Days of a Russian Noblewoman

After reading Anna Labzina’s book “Days of a Russian Noblewoman”

Anna Labzina’s memoir of life with her first husband offers a rare glimpse into the family and private lives of an elite and well-educated noble family in late eighteenth-century Russia. It is particularly interesting because it offer’s a woman’s perspective, and it says a great deal about a number of men and women (e.g., herself, her mother, her niece, her mentor’s wife), boys and girls, masculine and feminine.

Does she see men and women as fundamentally different, either by nature or in terms of their morality or religiosity? To what extent, in her writing, do women have the capacity to shape or control their own lives in the Russia of her time, and to what extent are they beholden to or subject to the wishes of men? In answering this question give specific examples and discuss more than one set of relationships and more than one individual.