Suchergebnisse

Based on the material of Boris Ryzhy's earliest poems, this article examines the contexts of his perception and comprehension of Sverdlovsk (or "my city"), which was an important element of the biographically verified "direct" lyrical statement of the poet. The article aims to determine the meaning and role of the images of Sverdlovsk / Ekaterinburg in the poems of Boris Ryzhy from 1992–1993 taking into account the process of his self-determination as a poet. The sources of Ryzhy's texts used are lifetime and posthumous publications of poems in Ekaterinburg periodicals and separate collections, as well as materials by A. V. Kuzin and O. Yu. Ermolaeva. As a result, the author of the article shows that B. Ryzhy's "city" in this period is still far from acquiring a holistic individual appearance and independent meaning, since it simultaneously depends on several processes that are inevitable for a novice author — mastering general literary topoi and eliminating poetic influences (V. Mayakovsky, I. Brodsky, and V. Kalpidi), developing one's own style and outlook. Special attention is paid to the comparison of V. Kalpidi's and B. Ryzhy's poetry in the aspects of 1) the relationship of their lyrical hero with the "city" and 2) the use of complex urban imagery oversaturated with stylistic devices. It is concluded that Ryzhy's overcoming the episodic influence of Kalpidi's complicated manner to a certain extent confirmed Ryzhy in his own worldview positions. It is assumed that the results of this work will become a preparatory stage for further analysis of the dynamics of the formation of the "Sverdlovsk of Boris Ryzhy" — an established literary phenomenon that affects the image of modern Ekaterinburg.

This paper reconstructs Ekaterinburg's economic landscape in 1914. The research is based on the 1910 city map and quantitative data from the 1914 city phonebook and relies on the space syntax method. During the study, the authors created a database including 390 local companies' phone numbers before World War I classified in accordance with the Fisher-Clark economic sector model (primary sector — extraction of raw materials, secondary — manufacturing, tertiary — service industries, quaternary — finances and information services, quinary sector — administration, education, medicine, sciences, etc.). The research demonstrates that there were just a couple of primary sector businesses in Ekaterinburg in the early twentieth century. Most secondary sector plants and factories had been moved outside of the city, while the others were evenly distributed following the environmental regulations and proximity to labour force. Tertiary sector firms dominated in the western part of the city and formed a commercial district around Market Square. The quaternary sector companies had almost the same location, spreading further to the northwest. Quinary sector organisations were dispersed all over the city with a notable concentration in the center and north-western part. The reconstruction of the Ekaterinburg economic landscape reveals that its centre occupied the area around the dam that locked the Iset River running through the city and spread towards the west and north-west part in the early twentieth century forming the city's future business district.

This paper studies female "singleness", which is defined as the status of being non-married, in the cities of Perm Province. Emphasis is placed on the two largest cities — Perm and Ekaterinburg — compared with the entire urban and rural population. The authors refer to aggregates from the city censuses taken in Perm and Ekaterinburg as well as the national censuses of 1897 and 1926 as the main sources. The study quantitatively analyses women's marital status in relation to age, place of residence, ethno-religious, and social affiliation, and calculates the rate of women who never married and singulate mean age at marriage. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in Perm and Ekaterinburg, the authors observe stability in the marriage structure among the female population. Over 50% of urban women and 33.6% of rural women aged 15 and older were not married: in the group under 30 years old, female "singleness" was determined by the fact that some girls were unable to marry. By the age of 40, a significant part of those "single" women were widows, and in the age group of 40–49, they made up the majority. Divorce was significantly less likely to be the cause of female "singleness" than non-marriage while still fertile. The differences in the level of female "singleness" in the Perm cities were influenced by the in-migration of female servants, whose background was often rooted in the peasant class, and the presence of a large monastery. During the new Soviet reality, renunciation of marriage as a life trajectory became infrequent, while the proportion of divorced people among those "single" increased noticeably.

This article examines the poem The House in Sverdlovsk (1926) by the futurist presentist and constructivist Dir Tumanny (pseudonym of Nikolai Nikolayevich Panov) as a fact of reception of the death of the Russian Emperor Nicholas Romanov and his family in the summer of 1918 in Ekaterinburg. Also, the author of the article considers the poem as a complex artistic statement reflecting and scaling the sense of history inherent both in the hero of the poem and the lyrical epic narrator and the author himself. In the space of the "Romanov text", D. Tumanny's poem is a unique precedent starting from the death of the tsar and his family but focusing not so much on it as a historical fact only but on the present modeled according to the Komfut ideals as a combination of the technocratic utopia of futurism and the social utopia of socialism and endowed with historical significance. However, the true content of The House in Sverdlovsk is the author's dialogue with the powerful artistic tradition. Characteristic of the lyrical epic poem of Pushkin's time and a completely outdated Byronic hero makes a pilgrimage to the Ipatiev House and is immediately replaced by pictures of Sverdlovsk being built (which becomes another hero of the poem). The features of a novella are combined with the optics of a travelogue essay, and Pushkin's abundant intertext (the epigraph, allusions, and specific stylistic devices including the usage of the octave and referring to The House in Kolomna, Eugene Onegin, The Stone Guest, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai) is only the upper layer of a deeper poetic adherence to Pushkin's tradition. It is the playful focus of the author of the poem who presented the pilgrimage as an anecdote that reduces the reception of a historical event and in some way deprives it of historical status and even more so than the ideological guidelines of Soviet historiography which D. Tumanny undoubtedly adopted.

This article studies the transformations of the urban space of Ekaterinburg in the conditions of socioeconomic changes in the late nineteenth — early twentieth centuries, associated with the development of transport and industrial infrastructure, population growth, and transformation into a "model capitalist city". Changes in the activities of citizens in the economic, sociopolitical, cultural, educational, and leisure spheres required appropriate spatial and physical design. The article identifies the most important territorial zones of concentration (clusters) of buildings and infrastructure elements that began to set the specialisation of specific parts of the city. One can distinguish a commercial and financial cluster in the western part, a medical cluster in the northwestern part, and a leisure cluster in the eastern part of the city. The key social systems — religious and educational — tended to encompass the whole city. It is also noted that during the residential development, there was no strict separation of rich and poor districts even in the city centre. The specialisation of different parts of the city centre formed during the period under consideration, continued to influence the development of the planning structure of Ekaterinburg-Sverdlovsk, consolidating a peculiar division between the financial and commercial right-bank and cultural and social left-bank parts of the city. There was little economic development of the eastern border of Ekaterinburg, the northern station area, and especially the southern districts, which was the only direction that could be occupied by residential development. However, the growth led to a disproportion, as there were no religious or educational institutions in the area. Such disproportions were among the most important challenges faced by the large urban centres of Russia, which were the driving force of late Imperial modernisation.

As part of the examination of the formation processes of public sphere elements in Russia, this article studies the peculiarities of functioning of mechanisms of forward and backward communication in the system of management of the first third of the nineteenth century. In this context, the public sphere is seen as a network of actors and information channels that provide an opportunity for individuals to express various arguments when discussing the most pressing socio-political, economic, and moral issues. The author analyses the complex of records management materials and decrees related to the process of consideration and decision-making on the issues of adjusting the legislation on elections among the nobility. A reference to a note by N. A. Maykov, a provincial governor of the nobility, shows the arguments for the need to adjust the legislation on elections and the response to the proposals of the Minister of Internal Affairs, members of the Committee of Ministers, the State Council, and the Senate. A comparison of the reports of the marshals of the nobility, governors, records of meetings, legislation, preceding and following Maykov's note, make it possible to formulate several important features of the functioning of feedback mechanisms in Russia in the period under consideration. The slow response to signals from the field happened because decisions were not always communicated to their direct implementers. This led to a duplication of requests and multiple discussions on the same issues, but in general did not prevent the institutions of power from being informed about the contradictions between the legislation and reality. This is confirmed by the results of a comparative analysis of the questions and proposals formulated by Maykov, with the content of subsequent decrees and the new "Regulations on the Order of Nobility Assemblies of Elections and Service on Them" of 1831.

This article continues the study of one of the constituent parts of the reform of the organisational foundations of the Russian mining industry in the second half of the nineteenth — early twentieth centuries, associated with the organisation of state supervision over private industry. The author deals with problems faced by officials of mining supervision, i.e. district engineers of the Ural mining region. In the early twentieth century, it remained the largest in terms of the number of objects of supervision and this aspect is in many respects indicative of what was happening around the whole country. According to the district engineers themselves, at that time, they had to face both problems of organising their work (defining the boundaries of districts and objects of supervision, financing, and official status), and problems related to the performance of their duties (lack of "measures of influence" on entrepreneurs). It turns out that if the former ones got solved, although not always promptly, the latter ones persisted, despite their acute character and social significance. It is concluded that the main reason for this was the different levels of overcoming certain problems. If organisational issues were resolved by means of administrative measures, as a rule, finding understanding in the mining department itself, functional ones required the approval of legislative bodies which brought them to a level of discussion where the mining department was no longer of decisive importance. The presence of diverse difficulties in the work of mining supervision in the early twentieth century indicates that at the final stage of its existence, it was not a perfect institution and did not always achieve its main goal of educating responsible entrepreneurship in such an important sector of the economy as the mining industry.

This article studies urban infant mortality in the post-reform period of Perm Province. The work reconstructs the dynamics of infant mortality in cities and villages of the Middle Urals, highlighting the patterns of individual cities and identified factors of evolution. It is based on published state and zemstvo statistics, archival documents from medical institutions and public organisations, as well as Orthodox Church parish records from Ekaterinburg. Methodologically, the work relies on general demographic indices, descriptive statistics techniques, seasonality coefficients, and dynamic series analysis. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the mining Urals had extremely high birth and death rates and the highest infant mortality rate in European Russia. The Great Reforms launched the demographic transition in the region, resulting, among other things, in the Empire's most significant infant mortality decline in the early twentieth century. The earliest and fastest infant mortality decline took place in cities. Small towns had slightly better rates than rural areas, while Perm and especially Ekaterinburg had significant reductions. The main reasons behind the changes in infant mortality were economic employment diversification, the weakening of ethno-religious traditions, and the creation of medical infrastructure. In daily life, these factors manifested in the smoothing of demographic seasonality, increased period between birth and baptism, the introduction of artificial nourishment with the help of glass feeding bottles and rubber comforters, and moving childbirths and infant care to hospitals. Ekaterinburg, the economic capital of the region, was the place where these factors had the best effect.

This article examines the lyrics of songs about Sverdlovsk created in the second half of the 1940s—1960s, to analyze the formation and consolidation of the image of the city in the context of the literature about Sverdlovsk of this period. By the 1940s, a stable image of Sverdlovsk had developed in literature as a major center of industrialization, a socialist city with an original history born "from the will of the Urals, labor and energy" (V. Mayakovsky). In the 1940s, the image of the city finally took shape — the "pantry", "arsenal", "fortress" — in a word, the "pillar" of the state. In 1948, three songs about the city were written in different stylistic registers by N. Kushtum, K. Murzidi, and E. Ruzhansky. All of them conveyed the "state" point of view emphasizing the formation of the audience's sense of pride in their place of residence and in the population labor contribution to the development of the country. Nevertheless, being created as intended for the masses, these songs never became mass. One of the reasons for this, apparently, was that the inhabitants of Sverdlovsk had a different idea of their city — the former Ekaterinburg, the center of the region with a specific way of life. This image was formed, among other things, by literary texts about Sverdlovsk. In the 1960s, in the songs of O. Gadzhikasimov / B. Karamyshev and G. Varshavsky / E. Rodygin, the tone changes to lyrical, embodied in plot models of "returning to the city of youth" and "walking around the city". The eclectic imagery of the first song deprived its content of the necessary universality. Sverdlovsk Waltz is emphatically "simple", but at the same time innovative in content. The song is based on the everyday positive experience of the listener. The text contains important "Sverdlovsk" signs, demonstrating that the song was written by a resident of this city. The song lacks drama and irony, and the authors emphasize the hidden poetry of unostentatious city life. The image of the world materialized in the songs of the "Thaw" period, turned out to be effective, because the authors refused to create the image of a city with well-known and non-specific features of the "support" of the state, which their listeners should be proud of. The imaginary transformation of the city into a place that can, thanks to the resources at its disposal, provide a person with psychological comfort — the feeling of satisfaction from belonging to the city, the creation of a common emotional and value background that unites the townspeople, turned out to be more attractive.

This article considers the history of the unrealised project of the establishment of "free mining towns" in Russia (in the Urals) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Only free people were to live and work in such towns. In 1802, the outstanding mining figure A. S. Yartsov filed a note addressed to Emperor Alexander I, in which he proposed several measures to improve the domestic mining industry. The creation of mining towns inspired by European Bergstдdte was one of these measures. A special committee on the reform of the mining part was established under the influence of Yartsov's note. In 1804, the French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux published a treatise L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des mœurs et de la legislation (Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Morals, and Legislation) in Paris. The work was preceded by a dedication to the Russian emperor. The project of the ideal mining city of Chaux was presented in the publication. With the help of architectural forms, Ledoux dreamed of creating an ideal environment for the moral development of people. Could the French architect have known that at the very same time in St Petersburg work was being carried out for a legal justification of the establishment of "free cities" in Russia, a country where serfdom was still a reality? This assumption does not look improbable. A special committee prepared a draft of new mining legislation, which was approved by Alexander I on July 13, 1806. Ekaterinburg received the status of a mining city on May 1, 1807. However, afterwards the emperor lost interest in liberal projects. Ekaterinburg remained the only mining city in Russia. The content of the concept of a "free mining city" also changed: the dream of free labour was replaced by the idea of independence of such a city from the governor's power.

Out-of-wedlock births are one of the important aspects of the demographic history in late imperial Russia. The percentage of children born to unwed mothers in the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was lower than the general average in European countries. However, in the specific context of the Russian demographic order, with earlier age at marriage and more universal nuptiality than in Europe generally, the study of out-of-wedlock births and especially their spatial distribution, acquires special significance. This work is aimed at studying the dynamics of out-of-wedlock births in Perm province in the decades around 1900. The authors pay particular attention to out-of-wedlock births in the city of Ekaterinburg, using official statistics and the "Ural Population Project" database, URAPP based on parish registers with vital events in five city parishes. The authors reconstruct the dynamics of out-of-wedlock births in each of the twelve Perm province counties, reflecting a general downward trend, especially in counties containing a significant proportion of Old Believers. It is established that the average level of illegitimate births among the rural population was 4%, and in cities — 9%. The out-of-wedlock birth rate increased during times of wars and social upheavals, especially in cities differing from parish to parish. In St Epiphany parish of Ekaterinburg, the illegitimate birth rate reached 41% during the famine of 1892. Concurrently, at least 11% of the women, including some from relatively wealthy families, baptised up to seven "illegitimate" children in the parish. This gives grounds to perceive the phenomenon of out-of-wedlock births not only because of the unfortunate circumstances for young women, but also as a sign of modernisation in the sphere of family and marriage relations, slowed down by archaic legislation.

This paper deals with the historical and cultural heritage of an important industrial centre of the Urals, the city of Zlatoust, namely, its constructivist architecture which emerged during the age of the first five-year plans, and which remained out of researchers' view. The specifics of the urban process of the industrialisation age in older industrial settlements of the Urals was defined by the deployment of new constructivist buildings in the existing dense urban environment and in the proximity to production sites. The author describes two key locations of new construction in detail. In the old centre, around the Square of the Third International and along Lenin Street, the old dominants were demolished in the early 1930s (cathedral, Lutheran church) and replaced by new ones (club, bank, fire station, 4-storey residential buildings). In the northern part of the town, the residential zone was developed by the Zlatoust Steel Mill, which was heavily reconstructed in the early 1930s, its settlement had a peculiar planning (terraces on the steep slope of a mountain). Drawing upon archival sources, the author traces the process of planning and construction of key residential and public buildings of Zlatoust (factory kitchen, public bath), shows the peculiarities of urban development in the industrial settlement in the Urals, and outlines the projects of particular structures as well as the course of construction. In the second half of the 1930s, the urban development of Zlatoust was stagnating, and most projects from this period (House of Specialists, House of the Soviets) remained on paper. The author specially describes the housing policy of the Zlatoust Steel Mill. Also, he demonstrates that Zlatoust was a leader among the old (pre-revolutionary) industrial settlements in terms of construction, however, due to the outpacing population growth, administrative changes in the second half of the 1930s and the complex natural landscape, the social infrastructure of the city remained underdeveloped. That, in turn, provoked an acute shortage of housing and communal crises during the Great Patriotic War. The constructivist heritage of Zlatoust was incapable of becoming a cultural symbol of the city in the second half of the twentieth century, and even suffered major losses associated with both the expansion of industrial sites and the outflow of the population from the old part of the settlement.

This article considers the short period of existence of the Orange Circle literary brigade in Chelyabinsk (1939–1940). Sharing the belief in building communism, the team developed outside the Union of Soviet Writers and relied on the aesthetics of the Silver Age in their work. This was probably due to the influence of its leader Alexey Bykov, a writer who began his career in St Petersburg in the early twentieth century and published the novel Thistle (1907). Unfortunately, the lack of publications and the loss of manuscripts, as well as the scarce number of archival materials make it difficult to reconstruct the social and literary practices of the group. However, the very fact of the appearance of such an "alternative" association in the era of early Stalinism in a provincial town with a meager sociocultural base which received an impulse for development only during the first five-year plans gives rise to scholarly reflection. The birth of the literary brigade took place during a difficult period in the history of the USSR, which had embarked on an unprecedented path of building socialism. The inconsistency of the process of institutionalisation of the new system gave rise to previously unfamiliar conflicts at all levels, which were especially acute in the artistic environment. The author demonstrates that over many years, the Chelyabinsk branch of the Union of Soviet Writers was able to organise full-fledged work. This was due to the frequent change of leadership, including due to the repression of many members, the reorganisation of the management system of the Union's branches, the predominance of non-professional authors, the shortage of "old" personnel, including editors, the lack of interaction between writers and regional authorities, the scarcity of the pre-revolutionary literary tradition, the poverty of prose writers and poets, especially beginners who often used this artistic structure for selfish purposes.