Russian dowry custom

Reading notes

• Love §22 sewing the foolish trousseau

  The pridanoe (trousseau/dowry linens) -- household linen, clothing, and needlework a bride's family prepared and sewed by hand in the weeks before a wedding -- was standard practice for a bride of the narrator's social class; its months-long labor, filling the household with cloth, thread, and the smell of pressing-irons, is used here as the great obstacle standing between the engaged narrator and his fiancee's attention.

• The Poison §5 I'm giving nothing at all for Lyubochka's dowry

  A pridanoe (dowry) -- money, property, or household goods a bride's family provided on marriage -- was a standard and expected feature of Russian marriage arrangements across social classes; Kadykin's blunt announcement that none is coming, and Lysov's loud indifference to it, sets the story's central irony in motion.

• Captions for Drawings §62 100,000 in dowry

  The dowry (pridanoe) a bride's family provided was a central financial transaction of marriage in 19th-century Russian society, driving much of this humoresque's satire of wedding mercenary calculation.

• The Dowry §19 This is a dowry!

  The trousseau of household linen and clothing a bride's family sewed and stored for years in preparation for her marriage; the sundry chests of it, sewn but never used, become the story's central image.

• A Serious Step §24 give even the children's linen as part of the dowry

  In provincial Russian custom a bride's pridanoe (dowry) was expected to include a substantial store of household linens -- chemises, handkerchiefs, towels, sheets -- assembled by the mother over years in anticipation of marriage. Marfa Afanasyevna's panic that the family has "not so much as a handkerchief or a towel put by" is a real domestic emergency by the standards of the custom, not mere fussiness, and comically eclipses the actual question of whether Lidochka is engaged at all.