There is an oratory communicating with this four-windowed apartment, also two rooms used as nurseries; one for boys, the other for girls. In these close, small rooms the children were reared, for it was the habit of the Russians not only to hide their children from all strangers, but to keep them from all but their most intimate friends and relatives.
A small doorway leads to a steep narrow staircase communicating with the top storey, the terem or women’s apartments, consisting of a reception room, a bed-chamber and turret; from these rooms the nursery may also be reached by a still narrower staircase. The walls of the reception room are covered with stamped leather, the woodwork is carved in high relief, the stiff benches round the wall have stuffed seats and are covered with brocade. There are a number of old coffers and close wardrobes, also some curious clothing is displayed in cases.
The four-post bedstead cannot be considered a native institution. It is peculiarly Scandinavian. The English adopted it from the Danes; the English reintroduced it into Russia, finding that the Russians themselves slept either on the stove, or on an eastern divan. More than once the early English ambassadors to Russia have complained that bedsteads were lacking, and it was long before their use became general.
The boyards kept their women folk hidden away in the terem in almost eastern seclusion. Jenkinson states that “the women be very obedient to their husbands, and are kept straitly from going abroad but at some seasons.” Other travellers write that the women are hardly used by their husbands, who beat them unmercifully; “and the women, though young and strong, never resent even if the husband be old and weak.” Herberstein relates that a foreigner in Moscow married to a Russian woman was upbraided by his wife because he never beat her as Russian husbands did their wives, and that he then beat her to please her; but as subsequently he cut off her legs, and finally her head also, the story is worth nothing as evidence of a custom.
Sylvester in his “Domostroi” says a wife ought never to take the title of Lady, but always to look on her husband as Lord. She was to concern herself only with household affairs, and might be treated like a slave; only the husband is enjoined “not to use a too thick stick, or a staffe tipped with iron, nor to humiliate unduly by flogging before men.”
Out of doors she was carried in a shuttered litter, and she wore the fata or veil; a special part of the church was assigned women, but the wives and daughters of the boyards usually worshipped in their own private chapels, and went to the Cathedrals but upon special and state occasions. Then it was that suitors caught a glimpse of their future brides, and received glances which bespake love.
As among eastern nations, the bridegroom usually did not see his wife before marriage. When the preliminaries had been arranged and settled by third parties, the bridegroom sent a present of sweetmeats and a whip to his bride elect, who always spent the night before the marriage ceremony at the house of the bridegroom’s parents. On the day of the marriage he put into one of his boots sweetmeats or a trinket, into the other a whip; the newly wedded wife took off the boots, and to remove first that which contained the trinket was considered the omen of a happy life for the woman. “But if she light on the boot with a whip in it, she is reckoned among the unfortunate and gets a bride-lash for her pains, which is but the earnest penny of her future entertainment.” There were also other little passes during the complex ceremony, the winning of any indicating the mastery during wedded life.
Such was the woman’s lot in the seventeenth century, but much was done to better it before Peter the Great introduced western freedom. Collins wrote in 1674:—
“The Russian discipline to their wives is very rigid and severe, more inhuman in times past than at present. Yet three years ago a Moscow merchant beat his wife as long as he was able, with a whip two inches round, and then caused her to put on a smock dript in brandy, to which he set fire, and so the poor creature perished miserably in flames. Yet none prosecuted her death, for there is no law against killing a woman, or slave, if it happens on correction. Some of these beasts will tie up their wives by the hair of the head and whip them stark naked. Now parents make better matches for their daughters, obliging husbands to contract to use them kindly, without whipping, striking or kicking them.”
Even Peter’s code was cruel: it was during his reign that Le Bruyn saw a woman executed in Moscow by being buried alive; covered up to her neck in the dank black soil she lived but two days, whereas, on the same authority, there were others who lingered ten or more. In Russia, as in countries further west, the crime of petty treason, the murder of a husband, was considered almost as heinous as high treason, and punished accordingly.