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New Unfortunates: Degeneracy and Violence against Parents in Imperial Russia (with Marianna Muravyeva and Discussant Anna Berman)

February 8, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Join us for another 19v seminar!

It is often the case that husbands kill their wives’lovers; sons, their fathers, frequently conspiring with their mothers and friends after they had caught them in flagrante with another woman; a brother-in-law kills his sister’s husband upon her request and together they dispose of the body. One sister stabs another for reporting her lewd behaviour to their mother; she confesses that originally she wanted to hack her to pieces but then planned to use a pestle to beat her [to death]. The body of a dead infant is floating in the nearby lake” (SergeMaksimov, Sibir’ Ikatorga, 1871).

This gloomy picture of the degeneration and decay of the moral principles of the working class in the remote mines of industrial Perm serves as a typical representation of the depressing social state of the Russian population in the mid-nineteenth century. Writers, social commentators, and the press were busy endlessly exposing tales of bloody fights and murders in numerous pamphlets, newspapers, and journals. Stories of fathers killing their sons and vice versa as the result of drunken brawls often appeared in newspapers under headlines such as (to quote one example) “The Power of Darkness.” The press blamed these incidents on the “ignorance and moral underdevelopment” of the Russian population. Excessive drinking was understood to be the most frequent cause of such widespread violence, especially within the family; other causes –– such as poverty and degradation resulting from the breakdown of the “traditional” peasant community after the 1861 Emancipation, from industrialization, and from mass migration — were seen as crucial explanations for what the upper classes and intelligentsia perceived as a high level of violence. Wife-beating remained the most important sign of the degradation and ignorance of the lower classes, but parent abuse and parricide emerged as new indicators of “cultural impoverishment.” While violence against wives and children frequently received attention (and been explained by social and economic factors such as poverty, lack of education, the low status of women and their dependence on the patriarchal family, and so on), the abuse of parentcalled for more elaborate explanations that related to the human psyche, to morality, and to pathology because such abuse violated what was understood as the natural order of things. Prior to the nineteenth century, courts dealt with parricide by discounting it as an “unfortunate crime”, the result of accidents following from reckless escalation in the mishandling of firearms or engaging in drunken fights, but the nineteenth century redefined “unfortunate” by pathologizing the perpetrators and examining their state of mind. In this period, alcohol was also declared to be the most frequent cause for mental disorders — thus those who murdered their parents could claim temporary insanity. In this talk, I will explain why these changes took place and why the authorities preferred to ignore the more “trivial” and “normal” environmental causes for parricide and to demonize this crime as the result of pathological behavior.

This event will be hosted virtually on Zoom

Details

Date:
February 8, 2023
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Organizer

The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia

Venue

New York, NY + Google Map