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1 Introduction marriage and its discontents “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thus begins Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy ’s great novel of contemporary life, which appeared in installments from 1875 to 1877. It concludes with the death of its beautiful high-society heroine, who flings herself beneath the wheels of an onrushing train. Anna’s flight from an arranged and loveless marriage and into the arms of the dashing Count Vronsky had brought only short-lived happiness. Ostracized by members of her former social circle, deprived of her beloved son, and dependent for her position on the passionate attachment of Vronsky, Anna finds herself picking quarrels with him over trifles and risking the alienation of the one person on whom her life depends. Like other nineteenth-century authors whose heroines defied social and sexual morality for the sake of love, Tolstoy can imagine no fate for Anna other than death. But this was rarely the fate of the real-life women, most of them from backgrounds far more humble than Anna’s, who left their husbands in the decades after the publication of Tolstoy’s novel. This book is about those women and the forces that encouraged them to imagine a different life for themselves, the institutions that helped and/or hindered them, and the responses of a wide variety of other people, including an ascending hierarchy of officials, up to and including men who spoke in the name of the tsar, to the challenge to Russia’s patriarchal family order. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Russia experienced a widely perceived “marriage crisis.” The crisis was a product of, and inseparable from, the profound social, economic, and cultural changes that occurred in the aftermath of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the accompanying “Great Reforms.” Even as Tsars Alexander II (1855–1881), Alexander III (1881–1894), and Nicholas II (1894–1917) preserved their monopoly on political power and, until 1905, denied their subjects fundamental civil rights, their policies generated new opportunities for social mobility that shook to its foundations Russia’s hierarchical social order. That social order rested on estates (soslovie, pl. sosloviia), legally 2 : : : Introduction constituted categories that were in most cases hereditary and established an individual ’s rights and responsibilities in relation to the state. Consisting of four main estates— nobility, clergy, townspeople, and peasantry—the soslovie order was complicated by new social categories, created as the need arose, and further divided into those who enjoyed important exemptions (or privileges) and those who did not. Peasants and lower townspeople (meshchane) endured the burden of recruitment and poll-tax paying until the military and poll tax reforms of 1874–87, and bore other disabilities thereafter, while the merchantry, who constituted the privileged portion of townspeople, were free of them, as were nobles, clergy, and professionals.1 Beginning in the 1880s and accelerating in the 1890s, a state-sponsored policy of economic modernization and rapid industrialization intensified the pressure on this system by vastly expanding the number of people whose legal status no longer corresponded to their occupation or way of life. To meet a growing need for professional expertise, institutions of higher education proliferated, offering specialized training in medicine, law, engineering, and other professions to an increasingly diverse student body, thereby adding to the ranks of individuals for whom soslovie ascription had lost its significance. A similar disparity between legal identity and occupation characterized the hundreds of thousands of peasants, a substantial minority of them female, who flocked to Russia’s towns and cities to work as laborers, servants, and in other nonagricultural capacities. Groups emerged outside the soslovie system, such as educated professionals, who tended to share social and cultural values despite their diverse origins, and factory workers, primarily peasant in origin. The resulting “disparity between social origin and social status,” as Gregory Freeze has put it, affected Russia’s long-standing gender order, too, creating new possibilities for self-definition at home as well as at work.2 1. See Gregory Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (1986): 11–36. Even after 1887, the law restricted personal mobility and treated meshchane as well as peasants as “workhorses,” burdening them with mutual responsibility for fulfilling a variety of government needs. See A. Zorin et al., Ocherki gorodskogo byta srednego Povolzh'ia (Ulianovsk: Izdatel'stvo Srednevolzhskogo nauchnogo tsentra, 2000), 312. On townspeople , see also V...

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