Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century

Not all religious celebrations, of course, were linked to economic or social events. Nizhnii Novgorod counted fifteen major processions every year, on holidays. Religious feasts and even the Sunday liturgy had an unusual intensity in Nizhnii Novgorod: the bishop’s reports, submitted annually to the Holy Synod, complained if anything of the excessive piety of local parishioners, who celebrated fervently and constantly (church attendance records were very high), while at the same time refusing to take communion even the obligatory one time a year, at Easter.23 The bishops attributed this reluctance to make a definitive commitment to the Orthodox Church to ‘infection’ with the Old Belief.

People

At mid-century, Nizhnii Novgorod boasted a population of 41,543. The number included 5,085 gentry (1,838 of them hereditary), 1,627 clergy, 16,014 townspeople (merchants, honorary citizens, meshchane), 7,431 peasants, 10,397 military, 207 foreigners and 782 others.24 The ethnic composition of the province as a whole was, characteristically for the Middle Volga region, quite diverse, and included Tatars, Mordvinians and Cheremis. However, it was mostly the Old Believers who gave the region its distinctive character. In the 1840s P. I. Melnikov counted 170,506 (as opposed to the mere 20,000 in the official governor’s report) Old Believers in the province.25 A breakdown of the town’s residents by religion yields the following picture: 39,784 Orthodox, 136 edinovertsy (members of Edinoverie, a group which combined aspects of Orthodoxy and Old Belief ), 260 Old Believers, 1 Armenian-Gregorian, 471 Catholic, 364 Protestant, 354 Jewish, 173 Muslim. They worshiped at forty-seven Orthodox churches and chapels; two major monasteries, Pecherskii and Blagoveshchenskii, both dating back to the thirteenth century, provided an important focal point for local religious life. Two edinovercheskie churches and one each Armenian-Gregorian, Catholic and Protestant, and one mosque, brought the total number of houses of worship to fifty-five.26 At fairtime, the population swelled to at least double its normal size, placing Nizhnii Novgorod temporarily in the ranks of the most populous of Russian cities. By the time of the 1897 census, the town’s yearround population had risen to 95,000, and proportions had shifted: the petty bourgeoisie (33 per cent) and peasants (48 per cent) together constituted the

23RGIA, Fond 796, d. 60, l. 8, 15.

24Pamiatnaia knizhka 1 865 , Statistical table #1, p. 116. Both genders are included in the count.

25P. I. Melnikov, Otchet o sovremennom sostoianii raskola P. I. Melnikova, 1 85 4 goda, in Deistviia NGUAK, vol. IX, p. 3.

26Pamiatnaia knizhka 1 865 , Statistical table #8, p. 158.

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bulk of urban residents.27 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.28

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 outstanding 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 (Gubernskie 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. Apparently, 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 1861.29

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 nizhegorododelanie 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 whirlwind of local activity: founder of the local statistical committee and editor of

27K. Kuntzel,¨ Von Niznij Novgorod zu Gor’kij: Metamorphosen einer russischen Provinzstadt: die Entwicklung der Stadt von der 1 890er bis zu den 1 93 0er Jahren (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag,

2001), p. 42, who gets this from D. Smirnov, Nizhegorodskaia starina (1948; repr. NN: Nizhegorodskaia iarmarka, 1995).

28Melnikov, 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 statistics. 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.30

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 nineteenth century. The extremely active marshal of the nobility Prince Gruzinskii dispensed justice and charity in the first quarter of the century.31 Merchants and Maecenases Nikolai Bugrov and Fedor Blinov (both millers) were famous for their municipal involvement and charitable deeds as well as their wealth.32 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.33 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.34

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 nineteenth century. In adhering to the traditional soslovie categories, informationgatherers ignored the emergence of significant new social 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

30For more on this see C. Evtuhov, ‘The Provincial Intelligentsia and Social Values in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1838–1891’, Slavica Lundensia, forthcoming.

31See 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.

32Galina Ulianova, ‘Entrepreneurs and Philanthropy in Nizhnii Novgorod, from the Nineteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, in W. Brumfield, B. Anan’ich and Iu. Petrov (eds.), Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1 861 –1 91 4 (Washington/Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 98–9, 100–4.

33T. P. Vinogradova, Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsiia vokrug N. A. Dobroliubova (NN: VolgoViatskoe knizhnoe izd., 1992), pp. 47–50.

34See 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).35

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’,36 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.37 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;38 of the much-admired local historian Stepan Eshevskii (1829–65);39 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.40 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 middleclass. 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

35Kuntzel,¨ Von Niznij, p. 94.

36Gatsiskii, Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia (NN: Tip. nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo pravleniia, 1887), p. vii.

37See A. A. Semenov and M. M. Khorev (eds.), A. O. Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (NN: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izd., 1990).

38On 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.

39Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodka, pp. 235–47.

40On 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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