Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia by Wendy s> Rosslyn (review)

Abstract

762 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 the steppe, Michail Khodarkovskyasks if Moscow was the 'Third Rome' or a tributarystate in the context of the vocabulariesand identitiesthat the government was attempting to impose on peoples and landscapes alike. Section Six, devoted to the Cossacksin the South and East, opens on the Don with N. A. Mininkov on changes among the Atamans in the later seventeenthcentury and Brian Boeck on relationsbetween the Host and Moscow after the Razin uprising. Christoph Witzenrath weighs up the effect of the trade frontier's institutionalchanges on the SiberianCossacks,takingTransbaikalia,i696-99, as a special case, before Serhii Plokhy brings the book to a close with an evaluation of the case for the comparativestudy of Cossackdom. AndreasKappeler has done well to assemblea group of scholarsinterested in a wide range of aspectsof their subject,spiritualand secular,and to find six contributorsofferingtheir perspectivesfrom the regions themselves:Kamkin fromVologda; Glazev fromVoronezh; Giliazovfrom Kazan'; Taimasov from Cheboksary;Ivanov from Ioshkar-Ola;and Mininkov from Rostov-on-Don. Four of the others are located in Moscow, one in St Petersburg,and the rest range from North America to Europe. It is a measureof the excellence of thle volume that provenance is rarely evident. Glokalizatsiia indeed! School ofDiviniy,Histogy andPhilosophy PAUL DUKES University ofAberdeen Rosslyn, Wendy (ed.). Womenand Genderin i8th-Centugy Russia. Ashgate, Aldershotand Burlington,VT, 2003. x + 283 pp. Notes. Figures.Illustrations . Index. C45.oo. IT is almost twenty years since 'Feminist Slavistics' was launched by the publication of Barbara Heldt's Ternible Perfection: Women andRussianLiterature (Bloomington,IN) in I987. This volume also initiatedthe rediscoveryof those Russian women, writers and others, who had been 'hidden from history'. Since then huge strideshave been taken, even if the pace of rediscoveryhas slackenedrecently,partlydue perhaps to the recuperationof women's studies into the mainstream.Against this changing backdrop,Wendy Rosslyn'slatest contributionis to be warmlywelcomed. Moreover, it providesan opportunity for Rosslyn to continue her important project of bringing to light the neglected workand lives of Russianwomen before Pushkin,followingher pioneering biographyof Anna Bunina, as well as her volume on women translators from 2000. Thanks to her overall contributionour knowledge of the life and work of Russianwomen in the eighteenth centuryis immenselyricherby comparisonwith a decade ago. This third, edited volume is, in fact, primarilyhistoricalin focus, with only a few articles on women's literary production or representation.The book opens with a very well researched Introductionfrom Rosslyn which offers a comprehensivesurveyof existingworkwhich coverswhat she termsthe 'long' eighteenth century, from I700 to I825. Sub-divided into helpful sub-sections (Bibliographies,IndividualWomen, Women's History, and so on) this chapter provides an excellent and methodical overview which will be an essential resourcefor futureworkersin the field. There then follow thirteen individual REVIEWS 763 chapters which cover a broad range of topics. In her Introduction, Rosslyn herself sub-dividesthese chapters into five groups (although the book is not divided into sections as such). These sub-divisionscomprise the following. The first section 'illuminates the radicalchanges in definitionsof femininity'(p.2I)during the period. The second section 'dealswith the social lives of upper-classwomen' (p. 22), while the third 'focuses on the culture of upper-classwomen in the capitals and provinces' (ibid.).The last two groups deal with legal issues and lower class women respectively. Contributors come from Russia, the UK, USA and Europe. All the essays have important things to say, and there are no weak links. Nearly all are writtenin a clear, straightforward style, and all are impressively researchedand sourced.Almost all the essaysadopt a straightforward, empirical , historicalapproach to the subject. Space does not allow considerationof all the essays, so I will cherry-pick those which particularly impressed. 'Feminisation as Functionalisation:the Presentation of Femininity by the SentimentalistMan' by Carolin Heyder and Arja Rosenholm is, as the title might suggest,the most theoreticallybased and challengingof all the chapters, and offersa radicallyfeministcritiqueof Sentimentalism.Their argumentsare organized around a key concept: 'we can say that gender is thediscourse of Russian secularisationand modernity' (p. 52- their emphasis). They then go on to explore the idea of the 'milaia' who is at the very heart of the Sentimentalistdiscourse.Despite thisprivilegedposition, 'She is everything and nothing' (p. 57). Helena Goscilo's 'Cosmetics or Dying to Overcome...