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157 6 CultivatingDomesticity Almost from the first moment of my marriage...nineteen years ago, my husband made my life truly unendurable: he beat me, insulted me in front of the family and placed me in a position unsuitable for a wife and mistress of the household [khoziaika] and was unfaithful to me under our own roof. Despite my husband’s substantial means, the children did not receive proper upbringing or instruction; and as a result, they did poorly. He beat the children and treated them cruelly, too, even burning the hands of one of them. I had to turn to my family even to feed them. Finally, he agreed to give me a separate passport, but it included only one of our six children, and he provided neither support nor money to educate the child....Now my passport has run out and he doesn’t want to renew it.1 ThusreadthepetitionsubmittedonJune8,1901,byVarvaraKupriianova , wife of the Moscow merchant Nikolai Kupriianov, a trader in manufactured goods and hereditary honored citizen. The investigation that followed indicated that, if anything, Kupriianova had understated her husband’s high-handed behavior. Upholding her allegations and providing telling detail, witness after witness portrayed a man who had abused his marital authority to an extraordinary degree, while reducing his wife to a state of utter abjection. To take one of the most glaring examples, Kupriianov was in the habit of coming home at three or four in the morning, waking his wife, and forcing her to read aloud to him until he fell asleep. If her voice grew too weak, he would shout at her, even strike her. Even when Varvara was in the advanced stages of pregnancy, he did not spare her this ordeal. Nikolai had so thoroughly terrorized his wife that she did not dare even to leave the house without his permission.2 Nikolai had also destroyed her authority over her own domain, the household. Demeaning her before the servants and the children , he encouraged those who owed her obedience to insult her by calling her “fool” and even “swine.” His flagrant infidelity provided another source of humiliation. He became sexually involved 1. RGIA, fond 1412, op. 221, d. 213 (Kupriianova, V., 1901), 1. 2. Ibid., 10, 45, 81–82. 158 : : : Chapter 6 with one of their servants, a liaison he did not trouble to conceal from his wife. When the servant became pregnant at the same time as Varvara, Nikolai showed greater concern with the servant’s well-being. Yet Nikolai insisted that he “loved” Varvara, and most witnesses agreed that he did. She had left him once before, five years earlier, and Nikolai had been so distraught he became suicidal.3 Most of those who testified in the case belonged to the same merchant milieu as Kupriianov, a milieu that had come to embrace the social and cultural practices of other well-to-do members of Russia’s educated and privileged strata, at least in public. Whether they had done so in private remains an open question, however, to which many historians give a negative answer. Alfred Rieber’s view that “the patriarchal condition ” persisted and “the fate of women” remained terrible well into the 1890s even in merchant families that had achieved a measure of culture has found an echo in more recent studies by others.4 Indeed, the fate of Varvara Kupriianova at her husband’s hands might well be read as a prime example. But it is a less than straightforward example. Even as the witnesses described behavior that was excessive by any criteria, even for a merchant-samodur (petty tyrant), in criticizing that behavior, witnesses drew their vocabulary from the wide-ranging critiques of arbitrary authority that circulated in the reform era and after. To a man, the witnesses condemned Nikolai for his behavior at home. Describing Nikolai’s high-handed treatment of his wife and children, a second guild merchant who had known the couple since their marriage called Nikolai “arbitrary and despotic to the highest degree.” He had reduced Varvara to a state of “utter subjugation,” asserted the townsman who worked for Kupriianov as a shop clerk and visited monthly from Ivanovo. More tellingly, several witnesses noted the contradiction between Nikolai ’s pretensions to the cultural values of the intelligentsia in public and the ways in which he treated his family. One was Vladimir Zolotarev, a man who retained his merchant status although he did not engage in trade. Married to Nikolai’s sister, Zolotarev recalled...

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