, pp. 331–51 (pp. 331–36), Al’bitskii and Mamontov, pp. 7–10, Solov’ev, no. 15, pp. 761–69, P. V. Verkhovskoi (Tip. Uchilishcha glukhonemykh), Naselennye nedvizhimye imeniia Sv. Sinoda, arkhiereiskikh domov i monastyrei pri blizhaishikh preemnikakh Petra Velikago. Kollegiia Ekonomii i Kantseliariia Sinodal’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Pravleniia (15 iiulia 1726 g.-12 maia 1763 g.) (St Petersburg, 1909), Tables, pp. 71, 130, and A. Zav’ialov (Tip. A. P. Lopukhina), Vopros o tserkovnykh imeniiakh pri imperatritse Ekaterine II (St Petersburg, 1900), Table IV, pp. 385–86. 8. Polnoe sobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii pravoslavnogo ispovedaniia Rossiiskoi Imperii [hereafter abbreviated as PSPR], 14 vols. (St Petersburg, 1872–1916), III [1723], no. 1079. 9. In Catholic women’s orders, ‘choir sisters’ took full vows and enjoyed greater privileges and material comfort than the ‘lay’ sisters who served them and performed other menial tasks. On a similar division in Muscovite convents, see Marie A. Thomas, ‘Muscovite Convents in the Seventeenth-Century’, Russian History, 10, Pt. 2 (1983), 230–42. In the 1710s about 60–70 women lived at the Conception Convent and about 7–25 at the Resurrection Convent; no information on membership for this period is available for the Procession Convent, although in 1764 it had 64 members, consisting of 26 nuns and 38 novices. See the references to Ieromonakh Makarii, Al’bitskii and Mamontov, and Solov’ev cited in note 5 above and TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1762 g., d. 22, za 1764 g., dd. 46–7, za 1765 g., d. 69; op. 555 za 1782 g., d. 27, za 1792 g., d. 61; and f. 582, op. 1, d. 6. 10. Noting this difference between female monastic tradition in Russian Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Isolde Thyret has argued that the former emphasised a ‘piety of action’ that stressed behaviour and works. See ‘Women and the Orthodox Faith in Muscovite Russia: Spiritual Experience and Practice’, in Orthodox Russia. Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. 159–75 (pp. 160–66, 174). 11. Descriptions of religious life in Nizhnii Novgorod at this time are woefully inadequate, but see Arkhimandrit Makarii, Pamiatniki tserkovnykh drevnostei (repr. ed., Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskaia Iarmarka, 1999), pp. 19–142, 245–422, 611–24, Khramtsovskii, Istoriia, pp. 118–19, 128, 131, 135, 230, 253–353, Gatsiskii, pp. 630–53, 659–61, 704 (n. 85), Smirnov, pp. 91–6, 221–4, 259, 262, 266–71, and Sviatiteli zemli Nizhegorodskoi (Nizhnii Novgorod: OOO ‘Tsentr Sodeistviia Biznesu’, 2003), pp. 14–90. 12. See Arkhimandrit Makarii, Pamiatniki, pp. 42–3, 150, 258, 319, 324, 347, 349, Khramtsovskii, Istoriia, pp. 264, 294, 352, and Gatsiskii, pp. 659–61. 13. Since the boundaries of Nizhnii Novgorod diocese changed several times during the eighteenth century, I have used those established in 1799 in compiling Table 10.1. There is no general study of female monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese during the early modern period, but for histories of individual convents see, in addition to the works cited in note 5 above, A. S. Petriashin, Arzamasskie monastyri. Istoriia, arkhitektura, khoziaistvennaia deiatel’nost’ (Arzamas: OAO ‘Arzamasskaia tipografiia’, 2003), P. Piskarev, ‘Arzamasskii Nikolaevskii zhenskii monastyr’, NGV, 1849, no. 60,

Female Orthodox Monasticism 213 ch. neoff., pp. 237–40, N. Shchegol’kov (Tip. N. Dobrokhotova), Arzamasskii Nikolaevskii obshchezhitel’nyi zhenskii monastyr’. Istoriia ego i opisanie (Arzamas, 1903), I. N. Chetyrkin (Tip. Nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo pravleniia, 1887), Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie Arzamasskoi Alekseevskoi zhenskoi obshchiny (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1887), and Istoricheskii ocherk i opisanie Arzamasskoi Alekseevskoi obshchiny (St Petersburg, 1866). 14. Central archival records indicate a wide range in the size of both male and female monastic communities. See Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov [hereafter abbreviated as RGADA], f. 280, op. 3, dd. 116, 137, 166, 246, 319, 398, 418, 490, 529, 562, 669. For 1763, diocesan archival records list the number of nuns at the following convents as: Nizhnii Novgorod Conception Convent, 38; Nizhnii Novgorod Procession Convent, 28; Murashkino Trinity Convent, 30; Kniaginino Archangel Convent, 10; Lyskovo Nativity of the Birthgiver of God Convent, 25; and Vasil’evo Archangel Convent, 9. These numbers do not include novices or other women living at the convent, which could be at least as many as the number of nuns. TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1763 g., d. 54. In addition, during the first part of the eighteenth century the number of members (including nuns, novices, and other women living at the convent) at the Arzamas St Nicholas Convent was about 80 and at the Arzamas Aleksei, Man of God Convent, about 50. See Piskarev, ‘Arzamasskii Nikolaevskii zhenskii monastyr’, p. 239, and Istoricheskii ocherk i opisanie Arzamasskoi Alekseevskoi obshchiny, p. 4. 15. On monastic economies in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese at this time, see Smirnov, pp. 96–9, 107–112, 121–22, 141, Arkhangel’skii, pp. 82–7, N. V. Sokolova, ‘Monastyrskoe zemlevladenie i khoziaistvo v Nizhegorodskom krae v XVIIseredine XVIII v.’ (avtoreferat diss., Moscow, 1990), P. I. Kovaleva, ‘Sekuliarizatsiia tserkovnykh zemel’ v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii’, in Problemy istorii i tvorcheskoe nasledie Professora N. P. Sokolova (Nizhnii Novgorod: Izd-o Nizhegorodskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1998), pp. 219–21, and on the histories of individual monasteries, see: Gavriil (Ieromonakh), Opisanie Oranskogo Bogoroditskogo pervoklassnogo monastyria (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1871), Istoricheskoe opisanie Gorodetskogo Fedorovskogo monastyria i ego nastoiashchee sostoianie (St Petersburg, 1870), P. Piskarev, ‘Opisanie Troitskogo Makar’evo-Zheltovodskogo vtoroklassnogo muzhskogo monastyria’, NGV, 1846, no. 66, ch. neoff., pp. 261–62, no. 67, ch. neoff., pp. 265–66, no. 68, ch. neoff., pp. 268–70, no. 69, ch. neoff., pp. 272–73, no. 70, ch. neoff., 276–78, no. 71, ch. neoff., pp. 279–82, no. 72, ch. neoff., pp. 285–87, no. 73, ch. neoff., pp. 290–92, and no. 74, ch. neoff., pp. 293–94, I. N. Chetyrkin, ‘Arzamasskaia Vysokogorskaia Voznesenskaia muzhskaia pustyn”, NEV, 1888 no. 10, ch. neoff., pp. 466–75, no. 11, ch. neoff., pp. 524–32, and no. 12, ch. neoff., pp. 575–83, and I. N. Chetyrkin, ‘Istorikostatisticheskoe opisanie Nizhegorodskogo Pecherskogo Voznesenskogo muzhskogo monastyria’, NEV, 1886, no. 14, ch. neoff., pp. 17–33, no. 17, ch. neoff., pp. 9–17, no. 18, ch. neoff., pp. 1–19, no. 19, ch. neoff., pp. 5–19, no. 22, ch. neoff., pp. 24–39, no. 24, ch. neoff., pp. 1–19, 1887, no. 1, ch. neoff., pp. 6–19, no. 2, ch. neoff., pp. 56–66, no. 4, ch. neoff., pp. 121–38, no. 5, ch. neoff., pp. 163–71, no. 10, ch. neoff., pp. 463–79, and no. 11, ch. neoff., pp. 519–42. 16. On these organisational effects, see in general N. A. Gorskaia, Monastyrskie krest’iane Tsentral’noi Rossii v XVII v. O sushchnosti i formakh feodal’nokrepostnicheskikh otnoshenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), I. K. Smolich, Russkoe


17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

monashestvo 988–1917 (Moscow: Tserkovno-nauchnyi tsentr ‘Pravoslavnaia Entsiklopediia’, 1997), pp. 127–56, and, on the differences between male and female monastic institutions, see Marie A. Thomas, ‘Managerial Roles in the Suzdal’skii Pokrovskii Convent during the Seventeenth Century’, Russian History, 10, Pts. 1–2 (1980), 92–112. On the property rights of women in Muscovy, see William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 227–33, and the literature cited there. See the individual histories cited in note 15 above and Petriashin, pp. 27–94. Although the Keze Saviour-Raevskii Convent did accumulate significant wealth during its brief existence, this wealth derived chiefly from its founder, Archbishop Pitirim, and the role assigned to it in combating Old Belief. See Table 1, Zverinskii, III, no. 2077, pp. 173–74, Arkhimandrit Makarii, Pamiatniki, pp. 59, 62–3, and RGADA, f. 280, op. 3, d. 562. The differences between female and male monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese conformed broadly with the pattern for the empire as a whole at this time. See Ia. E. Vodarskii, ‘Zemlevladenie russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi i ee khoziaistvenno-ekonomicheskaia deiatel’nost’ (XI-nachalo XX v.)’, in Russkoe pravoslavie: vekhi istorii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1989), Table 3, pp. 527–29, and the data in Verkhovskoi, Naselennyia nedvizhimyia imeniia, Tables III, IV, VI–XI, and Zav’ialov, Table IV. In general, see Smolich, Emchenko, ‘Zhenskie monastyri’, and V. S. Rumiantseva, ‘Monastyri i monashestvo v XVII veke’, in Monashestvo i monastyri, pp. 163–85. ‘Kallistrat Druzhina-Osoryin: The Life of Yuliania Lazarevsky’, in Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed. and trans. Serge A. Zenkovsky (revised and enlarged ed., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), pp. 391–99. See also E. V. Iazeva, ‘Zhenshchina v sisteme pravoslavnykh tsennostei’, in Zhenshchiny i rossiiskoe obshchestvo: nauchno-istoricheskii aspekt. Mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Ivanovno: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1995), pp. 23–31, and T. B. Riabova, ‘Ideal zhenshchiny – pravitel’nitsy doma v pozdnee srednevekov’e (Po russkim i ital’ianskim istochnikam)’, in the same volume, pp. 31–46. Vodarskii, ‘Zemlevladenie russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi,’ Table 3, p. 529, and p. 530, Sophia Senyk, Women’s Monasteries in Ukraine and Belorussia to the Period of Suppressions, Orientalia Christiana Analecta, vol. 222 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studorium Orientalium, 1983), p. 68, and Somlich, pp. 114–26. On these efforts, see N. N. Lisovoi, ‘Vosemnadtsatyi vek v istorii russkogo monashestva’, in Monashestvo i monastyri, pp. 203–4, Robert O. Crummey, ‘Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia’, in Religion and the Early Modern State. Views from China, Russia, and the West, eds. James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 68–9, Robert O. Crummey, ‘Religious Radicalism in Seventeenth-Century Russia: Re-examining the Kapiton Movement’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 46 (1992), 171–86, and Smolich, pp. 162–64. Smolich, pp. 72, 104–13, 154–6, Rumiantseva, pp. 171–2, 175, Zav’ialov, pp. 246–8, and I. A. Bulygin, ‘Tserkovnaia reforma Petra I’, Voprosy istorii, 1974 no. 5, p. 82.

Female Orthodox Monasticism 215 25. On Petrine measures with respect to monasticism, see Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 337–48, 355, 378, 385–8, Smolich, pp. 257–72, 286, Lisovoi, pp. 186–208, 217–18, Emchenko, ‘Gosudarstvennoe zakonodatel’stvo’, pp. 171–82, 188–213, Emchenko, ‘Zhenskie monastyri’, 258–63, I. A. Bulygin, ‘Monastyrskoe khoziaistvo v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII v.’, in Istoricheskaia geografiia Rossii XII-nachalo XX v. Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu professora Liubomira Grigorevicha Beskrovnogo (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 164–76, I. A. Bulygin, ‘Tserkovnaia reforma Petra I’, James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 84–90, 97–8, 251–61, 305–7, P. G. Ryndziunskii, ‘Tserkov’ v dvorianskoi imperii (XVIII v.)’, in Russkoe pravoslavie: vekhi istorii, pp. 231–39, 248–49, and, for older studies, P. V. Verkhovskoi, Uchrezhdenie dukhovnoi kollegii i dukhovnyi reglament. K voprosu ob otnoshenii Tserkvi i gosudarstva v Rossii, 2 vols (Rostov na Donu, 1916), I, 204–6, 490–91, 620–21, II, 79–80, 94–105, 124–51, and P. V. Verkhovskoi, Naselennye nedvizhimye imeniia, pp. 255–64. 26. See the works cited in the previous note. On Peter’s later intentions, see especially Verkhovskoi, Uchrezhdenie dukhovnoi kollegii, II, 124–51, N. A. Voskresenskii, Zakonodatel’nye akty Petra I (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Soiuza SSSR, 1945), nos. 121, 152, 154–5, 186, 190–91, 199, PSZ, VII, no. 4426 (20 January 1724), p. 207, no. 4456 (5 February 1724), p. 249, no. 4511 (22 May 1724), p. 287, and vol. XLIV, part 2, Kniga shtatov, schedule to no. 4511, and PSPR, IV [1724–1725], nos. 1371, 1372, 1379. 27. On the measures adopted by Peter’s successors, prior to Catherine II, see Smolich, pp. 266–74, 287, Lisovoi, pp. 193–95, Emchenko, ‘Gosudarstvennoe zakonodatel’stvo’, pp. 171–82, 188–213, Emchenko, ‘Zhenskie monastyri’, 258–63, A. I. Komissarenko, Russkii absoliutizm i dukhovenstvo v XVIII v. (Ocherki istorii sekuliarizatsionnoi reformy 1764 g.) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vsesoiuznogo zaochnogo politekhnicheskogo instituta, 1990), pp. 47–51, 103–9, Ryndziunskii, pp. 259–62, 276, and, for older studies, Verkhovskoi, Naselennye nedvizhimye imeniia, and Zav’ialov. 28. Vodarskii, ‘Zemlevladenie russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi,’ pp. 529, 546, Smolich, pp. 268–9, 283, 291, 563, Lisovoi, p. 191, and Emchenko, ‘Zhenskie monastyri’, pp. 262–4. The discrepancy in the totals for monastic communities given by these authors is indicated by the hyphenated figures in the text. 29. Vodarskii, ‘Zemlevladenie russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi,’ p. 546, Lisovoi, pp. 198–200, Emchenko, ‘Zhenskie monastyri’, pp. 262–64, and Smolich, pp. 278–79, 563. The reforms also eventually permitted a number of monastic communities, designated non-stipendiary and initially all male, to remain open provided they could maintain themselves without state support. 30. PSZ XVI, no. 11643 (12 August 1762), pp. 51–3, no. 11716 (29 November 1762), pp. 117–24, no. 12060 (26 February 1764), pp. 549–69, no. 12121 (31 March 1764), pp. 697–99, no. 12234 (4 September 1764), p. 894, and XLIV, part 2, Kniga shtatov, schedule to no. 12060. On Catherine’s reforms, see Smolich, pp. 269, 274–82, Lisovoi, pp. 195–200, Emchenko, ‘Gosudarstvennoe zakonodatel’stvo’, pp. 171–82, 188–213, Komissarenko, pp. 108–24, Burbee, pp. 75ff., Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great


31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp 23, 97–8, 109–22, 125–7, 503–18, Ryndziunskii, pp. 280–85, and, for older studies, Verkhovskoi, Naselennye nedvizhimye imeniia, and Zav’ialov. On this process in the Orthodox Church, see especially the works of Gregory L. Freeze, The Russian Levites. Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), ‘The Rechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850’, Studia Slavica Finlandia, 7 (1990), 101–36, and ‘Institutionalizing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850’, in Imperial Russia. New Histories for the Empire, eds Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 210–49. See TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1761 g., d. 22, RGADA, f. 280, op. 3, d., 562, ll. 3–4, 13, Verkhovskoi, Naselennye nedvizhimye imeniia, Tables III, p. 9, IV, pp. 16–17, V, pp. 26–7, VII, pp. 48–9, 58–9, 66–7, XI, pp. 100–101, 126–9, XIII, pp. 174–77; Arkhimandrit Makarii, Pamiatniki, pp. 411–13, 426–7, 436, and Arkadii (Kaznachei ieromonakh), Opisanie Nizhegorodskogo Blagoveshchenskogo tret’eklassnogo muzhskogo monastyria (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1884), pp. 3, 24–8. In addition to the references to the Nizhnii Novgorod Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and the Arzamas St Nicholas Convent cited in notes 5 and 13 above, see RGADA, f. 280, op. 3, d. 319, ll. 9ob.-10. On the Resurrection Convent, see Arkhimandrit Makarii, Pamiatniki, p. 102, and the histories of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross cited in note 5 above. TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1763 g., d. 54, za 1764 g., dd. 46–7, za 1765 g., dd. 66, 69, and za 1767 g., d. 53. On the impact of Catherine’s reforms in general on monastic communities in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese, see Table 1 and Arkhimandrit Makarii, Pamiatniki, pp. 145, 557–61. In determining which monastic communities to preserve, the state commission that prepared the reform generally gave preference to communities on the basis of their possessions of land and peasant households. Since most convents did not possess such property, however, in the majority of cases involving female communities the commission designated the cities or towns where a convent should exist, leaving the decision of which convent this would be to diocesan authorities and the Holy Synod. Both the surviving convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese were selected in this manner. TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1764 g., dd. 46–7, za 1765 g., dd. 66, 69, za 1767 g., d. 53; op. 555 za 1771 g., d. 33, za 1773 g., d. 29, za 1774 g., dd. 86, 99, za 1776 g., d. 27, and za 1777 g., d. 9. Arkadii, pp. 25–28, Gavriil, pp. 3–70 passim, M. Dobrovol’skii (Protoierei), Putevoditel’ po sviatym i tserkovnym dostoprimechatel’nostiam g. Nizhnego Novgoroda (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1912), pp. 147, 151–52, S. Dobrotvorskii, ‘Opisanie Pecherskago Nizhegorodskogo pervoklassnogo muzhskogo monastyria’, NGV, 1849, no. 33, ch. neoff., pp. 129–32, no. 34, ch. neoff., pp. 133–5, no. 35, ch. neoff., pp. 137–40, Istoricheskoe opisanie Gorodetskogo Fedorovskogo monastyria, pp. 18–24, Makarii (Ieromonakh), Opisanie Oranskoi Bogoroditskoi pustyni (Moscow, 1851), pp. 81–2, Petriashin, pp. 90–91, and, in general, Kovaleva. Shchegol’kov, 2nd ed. (Arzamas, 1913), pp. 24–8. See also Piskarev, ‘Arzamasskii Nikolaevskii zhenskii monastyr”, pp. 239–40, and Kratkoe


39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

skazanie ob Arzamasskom Nikolaevskom zhenskom monastyre, Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (St Petersburg: Tipografiia E. Pozdniakovoi, 1885), pp. 4–6. On the Arzamas Aleksei, Man of God Convent, see Chetyrkin, Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie Arzamasskoi Alekseevskoi zhenskoi obshchiny, pp. 20–24, 27–32, ‘Arzamasskaia Alekseevskaia zhenskaia obshchina’, NGV, 1859, no. 40, ch. neoff., pp. 149–50, Istoricheskii ocherk i opisanie Arzamasskoi Alekseevskoi obshchiny, pp. 5–7, and Petriashin, pp. 144–47, 158–59. These can be found in TsANO, ff. 570 and 582. TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1794 g., d. 58 and f. 582, op. 1, d. 16; see also f. 570, op. 555 za 1792 g., d. 59. No written rule for the convent for the period prior to 1807 has been found, and one may not have existed. The details of the convent’s internal regime therefore are unknown. The experience of neither the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross nor the Arzamas St Nicholas Convent supports Claus’s argument that Catherine’s reforms led to the reorganisation of convents on a communal basis, at least in the medium term. In both cases, the effect of the reforms was to reinforce their idiorrhythmic structure. TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1764 g., d. 47, ll. 8ob.-11. TsANO, f. 582, op. 1, d. 18, l. 4. TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1762 g., d. 22, za 1764 g., d. 46. TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1782 g., d. 27, za 1792 g., d. 47, ll. 3–6, and f. 582, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 3, 7–11, 15–15ob., 17, d. 5, l. 3, d. 6, ll. 19–19ob., d. 7, l. 3, d. 9, ll. 1–3, 5, d. 17, ll. 24–7, d. 20. In a few cases, diocesan authorities granted widows a special stipend to be paid until a regular stipendiary place became available. See ibid., f. 582, op. 1, d. 4, l. 14 and d. 7, l. 3. On the difficult position of these women and the assignment of a state salary to them, see TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1773 g., d. 29, ll. 3–4ob., 32–3, 39–40, 45–6ob., and za 1774 g., d. 99, ll. 1–4, and in general, Emchenko, ‘Gosudarstvennoe zakonodatel’stvo’, p. 181. TsANO, f. 570, op. 554 za 1765 g., d. 69, za 1769 g., d. 53; op. 555 za 1773 g., d. 29, za 1774 g., d. 86, d. 99, ll. 1–4, za 1776 g., d. 27, ll. 3, 11–20ob., za 1777 g., d. 9, ll. 4, 10ob.-11, 19–19ob. Supernumerary nuns from four dissolved convents, numbering 35 in 1772, similarly were assigned to the Arzamas St Nicholas Convent. Ibid., f. 570, op. 555 za 1774 g., d. 86. TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1776 g., d. 27, ll. 11–20. TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1776 g., d. 27, ll. 11–20, za 1792 g., d., d. 47, ll. 3–6, and f. 582, op. 1, d. 6, ll. 19–19ob., d. 20. On this process of estate formation, see especially Freeze, Russian Levites. See also TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1782 g., d. 27, which contains a list of 29 village women living at the convent, most of whom were wives, widows, or daughters of soldiers. See TsANO, f. 582, op. 1, d. 17, l. 30, and d. 18, ll. 9–9ob. On the St Nicholas Convent, see the references cited in note 13 above. See for example, TsANO, f. 582, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 3, 7–11, 14–15ob., 18, d. 5, l. 3, d. 9, l. 1–3, 5, d. 17, ll. 24, 27. E. I. Kolycheva, ‘Pravoslavnye monastyri vtoroi poloviny XV–XVI veka’, in Monashestvo i monastyri, pp. 96–9, and A. V. Ikonnikov, ‘Simvolika prostranstvennoi formy monastyrskogo kompleksa’, in Monastyri - kul’turnye i dukhovnye tsentry Rossii i Evropy. Istoriia i sovremennost’: Mezhdunarodnaia


57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

monografiia, ed. O. G. Sevan (Moscow: Ministerstvo Kul’tury RF i dr., 2003), pp. 39–47. TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za. 1796 g., d. 39, ll. 11–22. Ibid., ll. 20ob.-22. The exceptions were copies of works by Sts Cyril of Jerusalem, Ignatius of Antioch, Theophan of Syngria, and Ephrem the Syrian, a coronation service for Empress Catherine, and a copy of the Church Statutes, the only secular book in the collection. On cultural life in Nizhnii Novgorod during this period, see Istoriia goroda Gor’kogo, pp. 85–95, Khramtsovskii, Istoriia, pp. 137–53, Gatsiskii, pp. 167–76 and passim, Smirnov, ‘Ocherki zhizni i byta nizhegorodtsev XVIII veka’, pp. 251–362 passim, and B. N. Beliakov, V. G. Blinova, and N. D. Bordiug, Opernaia i kontsertnaia deiatel’nost’ v Nizhnem Novgorode-gorode Gor’kom (Gor’kii: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1980), pp. 14–23. TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1792 g., d. 59 and za 1794 g., d. 58. TsANO, f. 570, op. 555 za 1794 g., d. 58, and f. 582, op. 1, d. 10, l. 5. On Steshev, see Kazhdyi rod znamenit i slaven. Iz istorii Nizhegorodskogo predprinimatel’stva XVII-nachala XX veka (Nizhnii Novgorod: Komitet po delam arkhivov administratsii Nizhegorodskoi oblasti, 1999), p. 11. On the Russian merchantry at this time, see Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), N. V. Kozlova, Rossiiskii absoliutizm i kupechestvo v XVIII veke (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1999), and, on merchants of Nizhnii Novgorod see, Kazhdyi rod znamenit i slaven, pp. 10–11. This process is clear from the reports and correspondence contained in the archives of both the convent and the Spiritual Consistory. See TsANO, ff. 570 and 582, numerous dela. TsANO, f. 582, op. 1, d. 10, l. 4. William G. Wagner, ‘The Transformation of Female Orthodox Monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod Diocese, 1764–1929, in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Modern History, 78 (2006), 793–845.

11 Women with a Mission: British Female Evangelicals in the Russian Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century Wendy Rosslyn

Women who felt they had received the divine calling to spread the gospel faced considerable barriers in the early nineteenth century, when females were not yet appointed by the directors of missionary societies. However, a few British women managed to exercise their mission in the Russian Empire. This chapter examines the ways in which British evangelicals, Jean Paterson (1783–1820), Sarah Stallybrass (1789–1833), and Sarah Kilham (b. 1788) contributed to evangelism. This was a period in Britain of intense evangelical activity. The movement had begun with Methodism in the 1730s and embraced the other Protestant denominations. Evangelicals were reborn believers, who held that true Christianity was the surrender of the self to God, and who saw salvation as the work of Christ on the cross. Adherents urged that mere observance of church ritual be superseded by ‘the inner church’ or ‘vital religion’, communication between the soul and the divine. This inner church was not hedged around with the dogmas which distinguished denominations from one another, but which were insignificant compared to the union of all who were reborn in Christ.1 Those who had experienced conversion gave their lives to God, whatever might be asked of them, and strove to live according to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and to express their faith in service to their neighbour. Evangelicals felt called to share their beliefs with the aim of bringing others to conversion and salvation. They engaged in charity and philanthropy, through which they could contribute to the transformation of society through the power of divine love and individual moral edification. Evangelicalism was in many ways attractive to women: it offered 219


spiritual equality with men as reborn souls, and a role as exemplars and upholders of morality. It was more concerned with service to others than with doctrine, was relevant to home and family, and valued qualities which were perceived as female: humility, submission, self-abnegation, obedience, and charity. It also provided new forms of association with other women in prayer meetings and philanthropic associations.2 In Britain there were limitations on the evangelical work which could be carried out by women. They could engage in personal domestic evangelism, and work for conversions within their own family and circle. They could engage in philanthropy: some worked for district visiting societies, and a few set up schools for the poor, or even devoted themselves to prison reform. They could support missionary societies by collecting funds, and in fact the numerous women’s auxiliaries of missionary and Bible societies became indispensable to fund-raising.3 They were allowed to distribute Bibles, but not to teach or preach, since the British and Foreign Bible Society required Bible distribution without note or comment as a protection against accusations of sectarianism.4 The principal theological barrier to missionary work was the bar in all denominations except the Society of Friends on preaching by women. Methodist women had at first been encouraged to speak of their spiritual lives in public and exhort fellow Methodists to faith and repentance but from 1803 they were effectively restricted to addressing their own sex and under strict conditions.5 Quakers appointed women ministers, believing that male and female were one in Christ, and pointing to examples of female ministry in the early church. However, even the Society of Friends, though it supported members who felt called to take up particular concerns, did not appoint missionaries, believing that the guidance of the Holy Spirit could be known without the need for clergy. Women were not formally appointed by any denomination as missionaries until 1858.6 Practical objections were that women would be better engaged in countering heathenism in their own land than in travelling to areas where they would expose themselves to danger; missionary work would prevent women from discharging their responsibilities to family members at home, and would endanger their children abroad.7 Moreover, at a time when women were excluded from higher education and professional training, they could not access the formal preparation for missionary work.8 However, women succeeded in identifying areas for evangelism, both in mission work and in associated educational activity, through which the ‘heathen’ were taught the gospel.9 Missionary societies did allow women to play a minor role in foreign missions, which was justified by

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reference to the early church. It was argued that the cause of foreign evangelism could be served by the beneficial effect of wives on missionaries’ personal piety – preventing them from straying into improper liaisons, and providing company and domesticity. Wives could show heroism in consecrating their youth and talent to the cause, relinquishing earthly felicity, and even sacrificing their lives; to heroism they could conjoin conjugal excellence and maternal duty. Moreover, they could instruct children, and improve the character of local women through their exemplary domestic lives.10 Higher and lower levels of missionary work were distinguished, the higher including translation, writing manuals of instruction, studying the local religion, and presenting Christianity to the people, and the lower including giving elementary education and catechising children, or even adults. In cultures where male missionaries could not interact with local women, female teachers were already viewed in some quarters as a necessity for bringing the gospel to them.11 Thus, it was as missionaries’ wives and as teachers and catechists that women were able to serve in the Russian Empire at this point. This was a particular case of the general tendency for missionaries to work at this time as couples, both engaged in teaching, though preaching remained the male preserve.12 The Russian Empire with its large non-Christian population figured high in the priorities of the newly- formed missionary societies. The Scottish Missionary Society (1796) had a station at Karass in the Caucasus from 1802,13 and the London Missionary Society (LMS) (1795) supported the Moravian mission to the Kalmyks14 before sending its own mission to Siberia in 1819.15 The Religious Tract Society (RTS) (1799) concerned itself with distribution abroad almost immediately, and began work in about 1812 in Russia, where tracts (writing for the newly literate, designed to improve their morals and provide religious education) were seen as important substitutes for sermons and visits by clergy in far-flung villages.16 The conversion of Alexander I to vital religion in 181217 made evangelical piety acceptable, even fashionable, until the Orthodox Church campaigned against it in the mid-1820s. Alexander was enthused by Western mystics, and in 1812 gave his enthusiastic support to the formation of the Russian Bible Society to take the Holy Scriptures to the people. Many of his subjects similarly were moved to preach the gospel and to witness to the love of God through compassion for their neighbour, now with a sense that they had been called by the Lord Jesus Christ. The religious revival was not rooted in the Orthodox Church, which had been discredited by its subordination to state administration.


Most believers found the archaic language of the liturgy opaque, and nobles found it difficult to respect the clergy who in general came from a lower social and educational stratum. There were conversions amongst the elite to Catholicism, but more commonly the revival took the form of mystical spirituality, direct communication between the soul and God. In Russia the opportunities for women’s evangelical work were also restricted. There were no missionary societies. The membership of the Russian Bible Society was almost exclusively male, and it had no female auxiliary societies. There were, therefore, no formal arrangements for Bible distribution by women. However, a few women engaged in Christian philanthropic associations,18 and there were informal women’s prayer meetings.19 The evangelical Princess Sof’ia Meshcherskaia was extremely active in writing, translating, and publishing tracts. Since the RTS had been advised against creating a tract society in Russia, the early stages of its work there were carried out through individuals, principally Rev. Robert Pinkerton, formerly a missionary at Karass, and Meshcherskaia, in whose conversion Pinkerton had been instrumental. Meshcherskaia had a ‘successful career in the Society’s cause’.20 At first the Orthodox Church welcomed the circulation of tracts and she published, on Pinkerton’s estimation, ‘ninety-three different pieces, amounting to upwards of 400,000 copies’.21 The cause was hindered by the suppression of the Russian Bible Society in 1826, but circulation of tracts continued on a limited scale, with new impetus in 1830 when Meshcherskaia made 200,000 tracts available for gratuitous issue and new works were printed and circulated, and existing tracts reprinted, by Rev. Richard Knill of the Congregational Church in St Petersburg and his supporters.22 Meshcherskaia also translated evangelical writings and accounts of foreign missions to acquaint the Russian public with activity elsewhere.23 The British women discussed here to some extent interacted with their Russian evangelical counterparts, Meshcherskaia being a key figure.

Jean Paterson The case of Jean Paterson shows personal and domestic evangelism, and exploitation of facilitatory roles. Jean Paterson, née Greig,24 was the daughter of Admiral Samuel Greig (1735–1788), an outstanding Scottish commander in the Russian navy, and Sarah Greig, née Cook (1752–1793), daughter of Alexander Cook, proprietor of a rope-yard in Kronshtadt.25 One of a large family, she was brought up in Russia, after


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the death of her parents in the family of an English merchant, and led a conventionally pious life, harbouring a mistrust of Methodism, until she moved to London at the age of 21. Whilst living with her brother Samuel Greig the younger, Russian naval commissioner and later consul-general, who moved in fashionable society, she met a young man of evangelical views who introduced her to a minister, Mr Young of Margate. Her disputes with this preacher led gradually to her conversion in 1812. She then joined an evangelical church in London where she studied the Scriptures systematically. Her neophyte’s attempts to convert her friends were well-intentioned, but unsuccessful. After eight years she returned to Russia to live with another brother, Admiral Aleksei Greig, at Kronshtadt. In this phase of her evangelical life Jean Greig worked as a single woman, having no official role. She was spiritually isolated, finding that the Anglican Chaplain to the English Factory in Petersburg did not preach the gospel ‘in its purity’,26 and instead took spiritual sustenance from reading the Scriptures and devotional literature. She also began a correspondence with Dr John Paterson, who worked for the British and Foreign Bible Society in Petersburg (1812–1822), having previously served as a missionary in Scandinavia.27 She took up the cause of the Russian Bible Society, becoming one of its few female subscribing members and acting, on her own initiative, as a Bible woman, distributing the New Testament to the poor. Seeing that many were illiterate, she planned to build a school for poor children and employ a schoolmaster. Having purchased the materials, she was forced to abandon the plan when it was rumoured that she intended to convert the pupils from (it must be presumed) Orthodoxy, to ‘another religious persuasion and deprive them of their freedom’,28 and she was unable to allay these fears. She led a devout life, preferring her own room and prayer to her brother’s dancing parties, seeking for conversions (among them the merchant John Venning), and showing considerable forcefulness in procuring the preaching of the gospel in Kronshtadt. Paterson, whose wife Katrine Margarete Hollinder had accompanied him on his mission and died in Russia in 1813 from the effects of winter travel,29 proposed marriage, but this was opposed by Aleksei Greig. Jean Greig returned to England to enjoy the solace of her spiritual friendships, but another brother, Charles, terminally ill with consumption, asked her to nurse him. She put her duty to her family before her spiritual needs, but was delighted to find in Axminster an evangelical church which nurtured her spiritual life. After Charles’ death she was able to visit the poor, and spend time at the workhouse, where she gave


religious instruction to the children, and prayed with the sick and dying. She also made the acquaintance of the distinguished evangelical Hannah More, author of the phenomenally popular collection Cheap Repository Tracts. Undeterred by Aleksei Greig’s opposition, Paterson invoked the support of Alexander I, an enthusiastic promoter of the Bible Society cause, who intervened to permit the marriage, which took place in Axminster in 1817.30 Jean Paterson returned to Russia a second time, feeling ‘it to be the home which my heavenly father has appointed for me’.31 Now as a missionary’s wife and thus with some official standing, she was ‘possessed by the idea of useful service’. I hoped that a large field of usefulness was opened to me in Russia, which, from my knowledge of the people and language, might furnish me more ample occupation than I could have in this highly privileged land [England], where a people zealous of good works has lately been raised up. I must request that you will plead for me with double importunity at a throne of grace. Being engaged in the immediate service of our Master, I require a double portion of grace, not to bring reproach upon his cause.32 In this second phase, she acted much as a minister’s wife in support of the community of evangelicals. The Patersons created a refuge from the godless society of Petersburg33 and brought the evangelicals together for prayer, Bible-reading, and spiritual and practical support. They worshipped weekly in the Patersons’ home, and held monthly missionary prayer meetings, with Paterson presiding as minister. Members of the community at this time included the British evangelical and penal-reform campaigner Walter Venning, his brother the merchant John Venning, and the latter’s wife Julia, daughter of a wealthy merchant of German extraction living in Petersburg.34 The Vennings shared a spiritual friendship with Alexander I, who over a period of some 15 years was accustomed to visit them in their home to share prayer and pious conversation.35 Others were the missionary Ebenezer Henderson and Dorothea Pinkerton, wife of Robert Pinkerton. Eventually the group evolved into the Congregational (also known as the Independent) Church, led from 1820 by the LMS’s missionary, Rev. Richard Knill. Another member of the community, though not a member of the church, was Meshcherskaia, a strong supporter of several of its initiatives. The Patersons gave hospitality to missionaries passing through Petersburg on their journeys between Britain and their postings in the


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Russian Empire, and kept up a sustaining spiritual correspondence when they had moved on. Jean Paterson also contributed to evangelism by using her linguistic skills in the cause of the Russian Bible Society, interpreting, translating, and writing letters.36 The most innovative means of evangelism was her work in prisons, which she regarded as her bounden duty.37 She was invited to be a member of the Ladies’ Committee of the Obshchestvo popechitel’noe o tiur’makh (Society for the Care of Prisons (SCP) ), which took the word of God to prisons, houses of correction, and workhouses. The principle of the Society for the Care of Prisons was that religious education, Biblereading, edifying conversations, attendance at church services, and conversion to vital Christianity were the key to the rehabilitation of offenders.38 The society, rooted in the Congregational Church, was the project of Walter Venning, assisted by John Paterson and Meshcherskaia, and supported by Alexander I. The Ladies’ Committee, recruited by Venning, was described by Paterson as ‘Christian ladies of the first rank’, distinguished for their piety and benevolence.39 It included some of the few female subscribers to the Russian Bible Society, relatives of men serving it, and contacts of Walter Venning, amongst them Meshcherskaia (president), Jean Paterson, Julia Venning, and Dorothea Pinkerton. The work was very challenging, and evangelical zeal did much to sustain it. Most prisons in the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century had barbarous conditions. Men and women were mixed together and females were sexually abused by the guards. The rooms were under ground, damp, dark, unventilated, and vermin-ridden. The offenders had no occupation and were malnourished. Overcrowding led to constant outbreaks of jail fever. Walter Venning’s reform proposals urged the moral reformation of criminals and improvement of conditions through separation of prisoners by category, constant occupation, continuous supervision, religious and moral instruction, and the use of solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure. Once in action, the SCP improved physical conditions, laid down rules of good conduct, and instituted incentives and deterrents for observing them. Prisoners were provided with compulsory teaching of literacy, books, and work, payment for which was claimed on release. Priests were invited to talk with them. The Ladies’ Committee, having fewer offenders in its care, worked hard on the moral rehabilitation of prisoners, alongside priests and superintendents. The lady prison visitors paid constant attention to the prisoners’ spiritual condition and viewed their spiritual transformation as a battle against sin, blessed by God.40 They ran a broad rehabilitation


programme, taught offenders to read, gave Bible readings, provided church services, and talked with offenders about sin, repentance, and divine love. The visitors described them as ‘poor creatures’ for whom they felt sympathy, and, in biblical language, as sinners, ‘poor outcasts’, ‘unhappy sisters’ (in Christ), and ‘fallen sisters’.41 It was reported that the Lady Visitors always instilled the rules of piety with love and meekness, tried to root out their inclinations to vice, and to encourage a receptiveness to all that was good and honest, tried to implant sincere repentance in the criminals’ hearts and to turn them towards submission to divine and civil laws.42 Such was her devotion to this work that Jean Paterson rose at four or five in the morning to spend several hours each day with the prisoners, without neglecting her children, her other occupations, or the spiritual needs of her domestic servants. She was chosen as committee treasurer and took charge of providing the offenders with clothing.43 By the time of her death in 1820 the work was still in its early stages, and it is difficult to assess its effectiveness at this point. In 1820 Meshcherskaia reported that spiritual improvement had been perceived in the prisoners.44 On the positive side, the visitors reported that they had acquired the affection of the prisoners by attention, charity, and secretly-given help.45 In the report for 1821 the moral progress of the prisoners gave much satisfaction: some knew the gospel, dogma, and sacred history well enough to teach new arrivals. The crux of success was deemed to be repentance and visitors noted that prisoners’ consciences had been awakened, they were aware of their guilt, and accepted their punishment meekly, hoping in Providence.46 The work received the authoritative approval of the British reformer Elizabeth Fry, who saw it as God’s work.47 However, moral rehabilitation was probably not as successful as claimed. Underlying the evangelical approach was the assumption that the route to social amelioration was the moral improvement of offending individuals, which could be achieved through forging a bond between the advantaged and the poor, but the Ladies’ Committee was nevertheless a cog in the mechanism for the social control of transgressors and the visitors aimed to control disruptive behaviour (alcoholism, violence, and sexual licence), to teach the traditional skills of domesticity, and to habituate the prisoners to order, respect for authority, restraint, and self-discipline. There is also some evidence that the prisoners responded less to evangelism than to self-interest. Conditioned by traditional relations of patronage, they were aware that obedience could


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be advantageous:48 good behaviour was rewarded by the visitors in the form of gifts, bail, help with placements in service on release, and testimonials,49 which were seen as a means of reaching hearts and minds. It was self-evident that the visitors had the power to intercede with the prison authorities and the prisoners therefore collaborated in the enforcement of the rules.50 Whatever the success of the project, it seems likely that evangelism in prisons cost Jean Paterson her life: those close to her attributed her early death from typhus to over-exertion in this cause.51 But in her second phase of work in Russia, she was able to achieve more than in the first, due principally to her status as a missionary’s wife and her involvement with evangelical organisations, particularly since these were approved by Alexander I. Jean Paterson also had an evangelical afterlife as the subject of a memoir by the missionary William Swan, who presented her as an exemplary case of a convert to evangelical religion, and offered a commentary on her experience as spiritual guidance to readers of the memoir.52

Sarah Stallybrass Sarah Stallybrass, née Robinson, went to Russia in 1817 as the wife of the missionary Edward Stallybrass, with the approval of the LMS. Indeed, one of the missionaries, William Swan, referred to her as a ‘female missionary’.53 Potentially, therefore, she had a larger field of action than Jean Paterson. However, the fact that the LMS mission to Siberia was illconceived (the Buddhist Buriats were not receptive to the gospel)54 meant that, even though it enjoyed imperial approval, her achievements were modest, and their cost great. The daughter of a tallow-chandler of Stepney, deacon of the Congregational Church, she was converted in 1807, after which she worked in benevolent societies in Stepney. Her mother had striven to impart her concern for missions to the heathen to her children, and Sarah felt the call to missionary service.55 In due course she met with the evangelical Edward Stallybrass, who had been appointed a missionary of the LMS in 1815 and urged her to consider becoming his wife, a step she hesitated to take, on the grounds of caring for her widowed father. However, the latter permitted her to follow her vocation, and she resolved to ‘devote the remainder of her life to the work of a Missionary to the heathen’ and declared herself honoured to be employed for the promotion of the glory of God amongst the ‘deluded exiles of the plain’: ‘What an honour conferred upon mortals, to be employed for the


promotion of His glory! And am I thus to be honoured? O may I never abuse the privilege, but may my future life witness for God.’56 The remote posting to Siberia to convert the Buriats (envisaged as the springboard for missions to China) required her to renounce her own wishes, and it was with some struggle that she committed herself to obedience to the divine. In 1816 the couple became engaged. The LMS was not opposed in principle to women’s presence in missions, but its policy was that young men taking up a first appointment should preferably be unmarried and should work at the station long enough to decide whether it was suitable for a wife; this arrangement precluded the necessity for a pregnant woman to make a long and dangerous journey. Edward Stallybrass argued that Sarah had the ‘dispositions and qualifications’ for teaching. She had spent a short period of quasi-professional training learning the Lancastrian teaching method, invented by the British Quaker Joseph Lancaster: most of the teaching was done by senior pupils and peers (‘monitors’) under the supervision of trained adult teachers, hence the alternative name ‘schools of mutual instruction’. The ratio of pupils to teachers could be extremely high, making the system very cost-effective, and particularly suited to charity schools. The LMS interviewed Miss Robinson and found her suitable to be the wife of the missionary.57 The fact that the directors interviewed her indicates their acknowledgment of her semi-formal role in the mission. The couple married in 1817 and shortly set off for Russia, spending several months in the evangelical community in Petersburg for preparation. The mission first settled in a sizeable city, Russian-speaking Irkutsk, and only relocated to Selenginsk, a Buriat-speaking area, in 1819. However, the presence of women (Sarah Stallybrass, Betty Rahmn, wife of Rev. Cornelius Rahmn, and Martha Yuille, wife of Rev. Robert Yuille) was perceived to impede the mission, since it prevented their husbands from maintaining close and sustained contact with the nomadic Buriats by living amongst them in tents and following their migrations. Swan informed the LMS Directors in 1818: The Missionaries must move about from place to place, and in a word it requires men unincumbered with families. If frequent exposure to difficulties and danger are to be calculated upon in our first attempts to establish this mission, it is obvious that single men should be sent […] It is to be hoped that the female missionaries who are already at Irkutsk will be rendered abundantly useful to the cause as well as comforts to their husbands and that their going will be overruled for good.


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And further: ‘Females must be exposed to various dangers and sufferings, while at the same time they unavoidably cramp the exertions and in a measure tie the hands of their husbands’. The difficulties there were not exaggerated: Betty Rahmn left the mission for health reasons, Sarah Stallybrass suffered almost constant ill health, and Martha Yuille died of typhus. The families which made up the mission were isolated, had to be largely self-sufficient in food, and had no access to professional medical care.58 It was not until 1822, after the birth of her third child,59 that Sarah Stallybrass was able to begin evangelising, through providing education in Buriat for local girls. Education for girls of all ranks was neglected, and the missionaries estimated that perhaps not more than ten females amongst all the tribes could read their own language.60 Her school was a counterpart to the schools for boys run by the missionaries. Mission schools were designed to teach literacy for accessing the Scriptures, Christian principles, and the capacity to think critically about native religion; a few advanced male pupils were trained as teachers and evangelists.61 To the girls she taught reading and writing, catechism and passages of the Scriptures, and each day the pupils attended public Christian worship. Thus, although she did not preach the gospel to ‘the heathen’ in public, she was able to communicate Christianity in private. Teaching was no easy matter: ‘the perverseness and backwardness of the children, and the ignorant prejudice and heartless ingratitude of the parents, often tried her faith and patience’, a fellow missionary recorded.62 Numbers were never large, with a maximum of 12 at one time; the boys’ school fared little better. Parents suspected Stallybrass of working for her own gain, and had to be convinced of the contrary by payments for sending their daughters.63 Families paid annual taxes and to a poor family the loss of income earned by a child was a serious matter; hence the compensation. However, the LMS did not permit its funds to be used for this purpose.64 The expenses of boarding (on account of the families’ nomadic way of life), and probably of the compensation, were to be met by the sale of plaited straw bonnets, a craft which Stallybrass had learned before leaving England.65 Unfortunately, she and Martha Yuille quarrelled over the matter of whether the girls should be taught wool-processing and needlework or straw-plaiting; Stallybrass ungraciously prevailed, but her plan for selling plaited straw hats was a failure, nearly all the Russian ladies of rank refused to wear anything manufactured by the despised Buriats.66 It is not clear how the expenses of the school were covered.


Stallybrass’s approach to her pupils was unlike that of the evangelical women working in the prisons. Rather than perceiving ‘the heathen children’ as ‘poor creatures’, or ‘unhappy sisters’, she wrote of their ‘dirty habits’ and saw them as living in ‘strongholds of Satan’. When one girl withdrew from the classes, Stallybrass ‘did not feel under any obligation to recompense her with money for the time she has been applying’. She condemned the sisters of the Taisha (chief) for being ‘adorned with all the ornaments which the apostle Peter tells women not to be concerned about’, and found it ‘disgusting’ that they entered ‘every tent, however mean, where they could be entertained with strong drink’. She reviled Buriat religion: ‘While the worldly and irreligious would behold nothing in the religion of these people to condemn, and would exclaim that all was harmless, the Christian and the Missionary must lament the absence of God in all, and as its necessary consequence, a debasing slavery, and every carnal lust.’67 Here she reflected the approach of the missionaries who, whilst the lamas were prepared to view Christianity and Buddhism as two manifestations of one religion, insisted on the absolute superiority of Christianity and the worthlessness of Buddhism.68 Sarah Stallybrass evidently found it difficult to combine teaching with looking after and educating her family in a remote mission. She bore six children in Siberia, lost a baby daughter in an epidemic, was not in good health, and at times considered giving up teaching. After the birth of her last child in 1827 she left the teaching largely in the hands of the monitors. The struggle was not recompensed in her lifetime by any conversions at the mission, and in 1828 she recorded that ‘I cannot descry any spiritual good arising from my instructions, yet I labour in faith, that all shall not be in vain’.69 The Selenginsk school was closed in 1828 when the mission relocated, and a new school opened at Khodon,70 in which she taught until her death at the mission in 1833. The Siberian mission was a failure, and Sarah Stallybrass’s failure to instruct any large number of Buriat girls in literacy and Christian religion, or to change the customs of Buriat women, must be seen in that context. However, she responded to the divine call for better or for worse, and did not falter: she had borne, and had patience, and had not fainted, even though she was not allowed to see one seal [conversion] to her husband’s ministry, nor granted any evidence that her long-continued efforts for the instruction of the degraded ones around were owned by Him she served and from whom she asked the blessing.71


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In spite of being constrained by domestic duties she carried out the educational functions of missionary work. Moreover, it was remarkable that, at a time when education for the girls of poor families even in the capital was neglected, the attempt was made to provide tuition for them on the periphery, in the face of overwhelming cultural obstacles. In terms of ‘conjugal excellence and maternal duty’ she was successful, and though the presence of families may have slowed down the acquisition of the language for Bible translation, it did not in the longer term prevent it. There is also no doubt that her evangelical zeal was costly: she placed the mission cause above her responsibility to her father, and sacrificed to it both her youth and her life. She was duly commemorated in print by her husband for her zeal as a missionary’s wife.

Sarah Kilham Sarah Kilham is remarkable as a single woman who worked for evangelisation through education in her own right. The keys to this were the model and support of her step-mother, the missionary Hannah Kilham, and her membership of the Society of Friends: since it was generally considered inappropriate for missionary societies to employ women,72 Sarah Kilham worked under Quaker auspices whilst funding herself through the income from her school. Moreover, as a single woman she had more time to devote to the work than a married woman with children. As before, it was also crucial that her work carried imperial approval. There is little biographical information about Sarah Kilham, but it is known that her parents were evangelical Methodists. Her mother, Sarah Kilham, née Grey (1756–1797) married Alexander Kilham (1762–1798), a minister who was expelled from the Methodist Church in 1796 for advocating the spiritual equality of the laity, and who then founded the breakaway Methodist New Connexion Church. Sarah Kilham the elder lived a life of poverty and depression, after the deaths of two of her children and miscarriages, but supported her husband staunchly.73 Preachers’ wives were considered to have a vital supporting role in their husbands’ ministries.74 Their eldest child, Sarah, was dedicated to the Lord’s service at birth; Kilham wrote in his journal: ‘I was now informed of my dear wife being safely delivered of a daughter, and of her being in a hopeful way; I immediately went home to see her: we rejoiced together, and solemnly offered up our infant to the Lord to be his for ever.’75 Shortly after the death of his wife, in 1798 Kilham married Hannah Spurr (1774–1832), who had also left the Methodist Church to


join the New Connexion; he wrote: ‘We have both cause to believe that in this we were acting according to the order of providence’.76 Having worked tirelessly to build up the new church, which had 5,000 members by the end of its first year, Kilham died only months later. Sarah Kilham was then brought up by her stepmother. Hannah Kilham had no private means and worked at first in a Methodist day school for girls in Nottingham, and then in a Sheffield school;77 in about 1805 she set up her own day and boarding school for girls in Sheffield. She was soon drawn to Quakerism, and was accepted into membership of Balby Monthly Meeting in 1803. She expressed her evangelical faith through work for several benevolent societies in Sheffield. She was a founder-member of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (1803), served on the Sub-Committee for the Poor in her Quaker Meeting, and supported the Society for Superseding Climbing Boys [Chimney Sweeps] (1807). She was a sponsor of the Sheffield Lancastrian school for girls (1809), and one of the moving spirits behind the formation of the Sheffield Bible Association (1812). She was also a member of the Ladies’ Committee of the British and Foreign School Society78 and the author of tracts for the religious instruction of the young.79 Eventually, Hannah Kilham became interested in missionary work in Africa, and overcame Quaker objections to mission work by arguing for educational missionaries who would provide education for needy children and bring them to an understanding of the divine light within. In 1823 she went to work in the Gambia, and later also worked in Sierra Leone as a teacher. Sarah Kilham was brought up as a Methodist and then became a Quaker; there is no information on her conversion, but in adult life she followed an evangelical path. It is known from Hannah Kilham’s letters that she interested Sarah in missionary work.80 The latter earned her living by teaching in her stepmother’s school, which she also helped to run. The opportunity for service in Russia arose as a result of the journey to Russia of the Quaker William Allen, who was secretary of the British and Foreign School Society, which advocated the Lancastrian method of teaching as a means of improving popular literacy in order to increase Bible-reading by the poor. Allen had met Alexander I when the latter attended a Quaker meeting in London in 1814, and established an intimate spiritual friendship. Visiting Russia in 1818–1819, at Alexander’s invitation, he and his fellow Quaker Stephen Grellet advocated this cause, and urged Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna to set up elementary girls’ schools, as a means of improving their home-making skills, and thus keeping their future husbands from ‘improper places’, bad company,


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and drink; moreover, they might then ensure a ‘virtuous education’ for their own daughters. ‘We therefore urged the necessity for girls’ schools, under the care of pious, well-concerned female teachers.’81 They raised with Meshcherskaia the concern for Lancastrian schools, and persuaded her to ‘take the lead in the female department’.82 When Alexander commanded the foundation of six charity schools for girls, Meshcherskaia obtained the consent of the wife of the Minister of the Interior, Anna Kozodavleva, to become president of the committee to run a school,83 and asked Allen to recruit a schoolmistress.84 Allen’s search went to Balby Monthly Meeting on account of its connection with Daniel Wheeler,85 a former member, who was working at Alexander’s invitation at Okhta outside Petersburg on the improvement of land, and sent regular communications to the meeting.86 Sarah Kilham was encouraged by her step-mother to go to Russia, where she settled with the Wheeler family87 in the Quaker community; her membership was transferred to Okhta in January 1821.88 Although this was not a mission for conversion of ‘the heathen’ to Christianity, it was a mission in the sense that it required travel abroad, long-term separation from family members, and the obedient dedication of an entire life to a vocation. Kilham devoted herself to bringing literacy and religion to the deprived Orthodox, especially to the girls of poor families, for whom there was little provision in state-run schools. In 1819 the elementary (parish) schools in St Petersburg had 867 pupils, of whom 162, about 19 per cent, were girls.89 Kilham had an audience with Alexander I,90 learned Russian, and opened her Lancastrian school in the Narva quarter in October 1821 with 50 girls aged 8–12.91 This number represented a large proportionate increase in the number of girls receiving education. The curriculum covered reading, writing, elementary grammar, arithmetic, and divine law (religious instruction), the latter taught by a priest. Boarders in addition learned housekeeping, evidently in the course of helping to look after themselves, and attended church on Sundays. The fees were low: 12 roubles a year for day girls, and 225 for boarders. The school flourished, and she later received the tsar’s permission to expand. Her school became a lasting institution, still in operation in 1860.92 Imperial patronage may account for the success of this school, compared to the failure of Jean Greig’s. Kilham quite soon began a collaboration with the evangelical community centred on the Congregational Church. She contributed her experience to the management of the Lancastrian ‘school for poor’ established by the Congregational Church in Petersburg in 1821, a mixed-sex elementary school for the children of poor foreigners. Alexander


I appointed Knill as superintendent and Mr Gray, from the congregation, as schoolmaster.93 The managing committee consisted of men and women, to oversee both sides of the school, and, apart from Sarah Kilham, came from the evangelical community: John Venning and his wife Julia Venning, Knill, Meshcherskaia, and others.94 The school had a distinct religious basis and used the Scriptures as its book of instruction. Knill saw it as a contribution to the long-term improvement of the morality of the city: These children are from among the lower orders, and, through the Divine blessing, may be expected to exert a great influence over the morals of the present generation, and the next generation also. If you have never been out of England, it is not possible that you can form an idea of the depraved state of a large city with little religion in it.95 The girls in particular were seen as the means for moral improvement: Many of the poor girls were found entirely neglected, and there was reason to believe that without the care of the Committee they would have fallen into the most dreadful vices, which generally follow ignorance and folly. […] It is well known that the tranquillity and good order of the lower classes depend much on the good principles of females. On them depends the charge of the early years of infancy, and the direction of their first steps. Of what importance then is it that the female children of the poor should be instructed in the first principles of Christian morals, that they may inspire in the minds of infants the love of virtue, and fidelity in all their social relations!96 The children were not only trained in skills but evidently encouraged to practise charity – many who had graduated from the school supported their friends.97 The school was successful, and in 1824 it had 201 male and 112 female pupils, mostly Germans.98 By August 1823 the school had taught 70 boys to read, and placed them as apprentices.99 Girls were taught needlework as a means of supporting themselves without resorting to prostitution.100 The school made a significant contribution to education for girls from poor families in the city. In 1824 the 14 parish schools in St Petersburg had 1376 pupils, of whom only 285 were girls; 112 of these (39 per cent) attended this school, which formed part of the parish-school provision.101 However, in spite of the fact that the pupils were not Russian Orthodox, the school met with opposition. By 1823 it was perceived as part of the heterodoxy which was bringing the


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Russian Bible Society under attack,102 particularly for its evangelical associations.103 Hostility also came from the Anglican British community in Petersburg: Knill confided to the LMS that the Anglican congregation tried to damage the school by alleging that it was sectarian; ‘it has always been very hateful to the very high church – alas!’104 Sarah Kilham was also a member along with John Venning, Julia Venning, Meshcherskaia, and others, of the managing committee of another Lancastrian school established by the Congregational Church. The ‘school for poor boys’ opened in 1823, in spite of the opposition encountered by the school for poor foreigners. This school, which had more substantial government funding than the school for foreigners, was run by James Heard, a British specialist in the Lancastrian system, with annual grants from Alexander I.105 In 1824 the school for poor boys had 106 pupils and of the 1376 pupils in the 14 parish schools in the city in 1824, 419 (30 per cent) attended these two schools.106 Sarah Kilham also pursued more direct evangelism, in conjunction with the Congregational Church. In 1826 she left the Quaker meeting, and joined the Congregational Church; in the early 1830s she married one of its members, William Biller.107 In the 1830s she acted as an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society (the Russian Bible Society having ceased to function) and received a grant from it for Bibles and New Testaments for use in Russia, which, together with commentaries on books of the Bible, were in demand from soldiers and peasants,108 in spite of the fact that from 1824 the right to distribute the Scriptures translated by the Russian Bible Society was restricted to Orthodox clergy.109 In this respect her role was akin and superior to that of Bible woman. She also acted for the RTS, which financed the production of one of the tracts translated by Meshcherskaia, in 1830; she observed to the society how the reading of tracts led to a desire to read the Bible.110 Sarah Kilham was the most successful of the three women in terms of the number of people she was able to interact with, and she made an important contribution to widening the educational opportunities for girls from poor families. Where Jean Paterson and Sarah Stallybrass took up supportive roles in which to exercise their mission, Kilham acted with unusual professional autonomy, and even interacted with the British missionary societies in her own right. The British women’s work described here – elementary education for the needy, moral rehabilitation of offenders, and Bible distribution carried out in foreign lands – was a meaningful expression of mission at a time when the barriers to preaching and formal appointment as missionaries were insuperable. In order to embark upon it, it was crucial to


have a strong sense of divine vocation, and some standing, formal or informal, with a religious organisation, whether missionary society or Quaker Meeting. For success it was also crucial to have imperial patronage of the mission. Support also came from contacts with fellow evangelicals in Russia. All three accommodated themselves to the prevailing assumptions of women’s primarily domestic role and pursued private settings – home, school, confidential conversations with prisoners – in which to teach the gospel. Their faith enabled them to face daunting situations, even danger, to persevere when the work seemed ineffective, and to surrender their lives. By bringing the gospel to those who had not yet been reached, and contributing to the moral improvement of the young and offenders, these women were able to respond to the need for evangelism in foreign lands, where it appeared to be greater than at home. They were also celebrated in print as evangelicals. Unbeknown to themselves they helped to pioneer British women’s path to appointment as missionaries. The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the University of Nottingham, and the helpful comments of Malcolm Jones and Alison Twells.

Notes 1. Judith Cohen Zacek, ‘The Russian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church’, Church History, 35 (1966), 411–37 (pp. 421–22). 2. Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 73–76. 3. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 23, 24, 27. On the women’s auxiliaries see Sarah Lane, ‘Forgotten Labours: Women’s Bible Work and the BFBS’, in Sowing the Word: the Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society 1804–2004, ed. Stephen Batalden, Kathleen Cann and John Dean (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004), pp. 53–62. 4. Roger Martin, ‘Women and the Bible Society’, in Sowing the Word (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004), pp. 38–52 (p. 39). Martin notes that some women did, however, give short sermons or enquire into recipients’ spiritual state (p. 43). 5. Methodist Archives and Research Centre, http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/data1/ dg/methodist/methfem.html. Accessed 1 December 2006. I am indebted for this reference to Malcolm Jones. 6. Clare Midgley, ‘Can Women be Missionaries? Envisioning Female Agency in the Early Nineteenth-Century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), 335–38, note 11. I am indebted to Alison Twells for this reference. 7. These arguments are advanced, and refuted, by, for example, the feminist Clara Lucas Balfour in her biography of the American Baptist woman missionary A Sketch of Mrs Ann H. Judson (London: Cash, 1854), pp. 5–6.


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8. Midgley, p. 338. 9. See Midgley, p. 339. 10. Joseph Fletcher, introduction to Edward Stallybrass, Memoir of Mrs Stallybrass, Wife of the Rev. Edward Stallybrass, Missionary to Siberia (London: Fisher, Son & Co, 1836), p. xv. 11. Midgley, p. 339. 12. Midgley, p. 339. 13. See M. V. Jones, ‘The Sad and Curious Story of Karass’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, N. S. 8 (1975), pp. 53–81. 14. Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society 1795–1895, 2 vols (London: Frowde, 1899), II (1899), p. 585. 15. See C. R. Bawden, Shamans, Lamas and Evangelicals: The English Missionaries in Siberia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). 16. William Jones, The Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society Containing a Record of its Origin, Proceedings, and Results, A.D. 1799 to A.D. 1849 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1850), pp. 283, 392. 17. Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I (London and New York: Longman, 1994), p. 117. 18. See Wendy Rosslyn, Deeds, not Words: The Origins of Women’s Philanthropy in the Russian Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century, (Birmingham: Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, 2007). 19. Memoirs of the Life and Gospel Labours of Stephen Grellet, ed. Benjamin Seebohm (London: Bennett, 1860), p. 335. 20. Jones, Jubilee Memorial, pp. 394–95. 21. Robert Pinkerton, Russia or Miscellaneous Observations on the Past and Present State of that Country and its Inhabitants (London: Seeley and Sons, 1833), p. 358. 22. Wendy Rosslyn, ‘Benevolent Ladies and their Exertions for the Good of Humankind: V. A. Repnina, S. S. Meshcherskaia, and the Origins of Female Philanthropy in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review, 84 (2006), 52–82 (pp. 67–69). 23. For example, the work of the evangelist Samuel Walker, The Christian. Being a Course of Practical Sermons (London: [n. pub.], 1755), translated as Khristianin (i pr.) Samuila Valkera (St Petersburg: [n. pub.], 1815) and Rev. William Brown’s The History of the Propagation of Christianity among the Heathen since the Reformation, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1814), translated as Izvestiia o rasprostranenii khristianstva mezhdu iazycheskimi narodami i magometanami vo vsekh chastiakh sveta (St Petersburg: v tipografii N. Grecha, 1817). 24. The principal sources for her life are John Paterson, The Book for Every Land: Reminiscences of Labour and Adventure in the Work of Bible Circulation in the North of Europe and in Russia (London: John Snow, 1857); William Swan, Memoir of the late Mrs Paterson, wife of the Rev. Dr Paterson, St Petersburg, Containing Extracts from Her Diary and Correspondence, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: [n. pub.], 1823). 25. Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), pp. 68, 195–204. 26. Swan, Memoir, p. 86. 27. G. C. Boase, ‘Paterson, John (1776–1855)’, rev. H. C. G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/21533, accessed 5 Oct 2006]. 28. Swan, Memoir, p. 97.

238 Femininity and Religious Life 29. Bawden, p. 53. 30. John Paterson, Notices of Labours in Sweden and Russia in the Years 1808, 1809, 1810, 1811, 1812, 1813, 1814, 1815, and 1816, British and Foreign Bible Society (heareafter BFBS) Collections, pp. 256–57. 31. Letter of 17 August 1817, BFBS Collections. 32. Swan, Memoir, p. 134. 33. Bawden, p. 99. 34. Bill Forsythe, ‘Venning, John (1776–1858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; [http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/28193, accessed 14 Nov 2006]. 35. Thulia S. Henderson, Memorials of John Venning Esq (London: Knight, 1862), p. 37. 36. Swan, Memoir, p. 164. 37. Paterson, The Book for Every Land, p. 333. 38. On prisons and prison reform by the SCP see V. N. Nikitin, Tiur’ma i ssylka. Istoricheskoe, zakonodatel’noe, administrativnoe i bytovoe polozhenie zakliuchennykh, peresyl’nykh, ikh detei i osvobozhdennykh iz pod strazhi, so vremeni voznikniknovenie russkoi tiur’my do nashikh dnei (St Petersburg: G. Shparvart, 1880), pp. 7–49. 39. Paterson, The Book for Every Land, p. 333. 40. Otchet komiteta Obshchestva Popechitel’nogo o tiur’makh za 1822 god, reprinted in The Third Report of the Committee of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, 1821 (London: T. Bensley, 1821), p. 224. 41. Sketch of the Origin and Results of Ladies’ Prison Associations, with Hints for the Formation of Local Associations (London: Arch, 1827), p. 26; Otchet Sanktpeterburgskogo Komiteta Obshchestva popechitel’nogo o tiur’makh za 1821 god (St Petersburg: v tipografii Karla Kraiia, 1822), p. 60; Henderson, p. 57. 42. Otchet […] za 1821 god, p. 59. 43. Paterson, The Book for Every Land, p. 333. 44. Letter to Walter Venning of 2 August 1820, published in The Third Report, p. 172. 45. Otchet posetitel’nogo komiteta tiuremnogo obshchestva ot dekabria 20 1819 do 1821 goda (St Petersburg: v tipografii Departamenta narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1821). 46. Otchet […] ot dekabria 20 1819 do 1821 goda, p. 79; Otchet komiteta Obshchestva Popechitel’nogo o tiur’makh za 1822 god (St Petersburg: v tipografii Meditsinskogo departamenta MVD, 1823), p. 44. 47. Otchet […] za 1821 god, pp. 68–69. 48. The Third Report, p. 174. 49. Otchet […] za 1821 god, p. 62. 50. Otchet […] za 1822 god, p. 48. 51. Swan, Memoir, pp. 177, 204. 52. Swan, Memoir. This was one of the earliest of the memoirs of British missionary women, the first of which dates to 1815 (Midgley, p. 341). 53. Bawden, p. 94. 54. Bawden, p. 217. 55. Bawden, pp. 65–67, 70. 56. Stallybrass, p. 26 and pp. 42–43; Bawden, p. 217. 57. Bawden, pp. 66–67.


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58. Bawden, pp. 143, 94, 95, 199, 203, 210. This usage of the term ‘female missionary’ predates the first occurrence of the term supposed by Midgley, p. 343, in a text published in 1825. 59. Stallybrass, p. 150. 60. Stallybrass, Yuille and Swan to the LMS, November 1823, Council for World Mission, Russia, Incoming Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 6, Jacket B. 61. Bawden, pp. 220, 251–52. 62. Swan cited in Stallybrass, p. 259. 63. Stallybrass, p. 149. 64. Bawden, pp. 260–61. 65. Stallybrass, p. 151. 66. Bawden, pp. 188–89; Stallybrass, p. 151. 67. Stallybrass, pp. 152, 173, 203–04, 164. 68. Bawden, pp. 234–36. 69. Stallybrass, pp. 183, 217, 221. 70. Bawden, p. 273. 71. [Hannah Swan], Reminiscences of the Mission in Siberia (Edinburgh, n.d.), p. 13. 72. Midgley, p. 336. Sarah Kilham’s mission shortly preceded the first appointments of single women as educational missionaries by the Ladies’ Committee of the BFSS. 73. See Alexander Kilham, A Short Account of the Life and Death of Mrs. Sarah Kilham. To Which is Added, Three Sermons Preached on the Day She Was Interred (Leeds, 1797). 74. http://rylibwebman.ac.uk/data1/dg/methodist/methfem.html. 75. The Life of Mr Alexander Kilham, Methodist preacher, who was expelled from the Conference, or Society of Methodist preachers … To which are added, extracts of letters, (in favour of reform,) written by a number of preachers to Mr. Kilham (Nottingham: C. Sutton, [1799]), p. 43. 76. The Life of Mr Alexander Kilham, p. 163. 77. The principal sources on Hannah Kilham are Sarah Biller, Memoir of the Late Hannah Kilham, Chiefly Compiled from Her Journal and Edited by Her Daughterin-law, Sarah Biller of St Petersburg (London: Darton and Harvey, 1837); Mora Dickson, The Powerful Bond: Hannah Kilham, 1774–1832 (London: Dobson, 1980); Alison Twells, ‘ “Let Us Begin Well at Home”: Class, Race and Christian Motherhood in the Writing of Hannah Kilham’, in Eileen Janes Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere, 1800–1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998), pp. 25–51, 25–35. 78. Joyce Goodman, ‘Languages of Female Colonial Authority: the Educational Network of the Ladies’ Committee of the British and Foreign School Society, 1813–1837’, Compare, 30 (2000), 7–19 (pp. 7, 16). 79. For example, Scripture Selections on the Attributes of the Divine Being (Sheffield: William Todd, 1813). 80. Twells, p. 25. 81. Memoirs of […] Stephen Grellet, p. 318. 82. The Life of William Allen with Selections from his Correspondence, 3 vols (London: Charles Gilpin, 1846–1847), I (1846), 424. 83. The Life of William Allen, I, pp. 430, 436, 439, 443, 447, 450, 453. 84. The Life of William Allen, II, p. 22. 85. Dickson, p. 106.

240 Femininity and Religious Life 86. See Memoirs of the Life and Gospel Labours of the Late Daniel Wheeler, a Minister of the Society of Friends (London: Harvey and Darton, 1842), p. 72 and similar letters in later years. 87. Richenda C. Scott, Quakers in Russia (London: M. Joseph, 1964), p. 92. 88. Memoirs of […] Daniel Wheeler, p. 88. 89. Nachal’noe i srednee obrazovanie v Sankt-Peterburge XIX – nachalo XX veka, comp. N. F. Nikol’tseva (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2000), pp. 64–67. 90. Barry Hollingsworth, ‘Lancasterian Schools in Russia’, Durham Research Review, 17 (1966), 59–74 (p. 68). 91. Anon.,’Ob uchilishche po metode vzaimnogo obucheniia dlia devits’, Sorevnovatel’ prosveshcheniia i blagotvoreniia, 1823, part 23, pp. 216–18. 92. Judith Cohen Zacek, ‘The Lancastrian School Movement in Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review, 45 (1967), 343–67 (p. 353). 93. C. M. Birrell, The Life of the Rev. Richard Knill of St. Petersburg (London: Religious Tract Society, 1859), p. 109. 94. Zacek, ‘The Lancastrian School Movement in Russia’, p. 354. 95. Birrell, pp. 119–20. 96. Extract from the first report of the school, reprinted in the annual report of the BFSS for 1823, p. 99. 97. Birrell, p. 144. 98. Birrell, p. 110; Nikol’tseva, p. 65. 99. London School of Oriental and African Studies, Archive of Council for World Mission, Russia, Incoming Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 6, Jacket A, Knill to the LMS. 100. Birrell, p. 144. 101. Nikol’tseva, p. 65. 102. Birrell, p. 110. 103. Birrell, p. 119. 104. Letter of 4 May 1824, Council for World Mission, Russia, Incoming Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 6, Jacket C. 105. Zacek, ‘The Lancastrian School Movement in Russia’, pp. 354–55. 106. Nikol’tseva, p. 65. 107. Scott, p. 94. 108. Letter of 24 October 1831, BFBS Collections. 109. Judith Cohen Zacek, ‘The Russian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church’, Church History, 35 (1966), 411–37 (p. 433). 110. Letter to Mr Jackson of 24 July 1834, BFBS Collections.

Select Bibliography (2001–2006): Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825 Wendy Rosslyn

Bibliography Pushkareva, N., Russkaia zhenshchina: istoriia i sovremennost’: istoriia izucheniia ‘russkoi temy’ russkoi i zarubezhnoi naukoi. 1800–2000: Materialy k bibliografii (Moscow: Ladomir, 2002) Rosslyn, Wendy, ‘Introduction; Women in Russia (1700–1825): Recent Research’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 1–34

Individual women Danilova, Al’bina, Blagorodnye devitsy: vospitannitsy Smol’nogo Instituta: biograficheskie khroniki (Moscow: EKSMO, 2004) Dashkova, E. R., O smysle slova ‘Vospitanie’: sochineniia, pis’ma, dokumenty, ed. by G. I. Smagina (St Petersburg: Bulanin, 2001) Dolgova, S., Kniaginia E.R. Dashkova i sem’ia Malinovskikh (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2002) Kaidash-Lakshina, Svetlana, Velikie zhenshchiny Rossii (Moscow: ‘Prava cheloveka’, 2001) Karpichenko, N. P. and others, eds, E. R. Dashkova i rossiiskoe obshchestvo XVIII stoletiia (Moscow: Moskovskii gumanitarnyi institut im. E. R. Dashkovoi, 2001) Marsh-Flores, Ann, Literary Collaboration and the Rise of the Russian Woman Writer: Or, How Zinaida Volkonskaia Learned to Write in Tsarist Russia, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004 Priashnikova, M. P., E. R. Dashkova i muzyka (Moscow: Moskovskii gumanitarnyi institut im. E. R. Dashkovoi, 2001) Smagina, G. I., Spodvizhnitsa Velikoi Ekateriny: ocherki o zhizni i deiatel’nosti direktora Peterburgskoi Akademii nauk kniagini Ekateriny Romanovny Dashkovoi (St Petersburg: Rostok, 2006) Tishkin, Grigory A., ‘Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova and Women’s Issues in Russia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. by Judith P. Zinsser (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2005), pp. 179–96 Tosi, Alessandra, ‘Eighteenth-Century Traditions and Issues of Gender in Zinaida Volkonskaia’s Laure (1819) (synopsis)’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newsletter, 31 (2003), 12–17 241

242 Select Bibliography Tosi, Alessandra, ‘Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia’, in A. M. Belosel’skiiBelozerskii i ego mir, ed. by T. Artem’eva (Forthcoming: Sankt-Peterburskii tsentr istorii idei) Tychinina, L. V. and others, eds, E. R. Dashkova i ee sovremenniki (Moscow, Moskovskii gumanitarnyi institut im. E. R. Dashkovoi, 2002) ——, ed., E. R. Dashkova: lichnost’ i epokha (Moscow: Moskovskii gumanitarnyi institut imeni E.R. Dashkovoi, 2003) ——, Velikaia Rossiianka: zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ kniagini Ekateriny Romanovny Dashkovoi, ed. by I. V. Tarasenko (Moscow: Nauka, 2002) Veselaia, G. A. and E. N. Firsova, Moskva v sud’be kniagini Dashkovoi (Moscow: Moskovskii gumanitarnyi institut im. E. R. Dashkovoi, 2002)

Empresses and female members of the imperial family Alexander, John T., ‘Amazon Autocratixes: Images of Female Rule in the Eighteenth Century’, in Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilization, ed. by Peter I. Barta (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 33–53 Anisimov, E. Five Empresses. Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Westport, Conn. and London: Praeger, 2004) ——, Anna Ioannovna (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2002) ——, Elizaveta Petrovna (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2002) Chizhova, I. B., Piat’ imperatrits: peterburgskaia kul’tura XVIII veka (St Petersburg: Znanie, 2002) Cruse, Mark and Hilde Hoogenboom, trans. and ed., The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (New York: Modern Library, 2005) Danilova, Al’bina, Piat’ printsess: docheri imperatora Pavla I (Moscow: EKSMO, 2005) ——, Russkie imperatory, nemetskie printsessy: dinasticheskie sviazi, chelovecheskie sud’by (Moscow: Eksmo, 2005) Dawson, Ruth, ‘Eighteenth-Century Libertinism in a Time of Change: Representations of Catherine the Great’, Women in German Yearbook, 18 (2002), 67–88 Dickinson, Sara, ‘Russia’s First “Orient”: Catherine in the Crimea, 1787’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3 (2002), 3–25, reprinted in Orientalism and Empire in Russia, ed. by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica, 2006), 87–108 Dixon, Simon, Catherine the Great: Profiles in Power (Harlow: Longman, 2001) Ekaterina Vtoraia: pro et contra. Antologiia (St Petersburg: Izd-vo Russkoi Khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2006) Hughes, Lindsey, ‘Catherine I of Russia: Consort to Peter the Great’, in Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815. The Role of the Consort, ed. by Clarissa Campbell Orr (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), pp. 131–54 Marker, Gary, ‘Godly and Pagan Women in the Coronation Sermon of 1724’, in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Wittenberg 2004, ed. by Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. 207–20 Medvedkova, Olga, ‘Royauté et féminité: l’invention de l’image de l’impératrice en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’, La Femme dans la modernité, Modernités russes 4 (Lyon: Centre d’Etudes slaves André Lirondelle, 2002), pp. 21–36

Select Bibliography 243 Safonov, M., ‘ “Seksual’nye otkroveniia”: Ekaterina II i proiskhozhdenie Pavla I’, in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century. Papers from the VI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, July 1999, Leiden, Germany, ed. by Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon, and Maarten Fraanje (Bohlau: Köln, 2001), pp. 96–111 Safonov, M. M., Zaveshchanie Ekateriny II (St Petersburg: Liga, 2002) [on her favourites] Strizhak, Nika, Aleksandr Sokolov and David Raskin, Anna Pavlovna: russkaia printsessa na gollandskom trone (St Petersburg: Blits, 2003) Volovik, Oleg, Aleksandra: zhizn’, sem’ia, sud’ba, pamiat’: velikosvetskii dinasticheskii brak v zerkale politicheskikh sobytii v Evrope XVIII veka (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2004) [Aleksandra Pavlovna]

Women’s history Bisha, Robin, and others, Russian Women, 1698–1917: Experience and Expression, an Anthology of Sources (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002) Engel, Barbara Alpern, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) Kosheleva, Ol’ga, ‘Episodes from Women’s Lives in the Reign of Peter I’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 243–55

Women in public life Alexander, John T., ‘Catherine I, Her Court and Courtiers’, in Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives, ed. by Lindsey Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 227–49 Fainshtein, M. Sh., ‘I slavu Frantsii v Rossii prevzoiti …’: Rossiiskaia Akademiia (1783–1841 gg.) i razvitie kul’tury i gumanitarnykh nauk (St Petersburg: Bulanin, 2002) [Dashkova’s role in the Academy] Gapich, S. V., ‘Emantsipatsiia v Rossii na primere literaturnykh salonov pervoi chetverti XIX veka’, in Gendernaia istoriia: pro i contra (St Petersburg: Rossiiskii gos. pedagogicheskii universitet, 2000), pp. 117–20 Marker, Gary, ‘Peter the Great’s Female Knights of Liberation: The Order of St Catherine of Alexandria’, in Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony G. Cross, ed. by Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), pp. 35–47 Pashentseva, S. V., Zhenskie blagotvoritel’nye obshchestva Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Ikar, 2003) Pushkareva, N. L., ‘Zhenskaia istoriia Rossii 1801–1905 gg: Formy sotsial’noi aktivnosti’, in Gendernaia istoriia: teoriia i issledovaniia, ed. by N. L. Pushkareva (Kaluga: Eidos, 2001), pp. 89–113 Rosslyn, Wendy, ‘Benevolent Ladies and their Exertions for the Good of Humankind: V. A. Repnina, S. S. Meshcherskaia, and the Origins of Female Philanthropy in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review, 84 (2006), 52–82 ——, ‘Women’s Philanthropy in the Russian Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter, 32 (2004), 1–5

244 Select Bibliography Rosslyn, Wendy, ‘Zwischen Öffentlichkeit und Privatleben. Frauen und ihre Schriften im achtzehnten und frühen neunzehnten Jahrhundert in Rußland’, in Vieldeutiges Nicht-zu-ende-sprechen. Thesen und Momentaufnahmen aus der Geschichte russischer Dichterinnen, ed. by Arja Rosenholm and Frank Göpfert, FrauenLiteraturGeschichte, vol. 16 (Fichtenwalde: Göpfert, 2002), pp. 41–59 Shcherbinin, P. P., Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIIInachale XX v. (Tambov: Iulis, 2004)

Debates about gender Hammarberg, G., ‘Gender Ambivalence and Genre Anomalies in Late 18th-Early 19th-Century Russian Literature’, Russian Literature, 52 (2002), 299–326 Heyder, Carolin and Arja Rosenholm, ‘Feminisation as Functionalisation: The Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 51–71 Hughes, Lindsey, ‘ “The Crown of Maidenly Honour and Virtue”: Redefining Femininity in Peter I’ s Russia’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 33–49 Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo, ili Pokazanie k zhiteiskomu obkhozhdeniiu: Sobranie ot raznykh avtorov (Kaliningrad: Iantarnyi skaz, 2001) [reprint] Kelly, Catriona, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001)

Women and law Bisha, Robin, ‘Marriage, Church, and Community in 18th-Century St Petersburg’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 227–42 Glagoleva, E., ‘The Illegitimate Children of the Russian Nobility in Law and Practice, 1700–1860’, Kritika, 6 (2005), 461–99 Lamarche Marrese, Michelle, ‘From Maintenance to Entitlement: Defining the Dowry in 18th-Century Russia’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 209–26 ——, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002) Pushkareva, N. L., ‘Imushchestvennye prava zhenshchin v XVIII-nachale XIX v.’, in Sem’ia v rakurse sotsial’nogo znaniia: sbornik nauchnykh statei, ed. by Iu. M. Goncharov (Barnaul: Institut istorii SO RAN, Altaiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2001), pp. 188–203

Women’s education Bzhelova, A. V., ‘Domashnee vospitanie dvorianok v pervoi polovine XIX v.’, Pedagogika, 10 (2001), 68–74

Select Bibliography 245 Kelly, Catriona, ‘Educating Tat’yana: Manners, Motherhood and Moral Education (Vospitanie), 1760–1840’, in Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. by Linda Edmondson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–28 Pushkareva, Natal’ia L., ‘Russian Noblewomen’s Education in the Home as Revealed in Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century Memoirs’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 111–28 Uliura, A. A., ‘Spetsifika vospitaniia i obrazovaniia dvorianskoi devochki v Rossii XVIII veka’, in Gendernaia pedagogika i gendernoe obrazovanie v stranakh postsovetskogo prostranstva, ed. by O. V. Shnyrova (Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2002), pp. 78–85

Women and spirituality Bukova, Ol’ga, Zhenskie obiteli prepodobnogo Serafima Sarovskogo: istoriia desiati nizhegorodskikh zhenskikh monastyrei (Nizhnii Novgorod: Knigi, 2003) Chernykh, M. A., ‘Zhenskie obrashcheniia v katolichestvo v nachale XIX veka v Rossii: sotsial’nyi vybor i prostranstvo gendera’, in Mifologiia i povsednevnost’: gendernyi podkhod v antropologicheskikh distsiplinakh, ed. by K. A. Bogdanov and A. A. Panchenko (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2001), pp. 347–57 Emchenko, E. B., ‘Gosudarstvennoe zakonodatel’stvo i zhenskie monastyri v XVIII-nachale XX veka’, Tserkov’ v istorii Rossii, 5 (2003), 171–221. ——, ‘Zhenskie monastyri v Rossii’, in Monashestvo i monastyri v Rossii XI–XX veka, ed. by N. V. Sinitsyna (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), pp. 245–84 Marker, Gary, ‘The Russian Veneration of St Catherine of Alexandria’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter, 30 (2002), 7–11 Paert, Irina K., ‘Gender and Salvation: Representations of Difference in Old Believer Writings from the Late 17th Century to the 1820s’, in Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. by Linda Edmondson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 29–51 ——, Old Believers, Religious Dissent, and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003) Thyret, Isolde, ‘Women and the Orthodox Faith in Muscovite Russia: Spiritual Experience and Practice’, in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed. by Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2003), pp. 159–75 Wagner, William G., ‘Paradoxes of Piety: The Nizhegorod Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, 1807–1928’, in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed. by V. A. Kivelson and R. H. Greene (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2003), pp. 211–38 ——, ‘The Transformation of Female Orthodox Monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod Diocese, 1764–1929, in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Modern History, 78 (2006), 793–845 Worobec, Christine, Possessed: Women, Witches and Demons in Imperial Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2001) Zhenshchina i vozrozhdenie shamanizma: postsovetskoe prostranstvo na rubezhe tysiacheletii (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 2005) Zhizneopisanie igumenii Marii (Tuchkovoi): osnovatel’nitsy Spaso-Borodinskogo monastyria, 1781–1852 (Moscow: Leto, 2002)

246 Select Bibliography

Women’s private lives Belova, A. V., ‘Povsednevnost’ russkoi provintsial’noi dvorianki kontsa XVIIIpervoi poloviny XIX v. (k postanovke problemy)’, in Sotsial’naia istoriia: ezhegodnik 2003 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), pp. 269–84 Belova, A. V., ‘Women’s Letters and Russian Noble Culture of the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 147–61 Gentes, Andrew, ‘Licentious Girls and Frontier Domesticators: Women and Siberian Exile from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Centuries’, Sibirica, 3 (2003), 3–20 Glagoleva, Olga E., ‘Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provincial Noblewomen (1750–1825)’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 129–46 Kimerling Wirtschafter, Elise, ‘Patriarchy and Marriage in the Late EighteenthCentury Russian State’, in Zhenskaia povsednevnost’ v Rossii v XVIII–XXvv., ed. by P. P. Shcherbinin and others (Tambov: Tambovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2003), pp. 12–20 Uliura, A. A., ‘Opasaiasia chitat’ romany: zhenskaia biblioteka v Rossii XVIII v.’, in Pedagogicheskie idei russkoi literatury, ed. by V. A. Viktorovich (Kolomna: Kolomenskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut, 2003), pp. 53–54

Women in social life Hammarberg, Gitta, ‘Castalian Curative Springs: Muses and Muzhiks in Lipetsk’, in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Wittenberg 2004, ed. by Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. 341–55 Kolesnikova, A., Bal v Rossii: XVIII-nachalo XX v. (St Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2005) Lavrent’eva, E., Povsednevnaia zhizn’ dvorianstva pushkinskoi pory. Etiket (Moscow: Olma, 2005)

Women’s bodies Goscilo, Helena, ‘Cosmetics – or Dying to Overcome Nature in an Age of Art and Artifice’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 73–103 Hughes, Lindsey, ‘From Caftans into Corsets: The Sartorial Transformation of Women during the Reign of Peter the Great’, in Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilization, ed. by Peter I. Barta (London-New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 17–32 Kirsanova, Raisa M., Russkii kostium i byt XVIII–XIX vekov (Moscow and St Petersburg: Slovo, 2002) Politkovskaia, E. V., Kak odevalis’ v Moskve i ee okrestnostiakh v XVI–XVIII vekakh. 2nd edn (Moscow: Nauka; Flinta, 2005) Sosnina, N. and I. Shangina (comp.), Russkii traditsionnyi kostium: illiustrirovannaia entsiklopediia (St Petersburg, 2001)

Select Bibliography 247

Women and the arts Blakesley, Rosalind P., ‘Maria Fedorovna and the Rise of the Woman Artist in Russia’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter, 31 (2003), 18–23 Hughes, Lindsey, ‘Women and the Arts at the Russian Court from the 16th to the 18th Century’, in An Imperial Collection. Women Artists from the State Hermitage, ed. by J. Pomeroy and Rosalind P. Blakesley (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2003), pp. 19–49 Iovleva, L. I., ‘Zhenshchiny-khudozhnitsy v russkom iskusstve: k istorii voprosa’, in Iskusstvo zhenskogo roda: zhenshchiny-khudozhnitsy v Rossii XV–XX vekov, ed. by L. I. Iovleva and others (Moscow: Gos. Tret’iakovskaia galereia: 2002), pp. 11–14 Jones, Gareth, ‘Catherine the Great’s Understanding of the “Gothic”’, in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century. Papers from the VI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, July 1999, Leiden, Germany, ed. by Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon and Maarten Fraanje (Bohlau: Köln, 2001), pp. 233–40 Jones, Malcolm V., ‘Flirting Her Way Round the Court of St Petersburg: Some Thoughts on Vigée-Le-Brun’s Russian Period and Her Portrait of Varvara Nikolaevna Golovina’, in Diagonales dostoïevskiennes: mélanges en l’honneur de Jacques Catteau, ed. by Marie-Aude Albert (Paris: Presses de l’université de ParisSorbonne, 2002), pp. 273–89 Markina, L. A., ‘Khudozhnitsy v Rossii: ot barokko do moderna’, in Iskusstvo zhenskogo roda: zhenshchiny-khudozhnitsy v Rossii XV–XX vekov, ed. by L. I. Iovleva and others (Moscow: Gos. Tret’iakovskaia galereia: 2002), pp. 54–63 Muzykal’nyi Peterburg: Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’: Tom 1. XVIII vek, ed. by A. L. Porfir’eva (St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 1996–2004) Rosslyn, Wendy, ‘Female Employees in the Russian Imperial Theatres (1785–1825)’, in Women and Gender, pp. 257–77 ——, ‘Petersburg Actresses On and Off Stage (1775–1825)’, in St Petersburg, 1703–1825, ed. by Anthony Cross (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 119–47 ——, ‘The Prehistory of Russian Actresses: Women on Stage in Russia (1704–1757)’, in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Wittenberg 2004, ed. by Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. 69–81 Smith, Douglas, ‘New Archival Findings on the Life of Praskov’ia KovalevaZhemchugova’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter, 31 (2003), pp. 43–50. Stites, Richard, ‘The Misanthrope, the Orphan, and the Magpie: Imported Melodrama in the Twilight of Serfdom’, in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, ed. by Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), pp. 25–54 ——, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005)

Women’s writing Alexander, John T., ‘Catherine the Great and the Theatre’, in Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony

248 Select Bibliography G. Cross, ed. by Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), pp. 116–30 Breuillard, Jean, ‘La “langue des femmes” dans la littérature russe (fin du XVIIIe siècle et début du XIXe’, in La Femme dans la modernité, Modernités russes 4, Lyon, Centre d’Etudes slaves André Lirondelle, 2002, pp. 69–80 Donnels O’Malley, Lurana, The Dramatic Works of Catherine the Great: Theatre and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006) ——, ‘Catherine the Great’s “Rage aux Proverbes” ’, in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy, pp. 91–101 ——, ‘Catherine the Great’s Woeful Knight: A Slanted Parody’, Theatre History Studies, 21 (2001), 11–26 Göpfert, Frank, ‘Observations on the Life and Work of Elizaveta Kheraskova (1737–1809)’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 163–86 Hammarberg, Gitta, ‘Women, Wit, and Wordplay: Bouts-rimés and the Subversive Feminization of Culture’, in Vieldeutiges Nicht-zu-Ende-Sprechen: Thesen und Momentaufnahmen aus der Geschichte russischer Dichterinnen ed. by Arja Rosenholm and Frank Göpfert, FrauenLiteraturGeschichte, vol. 16 (Fichtenwalde: Göpfert, 2002), pp. 61–77 Kelly, Catriona, ‘Sappho, Corinna and Niobe: Genres and Personae in Russian Women’s Writing, 1760–1820’, in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. by Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 37–61 LeBeau, Mary Delle, [On Bunina] http://www-scf.usc.edu/~mlebeau/illness.htm (consulted 25 September 2006) Marsh-Flores, Ann, ‘Coming Out of His Closet: Female Friendships, Amazonki and the Masquerade in the Prose of Nadezhda Durova’, Slavic and East European Journal, 47 (2003), 609–30 Moracci, Giovanna, ‘Performing History: Catherine II’s Historical Dramas’, in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Wittenberg 2004, ed. by Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. 121–30 Stohler, Ursula, ‘ “I Will Create Whatever I Want to”: Naturalness as a Source of Mastery in the Works of Sentamentalist Women Poets’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter, 31 (2003), 24–29 ——, ‘Russian Women Writers of the 1800–1820s and the Response of Sentimentalist Literary Conventions of Nature, the Feminine and Writing: Mariia Pospelova, Mariia Bolotnikova, and Anna Naumova’, PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2005 Tosi, Alessandra, Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Age of Alexander I (1801–1825) (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006) ——, ‘ “L’Amazone Russe”: Les traits subversifs d’une héroïne sentimentale’, Revue des Etudes Slaves, 74.4 (2002–2003), 819–34 Uliura, A. A., ‘Robkaia Muza moia: mesto sochinitel’nits v russkoi kul’turnoi istorii XVIII veka’, in Sotsial’naia istoriia: ezhegodnik 2003 (Moscow, Rosspen, 2003), pp. 285–99 ——, ‘Zhenskoe vtorzhenie’ v russkoi literature i kul’ture XVIII veka (Kiev, 2001)

Select Bibliography 249 Vowles, Judith, ‘The Inexperienced Muse: Russian Women and Poetry in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. by Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 62–84

Women’s journals Hammarberg, Gitta, ‘Reading à la Mode: The First Russian Women’s Journals, in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon, and Maarten Fraanje (Weimar: Böhlau, 2001), pp. 218–32 ——, ‘Women, Critics, and Women Critics in Early Russian Women’s Journals’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. by Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 187–207 Heyder, Carolin, ‘Damskii zhurnal: eine russische Frauenzeitschrift im 19. Jahrhundert’, PhD. dissertation, University of Freiburg, 2003

Images of women Andrew, Joe, ‘A Crocodile in Flannel or a Dancing Monkey: The Image of the Russian Woman Writer, 1790–1850’, in Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. by Linda Edmondson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 52–72 Bühle, Maike, ‘Elizaveta Borisovna Kul’man in den Vertonungen von Robert Schumann’, in Russische Kultur und Gender Studies, ed. by Elisabeth Cheauré and Carolin Heyder (Berlin: Spitz, 2002), pp. 397–407 Glagoleva, E., ‘Gor’kie plody prosveshcheniia: tri zhenskikh portreta XVIII veka’, in Sotsial’naia istoriia: ezhegodnik 2003 (Moscow, Rosspen, 2003), pp. 300–23 Nekrylova, A. F. (Introd. and comm.), Russkie Narodnye Kartinki: Sobral i Opisal D. Rovinskii (St Petersburg: Tropa Troianova, 2002) [Reprint] Prokopenko, O., ‘The Real-Life Protagonist of Mikhail Chulkov’s Comely Cook: A Hypothesis’, Slavic and East European Journal, 48.2 (2004), 225–46 Schruba, Manfred, ‘Prigozhaia povarikha na fone frantsuzskogo pornograficheskogo romana (Chulkov i Fuzhere de Monbron)’, in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century. Papers from the VI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, July 1999, Leiden, Germany, edited by Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon and Maarten Fraanje (Bohlau: Köln, 2001), pp. 328–41

Biography and autobiography Gretchanaia, E., ‘Les écrits autobiographiques des femmes russes du 18e siècle rédigés en français’, Dix-huitième siècle, 36 (2004), 131–54 Holmgren, Beth, ed., The Russian Memoir: History and Literature (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 2003) Hoogenboom, Hilde, ‘Biographies of Elizaveta Kul’man and Representations of Female Poetic Genius’, in Models of Self, ed. by Marianne Liljeström, Arja Rosenholm and Irina Savkina (Helsinki: Kikimora, 2001), pp. 17–32

250 Select Bibliography Pushkareva, Natal’ia, ‘Wege zure “weiblichen Schrift” in Russland: Weibliche Autobiographien im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert’, in Russische Kultur und Gender Studies, ed. by Elisabeth Cheauré and Carolin Heyder (Berlin: Spitz, 2002), 457–76 Savkina, Irina, ‘Sui generis: muzhestvennoe i zhenstvennoe v avtobiograficheskikh zapiskakh Nadezhdy Durovoi’ in S. Ushakin (comp.), O muzhe(n)stvennosti: sbornik statei (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002), pp. 199–203 Schonle, Andreas, ‘Gender Trial and Gothic Thrill: Nadezhda Durova’s Subversive Self-Exploration’, in Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation, ed. by Peter I. Barta (London-New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 55–70

Index

Abdulova, Ziuliukha [Zuleikha] 155 Aglaia 45, 53, 85 Aksenova, Anna 149 Al’brekht [Albrecht], Anna 155 albums 84, 91 Aleksei Mikhailovich 10, 14 Alexander I 54, 221, 224, 225, 227, 232 Allen, William 232, 233 Amvrosii, Archbishop of Novgorod 183 Anan’ina, Mar’ia 13 Anan’ina, Ol’ga 13 Anastasiia Ivanovna, Grand Princess 196, 211 Andreeva, Dar’ia 148 Anna (Hannah), mother of the prophet Samuel 180, 181 Anna Leopol’dovna 137, 139 Anna Petrovna 181, 185 Anna, Empress of Russia (Anna Ioannovna; Anna Ivanovna) 1, 9, 11, 12, 17, 131, 132, 133, 137, 139, 141, 180, 181 Anna, mother of Mary 180 Apraksina, Marfa 127 Arakelova, Elizaveta 158, 159 Arzamas 196, 202, 203, 205, 206 Aspasia 88, 91

Bible 4, 14, 17, 172, 175, 182, 183, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235 Bible Societies British and Foreign Bible Society 220, 223, 235 Russian Bible Society 221, 222, 223, 225, 226 bigamy 3, 107–22 Blank, B. K. 53, 90, 91, 92 Blokhina, Anis’ia 159, 160 British and Foreign School Society 232 Bruyn, Cornelius de 131 Bulgakova (merchant’s wife) 154 Bunina, Anna 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 80, 91, 92 Buriat women 229, 230 Burmakina, Akulina 149 Buzhinskii, Gavriil 177, 198 Campredon, Jacques de 131, 176 Catherine I 64, 171, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186 Catherine II 1, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30, 65, 66, 68, 70, 75, 80, 82, 134, 135, 194 charity 193, 203, 219, 220, 226, 234 Chernyshevskii, N. G. 78 Chulkov, M. D. 48 churches Congregational Church, St Petersburg 222, 224, 225, 227, 233, 235 Methodists 220, 221, 222 Russian Orthodox Church 3, 4, 34, 116, 137, 174, 183, 185, 191–218, 221, 222, 233, 234, 235 Quakers 220, 228, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236

Babkina, Natal’ia 150 Bakunina, Varvara 64, 65, 66 Bartel’ts, Elena 160 Batiushkov, K. N. 46, 83, 97 Belinskii, V. G. 43, 46, 78 Belogradskaia, Elizaveta 12 Belosel’skii-Belozerskii, A. M. 54 Bergholz, Friedrich-Wilhelm von 11, 131 Berilova, Anna 14 Bezborodko, Prince A. A. 15, 16 Beznina, Anna 93, 95, 98 251

252 Index clergy 10, 26, 108, 112, 117, 118, 120, 121, 161, 180, 183, 187, 191, 192, 193, 196, 199, 201, 206, 220, 221, 222, 225, 233, 235 commerce 3, 25, 32, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 155, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 192, 193, 195, 199, 204, 205 Constantine the Great 173, 177 convents 112, 161, 172, 189, 191–218 see also monasteries conversation 31, 40, 224 Corinna 88, 91 Cossack women 151, 153, 155 Cottin, Sophie 46 court 3, 10, 11, 17, 40, 54, 64, 70, 75, 125–43, 171, 174, 178, 180, 181, 183, 186, 187 Crimea 78 criticism 47, 50, 85, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98 cultural constructs 85 Damskii zhurnal 45, 46 Dashkova, Princess Ekaterina 2, 16, 17–19, 20, 65, 66, 67–71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 81 David, King of Israel 173, 175, 176 de Staël, Mme 48, 55, 56, 62, 91 Diana 86, 94 Diulu, Mariia [Marie Dulout] 149 divorce 3, 107–22 Dmitriev, I. I. 96, 97, 98 Dolgorukaia, Natal’ia 64, 80 Dolgorukii, I. M. 30 Dolgorukova, Princess Varvara 153 Dukhovnyi reglament (Spiritual Regulation) 112, 200, 201 Durova, Nadezhda 56, 64, 80 economic peasant women 149 economic peasants 148, 157 editors 51, 83, 84, 85, 92, 94 Egorova, Praskov’ia 158 Ekaterina Ioannovna, Duchess of Mecklenburg 11, 81 Ekaterina Pavlovna (sister of Alexander I) 75

Elizabeth, Empress of Russia (Elizaveta Petrovna) 1, 9, 12, 14, 179, 181–7, Elizaveta Alekseevna, Empress (wife of Alexander I) 64, 80 Enlightenment 20 epistolary novels 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 eroticism 27, 76, 86, 89, 93, 94, 95 Esipov, P. V. 28, 29 evangelical Christianity 4, 219–40 Evdokia (Lopukhina) 17, 172, 180, 185 fashion 77, 85, 87, 89, 125–43 Fedotova, Tat’iana 155 femininity 3, 40, 43, 44, 46, 53–6, 66, 67, 68, 73 feminisation of Russian culture 41, 56, 67, 69, 78, 84, 89, 91, 98 Fiscal Chamber 147, 148 French language 2, 11, 20, 47, 48, 55, 68, 71, 77, 91 Fry, Elizabeth 226 Gan, Elena 56 gender 40, 45, 48, 52, 55, 56, 57, 66, 68, 76, 78, 86, 95, 126, 135, 136, 137, 180 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité, Mme de 41, 46, 48, 91 Gladkov, Grigorii 26, 28 Gladkova, Mar’ia 2, 65, 66, 74–8, 79, 82 Glebova-Streshneva, Princess Elizaveta 154 Glinskaia, Elena 171 Goethe, J. W. 48 Golitsyna, Dar’ia 65 Golitsyna, Natal’ia 80 Golovkina, Natal’ia 40, 41, 42, 44, 48–53, 60, 61 Gornostaeva, Avdot’ia 149 Graces 90, 91, 92 Gracheva, Varvara 149 Greig family 222–3 Grellet, Stephen 232 Griboedov, A. S. 24, 27, 28, 32 Guseva, Agaf’ia 32

Index Herzen (Gertsen), A. I. 27, 28, 29 hoaxes 95 Holy Synod 107, 110, 117, 118, 120, 176, 179, 189, 201, 202, 209, 216 homosexuality 86 Ianovskii, Feodosii, Archimandrite 108, 118 Iaroslavl’ province 12, 149 Iazykov, D. I. 94, 97 icons 162, 163, 173, 182, 186, 194, 198, 207 Ignat’eva, Praskov’ia 158 Imperial Theatres 15, 22, 24, 27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36 inheritance 113, 115, 146 intercession 173, 180, 186, 187, 194, 198, 227 Iskakova, Zuleikha 156 Islen’eva, Solomonida 114–15 Iushkevich, Amvrosii 184 Iusupov, Prince N. B. 27–8 Ivan V 11, 172 Ivoilova, Katerina 156 Izvekova, Mariia 40, 41, 42, 44, 46–7, 51 journals 2, 18, 41, 42, 45, 53 see also women’s journals Kaluga 149 Kamenskii, Count Mikhail 28 Kamenskii, S. M. 28, 29 Karamzin, N. M. 42, 43, 44, 50, 55, 60, 61, 67, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98 Karamzinists 45, 53, 83, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 Kavyrshina, Agrippina 120 Kazan’ 28, 109, 155, 156 Kheraskova, Elizaveta 19 Khlebnikova, Irina 149 Khodon 230 Khrapovitskii, A. V. 15, 16, 18 Khvostova, Aleksandra 41 Kilham, Hannah, née Spurr 231, 232 Kilham, Sarah (later Sarah Biller) 219, 231–5 kingship 4, 171, 175, 177

253

Kitaeva, Gadiba 156 Klushin, A. I. 93 Kniazhnin, I. B. 18, 86 Knill, Rev. Richard 222, 224, 234, 235 Kolesnikova, Agaf’ia 109 Kondrat’eva, Feodora 158 Koniukhova, Aleksandra 156 Kopteva, Mar’ia 156 Korovina, Domna 155 Kotzebue, August von 19 Kozlova, Anna 158 Kozodavleva, Princess Anna 233 Krüdener (Kriudener), Iuliia 55 Kumanina, Anna 154 Kunst, Anna 14 Kurakina, Mariia 65 Kursk province 153, 154, 155 Kuz’mina (actress) 28, 29, 35 Labzina, Anna 64, 80 Ladies’ Committee of the Society for the Care of Prisons 225, 226 Lanclos, Ninon 88 Landé, Jean-Baptiste 12, 130 Laval’, Countess Aleksandra 153 Lazarevskaia, Iulianiia 199 Lazhechnikov, Ivan Ivanovich 90 legislation 3, 108, 110, 111, 117, 118, 121, 126, 132, 134, 138, 139, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153, 173 Leskov, N. S. 28 letters 3, 49, 51, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 78, 107–24, 225, 232 Linkiewicz, Agata 154 literary genres 3, 17, 19, 20, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 65, 66, 67, 69, 84, 85, 86, 87, 99 literary groups 40, 41, 42 Lkshina, Lbv’ 92 London Missionary Society 221, 224, 227, 228, 229, 235 Lopukhov, Fedor 30 Maikov, V. I. 86 Makarov, M. N. 46, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92–8 Makarov, P. I. 85, 88–9, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98 Mamatova, Sagida 156

254 Index Manstein, Christofor H. von 137, 138 Maria Fedorovna, Dowager Empress 232 marriage 25, 31, 49, 52, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121 Mary, Mother of God 181, 182, 183, 207 masculinity 67, 68, 87, 89, 135, 183, 184 masquerades 126, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136 Matseevich, Arsenii 184 Matveeva, Akulina 116 Matveeva, Avdot’ia 148 Medvedeva, Avdot’ia 156–7 Mengden, Juliana 137 merchant women 3, 19, 34, 76, 79, 110, 133, 134, 144–67 see also women entrepreneurs; widows merchants 30, 33, 34, 134, 138, 144–67 merchants’ guilds 145, 165 meshchane, meshchanstvo, the lowest stratum of the urban population 146, 155 Meshcherskaia, Princess Sof’ia 222, 224, 225, 226, 233, 234, 235 Ministry of Finances 148, 150 misogyny 85, 87 missionaries 4, 219–40 Mniszek, Marina 171 Modnoe ezhemesiachnoe izdanie 84, 85–7 Mogilev province 154 monasteries 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 121, 177, 178, 184 monastic reform 191, 199–202 monasticism 191–218 More, Hannah 224 Morgan, Elizabeth 68 Moscow province 148, 153, 157 Moskovskii Merkurii 85, 88–9 Moskovskii zritel’ 85, 90–2 motherhood 53, 64, 86 mundus muliebris 90, 91, 93

Münnich, Burkhard Christoph von 137 music 12, 24, 27, 28, 32, 54, 72, 87, 91, 207 Musina-Pushkina, Agrafena 13 myths 40, 43, 55, 86, 90, 93, 178, 186 name-day saints 4, 173, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 189 Napoleonic wars 47, 64, 158 narrative 43, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 72, 77, 85 Natal’ia Alekseevna 10, 16–17, 131 Natal’ia Naryshkina 10 needlework 31, 127, 207, 229, 234 Neelova, Anna 41 Neoclassicism 14, 17, 20 Neuber, Caroline 11 Nikulina-Kositskaia, Liubov’ 29, 34–5 Nizhnii Novgorod province 4, 30, 33, 34, 64, 153, 191–218 Novgorod province 149 Novikov, N. I. 19, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 100 obrok 32, 33 Old Belief 148, 205 Ol’ga, Princess of Kiev 171 Orel province 154 palaces 10, 12, 26, 27, 28, 127, 130, 178 panageiai 178 Panova, Anna 154 Paterson, Dr John 223, 234, 235 Paterson, Jean, née Greig 219, 222–7, 235 patriotism 47, 92 patronage 1, 9–13, 16, 21, 31, 32, 42, 47, 50, 53, 54, 178, 182, 194, 198, 203, 226, 233, 236 Pavlova, Karolina 56 peasant women 1, 3, 26, 27, 30, 35, 64, 76, 77, 79, 86, 134, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 210 see also Economic peasant women

Index peasants 27, 34, 35, 130, 133, 146, 147, 148, 153, 156, 157, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 200, 202, 203, 205, 209 see also peasant women pedantry 87, 88 Penza 26, 153, 155 Peter I 14, 64, 110, 117, 125, 127, 130, 136, 139, 145, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 201 Peter II 180, 185 Peter Petrovich, son of Peter I 175, 176 philanthrophy 219, 220 Pinkerton, Dorothea 224, 225 Pinkerton, Rev. Robert 222 Pitirim, Archbishop of Nizhnii Novgorod and Alatyr 193, 196 Piunova, Nastas’ia 15 play 87, 90, 95 pleasure 14, 28, 76, 84, 89 Podobedova, Mar’ia 149 Poliakov, S. I. 186 Pososhkov, I. T. 138 Pospelova, Mariia 40, 41, 44, 47, 51, 53 Potemkina, Countess Praskov’ia 153, 154 pre-romanticism 47, 48, 66 prisons 4, 220, 225–7, 230, 236 Prokopovich, Feofan 102, 172 prostitution 29, 64, 134, 138, 234 Protopopova, Matrena 161, 162, 163 Pruth, battle of 179 Pskov province 155 public sphere 19, 65, 67, 77, 81, 130 Puchkova, Ekaterina 40, 41, 44–5, 47, 51, 59, 91, 92 Radcliffe, Ann 41, 58, 89 Radishchev, A. N. 64 Rahmn, Betty 228, 229 readers 42, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 55, 227 reading 25, 83–9, 94, 96, 223, 224, 225, 229, 232, 233, 235 Reitenfel’s, Iakov ( Jacob Reutenfels) 10, 119

255

Reval 109 Riazan’ 32 Richardson, Samuel 48, 75 Rimskaia-Korsakova, Mar’ia 64 romanticism 21, 53, 55 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 48, 55, 62 Rubanovskaia, Elizaveta 64 rule, female 3–4, 132, 171–90 Russian Academy of Sciences 18, 70, 71, 178 Rybnikova, Praskov’ia 110–11, 113, 114 Rzhevskaia, Aleksandra 19 Sabimova, Vakhrama 155 St Catherine of Alexandria 17, 173, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187 St Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist 182 St Pierre (de), Bernardin 55 salons 2, 39, 40, 41, 42, 54, 55, 87, 88, 90 Saltykova, Countess Dar’ia 71, 72, 73 Saltykova, Countess Mar’ia 75, 78 Saltykova, Praskov’ia 11 Samara 25 Sandunova, Elizaveta 14–16, 22 Sappho 46, 88, 91, 92 Saratov 32, 153, 155 schools 200, 209, 220, 223, 232, 233 charity schools 228, 233 Lancastrian schools 228, 232, 233, 235 mission schools 229 see also women’s education Sechenov, Dmitrii 182, 184, 185 Selenginsk 228, 230 Senate 145, 147, 148, 176 sentimentalism 2, 19, 39–48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78 serf actresses 1, 2, 9, 14–15, 16, 24–38 serfs 63, 79, 112, 116, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 193, 205

256 Index sex 2, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 86, 93, 94, 225, 226 Shakespeare, William 20, 34 Shakhovskaia, Varvara 153 Shakovskoi, Prince N. G. 15, 30–1, 33 Shalikov, Prince P. I. 42, 45, 48, 53, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98 Shcherbatov, Prince M. M. 139 Shelepova, Varvara 161 Shepeleva, Mavra 17 Sheremetev, Prince N. P. 14, 15, 16, 27, 31, 149 Shirabardina, Praskov’ia 155, 156 Shishkov, Admiral A. S. 96, 97, 98 Shishkova, Olimpiada 78 Shishkovites 83, 85, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103 Shostakova (landowner) 154, 155 Siberia 25, 64, 221, 227, 228, 230 Sichkova, Nastas’ia 156, 157 Simbirsk province 153, 154 Smirnov, I. V. 93 Smolensk province 25 Smol’nyi Institute 12 Society of Friends, see Churches Sof’ia Alekseevna 127, 171 soldiers’ wives 150, 151, 155 Spiritual Consistory 107, 207, 209 Spiritual Regulation, see Dukhovnyi reglament Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Mme de 48, 55, 56, 91 Stallybrass, Sarah, née Robinson 219, 227–31, 235 Sterne, Laurence 61, 74, 75 Stroganova, Baroness Natal’ia 2, 65, 66, 71–4, 75, 78, 79 Strukova, Akulina 161 Sumarokov, A. P. 10, 12, 14, 17 Summer Gardens 134 Sushkova, Mar’ia 19, 41, 55 Tambov 29, 111 taste 2, 13, 39, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 132, 135, 139, 184 Tatar women 155, 156 taxes 145, 146, 147, 148, 193, 200, 204, 206, 229

theatre 2, 9–23, 24–38, 71, 91, 133, 136 theatre performers 1, 9, 12, 13–16, 24–38 see also Imperial Theatres; serf actresses Timofeeva, Anna 14 Tolchevskaia, Matrena 163 Tolstaia, Countess Stepanida 153, 154 tracts 4, 221, 222, 224, 232, 235 Troepol’skaia, Tat’iana 14 Trubetskaia (Trubèska), Elizaveta 93, 95, 98 Tur, Evgeniia (Elizaveta Salias de Turnemir) 78 Tver’ province 75, 76, 109, 149 unmarried women 4, 137, 145, 146, 149, 153, 193, 204, 205 Uranova, Elizaveta, see Sandunova Vel’iasheva-Volyntseva, Pelageia 19, 20 Venning, John 223, 224, 234, 235 Venning, Julia 224, 225, 234, 235 Venning, Walter 224, 225 Viatka province 156 villages 29, 77, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 163, 181, 195, 196, 197, 205, 217, 221 Vladimir province 148, 149, 151, 162, 163 Vladimir, Prince of Kiev 171, 173, 175, 176 Vlas’eva, Avdot’ia 156, 157, 160, 162, 163–4 Volhynia province 154, 155 Volkonskaia, Princess Aleksandra 153 Volkonskaia, Princess Zinaida 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 53, 54–6, 65, 66 Volkova, Anna 53 Vologda 110 Voltaire 12, 13, 68, 90 Vysheslavtseva, Anna 33–4

Index widows 3, 4, 68, 116, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155, 160, 161, 163, 193, 199, 200, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210 women as evangelists 219–40 women as readers 2, 3, 41, 48, 57, 83–102 women, see Buriat women; Cossack women; economic peasant women; merchant women; motherhood; mundus muliebris; peasant women; solders’ wives; Tatar women; unmarried women; widows; women as evangelists; women as readers women’s clothing 3, 77, 89, 90, 93, 125–43, 156, 160, 163, 164, 226 women’s education 4, 12–13, 41, 44, 45, 54, 64, 76, 82, 86, 89, 91, 131, 220, 221, 225, 229, 231, 233, 234 women’s enterprises 3, 144, 150–7, 164 women’s journals 45, 53, 83–104, 241 see also Aglaia; Damskii zhurnal; Modnoe ezhemesiachnoe izdanie; Moskovskii Merkurii;

257

Moskovskii zritel’; Zhurnal dlia milykh women’s property 158–64 women’s rights 3, 144, 145, 198, 214 women’s writing drama 9, 10, 15, 16–20, 59 fiction 2, 39–62 in French 2, 20, 47–56, 61, 68, 71 memoirs 15, 16, 29, 47, 49, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 78 poetry 19, 39, 44, 53, 54, 65 translations 19, 39, 55, 65, 84, 88, 92, 96, 222, 225, 235 travel writing 2, 63–82 Yuille, Martha 228, 229 Zelenina, Mar’ia 116 Zezina, Matrena 161, 162, 163, 164 Zhemchugova-Sheremeteva, Praskov’ia 14–15, 16, 31 Zhukova, Mar’ia 56, 78 Zhurnal dlia milykh 85, 92–8 Zubova, Countess Natal’ia 153

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