One summer night in 1764, in a remote village in Oryol province, a company of noblemen convened on a country estate. The pleasant evening was suddenly interrupted by a quarrel between two guests, cousins Danila and Vasily Psishchev. Vasily, who started the quarrel, did not limit himself to words but tried to provoke a fight. Danila, however, did not respond. Vasily then rushed outside, grabbed a stray pig that happened to be running in the yard, and threw it at Danila’s wife, Ulyana, who was sitting at a window inside the house.
The pig hit the woman hard, but the affront to her honor was the greater damage. At least, that’s how she felt, and so she filed a complaint at the local court. The ensuing investigation lasted almost 30 years, well beyond the deaths of both the victim and the offender. Only in 1792 would the plaintiff’s heiress drop all charges and have the case finally closed, thus leaving the offense unpunished and the insult unavenged.
Historians have argued that honor underlay the moral systems of European communities at this time, determining social interactions. Honor gave an individual his or her reputation and sense of public esteem. And damage to honor, or dishonor, was often compared to death.
In early modern Russia, a person’s honor identified not only his or her reputation, but also his or her family’s status within the local community and society at large. Insult to a woman’s honor, and sexual assault in particular, was taken seriously by the law in Russia, and women often won litigation and received substantial compensation.
So why then had the two Oryol men not resolved their quarrel via a duel or a simple fistfight? Why had one of them insulted a woman instead? Why did Ulyana’s honor suffer to such a degree that she took her case to court and continued fighting for the rest of her life? Did the “tool” of the offense – “a live stray pig,” as Ulyana testified in her complaint – play a role? And, finally, why did her lawsuit not succeed? This was, after all, the second half of the eighteenth century – a time when women’s position in society, due to Catherine the Great’s enlightened reforms, was experiencing a substantial improvement.
The answer to the first question is easy. A duel was hardly an option in 1764: not only did contemporary Russian law severely punish duelists, but the practice was virtually unheard of in the provinces. Second, Ulyana’s husband, as the court investigation revealed, had a reason for carefully avoiding a fistfight. The assault on Ulyana, it turns out, was not an accident: damage to a woman’s honor was often used to hurt men in a conflict situation, as a way to challenge the entire family’s standing.
the night of the quarrel, tension between the two cousins was evident from the outset. Vasily (the pig-thrower) arrived “later and separately” from the other guests, was, in Ulyana’s opinion, “acting quite crazily,” and finally insulted her “in front of the whole company.” The latter circumstance seems to be extremely important to Ulyana.
So who were the people at the gathering and why was this insult so painful? The main actors in this story – members of the Psishchev family – have left no trace in Russian history. Their names appear in no encyclopedias or history books, nor do the published general registers of the Russian nobility provide any information on this Oryol clan. On the local level, however, they were rather visible – they purchased land and peasants, petitioned authorities for inherited property and were involved in litigation over various matters, honor among them. At the time of the “pig incident,” Ulyana Psishcheva, née Lutovinova, was a woman in her prime. She came from one of the region’s richest and most powerful families, known for their arbitrariness, cruelty and unrestrained tempers, as they felt they were the “true masters” of the province.
Although Ulyana’s immediate family was not rich, she could count on her relatives’ reputation to give her a sense of exceptionalism in the local community. Married off in 1746, at the age of about 13 (the average age for noble girls to get married at that time), for her dowry she received a village of 25 male peasants. Her parents had reason to hope for her promising future with her much older groom, the 44-year-old lieutenant Danila Psishchev (1702 – c. 1788). Although Danila was also not rich – he possessed only 36 male serfs – his career was progressing. He had first served in the Life Guards, the prestigious regiment which guarded the throne, then transferred to the Moscow dragoon regiment.
In 1764 Danila, then 62 years old, held the rank of major, likely retired. The couple lived on Danila’s hereditary estate in the village of Semyonovka Psishcheva in Oryol province’s Karachev district. There, as well as in other parts of the province, they owned considerable tracts of land and about a hundred male serfs – enough to position them among their peers as apparently well-to-do landowners. Importantly, they had good connections in high society through Danila’s brother Alexander, a retired colonel living in Moscow and related by marriage to the capital’s elite families. Alexander served as guardian to the young sons of Darya Saltykova, the notorious Saltychikha, whose case of murdering nearly a hundred of her serfs was supervised by the Empress herself. [bit.ly/saltychikha] Alexander’s son served as a page at the imperial court in St. Petersburg.
Ulyana’s offender, Vasily Psishchev, had also served in the Life Guards, and was trusted, in 1743, to escort to Siberian exile Anna Bestuzheva, convicted of conspiracy against Elizabeth. [bit.ly/bestuzheva] He retired from military service rather early, entered civil service and acquired, by 1764, the rank of titular councilor. Vasily lived with his family in the village of Semyonovka Psishcheva, but had less property there than Danila, just 23 male serfs. He, however, had good connections in local offices.
The rest of the company gathered that evening were of lesser importance and wealth. The host, Mikhaila Sopov, was of rather low social origin – an undersecretary’s son. His wife Agafia, noble by birth, owned an estate in the village of Lunino, where the gathering took place, along with some other property in the region, but not more than a dozen male peasants, so the couple was anything but rich. Other guests were “honorable people” (i.e., nobles) but petty landlords, as well: the hostess’s 44-year-old brother, lieutenant Sergei Somov, proprietor of the other part of Lunino village, with 40 serfs; the “landowner” Anna Sibileva, and ensign Mikhaila Alafson, of the “Lithuanian nation,” who, having served in the Russian military and civil service for more than 30 years, owned only two male serfs. Alafson was the only person with no family ties to anyone else at the gathering. Anna Sibileva was Danila’s sister, whereas Agafia Sopova and Sergei Somov were his maternal cousins. Among the guests, Vasily Psishchev was Danila’s only relative on his father’s side. In addition, Vasily may have felt socially less welcome at this gathering, as Danila’s rank was much higher and more prestigious. Thus, the insult from a poorer relative must have felt particularly damaging to Danila. As for Ulyana, with her own family’s reputation and customs, the humiliation must have been horrendous.
according to ulyana’s deposition, the incident with the pig resulted from an unresolved, 50-year litigation involving both cousins. It all started when their grand-uncle died childless sometime around 1692, and Vasily’s father, falsely claiming he was the sole heir, appropriated some peasants. Danila’s father, and after his death Danila himself, unsuccessfully petitioned the courts over this wrongdoing. By 1764, the property in question consisted of just two male serfs with their families. For a minor provincial landlord, any number of peasants were significant, but the injustice even more so. The night of the pig incident, Vasily failed to provoke Danila into fight, so he resorted to insulting his wife, aiming to humiliate them both and set off a response beneficial to Vasily in their property dispute. The very tool of the assault, a “not small live young pig,” brought about additional harm due to Russian cultural connotations.
Hardly any other animal possesses stronger symbolic meaning and more persistent overtones in Russian people’s minds than the pig. Within the Christian tradition, pigs were considered to be particularly attractive to demons, as seen from the Bible story of The Gadarene Demoniac Healed, in which Jesus sent a possessed man’s demons, at their own request, into a herd of pigs. [Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1 -20 and Luke 8:26-39.] A sow’s farrow, which often consisted of seven piglets, was linked to the seven deadly sins. Church writers also condemned the pig as an animal with raw, bestial passions and excessive sexuality. Since ancient times, pigs had been associated with the body, sin and woman’s honor. In early Latin slang, the word porcus (pig, sow) was often used to describe female genitalia; in Greece, prostitutes were called “pig merchants.”
The Orthodox Church canons showed great concern about people’s interactions with pigs, particularly sexual contacts and prescribed severe punishment for bestiality. We find similar prohibitions and penalties in the Catholic Church canons. Animals’ role in bestiality, although passive, was also regarded as a serious crime. In early modern Europe, well into the modern times, there were numerous cases of accused animals being taken to prison, interrogated, tried in courts, and publicly executed not only for bestiality but for a variety of human crimes, from murder to larceny to obscenity. Pigs were accused of crimes much more frequently than other animals. The purpose of their public punishment staged by the authorities was not deterrence, of course, i.e.: to impress other “potentially delinquent pigs.” Instead, executions were intended to show that even pigs must pay for breaking the law. This implied that, if and when people behaved like pigs, the law would punish them without mercy.
Adultery was one of the crimes most often associated with pigs. We find such a reference in a Russian court document: in 1742 the Holy Synod annulled, after an almost 20-year-long investigation, the marriage of a couple from Sevsk, a town in the same region as Oryol, because their “adulterous relations” had started when they were still married to their previous spouses. The final verdict stated: because Maxim Parkhomov and Daria Koltovskaya had “shamelessly and stoneheartedly like pigs wallowed for many years in adultery” and “there is danger that they can, due to their lack of fear and their stoneheartedness, sink into the same nasty lawlessness again,” they both should be bound in irons and put away as convicts – Maxim at Solovki and Daria at the Suzdal Pokrovsky monastery. They were prohibited from corresponding with each other and their children were declared illegitimate.
In the modern European literary tradition, the negative implication of the pig has a long tradition. It is most vivid in Molière’s comedic ballet Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, in which an arrogant provincial disgusts everybody by his rude behavior and his self-evident name (le pourceau – pig, hog).
In Russia, folk proverbs reflected the old tradition of associating such qualities as dirtiness, stupidity, and boorishness with the pig: “You dress a pig up, yet it wallows in manure” (Наряди свинью в серьги, а она в навоз); “Among people a man, at home a pig” (В людях Илья, а дома свинья);”As important a notable as a pig in the swamp.” (Велик боярин, свинья на болоте!) The identification of a stupid, uncultured person with a pig found its reflection in Nikolai Novikov’s satirical criticism of young men sent abroad for education who learned nothing but foreign vices: “A young Russian piglet who has traveled in foreign lands to enlighten his mind and who, upon his useful journey, has now come back as a complete pig, can be seen, free of charge, by those interested on many streets of this city.” In Russian literature of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the image of the pig also carried heavy social implications. We find examples in the literary fight, at the time of the Oryol incident, between the two most prominent poets of the period, Alexander Sumarokov and Mikhail Lomonosov, but Ivan Krylov’s satire The Pig Under the Oak stands out among others, presenting the pig as an ungrateful, even unpatriotic creature that could not care less about the tree or, more symbolically, the country that feeds it.[This fable appears in The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar, by Ivan Krylov and translated by Lydia Razran Stone bit.ly/krylov]
Thus, the pig’s negative connotation was universal in the Russian mind at the time of our pig story. Just placing somebody’s name near the word “pig” could tarnish that person’s reputation. Mere physical contact with a pig would disgust a noble person, even though daily interactions with the animal were hard to avoid. Cattle on the streets of large Russian cities, even the capital, were common in the eighteenth century. Peter the Great, wishing to transform his newly built capital of St. Petersburg into an advanced European city, issued several decrees to prohibit unsupervised livestock on the streets of the city because of “damage to roads and trees.” Europe faced the same issues at this time: in Germany, a 1722 treatise on economy recommended that towns be cleared of their livestock and “piles of dung.” In Venice, pigs constituted such a problem that in 1746 the authorities issued a decree that forbade the keeping of pigs “in the city and in the monasteries.”
A nobleman’s encounter with a pig in the Russian countryside was therefore quite a frequent and natural circumstance. A Russian nobleman’s country estate in the mid-eighteenth century was supposed to be a self-sufficient economic entity capable of producing enough food for both the owner and his peasants. Thus, it usually comprised the landlord’s animals and the peasants’ livestock. The owner’s cattle were kept closer to the house, in one or several special cattle sheds surrounded by the farmyard and the huts of the house serfs. To prevent livestock from entering the landowner’s quarters, a fence usually surrounded either the formal part of the estate or the farmyard. Yet on poorer estates, owners’ houses were surrounded by sheds, granaries, and small barns, allowing the owners to keep everything in clear sight. The low social position and scanty assets of Mikhaila Sopov, the “pig party” host, suggest that his estate was of this traditional variety. Therefore, had Vasily Psishchev premeditated assaulting Ulyana with a pig, the tool to do so would be readily available.
There is a common perception that, up to the end of the eighteenth century, even the houses of wealthy provincials were barely distinguishable from peasant huts. This perception is mostly based on A.T. Bolotov’s description of his house in Dvorianinovo in 1762. The house looked to him “small, squalid, and [like] a veritable prison, which indeed it was,” almost grown into the ground and so low that it was possible to touch the ground from some of the windows. The grim condition of the house, however, was a consequence of the fact that it had been abandoned for many years. A landowner coming to an estate to live, upon retirement or for other reasons, would normally try to improve the living conditions for his family. The Sopovs’ house on the Lunino estate had a garden and was comfortable enough to accommodate a party of eight. Still, its windows were quite low to the ground, allowing Vasily to reach one of them with his “not small pig.” On the other hand, they had to be high and wide enough for the pig to fly through and hit the unsuspecting Ulyana.
A violent attack involving a pig was, no doubt, extremely humiliating to the Psishchev couple, as it had the potential to make them district laughing stocks. The outraged Ulyana, who most likely fancied herself the grande dame of the community, had to retaliate quickly and effectively in order to restore her reputation. A week after the quarrel, she submitted her claim to the Karachev governor’s chancellery, the local institution for civil and criminal justice in the district town of Karachev. We can assume that, in addition to the moral matters related to honor and its restoration in the public eye, financial compensation was not the least among Ulyana’s motives: in accordance with the law, a major’s wife could expect to receive damages of about 600 rubles, enough to buy an estate with several peasant families. At the trial that took place a year later, Vasily rejected the accuser’s witnesses because they were her close relations. The case could have remained unsolved forever, as many cases did, but for Catherine the Great’s administrative and legal reforms. After the 1778 restructuring of the Oryol provincial government, the new local administration received orders to resolve “cold case files.” Ulyana’s case went to trial in 1784 and, surprisingly, she was found… guilty of false accusations! Instead of receiving compensation for the insult to her honor, she was to pay 700 rubles as a dishonor fine to Vasily’s family, and 75 rubles in litigation fees.
Ulyana refused to accept the verdict which was, in her words, “against all rules of law.” She maintained that the court had acted in favor of the defendant because of his personal contacts. She appealed to the Oryol Higher Land Court, but, to her disappointment, a new trial one year later upheld the lower court’s verdict. Ulyana made another appeal to the next highest level in the legal system, petitioning the Empress for “a lawful satisfaction to my rightfulness.” The new investigation lasted another three years. Finally, in 1788, the court overturned Ulyana’s guilty verdicts on the grounds of procedural violations and ordered another round of investigation. With no closure in sight, after 24 years of proceedings, Ulyana’s dishonor received neither vindication nor compensation.
By all appearances, the ordered investigation never took place. In 1792, the court received a petition from Ulyana’s daughter-in-law, Praskovia, who wrote that Ulyana and Danila, their son Alexei, Ulyana’s offender Vasily, as well as his wife and two sons, were all dead. Further, as heiress of Ulyana’s property and litigation, Praskovia stated that she had no intention of seeking its resolution. However, she sought to be reimbursed for Ulyana’s appeal fees (125 rubles), in accordance with the final verdict of the Oryol Civil Court Chamber. Also, as both of Vasily’s sons had died childless, Praskovia wanted their property auctioned on her behalf, so she could recover the money she had lent them against promissory notes. Upon examining the petition and local authorities’ reports on the Psishchevs, the Oryol Civil Court Chamber ruled on May 31st, 1792, to refund the 125 rubles, release Vasily’s sequestrated property, and close the 30-year-old lawsuit. Period.
In this case as in many similar ones, the authorities were in no rush to juridically protect and restore the applicant’s honor. With no other issues involved, court cases over dishonor were normally settled by some agreement between the parties. Yet in this case the pig was clearly a factor in Ulyana’s persistence – the humiliation associated with the insult by the animal must have been unbearable.
While the negative social and cultural connotations of a swine might seem justified, it is worth remembering that this is a human construct: people are ascribing their vices (stupidity, dirtiness, lust, and ill manners) to innocent animals. It was a way to cleanse their self-image, to distance themselves from the “bad” qualities they found in animals, to emphasize their own virtues. In this instance, the pig was a tool for human dishonor. Yet, ironically, the pig thrown at Ulyana Psishcheva one summer night in 1764 brought that woman and her family out of oblivion, and into the light of history. Were it not for the swine, the humans would have been lost forever. RL
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
