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among his female serfs: anyone who tried to oppose it, including his own wife, was physically beaten or locked up.⁶¹ Examples of such behaviour abound in the memoir literature of the nineteenth century.⁶² The most detailed and interesting such memoir was written by Maria Neverova, a former serf from the harem of an octogenarian nobleman called Pyotr Koshkarov. Twelve to fifteen of his prettiest young serf girls were strictly segregated in a special female quarter of his house and placed under the control of the main housekeeper, a sadistic woman called Natalia Ivanovna, who was fiercely devoted to Koshkarov. Within the harem was the master's room. When he went to bed he was joined by all his girls, who said their prayers with him and placed their mattresses around his bed. Natalia Ivanovna would undress the master and help him into bed and tell them all a fairy tale. Then she would leave them together for the night. In the morning Koshkarov would dress and say his prayers, drink a cup of tea and smoke his pipe, and then he would begin 'the punishments'. Disobedient girls, or the ones it simply pleased him to punish, would be birched or slapped across the face; others would be made to crawl like dogs along the floor. Such sadistic violence was partly sexual 'play' for Koshkarov. But it also served to discipline and terrorize. One girl, accused of secret liaisons with a male servant, was locked for a whole month in the stocks. Then, before the whole serf community, the girl and her lover were flogged by several men until each collapsed from exhaustion and the two poor wretches were left as bloody heaps upon the floor. Yet alongside such brutality Koshkarov took great care to educate and improve his girls. All of them could read and write, some of them in French; Neverova even knew by heart Pushkin's Fountain of Bakhchisarai. They were dressed in European clothes, given special places in church, and when they were replaced in the harem by younger girls they were married to the master's hunting serfs, the elite of his male servants, and given dowries.⁶³

By the beginning of the 1790s Praskovya had become Sheremetev's unofficial wife. It was no longer just the pleasures of the flesh that attracted him to her but, as he said, the beauty of her mind and soul as well. For the next ten years the count would remain torn between his love for her and his own high position in society. He felt that it was morally wrong not to marry Praskovya but his aristocratic pride would

not allow him to do so. Marriages to serfs were extremely rare in the status-obsessed culture of the eighteenth-century Russian aristocracy - although they would become relatively common in the nineteenth century - and unthinkable for a nobleman as rich and grand as him. It was not even clear, if he married Praskovya, whether he would have a legitimate heir.

The count's dilemma was one faced by noblemen in numerous comic operas. Nikolai Petrovich was a man susceptible to the cult of sentimentalism that swept over Russia in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Many of the works which he produced were variations on the conflict between social convention and natural sentiment. One was a production of Voltaire's Nanine (1749), in which the hero, Count Olban, in love with his poor ward, is forced to choose between his own romantic feelings and the customs of his class that rule against marriage to the humble girl. In the end he chooses love. The parallels in his own life were so obvious that Nikolai Petrovich gave the role of Nanine to Anna Izumudrova, even though Praskovya was his leading actress at this time.⁶⁴ In the theatre the public sympathized with the unequal lovers and applauded the basic Enlightenment ideal that informed such works: that all people are equal. But it did not take the same view in real life.

Praskovya's secret relationship with the count placed her in an almost impossible position. For the first few years of their liaison she remained his serf and lived among the other serfs at Kuskovo. But the truth could not be concealed from her fellow serfs, who became resentful of her privileged position and called her spiteful names. Her own family tried to take advantage of the situation and cursed her when she failed to make their petty requests to the count. The count, meanwhile, was entertaining thoughts of leaving her. He would tell her of his duties to his family, of how he had to marry someone equal in status, while she would try to conceal her torment, listening silently and bursting into tears only after he had gone. To protect Praskovya and himself from malicious gossip, the count built a special house, a simple wooden dacha, near the main mansion so that he could visit her in privacy. He forbade her to see anyone, or to go anywhere except to the theatre or to church: all she could do to while away the days was play the harpsichord or do needlework. But this could not prevent