Social Dancing in Peter the Great's Russia

The era of Tsar Peter I (“the Great,” ruled 1689–1725), has been widely studied and documented by political, military and religious scholars, but has been largely overlooked by cultural historians. This book investigates a significant but hitherto neglected aspect of the cultural fabric of this period in Russian history: that of social dancing. Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholz’s Tagebuch, or diary, written mainly in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1721 and 1725, provides among other things a very colourful portrait of social dancing and of social pastimes that involved social dancing during the last four years of Peter the Great’s reign.

This study shows how social mores in Petrine Russia were variously reflected by and changed through social dancing. The Petrine assembly and wedding ball were living plays in which the Tsar himself was both actor and director. Bergholz, as a young, endlessly curious and utterly ingenuous witness, provides the modern reader with a unique perspective from which to observe the nature and significance of social dancing at the end of the Petrine era.