Marriage without Love, Love outside Marriage: A Woman in the Eighteenth-century Noble Family

This article refers to a set of documents revealing the relations within the noble family of the Ural industrialist A. F. Turchaninov and one of his daughters, Natalia Koltovskaya, in the eighteenth century. The author considers general problems of the private life of people of a privileged Russian class, namely, marital relations, possibilities, and conditions of dissolution of marriage, the position of women in the family and their rights, and the attitude to extramarital affairs in secular society. The article examines the reasons for the emergence and development of a provincial woman’s sense of independence and inner freedom, the origins of her rebellion against patriarchal family structures, for the right to decide for herself, and the extent to which such manifestations of “freedom” could be considered typical of Russia at that time, or whether they should be considered an exception to the general norm of behaviour. The story of N. A. Koltovskaya’s escape from her family, her relations with Emperor Paul I and Senator G. R. Derzhavin, shows the conformism of the supreme power, which manifested itself, on the one hand, in the awareness of the latter of the importance of its role in protecting the family and the moral foundations of the upper class, and, on the other hand, in the possibility of the upper class to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the situation and, if necessary, of circumventing the existing rules of law, of influencing government bodies (the Senate) in one’s own interests and, in general, in the interference of the supreme power in the family life of its subjects. The appendix to the article contains four documents: two “women’s” letters – one from the mother to Catherine II and the other from the daughter to Paul I, as well as letters from her lover (translated from French) and her husband.