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of the nobleman for his childhood was associated with the warmth and tenderness of his relationship with these people.

The wet nurse was a particularly important figure in the Russian noble family. Russians continued to employ a peasant wet nurse long after it had become the conventional wisdom in the rest of Europe for mothers to breastfeed their own infants. Child-rearing handbooks of the early nineteenth century were overtly nationalist in their defence

of this habit, claiming that the 'milk of a peasant girl can give lifelong health and moral purity to the noble child'.¹³⁹ It was common for the wet nurse to be dressed, and sometimes even painted, in traditional Russian dress - a custom that continued in many families until the revolution of 1917.* Ivan Argunov, the Sheremetevs' artist, depicted several 'unknown peasant girls' who were most probably wet nurses. The fact that a girl like this should become the subject of a portrait painting, commissioned for display in her owner's house, in itself speaks volumes about her position in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. Pavel Sumarokov, recalling daily life among the nobility in the eighteenth century, said that the wet nurse was given pride of place among all the domestic staff. The family would call her by her name and patronymic rather than by the nickname that was given to most serfs. She was also the only servant who was allowed to remain seated in the presence of the mistress or the master of the house.¹⁴⁰ Noble memoirs from the nineteenth century are filled with descriptions of the family's affection for their old wet nurse, who was likely to be treated as a much-loved member of the family and provided with living quarters until she died. Anna Lelong loved her nurse Vasilisia 'more than anyone', and parting from her, as she had to do when she left home to get married, caused her 'dreadful grief. The intimacy of their relationship, which was 'like that of a mother and a daughter', stemmed from the death of the nurse's infant son. Because of her duties to nurse Anna, she had been obliged to abandon him. Guilt and surrogacy became intertwined, for both Anna and her nurse. Later on, when Anna's husband died, she took it upon herself to care for her old nurse, who came to live with her at the family estate.¹⁴¹

But it was the nanny who was closest to the heart of the noble child.

" The artist Dobuzhinsky described the spectacular appearance of the traditional wet nurse on the streets of Petersburg before 1917: 'She had a kind of "parade uniform", a pseudo-peasant costume, theatrically designed, which was worn right up to the outbreak of the war in 1914. One often saw a fat, red-cheeked wet nurse walking beside her fashionably dressed mistress. She would be dressed in a brocade blouse and cape, and a pink head-dress if the baby was a girl, or a blue one if it was a boy. In the

summer the wet nurses used to wear coloured sarafans with lots of small gold or glass

buttons and muslin balloon sleeves'. (M. V. Dobuzhinskii vospominaniia (New York, 1976, p. 34.)

The stereotype of the old-fashioned nanny - the sort that appears in countless works of art from Eugene Onegin to Boris Godunov -was a simple and kind-hearted Russian peasant woman who got the children up, supervised their play, took them out for walks, fed them, washed them, told them fairy tales, sang them songs and comforted them at night when they woke up with nightmares. More than a surrogate mother, the nanny was the child's main source of love and emotional security. 'Simply and unthinkingly,' reminisced one woman of her noble childhood, 'I imbibed the life-giving fluids of love from my nanny, and they keep me going even now. How many loyal and loving Russian nannies have guarded and inspired the lives of their children, leaving an indelible impression upon them.'¹⁴²