Abstract
Even as Nicholas Petrovich Kirsanov delighted in his son Arcadii’s return to the family estate after a number of years away at the university, he lamented the ever-increasing distance between himself and his son. ‘Oppressed with sad thoughts,’ Nicholas Petrovich ‘for the first time clearly realized the gulf that separated him from his son.’1 Weeks, months, and years spent at the university had widened the emotional and philosophical gap that opened between the generations. Although he had returned home, Arcadii largely rejected the past — personified by his father — in the hope of a more fulfilling future with his friend, the nihilist Bazarov. This familiar story, found in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, connected Arcadii’s distancing himself from his father with his own coming of age into new, more radical, political ideas.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. George Reavy (New York: Signet Classics, 1989), 61.
Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 65.
The most poignant example is Martin Malia’s biography of Alexander Herzen. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961).
Daniel R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 22.
See also Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: a History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: the Eighteenth-century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 129, 141.
Alexander I. Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ Russkaia starina 164, no. 9 (September 1915): 439–42.
Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 9 (June 1915): 464–65.
Boris Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina I (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991), 55–6.
Riasanovsky discusses the seriousness with which Nicholas took his role as tsar-batushka: ‘the common popular term for the ruler of Russia was more than a superficial epithet in the reign of Nicholas I.’ Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 120.
Although there were a number of differences between the domesticity in the Victorian context and the patterns of domestic life in Russia, not least of which were the composition of the family and women’s rights to own property in Russia, the symbolic power of the father was of the utmost importance in households across Europe. On property rights, see Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
M. Pogodin is quoted in Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, 118–19. The original is from M. P. Pogodinim, Rechi proiznesennie v torzhestvennikh i prochikh sobraniiakh, 1830–1872 (Moscow, 1872), 90.
Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 334–5.
Catriona Kelly, ‘Educating Tatyana: Manners, Motherhood and Moral Education (Vospitanie).’ In Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. Linda Edmondson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 17.
The 1852 instructions to the administrators in charge of girls’ schools stated: ‘Since a woman is a delicate creature who is naturally dependent upon others, her destiny is the family.’ Therefore, instruction itself at school was ‘decorative rather than practical’ and focused on the languages and the acquisition of manners. On this, see Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 24–5.
This is quoted in Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 6. It is also important to note that a married woman was obligated to ‘obey her husband,’ and needed his permission to travel, work, study, or move around locally.
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1–2.
Ibid., 4. Many historians of western Europe have written about the connections between domesticity and emotionality in family life. In addition to Tosh, see Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Mary Wells Cavender, ‘“Kind Angel of the Soul and Heart”: Domesticity and Family Correspondence among the Pre-Emancipation Gentry,’ The Russian Review 61 (July 2002): 391–408.
Jessica Tovrov, ‘Mother-Child Relationships among the Russian Nobility.’ In The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David Ransel (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press 1978), 19.
Literature on the Victorian ideal of femininity is abundant. Seminal texts include: Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Carol Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.’ In Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes;
and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Ibid., 86. Greene argues that boys were not expected to have the same traits of piousness, submissiveness, and purity. My readings of military statutes for cadets indicate quite the contrary. Although purity in not mentioned per se, certainly cleanliness, submissiveness, and piousness were required of the young boys ages seven to 18. On this, see the Military Law Codes. Svod voennikh postanovlenyi: chast’ pervaia. Obrazovanie voennikh uchrezhdenii (St Petersburg, 1838).
Barbara Clements, ‘Introduction: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation.’ In Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3.
Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 128.
Just as masculine virtues were taught in the Empire’s training institutions, so were feminine ideals taught in all-girl school environments. In her memoir of her days in the Ekaterininsky Institute in Moscow in the early 1840s, for instance, Sofia Khvoshchinskaia describes how pupils were taught feminine skills and virtues, which included a French-only policy and the placement of pans of vinegar to ‘purify the air.’ Sofia Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Reminiscences of Institute Life.’ In Russia through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Judith Vowles, trans. Edward Hynans (New Haven, CT and New York: Yale University Press, 1996), 75–108.
This is a quote from Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England trans. E. Hyams (Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958), 78. This passage is quoted in Tosh, A Man’s Place, 29.
Baron von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), 103. This passage is quoted in Tovrov, ‘Mother-Child Relationships,’ 16.
Jessica Tovrov, The Russian Noble Family: Structure and Change (New York: Garland Publications, 1987), 2 and 112–13.
Iakov Petrovich Polonskii, ‘Moi studencheskii vospominaniia,’ Ezhemesiachniia literaturniia prilozheniia k Nive 12 (December 1898): 645.
Wayne Dowler, An Unnecessary Man: the Life of Apollon Grigor’ev (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 12.
A. A. Fet, Rannye gody moei zhizni (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov Publishers, 1893), 140.
Ianurii Neverov, ‘Glava iz “Aftobiografii” Ia. M. Neverova,’ Vestnik vospitaniia xxiv, no. 6 (September 1915): 109–10. These ties included those with the Beyer family and Maria Afanaseva Dokhturova, a distant relative of the Beyers.
Alexander Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 2 (February 1915): 347.
Alexander Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia.’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 6 (June 1915): 163.
Alexander Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia.’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 3 (February 1916): 290.
F. I. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia akademika F. I. Buslaeva (Moscow, 1897), 98.
E. P. Ianeshevskii, Iz vospominanii starogo kazan’skogo studenta (Kazan’, 1893), 64–5.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Rebecca Friedman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Friedman, R. (2005). Loyal Sons and the Domestic Ideal. In: Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804–1863. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500235_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500235_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51964-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50023-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)