Abstract
During a break from classes in the 1840s, a number of Moscow University students headed off to the dacha (cottage) of one of their class-mates for a weekend of hunting and merry-making. In order to gain permission for the use of the family place, student Blagov made a promise to his mother — one that he would do his best to keep — that no one would consume alcohol during their visit. However, he failed to inform the other young men of this promise. Upon reaching the cottage, the student-guests took out several bottles of wine and were ready to begin their evening of drinking and roistering. When Blagov came into the dining room and saw his comrades toasting, he became sullen, quickly finished his meal and retired to his bedroom. After some time, several of the students peeked inside Blagov’s room and found a different world: the quiet, pious interior sharply contrasted with the raucous activity in the dining area. Boris Chicherin records this moment in his student memoir; he highlights the outsider status that Blagov had achieved. ‘The contrast,’ Chicherin remarks, ‘was staggering.’ Ignoring his friends’ drunken antics, Blagov, ‘wearing a nightcap with pink ribbons’, knelt in front of an icon reciting his evening prayers.1 The pious, submissive and effeminate picture of Blagov that Chicherin paints starkly contrasts with the image of the other students gathered around a table drinking and laughing in preparation for the next day’s hunting expedition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Boris Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina, vol. 1 (New York, 1973), 70–1.
L. Ray Drinkwater, ‘Honor and Student Misconduct in Southern Antebellum Colleges’, Southern Humanities Review, 27, no. 4 (Fall 1993), 328–31.
On the question of Nicholas I’s attempt to project an image of European civility and respectability, see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1995), 255–378.
James T. Flynn, ‘Tuition and Social Class in Russian Universities: S. S. Uvarov and the “Reaction” in the Russia of Nicholas I’, Slavic Review 35, no. 2 (June 1976), 236. Although these numbers are small, the universities in the early years of the nineteenth century had even fewer students. The oft troubled Kazan’ University in 1815 had a mere 42 students and just 169 four years later.
There is a discussion of the problems at Kazan’ University in the article by James T. Flynn, ‘Magnitskii’s Purge of Kazan’ University: a Case Study in the Uses of Reaction in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Journal of Modern History, 43, no. 4 (December 1971), 598–614.
Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855 (DeKalb, 1984), 175–6.
Friedrich Paulsen, German Education: Past and Present (London, 1908), 187.
Arkhiv gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo muzeia g. Moskvy, fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, 1. 21ob. From now on GIM. Materials on Kazan’ students are found in Kazan’s main historical archive, Natsional’nyi arkhiv respubliki Tatarstan fond 977, op. ins, d. 12. From now on NART. In her study about sex and liberalism in fin-de-siècle Russia, historian Laura Engelstein describes how turn-of-the-century Russians preoccupied themselves with male sexuality and declared, in their medical and pedagogical literature, that young boys needed to exercise self-restraint to control their own libidos. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century professionals’ anxieties about male sexuality had antecedents in earlier decades. On this subject see especially Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 215–53.
D. Naguevskii, Professor Frant Ksvarii Bronner (ego dnevnik I perepiski) (Kazan’, 1902), 128.
P. F. Vistengof, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, Istoricheskii vestnik, 16, no. 5 (1884), 336. Italics in original. Regulations for students’ hair length echoed both Nicholas’ preoccupations and paralleled requirements in other branches of the bureaucracy. In 1837, for instance, the Minister of War decreed that hair was supposed to be cut on the forehead and the side no longer than ‘one-and-three-quarters inches, from left to right’ (Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 312).
To describe the places where they drank in the nineteenth century, student-memoirists often use the term traktir, which — at least in eighteenth-century usage — was ‘primarily a drinking establishment where eating was of secondary importance’. On this see George Munro, ‘Food in Catherinian Russia,’ Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington, 1997), 42.
F. I. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia akademika F. L Buslaeva (Moscow, 1897), 12.
A. Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia’, Russkaia starina, 165, no. 6 (June 1915), 428.
Nikolai Dmitrievich Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia o Moskovskom universitete’, Otechestvenniia zapiski 122, no. 1 (January 1859), 3.
P. P. Semenov Tian-Shanskii, ‘Sank Peterburgskii universitet (1845–1848)’, Leningradskii universitet (Leningrad, 1956), 44.
A. N. Afanasev, ‘Moskovskii universitet, 1843–1849’, Russkaia starina, 51, no. 8 (August 1886), 359.
N. A. Popov, ‘Iz vospominanii starogo studenta’, Russkie universitety v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh (St Petersburg, 1914), 686.
A. N. Afanasev, ‘Moskovskii universitet v 1840-kh godakh’, Russkaia starina, 55 (September 1887), 651. Italics in the original
Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 31. Nakhimov also helped students hide their smoking habits. This is described in Afanasev, ‘Moskovskii universitet’, 651. There are other student accounts of Nakhimov’s drinking, for instance N. A. Popov, in ‘Iz vospominanii starogo studenta’, Russkie universitety v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh (St Petersburg, 1914), 136–7. One student memoirist alludes to drunkenness among the faculty in general.
On this see P. E Vistengof, ‘Iz moikh vospominaniiakh’, Istoricheskii vestnik 16, no. 5 (May 1884), 340–1.
N. D. Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia o moskovskom universitete’, Otechestvennoe zapiski, 119, no. 8 (1858), 86.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2002 Rebecca Friedman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Friedman, R. (2002). From Boys to Men: Manhood in the Nicholaevan University. In: Clements, B.E., Friedman, R., Healey, D. (eds) Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501799_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501799_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42592-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50179-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)