09 August 2018
East European newspapers in the British Library collection
The rapid growth of the British Museum Library from the 1840s onwards brought about the expansion of its collections of foreign material. Books, journals and newspapers in East European languages were also regularly acquired, initiating the future development of the individual countries’ collections. Newspapers, though relatively small in numbers of titles, constituted a vital part of them. The Catalogue of the Newspaper Library, Colindale (London, 1975; HLR.011.35; all records are now also available in our online catalogue) records numerous 19th-century papers from around the world. Among them the oldest titles in East European languages are:
Russkii invalid (St Petersburg, 1813-1917; NEWS13712) a paper of the Russian military.
Dostrzegacz nadwiślański / Der Beobakhter an der Vayksel (Warsaw, 1823-4; NEWS15170). A bilingual Polish and Yiddish weekly, the first Jewish journal published in Poland. Only 44 issues appeared, of which the BL holds three copies for February 1824.
In 1932 the Newspaper Library was established in Colindale and overseas titles were moved there from the British Museum building. Eastern European newspapers were part of this process. In the 1950s there were 74 titles in Slavonic and East European languages acquired annually by the Library. In 2014 a new reading room for all forms of news media opened in the St Pancras building, where these titles can now be consulted.
Political, social and economic transformations in Central and Eastern Europe following the revolutionary wave of 1989 had a huge impact on the publishing industry. Such phenomena as the free market economy, freedom of expression and the rapidly growing political movements, all new to Eastern Europe, also greatly influenced the newspaper output, giving rise to many new titles or title changes. In the early 1990s there was an explosion in the number of papers published, and at its peak the British Library was receiving about 300 titles per year. Many were short-lived and produced only one or two editions. In such chaos it became necessary to get an overall picture of the situation, especially since other UK libraries experienced a similar influx of newspapers. A Union List of Slavonic and East European newspapers in British libraries (YC.2018.b.1946), which was put together in 1992, aimed to provide information about the availability of any particular title in the UK libraries. It should be noted that there were no online library catalogues at the time, so the printed list was the most effective way of communicating.
The collection of newspapers for this period represents the whole spectrum of political colours, social movements and cultural diversity in Eastern European countries. Examples include:
Respekt (LOU.F631G) began publication in November 1989 as one of the first independent journals in Czechoslovakia. It was a pro-Havel liberal weekly reporting on domestic and foreign political and economic issues with a focus on investigative journalism. It is still running.
Spotkania (NEWS13748) attempted to act as the Polish Newsweek and aimed to be an informative paper with no political bias; it lasted only from 1991 to 1993. BL holds 93 issues for the years 1991-2.
The Warsaw Voice (NEWS3057) is an English-language newspaper published in Poland, providing news on Poland and neighbouring countries with the focus on business and the economy. First published in 1988, it is still running; our holdings include the years 1992–2017.
Oslobođenje (LOU.F710D) is the oldest daily newspaper in Bosnia, which began in 1943. The paper received many international awards for continuous publication throughout the 1992–95 siege of Sarajevo. During the war, the editorial board consisted of Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats, reflecting the multi-ethnic society of Bosnia.
At present our collection includes newspapers held in print form, as microfilm and in digital copies. With hard copies and microfilms creating storage and preservation problems, the policy of the Library is to subscribe to aggregated newspaper databases or link to online resources. We currently still receive 17 newspaper titles in print from Lithuania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Romania and recently Poland. A number of Russian, Ukrainian, Moldavian, Belarusian and Baltic newspapers are available online through the commercial supplier Eastview, but currently there is no newspaper coverage for the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia and Macedonia, mainly because of distribution problems and a lack of aggregated databases.
Magda Szkuta, Curator of East European Collections
11 April 2018
The British Library’s Russia in the UK Web Archive
The Russian-speaking community has a long and established presence in UK cultural and political life. The UK-based Russian-speaking diaspora is a visibly distinct community with a rich and diverse history and cultural life, while also being an integral and significant part of the UK’s historical landscape.
Three Anglo-Russian Newspapers: Nasha Rodina, 1 August 1943. P.P.3554.emz; Russkii v Anglii, 15 January 1936. LOU.LON 696 [1938]; Russkii Put’, 11 March, 1922. LOU.LON 682 [1922]
A web archive focusing on the online presence of this community in the UK will form one of the British Library’s Special Collections, Russia in the UK. This special collection will bring the online presence of Russian culture and community in the UK together in a unified archive.
Collected and curated by the British Library, the collection aims to reflect the virtual life of the UK-based Russian diaspora, from news, sports and music, to literature, art and cultural collaborations. It will include sites relating to the activity of the Russian-speaking communities in Britain, such as community events, groups and campaigns, cultural centres and schools, businesses and blogs. This special collection hopes to provide a platform which represents the diverse experiences of the Russian-speaking community, and the services and frameworks that exist to support and promote this Russian-speaking diaspora. It seeks, most importantly, to collect and preserve the online presence created for and by this community.
Legal Deposit Libraries (LDLs) like the British Library prioritise the selection of websites which reflect the diversity of a community’s life, interests and activities throughout the UK. The objective is to preserve those web resources which are expected to be of interest to future researchers. The website selection process is also influenced by considerations of whether a website is at risk of being lost, and whether selection would result in a more comprehensive collection.
A snapshot of websites related to the Russian Revolution included in the British Library’s web archive. February 21, 2018
The Russia in the UK collection will serve both as an original dataset and as a means of including and engaging a diverse range of audiences. This collection represents a cross section of Russian and English UK-based websites containing a wealth of material which will be of value to researchers now and in the future.
In bringing together these virtual traces of a linguistic community, connected through their common cultural and diasporic identities, this special collection will provide a foundation for community-members and researchers curious about the heritage and influence of the Russian diaspora in the UK.
The Russia in the UK web archive is growing and is now ‘live’ and accessible to the public through the British Library’s reading rooms. We would like to invite members of the public who are interested in contributing to web archive to nominate websites they feel reflect Russia in the UK today.
For more information about this project, please send your questions and suggestions to [email protected].
Hannah Connell, Collaborative Doctoral Student, King’s College London and British Library
16 March 2018
The Russian Love Affair with the Arabian Horse
The title does not refer to the mythical indiscretions of Catherine the Great, although she indeed kept a number of Arabian horses, but to the enthusiasm which many famous Russian equestrians and breeders have had for the type.
An Arabian from an album of characteristic horse breeds of the USSR, 1953. S. V. Afanas’ev, Al’bom porod loshadei SSSR (Moscow, 1953). Cup.1253.dd.28.
Among the British Library’s collections, one book in particular illustrates the aristocratic infatuation with the Arabian. Prince A. G. Shcherbatov and Count S. A. Stroganov’s Kniga ob Arabskoi Loshadi (Saint Petersburg, 1900; 7293.l.33.) combines an overview of the breed with an account of the authors’ journey to what is now Syria, purchasing stallions for breeding back in the Russian Empire. It was translated into English as The Arabian Horse: A Survey, which the Library also holds (London, 1989; YK.1990.b.3731).
Above: The lavish cover to Shcherbatov and Stroganov’s book. Below: A mare called Latifa, bought by Stroganov in Damascus in 1895.
Shcherbatov and Stroganov championed the Arabian against the English Thoroughbred, another popular breed. They considered the Thoroughbred inferior, as it had emerged during a great confusion of equine bloodlines after the English Civil War. Cromwell’s revolution had led to the destruction of stud books and heavy loss of stallions – ‘it turned out to be impossible to reconstitute the pedigrees of the surviving animals’.
By contrast, Bedouin traditions ensured no confusion of bloodlines: ‘Our belief in the pure blood of the Arabian horse stems above all from the importance which the Arabs in horse-breeding attach to blood’. The purity of the Arabian appealed to principles close to the hearts of Russia’s ruling classes, who meticulously traced their own genealogies as well as those of their animals.
Shcherbatov and Stroganov argued that the increasing encroachment of the railway and the disruption of traditional Bedouin ways of life, such as the shift in warfare to the use of rifles from the back of camels rather than lances on horseback, brought the future of this unspoiled breed into question in its native homeland.
It fell to Russia to ensure the preservation of the Arabian’s pure bloodline, for Russia alone remained true to the aristocratic conception of an ideal purity of blood within a perceived sea of international vulgarity. In its turn, they thought, only the pure-blooded Arabian could help breed horses to out-compete the constitutional monarchies and democratic republics in equestrian sports and on the battlefield.
By 1900, the Arabian had already clearly proved its worth for improving the Empire’s stock. In the late 18th century, an Arabian stallion named Smetanka had been used as the basis for one of Russia’s best known breeds – the Orlov trotter.
An Orlov trotter from the album of Soviet horses.
The project to develop a Russian trotting horse had been taken up by Count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov-Chesmensky, in his retirement after an eventful military career. Orlov had been a central player during the 1762 coup which secured the throne for Catherine the Great, and was rumoured to have personally assassinated the deposed Tsar Peter III. Through his rigorous and experimental breeding programme, the Orlov trotter emerged as one of the leading horses for harness racing and other sporting disciplines of the 19th century.
Above: A portrait of Count Aleksei Orlov-Chesmensky from Sergy Dmitrievich Sheremetev, Alekhan (Saint Petersburg, 1898). 09603.dd.13. Below: Tolstoy based his 1886 work Kholstomer on the life of the Orlov trotter Muzhik I, born in 1805. Leo Tolstoy, Kholstomer (Moscow, 1951). YF.2011.b.1596.
According to the coaching expert Andreas Nemitz, wealthy Russians typically used Orlov trotters as the centre of a troika to pull their droshkys, flanked by two gallopers. Captain M. H. Haynes, a British observer of Russia’s equine culture at the end of the 19th century, wrote that Orlov trotters ‘admirably suit the requirements of fashionable Russians, who love to go as fast as their coachmen can drive them, even over the roughest cobble stone pavement, which of course does not suit the long fetlocks’.
A pair of Orlov trotters in harness from Capt. M. H. Haynes, Among Horses in Russia (London, 1900). 07293.i.46.
Russia’s Arabian and Orlov trotter populations declined sharply during the 20th century, harmed by the wars and social upheavals of this time. In 1997, enthusiasts founded the International Committee for the Protection of the Orlov Trotter to secure the future of the breed.
Despite the development of more competitive breeds since its heyday, the Orlov trotter is still well loved by enthusiasts and amateurs alike. As Sherbatov and Stroganov wrote in 1900: ‘One has only to glance at the Orlov-type trotters … to recognise immediately in the proudly-arched neck, the bright, prominent eye, the thin skin, the silky mane, the high-soaring tail and the overall nobility of their bearing, the Arabian blood infused only once, more than a century ago’.
Above: An Orlov trotter, image from Wikimedia Commons. Below:
the Orlov trotter in action, image from Wikimedia Commons.
Mike Carey, Eastern European Curator.
References
‘A Russian History’, The Arabian Magazine 29.5.2013
Vsevolod A. Nikolaev & Albert Parry, The Loves of Catherine the Great (New York, 1982). 83/10566.
Andreas Nemitz, ‘Traditions and Styles in the Way of Driving Horses Part One’, The Carriage Journal 36, 4 (Spring, 1999), 152-4. P.P.8003.qn.
‘Orlov Trotter’, International Museum of the Horse (2018) [online] available at http://www.imh.org/exhibits/online/breeds-of-the-world/europe/orlov-trotter/
13 March 2018
Konstantin Somov and Hugh Walpole in Russia
One of the curious aspects of working with the material book is the sudden confrontation of its physical properties, the weight of proofs, the storage of sheets and missing gatherings – and its combustibility.
I was reading a work by Hugh Walpole, written in Russia during the First World War. A copy of the first edition of this novel, The Dark Forest, published in 1916 is in the British Library, and contains two curious pieces of evidence: a printed dedication to Konstantin Somov, and a pencil annotation stating that almost the whole of the edition was destroyed in a fire at the printer’s warehouse.
Hugh Walpole, The Dark Forest (London, 1916) C.134.c.9. Front endpapers with a note describing the fate of the edition and a handwritten dedication by Walpole to Sir Gerald Kelly
Fires were not, unfortunately, uncommon in the printing trade at that time and accounts abound with records of losses or inventories depleted by smoke damage. More commonly mice or cats are blamed for the loss of sheets or full gatherings. However, I had been reading about Walpole’s experiences writing a novel and attending to proofs in the conflagration of the Eastern front, so a fire in what was the safe shores of ‘home’ was all the more shocking.
Walpole was a popular, though now largely forgotten, English writer who, in the First World War, travelled to Eastern front as a volunteer for the Russian Red Cross. He stopped in Petrograd before joining his ‘Otriad’ on a tour of duty near Lviv in May 1915. He managed to get a position as a ‘sanitar’ (medical orderly) and in his memoir ‘The Crystal Box’ he vividly described the conditions in which he wrote his novel at the Galician front:
Standing beside some carts in the Galician lane, my knees trembling with terror, the wounded moving restlessly on their straw, the afternoon light like the green shadow of a dried-up conservatory, I found a pencil and, steadying my shaking body against the cart, I wrote.
After his tour ended in October 1915 Walpole returned to the UK to publish his novel, excited by what he had achieved. The Dark Forest and his second novel The Secret City: ‘capture an atmosphere that would I know escape me afterward. … they are not bad books because as records of a foreigner’s apprehension of a country at its most critical time, they are true.’ In 1916 he went back to Russia to found the Anglo-Russian Bureau in Petrograd, part of a British initiative to counteract German propaganda.
Walpole’s time in Russia was formative of his literary taste. On 28 March 1915 he noted in his diary that he was with Arthur Ransome, Hamilton Fyfe, Konstantin Somov, and other Russian friends debating that ‘realism no good any more for Russia – Symbolism also dead. Alexis Tolstoi most interesting new novelist.’
After Walpole left the Anglo-Russian Bureau, his friend Arthur Ransome continued to report on the situation as in this pamphlet, The Truth about Russia (London, 1918) 8286 f. 17.
Walpole’s mentor in Russia was the acclaimed painter Konstantin Somov. A former member of the ‘Pickwickians of the Neva’, the circle whose ideas were to be key in the creation of innovative magazines such as Mir Isskusstva (‘The World of Art’), and of the Ballets Russes, Walpole was a sentimentalist and his reaction to the Russian Modernists is complex: in his appreciation of plays at home or in Russia he frequently mentions the emotion of specific scenes, individual actors or joint performances. He was not ‘highbrow’ and also went with Somov to watch wrestling and barebacked riding, and his enthusiastic observations are drawn into his novel: ‘I adore a circus; and when I can find one with the right sawdust smell, the right clown, and the right enthusiasm, I am happy.’ Yet he was drawn to the idealism of the Russian Revolution.
Illustration by Somov from Frans Blei Das Lesebuch der Marquise: ein Rokokobuch (Munich, 1923) YA.1994.a.19985. Somov was working on this book when Walpole was in Russia.
Somov had not followed Diaghilev to the West, finding for the time being artistic fortune in his own country. Escorted by Somov, Walpole was thus able to socialise with leading representatives of Russia’s new culture, such as Sologub, Glazunov and Scriabin, and to see legendary stars such as Tamara Karsavina in La Fille Mal Gardée, recording that she ‘seemed inspired’. In addition to the Anglo-Russian Bureau in Petrograd, Walpole set up a small office in Moscow with R.H. Bruce Lockhart which had good relations with Moscow’s cultural life. As Karsavina recalled in her memoir Theatre Street, entertainments continued, Lockhart gave banquets, wrote stories for the wide-circulation Russian trench newspapers and took propaganda films to the Russian troops. Walpole himself reported on the build-up to the October Revolution, writing the official report for the British government, and portraying it in his second novel The Secret City which won the inaugural James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1919.
Picture by Edmund Dulac of Tamara Karsavina in the ballet Parade in 1920, reproduced in Karsavina’s memoir, Theatre Street (London, 1930) 010795.d.46. in which she records her friendship with Walpole.
The development of his taste in Russia would lead to Walpole’s re-evaluation of the role of cultural production and his desire for a ‘broadbrow’ view of the arts. He recalled his Russian experiences in the forewords to his works on Russia, recommended Lockhart’s A British Agent to the British Book Society, and wrote an introduction for an edition of Saki's Reginald and Reginald in Russia. His experiences also gave him a lifelong collecting habit; he filled his house in Cumbria with paintings, books and sculptures and later donated works to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
On his return to Britain Walpole helped Russian friends who came over after the Revolution, seeing Somov again on his way to New York for an exhibition of Russian revolutionary art in January 1924. Somov urged Walpole to support the artists by writing magazine articles, but Walpole had moved on.
Somov was disappointed in their US reception: the American public were more interested in pre-revolutionary art and icons. He moved to France he continued to paint and produce illustrations. He corresponded briefly in his later years with Walpole, offering to sell him paintings to add to his collection, something Walpole could not resist.
Illustration by Somov from Longus Daphnis et Chloé translated by Paul Louis Courier. Grande Collection du Trianon, No.8 (Paris, 1931) 012403.f.38.
Giannandrea Poesio and Alexis Weedon, University of Bedfordshire
This work is part of a larger project and forthcoming article ‘The origins of the ‘Broadbrow’: Hugh Walpole, Konstantin Somov and Russian modernism’ co-authored by Giannandrea Poesio and Alexis Weedon.
References
Hugh Walpole, ‘The Crystal Box: Fragments of Autobiography’, in The Bookman (Feb 1923) PP.6479.e.
Hugh Walpole, The Secret City: a novel in three parts. (London, 1919) NN.5340
20 February 2018
Chekhov, Sakhalin and the Russian Famine of 1891–92
In 1890, the 30-year-old Anton Chekhov made the long and arduous journey from Moscow through Siberia to the remote island of Sakhalin. There he spent three months recording his observations and carrying out a census of the some 10,000 convicts and settlers who lived in the Russian penal colony on the island. An accredited correspondent, Chekhov in part financed his trip by writing a series of articles while en route to Sakhalin for the newspaper Novoe vremia (‘The New Times’; MFM.MF1223), which was owned by his acquaintance Aleksei Suvorin. The first six articles appeared in the paper in June 1890 under the title ‘From Siberia’ (Iz Sibiri) and a further three were later published in July and August under the heading ‘Through Siberia’ (Po Sibiri).
Portrait of Chekhov around the time of his visit to Sakhalin, from V. A. Brender, O Chekhove. Vospominaniia i statˊi (Moscow, 1910). 010795.i.19.
During his stay on Sakhalin, Chekhov witnessed the appalling conditions and treatment many of the inmates and settlers were forced to endure. He took a particular interest in the intellectual needs of the colony’s children, later collecting and sending a library of over 2,200 books to Sakhalin. He also came into contact with the island’s indigenous peoples and observed first-hand the devastating effects of colonialisation on their communities.
The famous Sakhalin inmate Sofia Bliuvshtein, known as Zolotaia Ruchka (‘Golden Hand’). Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Returning to Moscow in December 1890, Chekhov began writing an account of his time on Sakhalin, which would later be published in full in 1895 as Ostrov Sakhalin (‘Sakhalin Island’; BL 10011.l.21). Initially Chekhov is said to have been reluctant to publish sections of his book in literary journals, preferring instead for the book to appear as a complete work. This changed, however, in 1892 when he agreed to publish Chapter 22, ‘Beglye na Sakhaline’ (‘Escapees on Sakhalin’), in Pomoshchˊ golodaiushchim (‘Aid for the Hungry’), a collection of works published to raise money for victims of the Russian famine that had begun along the Volga River the year before. 6,100 copies of the anthology were published and its other contributors included Leo Tolstoy (who was an outspoken critic of the government’s handling of the famine), Konstantin Balmont and Dmitry Merezhkovsky.
Image from the inside cover of Pomoshchˊ golodaiushchim. (Moscow, 1892) YA.2002.a.2793
The famine had arisen following bad weather in 1890-91 and a subsequent poor grain harvest. However, despite the severely reduced harvest, there was in fact enough food available to feed the population. Problems with infrastructure and government policy meant that food supplies were not fairly and adequately distributed. As a result, almost half a million people are believed to have perished by the end of 1892, the majority from disease triggered by the famine.
An illustration printed in Pomoshchˊ golodaiushchim. The caption reads: ‘A hungry man understands the hungry’.
The British Library’s rare copy of the first and only edition of Pomoshch’ golodaiushchim not only provides information on the horrific famine and the attempts to aid its victims, but it is also particularly noteworthy as it contains the first appearance in print of any part of Chekhov’s book on Sakhalin Island. The chapter in question deals with runaways in the penal colony and later formed the penultimate chapter in the full version of his 1895 book in revised and abbreviated form. For example, an evocative passage describing the natural obstacles facing those attempting to escape the island appears in the 1892 and 1895 publications as follows:
Но среди препятствий, удерживающих людей от побегов, не так страшны морские волны, как путь к морю. Переплыть море не трудно, не страшно и утонуть в нем, но трудно и страшно подходить к нему. Непроходимая сахалинская тайга, горы, постоянная сырость, туманы, голод, безлюдье, а зимою страшные морозы и метели – вот истинные друзья надзора.
But among the obstacles which restrain people from escaping, the path to the sea is more formidable than the waves. It is not the crossing of, or even the fear of drowning in, this sea that is difficult and frightening, but the route to the sea itself. The impassable taiga, the mountains, the permanent damp, the mists, hunger, the lack of human beings, and in winter, the dreadful frosts and snow-storms – it is these things that are the true allies of surveillance.
(‘Beglye na Sakhaline’, 1892, Pomoshchˊ golodaiushchim, p. 228)
Но среди препятствий, удерживающих людей от побегов, страшно главным образом не море. Непроходимая сахалинская тайга, горы, постоянная сырость, туманы, безлюдье, медведи, голод, мошка, а зимою страшные морозы и метели – вот истинные друзья надзора.
But among the obstacles which restrain people from escaping, it is not the sea that is primarily so terrible. The impassable taiga, the mountains, the permanent damp, the mists, the lack of human beings, bears, hunger, mosquitoes, and in winter, the dreadful frosts and snow-storms – it is these things that are the true allies of surveillance.
(Ostrov Sakhalin, 1895, p. 475)
Following the publication of Pomoshchˊ golodaiushchim, Chekhov published several other chapters from Ostrov Sakhalin in the Russian periodical Russkaia myslˊ (‘Russian Thought’; P.P.4842.dc.) prior to its full publication.
Chekhov’s reasons for travelling to Sakhalin have long been a source of debate for scholars (Karlinsky, pp. 152-154). It is clear, however, that the trip and his subsequent book had a profound impact on both him and Russian society. To this day, the island and Chekhov’s work continue to hold a poignant fascination, as a photo essay by Oleg Klimov for the 120th anniversary of the 1895 publication of Ostrov Sakhalin demonstrates.
Katie McElvanney, Curator Eastern European Collections
References and further reading:
Anton Chekhov, Ostrov Sakhalin (Moscow, 1895). 10011.l.21
Anton Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem A. P. Chekhova. Volume 10. ‘Ostrov Sakhalin, 1891-1894’. ‘Iz Sibiri, 1890’. 1948. 12266.l.1.
Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, translated by Brian Reeve (Richmond, 2013). YC.2014.a.1499
Anton Chekhov’s life and thought: selected letters and commentary, translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky; selection, introduction, and commentary by Simon Karlinsky (Evanston, Illinois, 1973). YC.1999.a.3087
Donald Rayfield, Understanding Chekhov: a critical study of Chekhov’s prose and drama (Bristol, 1999). YC.1999.a.3685
16 February 2018
Silent Witnesses: Two Manuals of the Sart Language
We’ve all heard of dead languages: the Latins, Ottomans, Manchus and Arawaks that dot the pages of historical texts. These are languages that have ceased to be spoken, whether as first languages or taught ones, by anything more than a handful of scholars. Some dialect groupings disappear altogether for reasons of politics (consider Ottoman and Manchu); social change (Gaulish and Messina Greek); or simple brutality and terror (Arawak and Beothuk). For many others, their “death” is merely a fudge: Latin developed into Italian, French, Spanish and other Romance languages by the same process that brought us contemporary English from Old English, although the latter grouping was never considered to have died. But what of languages that have disappeared through bureaucratic measures? The Sart language might be considered one such example.
Sart is, or was, a Turkic language spoken by the Sart people of Central Asia. Although ethnic identity in pre-Soviet Central Asia is an exceptionally thorny issue, consensus seems to be that the Sarts were a sedentarized Turkophone population in various urban centres throughout the region. They were assumed to be Iranic by descent, but a quick look at two works in the British Library’s collections confirm that their speech, as recorded by Russian officials and travellers at the end of the 19th century, was very much Turkic. This was a basis for their distinction from the neighbouring Tajik peoples of the Pamir range, a community with whom 19th and early 20th century ethnographers assumed they shared a common ancestry, as Maria Subtelny explores in ‘Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik’.
Portraits of Sayid Azimbaev (above) and Palvan Tapylbaev (below), two Sarts whose lives and genealogies are studied in N.P. Ostroumov’s 19th-century ethnographic work on Sart communities, Sarty: etnograficheskie materialy (Tashkent, 1896) RB.23.b.6250.
The first of the two works in question is a phrasebook entitled Frazy na sartovskom” iazykie (‘Phrases in the Sart Language’), authored by Z. A. Aleksieev in 1884 and published in Tashkent. It was intended to be of “useful benefit for landlords and landladies, buyers and farmers, and [with] a good chrestomathy for Russians learning literacy in Sart and for Sarts beginning to read in Russian.” This was only 19 years after the city of Tashkent had fallen into Russian hands, and five years before the arrival of the Trans-Caspian Railway. It is a good indication of the pressure Russian officials felt to cement their interests among the mercantile classes of a sensitive part of the Empire abutting British interests in the Sub-Continent.
Cover of Frazy na sartovskom” iazykie … (Tashkent, 1884) 14489.d.15
Although the work was advertised as being a learning resource for Sarts, it was clearly aimed at Russians: it is organized into three columns, with a Sart phrase on the far right; its Russian translation on the far left of the page; and a Cyrillic transliteration of the Sart in the middle. No Arabic transliteration of the Russian exists.
A page from Frazy na sartovskom” iazykie, dealing with tree planting
The table of contents shows just how heavily it was geared towards functional interactions: while there is no section on small talk, there are stock phrases about buying birds or carpets; teacher-student interaction; farming; and the repair of telegraphic lines.
Table of contents from Frazy na sartovskom” iazykie showing the diversity of commercial topics covered by the book
It is difficult to compare Sart to contemporary Turkic languages from the region. These reflect heavy state intervention on the part of the Soviet authorities and bear the scars of often traumatic social disruption, such as the collectivization and sedentarization campaigns of the 1930s. Nonetheless, what we can say about it is that it resembles considerably contemporary Uzbek, as well as certain features of Kazakh and Kyrgyz, all of which are spoken today in the regions where the Sarts lived.
Cover of V.P. Nalivkin, Russko-Sartovskii i Sartovsko-Russkii Slovar’ (Kazan, 1884) 12975.l.21.
The second work is a dictionary and short grammar of the language compiled by Vladimir Nalivkin. Published in 1884 as well, this time in Kazan’, it focuses on the dialect of the Namanganskii Uezd, in contemporary eastern Uzbekistan. Russko-Sartovskii i Sartovsko-Russkii Slovar’ is not, unfortunately, as telling of the social relations between Russians and Sarts as is Frazy, but it does reveal many important features of the language. Much of the vocabulary is not far from that of the Turkic languages of today’s Central Asia, although there are some remarkable departures, including in the names of months. The grammar is far from systematic, and provides only a sketch of the most important morphological structures of the language. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that Sart behaved very much like other Karluk Turkic languages; it would not have been hard for anyone versed in Chagatai or even contemporary Uyghur or Uzbek to pick up.
Sketch of Sart grammar, from Russko-Sartovskii i Sartovsko-Russkii Slovar’
As an important vehicle of commercial communication, it would be easy to assume that Sart would function as a crucial tool in extending Moscow’s authority over Central Asia in the 20th century. Such was not the case. In the 1920s and 30s, the Soviet government sent out teams of ethnographers and anthropologists in order to determine the region’s ethno-linguistic make-up; a key step towards the division of the territory into national republics. As Francine Hirsh has explored in Empire of Nations, this was a fraught process, occasionally led by political fiat rather than evidence. Throughout it, the Sarts fared badly. It was assumed that, in the march towards Socialism, they would be absorbed into the Uzbek nation. As a result, their language was not provided official recognition, and their culture ignored in favour of a Socialist Uzbek one. Sarts disappeared from the 1926 census and official discourse. The Sart language, along with dozens of other dialects that were no longer deemed to be expedient in the march towards Communism, was expunged from the historical record. These two items in the British Library’s collections, however, remain as testimonies to the vibrancy and importance of the language in the pre-Soviet period, and the people who spoke it.
Michael Erdman, Curator of Turkish and Turkic Collections
References/Further reading
Sergeĭ Abashin, Natsionalizmy v Sredneĭ Azii: v poiskakh identichnosti (St Petersburg, 2007) YF.2009.a.901
Maria Subtelny, ‘The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik’, in Central Asia in historical perspective, edited by Beatrice F. Manz (Boulder, 1994) ORW.1996.a.1330
Frances Hirsch, Empire of nations: ethnographic knowledge & the making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005) YC.2005.a.7999
Polveka v Turkestane : V.P. Nalivkin biografiia, dokumenty, trudy = Half a century in Turkestan : Vladimir Petrovich Nalivkin : biography, documents and works, Redaktory-sostaviteli: S.N. Abashin [and five others] (Moscow, 2015) YF.2017.a.4115
12 February 2018
1918 and the Eclipse of Populist Marxism
2017 saw a number of important milestones in the history of Russian Marxism, including the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital and the centenary of the Russian Revolution. From 1 May to 5 August 2018, the British Library will be celebrating 200 years since Marx’s birth with an exhibition in the Treasures Gallery.
This year will also see the centenaries of the deaths of five central figures from the generation of ‘Populist’ Russians who began to engage with the ideas of Marx – V.V. Bervi-Flerovsky (b. 1829), Nikolai Danielson (b. 1844), Nikolai Liubavin (b. 1845), German Lopatin (b. 1845) and Vasily Vorontsov (b. 1847). The British Library holds original editions of many of their books, the manuscripts of the extensive correspondence between Danielson and Marx (Add MS 38075), and the fruits of their work: Russian translations of the three volumes of Das Kapital, completed between 1872 and 1896.
Above: Title page of volume 1 of Karl Marx, Kapital (St Petersburg, 1872-1896) C.185.b.12. The first translation of volume one of Das Kapital into any foreign language. Below: Inscription on the title-page of the second volume (completed by Danielson in 1885 after Marx’s death): ‘To the British Museum from the literary executors of Karl Marx. London 1.2.86. Presented by F. Engels & Eleanor Marx Aveling’.
These Populist ‘fathers’ represent something of a forgotten generation, overshadowed by the more familiar names of the Social Democratic ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’: the Mensheviks Georgi Plekhanov (who also died in 1918), Vera Zasulich, and Yuri Martov; and the Bolsheviks Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
Many commentators have depicted a rigid division between Populism and Marxism. Lenin wrote that Populism was a ‘whole vision of the world whose history begins with Herzen and ends with Danielson’ – a precursor of his own revolutionary ideology, but essentially non-Marxist.
Top row, left to right: V.V. Bervi-Flerovsky (date unknown) and Nikolai Danielson (1908). Bottom row, left to right: German Lopatin (c.1895) and Vasily Vorontsov (date unknown). Images from Wikimedia Commons
The ‘Populists’ did not see it that way. As well as being involved in the translation of Das Kapital into Russian (in the case of Danielson, Liubavin, and Lopatin), they also sought to grasp what it meant for Russia. In the book, Marx vividly depicted what he called the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, which shifted resources from pre-capitalist agricultural forms to the developing industrial capitalist sector - with devastating consequences for agricultural communities.
In Marx’s work, this is a historical account of a task already substantially achieved by the bourgeoisie – the subordination of agriculture to industry. For his Russian readers, however, this process lay not in the recent past but in their immediate future. They feared that the famines and social dislocation of industrialisation in the British Empire might be repeated in Russia.
A common experience for Marx’s early advocates in Russia. Ilya Repin’s Arrest of a Propagandist (1880-92). Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Must Moscow travel the British road, ‘the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil’? In the closing decades of the 19th century, Russian intellectuals drew on Marx to argue for various positions in relation to this question.
Though with differing emphases and political approaches, Bervi-Flerovsky, Danielson, Liubavin, Lopatin, and Vorontsov foresaw a ‘non-capitalist’ industrialisation in Russia, which would avoid the horrors of the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’. By exposing the economic mechanisms driving development in Western Europe, they argued, Marx opened up the possibility of a more self-conscious and planned process. They hoped for a more humane path which would allow the peasant commune to persist in some form, or at least enable the class of peasants to become modern socialist citizens without severe disruption.
Vorontsov’s Krest'ianskaia Obshchina (‘The Peasant Commune’) (Moscow, 1892) 08207.k.30.
Other readers of Marx advanced a more fatalistic interpretation. For Nikolai Ziber (1844-88), known as ‘the first Russian Marxist’, there could be no path to socialism except through a long period of capitalist development exactly as depicted in Das Kapital. There must first be a bourgeois-democratic revolution to enable the unfettered accumulation of capital. A socialist revolution would follow only once more traditional economic forms had been dismantled, and the peasantry forcibly transformed into a wage-earning proletariat. This reading became known as ‘orthodox Marxism’, influencing the Social Democratic movement as well as the Legal Marxist intellectuals like Peter Struve.
By 1917, Lenin had resolved to cut the Gordian Knot by a third solution: to try to spark a world revolution, and contribute to the success of socialism in the developed capitalist countries. Socialist Russia would then be able to modernise in collaboration with the advanced economies of Socialist Europe.
An early Soviet work about Lopatin. I. I. Popov, German Aleksandrovich Lopatin (Moscow, 1926) 010795.aa.85.
The daring actions of the Leninists in 1917 brought their particular strand of Russian Marxism to the fore, eclipsing all rival interpretations. In 1918 the Bolsheviks celebrated the centenary of Marx’s birth as the rulers of Soviet Russia, staking their claim to be his only faithful followers.
However, the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary ideology itself had emerged out of engagement with these older figures, albeit often in passionate argument with them. As the world socialist revolution failed in the years after 1917, the question of the fate of the peasantry along Russia’s path of industrial development, which had been so central for these early readers of Marx, returned with even greater urgency.
Mike Carey, Curator of East European Collections
References/Further Reading
Ewa Borowska, ‘Marx and Russia’, Studies in East European Thought 54, 1/2 (March, 2002), 87-103. 8490.413600
Henry Eaton, ‘Marx and the Russians’, Journal of the History of Ideas 41, 1 (January-March, 1980), 89-112. 5000.900000
Letters of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Nikolai Frantsevitch Daniel’son (1868-1895) Add MS 38075.
Derek Offord, ‘The Contribution of V.V. Bervi-Flerovsky to Russian Populism’, The Slavonic and East European Review 66, 2 (April, 1988), 236-51.
Albert Resis, ‘Das Kapital Comes to Russia’, Slavic Review 29, 2 (June, 1970), 219-37. 8309.385000
Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy Over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford, 1969) X.529/10228.
07 February 2018
Exporting the Animals’ Revolt: Kostamorov - Reymont - Orwell
People say that there are only 3? (7? 11?) basic plots in the whole of world literature. Goethe claimed it was 36, but apparently he nicked the idea from a guy named Gozzi. I suspect the exact number will be argued as long as people tell stories but they can spin yarns of such striking likeness it makes one wonder how these plots travel, cropping up in different times and places, in seemingly disparate worlds.
Orwell’s Animal Farm is a good case in point. As discussed in two previous blog posts, for close on 60 years it was the prime example of a political allegory using the ancient form of animal fable to comment on 20th century politics, but the rediscovery of two earlier stories of animal revolutions, Władysław Reymont’s Bunt, and Nikolai Kostomarov’s Skotskoi Bunt in recent years has raised the question of whether the three stories share the same genetic lineage. If they do, the next question is: how did the original idea travel from Russia to Poland to Britain?
The first possible route that immediately comes to mind is via Sonia Brownell, “the girl from the Fiction Department”, Julia from 1984, and Orwell’s future wife. They met in the early 1940s at Horizon magazine where Sonia was working as a secretary to the writer and critic Cyril Connolly, but already had solid editorial experience as assistant to Eugene Vinaver, a Russian post-revolutionary émigré and another specialist in fairy tales, though in his case they were Malory’s Arthurian tales.
Eugene was the son of Maxim Vinaver who was born, raised and educated in Warsaw before making a career as a lawyer in St Petersburg. He played an active role in the Russian Revolution but escaped to France before it could swallow him up. While settled in St Petersburg, the Vinaver family would almost certainly have subscribed to the legendary magazine Niva, which published Kostomarov’s story in 1917, as no respectable bourgeois family could function in society without it.
Maxim Vinaver as a member of the first Russian Parliament in 1905, from Pamiatnaia knizhka pervoĭ Gosudarstvennoĭ dumy (St Petersburg, 1906). RB.31.c.577
It’s practically certain too that Maxim Vinaver knew Reymont’s work; after all they went to school in Warsaw at the same time, a fact which wouldn’t have been lost on Maxim when Reymont won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. As a sociologist and a lawyer fighting for Jewish rights, he must have been familiar with Reymont’s rural and industrial novels of the Russian Empire, Chłopi (‘The Peasants’; Warsaw, 1904; 12591.b.52.) and Ziemia Obiecana (‘The Promised Land’; Warsaw, 1899; 12591.cc.39) and also with his journalism dealing with the rights of Polish minorities subjected to heavy Russification in the Lublin Governorate after 1912. Maxim might have even read Bunt, and would have shared both its anti-revolutionary sentiment and its interest in folklore – he was a founding member of the Russian Jewish Ethnographical Society and apparently infected his son with his interests badly enough for the young Eugene to study mediaeval literature and eventually to become an academic specialist in fables.
Clearly both Vinavers had good first-hand knowledge of both the mechanics of revolution and the art of fairy tales. Just as Orwell had towards the end of his spell at the BBC when he was working on radio adaptations of fairy tales. At that time he had already met Sonia Brownell. Could it be it was then she passed Vinaver’s infection (in-fiction?) on to Orwell?
Another possible route from 1920s Poland to 1940s Britain for the story of animal revolt as a parable of Russian Revolution could be via Teresa Jeleńska, Animal Farm’s Polish translator (in fact the first translator of Animal Farm into any language). Jeleńska was an aristocratic socialite in pre-war Poland, moving in European literary and political circles, who found herself as a refugee in London in 1941. Working as a journalist she met Orwell and the two became friends.
Photo of Teresa Jeleńska (Rome, 1924) from: Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Teresa Jeleńska, Konstanty A. Jeleński, Korespondencja (Warsaw, 2008). YF.2011.a.6916
Jeleńska’s son, Konstanty, or Kot, later an influential essayist and translator of Witold Gombrowicz, after the war ran the Eastern European division of Congress for Cultural Freedom (its Manifesto was drafted by Arthur Koestler, a close friend of Orwell). In a letter to Jonathan Brent of 7 August 1985, explaining the biographical introduction to his first collection of essays Zbiegi okoliczności (‘Coincidences’; Paris, 1982; X.950/16831), Konstanty recalled, “During my war years in England I discovered the Horizon and Partisan Review and met some English writers like Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Raymond Mortimer and George Orwell (a friend of my mother…)”. It must have been at the same time that he met and befriended Sonia Brownell, though their shared interest then was probably more in painting than literature.
Title-page and frontispiece of Konstanty A. Jeleński, Chwile oderwane (Gdańsk, 2008). YF.2009.a.16241
Jeleńska’s name doesn’t register in any biography of Orwell as one of his friends but only as a translator. Yet their paths apparently crossed quite frequently (probably after Jeleńska and Kot moved to Scotland in 1942), and their friendship, or at least their working relationship, was close enough for Orwell to trust her with the typescript of Animal Farm before publication. They may have been also Orwell’s Polish liaison behind his piece in Tribune (Sept. 1944) on the Warsaw Rising, in which he denounced the West for not helping the insurgents and Stalin for holding up the offensive and waiting for the Uprising to bleed to death. They corresponded regularly until Orwell’s death in 1950.
It’s unlikely that the Jeleńskis would not have known of Reymont’s story but whether they talked about it with Orwell remains unknown, as does whether Sonia Brownell regaled Orwell with stories heard from Eugene Vinaver about his years in St Petersburg or his father’s knowledge of a fellow Varsovian’s work on revolution. The readily available literature is mute on the subject, perhaps the secrets are still buried in the archives? These are mostly uncharted waters but perhaps one day someone out there will map them out. Sails up.
Wiesiek Powaga, Polish translator
26 January 2018
Another Revolt of the Animals: Nikolai Kostomarov’s ‘Skotskoi Bunt’
As discussed in a previous blog post Władysław Reymont’s Bunt (‘The Revolt’) – a story of farm animals revolting against their master, first published in 1922 and re-discovered in Poland in 2004 – raised the question of whether and how this obscure story by a long-forgotten Polish writer could have inspired Orwell’s more famous treatment of the same theme in Animal Farm. The recent rediscovery of an even earlier story of an animals’ revolt on a farm in 19th-century Ukraine told as political satire makes the question of how such strikingly similar plots travel, cropping up in such seemingly disparate worlds, even more fascinating.
Portrait of Nikolai Kostomarov from Thomas M. Prymak, Mykola Kostomarov: A Biography (Toronto, 1996). YC.1999.b.6922
Written in 1880 by Nikolai Kostomarov, the great Russian and Ukrainian historian, writer and ethnographer, the manuscript of Skotskoi Bunt (‘The Farm Animals’ Revolt’) lay dormant long after the author’s death in 1885. It was finally published in 1917 in one of the most popular magazines of the time, Niva. The fact it was published just before October Revolution may explain why the story never gained much readership at the time. But it doesn’t mean it was not read by Niva’s devoted audience – even as some of them fled the Revolution, such as the Vinavers, Zinovieffs and Nabokovs, who would later be influential in the London literary and cultural scene.
Front page of issue 34-37 of Niva, September 1917, where Skotskoi bunt was first published. Available in our Reading Rooms via Electronic Resources
There are various ways in which the story might have travelled from revolutionary Petrograd via post-revolutionary Poland to post-Second World War Britain, each worth a story in its own right. But the interesting thing would be to compare these tales to see how much they have in common.
The basic plot and the main dramatis personae remain the same in all of them, though each story takes its own, different narrative route. Kostomarov’s rebellious animals rise against the landlord but never in fact gain control of the farm. The person in control turns out to be a trusty old farmhand, Omelko, who possesses the gift of understanding animals’ talk. While the master panics, running around with a rifle, Omelko jumps onto the wall and quickly outwits the leaders of the insurrection – the powerful bull and the beautiful stallion – by giving in to their fervent demands and granting them and their folk freedom. But soon some of the rebels are forced, shouted or talked into submission, with many confused beasts gratefully returning to the fold. When winter comes and the liberated “horns and hooves” run out of food, which for the most part they had destroyed themselves, the leaders are punished: the bull felled and sent to the slaughterhouse, and the horse neutered. Omelko is instructed to take every precaution to prevent the uprising ever happening again, and the world returns into the old rut.
In Reymont’s story there is also a character who understands animals’ talk, called Mute, but he is on their side. He too feels mistreated by his fellow men and joins the animals in their mass escape from man’s bondage. Later he and his friends fall out and go their separate ways. Mute dies alone in the wilderness, but the animals continue their exodus east, towards the promised land.
Orwell’s story has the line between man and beast clearly drawn, the two facing each other on opposing sides, as in Kostomarov’s, though never on an equal footing as they are with Mute in Reymont’s story; that line later blurs as some of Orwell’s animals become all too human.
Although the stories have the same triumvirate (triumbrutat?) of leaders, the original stirrers among them are different. In Kostomarov’s it is the bull, so wilful and strong it has to be kept in fetters at all times and beaten into submission if need be; in Reymont’s it’s a dog named Rex, not so long ago the master’s favourite but through some unintended mischief fallen out of favour; in Orwell’s it’s Old Major, the wise boar, the philosopher of change. Their characters and motivations differ too – from the injured pride of a bull aware of his power, through the vengeful hurt of the rejected man’s best friend, to the wisdom of the old swine who dreams of a fairer world. Yet the way they inflame their brethren to rise and fight is the same – with long idealistic speeches. The most surprising one is given by Kostomarov’s brawny bull who sells pure Marx to his fellow bovines, calling on them to assert the ownership of their labour and the right to enjoy its fruit as they see fit. But perhaps it was not Marx but Blanqui, since it is the original elite group of the revolutionaries, the cattle, who establish the dictatorship. Interestingly, this shows that in Kostomarov’s time, although the Age of Revolution had already dawned, the exact way of doing it was still being debated, the Blanquists and Marxists soon joined by the ever-growing number of theorists who claimed to have the know-how.
‘Ploughing in Ukraine’, painting by Leon Wyczółkowski, 1892. (Image from Wikimedia Commons. Also reproduced in Urszula Kozakowska-Zaucha, The Borderlands in Polish Art (Olszanica, 2009), LF.31.b.7294. )
Interestingly, only Kostomarov’s and Orwell’s stories try to set the animals’ rebellion on a proper ideological foundation. Reymont’s story, much closer to the actual Russian Revolution, emphasizes the psychology of hurt and vengeance which drives the rebellion to its tragic end. Orwell on the other hand concerns himself mostly with exposing the mechanics of power and how it corrupts, painfully knowledgeable as to how these things end. And while Kostomarov and Reymont stay with the simple formula of a cautionary tale – one funny in still a fairly theoretical argument, the other bleakly confirmed by eye-witnesses, Orwell upgrades it to a biting political satire more suited to the sophisticated 20th century reading public.
The shifts in emphasis in each story reflects the time in which it was written, their changing social and political context practically covering the entire Age of Revolution from the mid 19th to mid 20th century. For undoubtedly, the parable of the animals’ revolt as told by Kostomarov, Reymont and Orwell tells the same story of revolution - how the idea developed, how it came to pass and what happened to it when it actually won and died. And why.
Wiesiek Powaga, Polish translator
18 December 2017
Yevgenіy Bolkhovitinov - Metropolitan of Kyiv
December 18 2017 marks 250 years since birth of Yevgenіy Bolkhovitinov, Metropolitan of Kyiv and Galicia (secular name Evfimii Alekseevich Bolkhovitinov). He was an outstanding personality within the Orthodox Church, a religious historian, author, and explorer of ancient written and archaeological heritage.
He was born into the priest’s family in Voronezh. From 1778 he studied at the Voronezh seminary, and later simultaneously at the Slavic Greek Latin Academy and Moscow University (1784-1788). During these years he published his first literary translations.
Once back in Voronezh after his studies, Bolkhovitinov taught in the seminary, oversaw its library, and served as prefect. A literary group that developed around him founded the first printing house in Voronezh.
Metropolitan Yevgenіy. Early 19th century lithograph. From the Private collection of Tetiana Ananieva
After becoming a widower in 1799, Bolkhovitinov moved to St. Petersburg, where he took his vows under the name Yevgenіy. From 1800-1803 he taught at the Ecclesiastical Academy of St. Petersburg. In 1808 he bacame Bishop of Vologda, in 1813 Bishop of Kaluga, and in 1816 Bishop of Pskov. In 1822 he became Metropolitan of Kyiv.
In all the cities and dioceses where he served he invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into managing church work, resolving daily problems in the diocese, building and restoring churches, and providing oversight and support to religious educational institutions.
However, his activity spread beyond just the duties of his job. In each of his placements, he took great interest in local historical memorials and history of monasteries and churches, he explored local archives and libraries. For more than 30 years he collected material for his dictionary Slovar’ istoricheskii o … pisateliakh Dukhovnago china Greko-Rossiiskoi TSerkvi (Historical Dictionary of Past Clerical Writers in Russia; picture below) – a fundamental work that paved the road for history of literature and remains a valuable resource. Yevgeniy gladly shared his knowledge and collected information with other researchers. Vasily Sopikov admitted that success of his fundamental bibliographical work Opyt rossiskoi bibliografii (St Petersburg, 1813-21; 011908.e.1.) was possible in great part due to Yevgeniy.
Title-page of Slovar’ istoricheskii o … pisateliakh Dukhovnago china Greko-Rossiiskoi TSerkvi (1827) 817.d.17.
Yevgeny reached the greatest success as enlightener and scholar at the time when he was the Metropolitan of Kyiv. He actively connected with advanced scientists and scholars such Alexander Vostokov, the well-known bibliographer V. G. Anastasevich, patron and collector Count Nikolay Rumyantsev and many others. The British Library holds his correspondence Perepiska Mitropolita Kievskago Evgeniia s …grafom Nikolaem Petrovichem Rumiantsevym i s nekotorymy drugimi sovremennikami, s 1813 po 1825 vkliuchitelno, (Voronezh, 1868-72; 7708.eee.2.)
These relationships turned Kyiv into one of the major centre of scholarly and historical activitiy alongside Rumyantsev’s Group - an informal society of historians, philologists, other humanitarian scientists who did their research work under patronage of Count N.P. Rumyantsev (1754 – 1826) - and the Moscow Society of History and Russian Antiquities.
Metropolitan Yevgeniy oversaw the opening of the Kyiv Ecclesiastical Academy Conference, students worked under his supervision to explore historical topics, public thesis presentation took place, as well as Yevgeniy published his own work. This all created a new social and cultural milieu and formed intellectual profile of the city.
Yevgeniy wrote Opisanie Kievo-Sofiiskago sobora i Kievskoi ierarkhii (Kyiv, 1825; 5005.d.4.; title-page and frontispiece below), the first description of history and archaeology of the 11th-century Kyiv Saint Sofia Cathedral, as well as a description of the Kyivan Cave Monastery, Opisanie Kievo-Pecherskoi Lavry (1826).
In order to determine the size and appearance of the Desiatynna church Yevgeniy organized the excavation of the church’s foundations in 1823-1824 and published the report detailing the findings in the journal Otechetvennye zapiski (St-Petersburg,1839-84; Mic.F.13.) This excavation project started archaeological investigation of Kyiv. In 1830s a few remains of places mentioned in annals that relate to Kievan Rus were discovered, such as famous Golden Gate. In all these discoveries Metropolitan Yevgeniy served as a consultant. After the foundation of Kyiv University (1834), Yevgeniy’s dream of founding a city archaeological society came true – in 1835 the Provisional Committee For Investigating Antiquities in the City of Kiev (Vremennnyi komitet dlia izyskaniia drevnostei v Kieve) was formed.
The time when Yevgeniy was Metropolitan of Kyiv created a distinctive epoch, it facilitated formation of city’s intellectual space, set historic and archaeological thought in motion, specifically focusing on studying Kyiv. According to Yevgeniy’s testament, his library, comprising tens of thousands of volumes and manuscripts has been gifted to the Kyiv Ecclesiastical Academy and seminary, and to Saint Sophia Cathedral.
Tetiana Ananieva, Research Fellow at the Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv
Further reading
E. Shmurlo, Mitropolit Evgenii kak uchenyi. Rannie gody zhizni (St Petersburg, 1888). 010795.f.33.
N.I. Poletaev, Trudy mitropolita Kievskago Evgeniia Bolkhovitinova po istorii russkoi tserkvi (Kazan', 1889). 3926.i.33.
Evgeniĭ, Metropolitan of Kiev, 1767-1837. Vybrani pratsi z istoriï Kyieva (Kyiv, 1995). YA.1997.a.9759
IEvhenia Rukavitsyna-Hordziievsʹka, Kyïvsʹkyĭ mytropolyt IEvheniĭ (IE. O. Bolkhovitinov): biobibliohrafiiia, biblioteka, arkhiv (Kyiv, 2010). YF.2012.a.20365
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