The Reception of J.S. Mill’s Feminist Thought in Imperial Russia

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-141
Author(s):  
Julia Berest

The essay explores the publication and reception of J. S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women in Imperial Russia. Translated in 1869, the same year that the book came out in Britain, The Subjection of Women found a wide audience in Russia, attracting both feminist and conservative readers, many of whom had already been familiar with Mill’s name after the publication of his Principles of Political Economy in Russia nine years earlier. Until the end of Imperial period, the book was published in four translations and six editions, some of which were accompanied by extensive editorial introductions and followed by reviews in the leading Russian journals. The essay analyzes conservative and feminist responses to Mill’s ideas in the context of Russian intellectual and socio-political developments in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also highlights the similarities and differences in the reception of Mill’s feminist thought in Russia and in England.

Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler

The chapter explores how works of literature in the nineteenth century increasingly mapped the complex social structure of imperial Russia. It explains why social class and group identity features so prominently in the representation of characters in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The chapter demonstrates that different types of space, such as the capitals (St. Petersburg and Moscow), the village, or the estate, have specific cultural associations in literature. It discusses the phenomenon of the Petersburg mythology and the genre of Petersburg fiction, examines the provincial spaces as presented by Gogol and Chekhov, and colonial spaces such as the Caucasus as portrayed by Tolstoy.


Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.


2021 ◽  
pp. 389-405
Author(s):  
Lars Magnusson

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Cameralism, both as a discourse and as an administrative political economy, in both theory and practice. Attention has been drawn to how Cameralism—defined as thought and practice—should be understood. The aim of this article is to take a step back and focus on the historiography of Cameralism from the nineteenth century onwards. Even though many in recent times have challenged old and seemingly dated conceptualizations and interpretations, they are still very much alive. Most profoundly this has implied that Cameralism most often in the past has been acknowledged as an expression of—German. as it were—exceptionalism to the general history of economic doctrine and thinking.


Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Davis

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
GARETH STEDMAN JONES

ABSTRACTThis article examines radical and socialist responses to Malthus's Essay on population, beginning with the response of William Godwin, Malthus's main object of attack, but focusing particularly upon the position adopted by his most important admirer, Robert Owen. The anti-Malthus position was promoted and sustained both by Owen and the subsequent Owenite movement. Owenites stressed both the extent of uncultivated land and the capacity of science to raise the productivity of the soil. The Owenite case, preached weekly in Owenite Halls of Science, and argued by its leading lecturer, John Watts, made a strong impact upon the young Frederick Engels working in Manchester in 1843–4. His denunciation of political economy in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, heavily dependent upon the Owenite position, was what first encouraged Marx to engage with political economy. Marx initially reiterated the position of Engels and the Owenites in maintaining that population increase pressured means of employment rather than means of subsistence, and that competition rather than overpopulation caused economic crises. But in his later work, his main criticism of the Malthusian theory was its false conflation of history and nature.


1966 ◽  
Vol 15 (58) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Goldstrom

Throughout the nineteenth century, books, pamphlets and periodicals offered widely-ranging advice to the working class. One theme, appearing about 1820, was political economy: ‘Next to religion’, a royal commission reported, ‘the knowledge most important to a labouring man is that of the causes which regulate the amount of his wages, the hours of his work, the regularity of his employment, and the prices of what he consumes’. And Richard Whately, former Drummond Professor of political economy at Oxford, now archbishop of Dublin, urged similarly the need to teach political economy to the poor : ‘The lower orders’, he said, ‘would not … be, as now, liable to the misleading of every designing demagogue … If they were well grounded in the outlines of the science, it would go further towards rendering them provident, than any other scheme that could be devised.’


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