Abstract
Between 1526 and 1530, when Grand Prince Vasilii III wrote to his wife Elena Glinskaia using flowery religious language, and 1709 when Peter the Great wrote these direct lines to his consort Catherine, much had changed for men in Russia. Traditional prescriptions of behavior were being challenged by a new ethos of energetic masculinity. Such new codes do not necessarily predict actual behavior, but they shape the parameters of the acceptable and thus demarcate social boundaries. At the same time, and not coincidentally, such prescriptive visions are virtually all that survive in recorded sources; Muscovites left almost no personal testimony about how they lived their lives or how they regarded the traditional gender roles to which they were expected to conform until at least the early eighteenth century. So we shall explore here prescriptive constructions of masculinity in the Muscovite and Petrine eras, and focus on the question of love to suggest how models of masculinity were changing in early modern Russia.
‘From Grand Prince Vasilii Ivanovich of all Rus’, to my wife Elena. I am here, thank God, by the grace of God and his Immaculate Mother and the Miracleworker St Nikola, alive until God’s will, and I am completely healthy and suffer no illness, thank God. And you should write to me about your health and do not keep me without news of your health.’
‘Little mother! Since I left you, I have had no news of you, which I would like to hear, and particularly how soon you can come to Vilnius. Without you I am bored, and I expect you are, too. . . . Piter’1
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Notes
See essays on this topic, including Jo Ann McNamara, ‘The Herrenfrage: the Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150’, and Vern L. Bullough, ‘On Being a Male in the Middle Ages’, Medieval Masculinities; Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Medieval Cultures, vol. 7 (Minneapolis, 1997), 3–45.
See G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. II: the Middle Ages: the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), esp. ch. 2, and Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, ed. and trans., The Domostroi; Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible (Ithaca, 1994).
M. D. Priselkov, comp., Troitskaia letopis’ (Moscow-Leningrad, 1950), 411 (1392).
On the new civic humanism of the late seventeenth century, see my By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 210–26, and Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia; the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1992), ch. 7. On Petrine models of civic engagement,
see Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State; Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983),
and Sumner Benson, ‘The Role of Western Political Thought in Petrine Russia’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 8, no. 2 (1974): 254–73.
On love charms, see W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse atMidnight: an Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park, Penn., 1999), 179–83; E. B. Smilianskaia, ‘Sledstvennye dela ‘o sueveriiakh’ v Rossii pervoi poloviny XVIII v. v svete problem istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia’, Rossica (Prague), I, no. 1 (1996): 3–20. Texts of such charms are published by V. L. Kliaus and Smilianskaia in Russkii eroticheskii fol’klor, ed. A. Toporkov (Moscow, 1995), 344–70.
On ‘illicit’ sex condemned by the church, see Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 179–97.
See Orest Ranum, ‘The Refuges of Intimacy’, A History of Private Life, III: the Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 252–7,
and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977), 102–5 and chs 7–8.
Ibid., 61. On Western teachings about marriage, see Georges Duby, ‘What Do We Know about Love in Twelfth-Century France?’, ‘Marriage in Early Medieval Society’, and ‘The Matron and the Mismarried Woman’, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett (Chicago, 1994), 3–55.
For a description of the icon, see V. I. Antonova and N. E. Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi; Opyt istoriko-khudozhestvennoi klassifikatsii, 2 vols (Moscow, 1963), 2: 411–12. Other examples of secular figures in icons are rare: a fifteenth-century Novgorod icon includes the donor’s family (men, women and children), and in the late seventeenth century the family of the donor is included in the frescos of the Nikitniki Church in Moscow, a church with which Semen Ushakov was associated.
On seclusion, see my ‘The Seclusion of Elite Muscovite Women’, Russian History, 10, pt. 2 (1983): 170–87, and Natalia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries, trans. Eve Levin (Armonk, NY, 1997), 88–101.
For primary sources, see Adam Olearius, The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, trans. and ed. Samuel H. Baron (Stanford, Calif., 1967), 158;
Grigorii Kotoshikhin, O Rossii vo tsarstvovanie Alekseiia Mikhailovicha, 4th edn (St. Petersburg, 1906), chs 1 and 13.
Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’, is said to have passionately loved his first wife, Anastasiia Romanovna, and to have grieved deeply at her death. The Muscovite-era sources on their relationship, however, reveal little of this and this topos owes most to N. M. Karamzin’s romantic rendering of Ivan and Anastasiia in the early nineteenth century. For Karamzin’s version, see Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo (Moscow, 1989; 1842–4 edn), vol. 8, ch. 3, cols 58–9 and ch. 4, cols 187–8. The Muscovite sources are Ivan IV’s First Letter to Kurbskii (J. L. I. Fennell, ed. and trans., The Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 1564–1579 [Cambridge, 1963], 94–9, 136–7, 148–9, 190–1 and 210–11) and Kurbskii’s ‘History’ (J. L. I. Fennell, ed. and trans., Kurbsky’s History of Ivan IV [Cambridge, 1965], 152–3).
The authenticity of all these sources has been seriously challenged and in my view the controversy is not resolved. See Edward L. Keenan, The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) and his ‘Putting Kurbskii in His Place: or, Observations and Suggestions Concerning the Place of the “History of the Grand Prince of Muscovy” in the History of Muscovite Literary Culture’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 24 (1978): 131–62.
N. Ustrialov, Istoriia tsarstvovaniia Petra Velikogo, vol. 1 (St Petersburg, 1858), 382–4;
English translation in Lindsey Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 (New Haven, 1990), 227–8.
Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 56–60.
For a concise survey of Peter’s relationship with Catherine, see Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, 1998), 393–8.
PRG, 1 (1861): no. 31, 22 (8 August 1712). With regard to Peter’s attitude towards love and marriage, the fact that Peter often carried with him a copy of the ‘Tale of Peter and Fevroniia’ when he traveled is intriguing: L. R. Lewitter, ‘Peter the Great and the Modem World’, Russia and Europe, ed. Paul Dukes (London, 1991), 104.
N. V. Kaliazina and G. N. Komelova, Russkoe isskustvo petrovskoi epokhi (Leningrad, 1990), nos 4, 98, 114–16, 129, 135, 136. For the 1715 engraving,
see M. Alekseeva, Graviura petrovskogo vremeni (Leningrad, 1990), 139–41.
Wortman, Scenarios 1, 55–9; illustration of the wedding banquet on 59. Firework/engraving: V. N. Vasil’ev, Starinnye feierverki v Rossii (Leningrad, 1960), 51, plate 29.
1702 law on betrothal: PSZ, 4, no. 1907, 191–2. On divorce, see Brenda Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: the Russian Service Elite of 1730 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1982), 122–6.
On portraiture in this period, see James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago, 1997), 190–220, and Kaliazina and Komelova, Russkoe isskustvo petrovskoi epokhi, 14–53. Martial portraits of Peter are widely reproduced in the above two works. For portraits with symbols of European culture, professional or personal attributes, see ibid., nos 90–3, 96, 101, 108, 112, 119, 121–2, 125–7. For family portraits, see ibid., nos. 104, 135, 136.
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Kollmann, N.S. (2002). ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’: Changing Models of Masculinity in Muscovite and Petrine Russia. In: Clements, B.E., Friedman, R., Healey, D. (eds) Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501799_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501799_2
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