"the Poetics of Everyday Behavior" Revisited: Lotman, Gender, And the Evolution of Russian Noble Identity (Forum: The World of the 18Th-Century Nobility) (Essay‪)‬

In a letter to her brother in 1828, describing a course of summer reading that included Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, Mariia Mukhanova begged his forgiveness for the choice of language in her previous letter. "I don't know why ! wrote to you in French," she admitted, attributing her decision to "female capriciousness, to which I, like many women, am susceptible. I have always preferred to express myself in Russian." (1) Mukhanova's apology raises important questions both about the relation of Russian noblewomen to European culture and, more generally, the evolution of noble identity in pre-reform Russia. Since the 19th century, scholars have identified the encounter between educated noblemen and European civilization as a central question in the history of the Russian nobility. The motif of the "alienation" of the Europeanized nobleman from the customs of his native land has dominated this debate: while historians such as Marc Raeff argued that cultural change culminated in the isolation of intellectuals from both the state and Russian people, producing the "superfluous man" of the literary imagination, a competing school underscores the persistence of "shared superstitions and rituals" that bound the vast majority of the nobility to peasant culture. (2) The related question of how Russian noblewomen experienced the assimilation of Western manners and morals in the post-Petrine era has, by contrast, attracted little analogous attention. Numerous studies have examined the advances made in the education of noble girls in the late 18th century. These works have, however, focused primarily on the significance of Western models in fostering women's role as moral and cultural arbiters in the family and society. Indisputably, improvements in female education transformed expectations of marriage and motherhood among nobles of both sexes. (3) Yet the impact of noblewomen's increasing familiarity with European culture on their own perceptions of national identity, and whether these differed from those of their male counterparts, remains largely unexamined.