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The fantasies of debauchery regnant cast a long shadow over the image of Russia in the age of Peter I and Catherine II—the popular TV series The Great, featuring Elle Fanning in the role of the empress, is but the latest example of their tenacity. The Great is a brilliant caricature, and as such, it contains a kernel of truth. References to illicit liaisons practiced by the Russian elite, to sexual licentiousness and sexual abuse abound on the pages of eighteenth-century letters and diplomatic dispatches, diaries and police reports. There was much that was cruel and absurd about these episodes – and occasionally comic, too.
The stories of eighteenth-century debauchery were often used for othering Russia vis-à-vis Western Europe, but this was the Libertine Age across all of Europe. This talk, based on a forthcoming book about three generations of the Beloselskii family, is a reflection on whether these aristocrats’ sexual licentiousness could be seen as a form of libertinism. Their liaisons were central to power relations and the life of the court; they embodied social and cultural change and Russia’s complicated engagement with Western Europe. They offered the members of the elite identities that were not defined by imperial service and helped to legitimize certain forms of privacy and autonomy. Just like the “liberties” asserted by libertines in Western Europe, this hedonistic autonomy was profoundly imperfect and problematic. It prepared the cultural and social ground, however, for the more modern and explicitly political claims to liberty that some members of elite began to stake in the nineteenth century.
Igor Fedyukin is Associate Professor of History at ShanghaiTech University in Shanghai, China. A historian of early modern Russia and a historian of education, he is the former founding Director of the Center for History of Modern Russia at HSE University (Moscow) and the author of The Enterprisers: The Politics of School in Early Modern Russia (Oxford University Press, 2019), in addition to numerous edited volumes.
