'Although Pulcheria Alexandrova was already forty-three years old, her face still kept the remnants of its former beauty, and besides, she looked much younger than her age, as almost always happens with women who keep their clarity of spirit, the freshness of their impressions, and the honest, pure ardor of their hearts into old age.'
🙄 43. Old age. 🤨
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Bookwomble Life expectancy in Czarist Russia was shockingly low, being 29.6 years in 1845, and not significantly improving until after Stalin. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041395/life-expectancy-russia-all-time/ 20h
Leniverse @Bookwomble But surely that just means that child mortality was really high, and that illness and accidents took a lot of people, and not that people were considered old if they made it past 30. Still, that really is shockingly low! 😧 19h
Bookwomble @Leniverse Yes! Of course you are right, and child mortality rates in Czarist Russia are shockingly high, with 42% of children not making it past 5 years ?. I guess old Fyodor had that patriarchal "women over thirty are past it" mentality. These days, he'd probably be a film or TV casting director! 13h
Leniverse @Bookwomble I can see how the kind of life people had would age them beyond their years though. 🫤 And there's been rather a lot of death in the book too! 13h
Bookwomble @Leniverse It's one of my favourite books, that I'm well overdue a re-read! 😊 10h
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