The role of the capital city magazines in presenting the Kalmyk ethnos to the Russian audience in the first decades of the XIX century

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to specify the representation of the Kalmyk ethnic group in St. Petersburg and Moscow magazines in the first decades of the XIX century. The study of publications in the journals Vestnik Evropy, Syn Otechestva, Otechestvennye Zapiski, Sibirskiy Vestnik, Severny Arkhiv and other included the volume and details of information about the Kalmyks, the availability of historical and ethnographic information, the characteristics of the ethnic group and / or its individual representatives, the social status of the authors and the genre forms of the materials. The study has found that over the period under consideration the capital city magazines showed a gradually growing interest in the Kalmyk ethnic group, revealing its unusual history and culture to the Russian audience. The publications mainly belonged to contemporary authors, but texts from the XVII–XVIII centuries were also used, which made it possible to demonstrate the ideas about the Kalmyks at different stages of their history. By the social status, the authors included officials, travelers, historians, ethnographers, writers, including the European ones and a Chinese one, which contributed to the creation of a diverse picture of the past and the present of the Kalmyk people. At the same time, the depth of topic coverage was determined by the breadth of the author’s outlook, their ability to observe, the degree of understanding and acceptance of a different culture, and the place of the ethnic group in the overall plot of the text. The difference between empathy and immersion in culture led the authors in some cases to define the Kalmyks as an “ignorant” people and, on the contrary, as a “shepherd”, demonstrating the highest level of originality. Most often, the texts created a collective image of the people or individual social groups. In historical discourse, the names of the Kalmyk rulers were called. Modern personalities were uncommon, as well as women – only three of them. The representation of the ethnic group was carried out mainly in voluminous genres – historical, ethnographic, historical-ethnographic and travel essays; less often – in the form of portrait sketches and reviews, which allowed magazines to provide diverse information and create a multifaceted image of the Kalmyk people.