Barbara Engel, “Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia” (Cornell UP, 2011)

Divorce was virtually impossible in Imperial Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church monopolized matrimony, and it rarely granted divorce except in extraordinary cases of adultery, abandonment, sexual impotence, or exile. Marriage as an unbreakable religious sacrament still held. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, Russian perceived a “crisis of...

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