WOMEN IN THE INTELLIGENTSIA

Also part of that involvement was women’s participation in one of the most important developments of the Nicholaevan era, the emergence of the reform‑minded intelligentsia. The foundation for this participation was laid by Catherine. In her day it consisted mostly, as it did in Western Europe, of wealthy women sponsoring male thinkers and writers. This was not one of Catherine’s innovations; rich women had been supporting the arts in Russia since Peter’s reign. The new development of Catherine’s reign was the salon, weekly gatherings hosted by women at their homes during which people debated political questions or talked about the arts. Salons were all the rage across Europe during the Enlightenment; Russia’s first one met at the home of Varvara Iushkova in the city of Tula in the 1790s. There some of Russia’s best poets debuted their latest works. The heyday of salons in Russia came during Nicholas’s reign, when Iushkova’s daughter, Avdotia Elagina, led a salon in Moscow that met for more than thirty years and played an important part in generating the political and intellectual movement known as Slavophilism. In St. Petersburg, Grand Duchess Elena, the philanthropist, held a salon at her palace on Thursdays, to which she invited the leading lights of Russian culture, as well as distinguished foreign visitors. Dozens of other noblewomen sponsored salons in the capitals and other major cities in the first half of the nineteenth century.

A few women also joined the ranks of Russia’s writers during the reign of Catherine II. The empress herself, as noted earlier, wrote plays and essays. Following her example, dozens of women became poets. Most wrote light, entertaining verse, but the most ambitious, for example Ekaterina Sumarokova and Ekaterina Urusova, undertook the more difficult task of publishing lyric poetry on classical themes. Such poetry was accepted by educated readers, perhaps in part because male poets were wary of provoking Catherine’s disfavor by publicly denigrating women’s intellectual abilities.

The female writers of the Nicholaevan decades did not receive as warm a reception, for now the ruler was a man who viewed female intellectuals with suspicion, a suspicion shared by many of Russia’s male writers. The critique of intellectually accomplished women propagated by the cult of domesticity fed this suspicion. A loving wife could provide the inspiration for a talented man, she could serve as “the radiant guiding star of his life,” as the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii put it in 1835.⁴¹ But a woman who tried to be a writer herself, particularly a writer of serious fiction or poetry, took the immodest step of entering a world created by and for men, a world for which she was not suited intellectually or spiritually. She would fail, her work would be inferior, and she would end up a pathetic or ridiculous curiosity.

These prejudices, which prevailed across Europe, repressed the literary efforts of several generations of women. In Russia, as elsewhere, most of those who wished to write devoted themselves to autobiographies, diaries, and letters that they shared only with family members. Others took the course of Avdotia Elagina, the salon hostess, who translated foreign works of history and ethnography. Elagina also served as editor for the poet Vasili Zhukovskii. Still other women published works on topics considered appropriate to their gender, such as housekeeping, childrearing, etiquette, fashion, and religion. Maria Korsini’s essays for young people, discussed above, are an example of this sort of women’s writing. It was acceptable because it dealt with matters best left to women, such as manners and babies, and because it inculcated the virtues of domesticity.⁴²

A few female writers of fiction and poetry did publish their works in the Nicholaevan era, and several of them were bold enough to launch a frontal attack on patriarchal ideas. By the 1840s, Sophia Khvoshchinskaia (whose memoirs of the Smolny Institute were quoted above), her sister Nadezhda, and Elena Gan, among others, were criticizing the triviality of elite women’s education, the intellectual and emotional poverty of their home lives, and the evils of their being dominated by their fathers and husbands. In 1844, Karolina Pavlova, author of splendid poetry as well as fiction, summed up the consequences of these controls in her description of the typical young noblewoman: “By now Cecelia was 18 years old, and was so used to wearing her mind in a corset that she felt it no more than the light silk one which she would take off at night. That is not to say that she had no talents; she certainly did, but they were modest ones…. She sang very prettily and drew very prettily too.”⁴³

Similar complaints about the vacuousness of women’s education were circulating among reform‑minded people across the European world in the 1830s. A critique of the patriarchal principles at the heart of the cult of domesticity was developing, centered at first on education and married women’s subjugation to their husbands. Russian female writers and the intelligentsia to which they belonged took it to their collective hearts and thereby demonstrated their close connection to the continental currents of opinion regarding women.