Pre-revolutionary Childhood in the Texts of Habib Zaini, Tatar Teacher of the Soviet Era

Abstract

They were representatives of the Tatar intelligentsia, born in the 1880-90s. The pre-revolutionary world with the unique urban everyday life of the early 20th century was already lost, but it occupied a central place in the Tatar memoirs of that period. Memoirs and other records of a native of the city of Troitsk, Orenburg province, teacher Habib Zaini (1890-1967) also continue this trend. In his notes, he wrote about his native city of Troitsk and its inhabitants. In the article, we analyze the materials that the author donated to the Lobachevsky Scientific Library of Kazan University in 1967 and notebooks with memories from his family archive. “Family” and “public” memoirs differed in the style of presentation, in the second version the author used formulaic expressions and famous names more often. These ego-documents allowed us to identify several dominants of the “pre-revolutionary world” of Habib Zaini: family ties, the mahalla (Muslim community) and hometown, the clash of traditions and innovations at the turn of the 19-20th centuries. Ego-documents include two layers - the mythologized world of the 1870-80s and the childhood world of the hero of the 1890s, which are united by the place of action and actors. The author of the memoirs received a special education in his family, one of his results is the creation of such a text.

Keywords

• urban tatars
• everyday life of tatars
• tatar culture
• mahalla
• muslim subjectivity