POLITICS
In 1796, Catherine died. Her son Paul seized the powers of autocrat eagerly and issued strict regulations to his courtiers and military. Paul was peevish; he had lived too long under the thumb of his unloving mother. He sought to undermine her reputation in a variety of ways, one of which was the publication of a new law of succession in 1797 that prohibited women from inheriting the crown ever again. Unfortunately, Paul’s political skills resembled those of his father more than his mother, so he made enemies, especially among the military high command. In 1801, army officers murdered Paul in his bed and thrust his son Alexander onto the throne.
Alexander I (ruled 1801–25) was an intelligent, thoughtful man, steeped in the Enlightenment. In the early years of his reign he reformed the government and the law code and improved the administration and funding of higher education. Alexander also joined the European-wide coalition fighting Napoleon, suffered defeats, but distinguished himself in 1812 by refusing to surrender, even after the French occupied Moscow. The Russian army thereafter played an important part in Napoleon’s defeat, and Alexander entered the peace negotiations that followed as one of Europe’s most highly regarded monarchs. On his return to Russia, he pursued conservative domestic policies.
In November 1825, the forty-eight-year-old emperor suddenly died of natural causes, possibly typhus. The succession was muddled, for Alexander was childless. His younger brother Nicholas took power, then immediately had to suppress a revolt by an army faction, the Decembrists, that was calling for a constitutional monarchy. The Decembrists were easily routed, but the existence of revolutionary sentiments within the military elite alarmed Nicholas, already a conservative by temperament and training.
For thirty years, he labored to keep democratic ideas from penetrating Russia, while continuing the policies of his predecessors. He promoted elite education and government reform, in hopes of making both elite and government into instruments of his will. He maintained a huge army. This required raising government revenues, which in turn led the emperor to consider abolishing serfdom, for he and many of his advisers believed that the bondage of the peasantry inhibited economic development. And, to his credit, Nicholas also thought that serfdom was morally indefensible. In 1842 he described it as “an evil, palpable and obvious to everyone.” “However,” he added, “to attack it now would be, of course, an even more disastrous evil.”25
Thus torn between the old evils that he knew and new ones that he dared not foster, Nicholas spent his reign trying to limit the consequences of his own reforms, while pursuing a foreign policy that caused him to be seen abroad and at home as an aggressive reactionary. He funded the universities, but clamped them under strict controls to prevent faculty from teaching pernicious subjects. He presided over a huge expansion in the number of books, newspapers, and magazines imported to and printed in Russia, but had them censored. Ultimately he failed to maintain control over the minds of his ruling class. By the 1840s, proposals for major reform were circulating among intellectuals and government bureaucrats. In 1853, Nicholas blundered into the Crimean War with Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire. It was a disaster for the Russian army and a demonstration of the nation’s military and economic inferiority to the Great Powers. In February 1855, before peace could be made, Nicholas died of pneumonia. He left behind an intelligentsia seething with new ideas and an heir, Alexander, who was committed to major reforms.
EMPRESS MARIA (1759–1828) AND EMPRESS ALEXANDRA (1798–1860)
Nicholas was a happy subscriber to the variant of the cult of domesticity that prevailed among the European nobility. It may seem odd that the cult, which arose within a bourgeois critique of the aristocracy, won fans among aristocrats. It did so perhaps in part because, especially after the French Revolution, such people were afraid to be out of step with the cultural changes of the time, on which the middle class was having increasing influence. The cult also appealed to the nobility for the same reason it appealed to lower-ranking folk: it was based on an ancient vision of family life in which man provided and woman served. The cult valued her emotional service more than her physical labor, which was a shift of emphasis from earlier gender ideals, but a shift only. The notion of the gentle, all-forgiving, virtuous mother preached by the cult had been present for centuries in the idealizations of the Virgin.
Because the cult was rooted in these widely accepted universals and because it held out promises of loving families and sheltering homes in a time of rapid, unsettling economic and political change, it traveled easily. It was picked up by conservative rulers, such as Nicholas, who saw its potential to shore up the status quo; by republican Americans, who believed that mothers could teach democratic values to the citizens of the new United States; and later in the nineteenth century by nationalists from Wales to Poland, who granted women a central role in preserving ethnic identity. Feminists made use of the cult as well, arguing that women should be permitted to apply their moral sense and housekeeping skills to social improvement. After Europeans disseminated it around the world, non-Europeans as remote from one another as Hindu fundamentalists and Chinese communists incorporated its ideas into their worldviews. Even as all these devotees adapted the cult of domesticity to their cultures and objectives, its core ideas about women remained remarkably stable. Their influence endures in the twenty-first century.
The nobles’ variant of the cult arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from their own critique of the customs of family life in their class. Many of these people agreed with bourgeois critics who charged that aristocratic parents paid too little attention to their children. Catherine the Great shared these discontents, and in the memoirs she wrote in the 1790s, she portrayed herself as a lonely child, dominated first by an autocratic, self-absorbed mother who slapped her for the least misbehavior, then by Empress Elizabeth, who was still more distant and controlling.26 The ideal of a sympathetic, attentive mother had tremendous appeal to people who had had such childhoods. Catherine complained about her own mother while being a distant and demanding mother herself, which may explain why her son Paul was drawn to the cult of domesticity.
So was his wife Maria, whose parents, the duke and duchess of the German principality of Württenberg, had brought her up to believe in the importance of loving relations between royals. Maria married Paul in 1776, after his first wife died in childbirth; the young people had the good fortune to love one another. An energetic woman, Maria remodeled the couple’s palace at Pavlovsk, outside St. Petersburg, patronized charities, attended the many court ceremonies and religious observances, and painted, embroidered, carved cameos, and played several musical instruments. Maria enjoyed her heavily scheduled life, first as grand duchess, then as empress, but she also believed that she should be an attentive and affectionate mother. So she oversaw the education of eight of her ten children (her eldest sons, Alexander and Constantine, were reared by Catherine) and kept in close touch with all of them when they were grown. She also commissioned poets to sing her praises as a loving mother, and she stressed her devotion to family by undertaking extended periods of mourning for deceased relatives and having monuments constructed to commemorate her parents and husband. All this was sincere, and it served as a repudiation of her mother-in-law Catherine, with whom she had a frosty relationship. It also gave the royal stamp of approval to the nobles’ variant of the cult of domesticity.
Maria remained true to the ancient principle that marriage among royals must serve the purpose of preserving the dynasty. So she was disappointed when her oldest sons, Alexander and Constantine, could not reconcile the promptings of their hearts with their obligations as princes. Alexander barely tolerated the wife that had been chosen for him and, perhaps as a consequence, had no children. Constantine insisted on marrying his beloved, a Polish noblewoman who was not of royal rank. Then he renounced his claim to the throne. Fortunately for the house of Romanov, Nicholas, Maria’s third son, did not disappoint. He contracted a love match with Princess Charlotte of Prussia, and she became an empress who personified the ideals of the cult of domesticity even more perfectly than her formidable mother-in-law.
Christened Alexandra on her baptism into Orthodoxy, the new grand duchess set about having babies and developing her reputation as a frail, shy consort. In part this image arose because Alexandra was in fact a retiring woman who lacked Maria’s self-confidence and energy. It also reflected a shift in the aristocratic cult of domesticity, away from the culturally accomplished women of the late eighteenth century to a more emotional, even childlike, ideal. Artists portrayed Alexandra as a pale, willowy, and serene woman, swathed in gauzy dresses and hung with ropes of pearls. Courtiers declared reverently that she had taken an oath never to use the word “command.” Court poets portrayed her as radiating happiness. “Near her all our thoughts are song!” crooned Vasili Zhukovskii. Perhaps this was not mere sycophancy. Nicholas wrote to Alexandra after twenty years of marriage, “God has bestowed upon you such a happy character that it is no merit to love you.”27
Nicholas and Alexandra, like their British counterparts Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, were deeply committed to one another and to being good parents. The emperor was a devoted husband who considered his wife both friend and confidant. The empress returned his love in full measure. Breakfasting with his family frequently, the emperor expected his children to tell him about their lessons and whatever else they were doing. The family also often dined together. A bevy of nannies and tutors did the work of rearing the children, but Nicholas and Alexandra’s brood were far closer to their parents than their predecessors had been.
Government spokesmen publicized the royal family’s happy home life to promote the popularity of the emperor, tapping into deep affinities within the Russian public, elite and poor folk alike. The image of domestic felicity conveyed in pictures, poetry, and public appearances was reassuring and endearing. By presenting it as in tune with ideas fashionable in the great capitals of Europe, Nicholas’s publicists also portrayed the monarch and his consort as cosmopolitan enlighteners of their people, a role played by all the Romanovs since Peter.28 There were older ideas at work in the campaign as well. Emphasizing Nicholas’s dutiful and loving attention to his children reinforced the notion that the emperor was also the caring father of his country. Catherine had done the same when she portrayed herself as the enlightened empress and as Matushka.
THE ASCENDANCY OF THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY
Nicholas did not have to coerce his subjects into accepting the cult of domesticity; it already had many devotees among the elite when he took the throne. Mary Cavender has found late eighteenth-century letters in which Russian nobles praised mothers who instructed their families in ethical behavior. We have already seen the increased emphasis in these decades on more loving, less patriarchal relations between husbands and wives. In the early nineteenth century, government officials turned to the ideas of the cult for ways to control criminals exiled for life to Siberia. The men should marry, officials believed, because loving wives tamed men’s unruliness and inspired them to behave better. The exile would also “find a helpmeet in his wife, who will uphold and increase the comfort of domestic life through her own activity,” an 1827 report declared.29
The dissemination of cult ideas continued throughout Nicholas’s reign, as the bookstores filled with housekeeping guides, cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and edifying literature and poetry, some published in Russia, some imported from abroad. A typical description of the perfect wife appeared in an 1846 collection of essays for young people, written by Maria Korsini, a graduate of the Smolny Institute: “Her dominion is kindness and gentleness. She looks after the domestic tranquility of her husband…. She raises her babies and is the first to pronounce for them the name of God and to make them pray. She also ensures that the servant performs her duties and that quietude and peace reign in her house. A woman is given inexhaustible patience, which helps her to endure the screams of children, lack of sleep, and many minor domestic unpleasantries.”30
This version of the cult is adapted to the life of the average noblewoman, for it emphasizes household management, as the royal version did not. Royal women supervised their staffs, but this was not an activity for which they were widely praised. More important was their symbolic position as consort of the emperor and mother of his children and, by extension, of the nation. It was quite otherwise with noblewomen, whose primary responsibilities included running households, and so Korsini harkens back to The Domostroi in the importance she attaches to “ensuring that the servant performs her duties.” Novels, short stories, and diaries from the period suggest that there was still a good deal of the steely mistress of The Domostroi in real married noblewomen. Managing domestic chores and possibly their own estates required them to be authoritative.
There were other differences between the Nicholaevan cult of domesticity and the more bourgeois versions ascendant in Western Europe and North America. Chief among them was a different emphasis on the importance of separating woman’s sphere, the inside and private, from man’s, the outside and public. The notion that women belonged in the home, away from the temptations and dangers of the wider world, was an ancient one among Europeans, as well as among Arabs, Turks, Chinese, and other peoples. We have seen it in The Domostroi, and in the Muscovite seclusion of elite women. Nineteenth-century Russian advocates of the cult of domesticity, however, never carried that idea to the extremes of those contemporary British or Germans who wrote obsessively about the importance of women staying home. Now it was the Western Europeans who were harping on women’s seclusion.
This difference arose from differences in economic and social development in Western and Eastern Europe. In the West, especially the northwest, the growth of commerce and manufacturing led to a physical separation of urban residences from workplaces. By the end of the eighteenth century, more and more men were working away from home, which had not been the case in earlier times, when workers and bosses lived and labored in the same buildings. This development was idealized as the cult of domesticity was formulated. Home came to be seen as a refuge from the moral and physical squalor of public spaces. Soon this idealization was put in service to the social agenda of the middle class. Desirous of distinguishing themselves from the nobles who still outranked them in status and the artisans and peasants from whom many of them sprang, these people, particularly the English ones, defined middle-class “respectability” as requiring that women spend most of their time in their residences, as nobles did not and poor people could not. The Russian nobility in the early nineteenth century had no such social anxieties. Nor did the physical separation of workplaces and residences exist in Russia, either in the preindustrial cities or in the countryside. Hence the version of the cult that they created laid far less stress on the physical locations of men’s and women’s “separate spheres” than did middle-class variants elsewhere, which resulted in less attention being devoted to policing elite women’s behavior when in public.31
The Russian cult of domesticity also differed from the Western European bourgeois one in its definitions of masculinity. Thus far we have not discussed the cult’s prescriptions for men, and, indeed, they are often overlooked by historians. This is unfortunate, for the cult of domesticity had quite a bit to say about men, as all gender codes do, and what it said was very influential. Western European proponents of the cult sang the praises of the hard-working husband who provided for and loved his family, disciplined his children, and supervised their education, especially that of the boys. To the larger world, he set an example of rectitude and rationality. These values moved quite easily to Nicholaevan Russia, where they merged with Peter’s energetic masculinity. Nicholas’s government preached that the men of the ruling class should be educated, self-disciplined, dutiful, modest, pious, and hard-working. But public life might toughen them too much, deadening their capacity for fellow-feeling and perhaps even corrupting their morals. (This was a key idea of the cult.) Hence they needed good wives waiting at home to soothe and advise them. This synthesis of imported and inherited masculine ideals reflected, as Peter’s gender ideas had, the character of the monarch as well as his agenda for his servitors.32
Nicholas’s notions about masculinity and those proclaimed by opinion-makers in Western Europe differed most significantly in that his were more autocratic, theirs more democratic. The masculine ethos popular among the middle and, increasingly, the working classes argued that a man should be judged not according to his social rank, his family’s connections, or how well he subordinated himself to the authorities, but on his own merits and by his own accomplishments. He could be considered successful if he was a good family man who did well in business or the professions. This leveling individualism, which suited Western Europeans, especially the British and their North American cousins, could never win the favor of authoritarian rulers such as Nicholas. He stayed true to older patriarchal ideals of obedience, service, and class and believed in the importance of duty, especially the duty to serve the tsar.
Nicholas could not keep the cult’s more democratic version of masculinity out of Russia, though. It crept in among those elite men who dreamed of political change and rejected what they saw as the servility demanded of them by the autocrat. They valued rationality, education, integrity, social responsibility, diligence, and independence of thought. Like Peter the Great, they also put stock in energy and initiative. During Nicholas’s times such men were few. There would be many more of them during the reign of his son Alexander.
NICHOLAEVAN FAMILY LAW
The cult of domesticity was the soft, persuasive voice of Nicholaevan gender discourse. When the law spoke, it sternly reaffirmed the enduring rules of patriarchy. The Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, issued in 1832, declared, “[The] wife is obligated to obey her husband as the head of the family, to live with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience, and to render him all pleasure and affection as mistress of the household.” A husband’s duties were “to love his wife as his own body, to live with her in harmony, to respect and defend her, and to forgive her insufficiencies and ease her infirmities.”33
This statement of general principles was attached to a short list of specific obligations drawn from older Russian laws. William Wagner has pointed out that the Collection’s medieval origins are reflected in the fact that it was mostly concerned, as The Domostroi had been, with prescribing duties and stressing the importance of submission to authority.34 Husbands were required to support their wives. Wives were required to live with their husbands, unless those husbands were sentenced to exile in Siberia. The law of common residence was reinforced by another regulation that forbade women from holding passports in their own names. Passports were the identification cards of imperial Russia. Since women could not obtain them, they had to have their husbands’ or parents’ permission to live apart from their families or to travel. Married women also required the consent of their husbands before they could take a job. Both spouses were forbidden to injure one another physically or involve one another in criminal acts. The latter requirement was far more likely to be enforced than the former, for Russian custom and Russian people of all social ranks, as we have seen, had long tolerated the beating of wives and children, so long as it did not result in serious injury, and sometimes even when it did.
The 1832 law code preserved ancient patriarchal principles regarding the relations between parents and children as well. Parents were required to support their minor children; children repaid this care by giving their parents lifelong obedience. The laws declared that dutiful children should accept uncomplainingly whatever punishments their parents administered. Disobedience was defined as a crime, and particularly objectionable were failing to support aged parents financially and marrying without parental consent. A young woman or man who eloped could be disinherited and brought up on criminal charges.
Marriage law still fell under the jurisdiction of religious authorities in this period. Gregory Freeze has found that, as the Orthodox Church enlarged its administrative apparatus in the eighteenth century, it became better able to enforce its definitions of monogamy. By Nicholas’s reign, consequently, Russian divorce procedures were among the strictest in Europe. Orthodox prelates declared that the only justifiable grounds for dissolving a marriage were adultery, abandonment for many years, impotence, or exile to Siberia. Even when these conditions existed, obtaining an annulment was time-consuming and expensive. For example, to gain an annulment on the grounds of sexual incapacity, a plaintiff had to provide evidence that his or her spouse’s impotence arose from physical causes and had existed prior to the marriage. Testimony from physicians was required, and if the wife was the plaintiff, she had to also have a doctor certify that she was still a virgin. If a woman did obtain an annulment, she had no right to custody of her children or financial support from her former husband.35
Roman Catholic and Lutheran authorities in the Russian empire also prohibited divorce and rarely granted annulments. Indeed, Christians across Europe in the nineteenth century opposed divorce because they still believed, as they had for centuries, that marriage was a union created by God during the wedding ceremony. To dissolve it was to go against God’s will. The pain experienced in an unhappy marriage was no different from all the other suffering of life, Christians were taught. Suffering was a necessary means to the end of learning how to be patient and dutiful; it brought one closer to Christ, who had suffered agonies for humankind’s sake. So a bad marriage was to be endured humbly, with the hope that things would improve if people stuck it out long enough. Labzina’s mother and in-laws told her precisely this in the eighteenth century. Christian and Jewish authorities also argued that marriage was the bedrock institution of society; peace in the larger community depended on peace within the family, family tranquility depended on orderly relations among family members, and order depended on patriarchal power, whether or not it was exercised benignly.36
EDUCATION
The proposition that elite women could best meet their family obligations if they were formally educated was widely accepted in the early nineteenth century, and schooling for propertied girls continued to expand. Tutoring at home remained the predominant method, but by 1845 thirty-six boarding schools for girls, called “institutes,” had been founded. In 1843 the church began opening schools for the daughters of priests, and private organizations and individuals also endowed schools. All these institutions emphasized the preparation of their students to be wives and mothers. As in the past, the curriculum varied according to the social class of the pupils: there was more stress on the arts in schools for noble girls, more stress on learning trades in those for the less privileged. The 1827 rules and regulations for a school for middle-class girls declared, “The purpose… is to teach the students to be good wives, solicitous mothers, and exemplary mentors for their children, and to teach them the skills they need to be able to provide for themselves and their families by means of their own hard work.”37
In memoirs, graduates of the boarding schools paint portraits of their teenage years that are similar to those created by other nineteenth-century Europeans. They report feeling terrified when, at age eight or nine, they first entered the institutes that would be their homes until they graduated at age sixteen. This was more than the usual anxiety of a child on the first day of school, for many of these girls were beginning a long separation from their families. Contact with relatives was not encouraged even for pupils whose families lived nearby, because Russian pedagogues believed that the shaping of girls into moral young ladies proceeded best without distraction. Years passed before those from provincial families returned home.
The schools were spartan. Sophia Khvoshchinskaia, a graduate of the Smolny, remembered her first impressions: “The longest of corridors, enormous classrooms, endless dormitories, staircase upon staircase. A spacious and bleak place after the crowded coziness of home.”38 Many alumnae complained about bad food, stifling rules, lazy instructors, and autocratic matrons who supervised the dormitories. But they did form deep attachments to other girls and to the more admirable teachers. By the time they graduated as teenagers, many girls had come to consider the institutes their homes, and they found it wrenching to leave their friends. “Spare me from describing our final farewells,” wrote Nadezhda Sokhanskaia in 1847–48. “It all seems even sadder to me now. Where have you gone? What has become of us? How much that was fine and beautiful has disappeared, perhaps forever, never to return!”39
Across Europe, the curriculum of women’s education in the early 1800s was often criticized for being insufficiently rigorous. Religion, embroidery, and social graces were taught to girls, while boys studied classical languages and mathematics. This educational inequality was galling to those who did not consider women innately inferior to men intellectually. In Russia as elsewhere, however, the education available to elite women did foster the participation of those women in the nation’s growing secular culture. From the reign of Catherine on, noblewomen were reading poetry, novels, and magazines as well as devotional texts. By the 1820s they were also attending lectures, plays, and poetry readings.
PHILANTHROPY
One of the great ironies of women’s history in nineteenth-century Europe is the fact that the cult of domesticity, which prescribed women’s concentration on their homes and families, was used to justify ever greater involvement by elite women in the world beyond those homes. Philanthropy, a highly organized type of charity, was one of the first, most popular, and most enduring of their many ventures. We have seen that elite women had long been expected to help the poor. The rapid social changes of the time, particularly the growth of slums in the cities of northwestern Europe, convinced some that traditional benevolence (giving alms to beggars, taking in homeless people, making donations to the church) was no longer sufficient. So charitable societies were established across Europe. Female philanthropists often focused their energies on urban poor women and justified their engagement by arguing that the virtuous upper-class woman had a religious duty to rescue her less fortunate and more corruptible sisters by giving them financial assistance and educating them to be self-supporting, pious, and virtuous.
The prejudices and condescension of nineteenth-century philanthropists should not blind us to the great social evils they were trying to alleviate. Crime, epidemic diseases, alcoholism, and prostitution bedeviled nineteenth-century cities, and poor women struggled as well with awful living and working conditions. In the first half of the century, the need was less severe in Russia than in Western Europe, because Russia had yet to experience the Industrial Revolution, which swelled urban populations and urban problems. But the situation of poor women in Russia’s cities was compelling, nonetheless.
The foremost advocate for philanthropy aimed at women was Empress Maria, Nicholas’s mother. This redoubtable woman was running so many charities when she died in 1828 that a government agency, the Department of the Institutions of Empress Maria, had to be created to oversee them all. The empress also inspired her daughters-in-law to become philanthropists. Elizaveta, the wife of Alexander I, established the Women’s Patriotic Society in 1812 to work among those injured or displaced by the Napoleonic Wars. It continued on as a sponsor of girls’ schools after the wars ended. Alexandra, Nicholas’s wife, allocated funds to several charities and paid close attention to the operation of the Smolny Institute. Still more energetic was her sister-in-law, the Grand Duchess Elena, a German princess who was the wife of Michael, Nicholas’s younger brother. Elena funded charities and schools, and became an advocate of the emancipation of the serfs.
The example of Maria and her daughters-in-law was widely followed. Adele Lindenmeyr has written that setting up a charity became “virtually part of the job description of the wives of high-ranking state officials.”40 By the 1830s, “Ladies’ Charitable Societies” in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Riga, Tver, and other provincial cities were distributing food, clothing, and money to the needy. Prison societies were sending members into the jails to pass out warm clothes and nutritious food, teach basic literacy and numeracy, and read the Bible aloud. Other groups sponsored schools and workhouses in which poor women learned marketable skills, particularly needlework. Their philanthropy was part of an increasingly wide-ranging involvement of elite women in public life.
WOMEN IN THE INTELLIGENTSIA
Also part of that involvement was women’s participation in one of the most important developments of the Nicholaevan era, the emergence of the reform-minded intelligentsia. The foundation for this participation was laid by Catherine. In her day it consisted mostly, as it did in Western Europe, of wealthy women sponsoring male thinkers and writers. This was not one of Catherine’s innovations; rich women had been supporting the arts in Russia since Peter’s reign. The new development of Catherine’s reign was the salon, weekly gatherings hosted by women at their homes during which people debated political questions or talked about the arts. Salons were all the rage across Europe during the Enlightenment; Russia’s first one met at the home of Varvara Iushkova in the city of Tula in the 1790s. There some of Russia’s best poets debuted their latest works. The heyday of salons in Russia came during Nicholas’s reign, when Iushkova’s daughter, Avdotia Elagina, led a salon in Moscow that met for more than thirty years and played an important part in generating the political and intellectual movement known as Slavophilism. In St. Petersburg, Grand Duchess Elena, the philanthropist, held a salon at her palace on Thursdays, to which she invited the leading lights of Russian culture, as well as distinguished foreign visitors. Dozens of other noblewomen sponsored salons in the capitals and other major cities in the first half of the nineteenth century.
A few women also joined the ranks of Russia’s writers during the reign of Catherine II. The empress herself, as noted earlier, wrote plays and essays. Following her example, dozens of women became poets. Most wrote light, entertaining verse, but the most ambitious, for example Ekaterina Sumarokova and Ekaterina Urusova, undertook the more difficult task of publishing lyric poetry on classical themes. Such poetry was accepted by educated readers, perhaps in part because male poets were wary of provoking Catherine’s disfavor by publicly denigrating women’s intellectual abilities.
The female writers of the Nicholaevan decades did not receive as warm a reception, for now the ruler was a man who viewed female intellectuals with suspicion, a suspicion shared by many of Russia’s male writers. The critique of intellectually accomplished women propagated by the cult of domesticity fed this suspicion. A loving wife could provide the inspiration for a talented man, she could serve as “the radiant guiding star of his life,” as the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii put it in 1835.41 But a woman who tried to be a writer herself, particularly a writer of serious fiction or poetry, took the immodest step of entering a world created by and for men, a world for which she was not suited intellectually or spiritually. She would fail, her work would be inferior, and she would end up a pathetic or ridiculous curiosity.
These prejudices, which prevailed across Europe, repressed the literary efforts of several generations of women. In Russia, as elsewhere, most of those who wished to write devoted themselves to autobiographies, diaries, and letters that they shared only with family members. Others took the course of Avdotia Elagina, the salon hostess, who translated foreign works of history and ethnography. Elagina also served as editor for the poet Vasili Zhukovskii. Still other women published works on topics considered appropriate to their gender, such as housekeeping, childrearing, etiquette, fashion, and religion. Maria Korsini’s essays for young people, discussed above, are an example of this sort of women’s writing. It was acceptable because it dealt with matters best left to women, such as manners and babies, and because it inculcated the virtues of domesticity.42
A few female writers of fiction and poetry did publish their works in the Nicholaevan era, and several of them were bold enough to launch a frontal attack on patriarchal ideas. By the 1840s, Sophia Khvoshchinskaia (whose memoirs of the Smolny Institute were quoted above), her sister Nadezhda, and Elena Gan, among others, were criticizing the triviality of elite women’s education, the intellectual and emotional poverty of their home lives, and the evils of their being dominated by their fathers and husbands. In 1844, Karolina Pavlova, author of splendid poetry as well as fiction, summed up the consequences of these controls in her description of the typical young noblewoman: “By now Cecelia was 18 years old, and was so used to wearing her mind in a corset that she felt it no more than the light silk one which she would take off at night. That is not to say that she had no talents; she certainly did, but they were modest ones…. She sang very prettily and drew very prettily too.”43
Similar complaints about the vacuousness of women’s education were circulating among reform-minded people across the European world in the 1830s. A critique of the patriarchal principles at the heart of the cult of domesticity was developing, centered at first on education and married women’s subjugation to their husbands. Russian female writers and the intelligentsia to which they belonged took it to their collective hearts and thereby demonstrated their close connection to the continental currents of opinion regarding women.