Historical and Cultural Landscape of a Small Ural Town: Images of the Irbit Fair in the Essay on the 19th Century

About the author:

Natalia B. Gramatchikova, Cand. Sci. (Phylol.), Senior Researcher, Center of Literary History, Institute of History and Archeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Yekaterinburg); n.gramatchikova@gmail.com; ORCID: 0000-0002-2585-7399

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the key image of the historical and cultural landscape of Irbit — the Irbit fair. Based on the essays of the 19^th century, three main trends in the depiction of the fair seasons of Irbit, which are dominant in different decades, are considered. In the economic essays by E. A. Verderevsky and A. G. Khitrov, the distinctive features of the Irbit Fair were first identified, and the topics of “trust” and “riddles” of the fair that were important for the trading community were declared. The second tendency of description, developing in the letters of E. A. Verderevsky and travel sketches of N. D. Teleshov developed the image of the fair season as a carnival, providing rich material for understanding the fair as a dystopia (M. Foucault), with special space-time relations, interconnection isolation and permeability. The third tendency of the image is found in the sketches of the Uralites D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak and K. D. Nosilov, aimed at improving public mores. In their texts, the fair becomes a kind of provocative landscape, both attracting and repulsive to the authors.

Throughout its history, the Irbit Fair has retained its attractiveness for ethnographers, writers and folklorists as a representation of a wide range of social strata and ethnic groups. At the same time, there is no single narrative about the fair. By the end of the 19^th century, the Ural literature focused on describing and exposing the spontaneous destructive forces that seize the community and the person during the days of the fair, while it was at this time that the local merchant class used the language of architecture to manifest their own collective identity.

The growing gap reveals its adherence to principles during a radical rethinking of the historical and cultural heritage of Irbit in the 1920s-1930s.

The article connects local “fair plots”, compares the views “from the outside” and “from the inside”, condenses the description of the regional literary context.

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