Suchergebnisse

The Napoleonic invasion of 1812 marks a watershed in the history of Russian aristocratic women. Their social position before 1812, while privileged and sometimes even quite autonomous, had mostly kept their political and social horizons narrow. In addition, eighteenth-century culture had presented them with competing, at times conflicting, models of aristocratic femininity. Based on memoirs by women who experienced the 1812 war, this article argues that the invasion disrupted their pre-war insular way of life and confronted noblewomen with traumas specific to their class and sex. In response, women reaffirmed the aristocracy's stoic ethos and its claim to leadership in society, and represented women as gentle humanitarians but also patriots and fearless protectors of their loved ones. The women of the 1812 generation thereby helped to crystallize the emerging intelligentsia's vision of ideal Russian womanhood, which in turn contributed to the rise of the Russian revolutionary movement.

SUMMARY:
На протяжении большей части XVIII века западные идеи лишь поверхностно затрагивали повседневную жизнь большинства россиян. Однако возникающее в начале XIX в. понятие "русскости" начинает формировать основу для институтов, практик, отношений и поведения, которая постепенно утвердилась среди всех слоев общества и оставалась стабильной на протяжении поколений, в некоторых случаях – вплоть до нашего времени. Кристаллизация "русскости" в определенной исторической форме не позволила реализоваться другим стратегиям, заложенным в заимствованных с Запада в XVIII в. представлениях, таким как более определенная ориентация на либеральный капитализм или идея принадлежности к западной цивилизации и общности исторического пути России и Запада. Распространение понятия "русскости", таким образом, помогло придать большую стабильность и прочность российскому обществу, однако ограничило спектр возможных путей дальнейшего развития страны.

It was long accepted throughout the European world that a father's authority over his children should be unchallengeable and that the authority of monarchs and noble lords was absolute because they, too, were "fathers" to their subjects. A profound shift in this thinking occurred during the eighteenth century, however, as increasingly critical attitudes toward paternal authoritarianism subverted the patriarchal ideology that undergirded the old regime. Recent scholarship has even linked the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions to these changing beliefs about the nature of the family. These ideas had a powerful impact among Russia's westernized upper class and drove conservatives to search for a less harshly authoritarian justification for the old regime. Much soul-searching went into their attempt to reconcile autocracy and serfdom with the respect for human dignity and the delicate moral sensibilité that were increasingly expected of any cultivated European. Slavophilism, which glorified the common people and emphasized the duties of monarch and nobility, represented one outcome of this quest. The anguished process by which proto-Slavophile beliefs evolved out of the noble culture of the Catherinian age is strikingly apparent in the turbulent biography of the poet, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka.