10 июня на конференции Nobility Reconsidered New Perspectives on the European Aristocracy в университете Jyväskylä (Финляндия) выступит Елена Корчмина

 

What Was Luxury for Russian Provincial Noblewomen in the 19th Centuries? 

 

Аннотация: The discrepancy of the juridical and economic status of noblewomen in Russia was vividly described by Michelle Marrese. She demonstrates that on the one hand, the Russian noblewomen had no right to do a lot of things without father’s or husband’s permission, but on the other hand they disposed considerable economic freedom. But how did they use that freedom? We’d like to answer the question what the consumption strategies of Russian provincial noblewomen were, paying special attention to the problem of luxury goods. What was luxury for provincial noblewomen in Russia in comparison with the upperclass nobility? How much money did they spend on such goods? Primarily it is very difficult to find answers to these questions because of the shortage of sources. The traditional works of that kind are based on the memoires and letters, but in the case of provincial noblewomen only small number of sources remained. So to our mind the best way to answer these questions to use new types of sources – documents of guardianships (dvoryanskie opeki) and accounting books (prikhodno-raskhodnye knigi). The descriptions of different property items in guardianships’ documents are very detailed, so it can help us to reconstruct almost the whole environment of noblewomen, and accounting books allow us to understand the their financial flows.