Russian Peasant Letters

Slavistische Studienbücher. Neue Folge 18

Texts and Contexts

Bearbeitet von Olga T Yokoyama

1. Auflage 2008. Buch. VII, 973 S. Hardcover ISBN 978 3 447 05653 3 Format (B x L): 17 x 24 cm

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2008 Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden

ISSN 05835445 ISBN 978-3-447-05653-3

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Introduction ...... 1

Guide for the reader ...... 9

Chronology of letters and events ...... 15

Chapter one: Transcribed letter texts ...... 27

Chapter two: Essay A

Linguistic features of the texts ...... 369

Selected letter facsimiles ...... 441 CONTENTS OF VOLUME II

Chapter three: Normalized letter texts ...... 1

Chapter four: Translated letter texts ...... 211

Chapter five: Essays B a. The Bekhterev family ...... 389 b. The Rodigin family ...... 393 c. The Stefanov/Zherno/akov family ...... 397

Family trees ...... after page 406

Chapter six: Essays C a. Pazdery ...... 407 b. Sharkan ...... 410

Indices A. Words and word forms ...... 411 B. Personal names ...... 423 C. Place names ...... 453

Appendices A. Measures and weights ...... 457 B. A.V. Timofeev’s poem Выбор жены ...... 458

Sources cited ...... 459

Illustrations ...... 473 Introduction

The letters and this edition Interest in the human documents represented by the writings of “common folk” — people largely ignorant of the literary culture of their society — has been steadily rising since the last decades of the 20th century. This collection is an editio princeps of one such body of texts from late 19th-century Russia. The original letters, au- thored by members of a single peasant family, are located at the Tyumen’ branch of the Russian State Archive, in the Western Siberian capital of Tyumen’ Province (ob- last’). The letters were written between 1881 and 1896 in the southern part of the former Vyatka Province (guberniia), which lay to the West of the Ural mountains, the range separating Southern Vyatka (presently the Udmurtia Republic) from West- ern Siberia. The precise location of the letters’ origin is spread over several villages and towns; most of them were written in the village of Pazdery, but other locations include Votkinsk, Sarapul, Sharkan, as well as several river ports along the Kama, Belaya, and Volga rivers, and even on boats. All but five letters were written by the members of an ethnically Russian Orthodox “state peasant” family (with some of their roots traceable to Tartar ancestors), writing to the second son Vasily (after his marriage, the address also includes his wife, and, still later, even his little sons), who in 1881, at the age of 17, left home for Siberia to earn money. The remaining five letters were written to the oldest son Aleksey, who had left home some time before his brother Vasily but returned to live with the family in 1883. The collection also includes four telegrams. The main authors of the letters were the parents Lavr and Elizaveta, their two sons Ivan and Gavriil, and their daughter Tatyana. The inclusion among the writers of two women provides us with a bulk of rare examples of female peasant writing in late Imperial Russia. The precise number of letter pages written by each letter-writer is impossible to state, because sometimes several siblings added a few lines each, and a few pages in some of the letters were written by other members of the extended family. The main letter-writers and addressees of the letters are: Letter-writers The father Lavr Andreyevich Zherno/akov (b. 1836) The mother Elizaveta Dimitrievna Zherno/akova (b. 1839) The third son Ivan Lavrovich Zherno/akov (b. 1867) The fifth son Gavriil Lavrovich Zherno/akov (b. 1872) The daughter Tatyana Lavrovna Zherno/akova (b. 1876) Addressees The oldest son Aleksey Lavrovich Zherno/akov (b. 1862) The second son Vasily Lavrovich Zherno/akov (b. 1864) The collection is catalogued as “Fond I-134, opis’ 1, delo 1”, and consists of 197 hand-written folio pages (listy), most folia written on both sides. The character size differs from almost 2 cm to 1 mm, and the paper size and quality varies greatly as well. The ease of decipherment (and hence its reliability) was not uniform in all cases: some portions of the text are covered by paper of varying degrees of opacity, 2 RUSSIAN PEASANT LETTERS: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS pasted on the margins in order either to fortify the margins or to attach the letters to the document folder; not infrequently, such passages had to be deciphered using an additional light source and/or magnification. Magnification and additional light also aided the task of decipherment in cases when ink bled through the paper. Occasion- ally, the paper was sufficiently damaged for a fragment to be missing altogether. The reconstruction in such cases was based, when possible, either on independent research (e.g., determining a personal name in a missing fragment from church records), or on linguistic and/or contextual considerations. Scribes and the voices of the authors The custom of using scribes, familiar to readers of Russian literature through Chekhov’s and, later, Zoshchenko’s stories, receives ample empirical support from this collection. The texts of the letters signed by the father and/or by the mother are usually written by hands that are different from the signatures. In the course of research in the archives of the Republic of Udmurtia and of Kirov Province, we were able to identify some of the scribes, while others still await identification. We were able to determine that in those cases when the scribes signed their names, they were usually not outsiders, but members of the larger extended family. This shows the importance of family connections in this peasant community. It also calls for establish- ing the scribe as another insider present at – and potentially affecting – the communicative act represented by the epistolary discourse recorded in these letters. When noteworthy, evidence of the influence of such an insider/third-party presence is pointed out in the footnotes. The need to show respect to the scribes, or at least an awareness of their adjunct presence in the communicative process, complicates the well-known problem associated with the employment of scribes, i.e., that of asses- sing the extent of the contribution of the person signing the letter to the content and the language of the letter text. This problem was dealt with in this collection by com- paring the language, style, and content of letters signed by the same name but written in different hands; features common to all of the mother’s or all of the father’s letters, across different scribal hands, were considered to originate from the respective letter-writers rather than from the scribes. Overall, the letters show that the voices of the dictating parties were preserved by the scribes remarkably well, despite the literary stereotypes the fictionalized scribal letters mentioned above may call to mind. The paucity of texts written in the father’s and the mother’s own hands makes it difficult, of course, to assess the parents’ real level of literacy. (It is noteworthy that in the national census record of 1897 they both identify themselves as “self-taught [and] literate”). The history and preservation of the collection The collection remained unknown to scholars until 2001. Its archival life began in 1920, when the letters appeared in the Omsk State Archive. In 1945, they were transferred to the Tyumen’ State Archive. The OSA has no record of their prove- nance, but it is reasonable to speculate that they were brought to Omsk from Tyu- men’ by the main addressee of the letters, V.L. Zhernakov. By the early 20th century INTRODUCTION 3 he had become a Hereditary Honorary Citizen, a well-known entrepreneur and phil- anthropist in Tyumen’, with considerable ventures in Omsk as well (Zueva and Skubnevskii 1995, 19-20). He fled Tyumen’ in the late summer of 1918, escaping from the revolutionary army, and for a while settled in Omsk, where the counter- revolutionary government of General Kolchak was based in 1918-1919. It is difficult to imagine who except VL would have saved and filed these letters addressed to him over the years. Our guess is also supported by the fact that on the top of the first page of some letters there is a record of the date of receipt of the letter, sometimes accompanied by the abbreviated word получ ‘receiv(ed)’ (e.g., L194). The hand is that of VL; his handwriting was identified by us from later documents (e.g., a 1911 application for primary school admission for VL’s son Nikolai; TSA I-92.2.76, 1). If our assumption about VL’s role in the preservation of the letters is correct, we can begin to speculate what caused VL to collect precisely these, and not other letters which must have been received by him from his family over the years. It is important to ask this question, in order to try to understand the significance of the letters’ content, and through that, in some cases at least, to reach an understanding of their referential world. When one examines the content of the letters, several possible reasons for saving them suggest themselves: their sheer entertainment value, their sentimental value (e.g., the emotional attachment some charming letters from younger siblings were likely to foster in the older brother), and pride, i.e., the gratifi- cation VL may have experienced in keeping the letters, as a record of the upward mobility of his family, who went from being some of the poorest peasants in the village to successful entrepreneurs and even, in part, members of the intelligentsia (in the case of his sister). Our archival research has revealed, moreover, that some of the letters (and telegrams) were records of certain momentous events in the lives of the family members. Perhaps the collector was objective enough to have a sense of the human drama encapsulated in the letters of the common folk his kin represented. It is not clear whether the original collection continued beyond 1896. If the collection actually stopped at that date, this may be related to the fact that the funeral records of both parents and of the two brother authors were discovered to be in Tyumen’: evidently, at least four out of the five main writers of the letters eventually moved across the Urals to join VL, and their lives ended in that West Siberian city. Perhaps the correspondence stopped because there was no longer any need to com- municate by mail. On the other hand, no mention of such a planned major move is found in the last letters of the collection, suggesting that the move did not take place any time soon after 1896. Moreover, no trace of the youngest of the writers, the daughter TL, was found in Tyumen’. She very likely never moved to that city. Given that she was the best represented author in the latter part of the collection, it is doubtful that she stopped writing letters worth saving after 1896, while continuing to live far away from her brother VL. The situation remains unresolved, leaving open the possibility that somewhere in Russia a continuation of these letters may yet be found. Moreover, there surely must have been correspondence between VL and his oldest brother AL, as implied at several points in the corpus (e.g., L156ob.2a). The 4 RUSSIAN PEASANT LETTERS: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS total absence of letters from AL in this collection suggests that his letters were saved and filed separately, perhaps because they were more business-related and were important in a different way. Importance of the letters: language, literacy, history, culture The letters constitute an invaluable source for studying the language and life of Russian peasants in the late 19th century, covering the entire reign of Alexander III and the first two years of his successor Nicholas II. The letters are unique in several respects, their sheer volume being only the most obvious one. The collection represents a primary source containing remarkable examples of near-illiterate and semiliterate writing by dialect speakers, which shows a host of phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic features never before documented for this era and this segment of Russian society. In this respect, this material is to be distinguished from a handful of writings by formerly illiterate Russians. The memoirs of the Tyu- men’ (and, later, Moscow) merchant Nikolai Chukmaldin (1836-1901), a contemporary of the parent generation of the authors in this collection, were written when he was already fully literate, and for the purpose of publication (Chukmaldin 1899). He even did freelance writing for several newspapers in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Tobol’sk, and Tyumen’. Even further removed from incipient literacy are other memoirs, such as those by another former peasant, Semen Kanatchikov (1879-1940), a contemporary of the children’s generation of the writers in this collection. A Marx- ist activist born in a village near Moscow, he eventually attained the post of univer- sity president. These works were written to be read by the world, and their language is defined by their concern not to violate literary norms and their self-consciousness with respect to the reader. The letters in our collection, in contrast, were never intended to be read by anyone other than the addressees, or at least not by people outside the extended family circle. Although deviations from the spelling norms of the time abound on every page, the authors, quite remarkably, were sensitive writers who consciously rendered on paper what they pronounced. The phonetic nature of nearly all of the non-normative spelling in the corpus makes it possible to reconstruct the native dialect of the writers in considerable detail and consistency, justifying the basic principles of linguistic reconstruction adhered to by A.A. Shakhmatov and his followers, and identi- fying the writers as speakers of a subdialect of North Russian. The corpus constitutes a rich resource for students of Russian dialectology, and contains numerous morphological and lexical forms that have either been previously unattested or that fill geo- graphic or chronological gaps in existing descriptions and data collections. The style of the writing in many of these letters evidently followed certain models, and lexical, phraseological, paremiological, and even metrical poetic devices can be found on their pages. The authors unmistakably show sensitivity to stylistic variation, despite the widely accepted notion of the absence of stylistic differentiation in peasant language. All these features constitute rich and precious material for linguistic analysis. INTRODUCTION 5

The body of letters in this book, published as is with all their errors, corrections, and false starts, also represents a unique source for the exploration of orality vs. literacy in the texts of 19th-century Russian peasants. The general question of orality and literacy, a topic generally ignored by Russian linguists, has been gaining promi- nence in the West in the last two decades (Goody 1968, 1987, Chafe 1982, Ong 1982, Finnegan 1988, Dyson 1991, Lytle 1991, Hasan and Williams 1996). With the exception of two recent papers by Zemskaia (2004a and 2004b), no Russian data have contributed to the discussion of this topic so far. Zemskaia 2004a and 2004b re- produce the original linguistic features of semiliterate writing of the late 19th and the late 20th centuries, respectively. This testimony is important, and the author’s attention to the original text is exemplary; but the scope of her material is limited to a single letter each. A remarkable example of semiliterate writing is due to Evgeniia Kiseleva (1916-1990), a woman with only five classes of primary education in one of Ukraine’s eastern provinces. She wrote her memoirs between 1977 and 1990, hoping that they would be made into a movie. In 1996, they were published, unedited, as an exceptional, non-normative publication (Kozlova and Sandomirskaia 1996). Having begun work on the memoirs after her 60th birthday, with an outside reader/audience in mind, Kiseleva never attained full literacy, and it is unlikely that she had set any standards for her writing at all (although her unedited texts are quite powerful). The letters in this collection provide a large body of data for studying the question of orality vs. literacy from a century earlier. The collection, moreover, allows us to observe the process of the acquisition of literacy in the case of the three youngsters, whose letters from different ages constitute the bulk of the collection, showing their progress from rudimentary to – in the case of the daughter – a nearly full command of the written literary language. This is another topic that has been gaining in significance in the West (cf., e.g., Ammon 1991, Foorman 1991, Pontecorvo 1997), but has not yet benefited from the examina- tion of Russian data. The texts in this collection document the process of the acquisition of literacy and the literary language, as well as attitudes towards language, linguistic norms, and education in general held by the linguistic personas who wrote them, during a time when public education and literacy in Russia were spreading rapidly. In addition to their linguistic value, the importance of the letters as a major resource for scholars working in Peasant Studies must be underscored. The span of almost 16 years covered by the letters allows the researcher to track the development of events and of the people reporting them. The children grow up to be adults, and the adults age and decline. Births, deaths, and marriages occur. The family rises in its economic status, as the stage on which their lives play out their parts shifts from their home village towards the city and further to the country as a whole. These processes are palpable in the letters, which give us direct and unadorned testimony concerning all aspects of life, as conveyed by family members to other family members, including the writing of two women. A comparison with Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia’s Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia 6 RUSSIAN PEASANT LETTERS: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

1993) makes this point clear: Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia’s ethnographic study of village life, one of the very few sources of our knowledge of this subject (and one that includes, notably, information about women), represents her own views on the peasants, as informed by her observation of them in a village setting. The distance between the educated lady-scholar and her subjects is clearly felt, and the peasants’ own voices are heard, at best, only as they were occasionally overheard by the author. By contrast, this collection is a primary source, written entirely in the peasants’ own voices. The content includes economic and personal news, village and town gossip, parental admonition and prayers, requests for help, intrafamily troubles, and simply the authors’ pouring out their hearts. The reader learns not only about actual events, but also – significantly – about the writers’ views on these events, as expressed explicitly and as can be inferred from evidence susceptible to indirect (but close) analysis of the letters’ graphic and linguistic features. So far, these letters have been featured in two historical articles and one article for the general reader. Dolgushina and Kubochkin 2002 introduces Fund I-134.1.1, with excerpts from non- scholarly normalized versions of selected letters. Klyueva 2003 provides a brief historico-cultural analysis of the letters, pointing out the importance of the materials for historians. Kubochkin 2002 partly overlaps with Dolgushina and Kubochkin 2002, supplying additional information on VL’s activity in Tyumen’ and supplying photographs of the Tyumen’ period of VL’s life. The “pragmaphilological” method As will be shown in the notes to individual letters, linguistic subtleties sometimes conceal a significant extralinguistic reality, justifying our attention to detail and our assumption that even a semi-literate text must be treated with constant respect. Ascribing its ostensible oddities to accident, carelessness, or error should be the scholar’s last resort, only when all other explanations fail. The method developed and used in this book could be called pragmaphilological. It combines a detailed textual analysis of raw texts in the original language with a reconstruction of the personas of the writers and the personas of the assumed readers, as revealed by the writing itself, together with the results of research on extralinguistic realities that sub- stantiate, clarify and contextualize the texts. The focus on the original texts is fundamentally philological, and the attention to the “speaker, hearer, time, and place” of the communication recorded in the letters is fundamentally pragmatic. We thus ex- tend Philipp August Böckh’s definition of philology as reconstruction of all forms of culture and its productions to incoprorate the there-and-then producer and consumer of a given culture, with his or her shifting body of knowledge and limited scope of attention, and with his or her often irrational emotions. Taking advantage of extralinguistic documentation is particularly fruitful in the case of this data because of the relatively recent time depth of the letters, as com- pared to the medieval or ancient texts commonly used in philological analysis; for an in-depth demonstration of the actual discovery process and some of its results, cf. Essays B. As will become evident from numerous editorial notes in this book, con- INTRODUCTION 7 sistent attention to minute linguistic and even graphic details of the texts allows for the reconstruction of the writers’ linguistic and – from that, with additional help from factual archival data and historical accounts – social personas in what I hope is a fairly convincing way. In its respect for the language of the raw texts, with all their errors and corrections, the approach taken here differs from other approaches taken with texts produced in late modern times by writers with little or no formal education (with the exception of Zemskaia’s work mentioned above). It is also, of course, different from studies concerned only with content, using letters in English translation, such as in Thomas’ and Znaniecki’s classic (1918) study of the sociology of Polish-American immigrants in the early 20th century. Contents of the book The bulk of the book consists of the letter texts themselves and the commentary attached to them. The texts are reproduced in three versions: the original Russian version written in the old orthography and transcribed with attention to all graphic and linguistic details (volume I), a normalized Russian version in modern orthography (volume II), and an English translation of the normalized version (volume II). The transcribed originals are intended for Slavic linguists, and the commentary to that text is primarily concerned with the graphic and (mostly dialectal) phonolog- ical, morphophonemic, and morphological features of the texts. The normalized version is intended for Slavic linguists with little interest in the historical or phonolog- ical aspects of the language but concerned with its syntax, lexicon, and discourse- pragmatic and sociolinguistic features. The English version is offered to those with no knowledge of Russian who are interested in the historical, sociological and cultural aspects of the content. Each version is supplied with a commentary in the form of footnotes. In all threee version, the letters are presented chronologically in the same order and a chronological guide to the letters and the events in them precedes the normalized version. The full commentary to the letters appears in three forms: first, as a long essay on the linguistic features of the texts (Essay A, volume I), then as footnotes to the three versions of the letter texts themselves, and finally, following all the texts, in the form of Essays B and C (volume II), addressing specific referential realities that re- cur across the letters. All of the commentary is intended as material that can be used by scholars interested in an in-depth study of the language or the content of the letters, or by anyone interested in exploring the subject in greater depth. The essays are followed by three indices, appendices, and references. The “Word and form index” is organized in modernized Cyrillic, the “Place name index” and the “Personal name index” are organized in transliterated English. The “Personal name index” is an- notated in some detail: the purpose of the annotations is to reveal the family- and community-based ties (rodstvo, svoistvo, kumovstvo) of the personal context of the letters and to provide information about the referents’ social position, thus approx- imating the referential knowledge the authors and readers of the letters presumably shared with respect to these individuals. Both volumes conclude with illustrations: 8 RUSSIAN PEASANT LETTERS: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS facsimiles of selected letter texts at the end of volume I, and archival documents, a map, and photographs at the end of volume II. Attribution of information Finally, a note on the attribution of information is called for. I have tried to credit all information to printed, archival, or internet sources whenever possible. In the process of the final read-through, however, I realized that a portion of my knowledge was impossible to credit, as it always was or had become mine. This includes, of course, knowledge gained from the three decades of my scholarly career as a Slavic linguist, as well as my self-training and fieldwork in Slavic folklore, undertaken in the 1990s. (In fact, even my earlier training in pre-medicine and dentistry turned out to be helpful for writing several footnotes.) Also included is knowledge arising from travels undertaken specifically for this project in 2003-2005: I visited the areas named in the letters, seeing the very churches and houses where some of the people in the letters had been, and the fields and rivers they saw and worked in, as I spoke to local strangers on buses and in market places, to old ladies in station waiting rooms, to cab drivers and fellow train-travelers, acquiring in this way background information no less important, in its way, than material that can be credited with a con- ventional scholarly apparatus. But this is not all. I see now that some of my own personal knowledge, learned by osmosis while growing up in an émigré Russian community in Harbin, amidst thriving pre-revolutionary Russian cultural values that sur- vived anachronistically into the mid-20th century, turned out to be invaluable for understanding the assumptions and implications behind ostensibly trifling details mentioned in the letters, details that sometimes allowed for the plausible reconstruction of vanished contexts. It is this background that led me on occasion to speak with a certain authority on cultural details that I could not and – if I may be permitted – need not reference, since I myself qualify in such cases as my own native informant.

June 2007, Los Angeles