Privat Life and Public Interest. The Noble Family and Childhood in Russia’s Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The essay provides an overview of the recent scholarship on the noble family and childhood in nineteenth-century Russia. The authors focus on literature of Western and Russian origin that discusses the wider social and political implications of noble private life in imperial Russia. Although images of family intimacy and seclusion were celebrated throughout the nineteenth century, as a painting by Fedor Slavianskii exemplifies, the Russian state and public took a great interest in these seemingly private realms, as scholars have shown in the last fifteen years. This public interest was especially strong with regard to Russia’s nobility, whose privileged political and social status rendered high visibility to its members’ private life. At the same time, private life was also a prime vehicle for noble agency and influence in imperial Russia. Recent literature has aptly shown how the family shaped and strengthened the nobility’s involvement with society and state. As a substantial part of family life, childhood constitutes a culturally and socially defined space where succeeding generations, especially of the nobility, were brought up to serve the state’s well-being. Childhood and the idea of it changed in Russia as elsewhere in correspondence with political and economic transformations. For the nineteenth century, scholarship underlines its transformation from a discourse among the affluent and well-educated to a subject in society as a whole. Embracing different approaches and covering a wide range of topics, recent scholarship has shown how family and childhood functioned as central social spaces where Russia’s future was debated and shaped. This insight and future findings could stimulate broader European or even global studies on private life, the authors argue in their conclusion.