The Student

One of the most controversial topics in mid-nineteenth-century Russia was women’s right to higher education. Neither within the government nor within the educational institutions themselves was there a consensus on whether women should be allowed into universities.

In 1863, when a new statute governing universities was being drafted, some institutions inquired whether it might be possible to allow women into lecture halls to audit courses.

Moscow and Tartu Universities were categorically opposed to this idea; Petersburg and Kazan were for it; and the administrators of Kharkov and Kiev Universities wanted to grant women the same rights and status as the male students. Kharkov was the most progressive, advocating making their female graduates eligible for appointment to government posts.

In its final form, the statute reflected the more conservative stance. And so, education-hungry women (at least those who could afford to) went abroad for their educations, primarily to Switzerland. But the struggle for their right to study within the Russian Empire went on.

Activists like Yevgeniya Konradi, Nadezhda Stasova, and others, along with many progressive men, such as the educator Nikolai Vyshnegradsky, continued promoting the idea of higher education for women, at least in separate specialized institutions.

In 1869, the first of what came to be called “Higher Women’s Courses” (Высшие женские курсы) were opened almost simultaneously in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Their numbers gradually grew, as did the quality of the education they offered. In 1872, the Medical and Surgical Academy established its own program of Higher Women’s Courses, and 1878 saw the establishment of the renowned Bestuzhev Courses – essentially a women’s university, with a systematic program and several different departments and schools.

A new breed of Russian began appearing in the country’s major cities: the kursistka (from kurs, the Russian word for “course”) – a progressive young woman pursuing a higher education. The kursistka had a recognizable style of her own. As the art historian Olga Khoroshilova described it:

The kursistka wore austere outfits and scorned pretty trinkets. Their usual spring-summer clothing consisted of dark woolen skirts and white blouses with a turn-down collar under which they sometimes tied a scarf or “navy” tie, done up with a wide and loose sailor’s knot. At colder times of the year they preferred to wear dark, austere, and high-throated woolen dresses… A touch of lace was sometimes added to the low collars and cuffs… The kursistka usually wore a simple schoolgirl hairdo – neatly brushed hair gathered into a tight braid and tied with a dark ribbon.

In the realm of art, a painting by Nikolai Yaroshenko, Kursistka (often translated as “A Girl Student” or “Student Girl” – see page 44), was first exhibited at an itinerant exhibition in 1883 and became a symbol of women’s emancipation. The painting, which looks far from controversial from today’s perspective, caused an outcry in its day. Wildly popular among the public, it was harshly criticized in the press. An art critic for the St. Petersburg News, Alexander Ledakov, for example, described the painting as depicting “a shabby, unpleasant-looking woman with bulging eyes running at full tilt as evening descended, her hat aslant and with a blanket over her shoulders.” The Kiev legal scholar and social commentator Pyotr Tsitovich was even harsher:

Just look at her: a man’s cap, a man’s cape, a dirty skirt, ragged clothing, a bronze or greenish tint to the face, chin out, clouded eyes that tell it all: aimlessness, fatigue, anger, antipathy, and there’s some sort of dark of night with the glow of a swamp fire – what is this? On the surface, this is some sort of hermaphrodite, but deep down, she’s a true daughter of Cain. She’s cut off her hair, and for good reason: that is how her mother labeled the sinfulness of her Gapkas and Palashkas … Now she’s alone, with a crypt-like cold in her soul, with oppressive bitterness and longing in her heart. There’s nobody to pity her, nobody to pray for her – they’ve all abandoned her. And perhaps it’s for the best: when she dies in childbirth or from typhus, no one will make a fuss at the burial.

For liberals, on the other hand, the painting became a symbol of social change. Gleb Uspensky devoted an entire essay to Kursistka in the prominent journal Notes of the Fatherland. From today’s perspective, his words sound awkward, perhaps even chauvinistic, but back then, they sounded like resounding praise.

The artist, in picking out from among this crowd of “people running with books” one of the most ordinary, common figures in simple clothing adorned with the most ordinary accessories – a blanket, a man’s cap, short hair – astutely perceives and communicates to you, “the observer,” “the public,” something essential… This “essential” is the purely feminine, girl-like features of a young face that suffuse the painting – if it can be put that way – with the presence of radiant and youthful thought… Also essential, and touching the soul with a special radiance, is something that goes beyond the ordinary female type – again, I’m not sure how to put it: a new, masculine feature, the feature of radiant thought in general (the result of all that running around with books)… That exquisite unfeigned (in fact very real) blending of female and male features into a single face, a single figure, invested not with feminine, not with masculine, but with “human” thought, immediately cast a particular light on the cap, the blanket, the book, giving them meaning, and made them part of a new, emerging, unprecedented and heartening image of humankind.

The revolutionary Vera Figner admitted that she saw in Kursistka the portrait of a generation: “It is simply the embodiment of our young people with everything that makes them fresh, pure, and sincere.” Other fans of Yaroshenko’s painting made similar statements.

Many people saw Kursistka as being one in a pair with another painting by Yaroshenko: his 1881 “The Student.” The painter produced at least two versions of Kursistka, the more canonical of which is in the Kaluga Museum of Art, while the other is in a gallery in Kiev.

At the time Yarkoshenko produced Kursistka, the woman it portrays was a student of the Bestuzhev Courses. In the painting, she is presumably hurrying home from Vasilyevsky Island, where the Bestuzhev Courses were located, after a day of study. Her name was Anna Konstantinovna Diterikhs.

Anna was born in 1859 in Kiev. Her father, Konstantin Diterikhs, was an artillery colonel and her mother, Olga Diterikhs (née Musnitskaya), was also from a noble family with deep roots in the military. Her grandfather, General Oleg Musnitsky, had been commandant of Kiev, fought the Turks along the Danube, and took part in the Caucasus War. Incidentally, it was he who gave her the family name Galya, by which she was known most of her life, although her official name was always Anna.

Anna spent her childhood in Ukraine and the Volga region, in the merchant town of Dubovka, not far from Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, today Volgograd). She graduated from a girls’ high school, a gymnasium, in Kiev and was a serious student of music. She wanted to continue her education, but Kiev’s “higher courses” were not yet up and running. This led her to move, along with her sister Olga and her mother, to St. Petersburg in 1878. There, the family rented an apartment with a piano in Yakovlev House: 96 Nevsky Prospekt, on the corner of Nevsky and Nadezhdinskaya.

The building was almost brand new at the time. It had been commissioned by the owner of a carriage factory, Pyotr Yakovlev, designed by architect Mikhail Makarov, and built between 1866 and 1870. To save on bricks, instead of tearing down a building that stood on the desired site, Yakovlev House had been built on top of a three-story building from the 1830s – they just renovated it and expanded it outward and upward in the “merchant” style of commercial architecture typical of the reign of Alexander II, a style that was later lambasted by pre- and post-revolutionary critics.

“They are erecting some huge buildings with ‘pleasing’ and “palatial” facades; they’re opening light-filled stores abounding in ostentatious rubbish – in other words, something disturbing or even obscene is taking place,” the art critic Alexander Benois wrote of such buildings in 1902.

The Yakovlev building was a moneymaking machine. It consisted of storefronts for lease, the owner’s carriage factory, warehouses, apartments, and numerous furnished rooms. One such room was famous because its occupant, Kutuzova, was known in some circles for having close ties to the Third Department – the political police tasked with keeping a surreptitious eye out for sedition. She drew a number of middle-rank revolutionaries, who liked to use the gullible Kutuzova to feed disinformation to the enemy.

The Diterikhs spent many years at this address. In 1878, Anna entered the History and Philosophy department of the Bestuzhev Courses. The program was designed to last four years, but Anna did not complete her studies until 1886, mostly because she switched to the Natural Sciences Department mid-course. Some scholars believe that she even managed to study alongside Nadezhda Krupskaya (Vladimir Lenin’s future wife), even though the latter was ten years older.

It must have been upsetting for Anna that she did not receive a diploma at the end of her studies, since she was seriously ill at the time the final exam was scheduled, and the idea of “make-up exams” was not yet in fashion.

Anna was the prototypical kursistka. She had been in poor health all her life and was thin and pale, yet she was exceptionally driven by a thirst for knowledge. Furthermore, since childhood she had astonished people with her hatred of brightly colored dresses (“I harbored an antipathy for bright colors my entire life”) and mirrors, and she proclaimed outright that would rather become a boy.

She was first painted in the image of a kursistka by Grigory Myasoyedov in 1881. But this painting never gained the renown Nikolai Yaroshenko’s enjoyed. Yaroshenko spent years trying to capture the image of the prototypical young progressive woman.

In 1880, Yaroshenko painted a rosy-cheeked young schoolgirl (the painting was titled Gimnazistka, a girl attending a gymnasium) but continued his quest, seeking a more severe and dramatic image. As part of this quest, he tried to familiarize himself with all the new types of people making up Petersburg’s student population. In the end, he wound up using the details of Anna’s appearance as the foundation for his painting, taking a few years off and generalizing her features, making them more typical.

Art historians have identified other prototypes used in the artistic representation of the kursistka: Maria Nevrotina, Yelizaveta Shlitter (the wife of the painter’s brother), and the activist Nadezhda Stasova.

But it was Diterikhs who has gone down in history as the ultimate kursistka. Yaroshenko would go on to paint Anna several more times. In 1890 he produced a painting titled In Warm Climes [В теплых краях], but he also featured her in several comic sketches.

In 1885, while still a student at the Bestuzhev Courses, Anna started to work at the publishing house The Intermediary [Posrednik], which had been established by Lev Tolstoy to print inexpensive and edifying literature. There she wore many hats: secretary, proofreader, editorial assistant, office manager, compiler, contributor, layout artist, and print house liaison.

While working at The Intermediary, she got to know Tolstoy himself, as well as his right-hand man, Vladimir Chertkov. With the blessing of their spiritual teacher, Vladimir and Anna were married in 1886 in St. Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral.

After the newlyweds left Petersburg, Anna’s family continued living in Yakovlev House another two years.

Anna and Vladimir Chertkov remained devoted adherents and popularizers of Tolstoy’s teachings and helped organize colonies of Tolstoyans across the world.

Anna also collected folklore and was a poet, prose writer, and a journalist. An article she published in Kiev, “How I Became a Vegetarian,” became famous. In the article she wrote that the transition to a plant-based diet, which was motivated by philosophical convictions, was difficult, but in the end, rather than undermining her weak health, it improved it. 

She and her husband were exiled from Russia in 1897 for helping the pacifist dissident Dukhobors, and after living in Britain for eleven years, in 1900 she published a Practical English-Language Textbook Intended for Russian Settlers in America. On top of these accomplishments, she was widely admired as a musician and singer.

Chertkova died in Moscow in 1926. By then, the painting that bore her image had become a Realist classic. The Soviet Union sent her to international exhibitions as a symbol of nineteenth-century Russian suffragism.

The Kursistka remains ubiquitous in Russian culture, appearing everywhere from school textbooks to Soviet postage stamps.