1838), before retreating to provincial obscurity in Yelabuga, where she was known as an amiable eccentric woman with semi-masculine mannerisms and dress. Durova’s memoirs omit inconvenient facts (an early marriage; the birth of her son), but she was a gifted storyteller, and her tales are rich in astute, humorous observations of military life as an outsider saw it. Her biography, heavily romanticized, became a propaganda tool during World War II, but The Cavalry Maiden was reprinted in full in the Soviet Union only in the 1980s. See also: FRENCH WAR OF 1812; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; NAPOLEON I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Durova, Nadezhda. (1988). The Cavalry Maiden, ed. and tr. Mary Fleming Zirin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
“Dvoeverie”-“double-belief” or “dual faith”-is a highly influential concept in Russian studies, which began to be questioned in the 1990s. Since the 1860s, historians have used it to describe the conscious or unconscious preservation of pagan beliefs and/or rituals by Christian communities (generally as a syncretic faith containing Christian and pagan elements; a form of peasant/female resistance to elite/patriarchal Christianity; or two independent belief-systems held concurrently). This concept has colored academic perception of Russian medieval (and often modern) spirituality, leading to a preoccupation with identifying latent paganism in Russian culture. It has often been considered a specifically Russian phenomenon, with the medieval origins of the term cited as evidence.
This definition of dvoeverie is supported in part by one text, the eleventh-century Sermon of the Christlover, but its notable absence in other anti-pagan polemics (including those regularly cited as evidence of double-belief), plus many uses of the word in different contexts, lead one to conclude that the term was not originally understood in this way. Dvoeverie probably originated as a calque from Greek, via the translated Nomocanon. While at least six Greek constructions are translated as dvoeverie or a lexical derivative thereof, the common thread is that of being “in two minds”; being unable to decide or agree, or being unable to perceive the true nature of something. In the majority of these cases, there is no question of there being two faiths in which the practitioner believes simultaneously or even alternately, and sometimes no question of religious faith at all.
In other pre-Petrine texts, dvoeverie means “du-plicitous” or “hypocritical,” or relates to an inability or unwillingness to identify solely with the one true and Orthodox faith. Lutherans and those fraternizing with Roman Catholics, rather than semi-converted heathens, were the target of this pejorative epithet. See also: ORTHODOXY; PAGANISM
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Levin, Eve. (1993) “Dvoeverie and Popular Religion.” In Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia ed. S. K. Batalden. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Rock, Stella. (2001). “What’s in a Word? A Historical Study of the Concept Dvoeverie.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 35 (1):19-28.
The term dvorianstvo is sometimes translated as “gentry,” but often historically such a translation is simply incorrect. At other times, such as between the years 1667 and 1700, and again after 1762 (or 1785) until 1917, “gentry” is misleading but not totally wrong.
The term has its origins in the later Middle Ages in the word dvor, “princely court.” In that historical context, the dvorianstvo were those who worked at the court of a prince. Originally such people might be free men, or they might be slaves of the prince or someone else. Moreover, these men, most of whom were cavalrymen and a few of whom were administrators, were wholly dependent on the grand prince for their positions, status, and livelihoods. They did not have lands, but lived off booty, funds collected in the line of governmental duty, and funds collected by others for the sovereign’s treasury. Their social origins were most diverse. A handful were princes (descendants of one of the princely houses circulating in Rus’: the Rus’ Riurikids, the Lithuanian Gedemids, or Turkic/Mongol nobility), some were slaves, others were of diverse origins. A prince or nobleman had no right to be a member of the dvorianstvo, for such men got their positions because they were selected by the grand prince and served at his pleasure. Promotion within the dvorianstvo was meritocratic, however service might be defined. Membership in the dvorianstvo conferred no special status, and in law such men could be punished like everyone else, including flogging.
The origins of the early dvorianstvo are obscure, but around 1480, the Moscow government began to formalize the situation when it initiated the first service class revolution after the annexation of Novgorod. Moscow initiated the service land system (pomestie) on the lands annexed from Novgorod, and then gradually extended it to the entire Muscovite state. By 1556 most of the inhabited land (which did not belong to the church) in central Muscovy was included in the fund that had to support cavalrymen. The cavalrymen based in Moscow were the upper service class; those in the provinces were the middle service class. (Members of the lower service class did not have lands for their support and lived off government cash salaries, and their own extra-military employment; they were arquebusiers-later in the seventeenth century musketeers, fortress gatekeepers, artillerymen, some cossacks, and others.) Members of both the upper and middle service classes comprised the dvorianstvo and were the core of the army. They had to render military service almost every year, typically on the southern frontier against the Tatars, Nogais, Kalmyks, Kazakhs, and others who raided Muscovy in search of slaves and other booty. The dvorianstvo had to render military service on the western frontier whenever called against the Poles, Lithuanians, and Swedes, where the prizes for the victors were landed territory and booty (including slaves) of every sort.
Between 1480 and 1667 the life of the dvo-rianstvo was very hard. Military service was basically for life, from about age fifteen until immobility compelled retirement from service. Those who could no longer serve as cavalrymen still could be called upon to render “siege service,” which meant standing up in castles and shooting arrows out at besieging enemies. In the seventeenth century gunpowder arms replaced the arrows. Only when the member of the dvorianstvo was dead or could only be carried around in a litter was he allowed to retire from service. Members of the provincial dvo-rianstvo had the ranks of provincial dvorianin and syn boyarsky and were supported primarily by a handful of peasant households (government cash stipends were meant to purchase military goods in the market, such as cavalry horses, sabers, and guns in the seventeenth century and later). In the provinces they lived little better than most of their peasants and until the post-1649 period were as illiterate as their peasants also. The capital dvo-rianstvo, living in Moscow, had the ranks of bo-yarin, okol’nichii, stol’nik, striapchii, and Moscow dvorianin, lived the same rigorous lives as did their country cousins, although with higher incomes. Both rose in the dvorianstvo on the basis of perceived meritocratic service by petitioning for promotion. Because of their precarious economic positions, the provincial dvorianstvo were highly conscious of how many rent-paying peasants they had. Should their peasants depart, they were in
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straits. They were the ones who forced the enserf-ment of the peasantry between the 1580s and 1649.
The Ulozhenie of 1649, which completed the en-serfment by binding the peasants to the land, was a triumph for the provincial dvorianstvo, and a defeat for the capital dvorianstvo, who profited from peasant mobility. The Thirteen Years’ War (1654-1667) delivered the coup de grace to the middle service class provincial dvorianstvo by illustrating definitively the obsolescence of bow-and-arrow warfare. Moreover, much of the dvorianstvo fell into Turkish captivity, where many of them remained for a quarter century. From then until 1700, the dvorianstvo occasionally fought the Turks, but otherwise did little to merit their near-monopoly over serf labor. Reflecting the fact that Russia was a very poor country with a very unproductive agriculture, the dvo-rianstvo comprised less than 1 percent of the population, a much smaller fraction than in other countries. After the annexation of Poland, the dvo-rianstvo of the Russian Empire rose by 1795 to 2.2 percent of the population.
At the battle of Narva in 1700 Charles XII defeated Peter the Great, who responded by launching the second service class revolution. This meant putting the dvorianstvo back in harness. In 1722 he introduced the Table of Ranks, which formalized the Muscovite system of promotion based on merit. Rigorous lifetime military or
