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Russian society, law and economy

bulk of urban residents.

In comparison with other cities, there may have been

more merchants in Nizhnii Novgorod, or perhaps they merely wielded more

power and inﬂuence.

Both the fair and the annual inﬂux of impoverished labourers in search

of employment created an underclass of beggars, wanderers, the homeless

and the diseased, whose numbers evaded the soslovie (estate)-based categories

of nineteenth-century statisticians. The dormitories and homeless shelters

erected, in the Makariev Section in particular, bear ample witness to their

presence. Cholera epidemics regularly spread up the Volga from Astrakhan,

most devastatingly in 1892 and 1893 when the disease ravaged the working

population of the fair.

Aggregate statistics leave much to be desired if one is trying to capture

the atmosphere of provincial society, for two reasons. First, one or two out-

standing individuals could have an enormous inﬂuence on local development.

Two such individuals in Nizhnii Novgorod were Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov

(1819–83) and Aleksandr Seraﬁmovich Gatsiskii (1838–93). Melnikov, the son of

a minor landowner in the remote and densely forested Semenov district, made

his mark as editor of the recently established Provincial Messenger (Gubern-

skie vedomosti), which he transformed from a terse purveyor of governmental

directives into a vibrant annal of local life and history; and as an ethnographer

who, while occupying a series of positions in the state bureaucracy, compiled

an abundance of materials on the region’s inhabitants and particularly the Old

Believers. Eventually, these researches bore fruit in the extraordinarily rich

and basically sympathetic ﬁctional account of Old Believer life, In the Forests

and On the Hills, composed under the pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii. Appar-

ently, Melnikov’s saga originated in the tales he recounted to the subsequently

deceased heir to the throne, Nicholas, in the course of a voyage down the

Volga in 1861.

Gatsiskii, who came to Nizhnii from Riazan at the age of nine, dedicated

his life to things local – as he jokingly put it, to nizhegorodovedenie and nizhe-

gorododelanie from the moment of his return from a brief stint at St Petersburg

University in the crucial year, 1861. Gatsiskii’s curriculum vitae is a whirl-

wind of local activity: founder of the local statistical committee and editor of

27 K. K

untzel, Von Niznij Novgorod zu Gor’kij: Metamorphosen einer russischen Provinzstadt: die

Entwicklung der Stadt von der 1890er bis zu den 1930er Jahren (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag,

2001), p. 42, who gets this from D. Smirnov, Nizhegorodskaia starina (1948;repr.NN:

Nizhegorodskaia iarmarka, 1995).

28 Melnikov, Ocherki,pp.209–14.

29 ‘Melnikov, Pavel Ivanovich’, in F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’

(repr. Moscow: Terra, 1992).

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its papers, president of the local provincial archival commission, member of

the zemstvo (elective district council)(at moments when he was able to meet

the property qualiﬁcation) and at one time its president, author of some 400

articles on local history, popular religion, archeology, ethnography and statis-

tics. Gatsiskii never became a nationally known ﬁgure on the same scale as

Melnikov; but he did enter the national limelight in the 1870s as the defender

of the ‘provincial idea’ – the notion, in part inspired by Shchapov’s regionalism

(oblastnichestvo), that Russia’s provinces had a crucial role to play in national

development.

Besides these two, a number of other key ﬁgures appear inevitably on the

pages of any historical account of the city of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nine-

teenth century. The extremely active marshal of the nobility Prince Gruzinskii

dispensed justice and charity in the ﬁrst quarter of the century.

Merchants

and Maecenases Nikolai Bugrov and Fedor Blinov (both millers) were famous

for their municipal involvement and charitable deeds as well as their wealth.

The priest Ioann Vinogradov, from whose illustrious family the radical and

poet Nikolai Dobroliubov came, managed a prestigious apartment house in

the centre of town.

Ivan Kulibin gained national fame as the inventor of

the steam engine; while the renown of the merchant of Greek origin and

owner of the Sormovo shipyards D. E. Benardaki rested on his commercial

achievements.

Aggregate statistics prove inadequate for a second reason: they also fail

to capture the dramatic changes in social composition experienced by many

Russian cities, Nizhnii Novgorod among them, in the last third of the nine-

teenth century. In adhering to the traditional soslovie categories, information-

gatherers ignoredthe emergenceof signiﬁcant newsocial groups, most notably

middle classes and workers. To give the statisticians some credit, the perpetual

ﬂux of post-emancipation society, in which, for example, the same person could

be the employee of a sheepskin manufacturer, an independent entrepreneur in

30 For more on this see C. Evtuhov, ‘The ProvincialIntelligentsia and Social Values in Nizhnii

Novgorod, 1838–1891’, Slavica Lundensia, forthcoming.

31 See Melnikov, Ocherki,pp.33–7. The name, ‘Gruzinskii,’ was carried by descendants of

the Georgian monarchs; the Nizhnii Novgorod line descended from Vakhtang VI, whose

son Bakar (d. 1750) emigrated to Russia in 1724.

32 Galina Ulianova, ‘Entrepreneurs and Philanthropy in Nizhnii Novgorod, from the

Nineteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, in W. Brum-

ﬁeld, B. Anan’ich and Iu. Petrov (eds.), Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861–1914

(Washington/Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2001), pp. 98–9, 100–4.

33 T. P. Vinogradova, Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsiia vokrug N. A. Dobroliubova (NN: Volgo-

Viatskoe knizhnoe izd., 1992), pp. 47–50.

34 See Smirnov, Nizhegorodskaia,pp.377–81, 430–3.

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that same line of business and an agricultural labourer in the course of a single

year, made it virtually impossible to measure status, occupation and class; the

geographical location and employ of many provincial inhabitants was subject

to change. The Sormovo shipbuilding plant, dating back to the 1840s and one

of the earliest working-class communities in Russia, alone employed 10,748

workers in 1899 (up from 2,000 only ﬁve years earlier).

Even more elusive are the middle classes. Fortunately, we can turn to the

eye of contemporaries who, if they did not count, caught members of Nizhnii

Novgorod society on paper or on ﬁlm: Aleksandr Gatsiskii’s fondest project,

in fulﬁlment of his belief that ‘history should take as its task the detailed

biography of each and every person on the earth without exception’,

was

the compilation of quantities of biographies of local citizens; in combination

with the exquisitely posed portraits by the local photographer A. O. Karelin,

we can get a satisfying impression, if not quantiﬁcation, of Nizhnii’s middle

class.

Through Gatsiskii’s materials, we learn of Anna Nikolaevna Shmidt,

the eccentric journalist of petty gentry background who created a theology

which she called the Third Testament, and was ‘adopted’ by various Silver

Age cultural ﬁgures, Zina

ıda Gippius in particular; of Petr Bankal’skii, the

meshchanin and small businessman who eventually opened a bar, then a hotel

near the fairgrounds, in the meantime writing treatises that sought to reconcile

science and religion;

of the much-admired local historian Stepan Eshevskii

(1829–65);

of A. V. Stupin (1776–1861), founder of a well-known icon-painting

school in the wilds of Nizhnii Novgorod province; of Liubov’ Kositskaia (1829–

68), beloved local actress.

Karelin, in the meantime, went inside the bourgeois

household with his camera (1870s–90s) to portray families, loving couples,

girls in exotic dress – in short, the whole panoply of Victorian photographic

repertoire. Whether verbal or visual, the portraits are unmistakably middle-

class. The middle class might perfectly well contain people ofﬁcially classiﬁed

as gentry, merchants, clergy (namely in the Dobroliubov family’s apartment

building), meshchane, and even peasants (who continued to be counted as

such even if – as happened in Old Believer circles – they happened to be

35 K

untzel, Von Niznij, p. 94.

36 Gatsiskii, Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia (NN: Tip. nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo

pravleniia, 1887), p. vii.

37 See A. A. Semenov and M. M. Khorev (eds.), A. O. Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (NN:

Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izd., 1990).

38 On these two ﬁgures, see C. Evtuhov, ‘Voices from the Provinces: Living and Writing in

Nizhnii Novgorod, 1870–1905’, Journal of Popular Culture 31, 4 (Spring 1998): 33–48.

39 Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodka,pp.235–47.

40 On Kositskaia, see Toby Clyman and Judith Vowles (eds.), Russia through Women’s Eyes:

Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), chapter 4.

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millionaires). Donald Raleigh estimated for another provincial town, Saratov,

that the professional and commercial middle classes made up 25 per cent of

the urban population.

Administration and institutions

Since at least the local government reform of Catherine II, the provincial cap-

ital (gubernskii gorod) signiﬁed the extension, down to the provincial level, of

the state administrative apparatus.

By deﬁnition, the provincial and district

capitals were distinguished from other types of settlements by the presence of

governmental ofﬁces – even though the non-administrative (zashtatnyi) town,

the Cossack village (stanitsa), or the industrial village might have a larger pop-

ulation and every appearance of a city. The administration and institutions

of every provincial capital were thus very nearly identical. Before the 1860s,

these were limited to the governor and his staff, the Gentry Assembly, and the

Merchant Guilds; the post ofﬁce, the local Statistical Committee (1840s) and

tax and customs ofﬁcials completed the picture. The Great Reforms wrought

deep and immediate changes in provincial administration, creating a new insti-

tution, the zemstvo, conceived by the monarchy (it was originally Nicholas I’s

idea) essentially as an organ for the more efﬁcient collection and disbursement

of taxes;

setting up a court system; and granting the provincial capitals a city

council (1870). In the last third of the century, Nizhnii Novgorod housed the

provincial zemstvo, the district zemstvo, the city duma and various ofﬁces

of the government bureaucracy. Overlapping jurisdictions provoked frequent

complaints.

Yet the importance of these institutions lies above all in the uses to which

they were put, locally. Nizhnii Novgorod had a tradition of liberal governors

that included Mikhail Urusov (1843–55), the ex-Decembrist Alexander Muravev

(1856–61) and the beloved Aleksei Odintsov, whose illustrious governorship

(1861–73) set the tone for the reform era in Nizhnii Novgorod. Odintsov,

who, in a humorous farewell speech in 1873, characterised his tenure as

41 D. Raleigh, ‘The Impact of World War I on Saratov and its revolutionary movement’,

in Rex Wade and Scott Seregny (eds.), Politics and Society in Provincial Russia: Saratov,

1590–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 258.

42 The central government’s arm reached one level further, to the province’s districts,

and stopped there. The introduction of the zemskii nachal’nik in 1889 signalled the

government’s ﬁrst intrusion into local jurisdiction.

43 See M. Polievktov, Nikolai I: biograﬁia i obzor tsarstvovaniia (Moscow: Izd. M. i S. Sabash-

nikovykh, 1918), pp. 212–13. Special commmittees set up in 1827, 1842 and 1847 raised the

possibility of satisfying local needs by both collecting and spending taxes locally.

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‘proof – and this is my main achievement – that the province could do perfectly

well without a governor for ten years’,

in fact presided over the elections of

the ﬁrst zemstvo and the municipal duma, and managed the peaceful transition

to new landlord-peasant relations. The conservative politics of his successor,

Count Pavel Kutaisov (great-grandson of one of Paul I’s henchmen) sat so ill

with local society that they managed to squeeze him out of power and replace

him brieﬂy with the local marshal of the nobility, S. S. Zybin, until the appoint-

ment of a new and once again liberal governor, Nikolai Baranov, in 1882. One

of the most potentially inﬂuential posts one could have on the governor’s staff

was that of ‘ofﬁcial for special assignments’ (chinovnik osobykh poruchenii): both

P. I. Melnikov and A. S. Gatsiskii held this position, compiling some of their

most important statistical and ethnographic studies under its auspices.

The Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo was one of the most dynamic

among the thirty-four such institutions. In the ﬁrst elections to the district

zemstvos, the delegates numbered 402: 189 representing the landlords, 38

city-dwellers and 175 from the peasant communes. The zemstvos had a dual

mandate: the ‘obligatory’ functions included oversight of peasant affairs, land

redistribution, local administration (police, courts, statistics), transportation,

and property taxes; and ‘non-obligatory’ responsibility for medicine, veteri-

nary medicine, education, pensions, railways, commerce, welfare, agricultural

credit and insurance. The 1864 law gave the zemstvos the right to collect and

spend their own taxes; a good deal of decision-making power thus devolved on

to this local institution. The Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo built schools, hospi-

tals, roads, sanitation, lighting, and provided ﬁre insurance. Some of its most

signiﬁcant initiatives included an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Trans-

Siberian railroad, ‘restoring the old natural route through Nizhnii Novgorod

province to Siberia and Central Asia’;

a constant struggle against the epi-

demics that periodically wound their way up the Volga; and an extremely

sophisticated local cadaster (1880s–90s), funded by the zemstvo and executed

by scientists from St Petersburg, intended to create an absolutely equitable

system of land taxation and distribution.

44 V. G. Korolenko, ‘Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo’, in K. D. Aleksandrov (ed.), A. S. Gatsiskii,

1838–1938: sbornik posviashchennyi pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo (Gorky: Gor’kovskoe oblastnoe

izd., 1939), p. 10.

45 Sbornik postanovlenii nizhegorodskogo zemstva, 1865–1886 (NN: Tip. I. Sokolenkova, 1888),

p. 490. The Moscow–Nizhnii line was one of the earliest in Russia, constructed in accor-

dance with an 1857 decree.

46 See N. F. Annenskii, ‘Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika’, Trudy podsektsii statistiki IX

s’ezda russkikh estestvo

ıspytatelei i vrachei (Chernigov: Tip. gubernskogo zemstva, 1894),

pp. 17–44.

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The city duma was dominated by local merchants.

The inﬂuential mayor’s

post attracted some of the most visible municipal ﬁgures. Fedor Blinov, in the

1860s, became a sort of shadow mayor: elected by an overwhelming majority,

he nevertheless, as an Old Believer, could not ofﬁcially occupy the position.

If, prior to 1870, participation in municipal government was considered an

onerous duty to be avoided by all available means – medical excuses, decla-

ration of capital in other cities, or, in one case, serving a twenty-day prison

term, the council, whose mandate was basically to ensure the absence of basic

disorder, managed to achieve some limited goals. It was their decision that

resulted in the construction of a water-supply system in 1847.

The reformed

duma of 1870, headed by Mayor A. M. Gubin, included members of all estates

but still a preponderance of merchants. Apart from routine management, they

continued to make improvements in the water supply and initiated measures

to institute gas lighting.

Secular regional administration functioned alongside a parallel ecclesiasti-

cal administration. Nizhnii Novgorod diocesan history was linked from the

beginning (1672) with the struggle against Old Belief. Peter I’s appointee Pitirim

(1719–38) became renowned for his merciless campaigns against the regime’s

opponents.

In Catherine II’s reign, Ioann Damaskin (1783–94) made his rep-

utation in a different fashion, making converts among the Finnic and Turkic

peoples of the region and compiling grammars of Mordvinian and other local

languages. Catherine’s secularisation of church lands had a profound effect

on landholding patterns: the two major monasteries on the outskirts of the

city, as well as Makariev monastery downriver, monasteries and a convent in

Arzamas, all lost substantial holdings in the region. The ecclesiastical hierar-

chy extended down to the parish level, where local initiative had, until the

1880s, a means for expression through the elected blagochinnye. The Nizh-

nii Novgorod Seminary was one of the most visible and active institutions

in the city landscape, situated just across the square from the kremlin and

the Alma Mater of Nikolai Dobroliubov and other less iconoclastic priests’

sons. The effort to increase ‘bottom-up’ participation emblematised by the

Gubernskie vedomosti found an echo in the Eparkhial’nye vedomosti, established

47 A. Savelev, Stoletie gorodskogo samoupravleniia v Nizhnem Novgorode, 1785–1885 (NN: Tip.

Roiskogo i Dushina, 1885), p. 31.

48 Savelev, Stoletie, p. 24.

49 Savelev, Stoletie, p. 24.

50 Compare the policies of his near-contemporary: Georg Michels, ‘Rescuing the Orthodox:

The Church Policies of Archbishop Afanasii of Kholmogory, 1682–1702’, in Robert Geraci

and Michael Khodarkovsky (eds.), Of Religion and Empire: Missions,Conversion, and Tolerance

in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 19–37.

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Russian society, law and economy

throughout the empire in the 1860s and in 1864 in Nizhnii Novgorod. In gen-

eral, the 1860s witnessed remarkable social activism in clerical circles – the

founding of rural schools, sometimes with just a few students; clerical par-

ticipation in various scientiﬁc observations and educational experiments; and

the centrally engineered effort, in the wake of the Emancipation which after

all was to a large degree implemented by the Church, to add inspirational

sermons to the highly ritualised liturgy. Ironically, this last effort backﬁred

signiﬁcantly in Nizhnii Novgorod, where parishioners complained that they

came to church to hear the eternal wisdom of the Fathers of the Church, not

some kind of off-the-cuff musings by their local priest.

In the 1880s, as Kon-

stantin Pobedonostsev increasingly took the parish-school movement under

his wing, the activities of the Nizhnii Novgorod Brotherhood of Saint Gurii

(modelled after the seventeenth-century Ukrainian religious brotherhoods)

intensiﬁed in the promotion of ecclesiastically sponsored education.

This ‘ofﬁcial’ religious life found a constant shadow and counterpoint across

the river, in the sketes and communities of the Old Belief. This universe, where

priests were a rarity and needed, if at all, to be imported from Old Believer

communities at Belaia Krinitsa in Austria, was run by powerful female reli-

gious ﬁgures and funded by wealthy male merchants. Hundreds of thousands

of faithful, from merchants’ daughters sent to the sketes for a convent educa-

tion to peddlers of icons and ‘old-print’ (i.e. Slavonic) books, found a home

or a touchstone in the powerful communities, even after Nicholas I’s (with

Melnikov’s critical help) massive campaign shut many of them down in the

1850s. Melnikov’s unforgettable portrayal of this universe inspired a whole

movement in art, music and literature, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s

Invisible City of Kitezh, Modest Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Mikhail Nesterov’s

Taking the Veil, and Andrei Bely’s Silver Dove.

Civic and cultural life

As in many provincial towns, cultural life in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth

century revolved around a very small number of institutions: apart from the

domestic living room and an occasional ball or concert, the Gentry Assembly

and above all the town theatre provided a venue for social gatherings and

entertainment. For a few days in 1847, the local Gubernskie vedomosti engaged

in a debate over whether there was, in fact, anything to do in Nizhnii, or not.

The newspaper’s contributor A. P. Avdeev took a Gogolian tone, lamenting the

51 RGIA, diocesan reports, Fond 796,d.60,l.14.

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Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century

boredom and limitations of provincial life (‘You cannot imagine how difﬁcult

is the situation of a person taking up his pen to write the chronicle of a city,

whenthere are decidedly no events in this city that could possibly deserve atten-

tion’).

Finally, mimicking Gogol directly, he decided to describe theatre-goers

as they left a performance. The editor, P. I. Melnikov, responding with local

patriotism, insisted that Nizhnii Novgorod with its gentry elections, balls, mas-

querades, plays and religious processions, was better than most other places,

and exalted the physical beauty and architecture of the city. The Nizhnii

Novgorod theatre provided the focal point of cultural life. It originated in the

immensely successful serf troupe of the landowner Prince Shakhovskoi which,

transported to an ugly and unwieldy but permanent building on the Pecher-

skaia Street in 1811, metamorphosed into a public institution.

Performances

took place thrice weekly, and daily in holiday season; a second theatre on the

fairgrounds played daily in the summer months.

A Russian and European

repertoire – Griboedov, Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, alongside Shakespeare, Calderon

and Kotzebue – attracted local audiences and foreign visitors, among them

Baron Haxthausen who in 1843 pronounced the performance of the opera,

‘Askold’s Grave’, not bad (‘passablement bon’).

One of the key moments in Nizhnii’s cultural and intellectual life took place

outside the city and even the province: the founding of Kazan University in 1804

provided a regional centripetal focus and helped to create a local intelligentsia

that was able to complete its education without travelling to the capitals, or

abroad. Such ﬁgures as Stepan Eshevskii, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, and

Melnikov wended their way downriver to study at Kazan, attending lectures

by Shchapov, Lobachevskii and other more or less illustrious professors, sub-

sequently returning to teach history, ethnography, mathematics and other

subjects to students at the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium. When Eshevskii

ﬁnally removed to Moscow in 1862, his ﬁrst course of lectures there sur-

veyed the provinces of the Roman Empire, proposing as its central thesis

the retention of local culture – in the form of language, custom, religion and

even social organisation – in the face of the centralising aims of the Roman

state. An interesting early product of the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium is

the Statistical Description of Nizhnii Novgorod Province written by the senior

instructor, Mikhail Dukhovskii, and published under the auspices of the Kazan

52 Nizhegorodskie gubernskie vedomosti (NN) 1847,#37,p.145.

53 NGV 1847,#39,p.154.

54 A. S. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr (1798–1867) (NN: Tip. nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo

pravleniia, 1867), p. 15.

55 Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr,p.21.

56 Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr,p.24.

279

Russian society, law and economy

University Press in 1827. Although the pamphlet bears little resemblance to

our notion of statistics, it comprises a sober breakdown of types of indus-

try and agriculture, population, architecture, ethnicity (which noted, among

other things, the virtually complete assimilation of indigenous populations),

religion, a detailed district-by-district survey, and a good deal of data and also

colour on the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair.

An added, if serendipitous, impetus,

to local cultural activity resulted from the temporary exile of Moscow liter-

ary circles speciﬁcally to the city in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.

Nikolai Karamzin, S. N. Glinka and Konstantin Batiushkov found temporary

refuge in Nizhnii’s wilds, where their salons and gatherings doubtless fuelled

the proverbial ‘mixture of French with Nizhegorodian’.

Finally, the above-

mentioned Gubernskie vedomosti – established by decree throughout European

Russia beginning in 1838 – became itself a crucial agent in stimulating local

historical, scientiﬁc and aesthetic interests. Particularly under Melnikov’s edi-

torship in 1845–50, the Vedomosti became an organ for the construction of a

local, non-state-centred, narrative of Russian history, as well as for conveying

useful local meteorological, statistical and ethnographic material.

Still, the blossoming of provincial culture and civic life unquestionably

belongs to the post-reform period. The new institutions – the zemstvo, the

courts, the municipal duma – as well as some old ones – merchant guilds,

corporations, the gentry assembly – were invested with real power to make

decisions on a local level. Elections to the zemstvos, controversial court cases

and important decisions on urban infrastructure – electric lighting, sanita-

tion, transportation – became the stuff of animated public discussion. Nine

full-ﬂedged lawyers resided in town in 1877, as well as twenty-ﬁve persons

authorised to intervene for other parties in the circuit or communal courts.

Private societies and brotherhoods operating in the city in the 1870s included:

a commercial club, a military club, a hunting society, societies for co-operation

with industry and trade, a mutualinsurance fund in case of shipwreck, a mutual

aid society for the private service sector, a literacy society, a local physicians’

society, a branch of the Russian Musical Society, the brotherhood of Cyril and

Methodius, and the ubiquitous all-estate club; there were twenty in all. As the

57 Marie-No

elle Bourguet also notes the descriptive nature of the ‘statistics’ of the

Napoleonic period. M.-N. Bourguet, D

echiffrer la France: la statistique d

epartementale

l’

epoque napol

eonienne (Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 1989), p. 12.

58 See Smirnov, Nizhegorodskie,pp.390–4 and probably also N. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk

istorii i opisanie Nizhnego Novgoroda (NN: Izd. V. K. Michurina, 1857–59).

59 C. Evtuhov, ‘The Gubernskie vedomosti and Local Culture, 1838–1860’, paper presented at

American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Seattle, 1997 (unpublished

manuscript).

280

Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century

century drew to an end, the old soslovie organisations – merchant guilds and

the meshchanstvo society in particular – began to function as corporations,

providing social standing to small-scale entrepreneurs and creating a forum

for commercial transactions. Some of the most prosperous merchants became

known for their service to charity, among them Nikolai Bugrov (1837–1911),

major industrialist and banker who became famous for his aid to Old Believer

communities and for founding a homeless shelter (1880) that made it onto the

pages of Maxim Gorky’s novels.

If, until the 1870s, the Gubernskie vedomosti had been the sole legal periodical

publication in the Russian provinces, lifting the ban resulted in an explosion of

provincial publishing. The questions of the potential civic role of the provin-

cial press triggered a nationwide debate in the mid-1870s, that raised much

deeper issues of the relation of the centre and the provinces. In response

to the claim of the Petersburg publicist, D. L. Mordovtsev, that the capitals

necessarily exercised a gravitational pull, extracting all true talent from the

provinces, Aleksandr Gatsiskii argued that the centre could only be as strong

as its constituent parts. The same year, a Kazan-based publication, Pervyi shag,

brought together provincial authors to demonstrate the provinces’ literary

power. (One of the stories later provided material for one of the ﬁrst Russian

feature movies, Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter, 1913.) Already in 1880, Nizhnii

Novgorod had two major daily newspapers (Volgar’ and the Vedomosti), as

well as the Iarmorochnyi Listok which came out in fairtime. Other publications

came and went. Six private printing presses, three photographic studios, two

bookstores and a public library provided the literary infrastructure.

Provincial residents read a good deal. An 1894 survey found that residents

subscribed to 110 Russian journals and newspapers, or 4,198 copies. Adolf

Marx’s illustrated weekly, Niva, accounted for more than a quarter of all pub-

lications purchased. Judging by Niva’s popularity, as well as by the illustrated

journals that followed it on the list (Rodina, Zhivopisnoe obozrenie, Sever, Nov’,

Vokrug Sveta, Sem’ia, Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia, Lug, PrirodaiLiudi), people wanted

to read about, and see images of, exotic travels, family life, art and nature.

Russkaia mysl’ was by far the most widely read of the national thick jour-

nals, followed by Russkoe bogatstvo and Vestnik Evropy. Residents subscribed to

national daily newspapers as well: Svet, Novoe vremia and Russkie vedomosti by

the 1890s displaced the once-dominant Syn Otechestva.

Nizhegorodianshad a particular penchant for musicand science. In the 1840s

theviolinist and musicologist (and memberof the localnobility) Aleksandr Uly-

60 Ulianova, ‘Entrepreneurs’, p. 102.

281