The Image of a Siberian City in Nikolay Kostrov’s Essays

The article analyses the images of Siberian cities created by Nikolay Kostrov, a Russian Siberian historian and ethnographer, in his essays of the 1860s-1870s. The essays created a fairly original idea of the Siberian urban space. The article examines the evidence of Kostrov’s reception of Siberian cities, objectified in essay texts written in accordance with the most important principles of this genre, and thus reveals the cities’ uniqueness in comparison with the cities of Europe and the European part of Russia. Kostrov builds his images of Siberian cities at the intersection of their different “images” created by their predecessors, and through the prism of his own ideas about Siberia and the ways of its development. The essayist represents a type of space that is developing in a more or less successful and dynamic complex way. The desire to understand the history of a particular city organically complements city portraits with descriptions of their current status and condition. Supporting the features of the all-Russian and European image of a Siberian city established by the middle of the 19th century: remote from Central Russia, from civilization, sparsely populated, and still essentially inseparable from rural space, Kostrov thus emphasizes their “otherness”, which consists in the close intertwining of the past (sometimes not far away, by the standards of European cities, and sometimes going back to antiquity with its roots much deeper than in Central Russia and Europe) and the present that timidly highlights their future. Kostrov also presents the culture of Siberian cities as “other”: the cities are surrounded by a wide unique layer of ancient man-made and verbal cultural monuments and eternal natural values. This determined Kostrov’s point of view on the Siberian townspeople, also not yet completely separated from farmers and cattle breeders, fishermen and hunters, but already directing their efforts to industry, trade, and civilization, without losing the original features of their mentality. Kostrov focuses on the diverse, multi-class, multi-ethnic, and multi-layered sociocultural space of Siberian cities, which is the result of a meeting of the indigenous peoples of the region with migrants from Central Russia, which is taking place for objective reasons. Within the framework of these ideas, Kostrov highly evaluates the process of colonization of Siberia; in his essays, he practically does not allow any critical intonations in the interpretation of the theme of the conquest of Siberia, which he, in contrast to Siberian regionalists, interprets as civilizing.

Keywords

Authors

References