In Praise of the Local: Post-Emancipation Authors of the Provincial Press and Celebrations of the Russian Empire
1-2/2001
Published in Russian translation.
SUMMARY:
The article by Chris J. Chulos explores the interdependence of imperial narratives and the role of the local festivities which offered a public space for communities to express local pride vis-à-vis a larger political and cultural entity. The author argues that for most rural inhabitants, the meaning of identity in the late imperial period began as locally-centered knowledge of who belonged to which settlement, village, or town and expanded to a multifarious complex of identities that eventually connected the local to the national. Three celebrations are studied in the article: the nine hundredth anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’ in 1888, the Pushkin centenary in 1899, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation in 1911.