The Smolny Institute

The Smolny Institute, or The Imperial Educational Society of Noble Maidens, was founded by Catherine the Great as the first state educational institution for women in Russia. An informative article drawing on primary sources presents the history of this pioneering Institute until its dissolution during the Revolution. Central to this volume are photographs of The Smolny from an extremely rare album that belonged to the editor’s ancestor, who attended the Institute. Accompanying commentary calls attention to details of the photographs and brings them to life by excerpts from writings of Smolny students and other contemporaries found in St. Petersburg’s archives.

Russian historian Alexander Liarsky has published on the history and anthropology of education, the history of childhood and of everyday life, and the history and anthropology of modernization. He has taught at Saint Petersburg University of Management Technologies and Economics, and the Interregional Institute of Economics and Law. Currently he is Senior Lecturer at the St. Petersburg State University of Technology and Design.Nancy Kovaleff Baker has taught music history at Columbia and Yale Universities, and has been an administrator at Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Boston Universities. She has published translations, with commentary, of an eighteenth-century German theoretical music treatise, and articles on a variety of topics, including music theory, aesthetics, and American popular music. The book on the Smolny is her tribute to her Russian forebears.