Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2022 number

The article introduces a new ego-document - a notebook of the merchant Andrey Konovalov from Turinsk. The notes date back to the mid XVIII century and record mainly the dates of the merchant’s movement along the rivers of Siberia to buy and sell goods. The way laid through Tyumen, Tobolsk, Samorov Yam, Surgut, Narym, Yeniseisk and other cities, but the trip’s ultimate goal was Kyakhta - the Russian-Chinese trade center. The private fur trade was forbidden that time by the state, which sent its caravans to China. Obviously, Andrey Konovalov participated in smuggling furs, so some notes were made with cryptography - transliterated in Latin. Andrei Konovalov’s notebook is one of the earliest ego-documents related to the Siberian merchant class. The records reflect the difficulties of the river route, Baikal storms. There was Chinese fabrics’ trade besides furs. In addition to business records, the book contains several family dates, a list of purchases for oneself (including icons), and a rewritten news on the discovery of Dimitri of Rostov’s relics. The document is preserved as a manuscript in the collection of Vladimir Malyshev Archive of Ancient Relics at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The second part of the manuscript is a dictionary of foreign words appeared in the Russian language and drawn from various books of the XVIII century. As a whole, the manuscript demonstrates its owner as an educated person. The publication of Turinsk Merchant’s notebook is preceded by an introductory article, restoring the chronological sequence of the entries with relevant comments. The historical context for understanding the manuscript is provided by the writings of historians and travelers of the XVIII century: Gerard Friedrich Miller, Peter Simon Pallas, Alexander Radishchev; as well as works of modern historians. The notebook gives an idea of the goods exchange at the Russian-Chinese border in Kyakhta, allows to restore the portrait of the notes’ author to some extent, to see the circle of his interests.