SUMMARY:

Following their emergence in the 16th century, the kupecheskie prikazchiki (merchants’ sales assistants and managers) occupied a specific social niche: while preserving ties with different communities, the prikazchiki acquired autonomy and mobility uncharacteristic of the peasants and the posadskie (townsfolk). From the 18th to the early 20th century, the prikazchiki (and later, clerks in retail and industry) repeatedly became objects for various modernizing programs by state and private social engineers. Thus they went all the way from being an estate to a tax category to a class. The artistic intelligentsia included the prikazchiki into the context of Russian “culture” by turning them into a literary metaphor. At the same time, from the second half of the 19th century the prikazchiki milieu began to generate its own influential and efficient languages of self-description.
The article selectively analyzes four semantic layers of the terms kupecheskii prikazchik and torgovo-promyshlennyi sluzhashchii (trade and industry employees) from the late 18th to the early 20th century. These layers are contextualized in the chronological and socio-cultural spaces and are tentatively termed “archaic,” “modernizing,” “self-descriptive,” and “politicizing.” The author explores the relevance of the two terms for the history of social culture in late-imperial Russia and demonstrates the dynamic connection between categories of the languages of self-description, semantic and reference fields with specific processes, structures, and practices of the diverse social and cultural space of empire.
Who identified themselves or others as prikazchiki or torgovo-promyshlennye sluzhashchie, and when, and which meaning was attached to these terms by the “speaking” groups and actors? These questions are central to the article as a whole, while its methodology is based on the concept of Begriffsgeschichte. This concept is not limited by the author to textual forms of speech of enunciating groups and actors but is broadened to include various manifest forms of “language” of group socio-cultural practices and gestures.