Author vs Critic: The Dispute about the Ural People in the Russian Media of the Mid-19th Century

Abstract

In 19th century Russia, literary critical and sociopolitical discussions were often an instrument of regulating public opinion, and one of such discussions is the subject of this article. The theoretical basis of the study is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept, according to which a text can be regarded as a territory of struggle and an area of ideology. This concept continues in the contemporary understanding of text and its interpretation as a social event, being involved in which the sides of the reading dialogue struggle for the possession of meaning (B. Ashcroft). The situation of debate with reference to texts reveals personal and other identities of the subjects of such debates and being exteriorised, the reader’s critical perception of someone else’s statement or language, becomes a text of its own where the subject describes themselves and, quite frequently, the community he or she belongs to or represents. In the mid-19th century, Russian culture faced the development of inner spaces of the country, accompanied by the formation of the ethnographic sphere in scholarship and literature. During the 1850s, a few journalists from the capital visited Orenburg Province and became acquainted with the everyday life of the Ural Cossack Host, publishing materials about it. The article describes the debate between one of the visitors, P. Nebolsin, and a local Ural Cossack, I. Zheleznov who wrote several objections to Nebolsin’s cycle of articles. Soon enough, the debate changed its focus and concentrated on Russia’s relations with the Kyrgyz (Kazakhs), Ural Cossacks’ closest neighbours, and was joined by another author, L. Plotnikov, an Orenburg official. The article singles out the positions of the three actors of the situation, representing different versions of imperial and colonial consciousness which was heterogeneous even in those times.

Keywords

• критическая полемика
• колониальная проблематика
• уральские казаки
• этнографический дискурс
• тексты самоописания.