Educating Tat’yana: Manners, Motherhood and Moral Education (Vospitanie), 1760–1840

Abstract

The Lazar’evskoe Cemetery at Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg is a grander version of the teeming town graveyard described by Pushkin in his 1836 poem, ‘When, sunk in thought, I wander on the outskirts’.² Notabilities from the reigns of Catherine, Paul and Alexander stand as closely packed, in death, as they once did at routs or at balls. Busts and statues stiffly reanimate beribboned jackets and powdered hair; tablets boast of court positions and public offices. But among routine commemorations of dynastic alliances and the hackwork statues stand some more personal and emotional memorials. Mar’ya Borisovna Yakovleva, ‘the wife of a lieutenant-colonel’, who died at the age of 31 on 20 March 1805, is commemorated by an expostulatory verse passage in the voice of her husband, who commends her virtues to his ‘orphaned little ones’:

This chapter draws on sections of my Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender in Russia from 1760 (forthcoming, Oxford, 2001) ch. 1. The generous sponsorship of the British Academy, through its Personal Research Grants and Academic Exchange with the Russian Academy of Sciences, allowed me to visit Russia and Finland in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 1998 to collect material for the project.