At Home with the Gentry: A Victorian English Lady's Diary of Russian Country Life byAmelia Lyons; John McNairReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 747-749Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212973 .

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REVIEWS 747

impossible to get Kirgiz sheep, our supper consisted of soaked rusks of black bread, fried in the fat of a sheep's tail.'

His contribution to Russian knowledge of the Issyk-Kul portion of Kazakhstan, the Ili Valley and surrounding mountains must have been considerable, given that very few of his countrymen had travelled there previously. His diaries would be valuable for that reason alone. However, I was surprised at the richness of his writing, which extended far beyond natural phenomena. He composed perceptive vignettes characterizing the mining settlements in the Altai. He provided powerfully contrasting images of the good and the bad in Siberian administration (via portraits of Gasfort, Khomentovskii and Peremyshlskii). He depicted frontier characters such as the soldier-scientist Abakumov, and clashes between local indigenous groups (Sarybagish and Bogintsy). He wrote of Dostoevskii a personal friend and his relationship with Isaeva, whom Dostoevskii later married. He even set forth a plan for Russian conquest and colonization of the Ili Valley region. It is quite clear that things, scenes, events and people delighted and fascinated him. In short, this is one of the best travelogues I have read for some time. Its publication by the Hakluyt Society is a real benefit to anglophone readers.

A selection of the drawings sketched by Pavel Kosharov, 'my dear friend ... ] who had accompanied me throughout my entire Tian'-Shan' and Trans-

Ili travels of I 857, and endured all the labours and dangers of the journey with remarkable selflessness', are reproduced on fifteen colour plates. They give a vivid, if somewhat sombre, idea of the majestic topography traversed by the expedition.

Colin Thomas's brief but effective Introduction places Semenov firmly within his time and cultural milieu and assesses the significance of his travels. The text has been largely based on a Russian publication of I946, but the editor has juggled it somewhat to allow smoother reading and added numerous explanatory notes.

This is a splendid publication, for which I have only the highest praise.

Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies DAVID N. COLLINS University of Leeds

Lyons, Amelia. At Home with the Genthy. A Victorian English Lady's Diagy of Russian County Life. Edited by John McNair. Russian Memoirs Series, I.

Bramcote Press, Nottingham, I998. xxii + I 3' pp. Introduction. Notes. [8.95 (paperback).

THE author of this short memoir was an English gentlewoman who spent about five years (I849-54) in Russia during the last years of the reign of Nicholas I, including three years (i85 I-54) on the estate of the 'T' family in Tambov province (John McNair suggests that this may have been the Chicherins of Karaul, who in French-style transliteration would have become the 'Tchicherines'). The identity of the memoirist herself is likewise not known for certain, but the previously unpublished manuscript came to light in 1995 among the family papers of the Lyons family in Brisbane, and McNair plausibly argues that she was Amelia Lyons (I820-96), who is registered in

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748 SEER, 77, 4, I999

the i86i census as a 'professor of music', and who may well have been engaged as a governess or music teacher in the families where she lived.

The difficulty in precisely identifying Miss Lyons derives from the fact that her narration is in no sense an autobiography but, rather, a gracefully composed and well-observed chronicle (the term 'diary' used in the title is misleading, since this is a sequential account composed in retrospect) of life in a cultivated family from the upper-middle part of the provincial dvorianstvo. Miss Lyons's immediate motive for travelling to the provinces was the fact that she found St Petersburg society so Westernized: 'from a habit which the Russians have acquired of the manners and customs of foreigners, almost all appearance of Russian nationality in that city is lost' (p. 2). After a brief interlude in the capital, therefore (where she noticed, among other things, Nicholas I roaming the streets in badly maintained incognito, 'keeping his eyes bent upon the ground, but raising them from time to time, and casting a quick searching glance from side to side' [p. I2]), she duly made her way to Moscow and thence to Tambov.

Once arrived in 'the real Russia' she had sought, she, like many writers, both foreign and Russian, struggled to generalize about the nature of the 'national character' that she so firmly believed existed. Even in the dvorianstvo, there were huge divisions between modes of behaviour. Cultivated manners jostled with naked aggression (there is a chilling account of a woman landowner, with whom Miss Lyons stayed on her estate near Moscow, reducing a slipper to shreds by beating it round the face of a servant who had lost her dog, and thrashing her daughter so severely that she was stiff and bruised for a month). Thorough weekly scrubs in the bathhouse were combined with poor personal hygiene at other times (washing was supposed to be 'bad for the complexion'); and despite the luxurious appointments of grand houses, 'what is most necessary for comfort and convenience is entirely unknown to them' (p. 4: no doubt this refers to the recent English innovation of the water-closet). Miss Lyons does not attempt to establish any broader context for what she witnessed (for example, serfdom is never discussed as an institution in itself), venturing only some perfunctory remarks on the prevalence of benightedness and 'superstition'; but, to do her justice, she records that her acquaintances 'scarcely dare[d] to permit an opinion with regard to the government' (p. io), so there was not really any way in which she could have gained a grasp of the political system of the country that she was in. In compensation, her accounts of daily life record unexpected details seldom noticed by other writers: so, for example, when she describes the discomforts of travelling in a vozok ('the tumbling continues long after the amusement afforded by its novelty has ceased', p. 28), or the delights of an expedition by raft; or the monotony of Lenten observance in a religious household where the fast was strictly observed, and where, during Holy Week, 'the only sound that from time to time broke the mournful silence of the house was the monotonous voice of the priest' (p. 48). A shrewd and often humorous witness, she offers a closely observed view of a group most familiar to anglophone (and indeed Russian) readers from literary accounts such as Turgenev's Dvorianskoe gnezdo and Ottsy i deti, and from openly nostalgic

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REVIEWS 749

memoirs of country childhoods, such as Sergei Aksakov's Semeina'a khronika and Tolstoi's Detstvo.

Miss Lyons's account is so vivid, fluent and accessible that it scarcely requires detailed editorial comment, and John McNair has worked tactfully, largely confining interpolations to a word or two needed for clarification, or to supplying the correct orthography and meanings of Russian words (Miss Lyons knew no Russian, and transcribed by ear: so, for instance, vozok emerged as vasok, Kolomna as Kalomna, and Riazan' as Reizan). McNair's short Introduction does an excellent job of setting the memoir in context. This attractively presented little book, illustrated with a watercolour of a generic 'Russian scene' on the front cover, no doubt found its way under plenty of Christmas trees when first published in late I998; but it is also a valuable resource for study of dvorianskii byt in the mid-nineteenth century, and could profitably be employed as background reading for courses on Russian literature of the period. All in all, it is an excellent first volume in a series that deserves to thrive.

New College CATRIONA KELLY

Oxford

Hartley, Janet M. A Social Histogy of the Russian Empire I650-I825. Social History of Europe Series. Longman, London and New York, I999.

xi + 3I2 pp. Notes. Maps. Bibliography. Chronology. Glossary. Index. f 1 4.99 (paperback).

FEW textbooks are as clearly written and as easily accessible as this one. Following a brief statement of coverage and a hint at the historiography, each chapter is divided into readily assimilable thematic sections and each closes with a summary of developments over the whole period. Already an expert indexer, Janet Hartley now provides a twenty-five-page whopper that covers everything from acrobats to whistling, and except for the fact that Willard Sunderland has accidentally become 'Sutherland' in the bibliography at page 273, the rest of the apparatus is exemplary. Nor does Hartley merely reprise familiar material. On the contrary, one can think of plenty of books, nominally classified as works of research, which contain less original information than this one. What we are offered here is not only a synthesis of the best scholarship on the subject, not all of it recent, but also the fruit of the author's own archival forays. The new material is all the more valuable in that Hartley's particular expertise lies in the towns and the heterogeneous urban population who often find themselves squeezed into obscurity between the nobles and peasants who dominate most Russian social history. The text is further enlivened by extensive quotation from an impressive range of newspapers, memoirs and foreign travellers' accounts, some of them little known.

Following a brief statement of the author's two guiding themes 'the relationship between society and the state and the degree of stratification and diversity between and within social groups' (p. i) the book opens with a sketch of demographic change. There follow well-organized discussions of the structure and composition of Russia's social estates; the rights and obligations of the various social groups; the role of the institutions that represented them;

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