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The Enlightenment of Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gary Marker
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In recent years the historiography of Catherinian Russia has made small but perceptible strides toward engendering or at least toward discussing women as historical subjects outside the specific context of the household. Beginning with Brenda Meehan's 1976 article “Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule,” most attention has focused, appropriately, on female rule and the question of how a patriarchal culture accommodated itself to the preponderance of female rulers in the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. In the interim, several scholars have had occasion to expand upon this theme, and yet most would agree that much remains to be explored on this topic.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 369 - 390
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

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17. See her entries in Grand Price Nikolai Mikhailovich, ed., Moskovskii nekropol' (St. Petersburg, 1908), 2:135; and in Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg, 1914), 10:1-2.

18. This fragment is contained in an anonymous essay entitled “Vzgliad na Sibir'“ that appeared in an 1817 issue of Sionskii vestnik.

19. Questions of authenticity have surrounded Dashkova's memoir ever since its first appearance, primarily because there are no surviving copies in Dashkova's own hand. Scholars have long been aware of Dashkova's selective memory and her inaccurate recounting of certain events in her life. Most, though, have either passed over this issue or have concluded that the memoir is genuine. Recently, however, M. M. Safonov revived the question of provenance and concluded that the text we recognize as the memoir was not, strictly speaking, composed by Dashkova. M. M. Safonov, “Ekaterina Malaia i ee ‘Zapiski,'” in Palkina, I. P. and Bulanin, D. M., eds., Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova: Issledovaniia i materialy (St. Petersburg, 1996), 13–22 Google Scholar. Samples of the manuscript, showing Dashkova's lack of formal handwriting, were reproduced in the 1974 reprint edition.

20. Smith, Douglas, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth- Century Russia (DeKalb, 1999)Google Scholar.

21. Aleksandr Labzin had been a close associate of Novikov and a Martinist as early as 1780 when, as a student at Moscow University, he became a member of Novikov's Society of University Students and his Friendly Learning Society. The two of them maintained an active correspondence for many years, right up to Novikov's death in 1818. During his latter years, while confined to his estate in Avdotino, Novikov relied upon Labzin to act as his primary conduit to both officialdom and Freemasonry.

22. Much of the correspondence between Labzin and Novikov has been published in a variety of venues. See, for example, A. I. Serkov, et al., Pis'ma Novikova (St. Petersburg, 1994), nos. 39-42, 49-58, and 61; B. L. Modzalevskii, “K biografii N. I. Novikova: Pis'ma ego k Labzinu, Chebotarevu i dr., 1797-1815,“Russkii bibliofil, 1913, no. 3:5-39 and no. 4: 14-52.

23. Martin, Alexander M., Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, 1997), 160 Google Scholar.

24. On the Bible Society, see Zacek, Judith C., ‘The Russian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church,” Church History 35, no. 4 (December 1966): 411-37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; I. A. Chistovich, “Ocherk iz istorii religioznogo mistitsizma v tsarstvovanie Aleksandra I,” Russkaia starina, 1894, no. 2:120-34; and Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 159-67.

25. For a brief discussion of this encounter, see Judith C. Zacek, “Introduction,” to A. E. Labzina, Vospominaniia Anny Evdokimovny Labzinoi, 1758-1828 (St. Petersburg, 1914; reprint, Newtonville, Mass., 1974), iii-iv.

26. In addition to the sources cited elsewhere in this paper, Karamyshev's career can be followed in his entry in Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg, 1897), 8:514-15.

27. Marc Raeff, “Transfiguration and Modernization: The Paradoxes of Social Disciplining, Pedagogical Leadership, and the Enlightenment in 18th Centuiy Russia,” Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia, 341.

28. The molestation of a 10-year-old girl is recounted on page 83 of the 1914 edition of Labzina, Vospominaniia.

29. Ibid., 36.

30. Ibid., 82.

31. To give one example, when Modzalevskii's 1914 edition of Labzina's memoirs were republished in a reprint edition in 1974, the new introduction devoted precisely one paragraph to Labzina herself and accorded the remaining space to Labzin and Russian mysticism, in spite of the fact that the memoir ends long before Labzina meets her second husband! See Zacek, “Introduction,” to Labzina, Vospominaniia, i-v.

32. Mary Mason has suggested that women's autobiographical writings in general were less egocentric and less programmatic than male autobiographies, and that women typically defined themselves by pairing their own identities with others. Both Barbara Heldt and Beth Holmgren have made similar observations for Russian women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Labzina employs this strategy of pairing herself with another repeatedly in her memoir and diary, although the paired other changes continuously. Thus, the absence of a dedication or an obvious implied reader may have less to do with the decision to publish than with narrative strategies of female writers. Mary G. Mason, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Brodzki, Bella and Schenck, Celeste, eds., Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiographies (Ithaca, 1988), 21–23 Google Scholar; Heldt, Barbara, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington, 1992), 6–24, 77-79Google Scholar; Holmgren, Beth, Women's Work in Stalin's Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelshtam (Bloomington, 1993), 2 Google Scholar.

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34. Bicilli, P., “Die ‘Haus'-Literatur und der Ursprung der klassischen Literatur in Russland,“ Jahrbiicherfur Kullurund GeschichtederSlaven 10 (1934): 398-99Google Scholar; Lotman, Iu. M., “Dve zhenshchiny,” Besedy o russkoi kul'tury: Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII-nachalo XlXveka) (St. Petersburg, 1994), 301.Google Scholar

35. Lotman, “Dve zhenshchiny,” 310. Emphasis added.

36. Ibid., 310. Emphasis added.

37. The reference, of course, is to Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What Is to Be Done? The most recent translation of this work is by Michael R. Katz (Ithaca, 1989).

38. V. M. Bokova, ed., Rossiia v memuarakh: htoriia zhizni blagorodnoi zhenshchiny (Moscow, 1996), 13-88. Bokova, while emphasizing Labzina's womanhood, accepts the affinity between her memoir and the genre of—men's—zhitiia and makes specific reference to Awakum (quite a stretch in my view) and the “Zhitie Moiseiia Ugrina.“

39. Zirin, “Labzina, Anna Evdokimovna,” 355—56.

40. Kelly, Catriona, A History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820-1992 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; Fainshtein, M. Sh., Pisatel'nitsy pushkinskoi pory: Istoriko-literaturnye ocherki (Leningrad, 1989)Google Scholar.

41. M. A. Kriuchkova, “Russkaia memuaristika vtoroi poloviny XVIII v. kak sotsiokul'turnoe iavlenie,” Vestnik Moskovskogo gosudarstxiennogo universiteta, series 8, Istoriia, 1994, no. 1: 17-28; Tartakovskii, A. G., Russkaia memuaristika XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow, 1991)Google Scholar; Andrew, Joe, “Mothers and Daughters in Russian Literature of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavonic and. East European Review 73, no. 1 (January, 1995): 37–60 Google Scholar; Jessica Tovrov, “Mother-Child Relationships among the Russian Nobility,” in Ransel, ed., Family in Imperial Russia, 31; Engel, Barbara Alpern, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), 14–16.Google Scholar

42. Modzalevskii, “Predislovie,” in Labzina, Vospominaniia, xiv.

43. The theme of noble pastoralism is beautifully presented in Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven, 1995), esp. chap. 6: “Nests of Gentlefolk: Patriarchy in the Provinces,” and chap. 11: “Ideal Worlds: The Idyll of the Russian Intelligentsia.“

44. Newlin, Thomas, “Rural Ruses: Illusion and Anxiety on the Russian Estate, 1775- 1815,” Slavic Reviexu 57, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 295–319 Google Scholar.

45. Compare Durova's description of a girlhood frolic in the fields: “This was the very first time in my life that I had been taken out into the open where I could see dense forest and vast fields and the wide river! I could barely catch my breath for joy … I ran, frisked, picked flowers, and climbed to the tips of tall trees to see farther…. Two hours flew like two minutes! … how could I part with such captivating freedom?” Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic. Wars, trans. Mary Fleming Zirin (Bloomington, 1989), 6-7.

46. Labzina, Vospominaniia, 34.

47. Ibid., 68, 78.

48. Ibid., 37.

49. Ibid., 34.

50. Ibid., 35. Emphasis added.

51. Ibid., 48, 50.

52. Ibid., 48.

53. Ibid., 58.

54. Ibid., 48.

55. Ibid., 58.

56. Ibid. Emphasis added.

57. Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov's Family Chronicle offers a well-known example of a family striving to comfort female victims of male misbehavior, while deeming this misbehavior private. S. T. Aksakov, TheFamily Chronicle, trans. M. C. Beverley (New York, 1961) is a highly abridged translation of the original.

58. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 204-7; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 113-21; and the essays by Fraser, Nancy, Cohen, Jean L., Landes, Joan B., and Fleming, Marie in Meehan, Johanna, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New York, 1995), 21–138.Google Scholar

59. Labzina, Vosporninaniia, 5.

60. Ibid., 8.

61. Evasdaughter, Elizabeth N., Catholic Girlhood Narratives: The Church and Self-Denial (Boston, 1996), 25.Google Scholar

62. Ibid., 26-27 and 85.

63. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Selves in Hiding,” in Estelle C.Jelinek, ed., Women's Autobiographies: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington, 1980), 114.

64. Labzina, Vospominaniia, 15.

65. Ibid., 22.

66. Ibid., 78. Emphasis added.

67. Eighteenth-century terms and spellings were typically unsystematic, and as a rule assigning a single fixed meaning or expression to fluid constructions is ill advised. Zastupa or zastuplenie are prime examples in that they have no specific legal standing. Thus, depending on context, it could imply protection, formal guardianship, or personal intercession by a powerful person with access on behalf of a client, one who, by using this language, formally acknowledges subordination. V. Dal', Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow, 1989), 1:643; Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka (St. Petersburg, 1995), 8:104-5.

68. M. Semevskii, Tsaritsa Praskov'ia, 1664-1723: Ocherk iz msskoi istorii XVII 1 veka (Moscow, 1989), 17-39; Hughes, “Peter the Great's Two Weddings,” 38-41. More recently, Isolde Thyrel has expanded on their work by suggesting that, while in the lerem, tsaritsy had the ability to act as arbiters in a variety of legal disputes. Isolde Thyret, “Life in the Kremlin under the Tsars Mikhail Fedorovich and Aleksei Mikhailovich: New Perspectives on the Institution of the Terem” (paper presented at the conference “Private Life in Russian History,“ Ann Arbor, May 1995).

69. Semevskii, Tsaritsa Praskov'ia, 12-13.

70. Semevskii, M.I., Tsaritsa Katerina Alekseevna: Anna I Villim Mons, 1692-1724 (1884; reprint, Moscow, 1994), 356-67.Google Scholar

71. Labzina, Vospominaniia, 1-2.

72. In writing about holy men and women, both Peter Brown and Brenda Meehan have observed, in Meehan's words, that “the authority of the holy man derives in part from his [or her] ascetic discipline, which both gives him a reputation for spiritual prowess and renders him capable of spiritual judgment.” But unlike Brown's holy men and Meehan's holy women, Labzina never proclaimed herself holy or uniquely spiritual. Neither she nor her mother aspired to asceticism — even though both exercised a kind of religious discipline over their bodies and behavior—and neither is depicted as having a charismatic or unworldly relationship with God. On the contrary, their identities and strivings toward service were entirely social and familial: Labzina was a daughter, ward, and wife throughout her life, and it was as a spiritual, but thoroughly lay, mother that she carried out her public activities. Far from separation from society, she embraced it in her day-to-day existence, albeit on her own terms. Indeed, it was the sense that her chosen path was open to anyone from any walk of life that made her faith so this worldly and publicly relevant. In this context it may be useful to distinguish between holy lives, endowed with a supernatural aura, and pious ones, devoted to doing God's work in the world as one finds it. Brenda Meehan- Waters, “The Authority of Holiness: Women Ascetics and Spiritual Elders in Nineteenth- Century Russia,” in Geoffrey A. Hosking, ed., Church, Nation, and State in Russia and Ukraine (New York, 1991), 41; Brown, Peter, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,“ Journal of Roman Studies, 61 (1971): 80–101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73. Labzina, Vospominaniia, 84.

74. Ibid., 88.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., 89.

77. “Dnevnik A. E. Labzinoi,” in Labzina, Vospominaniia, 116.

78. Ibid., 119.

79. Ibid., 123.

80. Ibid., 119.

81. Lotman, “Dve zhenshchiny,” 304.

82. Tira Sokolovskaia, “Podnesenie massonskikh perchatok A. E. Labzinoi: Epizod iz istorii Russkogo masonstva (1819),” Russkii arkhiv, 1905, no. 12:532-35.

83. Ibid., 533.

84. Jacob, Margaret C., Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth- Century Europe (New York, 1991), 135, 139-42Google Scholar; Burke, Janet M. and Jacob, Margaret C., “French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship,” Journal of Modern History 68 (September 1996): 513-49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

85. On North American Masonic practice, see Bullock, Steven C., Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 180 Google Scholar.

86. Smith cites a reference to an earlier work by Andrei Serkov claiming that at least three female lodges operated in the Russian empire in the 1780s, in Mitau, Zhitomir, and Vil'no respectively. But there seems to be no documentary trace of these lodges, and it is not known whether they included Russians among their members. In Labzina's case we have the actual protocols from Dying Sphinx, which detail rather precisely her relationship to the lodge. Smith, Working the Rough Stone, 43-44. The role of women in Freemasonry has received a fair amount of recent attention, but very little of that has focused on Russia. A recent article by Maria Carlson comments that “Unlike the earlier lodges, which were exclusively male, many post-1911 [Russian] lodges accepted women as members.“ Maria Carlson, “Fashionable Occultism: Spiritualism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and Hermeticism in Fin-de-Siecle Russia,” in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, 1997), 147.

87. Kelly Herrold's recent dissertation, “Russian Autobiographical Material in French: Recovering a Memoiristic Tradition (1770-1830) (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998) contains some additional observations on memoirs and the pubic sphere. See, in particular, chapter 4: “Memoir Literature and the Public Sphere in Russia,“ 177-207.

88. Svoeruchnye zapiski Kniagini Natal'i Borisovny Dolgorukoi docheri g. fel'dmarshala grafa Borisa Petrovicha Sheremeteva (St. Petersburg, 1992), 92.