The Communicative Strategies of the Ukrainian Nobility in the mid-19th Century (According to Correspondence)

Abstract

The life of the Ukrainian nobility within the realities of the middle of the 19th century via the analysis of the communicative strategies is presented in the article. The consideration of the family correspondence has permitted to reconstruct the complicated network of social and cultural connections of the regional elite, whose representatives realized different range of ideological and behavioral objectives. The resourceful base of the article was a complex of letters from Galagan’s family archive - a noble family that had origins in Cossacks’ officers. The choice of the sources was determined by the following reasons. Firstly, the family of Galagan maintained close contacts with the regional nobility and simultaneously, established the new with the imperial authorities according to the marriage strategies during 18th-19th centuries. Secondly, the perfectly preserved archive provides the important material for communicative strategies’ study on the base of correspondence. This fact permits to understand the work of social mechanisms affected on the landowners’ life of Left-bank Ukraine during the middle of the 19th century. The aim of the article is to consider communicative strategies of the Ukrainian elite on the base of the family correspondence from Galagan’s archive during the second half of 1840-s to the middle of 1860-s. The communicative scenarios of the nobility of Left-bank Ukraine in the connections with the local authority and imperial center, landowners and peasants, groups of relatives within the noble community have been studied. The documents consideration provided an opportunity to know the reaction of the Ukrainian nobility to the events of 1840-1860-s: the actions of the imperial government during the reign of the emperors Mykola I and Oleksandr II regarding Ukraine, the Crimean War, the Peasant reform of 1861 and consequences of its implementation on the Ukrainian lands. The research results have developed the presentation of the Ukrainian society in space and time of the 19th century. The article is based on the original author’s conception.