'Oh, come! Our world was quite another! We'd never heard of love, you see. Why, my good husband's sainted mother Would just have been the death of me!' 'Then how'd you come to marry, nanny?' 'The will of God, I guess… My Danny Was younger still than me, my dear, And I was just thirteen that year. The marriage maker kept on calling For two whole weeks to see my kin, Till father blessed me and gave in. I got so scared - my tears kept falling; And weeping, they undid my plait, Then sang me to the churchyard gate.
'And so they took me off to strangers… But you're not even listening, pet.'63
The scene encapsulates the contrast between the two different cultures - the European and the folk - in Russian society. Whereas Tatiana looks at marriage through the prism of romantic literature, her nurse regards it from the viewpoint of a patriarchal culture where individual sentiments or choices about love are foreign luxuries. Tolstoy draws the same contrast in Kitty's wedding scene. During the ceremony Dolly thinks back tearfully to her own romance with Stiva Oblonsky and, 'forgetting the present' (meaning all his sexual infidelities), 'she remembered only her young and innocent love'. Meanwhile, in the entrance to the church stands a group of ordinary women who have come in from the street to 'look on breathless with excitement' as the bridal couple take their marriage vows. We listen to them chattering among themselves:
'Why is her face so tear-stained? Is she being married against her will?' 'Against her will to a fine fellow like that? A prince, isn't he?' 'Is that her sister in the white satin? Now hear how the deacon will roar:
"Wife, obey thy husband!" ' 'Is it the Tchudovsky choir?' 'No, from the Synod.' 'I asked the footman. It seems he's taking her straight to his home in the
country. They say he's awfully rich. That's why she's being married to him.' 'Oh no. They make a very well-matched pair.'
'What a dear little creature the bride is - like a lamb decked for the slaughter. Say what you like, one does feel sorry for the girl.'64
'A lamb decked for the slaughter' is perhaps not how Kitty felt - her love affair with Levin was a true romance - but, if Sonya's own experience is anything to go by, she might have found some points of contact with these women from the street.
Sonya was eighteen when she married Tolstoy - rather young by European standards but not by Russian ones. Eighteen was in fact the average age of marriage for women in nineteenth-century Russia - far younger than even in those pre-industrial parts of western Europe where women tended to marry relatively early (around the age of twenty-five).65 (For the past 300 years no other European country has
had an average female age at first marriage as low as twenty years -and in this respect Russian marriage more closely fits the Asiatic pattern.)66 Tatiana's nurse was, therefore, not exceptional in marrying so young, even though thirteen was the youngest she could marry under Russian canon law. Serf owners liked their peasant girls to marry young, so that they could breed more serfs for them; the burden of taxation could be easily arranged so that peasant elders took the same opinion. Sometimes the serf owners enforced early marriages -their bailiffs lining up the marriageable girls and boys in two separate rows and casting lots to decide who would marry whom.67 Among the upper classes (though not the merchantry) girls married at an older age, although in the provinces it was not unusual for a noble bride to be barely older than a child. Sonya Tolstoy would have sympathized with Princess Raevskaya, who became a widow at the age of thirty-five
– by which time she had given birth to seventeen children, the first at the age of just sixteen.68
The arranged marriage was the norm in peasant Russia until the beginning of the twentieth century. The peasant wedding was not a love match between individuals ('We'd never heard of love,' recalls Tatiana's nurse). It was a collective rite intended to bind the couple and the new household to the patriarchal culture of the village and the Church. Strict communal norms determined the selection of a spouse
