Provincial town through the eyes of the Tatar writer Galiaskar Gafurov-Chygtay (the case of Chistopol and Buzuluk)
Liliya R. Gabdrafikova, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher1, Leading Researcher2 1Sh. Marjani Institute of History of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, Kazan, Russia; 2FRC Kazan Scientific Center of RAS, Kazan, Russia, bahetem@mail.ru, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9940-9097
Abstract
This article presents an image of a provincial town at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries from the memoirs of the Tatar writer Galiaskar Gafurov-Chygtay (1867—1942) written in the 1930s. He lived in Chistopol in 1883—1891 and in Buzuluk in 1896—1914, studied at a madrasah and served as a mullah. These memoirs describe people of the Tatar community of these turns: their economic activity and relationships, cultural models and local leaders. The author concludes that Gafurov-Chygtay kept to the cliches of Soviet ideology when comparing the Tatar and Russian communities of these turns. The negative connotation of the narration is a reflection of some circumstances of the writer’s personal life. This ego-document provides new details about the life of provincial towns in the Volga-Ural region, shows a multi-ethnic urban community and the problems of everyday life of the petty bourgeois class in the late 19th — early 20th centuries.
Keywords
Tatars, Muslims, urban society, everyday life history of Russia, philistines, Tatar literature, ego-documents.
For citation:
Gabdrafikova L. R. Provincial town through the eyes of the Tatar writer Galiaskar Gafurov-Chygtay (the case of Chistopol and Buzuluk). Vestnik of Orenburg State Pedagogical University. Electronic Scientific Journal, 2024, no. 1 (49), pp. 227—235. DOI: https://doi.org/10.32516/2303-9922.2024.49.12.
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