Amongst the Chuvash, the Tatars and the Mordovians...": Eastern Russia in the Kazan magazine Zavolzhskiy muravey

The paper is prepared within Project No. 16-04-00118 of the Russian Foundation for the Humanities "On the Border of Literature and Fact: Languages of Self-Description in the Periodical Press of the Urals and the Northern Cisurals of the 19th - the first third of the 20th centuries". The magazine Zavolzhskiy muravey [Trans-Volga Ant], which was issued in Kazan in 1832-1834, is examined in the article. The magazine was positioned as an official organ of the Trans-Volga District or Eastern Russia as a whole; it presented Kazan and Kazan Province as a Eurasian region situated on the border of Europe and Asia, East and West. The history of the region was examined in the magazine from this perspective: Volga Bulgaria was declared a homeland of the people who lived along the Volga River. An assertion of their originality was expressed in the repulsion from Moscow and in the constant accentuation of the multinational and multicultural nature of the region, whose eastern borders were not clearly outlined and stretched up to the Pacific Ocean. Factual ethnographic, historical and descriptive-geographical materials of the magazine are of greatest interest. The imperial-colonial discourse of the edition is developed in these materials: it has a number of specific features which are connected with the globalist pretensions of the magazine that united the eastern and Siberian topics. Three types of narratives are distinguished in the publications of Zavolzhskiy muravey in accordance with the three groups of peoples of the Trans-Volga region the magazine authors described. These types are: 1) the Kirghiz-Kaysak discourse about the steppe people of the neighboring Orenburg Province and Siberia (the authors of Zavolzhskiy muravey also considered these areas as part of the Trans-Volga region) who were mostly alien to their Russian neighbors; about Siberian peoples (e.g., "The Nomadic Peoples of Turukhanskiy Krai" by Colonel Maslov and others); 2) ethnographic materials about the closer peoples of the Volga region: the Chuvash, the Mari, the Tatars and the Mordovians which were often published together with oral folk art materials. A.A. Fuks's collection of materials about her visit to the Chuvash is worth mentioning in this respect in which she aspired to show the most integral and precise image of the mode of life of the neighboring people and impressions of what she had seen; 3) the Bashkir discourse about the neighboring people in which "semi-fiction", i.e. artistic-ethnographic, works are presented such as The Image of Life of the Bashkir People by P. Razmakhnin, a Bashkir-style story by N. Kaftannikov Araslan-Babr and others. Thus, the magazine stimulated the development of ethnographic fiction - a particular trend in the evolution of Russian literature of the middle and the second part of the 19th century. The paper shows that it is documentary narratives that depended on the ideological stereotypes and ethnocentrist directives of that time more often than artistic texts that usually corresponded with the literary etiquette of the Russian literature of the 1820s-1830s.

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