The other side of this paper is that the title, as I mentioned, is based on a late 19th century Romance of the same title (Когда я на почте служил ямщиком, in Russian).
It's an odd and interesting fact that -- going back into the 18th century -- coachmen (iamshchiki) were often imagined singing. The Academy of Science author Staehlin does it; Radishchev does it; L'vov and Fomin do it; before them Chappe d'Auteroche and other West European authors. (I describe them in an article I published in the Journal of Early Modern History in the Winter of 2007, "The Singing Coachman, or The Road and Russia's Ethnographic Invention in Early Modern Times")
But it's one thing to note a cliche that runs across a variety of sources, which seems (in turn) to anticipate the rich popular culture of "coachmen's songs" (iamshchitskie pesni) of the 19th century.
It's quite another to ask if there's some real-life referent standing behind it.
Anyone have any ideas why the coachmen sing? Was this common to coach cultures around Europe? Or a uniquely Russian convention? Did they actually sing, or is this just an ethnographic phantom?
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
When I Served the Post as a Coachman, Pt. 1
Over at the Working Group I put up a talk that I was giving last year (various universities, the AAASS), that I'd like to turn into an essay for publication. Or at least an essay for discussion, in that it contains a kind of interpretation linking infrastructural history (if I may so explain myself) with intellectual history. The talk is called "'When I Served the Post as a Coachman'," which postal cognoscenti will recognize as the title of a song, actually, created in the late 19th century through some popularization process I've yet to fully unravel, whereby lyrics by the populist poet L.N. Trefolev were defanged of some of their anti-statist zeal, made a little more like country music, and then printed up on sheets, sold, and well, it's just an awesome song (in Russian, "Когда я на почте служил ямщиком", a version of the text here, an .mp3 just a Google search and various purchasing or pirating away).
My essay concerns an event celebrated since 1994 as the foundation of the first regular Russian post, Archangel-Moscow, in 1693. It was thoroughly documented in a 2-volume history with documents by I.P. Kozlovskii, Pervye pochty i pervye pochtmeistery v moskovskom gosudarstve (1913), but the hundreds of pages of petitionary documents Kozlovskii published still have not been analyzed as a discussion about the meaning of movement, or more particularly the costs of regularizing movement, which is what I attempt to do.
As a side note, let me add one comment: in the history of transport, by and large and also in Russia, it seems, the biographical / technological mode of interpretation tends to predominate among scholars who care about transport per se (i.e. how people move through space). For Annales-like historians who care about transport in an infrastructural sense (i.e. Braudel in Civilization and Capitalism), the main thing seems to be an inspiring but still very broad description of "the limits of the possible". Getting somewhere in between these two visions -- between the vision that focuses on the designers, engineers and architects, on the one hand, and the big bassein of movement created by economy, nature, and technology, on the other, seems relatively rare.
The style of interpretation I attempt in my essay is one that tries to hit that middle spot by asking how a big (attempted) shift in the organization of official circulation reshuffled the politics of the government's relation to northern communities, and beyond that helps us think about the genesis of early imperial (Petrine) ideals.
It's a frightfully sketchy essay, empirically, but I'm hoping to fill that out now that I can make it an essay proper, and not just a talk. I guess the question for me is whether this style of interpretation can go anywhere, or whether it's the sort of thing that works for a talk but will melt like butter if you try to make it a book.
Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts about it, if and as this interests you.
My essay concerns an event celebrated since 1994 as the foundation of the first regular Russian post, Archangel-Moscow, in 1693. It was thoroughly documented in a 2-volume history with documents by I.P. Kozlovskii, Pervye pochty i pervye pochtmeistery v moskovskom gosudarstve (1913), but the hundreds of pages of petitionary documents Kozlovskii published still have not been analyzed as a discussion about the meaning of movement, or more particularly the costs of regularizing movement, which is what I attempt to do.
As a side note, let me add one comment: in the history of transport, by and large and also in Russia, it seems, the biographical / technological mode of interpretation tends to predominate among scholars who care about transport per se (i.e. how people move through space). For Annales-like historians who care about transport in an infrastructural sense (i.e. Braudel in Civilization and Capitalism), the main thing seems to be an inspiring but still very broad description of "the limits of the possible". Getting somewhere in between these two visions -- between the vision that focuses on the designers, engineers and architects, on the one hand, and the big bassein of movement created by economy, nature, and technology, on the other, seems relatively rare.
The style of interpretation I attempt in my essay is one that tries to hit that middle spot by asking how a big (attempted) shift in the organization of official circulation reshuffled the politics of the government's relation to northern communities, and beyond that helps us think about the genesis of early imperial (Petrine) ideals.
It's a frightfully sketchy essay, empirically, but I'm hoping to fill that out now that I can make it an essay proper, and not just a talk. I guess the question for me is whether this style of interpretation can go anywhere, or whether it's the sort of thing that works for a talk but will melt like butter if you try to make it a book.
Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts about it, if and as this interests you.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
And We're Off...
Well, here I go.
As some of you may know, I'm a historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I specialize in Russian history. Specifically, I'm interested in the political, institutional, and intellectual history of the early Russian Empire, say 1650-1850, without getting in to too many disputes.
My first book was a biography of the Bakunin family; on the whole, I think it went fine. But after being cooped up, intellectually, in a small,private archive for over a decade, I decided it was time to hit the road, metaphorically and literally, and see a little more of this place we call Russia. And beyond that I began to be interested in the big question -- researched little, in relation to its importance -- of how people got around this place called Russia.
It's something Russian princes, certainly, worried about from earliest times (ca. 13th century1), with an obligation (sometimes a tax) called podvoda: 'carriage', or perhaps more literally 'cartage', as the word podvoda also means 'cart'. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that everything else involved in the making of a place called Russia depended on the simple business of hauling things around.
And so when I set out to start this blog, I couldn't think of a better name.
What is this, then?
This is, simply, my cart, carrying my thoughts about my new project, as they evolve and as I have time to write them down. All blogs, of course, run the risk of graphomania; and I guess I could just as well keep my thoughts to myself.
But I've chosen to throw open the research process for three reasons:
1) It's a convenient way for me to focus my thoughts, and discipline them, as I go along; somehow writing in a handwritten journal, despite my antique desire to do so, just doesn't happen; and in any event, I'll be on the literal road a lot this year, and in this sense a journal is just another thing to haul and lose.
2) I suppose that on occasion I might want to invite others to comment on an idea I've had; or alternatively, it might be useful to someone to read this open research journal, for their own reasons;
3) Last, but not least, I've just helped launch an online Working Group for the Study of Mobility in Russia and the Soviet Union (see link at right); and this blog will also be a place where I'll reflect on what's going on over there.
In any event, this blog is about my ongoing research and discoveries. I welcome comment.
1. See I. Ia. Gurliand, Iamskaia gon'ba v moskovskom gosudarstve do kontsa XVII veka (Iaroslavl': Tipografiia gubernskogo pravleniia, 1909), 24-26.
As some of you may know, I'm a historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I specialize in Russian history. Specifically, I'm interested in the political, institutional, and intellectual history of the early Russian Empire, say 1650-1850, without getting in to too many disputes.
My first book was a biography of the Bakunin family; on the whole, I think it went fine. But after being cooped up, intellectually, in a small,private archive for over a decade, I decided it was time to hit the road, metaphorically and literally, and see a little more of this place we call Russia. And beyond that I began to be interested in the big question -- researched little, in relation to its importance -- of how people got around this place called Russia.
It's something Russian princes, certainly, worried about from earliest times (ca. 13th century1), with an obligation (sometimes a tax) called podvoda: 'carriage', or perhaps more literally 'cartage', as the word podvoda also means 'cart'. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that everything else involved in the making of a place called Russia depended on the simple business of hauling things around.
And so when I set out to start this blog, I couldn't think of a better name.
What is this, then?
This is, simply, my cart, carrying my thoughts about my new project, as they evolve and as I have time to write them down. All blogs, of course, run the risk of graphomania; and I guess I could just as well keep my thoughts to myself.
But I've chosen to throw open the research process for three reasons:
1) It's a convenient way for me to focus my thoughts, and discipline them, as I go along; somehow writing in a handwritten journal, despite my antique desire to do so, just doesn't happen; and in any event, I'll be on the literal road a lot this year, and in this sense a journal is just another thing to haul and lose.
2) I suppose that on occasion I might want to invite others to comment on an idea I've had; or alternatively, it might be useful to someone to read this open research journal, for their own reasons;
3) Last, but not least, I've just helped launch an online Working Group for the Study of Mobility in Russia and the Soviet Union (see link at right); and this blog will also be a place where I'll reflect on what's going on over there.
In any event, this blog is about my ongoing research and discoveries. I welcome comment.
1. See I. Ia. Gurliand, Iamskaia gon'ba v moskovskom gosudarstve do kontsa XVII veka (Iaroslavl': Tipografiia gubernskogo pravleniia, 1909), 24-26.
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