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Russian Ethnographers in the Service of Empire, 1856-1862

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Catherine B. Clay
Catherine B. Clay*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Gettysburg College
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Extract

Several young Russian and Ukrainian writers responded to the era of Great Reforms by taking up a new enterprise: literary ethnography. Their ethnographic expeditions and reports of 1856 to 1862 manifested new political, cultural and social scientific movements within the empire. They not only investigated obstacles to forging a diverse, multinational population into a common empire, they also called the attention of educated Russians and the Russian state to cultural legacies of the countryside. Some were deemed worthy of preservation; others seemed inconsistent with modern ways. They sought a new socio-political path for the public. In these ways they began to link the various peoples in the empire, the imperial state and educated Russia at a time of social and political disclocation.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , Spring 1995 , pp. 45 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

This paper was researched and written with the help of Summer Faculty Development grants from the Grants Advisory Commission, Gettysburg College

1. The meaningful historiographic context of the reform era ethnographers and their new approach draws from several different fields, and begins with the surveys of the history of ethnography by A.N. Pypin (St. Petersburg: M.M. Stasiulevich, 1890-91) and S.A. Tokarev (Moscow, 1966) and the history of folkloristics by M.K. Azadovskii (Moscow, 1963). One of the writers, S.V. Maksimov, wrote a memoir account of the “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia” (Russkaia mysl’ II [1890]: 17-50). Recent work has appeared on Ukrainian ethnography; see Clay, Catherine B., “From Savage Ukrainian Steppe to Quiet Russian Field: Ukrainian Ethnographers and Imperial Russia,” in Krawchenko, Bohdan, ed., Ukrainian Past, Ukrainian Present (New York : St. Martin's Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Thomas, Prymak, “Mykola Kostomarov and the Fast Slavic Fathnography in the 19th Century” Russian History 18, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 163–186 Google Scholar. Several monographs on mid-century reform provide an essential backdrop for this work. Among the most important are: Jacob Kipp, “The Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich and the Epoch of the Great Reforms 1855-1866” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1970); Charles, Ruud, “A.V. Golovnin and Liberal Russian Censorship, January-June 1862,” Slavonic and East European Review 50 (April 1972): 198–220 Google Scholar; and the work on enlightened bureaucrats by W. Bruce Lincoln. Many works exist on educated Russian political culture in the mid-nineteenth century; among the most useful for this study are: Kimball, Alan “Who were the Petrashevtsy?” Mentalities 5, no. 2 (1988): 1–13 Google Scholar; Clowes, Edith, Kassow, Samuel and West, James, ed., Between Tsar and People, Educated Society and the Quest for Public. Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 Google Scholar; Nathaniel Knight's unpublished work on the intellectual foundation of ethnography in the Geographic Society, 1848-55; and Anthony Netting, “Russian Liberalism: The Years of Promise, 1842-55” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1976). For later nineteenth century representations of rural Russia by educated Russians see Cathy A., Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth Century Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 Google Scholar). For a theoretical framework of the politics of ethnography, see James, Clifford and George, Markins, eds., Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986 Google Scholar. Works on the history of literature have also been useful, e.g., Todd, William M., ed., Literature and Society in Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978 Google Scholar. Biographies in article and book form of some of the writers exist. For a fuller bibliography, see Catherine B. Clay “Ethos and Empire: The Ethnographic Expedition of the Imperial Russian Naval Ministry, 1855-62” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oregon, 1989).

2. Maksimov, , “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia,” Russkaia mysl’ II (1890), 19.Google Scholar

3. The word used by the grand duke was iskusstvennaia, denoting something human-made or engineered, not occuring naturally. See Bruce Lincoln, W., The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990), 46 Google Scholar.

4. M.L. Mikhailov, G.P. Danilevskii, A.S. Afanas'ev-Chuzhbinskii, S.V. Maksimov and N.N. Filippov were also commissioned by the Naval Ministry.

5. For the Crimean War backdrop, see George, Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia (New York: Collier Books, 1962) 32–33 Google Scholar; Bruce Lincoln, W., The Great Reforms; and Zakharova, L.G., Eklof, B., Bushnell, J., eds. Velikie Reformy v Rossii: 1856-1874 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1992)Google Scholar.

6. Bruce Lincoln, W., Nikolai Miliutin, An Enlightened Russian Bureaucrat of the 19th Century (Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1977 Google Scholar.

7. Alfred, Rieber, ed., The Politics of Autocracy (Paris: Mouton, 1966 Google Scholar.

8. This became known as the “Literary Expedition” in Soviet literature. For this term and existing historical sketches of the “Literary Expedition,” see A. N., Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1890-92)Google Scholar; and Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia. “

9. This was attempted futilely by many ideologists in the government of Nicholas I in the 1830s and 1840s with S.S. Uvarov's ideology of “Official Nationality. “

10. This assumption was especially associated with the Grand Duke and his coterie. See below for the Grand Duke's concern to draw in outsiders. Lincoln, The Great Reforms, xi, 43-47.

11. Ibid., 43-45.

12. Nicholas V., Riasanovsky, A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 Google Scholar; Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 10-14; Bruce Lincoln, W., In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-61 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982 Google Scholar and Nikolai Miliutin; Charles A. Ruud, “A.V. Golovnin and Liberal Russian Censorship,” 199-219; Semevskii, M.I., “Aleksandr Vasil'evich Golovnin,” Russkaia starina LIII (1887): 767–90.Google Scholar

13. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, 93-99, and The Great Reforms, 43; and Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 45-59.

14. For more on the special role of the Imperial Russian Naval Ministry in the Reform era, see Catherine B. Clay, “The Shining Future,” presented at the AAASS conference in Hawaii, November 1993.

15. I. Egor'ev, “Rol’ ‘Morskogo sbornika’ v istorii russkoi zhurnalistiki i obshchestvennosti,” Morskoi sbornik, no. 4 (April 1923): 1-64; E. D., Dneprov, “'Morskoi sbornik’ v obshchestvennom dvizhenii perioda pervoi revoliutsionnoi situatsii v Rossii,” in Revoliutsionnaia situalsiia v Rosslii v 1859-61 gg. (Moscow, 1965) 4: 229–58Google Scholar; and Irina, Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 5 Google Scholar.

16. D. A., Obolenskii, “Moi vospominaniia o Velikoi Kniagine Elene Pavlovne,” Russkaia starina CXXXVII, no. 3 (March 1909): 503 Google Scholar; J. Kipp, “The Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich and the Epoch of the Great Reforms, 1855-66 “; and W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms, 44-46.

17. See Kipp, “The Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich and the Epoch of the Great Reforms, 1855-66 “; and especially “M.Kh. Reutern on the Russian State and Economy,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 440-41.

18. Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsia” 23.

19. S. Plekhanov, “Introduction” to S. V., Maksimov, God na severe (Arkhangelsk, 1984), 11–12 Google Scholar; and Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia,” 22, 24.

20. Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia,” 19; A. Netting offered other evidence of the naval minister's distrust of the Naval Ministry's bureaucratic ethos, op. cit.; as does W.B. Lincoln in his biography of N. Miliutin (1977). For more on Naval Ministry officials’ critique of autocratic formalism and centralization see Kipp, “Reutern,” 441.

21. N.N. Filippov was also commissioned, but his background differentiated him from the others in many ways. For his biography see Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 69-71; and Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia,” 25-6.

22. The Great Reforms marked this transition according to Irina Paperno (Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 5). D.S. Mirsky also remarked on the quality of realism and eschewal of idealism of some of the writers, like Ostrovskii, A.N. and Pisemskii, A.F.. (D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature [New York : Vintage Books, 1958], 245, 210)Google Scholar.

23. For biographies of the eight writers, and analysis of their perspectives, see chap. 2 of C. Clay's “Ethos and Empire.” For more on the political culture of the generation, see Netting, “Russian Liberalism.” For more on educated Russia's firm grounding in everyday life in the decade before the expedition, see Kimball, “Who were the Petrashevtsy?” 1-13.

24. From a letter from publicist I.I. Panaev to Naval Ministry official Count Dmitrii Tolstoy (Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” fn 32).

25. Clay, “Ethos and F.mpire,” 42-3; and Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia. “

26. For work on “the middle,” see the collection of work in Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow and James West, eds., Between Tsar and People.

27. N.F. Annenskii as quoted in Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 5.

28. Netting, “Russian Liberalism. “

29. Ibid., 175; and Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 94.

30. Ibid., 10.

31. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 8-9.

32. Ibid., 9. Other work in progress by the author seeks to discover more thoroughly the conventions of literary ethnography and social science methodology which were developed and accepted at the time.

33. In 1848 the Ethnographic Section of the Geographic Society had sent out thousands of questionnaires, drawing many contributors to the ethnographic study of Russia. The questionnaires themselves were highly structured and showed the influence of German natural history. Amateur ethnographers had been advised to consider physical anthropology, anthropometry, linguistics, domestic economy, social organization, cultural diffusion and folklore (Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 45-58; Semenov Tian-Shanskii, P.P., htoriia poluvekovoi deiatel'nosti Imperatorskago Geograjicheskago Obshchestva, 1845-1895 [St. Petersburg : 1896]Google Scholar; S. A., Tokarev, “Vklad russkikh uchenykh v mirovuiu etnograficheskuiu nauku,” Ocherki istorii russkoi etnograjii, fol'kloristiki i antropologii I, no. 30: (Moscow, 1956) 5–29 Google Scholar; and Nathaniel Knight, unpublished conference paper, “Nadezhdin, Ber and Ravelin,” delivered at the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, Swarthmore College, April 1992).

34. A.N. Ostrovskii, “Puteshestvie po Volge,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1978) 10: 323; and Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 77. For a complete listing of the ethnographic reports, see the bibliography of the 1989 dissertation.

35. 13 June 1856 Letter from Filippov to Wrangel (Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Morskogo Flota. F. 410, op. 2, d. 1069, 1. 160).

36. Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 70.

37. Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 80-82; and Afanas'ev-Chuzhbinskii, A., “Poezdka na Dneprovskie porogi i na Zaporozh'e,” Morskoi sbornik XXXI, no. 9 (1857) neof., 22–24.Google Scholar

38. From an 11 April 1856 letter written from on-site (Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 69; and Pis'ma k A.V. Druzhininu, 1850-63 [Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk, 1948] 215-16).

39. On the drive of writers as ethnographers to fashion authoritative representations and to mask the constructed nature of ethnographic representations, see James, Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 Google Scholar, and “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 1, no. 2 (1983): 113-46.

40. Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 56.

41. Many were even developing an obsessive fascination for science and technology. See I. Paperno on Chernyshevsky and Peter C. Pozefsky, “D.I. Pisarev and the Sources of Radical Identity,” presented at the AAASS Conference in Phoenix, November 1992.

42. See Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) on bridges between educated and peasant Russia at the end of the nineteenth century.

43. See Nicholas V., Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia 1825-1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959 Google Scholar.

44. For a fuller analysis, see Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 186 ff.

45. Ibid., 153, quoting from Mikhail Mikhailov, “Ural'skie ocherki,” Morskoi sbornik XLIII, no. 9 (1859): neof. 1-29.

46. Onamastics, the naming of places, had great political meaning for Mikhailov, for his readers and for the Cossack Host, as it did across the empire, as writers discovered in their investigations.

47. Prymak, “Kostomarov and the East Slavic Ethnography. “

48. Afanas'ev-Chuzhbinskii, A., “Poezdka po nizov'iam Dnepra. II. Ot Melova do Berislav,” Morskoi sburnik XL, no. 4 (1859): neof., 280–84.Google Scholar

49. A. Afanas'ev-Chuzhbinskii, “ “Poezdka po nizov'iam Dnepra. V. Kamenka,” Morskoi sbornik XLI, no. 11 (1859): neof., 49-50.

50. Mikhailov, M., “Ural'skie ocherki,” Morskoi sbornik XLIII, no. 9 (1859): neof., 17.Google Scholar

51. Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 173-204; and Treadgold, D., “The Peasant and Religion,” in Vucinich, Wayne, ed., The Peasant in 19th Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 73 Google Scholar.

52. A. Potekhin, “Lov krasnoi ryby v Saratovskoi gubernii,” Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 1903-1908), 12: 87; this report originally appeared in Morskoi sbornik XXVII, no. 1 (1857): neof., 44-73. Potekhin's ethnography of Volga fishing life is quoted and analyzed at greater length in Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 208-10.

53. Ibid., 96.

54. Ibid., 97.

55. G.P. Danilevskii, “Chumaki,” h Ukrainy (1860) 3: 87, 84, 114-16; this work was first submitted to Morskoi sbornik, rejected, then published serially in Biblioteka dlia chteniia, 143 (May 1857), as “Nravy i obychai Ukrainskikh chumakov,” I. Zima. II, Vesna; III. Leto; IV, Osen'. Editorial decisions like this one are under investigation in a work in progress “'The Shining Future': The Role of the Naval Ministry Journal in Literary Ethnography. “

56. Ibid., 75.

57. For more on representations of patriarchy and peasant women's history, see Barbara, Engel, “Engendering Russia's History,” Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 309–21Google Scholar; Johanna, Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1988); Christine Worobec, “Victims or Actors? Russian Peasant Women and Patriarchy” in F'sther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 177–216 Google Scholar; and Beatrice, Farnsworth and Lynne, Viola, eds., Russian Peasant Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 Google Scholar. See also Clements, Barbara, Engel, Barbara and Worobec, Christine, eds., Russia's Women; Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 Google Scholar. Future work will more deeply analyze literary ethnographic representations in this historiographic context. See C. Clay, “Bringing Order to the F'mpire: Imperial Russian Writers Investigate Female Sexuality and Culture in the Countryside,” delivered at the 9th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 1993.

58. The role of Mikhailov in the raising of this question has been described, as well as his distinct “anthropological” approach to the Women's Question (see Richard, Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia [Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1978], 38 Google Scholar.).

59. Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 242-308.

60. Mikhailov, “Ural'skie ocherki,” 7.

61. Ibid., 15-20, quoted in Clay “Ethos and Empire,” 264-66, 274.

62. Mikhailov, 19-20.

63. See the work on fel'dsher in Samuel Ramer, “Childbirth and Culture: Midwivery in the 19th Century Russian Countryside,” in David Ransel, ed., The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 218-35. For more on women's education, see Christine, Johanson, Women's Struggle for Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1900 (Kingston : McCill/Queen's University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; for education and popular culture in the village, see Ben, Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools; Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861-1914 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986 Google Scholar); and forthcoming work of Christine Ruane.

64. From Mikhailov, “Ural'skie ocherki,” quotes in Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” chap. 7.

65. See Clay, “Bringing Order to the Empire. “

66. New and very promising work is being published on epistemology and representation of the Russian empire. See Cathy, Popkin, “Chekhov as Ethnographer: Epistemological Crisis on Sakhalin Island,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 36–51 Google Scholar; and Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons.

67. Giuseppe Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe, trans. John McDaniel (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981), 362-63.

68. M. Azadovskii has suggested that some of the writers came from the soil of the Slavophile westerner controversy. For how romanticism and realism were blended in mid-century writing, see Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 7.

69. A. Netting, “Russian Liberalism,” 724-26, from N.P. Barsukov, XIV, 115-17. S.V. Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia,” 32-3, 38. S. Plekhanov, “Introduction” to S. V., Maksimov, God na severe (Arkhangelsk: AN, 1984), 15 Google Scholar, quoting from “Kritika,” Russkoe slovo (February I860): 13. A.V. Druzhinin had written for several journals and was editor of Biblioteka dlia chteniia. N.V. Shelgunov wrote for Sovremennik. For other reviews, see Otechestvennye zapiski, (December 1859): 86-87; Zapiski Imperatorskago Geograficheskago Obshchestva 2 (1862): 54; Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii, (Moscow, 1970), 9: 440.

70. M. Bassin has written of the Geographical Society's development in this context. See his “The Russian Geographical Society, the Amur Epoch and the Great Siberian Expedition, 1855-63,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, no. 2 (1983): 240-56.

71. James, Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski,” in Heller, Thomas C., Sosna, Morton and Wellbery, David, eds., Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986 Google Scholar.

72. Clay, “Ethos and Empire,” 118-20.

73. See C. Clay, “Enunciating a Russian Mission in Mid-Century. “

74. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 295-96, 317-22.