Katherine Pickering Antonova, “An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia” (Oxford UP, 2012)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 17, 2014 · 55m

Katherine Pickering Antonova‘s An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2012) investigates the Chikhachevs, members of the middling nobility in the pre-emancipation era. The book’s principal characters are Andrei, a graphomaniacal paterfamilias who (conveniently for historians) enlists his entire family in diary keeping and presides over the education of his son and serfs with love, moral clarity, and despotic meticulousness. And Natalia, the indefatigable khoziaika, who runs the estate, manages the budget, negotiates with serfs, and…