traditional standards. For theMirror, piety was a woman’s primary virtue, followed
closely by obedience, chastity, and above all silence.
Nevertheless, the Petrine era opened up a new life for elite women as well as for
men. In 1714 Peter I legislated new forms of sociability, called“assemblies,”
dispensing (not without some opposition) with Muscovy’s gender-segregated
households and entertainments. A decree defined what guests should expect in
the assemblies that noble families would be expected to hold: guests were to arrive
at an appointed hour and were expected to mingle, play cards, and dance. Peter I’s
sister Natalia, wife Catherine, and daughters Anna and Elizabeth set the example
for their peers, dressing in European fashions and dancing; at court Natalia founded
a theater ensemble. The elite adapted quickly: by the 1720s, Holstein diplomat
F. W. Bergholtz remarked on the“subtlety of manners and good breeding”of
Russian noblewomen and the familiarity of St. Petersburg’s cultural scene.
Muscovy’s boyar and gentry elite was transformed into a European nobility not
only by wearing different clothes and learning European social dance, but also by
living in different kinds of houses. In his design of St. Petersburg, Peter I mandated
that servitors should build homes according to three prescribed designs, based on a
family’s means. Modeled on European manors and townhouses, these homes
featured interiors unlike the low ceilings, small rooms, and narrow windows of
Muscovite boyar homes. They had large, airy rooms for leisure pastimes in the
European style. Studies, libraries, music rooms, and ballrooms, decorated with
secular portraits, landscapes, and allegorical ceiling frescos, were prescribed. Over
the century noblemen and women did indeed develop personal pastimes of reading,
writing, gardening, dancing, and music; they met and shared ideas, danced, and
sang for friends and family.
Throughout the century the state took the lead in introducing the nobility to
new ideas, new genres, and new habits of life, which they deepened by investing in a
European education (for the wealthiest, French and German tutors and university
education in Germany, for lesser families, tutors and schools as best they could
afford). Noblemen and women read voraciously, in French, German, and Italian,
in translations into Russian and eventually a burgeoning world of Russian poetry,
prose, and plays. European books were imported by traveling noblemen and
booksellers; the domestic publishing industry expanded gradually as a source for
Russian elite readers. Newspapers were primarily organs for official decrees and
political news: theMoscow News(Vedomosti) was published (erratically, with a small
distribution) from 1702 until 1727, when it was replaced by theSt. Petersburg
News, published by the Academy of Sciences bi-weekly in Russian and German.
While theNewsitself was official, its monthlySupplement(1755–64) provided a
varied content of scientific, practical, and literary articles and translations from
European literature and press. Private printing presses were not allowed until 1783,
but official organs (Academy of Sciences, Moscow University, the Synod) spurred
the development of a reading public. Vasilii Trediakovskii, for example, was
employed by the Academy of Sciences not only for research into Russian linguistics
and versification, but also as a translator of contemporary European literature and
history. The Academy published his work, as well as the work of official odists
436 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801