On Emotional Grounds: Private Communication of Muslims in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

This article explores the practices of private communication of Muslims at the eclipse of the Russian empire. The correspondence of a young Kazan mullah with his family and friends lays the ground for an analysis of subjectivity at the intersection of literary models and personal experience. In personal writings, individuals selected from a repertoire of available tools for self-fashioning, be that the usage of notebooks, the Russian or Muslim calendar, or peculiarities of situational language use. Letters carried the emotions of their writers as well as evoking emotions in their readers. While still having access to the Persianate models of the self, practiced by previous generations of Tatar students in Bukhara, the new generation prioritized another type of scholarly persona, based on the mastery of Arabic, the study of the Qur’an and the hadith, as well as social activism.