Russian families, accidental and other

Realist novels were vehicles for exploring ideological battles that Russians called ‘the Woman Question.’ Questions about women’s social role (emancipated or not, maternal or not, educated or not, etc.) were tied to other questions – economic, religious, legal, and political – facing a country where institutions were ‘modernizing’ (or westernizing) with disorienting speed. Hence Dostoevsky’s characterization of the contemporary Russian household as “an accidental family.” Many realist texts raise doubts about the traditional family’s ability to sustain itself in modernity; in Turgenev’s mid-century novellas, for instance, promising young female characters are repeatedly disappointed by their weak male counterparts (“superfluous men”). Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–1877) implies that a woman cannot sever the bonds of marriage and stay alive, but in Khvoshchinskaya’s novella The Boarding School Girl (1861), the heroine emancipates herself from all family bonds and constructs an independent life. Tolstoy’s late novella Kreutzer Sonata (1891) goes so far as to suggest that only radical chastity, even if it leads to humanity’s extinction, can free people from the degradation and commodification that are inevitable consequences of sexual relations. As Tolstoy’s own evolution suggests, many contradictory answers were offered to the Woman Question, but as the century drew on, the tendency was toward increasing radicalism.