Arkhangelsk Commercial Club (Marfa’s House) as a center of European culture of the port city of Arkhangelsk of the late XIX – early XX centuries

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the Arkhangelsk Commercial Club (Marfa’s House) – a cultural center of the port city during the late XIX – early XX centuries. The author traces the fates of the representatives of Western European dynasties of merchants and tradesmen who dwelled in the port city for several centuries and were subjected to repressions during the World War I and Soviet time. Currently, one of the paramount tasks of scientific community consists in the preservation of memory on the activity of the prominent people of the past, as not only the region, but also the country as a whole owes them for development of economy, culture, science, systems of state administration, education, and a number of other spheres of life. The theoretical-methodological framework for the research became the set of methods of new anthropologically-oriented branches of historical science, generalized by the concept of “historical anthropology”, which allowed shifting the point of attention from history of government structures towards life of households and separate individuals. The experience of working with cognate disciplines – such as historical sociology and sociology of everyday life became useful, especially when working sources of personal origin. The article employs modern methodology and introduces into the scientific discourse documents discovered by the author in the State Archive of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Archive of the Arkhangelsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, as well as biographical records on the representatives of the prominent Arkhangelsk merchant dynasties – families Leuzinger and Petz from the personal archives of the descendants.