Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Ekaterina Heath, Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia: Empress Maria Feodorovna’s Pavlovsk Park (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1350544505, £45 / $62.

How does a woman with no formal political authority influence the politics of an empire? Through her garden.

In the hierarchies of the late 18th- and early 19th-century Russian imperial court, a consort held no direct access to power. Yet Empress Maria Feodorovna, wife of Paul I and later Dowager Empress during the reign of Alexander I, influenced the politics of her era through the cultivation of Pavlovsk Park near St Petersburg. Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia draws on the rich historical record of the Russian royal court to recover the evidence of her agency. Heath traces Maria Feodorovna’s strategies for maintaining access to power under Catherine II and Paul I, and examines how, widowed and formally sidelined, she used Pavlovsk to consolidate influence during her son’s reign, turning a garden into a panopticon, a memorial, and a vehicle for rewriting history.

Ekaterina Heath is a Research Associate at the University of Sydney, specialising in garden studies and Russian history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her earlier work includes essays on Grand Tour memory at Pavlovsk and on plants as diplomatic gifts in British-Russian relations.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Imperial Family: Building Bridges
2  Plants in the Garden: Growing the Power Base
3  Diplomacy: Weaving the Networks of Power
4  Grief: Turning Defeat into Victory
5  Pavlovsk Panopticon: Arguing against Abolishing Serfdom
6  Charity: Creating Legacy through Rewriting History
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index