Abstract
The Russian critic Maria Tsebrikova, writing in 1884, noted that she was often asked on her travels “how it is that Russia, which by no means occupies the foremost rank in European civilization, is first in this matter of women’s emancipation?” “No country in the Old World,” she explains, “can vie with Russia in this respect.”1 Tsebrikova contends that because primogeniture never took hold in Russia, women were able to own property in their own right: “We have had no feudal aristocracy which made women slaves and victims to the dynastic interests of the family.” Although she concedes that a Russian woman is under the full power of her husband, he does not control her dowry, she contends, “for she is the absolute mistress of her own fortune.”2
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Notes
Maria Tsebrikova, “Russia,” in The Woman Question in Europe: A Series of Original Essays, ed. Theodore Stanton (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1884), p. 391.
Eve Levin, “Women and Property in Medieval Novgorod: Dependence and Independence,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 10.2 (1983), 156.
William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 228.
Michelle Lamarche Marresse, “From Maintenance to Entitlement: Defining the Dowry in 18th Century Russia,” in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 210.
George G. Weickhardt, “Legal Rights of Women in Russia, 1100–1750,” Slavic Review 55.1 (1996), 2.
Weickhardt, “Legal Rights of Women in Russia,” 12–14. Weickhardt has shown elsewhere that the pomest’e evolved from land conditioned on state service to what was in essence a hereditary estate. Because of the tradition of private property in Russia, he argues, “the tsar was ultimately unable to suppress the desires of service landowners to acquire the incidents of private property.” George G. Weickhardt, “The Pre-Petrine Law of Property,” Slavic Review 52.4 (1993), 677.
Michelle Lamarche Marresse, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 25.
Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 7.
Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, ed. and trans., The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 20–21. There is no clearly identified author; Pouncy believes it was almost certainly written by a single person, most likely a man. See her discussion, pp. 37–41.
Dorothy Atkinson, “Society and the Sexes in the Russian Past,” in Women in Russia, ed. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dalli, and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 15.
As quoted in Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 8–9.
Robin Bisha, “Marriage, Church and Community in 18th-Century St. Petersburg,” in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 228–229.
Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 8.
Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 95–96.
Engel, Mothers and Daughters, pp. 46–47. See also Linda Edmondson, “Equality and Difference in Women’s History: Where Does Russia Fit In?,” in Women in Russia and Ukraine, ed. and trans. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 103.
Engel, Women in Russia, pp. 70–71. This position has been challenged by Jane Costlow, who believes that women writers did not ignore the Woman Question, but rather approached it differently from men. See her article, “Love, Work, and the Woman Question in Mid Nineteenth-century Women’s Writing,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 63.
Arja Rosenholm, Gendering Awakening: Femininity and the Russian Woman Question of the 1860’s (Helsinski: Kikimora Publications, 1999), pp. 52–53.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Chto delat’? (Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Nauka, 1975), p. 630.
What Is To Be Done? Michael R. Katz, trans., annotated by William G. Wagner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 344.
Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 5.
Ivan Turgenev, Otsi e deti (St. Petersburg: Akademicheski Proekt, 2000), p. 191.
English translation: Fathers and Sons, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 178–179
Jane T. Costlow, “’Oh-là-là’ and ‘No-no-no’: Odintsova as Woman Alone in Fathers and Children,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sonia Stephan Hoisington (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 23.
Rosalind Marsh, “Introduction: New Perspectives on Women and Gender in Russian Literature,” in Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3.
Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, “The Strong-Woman Motif,” in The Transformation of Russian Society, ed. Cyril E. Black (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 468.
S. K. Somerwil-Ayrton, Poverty and Power in the Early Works of Dostoevsky (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), p. 1.
Boris Christa, “Dostoevskii and Money,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 109: “All of his characters,” writes Christa, “are made to undergo trial by money … the elect few that rise above the temptations of money and remain uncontaminated are the true heroines and heroes of his novels.” Similarly, Jacques Catteau has noted that money for Dostoevsky is the source of injustice, suffering, enslavement, and despiritualization. See his La Creation Littéraire Chez Dostoievski (Paris: Institut D’Études Slaves, 1978), p. 209. As William Mills Todd III has shown, there was a turning point in Dostoevsky’s own career when he lends his characters enough economic security to focus on ideological and psychological problems. See his “Dostoevskii as a Professional Writer” in Leatherbarrow, The Cambridge Companion, p. 66.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Akademia Nauk), v. 10 (1974). I use the English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), occasionally modified. Page number citations to this translation will follow those for the Akademia Nauk edition (244, 311).
Feodor Dostoevsky, Sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Akademia Nauk), v. 6 (1973).
The English translation is taken from the Jessie Coulson edition, Crime and Punishment (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989).
Nina Pelikan Straus, Dostoevsky and the Woman Question: Rereadings at the End of a Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 125.
Hilde Maria Hoogenboom, A Two-Part Invention: The Russian Woman Writer and Her Heroines from 1860 to 1917 (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 1996), p. 2.
Joe Andrew, Narrative, Space and Gender in Russian Fiction: 1846–1903 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 2.
Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820–1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 2.
Jehanne M. Gheith, Finding the Middle Ground: Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-Century Russian Women’s Prose (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), p. 16.
Barbara Heldt, “Karolina Pavolva: The Woman Poet and the Double Life,” prefatory essay to her translation of Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life (Oakland, CA: Barbary Coast Books, 1978), p. ii.
Donald Loewen, “Poetry, Perceptions and Personality: Finding Karolina Pavlova in Her Autobiographical Prose,” The Slavic and East European Journal 47.4 (2003), 632.
Munir Sendich, The Life and Works of Karolina Pavlova (PhD Dissertation, New York University, 1968), p. 50.
Alexander Lehrman, “The Poetics of Karolina Pavolva,” in Essays on Karolina Pavlova, ed. Suzanne Fusso and Alexander Lehrman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 3.
Diana Greene, “Gender and Genre in Pavlova’s A Double Life,” Slavic Review 54.3 (1995), 563.
All English quotations come from Barbara Heldt’s translation of Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life (Oakland: Barbary Coast Books, 1978), occasionally modified.
The Russian edition is V. Briusov, ed., Karolina Pavlova, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: 1915). All page references will hereafter be in parentheses with Russian first, followed by English.
Anthony D. Briggs, “Twofold Life: A Mirror of Karolina Pavlova’s Shortcomings and Achievements,” The Slavonic and East European Review 49.114 (1971), 8.
Marta Laura Wilkinson, Antigone’s Daughters: Gender, Family and Expression in the Modern Novel (PhD Dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2000), p. 81.
Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann, “The Rhetoric of Self-Interest: Ideology and Gender in Economic Theory,” in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, ed. Arjo Klamer, Donald N. McCloskey, and Robert M. Solow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 184–203.
N. D. Khvoshchinskaya, Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1984).
The English translations are from Karen Rosneck, ed. and trans., The Boarding-School Girl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), occasionally modified.
Catriona Kelly, “The First-Person ‘Other’: Sof’ia Soboleva’s 1863 Story ‘Pros and Cons’ (I pro, I contra),” Slavic and East European Review 73.1 (1995), 67–69.
Otechestvennye zapiski 6 (1863),. 295–337. English translation is from Catriona Kelly, An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), modified occasionally.
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© 2012 Sally A. Livingston
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Livingston, S.A. (2012). Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia: Women Writers Reject the Marriage Plot. In: Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010865_8
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