The Lithuanian Family in its European Context, 1800–1914 Dalia Leinarte The Lithuanian Family in its European Context, 1800–1914 Marriage, Divorce and Flexible Communities Dalia Leinarte Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas, Lithuania ISBN 978-3-319-51081-1 ISBN 978-3-319-51082-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51082-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938018 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover image © De Luan / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To Dalia, Emilija, Nicolas and Gilles PREFACE This book reaches readers at a time when the paradigmatic framework of the 1960s–1970s on the essential differences in marriage and household structures in North-Western and Eastern Europe is undergoing transfor- mation.1 Industrialisation and urbanisation alone were not capable of changing traditional household and marriage patterns. The East and West typologisation is being replaced by the methodological approach that the variety of family systems existed throughout Europe and these were determined by external factors.2 Military conflicts and the change in political regimes not only brought about sexual violence, and an increase in divorce and infanticide, but also often introduced new family ideologies and led to transformations in family behaviour.3 The fundamental ques- tion is, how did families in the past respond to social upheavals and economic reforms as well as policies of state and religious institutions? This question is especially important for the understanding of family behaviour in Eastern Europe, where due to drastic changes new marital behaviour often masked the dominant family systems. As Andrejs Plakans put it, “From the last decades of the eighteenth to the end of the nine- teenth centuries, virtually every generation of Eastern European rural people had to incorporate in its life some kind of unprecedented change ( ...) which affected everyday affairs.”4 This book investigates family life in nineteenth-century European terri- tories of the Russian Empire within the methodological inquiry noted above. Given the often restrictive laws and policies—manorial rights and serfdom up to 1861, the pervasive role of the Church and absence of civil marriage and divorce, in addition to deep-rooted customary practices—how did women vii viii PREFACE and men in Lithuania manage to normalise and solve the problems of their family life? The book reveals that it was possible through the adoption of unofficial, and often illegal, solutions. It explores the way in which the peasant community in the nineteenth-century Lithuanian society resorted to unsanctioned marital behaviour. Cohabitation, bigamy and levirate mar- riages, among others, practiced in order to respond to the external obstacles that had an impact on the family life. Up until now there have been no comprehensive investigations in English that examine the historical development of marriage and divorce in Lithuania during tsarist times. This historiographical gap has been partially filled by studies examining the family in central Russia and the three Baltic provinces of the tsarist empire. However, we must take into account the many particularities of marital behaviour in different regions of the European part of the Empire (Figs. 1 and 2). This book covers the case study of the two largest Lithuanian provinces, the Kaunas and Vilnius provinces. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, formally the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was dissolved in 1795, was the largest empire in the sixteenth century Europe. Subsequently, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was incorporated into Russia in 1795 and was part of the tsarist Empire until 1914. In 1801, Lithuania underwent a division into two provinces (guberniyas): Lithuanian Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno) and Lithuanian Gardin (Grodno). The period of 1842–1915 saw Lithuania being divided into two administrative units, that of Kaunas (Kovno) and the Vilnius provinces (Fig. 3). In 1867, Suvalkai (Suwalki) province, which was part of Poland until 1915, was established in the southwestern part of the current Lithuanian territory. In the nineteenth century, approximately 410,789 people inhabited the Lithuanian districts (volosts) of the Suvalkai province. The Kaunas province covered 38,400 km2 with a total of approximately 969,369 inhabitants in 1857 (Fig. 4). There were 144 districts with around 25,465 villages. Its inhabitants were predominantly Catholics. In the nineteenth century, the Kaunas province was the largest Catholic province in the entire imperial Russia. The Vilnius province covered 41,907 km2 with a total of approxi- mately 1,314,000 inhabitants (including both areas in Lithuania and Belarus) in 1889. According to the first Russian Imperial Census of 1897, there were around 738,943 inhabitants in the Lithuanian districts of the Vilnius province. The main conclusion of this book points to the existence of flexible family strategies in the traditional nineteenth-century Lithuanian PREFACE ix Fig. 1 European part of the Tsarist Empire, second half of the nineteenth century. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, K-796 community. Peasants made decisions that often went against the valid legal regulations, canons and dominant cultural norms. Flexibility and adaptability allowed them to “wait out” unfavourable economic reforms or political periods.5 Some family decisions required funds and sanctioned permission from the Church: in the case of an early death of a spouse, in order to preserve a certain household6 structure and the family’s property, farmers often requested dispensation for levirate or sororate marriage. In other cases, peasants would adopt or tolerate illegal family behaviour such as cohabitation and bigamy. Whereas reasons for cohabitation in Western Europe were usually related to the postponement of marriage, cohabita- tion in Lithuania was the result of restrictive canon laws. Flexible strategies x PREFACE Fig. 2 European part of the Tsarist Empire, 1911. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, K-1175 were also extended to the treatment of children born to single mothers. In this regard, peasant families could even go to the extent of justifying criminal behaviour: illegitimate children born to single mothers had no place in a farmer’s family and the community would tolerate their early death. The nineteenth-century Lithuanian community acknowledged only family life, so unwed single siblings would miss their part in the inheritance and would thus lose their social status. The introductory Chapter 1 of this book presents a comparative over- view of family systems, including household structures, marriage and inheritance models, divorce and separation, child-rearing, and nationalistic family ideologies in Europe. The chapter also details the description of archival sources used in this book. They include documents from the Curia of the Samogitian Diocese which cover annullments and dispensa- tions, as well as parishioners’ complaints about the interference of priests in their proposed marriages for the period 1813–1914. Another body of sources consists of files holding marriage annulments and separations in PREFACE xi Fig. 3 Kaunas and Vilnius provinces. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, K-938 the Kaunas province that were brought before the ecclesiastical court of the Consistory of the Samogitian Diocese in 1853–1914. Significant archival sources come from the so-called “Trials on Depraved Lifestyles” (Дело о блудной жизни) that were also brought before the ecclesiastical court of the Consistory of the Samogitian Diocese. A separate body of sources contains papal encyclicals and sermons given by parish priests in the Kaunas province relating to various matrimonial issues. The book is also based on a broad scope of inventory data from the first half of the nineteenth century, which includes 3,000 peasant households. The census was carried out in 1847 and recorded 19,917 people. The second chapter of the book is devoted to the various social phe- nomena associated with marriage