'The importance of the woman of the house': Gender, property and ideas in a Russian provincial gentry family, 1820--1875

This dissertation is a microhistory based on the unprecedentedly rich archival documents of the Chikhachev family of Vladimir province. It analyzes the Chikhachev story in light of three problems of nineteenth-century Russian history: (1) how gender roles were constructed in this family where the 'woman of the house' was an estate manager as well as mother and wife; (2) how Andrei Chikhachev's self-defined role as moral educator was enacted in the education of their son, and how Andrei's notions about upbringing informed his worldview and his reception of the Enlightenment, sentimentalism, and nationality; and (3) how the Chikhachevs understood their place in the village, in the larger society of their noble social estate, and in the provincial network that also included middling social groups. I conclude that Andrei Chikhachev's notions of duty, moral behavior and Russianness hinged on his private understanding of the family: on the mother's role as khoziaika, or estate manager and material provider, and the father's role as vospitatel', or moral educator. Andrei argued for the extension of this family model to the village and to all of Russia as a guarantee of its prosperous and stable future. Andrei's worldview is important not only as an unusually detailed articulation of how several major ideas of the time were received and re-interpreted, but most especially because this worldview was predicated on an arrangement of gender roles that was peculiar to Russia's middling provincial gentry and which has not been previously explored to this degree.;Natalia Chernavina married Andrei Chikhachev in 1820; in their following forty-six years together Natalia oversaw their estates while Andrei tutored the children, Aleksei and Aleksandra, and later engaged in journalism and philanthropy. The Chikhachevs' family archive contains diaries, correspondence, account books, legal documents and other materials (which are particularly rich for the 1830s). These documents give us an extraordinarily broad window into one man's ideas, but also multiple alternative perspectives on the reality behind his ideas---on his marriage, the upbringing of his children and the running of his provincial estates---written by almost all the other members of his family.