V. O. Kliuchevskii on Childhood and Education in Early Modern Russia

Abstract

KLIUCHEVSKII'S essay, Dva vospitaniia is the pioneering work in the history of childhood and of the family in Russia, and it has been sorely neglected. V.O. Kliuchevskii wrote this piece as a public lecture which was given on February 1, 1893, for the Moscow Committee on Literacy. (1) In it he contrasts the educational values of traditional Muscovite society of the sixteenth century with those of Ivan Ivanovich Betskoi, (2) Catherine the Great's principal educational advisor during the first years of her reign. More precisely, he compares two documents. The. first was the Domostroi, the House-orderer, of the priest Sil'vestr. He, Metropolitan Makarii, and Aleksei Adashev were the principal advisors of Tsar Ivan IV in the early years of his active reign after 1547. They were the creators of the new ideology of the Muscovite state based on the dream of unified Orthodox Tsardom. (3) They compiled a single all-Russian paterikon, a new unified law code, a unified ecclesiastical rule, and an official geneological history of Russia's rulers. The regimentation of personal behavior represented by the Domostroi was an essential part of the campaign for standardization and codification, which saw the origins of printing in Russia as well. In the sixteenth century these precepts had the same official sanction and status as did Catherine's legislation two hundred years later, especially the Statute of her boarding schools. The comprehensive nature of the discussion of childhood, family and education and the official standing of these documents recommend the Domostroi and Betskoi's Statute as important sources. They had not been compared systematically when Kliuchevskii wrote, and little work has been done on them since. His essay is original, and like most of his historical writings, brilliant but it stands a good chance of being forgotten. The Soviet editors omitted it from the already standard edition of Kliuchevskii's works. (4) It may be that Kliuchevskii's