In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction On March 16, 1797, in the city of Dmitrov, 80 kilometers north of Moscow, Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov, a Russian merchant, together with his family and its servants, loaded their worldly goods onto wagons in final preparation for a permanent move to Moscow. Just after the midday dinner hour, Ivan’s wife, children, and servants left with the family’s belongings. The following day, Ivan himself said his farewells to two close family members and a physician friend, and he too departed for Moscow in the company of a cousin. The Tolchënovs were leaving behind a large, elegant townhouse, the first masonry residence ever constructed in the city. The property on which the home stood was resplendent with orchards, gardens, orangeries and fish ponds. This marvelous urban estate, the envy of everyone in the city, had been lost. Ivan had dissipated his family’s fortune and gone deep into debt by failing to attend to business and living beyond his means. And this was not the end of his troubles. Creditors hounded him in Moscow until he was arrested temporarily and forced to account for the many tricks he had used to evade payment by stringing his creditors along and shielding his assets. In Moscow he found employment, but life had to be lived in much reduced circumstances. This story is not unusual. The life of a merchant in early modern Russia was risky, and many commercial families su√ered bankruptcy and the loss of their property and privileges. Unfortunately, we know very little about how these failures occurred and almost nothing about the inner life of merchant families in this period. In the case just described, however, Ivan Tolchënov (pronounced Tal-CHO-na√, the Russian letter ë always being stressed and voiced as o or yo) did something altogether out of the ordinary. He kept a diary—and not just a brief record of major events in his town or a count of births and deaths in the family. Records of that sort have been found for a few other merchants in late eighteenth-century Russia and are not especially revealing.∞ In contrast, Ivan Tolchënov produced a document of unmatched length and interest. Ivan began writing his diary in 1769 and continued faithfully recording his experiences almost daily for more than forty years. In this rare account we learn about his education and training, family dynamics, commerce, philanthropy, personal achievements and losses, and also much about the life of his city, the surrounding country estates, and the city of Moscow. He kept track of the rituals and rhythms of daily life, structures of the days and seasons, the quality of agri- xii introduction cultural output and the conditions of its transport, while also recording family events and social contacts with a wide array of people from lords to laborers. What is missing most often is the content of his personal and business relations; that is, the diarist did not report conversations or even topics of conversations. Accordingly, much of the story can be understood only when supplemented by research in documentary and printed sources in the archives and libraries of the city of Moscow and Moscow province. My objective has been to combine the diary and these additional materials to form a picture that takes us beyond the stereotypical understanding we have long had of merchant community and family life as exclusively static, benighted, and self-enclosed. One of the diary’s strengths is its record of contacts across the social hierarchy . Some years ago, Michael Confino challenged historians to study Russia as an integrated social body and not as a collection of isolated groups.≤ Yet because Russia was ruled as a collection of socially specific groups and archives were accordingly organized and preserved by institution and social position, scholars have found it di≈cult to integrate and analyze the interactions between people of di√erent social statuses. The observable interactions, when they go beyond a single ministry, party, or social estate, are usually two-sided. Scholars examine petitions from subordinates to superiors or look at court cases that pitted a person of one social estate against a person of another. But these limited and usually conflictual documents tell less about what held Russian society together than about points of stress and possible rupture. A source like Ivan Tolchënov’s diary o√ers a way around the barriers posed by this structure of preserved knowledge. The diary shows Ivan in frequent contact...

Share