Books About Yermak in the Library of Gavriil Tyumentsev as an Indicator of the Siberian Reader’s Cultural Self-Identification (Based on Materials from the Research Library of Tomsk State University)
Authors:   Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russian Federation), Gnyusova Irina F. 
Published: January 2021

Yermak Timofeevich, the conqueror of Siberia, is a key figure of the Siberian frontier and a special “myth” about Siberia in Russian culture. The aim of the article is to find out the idea of Yermak that Siberian intellectual readers formed at the turn of the 20th century. The library of the eminent Tomsk teacher Gavriil Tyumentsev is a representative material for this study. During his life, Tyumentsev collected books and various materials about Siberia. The corpus of publications on Yermak belongs to the period from 1832 to 1897. The books are mainly issued by the capital’s publishing houses and include works of various genres, both fiction (historical story, novel, tragedy) and non-fiction (historical essay, research paper, materials of anniversary readings). Two fictionalized biographies of Yermak stand apart. Folklore is an important component of many works. Readers of the publications are heterogeneous, although most of the books are intended for the mass educated reader. The degree of preservation of the books, few notes, and a number of external signs—all this made it possible to assess what turned out to be the most interesting for the reader. Fictional works about Yermak are in the lead, especially the voluminous historical novel Yermak, or the Conquest of Siberia (1834) by P. Svinyin and the love story From Chopping Block to Honor (1890) by E. Nikolaeva. However, popular science publications, primarily fictionalized biographies of the hero, aroused no less interest. In both cases, the fascination of the narrative turns out to be no less important than the quality of the text: for example, the publication of the short story of the populist N. Polushin, which is much more inferior to the work of the famous journalist and publisher A.S. Suvorin, has been preserved worse, and the book with E. Nikolaeva’s woman’s novel falls to pieces as a result of repeated reading. However, a remarkable historical essay by the Petersburg teacher A.N. Ovsyannikov, in which the author gave the most balanced assessment of the conqueror of Siberia, also attracted the reader’s attention. The collection of reports of the “literary morning” in Tobolsk (1883) is a vivid example of how the Siberian intelligentsia understands the events of the 16th century. Against the background of the same type of interpretation of Yermak’s personality by the metropolitan authors, Tobolsk teachers freely express their assessment of the activities of the ataman and his army, and also criticize their presentation in literature, which is far from the historical truth. The significant number of books about Yermak in the Tyumentsev library testifies to the fact that the heroic plot, associated not only with the capture, but also with the domestication of Siberia, was in demand among Siberian readers. And the “diversity” of Yermak in the collection of the Tomsk teacher is the best proof of the breadth of views of the Siberian intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century, the desire of the local reader to follow all the trends of both the literary process and the historical thought of Russia and form their own idea of the origins of the Siberian “transboundedness”.