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| WOMEN
IN RUSSIAN HISTORY 3 |
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Leading Russian historians consider that the main characteristic of
Russian l8th century culture was movement and change, affecting the whole
stagnant closed-up daily life of society, from hairdos and dress and
lifestyles to the reassessment of values. The l8th century had women
empresses, a woman president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, women
writers and artists, and fashionable women in whom, as an English diplomat
put it, there was not an iota of "nun-like flesh." The century had other
women who astonished society with their great spirituality and high morality
and their sacrifices. Some of them, not finding their place in the society,
became nuns by choice.
The empresses and their courts
enjoyed and amused themselves to excess, beginning with Catherine I, a girl
taken by Peter I from "the dregs of society," as Dmitri Golitsyn said of her
after her death, to Catherine II [the Great], who declared herself a pupil
of
Voltaire and assumed the role of the "northern Semiramid." |
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Catherine II truly is associated with many reforms. Important to us is
that she initiated women's education in Russia. In the Smolny Institute,
the first school for girls of the nobility was opened, under the direction
of
Ekaterina Dashkova, the first women president of the Russian Academy of
Sciences. Dashkova
gave the Academy her own marvelous library and financed the publication of
the best journal of that time, "The Companion of Those Who Love the Russian
Word." Her own memoirs are among the best of l9th century memoir
literature.
In the first decades of the l9th century there appeared in
Russia a new woman's image - girls inclined to mysticism, refined romantic
feelings and thoughts. They were raised in the humanistic traditions of the
l8th century.
They read Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, and at the same time
they had pure Christian ideas of love, faithfulness, sacrifice and suffering
on behalf of woman's duty to her husband and family. Such was Pushkin's
herone, Tatiana Larina, whom Dostoyevsky characterized as a national-literary
type of woman. … The best representative women of this type were the wives of
the Decembrists. The Russian Supreme Court convicted men and
sentences them
to various measures of punishment depending on the degree of
their participation in the plot again the Emperor Nicholas I
(in 1825). He
allowed the wives of the Decembrists to divorce their
husbands, but only three out of 23 women availed themselves of this permission. Eleven
wives went to Siberia with their husbands. They were all voluntary exiles
and from different social strata. Maria Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya
were titular
nobility; the others could not boast of high origins. They
were of different ages, but their common destiny was family, and they had known
nothing about their husband's involvement in secret societies.
For them, the
arrest of their husbands was a heavy burden - many of these
women were not much older than 20. Some of them had been raised in refined luxury, and they
defied parents and tsar to follow their husbands going into penal servitude
in Siberia, which was then seen as "frozen hell from which there is
no return," in order to share with their men the hard lot of exile-prisoners
without rights. There, alongside the prison mines, the women created an
everyday life. They shopped and prepared supper for the prisoners and sewed for
them. Several Decembrists, depressed and on the verge of suicide, were saved
by the kindness and sensitivity and educated intelligence of these
women. The local population was at first reserved and distrustful, but
the women's friendliness to the locals, their sharing of medicines and
money, and the free healing and literacy work they did, brought them great
respect. … The Decembrist wives had a colossal influence on shaping the
Russian woman's character in accenting aspects of heroism and self-sacrifice.
… Vera Figner, the revolutionary of the end of the l9th century, regarded the
Decembrist wives as her sisters in suffering. The recognition by educated
Russian society of these women's heroic deeds stimulated the birth in
the society of a new idea - emancipation.
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Maria Kotovskaya
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