Everything about Snokhachestvo totally explained
In
Imperial Russia,
snokhachestvo referred to illicit sexual relations between a
pater familias (
bolshak) of a Russian peasant household (
dvor) and his
daughter-in-law (
snokha) during the minority or absence of his son.
With a view to attracting additional workers to the household, marriages in rural Russia were frequently contracted when the groom was six or seven years old. During her husband's minority, the bride often had to put up with advances of her assertive father-in-law.
Snokhachestvo entailed conflicts in the family and put moral pressure on the mother-in-law, who would treat her son's wife as a rival for her own husband's affections.
Snokachestvo was considered incestuous by the
Russian Orthodox Church and unseemly by the
obschina, the rural community. Legally it was considered a form of
rape and was punished with fifteen to twenty lashes. Understandably, cases of
snokhachestvo were not publicized and the crime remained latent, making it difficult to assess its true extent in Imperial Russia.
One of the first Russian writers to decry
snokhachestvo, describing it as a form of "sexual debasement," was
Alexander Radishchev, who saw it as an outgrowth of
Russian serfdom. In the 19th century, its resurgence was fueled by obligatory
conscription and "the seasonal departure of young men for work outside the village."
Snokhachestvo remained relatively widespread even after the
abolition of serfdom in 1861.
Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a jurist, resented the fact that "nowhere it seems, except Russia, has at least one form of
incest assumed the character of an almost normal everyday occurrence, designated by the appropriate technical term."
Snokhachestvo in the arts
There are sexual connotations in the relationship between Katerina and her father-in-law in
Shostakovich's 1934 opera
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, but not in the 1865
story it's based upon.
In 1927,
Olga Preobrazhenskaia, "the leading woman director of
[Russian] fiction films in the twenties," and her co-director,
Ivan Pravov, released a movie condemning
snokhachestvo. Titled
The Peasant Women of Riazan (in Russian,
Baby Riazanskie), the
silent film is about the rape and pregnancy of a woman whose husband is away in
World War I. The rapist is her father-in-law, and the woman, overcome by shame, drowns herself when her husband returns from battle.
References
Further Information
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