D. L. Ransel-The Diary of A Merchant Insights Into Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Life

The Diary of a Merchant: Insights into Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Life
Author(s): David L. Ransel

Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 594-608
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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The Diary of a Merchant: Insights into
Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Life
DAVID L. RANSEL
The diary of I. A. Tolchenov, an eighteenth-century Russian provincia

rare source. Because its author did not belong to that minuscule elite o
crats and intellectuals who had recently learned to keep diaries or write
a window on the daily lives and concerns of an important social stratum
know very little. The structure of social life described in it-the frequ
visiting-and the sentimentalist voice in which personal concerns ar
points in common with the life of a later, more articulate social group,
Randolph's contribution to this issue. In the case of the eighteenth-cen
family, however, we usually get no more than a glimpse of local so
concerns and have to tease out the fuller meaning of the diaries entries
and sketching in the context.'
Historians are dependent on preserved records, and what tends to ge
the papers of and about political and military leaders, government offic
influential private persons, and prominent intellectuals. The common
left only faint traces in the preserved records. The principal means of
them has been through analysis of serial or institutional records. T
computer as a research tool in the 1960s and 1970s made this type
Analyses of serial records allowed historians to see the economic and d
pact of ordinary people, but it was usually possible to speak only in te
regions, and structures, not about individuals. Instances of the actions o
to mention the voice of ordinary people, rarely appear in serial record
government agencies, even the famous Tenishev private archive now at
Museum in St. Petersburg, contain at best heavily mediated echoes of th
nary Russians. In the records of foundling homes, for example, certai
the condition of ordinary women and families. On rare occasions, the
briefly on the laments or feelings of the people they were observing. B
to assess whether the reports were conveying direct speech or simply te
signed to claim resources or advance a particular policy.2
For studies of periods close to the present, oral interviews permit
historical inquiry to become not only visible but "audible," bringing the
'The source, I. A. Tolchenov, Zhurnal iii zapiska zhizni i prikliuchenii Ivana Aleksee
located in the manuscript section of the Academy of Sciences Library in St. Petersburg in t
umes (ed. khr. 34.8.15), into which, beginning in the 1790s, the diarist transcribed daily n
earlier. He began keeping daily notes in the late 1760s and continued to do so until 1812. A
was published in a very small print run in typescript form in 1974.
2See, for example, my Mothers of Misery: ChildAbandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1
The Russian Review 63 (October 2004): 594-608

Copyright 2004 The Russian Review
The Diary of a Merchant 595
into the historical record.3 The product of oral interviewing is a personal and often
intimate source that reveals current attitudes and assessments of past events and retrieves
and contextualizes knowledge of the past. It is not a diary but more in the nature of a
memoir, even though it differs from a personal memoir because of its directed and inter-
active creation. Oral history is a method for creating an archive of the lives of ordinary
people. Some scholars object that oral testimony of this sort is fraught with a host of
methodological problems concerning selective memory, narrative structuring of memory,
substitute memories, the intrusive and directive role of the interviewer. But for the most
part these methodological issues in oral history differ little from those that must be con-
sidered in analyzing personal written memoirs or even government memoranda.
It is one thing to capture the voice of ordinary villagers in the twentieth century. But
what about the distant past? Here we have to rely on written sources. Can a diary serve
the same purpose? Can it move us beyond the observations attainable from impersonal
serial data on economics and demographics and permit a glimpse into the everyday life of
ordinary people? Can it furnish the unmediated voice of a provincial Russian of the eigh-
teenth century, a Russian from a social position we scarcely know even in its larger im-
personal dimensions?
Andrei Tartakovksii's classifications of memoirs and diaries of the eighteenth cen-
tury provide a beginning. However, his spacious categorizations do not offer much in-
struction in how to situate and unpack such a source. Like literary analysts elsewhere,
Tartakovskii was not especially interested in diaries before they became the work of edu-
cated men of affairs or creative artists and therefore displayed the qualities that literary
scholars understandably most enjoy describing and comparing.4
A look outside the field of Russian studies shows the same thing. Literature special-
ists consider diaries a kind of bastard genre of little intrinsic interest before they become
conscious literary productions intended for publication. The Goethe specialist Peter
Boerner, who tried to give a systematic account of diaries, found the task difficult because
the form varied in literary quality from very high to very low and offered no rules about
what might be true or false.5 The editors of a recent book of essays on the diary argued
that the diary is
an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing,

between spontaneity of reportage and the reflectiveness of the crafted text, be-
tween selfhood and events, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the
private and the public ... [it] constantly disturbs attempts to summarise its char-
acteristics within formalized boundaries. The diary is a misfit form of writing,
inhabiting the frontiers between many neighbouring domains, often belonging
simultaneously to several "genres" or "species" and thus being condemned to
exclusion from both at once.6
3See, for example, David L. Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria
(Bloomington, 2000).
4For his categorizations see A. GC Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika XVIII-pervoipoloviny XIXv. (Moscow,
1991). He develops his thoughts on this form of writing and its relationship to the development of historical
consciousness in his more recent Russkaia memuaristika i istoricheskoe soznanie XIX veka (Moscow, 1997).
5Peter Boerner, Tagebuch (Stuttgart, 1969), 11-14.
6Rachael Langford and Russell West, eds., Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature
and History (Amsterdam, 1999), 8-9.
596 David L. Ransel
So, historians working with diaries cannot expect genre analysis to give
to interpretive strategies. The specialists on literary analysis themselves
dismayed or confused by this cultural product.
The diary does nevertheless have a history, and it is in its history th
difficulty of analysis of diaries as a genre resides. Each scholar who con
a particular era is inclined to invest it with meaning derived from a bro
ing of the values that are thought to characterize that particular era. If
classical antecedents and East Asian examples, the diary did not exist bef
century, and its appearance is usually ascribed to the development of an
vidual self-consciousness associated with the European Renaissance.
the diary is a sign of what is understood as the central truth of the Ren
ering this origin, it is interesting to observe that diary-keeping grew rap
teenth and eighteenth centuries among pietists, in other words, people w
against Renaissance humanism. Pietists nevertheless shared with the pe
naissance a concern with the individual. In the case of the pietists, this
not individual expression so much as individual responsibility and indiv
Historians locate the usual starting point and model for the diary in
household account books.7 In the hands of the Puritans in England and
Brethren in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accoun
records of an individual's successes and failures in meeting the moral st
religions. In their daily entries, diarists sought to dissect their inner sel
of improving themselves and justifying their position as members of th
the dawn of the age of science, and so analysts want to understand these l
reflective of a scientific outlook. Jiirgen Schlaeger, for example, frames
metaphor suitable to the scientific age in which these pietists lived wh
they explored the inner self "through a medium that allows meticulous p
ful observation, faithful documentation and critical self-reflexivity." De
to the age of science, he may be closer to understanding their efforts wh
that they turned themselves into texts to which they could return aga
assess their behavior and guide it along the proper path to salvation.8
The French scholar Beatrice Didier pursues the connection between th
estantism, and business accounting in the seventeenth and eighteenth c
was the age of science, it was also the age of the rise of the middle classe
thinks that we should view the diary as a quintessential sign of bourge
translated the personal into a business account. Like the archetypical di
Pepys, composed during the 1660s, this daily record-keeping often insc
business matters but also spilled over into an accounting of love, work,
Didier claims that the diary functioned as a number of capitalist device
balance sheet that calculated moral failures and successes. It also wor
account on which one could draw for memories untarnished by the passa
times will be less squandered because their passing will have been co
diary."9 As a practice, the diary had parallels in the life of a bureaucra
7Although Boemer mentions daily accounts of occurrences that the officials of some Ger
write in the late fifteenth century as a possible model (Tagebuch, 40).
8Jiirgen Schlaeger, "Self-Exploration in Early Modern English Diaries," in Marginal Voice
9Bdatrice Didier, "Pour une sociologie dujournal intime," in Lejournal intime et sesforme
du Colloque de septembre 1975, comp. V. Del Litto (Geneva, 1978), 245-48.
administrations that were forming in early modem Europe. "The attitude of the diarist in
this account-keeping is that of an official. ... The diary quickly becomes a kind of daily
obligation, altogether comparable to the daily output reports of an office worker."10 In-
deed, some famous diarists were officials, Samuel Pepys, the English naval administrator
of the seventeenth century, and Aleksandr Khrapovitskii, the personal secretary of Catherine
the Great in Russia a century later, who seemed to be extending bureaucratic logs to cover
personal matters. Looking ahead to more recent times, Didier also considers the diary an
extension of a childhood religious practice of daily bedtime prayer, a means of putting a
messy world into order at the end of each day. The loss of religious belief in adulthood is
compensated for by a continuation of this practice in the form of a diary reckoning. In
short, for Didier the diary appears at a convergence of capitalism, individualism, and
Christianity.1I
The idea that the diary compensates for something lost in childhood is picked up in
a slightly different way by the inventive and indefatigable researcher of autobiographic
writings, Philippe Lejeune. He notes that diary-writing grows in importance at just the
time, the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that Philippe Aries located the emer-
gence in professional and popular thinking of a life stage between childhood and adult-
hood, a period of adolescence.12 Lejeune's own researches in recent decades have demon-
strated that teenagers comprise the largest number of diary writers and that they use
diaries to work out their sense of who they are becoming.'3 Lejeune contends that the
development of diary-keeping in earlier times should therefore be understood in relation-
ship to the appearance of this new life stage.14 In other words, if we can extend Lejeune's
idea, the diary was a sign that individual self-consciousness had reached a point that
more and more Europeans felt a need to take time between childhood and adulthood to
work through on paper a personal identity crisis before they could move on and fully
engage their adult roles. So, now the diary is made to satisfy our need to explain a
twentieth-century concern with the psychological development of youth.
It can be seen that the diary is a form that can serve a variety of ends and be inter-
preted in a number of different ways. It is an almost empty vessel or, perhaps, an adapt-
able tool, at the disposal of its user for the purposes at hand. Its interpreters can fill it
with whatever meaning they find appropriate to the age they are studying.
What about the Russian diary? The form was borrowed from the West and, like
many other Western imports, it first appeared in Russia during the reign of Peter I. Not
surprisingly, the first Russian word for diary, iurnal, was a borrowing from the Dutch
Journaal. By 1720, the French articulation zhurnal came into use and remained the
designation for a daily account through the century and beyond. The most common
modern word for diary, the calque dnevnik, did not enter the vocabulary until late in the
eighteenth century." The earliest uses of journal in Russian are associated with military
operations on land and on sea, a log of movements and events. The term could also
be used to designate "a book of householder, accounting, or commercial notes," as in
'OIbid., 261.
"Ibid., 250.
'2Lejeune, "Ddbat," Lejournal intime, 272.
'3See more on Lejeune's researches on this theme in his "The Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an
Investigation (1986-1998)," in Marginal Voices, 185-202.
'4Lejeune, "Ddbat," 272.
'SSlovar' russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, vol. 6 (Leningrad, 1991), 146.
598 David L. Ransel
"keeping a journal of revenue and expenditures."16 With a few excep

travel journals of Petr Tolstoi and Boris Kurakin, writers only later d
as the record of personal actions and impressions that we associat
diary. True to its mid-eighteenth-century origins, Tolchenov's diary u
"journal," its full title borrowing from Daniel Defoe's famous work
imitations in eighteenth-century Russia, Zhurnal iii zapiska zhizni i
Tolchenova.
The number of Russian diaries before the nineteenth century, at least the number
those that have been preserved, was not large. The historian Petr Zaionchkovskii's com
pilation of diaries and memoirs before 1800 lists 867, and of these, according to Orest
Pelech only 82 "fitted a strict definition of diaries as distinct from autobiographies, me
oirs and some travelogues." Of these 82, six were composed before 1700 and 25 before
1750. The large majority were written in the second half of the century. Borrowing
phrase from Emile Cioran, Pelech observes that this emergence of "diary-keeping, th
writing of memoirs and autobiographies-all are testimony to Russians' 'fall into time,
to their self-discovery as actors on the stage of history-a stage not only with a past, bu
also with a future ... before 1700, this kind of historicist self-consciousness was absen
among Russians of all classes.""17
At first, classes other than the nobility hardly mattered. In Russia journals and
memoirs were produced almost exclusively by members of the nobility and, as such, th
functioned symbolically as a sign of elite status and perhaps also as a sign of leisure, ev
if nobles in the first half of the eighteenth century could scarcely be considered a leisur
class.18 Tolstoi and Kurakin, for example, kept their travel journals in large part to pro
that they were doing the work that Peter I had demanded of them during their stays i
Europe. Nevertheless, as a rule, such writing was confined to the nobility.
Social position as distinct from literacy was the issue. Many merchants were liter
ate. Evidence from urban elections and other sources indicate that even in the first half of
the eighteenth century, a large majority of first-guild merchants were literate while at t
lower end of the urban social scale about 15-20 percent of men could write.'" The num
ber of literate merchants increased substantially as the century wore on. A questionnair
sent from the Commission on Commerce in 1764 to merchants in thirty-seven provinc
towns indicates that among the "best merchants" of that time literacy was very high
indeed, if we can take the ability to sign one's name as proof of literacy.20 In one quart
of these small towns literacy among the leading merchants was virtually 100 percent, a
in three-quarters of the towns at least 60 percent.21 Although this level of literacy mig
'6Slovar' russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, vol. 7 (Leningrad, 1992), 148.

7See also Tartakovskii's Russkaia memuaristika i istoricheskoe soznanie, cited above, for more on the devel-
opment of historical consciousness. I am grateful to Orest Pelech for sharing his work with me: "Great Russi
Secular Culture: The Sense of Self in Diary-Keeping," a paper delivered at the Twenty-ninth National Conventio
of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Seattle, 22 November 1997.
'8On such writing as a sign of leisure see Sara Dickenson, "The Russian Tour of Europe before Fonvizin: Trav
Writing as Literary Endeavor in Eighteenth-Century Russia," Slavic and East European Journal 45:1 (2000): 15
'9N. V. Kozlova, "Rossiiskii absoliutizm i kupechestvo (20-nach. 60-kh godov XVIII v.)" (Doctoral diss., M
cow State University, 1994), 515-16. See also idem, Rossiiskii absoliutizm i kupechestvo v XVIIIveke (Mosco
1999), 336-40. See specific outcomes for the trading town of Torzhok as early as 1710 in M. Ia. Volkov,
gramotnosti posadskikh liudei Torshka v nachale XVIII v.," in Istoriograficheskie i istoricheskieproblemy russk
kul'tury (Moscow, 1982), 79-83.
20"Lutchie kuptsy" usually referred to the "pervostateinye" or first-guild merchants.
21Kozlova, "Rossiiskii absoliutizm," 518-19.
seem improbably high, it is not surprising if one considers that reference is made here to
the men who bore responsibility for staffing the local organs of self-government, the
magistracies and other city offices. The central government insisted that such people
command literacy and in a number of cases refused to accept illiterate mayors and select-
men even when they were elected by a large majority of their peers.22 Apart from the
requirements of official position, leading merchants had to conduct a large volume of
paperwork in their own private commerce, such as contracts, receipts, attestations, and
bills of exchange, and could scarcely have done so when illiterate.23 Indeed, books and
manuals of commerce, letter-writers, and form books were appearing in ever greater num-
bers to serve a growing market of literate business people.24 Despite this evidence of
literacy, merchant diaries are virtually unknown before the nineteenth century. Besides
the Tolchenov diary that I am working with, the handful of others that have been pre-
served are brief and refer primarily to well-known national events and the weather. Our
opportunity for a glimpse into the daily and intimate life of a Russian merchant in the
eighteenth century may rest largely on this one source. What can be done with it?
The ways that historians use diaries are principally two. First and most commonly,
they draw passages or specific incidents from diaries to illuminate the larger issues under
discussion or analysis. These are usually references to national or international events,
that is "historical" actions, and historians deploy diary passages to support their interpre-
tation of how people were reacting to the events in question. The famous eighteenth-
century Russian retrospective diary of Andrei Bolotov is often used in this way.25
A second approach is simply to publish a diary in whole or in part with more or less
detailed editing. Recent examples of Russian diaries translated into English with intro-
ductory contextualization and careful editing are The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, by
Max Okenfuss, and Time of Troubles: The Diary oflurii Vladimirovich Got'e, by Terrence
Emmons.26 These valuable undertakings provide rich source material on the periods they
cover and a wealth of contextual information in their notes and introductions.
Much less common is another method: the use of a diary as the basis for a commu-
nity study. To my knowledge, this device has not yet been used by historians of Russia.
A few examples of this approach can be found elsewhere. Arne Jarrick developed a
picture of artisan life in eighteenth-century Stockholm on the basis of Johan Hjerpe's
journal and, most famously, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in A Midwife's Tale brought alive not
22Ibid., 517.
23Ifthey tried the consequences were often dire. A contemporary writer on commerce, M. D. Chulkov, gives a
two-and-a-half-page list of Moscow commercial families that went under because the head of the family did not
maintain proper records or handed over unanticipated debt at his death. See Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi
kommertsii, vol. 1, bk. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1781), 51-53.
24See the many examples in Kozlova, Rossiiskii absoliutizm, chap. 10. On a prominent letter-writer edition see
also my "Character and Style of Patron-Client Relations in Russia," in Klientelsysteme im Europa der Friihen
Neuzeit, ed. Antoni Maczak (Munich, 1988), 211-31.
25A notable exception is Thomas Newlin, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the anxieties ofRus-
sian pastoral, 1738-1833 (Evanston, 2001), which places Bolotov's life and works at the center of his analysis of
the Russian pastoral.
26The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi: A Muscovite in Early Modern Europe, trans. Max J. Okenfuss (DeKalb,
1987); Time of Troubles: The Diary oflurii Vladimirovich Got'e, trans. ed., and intro. Terence Emmons (Princeton,
1988). Gary Marker and Rachel May have done the same for the memoirs ofAnna Labzina, The Days ofa Russian
Noblewoman (DeKalb, 2001). Recent Russian examples from the mid-imperial period include 1812 god... voennye
dnevniki, comp. and intro. A. G. Tartakovskii (Moscow, 1990); and T. I. Ornatskaia, ed., Rasskazy babushki: Iz
vospominanii piati pokolenii zapisannye i sobrannye ee vnukom D. Blagovo (Leningrad, 1989).
600 David L. Ransel
only Martha Ballard, the diarist, but thoughtfully contextualized Ballar

recreate the life of an entire community of late eighteenth-century M
national book prizes for her effort).27 Ulrich's approach provides a mo
with Tolchenov's diary. Tolchenov, like the midwife of Ulrich's story,
who occupied an intermediate social position and lived in the late eight
nineteenth centuries.
A historian who decides to do an exegesis of a plebeian diary to bring to life an
individual as part of a community and the larger world that impinges upon it runs into a
series of choices that do not face a writer who is merely mining the diary for a few
illustrative quotations. The most obvious issue is what to make of the bulk of a diary's
contents, which include listings of mundane tasks, the comings and goings of everyday
life. Diary entries by ordinary people are not the record of History with a capital H. For
just that reason researchers often pass by the plebeian diaries of the early modem period,
seeing them as merely the same dull insignificant jottings day after day. This dull dailiness
may, however, be this source's principal value. If such a diary facilitates close study of
community, it can be used to test the macrohistorical observations that inform the grand
narrative. By radically reducing the scale of observation, it is possible to see social dy-
namics that not only do not appear in the larger picture but that may even be incommen-
surable with it.28
To read the life of a family or community from the evidence of a diary, a scholar has
to challenge received notions of what is historically and experientially important. To
achieve such a shift in valuation of everyday life as against actions of national and inter-
national prominence requires a narrative powerful enough to offer insight into the lives
of ordinary people that balances, modifies, or extends the established grand narrative in
instructive ways. In other words, it has to do what the best examples of microhistorical
analysis achieve. Laurel Ulrich accomplished this by making visible and comprehensible
the key role that women played in weaving her Maine community together, the extensive
rather than intensive ties that women maintained to this end, and the daily engagement of
women in not only the social relations of the community but also its business, medical,
and political practices.
Another choice for the scholar is point of view. The normal approach for a historian
is to adopt the position of omniscient narrator. If a diary is the main source, the historian
positions the diarist as a central figure in the large tapestry that is being described. Be-
cause sections of the tapestry are not visible to the diarist, the historian sketches in the
rest to complete the picture of the evolution of the community and of the practices that
constitute it. But, as Ulrich demonstrated in A Midwife's Tale, the historian can take
another approach to point of view, namely, to describe the world through the eyes of the
diarist. Ulrich tries to limit her story to what the diarist Martha Ballard herself knew or,
at least, what she was able or willing to record. For example, Ulrich could have elabo-
rated on the process of birthing in early America by drawing on detailed descriptions in
manuals and other medical sources of the period. Instead, she tells us only what Ballard
27Arne Jarrick, Back to Modern Reason: Johan Hjerpe and other petit bourgeois in Stockholm in the Age of
Enlightenment (Liverpool, 1999; first published in 1992 as Mot det modernafornuftet); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
A Midwife 's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990).
28For more on this see my "An Eighteenth-Century Russian Merchant Family in Prosperity and Decline," in
Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington, 1998),
256-58, and the sources cited there.
considered important enough to set down in the diary, and these were matters that had
little to do with the physical process of birthing. The events Ballard found worth record-
ing were social, one could even say psychological, and, very importantly, economic. In
managing the birth process, Ballard saw her role as primarily social, "gathering the women"
of the household and neighborhood to assist and comfort the mother, arranging care for
the mother and child. She was also a businesswoman, and like other business people she
used her journal as an account book, tracking the fees owed to her and the dates of pay-
ment. Ulrich, by fixing her gaze on what Ballard relates, permits, even compels, the
reader to see the past through the diarist's scale of values-a clever and instructive
device.
A diary is also a natural source for considering questions of identity formation. In
modem adolescent diaries this is often the main focus, but even in the laconic journals of
ordinary people of the early modem era we can observe the author constructing and
trying out a "self' to inhabit the space allowed within prescribed social boundaries. A
measure of the social boundaries can be found within the source itself by noting the
transgressions that occur and the social or psychological sanctions that the diarist suffers.
These boundaries can then be checked against the legal or other more general prescrip-
tions that appear in the grand narrative of the period. These observations offer a measure
of the distance between prescribed and actual behavior.
How do some of these issues of the correspondence between the historian's view of
the macro level (the grand narrative) and the micro level manifest themselves in the
merchant diary I am working with?
One issue is the personal aspirations and risk-taking that lie hidden behind the sur-
face record of social mobility within this highly unstable class. Studies of serial records
make clear the high rates of vertical social mobility that characterized merchants of the
eighteenth century.29 Yet this view from a distance (so to speak) does little to illuminate
the causes of the rapid rise and fall of merchant families. Some general considerations
are, of course, well known. The insecurity of merchant status, depending as it did on an
annual declaration of capital, was quite different from the position of the hereditary no-
bility or even the clergy, whose status and privileges were secure even if they fell on hard
times economically. A shift in trade routes or the passage of legislation permitting com-
mercial operations by competing social estates also affected the position of merchant
firms. But these exogenous considerations do not illuminate the personal aspirations and
motivations that governed merchant behavior and contributed to the rapid rise and de-
cline of families. It is the decline, in particular, that has been hidden from view in better-
studied sources. Information about the rise of merchant families, if not abundant, is
available in memoirs produced by members of successful families of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Having arrived, the first generation entrepreneurs or their offspring were some-
times inclined to pen romanticized narratives of their rise to wealth.30 These stories
referenced the means by which they had risen, often through tax-farming whose proceeds
were then invested in a commercial or manufacturing operation.
Understanding the downward side of social mobility is more difficult. Memoirs are
not especially helpful. They are apt to chronicle success. Diaries are more instructive
because as a contemporaneous record they map the daily shift in fortune and offer insight
29B. N. Mironov, Russkii gorod v 1740-1860-e gody (Leningrad, 1990), 151-69.

300ne of the best known is N. Vishniakov, Svedeniia o kupecheskom rode Vishniakovykh, 3 vols. (Moscow,
1903-11), but there are many others.
602 David L. Ransel
into the behavior that contributed to the rise and fall of an individua
Tolchenov diary, for example, we can see examples of the indefatigabl
ness acumen of the diarist's father as he builds his enterprises. Then
the different choices of the son, who invests in the good life and in se
nity but fails to keep a sharp eye on commercial affairs. When his w
observe something about Russian society that we would be unlikely
sources: the diarist's efforts to maintain credit by displays of spend
the Moscow English Club, appearances at parties in the Noble As
these lavish expenditures at the very time he is dodging creditors and
to relatives, in short, deploying all the devices of a loosely regulated
appearance and self-presentation are the key to credit and where per
allow one to circumvent the laws.
Another example of how this plebeian diary reveals what is usually unseen is its
disclosure of the social dimension of political change. The grammar of the diary is usu-
ally very simple, largely a record of hosting and visiting that takes the form: "I spent the
evening at so-and-so's home. So-and-so came to my house for dinner." Rarely is the
content of a conversation mentioned or even the purpose of a visit. What is important to
record is simply the personal contact. Yet this record of visiting tells something of inter-
est about urban society in this time of change.
The late eighteenth century in Russia was a period of major domestic reform. When
Catherine II came to the throne in 1762, she ruled a country whose provincial administra-
tion consisted largely of reserve military units. If these units were called up for a lengthy
campaign, as they were during the Seven Years' War, the domestic administration col-
lapsed. The collection of taxes and recruits, the maintenance of order and the adminis-
tration of justice ground to a halt. Catherine responded to this crisis with a "small re-
form" in 1763 and then planned the Commission on Laws of 1767-68 to consider what
more needed to be done to reform the laws and administrative organization of the coun-
try. Following the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-74, which again exposed the inability of
the domestic administration to maintain order when the army was at the front, Catherine
instituted the Reform of the Provinces in 1775 and the Police Ordinance of 1782. These
reforms doubled the size of the local administration.
The picture we receive of these reforms is normally limited to either a mechanical
recitation of the offices that they added locally and provincially and their functions or, at
best, some sketches of the noble assemblies at which elections took place for the occu-
pants of the new offices. Robert Jones, for example, gives a colorful portrayal of such
assemblies, noting their use as occasions of social mixing of the nobility, a venue for
parties and dances at which young noble men and women could be considered as pros-
pects for marriage.31 Because the reforms were seen primarily as a device for harnessing
retired nobles into management of local administration, the focus has remained on them.
The pictures historians have given of this period, and most others, is one of social estates
operating in isolation from one another. In a country governed as a set of estates, the
archival records are organized by social group, and historians therefore usually study
them in isolation.
What is not seen is the impact of the Catherinian reforms on groups other than
the nobility and the necessary social integration that occurred as a result. While the
31Robert E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility 1762-1785 (Princeton, 1973), 244-50.
traditional mechanisms of urban self-governance retained a measure of autonomy, they

necessarily came into intensified interaction with the rapidly growing number of local
officials installed via the reforms, which in addition to police officers and judges of dis-
trict courts included doctors, surveyors, and other professionals. In Russia administra-
tive interaction implied social interaction. This dimension comes through clearly in the
Tolchenov diary. The social sphere of this merchant family, which had been confined
primarily to close relatives, business associates, and the local clergy, now expanded to
include an increasing number of noble officials and their families.
Take just a few days at the beginning of November 1782, soon after the reforms were
introduced and when the diarist Ivan was serving as one of the town burgomasters. As
the month opened, we find him visiting the estate of the district's leading noble, Prince
Ivan Fedorovich Golitsyn, for midday dinner and staying until dusk, after which he calls
on the deputy voevoda. The next day, having worked until noon at the magistracy, Ivan
visits Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Golitsyn at his estate (possibly a business call, as Ivan
rented a mill and bought grain from Golitsyn) and then spends the evening at a city
council meeting. The third day in the evening he hosts three central government offi-
cials, all nobles: the police chief (gorodnichii), the deputy voevoda, and the district trea-
surer. On the fourth he spends the evening at the home of the treasurer. On the fifth he
visits one of his nearby mills and spends the evening at home with his uncle Ivan, a close
adviser and business associate. On the sixth he attends two weddings of city merchants,
one of whom is a cousin, and in the evening hosts the police chief, deputy voevoda, and
the treasurer and his family. The next day he is at the market and the magistracy. On the
eighth he has supper and spends the evening at the home of Prince Obolenskii, the dis-
trict court judge. The next day after work "Prince Obolenskii and his children spent the
evening at my home along with nearly all the city judges." And so it goes. On the
twenty-first of the month Ivan throws a big dinner party, probably on the occasion of the
feast day of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary, noting that "at dinner and staying through
the evening were Prince Obolenskii and all the local nobles and the best merchants, more
than thirty persons." In short, when we are able to look closely at the daily lives of Rus-
sians of this era, we do not see social groups working in isolation from one another. We
see a social elite that cuts across class lines and is in regular administrative, business, and
social interaction.
When we turn to the question of identity, the diary is also helpful in modifying and
filling out the received views of the lives of merchants in this period. The usual picture is
based on the stereotypes familiar from the plays of Petr Plavil'shchikov and Aleksandr
Ostrovskii. This was the confined world of ignorant, untrustworthy, and greedy people
that Nikolai Dobroliubov referred to as "A Dark Kingdom." Our picture of merchants
also takes brush strokes from the normative position of the class. State laws defined the
kind of trade merchants of various guilds could practice. Commerce with foreigners at
port cities was restricted, for example, to first-guild merchants, internal commerce to the
port cities to second-guild merchants, and so on. After the middle of the eighteenth
century, merchants were no longer supposed to own serfs. The nobility had arrogated this
privilege solely to itself.32 Sumptuary law regulated the type of homes and conveyances
32Lesser townsmen, even peasants, as well as merchants owned serfs right into the middle of the eighteenth
century. In 1746, however, the Governing Senate began to define serf-ownership as an exclusive right of the nobil-
ity. Merchants objected to this innovation, and the issue arose in connection with the Commission on Laws. See the
discussion by V. Sergeevich in his introduction to the town instructions in SIRIO, vol. 93, vi-vii.
604 David L. Ransel
people of different social statuses could occupy. In short, the govern

limits to the privileges and self-presentation of commercial people,
space in which they could fashion an identity.
A close look at daily life as recorded in Ivan Tolchenov's diary m
stereotypes and laws describe a far narrower range of behavior than w
the diarist and others of his estate mentioned in his writings. To be
chant family owned and sold household serfs. Just where the Tolche
or under what cover or dispensation they held them is not clear. Even
quite openly, arranging and publicly celebrating marriages for their
eventually selling them to one of the famous Orlov brothers without m
do so through some noble mediator. The diarist built a large mas
Dmitrov in the style of the finest noble townhouses of the period. A
architect designed the home. Tolchenov constructed large orangeries
model of those owned by nobles and a few merchants in Moscow and
near his home stocked for ready meal preparation. He attended the the
capital cities (not unusual for merchants) but also at the estate of a
district. He purchased books from the Academy bookstore in St. Petersbu
and clocks, a telescope, and other fashionable technological device
panded his role beyond that of a grain trader (an occupation that did
him) to a man of wealth and leisure who spent time gambling and h
crats, tending his properties and gardens. And in this role he was app
long as he had the means to sustain it. His pretensions to friendship a
nobility ended only with his business failure. His circle of well-born f
He was no longer welcome in the homes of former frequent acquainta
not present himself as a successful merchant. For a merchant, culture
enough. Wealth had to buttress his social identity. In this lack Tolch
anguish of lost social and, to some extent, personal identity, which
notes, writing that "from the respected position of the leading mer
descended to the contemptible status [of a poll-tax paying townsman
home I moved to dark and noisy rooms of a Moscow apartment, whe
tion was running a playing-card factory."33
It might be thought that Ivan's expansive life during his prospero
been unrepresentative of his class. While his experience differed fro
dling or poorer commercial classes, it did not depart significantly from
off merchants of the time in the capital cities and surrounding towns
regularly elected and reelected to posts in which he had to govern his
it to central political and clerical officials, including the governor and
If his behavior had been extravagant or observably irresponsible, he c
tinued in these roles. The memoirs of other merchants of the time make clear that social-
izing between wealthy merchants and nobles, even intermarriage, was not infrequent,
and, indeed, a substantial number of merchants were rising into the nobility.34
33Zhurnal 2:359.
34N. Chulkov, "Moskovskoe kupechestvo XVIII i XIX vekov," Russkii arkhiv, bk. 4 (1907): 489-502; V. P.
Uspenskii, Zapiska o proshlom goroda Ostashkova Tverskoi gubernii (Tver', 1893), 45; E. A. Zviagintsev,
"Moskovskii kupets-promyshlennik Mikhaila Gusiatnikov i ego rod," in Moskovskii krai v ego proshlom (Mos-
cow, 1928), 63; I. N. lurkin, Abram Bulygin: Chudnosti, veselosti, "neponiatnaiafilosofiia" (Tula, 1994), 110-
27. See complaints on this account by a contemporary, Ivan Vavilov, Besedy russkogo kuptsa o torgovle
Finally, the diary allows a measure of the emotional life of a commoner in this
period. An issue that historians continue to debate is the depth and timing of the emo-
tional attachment of people to their children in earlier times. Some believe that the toll of
childhood death was so high that people shielded themselves emotionally by not forming
an attachment with newborns until they had survived for a certain period of time. Others
question this view.3" The degree of attachment must surely have varied for the mother
and the father. Unfortunately, Ivan Tolchenov's diary does not speak about the feelings of
his wife, and we cannot therefore compare their emotional responses. Even in the case of
Ivan, most of the evidence of his feelings has to be assessed in terms of what he found
worth recording in regard to the birth, death, or survival and growth of his children.
Ivan and his wife Anna produced sixteen children in the years from 1774 to 1794,
nine boys and seven girls. Of these just four survived for more than a year, and all four
were boys. This record, poor as it was, improved on that of Ivan's own parents, who had
brought nine children into the world, of which only Ivan survived. Ivan linked the early
death of his mother to the grief she experienced over these losses, noting that from the
time of the death of the ninth child, "who to my parents' great sorrow expired unbaptized
on the day of its birth, my mother began to feel the illness that turned into tuberculosis
and cut short her days."36 It is worth noting, too, that these infant mortality rates of 75 to
nearly 90 percent, plus other evidence in the diary, suggest that wealthy merchant women
were not breastfeeding their children, a sign of this social estate's aspiration to set itself
apart from the laboring classes.
As for Ivan's diary reports on the deaths of his own children, his remarks reveal a
pattern. If children died within two months of birth, he merely notes the time of death
and invokes a common expression: either "she passed into eternal bliss" or, on a couple of
occasions, the variant "by the power of God she passed away." One or two perfunctory
sentences follow about arrangements for the funeral and burial. Ivan says nothing about
these children in his year-end summaries, which he inserted into the diary a few years
later, and where among comments on the weather, the grain trade, crops, unusual hap-
penings, he includes a brief section on national figures, local people, and relatives who
have died during the year in question. The death of even an immediate family member
did not rate inclusion in the summary if the deceased was under a certain age.
Three of the twelve children who died in infancy survived beyond two months, and
for them Ivan's diary had a bit more to say. The first was Mariia, who was born in 1781
and lived for two and a half months. Two weeks prior to her death Ivan mentions that she
had fallen ill. The next we hear of her is the entry on her death. "At 3 this afternoon my
daughter Mariia by the will of God consigned her infant soul into His holy hands." He
then notes that she was laid to rest beside his recently deceased father in the local monas-
tery. Another daughter, Varvara, lived for five months before dying in March 1786. In
this case, instead of the usual formula about passing on to eternal bliss, Ivan writes about
her illness, noting that "she passed away at 6 in the morning, having suffered for more
than month with a stomach ailment, vomiting, and diarrhea. I spent the entire day at
(St. Petersburg, 1846), 188-89. On the general trend see N. I. Pavlenko, "Odvorianivanie russkoi burzhuazii v
XVIII v.," Istoriia SSSR, 1961, no. 2:71-87.
35For a review of the debate see Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material ofEarly Childhood, 1600-
1900 (Boston, 1992), Introduction.
36Zhurnal 1:139.
606 David L. Ransel
home." The next day the funeral and burial took place at the monastery,
laid to rest at the feet of Ivan's father. Although Varvara had been sick f
Ivan had not noted the onset of her illness, as he had for Mariia and di
older surviving children. He had been back and forth to Moscow on busi
and indeed arrived home from one trip at 10 P.M. on the eve of Varvara's
that she "was beyond hope of living." It is difficult to believe that Ivan
of an emotional bond with either Mariia or Varvara in view of his brief c
had enough of a history with them that he could get beyond the pat phrase
other children. He also found a place for them in the monastery church
father, whereas later children who lived only a short time were interred
cemetery. Ivan wrote nothing about Mariia or Varvara in his year-end
Altogether different was Ivan's reaction to the death of a child wh
nearly a year. This was Ekaterina (Katen'ka), born on 12 November 1786
months after the death of Varvara in this world of near continuous preg
women). The diary leaves no doubt that Ivan had fallen deeply in love w
The daily entries on her illness and death are brief yet telling. Twenty
death, he mentions the onset of illness: "I went to mass at the cathedral a
of the day at home in sadness because of the illness of my children Le
and Katen'ka." In the following days he scarcely leaves the house (which
him). His son Aleksei after a brief but severe crisis begins to recove
rallies but then goes into decline. On 3 November we learn that "my da
is now hopeless," and the next day: "At 7:28 this morning she passed aw
sorrow, for she was a great joy."
Katen'ka was different from the other deceased children in receiving
tion but extended comment in Ivan's year-end summary. In this section
the diary form and adopts a narrative style as he looks back on the year
by the death of the child of one year, this man of affairs who had no form
some expressive passages. He speaks of how the illness first attacked hi
son Aleksei and then a day later the one-year-old Ekaterina. The illness,
as a fever and rash accompanied by a severe sore throat, may have begun
or other streptococcal infection (though at first the family's doctor susp
smallpox), and moved rapidly to pneumonia in the boy. He felt such we
sure in his chest that by the third day he asked his father to allow him
and receive the last sacraments. Soon after doing so and also receivi
treatment, the boy began to feel some relief. By the end of a week, he a
both much improved, "for which," Ivan writes, "my wife and I were inexpr
But while Leniushka had fully recovered a few days later, Katen'ka,
her usual play and learning to walk when held by the hand, continued to
symptoms. She refused solid food, the rash came and went, a fever linge
October she took a turn for the worse. "On the 31"st she was so weak that
up using her arms for support, and her chest was so congested that she
could only with great difficulty swallow water or milk. Now my wife an
all the sadness that only a parental heart can know when being deprived
child." In the next days, Katen'ka weakened further, exhibiting a larger
37Zhurnal 2:20-22.
and increasingly severe symptoms of the pneumonia that finally claimed her life on the
morning of 4 November. Her father describes in loving detail the white calico, gold
ribbon, and silk stockings and slippers in which she was buried as well as many other
details of the funeral, including the role played by Katen'ka's favorite horses in pulling
the coach bearing her coffin. And then he adds:
So, by the power of God and in punishment for my sins was I deprived of this
extraordinarily lovable child. Right from her birth she was completely healthy
and well-behaved, and as she grew she was always sprightly and happy, and her
games and play were in advance of her years, just as her intelligence was well
ahead of her age, for she understood everything right away and even went be-
yond what you would expect. For example, seeing that a door in a room was not
closed or that ... jars of kvas were not covered, she noticed all that herself and
was not content until the things had been put right. She loved horses and cows,
and her favorite thing to do was to visit our sorrel horses and to feed them oats,
pet them and kiss them. She loved fruits very much, and she developed quite a
taste for them when she was but a half year old, and when she was only eight
months old she was already picking cherries from the tree. Her face resembled
mine exactly and she was so very sweet, and she had two teeth, one of which at
her death remained not quite fully grown out. She had not yet begun to walk on
her own but could make a circle around the chairs without support-and to me
she was exceptionally affectionate.38
Confirming evidence about what feelings could be appropriately expressed in regard

to the death of children can be found in another source from this time, the zapiski of Petr
Ivanovich Rychkov. Rychkov was the son of a merchant who worked the trade to
Arkhangel'sk in the early eighteenth century. He obtained enough education for his son
that Petr was able to enter government service and rise into the nobility through the Table
of Ranks. Like Ivan Tolchenov, Petr Rychkov was the only surviving child of a large
progeny (twelve siblings in his case). He himself had fifteen children by two wives and
lost ten of them to early death. His reports on their deaths follow the pattern of Tolchenov's.
For a child who died very early, he writes simply that "she passed away, having lived
three months," and offers no expression of sorrow. But a son who died at age two is
described in detail as very intelligent and clever and passed away "to the great grief of me
and his mother." He also details the burial of this son. The loss of a nine-year-old daugh-
ter brings expressions of "indescribable sadness" and explanations that she already spoke
German.39
These intimate sources from ordinary Russians of the early modern period tell us of
the deep attachments that they developed to their children and the sentimentalist idiom in
which they were expressed-but these attachments either took root only after the children
had survived the first half year or more of life, or it was only after such a time that it
became acceptable to express such feelings. In view of the infant death rates of 60 per-
cent or higher, it is not surprising that people regarded an early and deep attachment to
children as improper and unhealthy.
38Zhurnal 2:23-24.
39p. I. Rychkov, "Zapiski Petra Ivanovicha Rychkova," Russkii arkhiv, 1905, no. 11:291-92, 306-16.
608 David L. Ransel
Thus, a plebeian diary of the early modem period, even one as laco
can yield a wealth of information about the experiences and values of
community in which he lived. By finding the patterns in the repetitio
visiting and hosting and watching for shifts in them over time, histo
sight into the life of a community and into the social and personal id
and those near to him. It is even possible to obtain some measure of t
a community by fixing the range of permitted comment on emotion-

D. L. Ransel-The Diary of A Merchant Insights Into Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Life

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The Diary of a Merchant: Insights into Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Life

Author(s): David L. Ransel

The diary of I. A. Tolchenov, an eighteenth-century Russian provincia

The Russian Review 63 (October 2004): 594-608

an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing,

"keeping a journal of revenue and expenditures."16 With a few excep

'6Slovar' russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, vol. 7 (Leningrad, 1992), 148.

only Martha Ballard, the diarist, but thoughtfully contextualized Ballar

29B. N. Mironov, Russkii gorod v 1740-1860-e gody (Leningrad, 1990), 151-69.

traditional mechanisms of urban self-governance retained a measure of autonomy, they

people of different social statuses could occupy. In short, the govern

Confirming evidence about what feelings could be appropriately expressed in regard

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