Olga T. Yokoyama
Russian Peasant Letters
Texts and Contexts
Part 1 and 2
2008
Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden
ISSN 05835445
ISBN 978-3-447-05653-3
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
Acknowledgements
Introduction
............................................................................................
vii
........................................................................................................
1
Guide for the reader
............................................................................................
Chronology of letters and events
........................................................................
Chapter one: Transcribed letter texts
9
15
..................................................................
27
.................................................................
369
....................................................................................
441
Chapter two: Essay A
Linguistic features of the texts
Selected letter facsimiles
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
Chapter three: Normalized letter texts
................................................................
1
...................................................................
211
...........................................................................
389
..............................................................................
393
Chapter four: Translated letter texts
Chapter five: Essays B
a. The Bekhterev family
b. The Rodigin family
c. The Stefanov/Zherno/akov family
Family trees
........................................................
.......................................................................................
397
after page 406
Chapter six: Essays C
a.
Pazdery
.................................................................................................
407
b. Sharkan
.................................................................................................
410
Indices
A. Words and word forms
........................................................................
411
....................................................................................
423
.........................................................................................
453
B.
Personal names
C.
Place names
Appendices
A.
Measures and weights
.........................................................................
B. A.V. Timofeev’s poem Выбор жены
457
..................................................
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, authored 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 (oblast’). 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 Western 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. Occasionally, 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 establishing 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 assessing 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 comparing 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 provenance, but it is reasonable to speculate that they were brought to Omsk from Tyumen’ 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 philanthropist 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 counterrevolutionary 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 gratification 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 communicate 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 Tyumen’ (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 Marxist activist born in a village near Moscow, he eventually attained the post of university 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 identifying 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 geographic 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 prominence 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 reproduce 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 examination 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 nonscholarly 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 substantiate, 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 extend 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 compared 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) phonological, morphophonemic, and morphological features of the texts. The normalized version is intended for Slavic linguists with little interest in the historical or phonological aspects of the language but concerned with its syntax, lexicon, and discoursepragmatic 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 recur 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 annotated 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 approximating 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 conventional 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 survived 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