Images of Private Life and Gender in the Povest&soft; vremennyx let
Benjamin M.
Sutcliffe
The Povest&soft; vremennyx let (PVL) is
an engaging yet complex venue for representing gender and private life
in Kievan Rus&soft;. Private life and gender are themselves
problematic terms within Russian historiography: gender has been
under-researched in medieval scholarship, and the Western term
private life
must be examined alongside the Russian
concept byt.
This paper is indebted to Natal&soft;ja
Pu&shachek;kareva's &Chachek;astnaja &zhachek;izn&soft; russkoj
&zhachek;en&shachek;&chachek;iny, a groundbreaking work
exhibiting both the promise and the peril of applying gender and
private life studies to Rusian culture: how valid is her application
of the Annales school conception of private life to a culture which
conceived of the individual in a different manner? How is
representation of private life influenced by the PVL, a
document explicitly devoted to integrating the individual into a
public and politicized conception of history? How are gender and
private life complicated by the cultural ferment of pre-Mongol Kiev,
in which differing cultural modes (paganism, Christianity, elite
lifestyles, peasant lifestyles, oral tradition, literacy) all made
claims on the image of the individual? Is private life a spatial or
metaphorical entity in this period? These questions are answered by
focusing on close readings of several passages from the
PVL. In addition to the PVL, analyses by
Pu&shachek;kareva, Eve Levin, Georges Duby, Jurij Lotman, Roman
Jakobson, and Svetlana Boym show how theories of gender and private
life can be applied in a manner compatible with the cultural milieux
of Kievan Rus&soft;.