Precarious Privacy: Russian Epistolary Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Although Russians had written letters long before the eighteenth century, 1708 marked a dramatic change in epistolary culture: it witnessed the publication of the first printed letter-writing manual in Russia, Priklady kako pishutsia komplimenty raznye. As Lina Bernstein has demonstrated, these model letters based on German sources were supposed to provide new models of behavior and thus modernize and westernize Russian society. Letter-writing throughout the long eighteenth century became inseparable from dramatic social changes and new understandings of educated Russians’ “public role and subjective self” (Schönle, Zorin, and Evstratov). Contributing to the rapidly growing field of Russian epistolary studies, this panel will explore how the new letter-writing culture reflected the changing boundaries between the personal and the official, the family and the court, ego-documents and literary facts.

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, to 1800 

Chair

• Alexei G. Evstratov, U Grenoble Alpes (France)

Papers

• Early Eighteenth-Century Letters and the Origins of Women’s Writing in Russia - Sara Dickinson, U of Genoa (Italy)

• Why Publish Correspondence in Eighteenth-Century Russia? - Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, U of Southern California

• The Boundaries between Public and Private: Pavel and Sof’ia Stroganov in the 1790s - Victoria S. Frede, UC Berkeley

• 'Such an Exercise… Shapes Both the Heart and the Mind': Children’s Letter-Writing in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia as Moral Education - Ekaterina Shubenkina, U of Southern California

Discussant

• Andrew Kahn, U of Oxford (UK)

Session Manager

• Maureen Waters O'Neill, Laval U (Canada)