Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825

264 Pages·2007·1.098 MB·English

by  Wendy Rosslyn, Alessandra Tosi (eds.)

Women in Russian Culture and
Society, 1700–1825
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Women in Russian
Culture and Society,
1700–1825
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.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-55323-1
All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of this
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Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2007 by
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Contents
List of Tables vii
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Alessandra Tosi
Part I Women and the Arts
1 Signs from Empresses and Actresses: Women
and Theatre in the Eighteenth Century 9
Lurana Donnels O’Malley
2 Female Serfs in the Performing World 24
Richard Stites
3 Women and Literature, Women in Literature:
Female Authors of Fiction in the Early
Nineteenth Century 39
Alessandra Tosi
4 Women’s Travel and Travel Writing in
Russia, 1700–1825 63
Sara Dickinson
5 The First Russian Women’s Journals and the
Construction of the Reader 83
Gitta Hammarberg
Part II Women and Society
6 ‘Without Going to a Regular Court…’: The Phenomenon
of the ‘Divorce Letter’ in Petrine Russia 107
Ol’ga Kosheleva
7 The Function of Fashion: Women and Clothing
at the Russian Court (1700–1762) 125
Paul Keenan
v
vi Contents
8 Merchant Women in Business in the Late
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 144
Galina Ul’ianova
Part III Femininity and Religious Life
9 Sacralising Female Rule, 1725–1761 171
Gary Marker
10 Female Orthodox Monasticism in
Eighteenth–Century Imperial Russia: The
Experience of Nizhnii Novgorod 191
William G. Wagner
11 Women with a Mission: British Female Evangelicals
in the Russian Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century 219
Wendy Rosslyn
Select Bibliography (2001–2006): Women in Russian
Culture and Society, 1700–1825 241
Wendy Rosslyn
Index 251
List of Tables
8.1 Number of enterprises owned by women
by branch of industrial activity 151
8.2 Soap-boiling enterprises in Kazan’ 156
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 160
10.1 Convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese
(1799 borders), during the eighteenth century 196
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Acknowledgements
The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Universities of
Exeter and Nottingham in funding preparations for this volume.
viii
Notes on Contributors
Sara Dickinson has degrees in Slavic studies from the University of
Chicago, Indiana University, and Harvard. A specialist in eighteenth-
and 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 Eighteenth-
Century 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
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