Russian families, accidental and other
Realist novels were vehicles for exploring ideological
battles that Russians called ‘the Woman Question.’ Questions about women’s social
role (emancipated or not, maternal or not, educated or not, etc.) were tied to other
questions – economic, religious, legal, and political – facing a country where
institutions were ‘modernizing’ (or westernizing) with disorienting speed. Hence
Dostoevsky’s characterization of the contemporary Russian household as “an
accidental family.” Many realist texts raise doubts about the traditional family’s
ability to sustain itself in modernity; in Turgenev’s mid-century novellas, for
instance, promising young female characters are repeatedly disappointed by their
weak male counterparts (“superfluous men”). Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
(1873–1877) implies that a woman cannot sever the bonds of marriage and stay alive,
but in Khvoshchinskaya’s novella The Boarding School Girl (1861),
the heroine emancipates herself from all family bonds and constructs an independent
life. Tolstoy’s late novella Kreutzer Sonata (1891) goes so far as
to suggest that only radical chastity, even if it leads to humanity’s extinction,
can free people from the degradation and commodification that are inevitable
consequences of sexual relations. As Tolstoy’s own evolution suggests, many
contradictory answers were offered to the Woman Question, but as the century drew
on, the tendency was toward increasing radicalism.
Article outline
- 1.
The Boarding School Girl
: Little Lola escapes the patriarchy
- 2.“She will be nobody’s wife”: Anna Karenina’s unbreakable bonds
- 3.Accidental families and inevitable declines
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Notes
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Works cited