XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

The life of a Russian nobleman of the 18th - early 19th century was divided into two parts: the first part was occupied with family life and economic work of various kinds, the second part was official, the nobleman was a military and static servant who served his sovereign and his motherland. But a special part of the life of a nobleman was devoted to evening "gatherings" - a ball or a guest night - in this way a nobleman realized his social needs in the society of people equal to him. "One of the masquerade days was only for the court and for those whom the empress wanted to allow; the other - for all the dignitaries of the city, starting with those who possessed the rank of a colonel, and for those who served in the guard in officer’s ranks; sometimes nobility and the most eminent merchants were also allowed to be present at this ball." [1, p.107]. Thus, balls were a place where a nobleman could easily communicate, rest and dance. But at the same time balls were a place of public representation, a form of collective life and social organization. So secular life got the value of a social cause.

The consequence of the issue of the organizational forms of secular life, which was both common for the people and for the boyar-noble environment, which were to give way to the noble structure of life, was the ritualization of the ball, the creation of the sequence of parts, the identification of stable and mandatory elements. Since internal organization became important and had to define the type of social behavior within noble culture. The ball became a theatrical performance, in which particular patterns of behavior matched each action. At the same time, the deviation from the rules became even more interesting, showing the confrontation to the order.

The ball was quite arranged in an interesting way, had a single whole subject to firm laws, the degree of this firmness varied between thousands of balls in Winter Palace coincided with particularly special occasions, and small balls in the houses of provincial landlords with dancing to a serf orchestra or even to the violin. The fact that the ball involved composition and strict internal organization restricted freedom. The words "ball" and its derivatives are used 35 times in the text, which testifies to the extensive information about this object and its inherence in the secular life of the highest nobility.

The strict organization of the ball caused the need for another element that would play the role of "organized disorganization" in this system, of planned and envisaged chaos. A masquerade assumed this role [2, p.91].

A masquerade contradicted deep church traditions and was a sign of devildom, so this European tradition infiltrated noble life slowly and with a difficulty. A masquerade was a secret fun. The elements of blasphemy and rebellion appeared in two characteristic episodes: staging coups, both Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine II changed clothes into male guards’ uniform and rode horses in a male manner. In this case changing clothes had a symbolic character: the woman - claimant to the throne turned into the emperor. "In 1744 in Moscow the Empress decided to force all men to appear at court masquerades in women's clothes, and all women - in men's clothes, without masks on their faces. Men were wearing big skirts on a whalebone, in women's dresses and with female hairstyles and ladies were wearing a kind of male clothes appropriate for these occasions. Men did not like these days of transformation; most of them were in the worst of spirits because they felt they were ugly in their attires; women seemed to be small unattractive boys, and the oldest ladies had thick and short legs, which did not make them pretty. In fact, only the empress herself was absolutely beautiful in men’s clothes, as she was very tall and a bit plump; a men’s attire fitted her in a wonderful way" [1, p.107].

Military public changing of clothes was followed by a masquerade game. Catherine II found it funny to hold completely different masquerades secretly in the closed room of the Small Hermitage. So, for example, with her own hand she drew a detailed plan of the holiday, which provided separate rooms for men and women to change clothes, so that all the ladies would appear in men 's clothes, and all the gentlemen - in ladies’ one. Catherine was not disinterested: such an attire emphasized her slenderness, but huge guards, of course, would look funny [2, p.100].

Catherine wrote: "The Grand Prince invented to arrange masquerades in my room; he forced his and my servants and my women to dress up and forced them to dance in my bedroom; he was playing the violin himself and dancing a bit. This continued until late at night; as far as I was concerned, under the pretext of headache or fatigue, I lay down on a canape but always being attired and I missed to death because of the ridiculous nature of these masquerades, which extremely entertained him" [1, p.42].

Everyday behavior of a Russian nobleman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was characterized by the distinction between ordinary and "theatrical" behavior. French language and dancing created the need for special teachers. Nobleman’s way of life promoted a complex system of training, which was not oriented to simple imitation. This process developed to such degree that in 1812 nobles living in the capital had to learn Russian as a foreign language. The system of nobility’s upbringing and way of life introduced a whole layer of behavior constrained by "decency" and the system of "theatrical" gesture to such a degree that it gave rise to the opposite desire – longing for freedom and rejection of conditional restrictions. As a result, the legalized norms of "decency" included drinking as "truly Hussar" behavior, accessible love adventures (which is also reflected in Catherine’s II "Memoirs"). At the same time, the stricter the life is organized, the more attractive are the most extreme forms of an everyday riot [2, p.188].

The materials of the verbal-semantic level show that Catherine’s the Great “Memoirs” contain an abundance of general political vocabulary and this is due to the fact that the Empress described himself as the Grand Princess, the wife of the Grand Duke, and also depicted the life of the Russian court and society, morals and customs of the nobility in detail and with great truthfulness (Empress Elizabeth, Peter III and others) [3,p.148-152]. And the word “nobility” was used 21 times in the text.

Thus, summing up the description of the noblemen’s life in Catherine's II "Memoirs", one can state that the source is very informative on this issue, as the life of the nobility. The way of life of the nobility, especially the court one, is described most fully. We learn a lot of information about the behavior, appearance and education of the nobility of the time. This source is subjective like all the sources of personal origin. It is considered in historiography that this source is rather unreliable, taking into account that there are several revisions that differ in their content.

Литература:

Записки императрицы Екатерины II // Россия XVIII столетия в изданиях Вольной русской типографии А.И. Герцена и П.Н. Огарева. Справочный том. М.: ,1992.

Лотман Ю.М. Беседы о русской культуре: быт и традиции русского дворянства (XVIII – начала XIX в.)/ СПб. 1994.

Никитина А.Ю. Вербально-семантический уровень языковой личности Екатерины II // Вестник Чувашского университета. 2013. № 4.