Women, Gardens and Agency: Empress Maria Feodorovna's Pavlovsk Park

For fifty years, Empress Maria Feodorovna (1759–1828) shaped Pavlovsk Park into one of the most celebrated English-style landscapes in Europe, and into a political instrument. Though her position as a consort and later dowager empress was structurally precarious, Maria Feodorovna used garden design, planting, and architecture to build relationships, conduct diplomacy, and argue for causes ranging from the preservation of serfdom to the commemoration of Russia's victory over Napoleon. This talk draws on my new book to explore Pavlovsk as a primary source for understanding women's political agency at the Russian imperial court. Moving chronologically from Maria Feodorovna's arrival as Grand Duchess in 1776 through her decades as the garden's main patron, I trace how she navigated shifting relationships with Catherine II, Paul I, and Alexander I by using flowers, monuments, and diplomatic exchanges of exotic seeds to signal loyalty, mourning, fertility, and authority. I argue that green spaces, often dismissed as decorative or domestic, in fact gave elite women like Maria Feodorovna a rare channel for political voice, at a moment when few other avenues were open to them.

SPEAKER: Ekaterina Heath (University of Sydney)

SOBESEDNIK: Alexander Martin (University of Notre Dame)