Zorin and Glafira

I want to recommend a book – a memoir that was published as part of a “Russia in Memoirs” series: “Institute Girls: Pupils’ Memoirs from Schools for Noble Maidens”. It contains 5 fragments from students of the Smolny Institute, starting with Glafira Alymova and others like her through different times and eras. You see how it was during the Golden Age of the Smolny under Nicholas I (who also went there from time to time, as if to a harem. While most of the time he was fond of ballerinas, but this as well). When you know about such things - this “adoration”, this known practice, of the emotional and erotic kind, begins to show itself in a new light. And no, there isn’t anything particularly scandalous in there, so why is it still interesting to read?

It’s because then and there, they taught people how to express their thoughts clearly, so first of all, it’s written not badly at all. Second, you get to experience the culture of the Smolny Institute and the culture of the Institute girls, which was a branch of the culture of sentimentalism and inside of these conservative walls, sentimentalism lived longer than anywhere else. While all the Lisas, Mashas, and those curly-haired shepherd girls and their equally curly haired sheep were fading away from everyday culture, there they were very much preserved. For example, in those Institutes, they did not study modern literature – it would have been lucky to have the curriculum go as far as Pushkin! And in some places, it didn’t even get that far – they had Karamzin and Zhukovsky and that would have been peak modernism. All in all, their literary canon was that of Classicism – that’s what you needed to study. So it makes for interesting memoirs from the 1860’s – the emergence and collision of cultures, their rise and fall, the eras of the Great Reforms when Professor Ushinskiy suddenly appeared and entered that stagnant swamp to proclaim that everything that was being taught was just a bunch of nonsense. The author of the memoir writes this touching passage where she had this literature professor who seemed to her like the perfect human being and teacher, but then it turned out that he was some sort of a pretentious turkey that recited things devoid of literary value. How first she disliked Ushinskiy because he destroyed her ideals, and then those new orthogonal understandings from the 1860’s begun to be absorbed by her very conservatory-like environment. Finally, the last memoirs are from the 20th century – on the terrifying dawn of the Revolution and you get to see the end of all that prior life.

Still, when you start with Alymova, you see how Smolny was a revolutionary, not a conservative project – how it began as innovative, progressive and a utopian (meaning not impossible, but idealistic) idea of forming a new enlightened person with civilized virtues; more so a person who is actively virtuous such that they would not merely know about these things, but who will be a teacher. They carried a culture of mentoring their juniors, with the intention of these women marrying and then educating not only their children, but also their husbands. It was considered that the woman is an agent of civilization, and speaking in the dry language of social science, women are the keepers of norms – that is a truth – society foists upon them this role (among many others). A woman knows how it should be, and teaches how it should be, and on the darker side – punishes those who break the norms, whether her own children, or other women. So, do read the memoirs – it’s not as humorous as we’d assume it would be, having read Chukovsky’s famous philippic against Charskaya (where he rants against the fact that the author that gets requested the most in libraries is not Pushkin, Tolstoy or Turgenev, but Lidia Charskaya). Charskaya had also written about her life at the Institute and I’ve read her – she is not talentless – in her ‘Princess Dzhavakha’ there’s a lot of references to Lermontov and I’m a fan, I think it’s a good book that fits next to “A Summer in the Red Scarf”. So, do read and observe how society and culture create and evolve behaviors that appear to us as natural and remember that nothing is natural to us – everything is first and foremost social, and the rest is what happens after.

Back to the story of Glafira Alymova and the Director of the Institute, who later became either her benefactor or her pursuer – a prominent associate of Catherine II, Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy. Now, who are they as people? Glafira is one of those people everyone had seen without realizing that it was her. Because she was one of the first Smolny Girls – she was in the inaugural class when the Institute was founded by Catherine the Great and in the first graduating class, obviously. Dimitri Levicki painted the portraits of all the first graduates and you’ve probably seen Alymova’s – it remains a well-traveled one to this day. Apparently, when it was last restored, it was revealed that underneath there is an earlier version with some architectural scenes, ruins and some sort of drapes, giving it a more colorful and festive look. To spot her among the graduate portraits, Glafira is the one who is smiling “for the camera”, as we’d say today, while holding her dress with one hand, doing a sort of a curtsy. As an aside, after graduating in 1777, Alymova married Alexei Rzhevskiy that very same year, and he was an illustrious man of the era who became a senator and a privy councilor and who was 20 years her senior, and then in 1805 she married Hippolite Masclet, who was 20 years her junior and of lower rank, which scandalized the Capital. That’s a long way away, though - we meet Glafira as one of the best students in Smolny who enjoyed the patronage of Catherine herself. Catherine was very invested in her personal project: she came there often, made graduates her Freilens (personal assistants at court), kept in regular correspondence with many of them and kept them very close to the court. This was modeled after Maison Royale de Saint-Louis in Saint-Cyr and Madame de Maintenon – then 2nd wife of Louis XIV who was also very concerned with women’s education and founded a school for girls, specifically for war-orphans and those from poor provincial nobility. The idea was that first, to raise a modern human being – a utopian, progressive project: to take girls at age 6, separate them from their families, and at first to even disallow contact between them and their relatives for the first number of years. Why? - So that they won’t absorb any incorrect behaviors there, so that their parents couldn’t ruin the flowers of this new art of teaching. The girls needed to be educated so that they, having become agents of enlightenment, could then become mothers of their own families and raise them in this new spirit. That’s the utopian half of the goal – the other half, the immediately practical part, is to give poor noblewomen the kind of education, closeness to the court and those kinds of connections and opportunities to marry that they would not have had otherwise. Otherwise, in their state of savagery, they would end up herding geese and being no different than the peasants, if not for us giving them such an opportunity of a lifetime.

Now, Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy was the first Director of the Smolny Institute – he was Catherine’s eagle and a leader of Russian enlightenment. When Alymova first entered the Institute, this Betskoy noticed her. His behavior towards her, though, let’s just say that it was ambiguous. We know her side of the story from her memoirs, which is ofcourse is only one side of the story, and from scattered contemporary remembrances. To say that he was pursuing her and was trying to use his position to make her his lover – no, we cannot conclude that. Nothing pointed to that and in the end she did not become his lover in any way. However, he did orbit her and wanted her to love him out of gratitude. He never directly proposed to her, neither honorably nor dishonorably – neither through marriage nor casually. Now, mind you, this is the time when Grigory Potemkin had sent for his 6 nieces, slept with 3 of them in turn (these were his own sister’s daughters), and then married them away with a massive dowry in tow. This was standard practice for establishing many prominent Russian families. Anyway, with this in the background, our Betskoy doesn’t do anything of the kind, but when she graduates from the Institute, he moves her in with him as a sort of a pupil, promising to give her away through marriage. Even when she finds herself a groom, that very Alexei Rzhevskiy, he doesn’t let her get married, telling Rzhevskiy some nasty things about her and her about Rzhevskiy, creating intrigues that lead nowhere, promising that he will give her the dowry not today, but tomorrow, and then delaying again. When the wedding was finally arranged, she writes in her memoirs that he started to tell her how often it so happens that a marriage falls apart right at the altar and there’s nothing strange in that at all. She wonders in her memoirs why he never proposed to her and that she would have accepted his proposal with gratitude because he was like a father to her and she owed him everything. He never proposed. It all ended badly – he let her get married, but insisted that her husband and her lived with him! Then he made their family life intolerable and they ran away. Well, maybe it’s not such a bad end – they did muster the courage to escape the maniac, and it could have ended a lot worse. The bad end was destined for Ivan Ivanovich, who outsmarted himself – he got paralysis.

The respectable Andrei Leonidovich Zorin considered their life story to be a collision of 2 life patterns: Betskoy thought he was Orosmane from Voltaire’s drama “Zaire” – a Sultan in love with a slave girl whom he cannot force to love him because it would not be true love – he has too much power over her, but she must fall in love with him on her own. And he keeps waiting for when his noble motive will resonate with her and make her forget all about her young suitors. Orosmane was also very jealous (and in the end killed her with a dagger, but that’s not the point here) – he suspected her to be in love with a young man, but that young man turns out to be her brother, meanwhile even though Zaire did fall in love with Orosmane, he did not realize it. This was Betskoy’s aria, and Glafira did not understand… or, as Zorin thought, she was acting as if she did not understand because she did not want an Orosmane – she wanted a normal husband, not a 70-year-old. Such is their story about learning to feel, about nature and culture - how nature that been formed by culture can sometimes exist in conflict with it, or can even complement it in unpredictable ways so that the outcomes become totally different from what the educators intended.

The idea of raising yourself a perfect wife from childhood is a widespread form of bewilderment and much has been written about it. I can’t go without mentioning the parallels from a series of girls’ adventure novel - the “Angélique” series by Anne Golon where in the first volume the titular 16 year old girl, from an impoverished noble house grows up with little to differentiate herself from the peasants, is forced into a loveless marriage with an old and lame Lord of Toulouse. Her new husband can do whatever he wants with her, but like Orosmane and Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy he spends half the book persuading her to love him “for real”. After 400 pages of romancing her with song and mandolin, Angélique gives herself to him without screaming. This appears to be a resilient cultural pattern and I won’t be surprised if today somewhere in university offices in the dark they do something analogous.

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