Table’ and the Politics of Class and Gender,” Russian Review 53 (April 1994 ): 2 ,
271–84.
2 .Women born serfs never had access to higher education. On the lives of
women serfs, see Mary Matossian, “The Peasant Way of Life,” in Russian Peas-
ant Women,ed. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1992 ), 27. However, a few men born serfs—or to landowners and
serf women—through upper-class sponsorship obtained the university or in-
stitute educations that enabled them to take a place in educated society (e.g.,
Vasilii Zhukovskii, Nikolai Pavlov, Aleksandr Nikitenko, Aleksei Kol’tsov,
Mikhail Pogodin). On the upward mobility possible to men through salons, see
William Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions and
Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986 ), 61–63.
3. During the nineteenth century only the well-to-do could enter a Russian
monastery or nunnery, since applicants had to supply both an entrance do-
nation and lifetime support for themselves (Brenda Meehan-Waters, “To Save
Oneself: Russian Peasant Women and the Development of Women’s Religious
Communities in Prerevolutionary Russia,” inRussian Peasant Women,ed.
B. Farnsworth and L. Viola, 121–22).
4. Under the 1835 Svod zakonov,a sister inherited one-fourteenth of her
brother’s share of immovable (real) property and one-eighth of her brother’s
share of movable property (Aleksei Vasil’evich Kunitsyn, O pravakh nasledovaniia
lits zhenskogo pola[Khar’kov, 1844 ], 9 ). See also Zhenskoe pravo: Svod uzakonenii
i postanovlenii otnosiashchikhsia do zhenskogo pola (Sankt-Peterburg: K. N. Plot-
nikov, 1873 ), 180–81. Michelle Marrese, however, writes that in some cases par-
ents (especially mothers) gave daughters a larger share of immovable and mov-
able property than was prescribed by law (A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and
the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861[Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2002 ], 148 , 153 , 155 ).
5 .Zhenskoe pravo, 108. The commentary states, “It is the unconditional duty
of spouses to live together” ( 108 ).
See also Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 32 ; Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law,
65. On marriage law for those of other religions living in Russia, see Engelstein,
28.
On the Church’s regulation of marriage, see Freeze, “Bringing Order to the
Russian Family,” 744. Freeze writes that in the nineteenth century the Russian
Orthodox Church “virtually eliminated the legal possibility of terminating a
marriage” ( 711 ), granting between 1836 and 1860 a yearly average of thirty-three
annulments ( 724 ) and fifty-eight divorces for the entire Russian empire ( 733 ).
On married women’s property rights, see also, Stites, The Women’s Liberation
Movement in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978 ), 7. Michelle
Marrese inA Woman’s Kingdomdocuments several cases of Russian noblewomen
actively managing their own and their husbands’ estates. She notes, however,
that many noblewomen gave over the management of their estates to a husband
or male relative and that an increasingly critical attitude toward women in au-
thority developed from the end of the eighteenth century.
6. On Pavlova, see Pavel Gromov, “Karolina Pavlova,” in Pavlova, Polnoe so-
branie stikhotvorenii,42–43, and Sendich, “Life and Works of Karolina Pavlova,”
Notes to Pages 21–22 227