Non-acidic young ladies: Why Europe and Russia shook from Russian students in the 19th century

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Thanks to popular culture in recent years, a pattern has emerged that a typical Russian girl of the nineteenth century is a muslin young lady who just sits, sighs, and obeys mama and papa. But for the entire second half of the twentieth century, Russian girls - more precisely, Russian students - made a rustle both at home and abroad, so they did not know how to calm them down!

Thousands will come for me

Nadezhda Suslova, the first Russian woman doctor, while still just a girl, obtained permission to attend lectures at the Medical and Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. Of course, only the most progressive professors, whose names are now inscribed (for a completely different reason) in the history of Russian medicine, were admitted to her classes: Ivan Sechenov, Sergei Botkin and Ventslav Grubber. It was this precedent that forced the Ministry of Education of Russia in 1863, while developing a unified University Charter, to add the question about women to the questions sent to educational institutions of the empire: is it permissible to allow them to attend lectures and take exams?

Only two universities - Kharkov and Kiev - answered positively. St. Petersburg and Kazansky indicated that there would be no harm if women became free listeners, that is, they attended classes without examinations and receiving a diploma, while Moscow and Dorpat were categorically against combining women and higher education. The opinion of the latter won, and, after the adoption of a single charter, Suslova and the other girl were prohibited from attending lectures.

Nadezhda was not taken aback and went to enter the University of Zurich. The halls of this venerable institution had not seen the students before, but Suslova armed herself with a published scientific work (experiments on electrical irritation of human skin), a certificate of the courses she had attended, a willingness to take exams to continue education, and a couple of sharp words - they came in handy to ridicule the cowardice of conservatives who they are afraid to compete with some stupid woman on equal terms.

Taking into account the already begun training and good knowledge of the subjects, the commission enrolled Suslova at the university, not forgetting to announce that it was doing this for the sake of an exception: so that it would be clear that this woman cannot study normally and pass exams, and it is not men who are afraid to give a woman a try. Suslova wrote in her diary: naive, they say, they still do not know that thousands will come for me. And thousands came for her. Switzerland groaned at the Russian students.

They smoke, they propagate nihilism, they take away places from our guys

I must say that Suslova did not choose the University of Zurich out of the blue. Twenty years earlier it had been visited by two female audiences, so at least a little, and the path was beaten. Fearing that the professors would come to their senses, by the end of the year Suslova prepared for the doctoral degree exams and passed them brilliantly. This inspired at first dozens, and then hundreds of Russian girls. Parental groans and daughter persuasions were heard throughout the country: the girls wanted to go to Switzerland.

Among a certain part of the Russian intelligentsia, it was already in vogue to privately educate their daughters, so the question was not that the parents were not ready to see the girls as students. They were not afraid for morality either: they were sure that "our girls know how to behave" and will always fight back with a crowd. They were afraid of something completely different. The Russian diaspora in Switzerland at that time was a hotbed of radical political ideas. Parents were afraid to see their daughters recruited into revolutionaries.

Nevertheless, the same hope for a girl's team, where they might look after each other, made it possible for girlfriends to convince their families to let them go together to distant Zurich. Many girls escaped abroad, marrying a like-minded person and thus getting out from under parental authority.

In the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, the capital of Switzerland was simply overcrowded with Russian students, and this aroused the indignation of the local population (and not only). The fact is that Russian girls prepared for the entrance exams as desperately as they were for a battle; those who had already passed were training newcomers; at night, everyone could lay out the answer to any question on the necessary subjects and even go a little to the subjects that were just about to be taught. It was very difficult to bypass the girls from Russia at the introductory ones: they took all the first places, displacing a huge number of local guys-applicants from the list of those who passed.

The girls were not frightened by the high cost of living in Zurich and the impossibility of families to provide them with a comfortable life abroad. The girls really stayed together, familiar or not. They lived in a community, which had its own library (so that each new one did not have to go broke for books and textbooks), its own common dining room (it was cheaper to share food), and a mutual aid fund.

Girls from Russia turned out to be incredibly highly organized, many learned to endure hardships in the harsh conditions of girls' institutions (the so-called boarding schools), where the main condition of upbringing the administration considered strictness and lack of literally everything: sleep, warmth and food. Sick girls were treated by senior students - many studied in medicine, thus spending on doctors was excluded.

Not only did the Russian students stick to each other and occupy many places - they really recruited the most radical political ideas. Many were anarchists, nihilists, socialists. Sharing the view of feminists of our time that “the personal is political”, they defiantly smoked (this was considered a forbidden pleasure for a woman), cut their hair short, just as defiantly rejected the “cute” image, deliberately choosing dark colors and provoking modest, business-like styles of clothing (now it's hard to imagine, but in those days in Britain they even tried to recognize women as crazy through the courts because they did not follow the fashion for bustles, but wear a "hanging" straight skirt).

A crowd of girls in gloomy costumes, with a belligerent expression of unusual Slavic faces, with cigars in their teeth, shouting something about moneybags in the streets, seriously frightened the layman, and in 1873 the city administration officially forbade Russian girls to study in Zurich. As a result, the "Russian infection" spread to other cities in Europe. After the progressiveness of Switzerland, many other universities did not want to lag behind, and Russian students found where to find a job either as a student, or at least as a laboratory assistant.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Russian female students in Western countries accounted for 75% of all foreign women. Girls also made up the bulk of Russian students abroad in general.

Bestuzhevka-bessyzhevka

After a number of female students who received their education abroad began to work there - showing brilliant scientific results that went to other powers - Russia came to its senses and decided to close the brain drain, giving Russian women an opportunity to get higher education at home. In St. Petersburg, the Bestuzhev courses were opened, fortunately, the Ministry of Education did not have to try hard for this - it was enough to give light to a project prepared by the progressists for a long time. Among the teachers who themselves volunteered to teach women were Dmitry Mendeleev, Ivan Sechenov, Inokenty Annensky, Lev Shcherba and other luminaries. The courses were popularly called by the founder, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and therefore Bestuzhev.

The courses themselves were paid, and many of the students were poor. They came from a remote province, they did it by hook or by crook. There is a well-known historical anecdote: when St. Petersburg prostitutes were examined by a doctor in the usual manner, several dozen virgins, Jewish women from the provinces, were found at once. Since it was not forbidden to keep their virginity in the brothel, they were not deprived of their "yellow tickets". In fact, these girls signed up as prostitutes only because Jewish women were not allowed to enter the capital for any other occupation. All this host of provincial women with burning eyes started a bad habit of falling into hungry faints, and the administration of the courses had to find the possibility of a dining room where you could have lunch for literally 15 kopecks.

Very soon there were jokes about the best-cut-best-cut; girls-students were called desperate. It is not at all a matter of sexual promiscuity; on the contrary, the most desperate of the students massively despised sexual intemperance and all kinds of love, as distracting a real anarchist or nihilist from high goals (while studying in Europe, Kovalevskaya got a lot from her friends because her husband, unlike many others, was completely non-fictitious and she lived with him). The reason was the same: extraordinary ideological radicalism, from simple advocacy of equality between men and women with appropriate demonstrative behavior to participation in terrorist circles. The most radical were the representatives of the suburbs: Polish and Jewish.

At some point, the government even decided that it was better to have more scientists with Russian names working for the West than a crowd of terrorists in Russia, and tried to shut down the courses, but then changed their minds and severely harassed the rules of their attendance, to the point that students were forbidden outside lectures to communicate with each other under the threat of expulsion, and at lectures all conversations were listened to by a special Madame Inspector. They deliberately raised tuition fees, thinking of cutting off the radical provincial women by this; in response, the city council began to pay twelve scholarships annually to the most talented and poorest female students. In 1910, the Council of Professors allocated money for 50 scholarships. They were named after Leo Tolstoy, which is very curious, since the writer was great, as they said at the time, a "sexist" and did not approve of female education. Whether they wanted to troll him or just forgot to ask his opinion will remain a mystery for centuries.

The generation of shameless bestuzhev and nihilists who went to study abroad gave science and politics such names as Sophia Kovalevskaya, Nadezhda Suslova, Maria Curie, Yulia Lermontova, Maria Zhilova, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vera Balandina and many others. If you need to remind the younger generation that girls a hundred and fifty years ago were gentle, obedient and shy, you better not remember these names. They destroy the whole picture.

How schoolgirls were brought up in tsarist Russia, and what hardships they had to endurethat they could then endure any hardships, becoming students - this is a separate story that will tell that all the cadets and cadets there do not even know anything about the harsh discipline.