The World of Childhood in Merchant Families of the Russian Empire in the 19th – Early 20th Centuries

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the history of сhildhood in the merchant families of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19 th-early 20 th century. A child in a merchant's family had a separate status, which was determined by a number of characteristics. The temporal characteristics include the age stages of the virginity period (infant, preschooler, school student) and a special "children's" daily routine. The category of space was expressed in the presence of conditional boundaries separating the children's world from the world of adults: the space of the children's room, the children's area at the family table, places for children's games in the garden. The allocation of children's space performed several functions at once: protective (protecting children from injuries, sources of illness), dividing: highlighting the boundaries between members of the same family, as if identifying among them those who are able to make independent decisions and be responsible for their actions (adults) and those in need of care and custody (children). The child in the family of a merchant had his own world with toys, children's dishes, furniture and clothes. Finally, childhood was accompanied by a special world of things, in which cultural meanings inherent in a given family, merchant class, country, and historical era were consolidated. As the main sources for illustrating each of the named characteristics, the author has chosen the memories of the childhood of two representatives of the merchant families T. Karson and S. Durylin. Memories written by a man and a woman, on the one hand, make it possible to reveal the specifics of the female or male perception of the children's world, on the other, to determine the basic cultural characteristics inherent in childhood in merchant families.

Comparable Analysis of the Ornamentation of Folk Bedspreads of the Western Part of Ukraine and Lithuania

“…This territory of Ukraine was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for a longer period, compared to the central, eastern, and southern regions of the country, and later became part of the Commonwealth of Nations together with Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus. Scholars from the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Kaunas University of Technology limited the subject of the study to artifacts from Western Ukraine and Lithuania since the comparison of Ukrainian, Polish, and Belarusian bedspreads had already been carried out within the framework of the study of common Slavic weaving traditions [1][2][3][4]. On the other hand, a comparison of the weaving traditions of Ukrainians (Slavs) and Lithuanians (Balts) has not been conducted yet.…”