Authors
Ksenia Smykovskaya1; 1 Brown University, United StatesDiscussion
When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, women’s traditional social roles of a wife, mother, and housekeeper started to change, Russian intellectuals faced the need to address the thorny issue of motherhood. All of them – whether democrat or conservative, male or female – used the figure of a mother to make political and ethical statements. During this heated public discussion, the image of a bad mother (opinions on her qualities varied) was gradually transforming into the cultural mechanism of surveillance. The “gaze of others” (Ruddick) started to control mothers and to criticize their practices. In this presentation, I will explore how, in their non-fiction works, such intellectuals as Nikolai Shelgunov, Lev Tolstoy, Evgenia Konradi, and Elizaveta Vodovozova, among others, contributed to the construction of the bad mother trope. 
