In such an atmosphere of discontent and bitterness, in vain search of adventure, which was to render that grey, soul-killing life endurable, the Russian woman had to bring up her children. What was to be their lot? We find the answer in the works of the Russian authors.
The boys will grow to become "heads of families" or revolutionaries.
The girls will become beings of the same "typeless" type, waiting and complaining of life—capable only of bearing beings after their own image, without will, at best women capable only of a passive protest, or martyrs whose martyrdom remains unknown to anybody, and therefore passes without leaving a trace.
When Dostoyevski painted this apocalyptic picture of Russia, finding in the Russian society so many "fiends" and "antichrists," he allotted to woman one role only, that of victim to man's passion, or victim to his perverted, unbalanced, and confused endeavours and strivings. Thus the mad whirl of life carried to fathomless moral depths or to death those impotent beings dispossessed of will, who were the mothers and wives of the Russian middle class.
Tolstoy, again, presents the peasant woman either as a semi-heathen enchanted with the mystery of nature's secrets which are unknown to her, or as a benighted criminal, or as one of a million of females of a still bestial species.
It may be that just this position of the Russian
