Family History

An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia

Katherine Pickering Antonova

This is the story of a marriage between middle-income gentry landowners in nineteenth-century provincial Russia. The mother, Natalia Chikhacheva, oversaw serf labor and managed finances ... More

This is the story of a marriage between middle-income gentry landowners in nineteenth-century provincial Russia. The mother, Natalia Chikhacheva, oversaw serf labor and managed finances while the father, Andrei Chikhachev, raised the children, at a time when domestic ideology advocating a woman’s place in the home was at its height in European advice manuals. Andrei defined masculinity as a realm of intellectualism existing only symbolically “outside the home.” Thus the father’s place could be in charge of “moral education,” defined as an intellectual task. Managing estates that often barely yielded a livable income was a practical task and therefore considered less elevated, though still vitally important to the family’s interests. This book examines the daily activities and ideas of a family based on diaries and letters by the husband, wife, and son of the family. Chapters focus on the Chikhachevs’ social life, reading habits, attitudes toward illness and death, as well as their gendered marital roles and their reception of major ideas of their time, such as domesticity, Enlightenment, sentimentalism, and Romanticism. Less