Both the fair and the annual influx of impoverished labourers in search of employment created an underclass of beggars, wanderers, the homeless and the diseased, whose numbers evaded the soslovie (estate)-based categories of nineteenth-century statisticians. The dormitories and homeless shelters erected, in the Makariev Section in particular, bear ample witness to their presence. Cholera epidemics regularly spread up the Volga from Astrakhan, most devastatingly in 1892 and 1893 when the disease ravaged the working population of the fair.[65]
Aggregate statistics leave much to be desired if one is trying to capture the atmosphere of provincial society, for two reasons. First, one or two outstanding individuals could have an enormous influence on local development. Two such individuals in Nizhnii Novgorod were Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov (1819-83) and Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii (1838-93). Melnikov, the son of a minor landowner in the remote and densely forested Semenov district, made his mark as editor of the recently established Provincial Messenger (Gubern- skie vedomosti), which he transformed from a terse purveyor of governmental directives into a vibrant annal of local life and history; and as an ethnographer who, while occupying a series of positions in the state bureaucracy, compiled an abundance of materials on the region's inhabitants and particularly the Old Believers. Eventually, these researches bore fruit in the extraordinarily rich and basically sympathetic fictional account of Old Believer life, In the Forests and On the Hills, composed under the pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii. Apparently, Melnikov's saga originated in the tales he recounted to the subsequently deceased heir to the throne, Nicholas, in the course of a voyage down the Volga in 1861.[66]
Gatsiskii, who came to Nizhnii from Riazan at the age of nine, dedicated his life to things local - as he jokingly put it, to nizhegorodovedenie and nizhe- gorododelanie from the moment of his return from a brief stint at St Petersburg University in the crucial year, 1861. Gatsiskii's curriculum vitae is a whirlwind of local activity: founder of the local statistical committee and editor of its papers, president of the local provincial archival commission, member of the zemstvo (elective district council)(at moments when he was able to meet the property qualification) and at one time its president, author of some 400 articles on local history, popular religion, archeology, ethnography and statistics. Gatsiskii never became a nationally known figure on the same scale as Melnikov; but he did enter the national limelight in the 1870s as the defender of the 'provincial idea' - the notion, in part inspired by Shchapov's regionalism (oblastnichestvo), that Russia's provinces had a crucial role to play in national development.[67]
Besides these two, a number of other key figures appear inevitably on the pages of any historical account of the city of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century. The extremely active marshal ofthe nobility Prince Gruzinskii dispensed justice and charity in the first quarter of the century.[68] Merchants and Maecenases Nikolai Bugrov and Fedor Blinov (both millers) were famous for their municipal involvement and charitable deeds as well as their wealth.[69]The priest Ioann Vinogradov, from whose illustrious family the radical and poet Nikolai Dobroliubov came, managed a prestigious apartment house in the centre of town.[70] Ivan Kulibin gained national fame as the inventor of the steam engine; while the renown of the merchant of Greek origin and owner of the Sormovo shipyards D. E. Benardaki rested on his commercial
achievements.[71]
Aggregate statistics prove inadequate for a second reason: they also fail to capture the dramatic changes in social composition experienced by many Russian cities, Nizhnii Novgorod among them, in the last third of the nineteenth century. In adhering to the traditional soslovie categories, information- gatherers ignored the emergence of significant new social groups, most notably middle classes and workers. To give the statisticians some credit, the perpetual flux of post-emancipation society, in which, for example, the same person could be the employee of a sheepskin manufacturer, an independent entrepreneur in that same line of business and an agricultural labourer in the course of a single year, made it virtually impossible to measure status, occupation and class; the geographical location and employ of many provincial inhabitants was subject to change. The Sormovo shipbuilding plant, dating back to the 1840s and one of the earliest working-class communities in Russia, alone employed 10,748 workers in 1899 (up from 2,000 only five years earlier).[72]
Even more elusive are the middle classes. Fortunately, we can turn to the eye of contemporaries who, if they did not count, caught members of Nizhnii Novgorod society on paper or on film: Aleksandr Gatsiskii's fondest project, in fulfilment of his belief that 'history should take as its task the detailed biography of each and every person on the earth without exception',[73] was the compilation of quantities of biographies of local citizens; in combination with the exquisitely posed portraits by the local photographer A. O. Karelin, we can get a satisfying impression, if not quantification, of Nizhnii's middle class.[74] Through Gatsiskii's materials, we learn of Anna Nikolaevna Shmidt, the eccentric journalist of petty gentry background who created a theology which she called the Third Testament, and was 'adopted' by various Silver Age cultural figures, Zinaida Gippius in particular; of Petr Bankal'skii, the meshchanin and small businessman who eventually opened a bar, then a hotel near the fairgrounds, in the meantime writing treatises that sought to reconcile science and religion;[75] of the much-admired local historian Stepan Eshevskii (1829-65);[76] of A. V Stupin (1776-1861), founder of a well-known icon-painting school in the wilds of Nizhnii Novgorod province; of Liubov' Kositskaia (182968), beloved local actress.[77] Karelin, in the meantime, went inside the bourgeois household with his camera (i870s-90s) to portray families, loving couples, girls in exotic dress - in short, the whole panoply of Victorian photographic repertoire. Whether verbal or visual, the portraits are unmistakably middle- class. The middle class might perfectly well contain people officially classified as gentry, merchants, clergy (namely in the Dobroliubov family's apartment building), meshchane, and even peasants (who continued to be counted as such even if - as happened in Old Believer circles - they happened to be millionaires). Donald Raleigh estimated for another provincial town, Saratov, that the professional and commercial middle classes made up 25 per cent of the urban population.[78]
66
'Melnikov, Pavel Ivanovich', in F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron,
67
For more on this see C. Evtuhov, 'The Provincial Intelligentsia and Social Values in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1838-1891',
68
See Melnikov,
69
Galina Ulianova, 'Entrepreneurs and Philanthropy in Nizhnii Novgorod, from the Nineteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century', in W. Brum- field, B. Anan'ich and Iu. Petrov (eds.),
70
T. P. Vinogradova,
73
Gatsiskii,
74
See A. A. Semenov and M. M. Khorev (eds.),
75
On these two figures, see C. Evtuhov, 'Voices from the Provinces: Living and Writing in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1870-1905',
77
On Kositskaia, see Toby Clyman and Judith Vowles (eds.),
78
D. Raleigh, 'The Impact of World War I on Saratov and its revolutionary movement', in Rex Wade and Scott Seregny (eds.),