NOTEBOOKS OF RUSSIAN PEASANTS AND MERCHANTS IN THE REPOSITORY OF ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS OF THE INSTITUTE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (PUSHKINSKIJ DOM) IN S T. PETERSBURG

This article considers notebooks as a type of manuscript source. The notebook is related to the diary but has its own characteristics: notebooks are easier to analyze and typify than diaries, they were written by many more people and better represent the variety of everyday writing practices of the 18th–20th centuries. This study is based on 23 manuscripts located in the Repository of Ancient Manuscripts of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkinskij Dom) in St. Petersburg. These manuscripts demonstrate the act of record-keeping in the peasant and merchant milieu of Russia. This article identifies structural elements that all these notebooks share to some degree. The first part of the article considers the notebook as a type of ego-document and its relationship with the diary. It also provides a brief historiography of the issue and a summary of valuable remarks by specialists concerning the publishing of peasants’ and merchants’ diaries. The second part of the article presents a typological analysis of the manuscripts that can be more or less conventionally called “notebooks”. The analysis considers the structure of the notebooks, the relationship between contents of a general nature and those that are private, reference information and economic records, documentary characteristics, family dates and phenological observations as central topics, inclusions of diary and memoir entries, and data about owners of the notebooks. The article is accompanied by a list of cited manuscripts from the Repository of Ancient Manuscripts, many of which are of interest to ethnographers, local historians, and linguists.