Three Merchant Men Who Longed for Love and How They Fared: Stories of Sentiment from Marriage, Household and Home in Modern Russia (with Barbara Alpern Engel, Discussant: Bella Grigoryan)

Join us for another 19v seminar!

Based on her forthcoming book, Marriage, Household and Home in Modern Russia: from Peter the Great to Putin (Bloomsbury Academic), Barbara Alpern Engel will explore the diffusion of sentimental ideas beyond the noble elites that comprised their initial audience.  From the reign of Catherine the Great through the first half of the nineteenth century if not later, she contends, those ideas rendered elite standing contingent on a person’s behavior, values, ideals and feelings, as well as their position in the social hierarchy and/or proximity to the ruler.    They thus opened the door to a new kind of social mobility and at a time when economic and other changes, including the expansion of education, fostered greater mobility, too.   Set in the first half of the nineteenth century, three case studies of men of the merchantry, the only social group in Russia whose privileged status rested on wealth, will suggest the complexity of what the “trickling down” of sentimental ideas might mean in practice.

Watch event recording on YouTube here.