This editio princeps of letters by three Russian peasant men and two peasant women from a single family in southern Vyatka (now Udmurtia) covers the reign of Alexander III and two years of Nicholas II. The letters represent a precious primary source for Russian dialectologists and other linguists, such as those interested in the acquisition of literacy. They also provide direct, unadorned, and often vivid testimony concerning all aspects of everyday life - a unique source for scholars of history, sociology, culturology, and Peasant Studies. Written entirely in the peasants' own voices, addressing other family members, the letters track the development of events and of the authors themselves. The content includes economic and personal news, village and town gossip, parental admonition and prayers, requests for help, intrafamily troubles, and simply the authors' pouring out their hearts. The texts (with commentaries) are reproduced in three versions (the original Russian, a normalized Russian version, and an English translation); essays on linguistic and content-related features are followed by indices, appendices, bibliographical references, and facsimiles and illustrations.

Around 1880, two teenagers left their village on the Kama river, 1000 km east of Moscow. Their father wanted them to earn cash in Siberia and send it home. The result: scores of letters over a period of 16 years (1881-1896). The parents, two brothers and a sister reported on harvests and family finances, on marriages, births, and deaths, asked for money, offered religious instruction and moral advice, described their daily lives, and shared their worries about their alcoholic father and their desire to see the world and succeed in it. Meanwhile, the family's activity steadily expanded, as their side business grew from a single leaky rowboat to a fleet of steamships. These unique letters, preserved in a Siberian archive, appear here in English translation for the first time. The accompanying detailed commentaries, based on meticulous archival research, recreate these peasants' social, cultural, and economic milieu. The family's letters thus document the complex changes that led to upward mobility in an era that saw the rapid growth of capitalism and urbanization during late imperial Russia. Facsimiles and photographs are included.

Around 1880, two teenagers left their village on the Kama river, 1000 km east of Moscow. Their father wanted them to earn cash in Siberia and send it home. The result: scores of letters over a period of 16 years (1881-1896). The parents, two brothers and a sister reported on harvests and family finances, on marriages, births, and deaths, asked for money, offered religious instruction and moral advice, described their daily lives, and shared their worries about their alcoholic father and their desire to see the world and succeed in it. Meanwhile, the family's activity steadily expanded, as their side business grew from a single leaky rowboat to a fleet of steamships. These unique letters, preserved in a Siberian archive, appear here in English translation for the first time. The accompanying detailed commentaries, based on meticulous archival research, recreate these peasants' social, cultural, and economic milieu. The family's letters thus document the complex changes that led to upward mobility in an era that saw the rapid growth of capitalism and urbanization during late imperial Russia. Facsimiles and photographs are included.

The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History analyzes the social dialect of Russian peasants in the twentieth century through letters and stories that trace their tragic history. In 1900, there were 100,000,000 peasants in Russia, but by mid-century their language was no longer passed from parents to children, resulting in no speakers of the dialect left today. In this study, Alexander D. Nakhimovsky argues that for all the variability of local dialects there was an underlying unity in them, which derived from their old shared traditions and oral nature. Their unity is best manifested in word formation, syntax, phraseology, and discourse. Different social groups followed somewhat different paths through the maze of Soviet history, and peasants' path was one of the most painful. The chronological organization of the book and the analysis of powerful, concise, and simple but expressive language of peasant letters and stories culminate into an oral history of their tragic Soviet experience.