Andrej Ivanovich Chikhachev (1798–1875) was a middling provincial landowner who left an unusually rich archive of personal papers. Many of these addressed education and upbringing of children (vospitanie), which Chikhachev understood as a nobleman’s primary role, as his duty, and even as a form of service to the state. This role was defi ned in contrast to a maternal role restricted to “nurturing” (providing for children and family materially through management of the household, but also of entire estates and their finances at least in some cases). The masculine role as vospitatel’ was understood by Chikhachev as an intellectual endeavor, and as an ideal form of service to the state, even the most important form of state service that was available to most nobles after their emancipation in 1762 from obligatory, formal state service, because for Chikhachev vospitanie was the only means of instilling moral conscientiousness in the Russian people (nobles and peasants alike), and fighting what he saw as the destructive influences of the city and secularism. Chikhachev’s newspaper articles attempted to articulate some of these views on behalf of the middling provincial nobility, emphasizing the crucial signifi cance of vospitanie and education for any improvement of Russia’s troubled agriculture and for the rural reform in general. However, the dominant, capital-based intellectual and political discourse failed to take heed of the provincial views. Chikhachev’s notions never became the predominant voice in later developments in Russian education, but some of his views survived and were shared by the early generations of professional educators that appeared in the late 19th century, for example, his emphasis on the importance of a strong parental role in education.
Chikhachev Andrej Ivanovich, Vladimir Province, Vladimirskaya guberniya, Zemledel’cheskaya gazeta, Vladimirskie gubernskie vedomosti, Moscow Agriculture Society, Russian provincial nobility, pomestnoe dvoryanstvo, Russian serfdom, Teykovo, vospitanie, ed
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