Social performance and social status at Russian court in the 1760s: a sociocultural perspective on marital infidelity

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The chapter studies a notorious marital conflict in a noble family in order to identify what kind of social roles were attributed to its main protagonists and how the latter navigated between these roles. Dramatic texts and performances provide the language for interpreting social situations. But the interpretations could diverge from each other, and to impose its vision of the role distribution in the conflict meant for one side to prevail. In order to tackle the social use of dramatic models, the chapter revises Yurii Lotman’s semiotic approach to the social performance of the self, introducing, in the analysis of individual strategies, the frame of group conflict. The chapter draws on two sets of data: writings documenting the conflict and reactions to it from the Russian nobility (mostly private sources); and fictional texts, which treat the subject of family conflicts, relevant for the studied social group, the educated St. Petersburg court nobility of the 1760s.