Karay-Saltykovo in Vyazhli: letters to G.F. and N.A. Petrovo-Solovovo to Baratynsky

The work is a commentary on the publication of several letters, which obviously constituted the regular correspondence that existed in the 1840–1880s between the owners of two estates in the Kirsanovsky County of the Tambov Governorate – G.F. and N.A. Petrovo-Solovovo, whose estate was in the Karay-Saltykovo Village, and S.A. and S.M. Baratynsky, who lived in the Mara (Vyazhli). Several letters preserved in the Baratynsky Foundation at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Russian Academy of Sciences (IRLI RAS) represent friendly correspondence in Russian and French, covering a large number of topics of everyday life in a country estate. The fact of this correspondence is interesting in the historical and literary aspect. First of all, letters are bilingual texts, the choice of language in which gives rise to reflection on the nature of the relationship in the nobility of the neighboring community that developed in one of the central Russian counties in the middle of the 19th century. This acquires special significance in cases when documents not only reveal the fact of existing social connections in general, but also, based on observation of the language, style, and emotional mode of letters, make it possible to judge the nature and duration of such connections in the community. Being one of the main historical sources, correspondence materials supplement the evidence of other documents about the past of two noble estates. In particular, this applies to historical information about the estates’ owners. And if there was always a steady interest in Mara (Vyazhli) in connection with the large-scale figure of E.A. Baratynsky, then the history of the Karay-Saltykovsky estate and several generations of its inhabitants today suffers from incompleteness, contradictions in the structure of local history narrative, extreme limited archival material and the absence of introducing new sources into the research field. The publication of letters from the first generation of the inhabitants of the estate in Karay-Saltykovo partly fills this gap. We use textual methods, classical historical study principles of external and internal criticism of the source.

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