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Paper abstract:

This paper seeks to analyze characteristics of a set of Qazaq texts written to Russian officials in the 1820s-30s through the sociolinguistic lens of “letters across social distance” (or “letters to power”). The texts, which were written by local scribes and submitted to Russian imperial administrative offices or officials by Qazaq nomads with a Russian audience in mind, were written in Chagatay and then translated into Russian. They were preserved in imperial archives, for imperial purposes. The texts represent but one genre of written communication in the fluid environment of the steppe territory as it began to come under colonial rule. Because of the rarity in this time period of any original texts produced by Qazaq nomads, they provide historians and linguists with a window on the larger language and social environment of the Qazaq steppe in this period that is otherwise largely obscured from view.

Focusing on the idea of “letters across social distance”—a term used by Alexander Nakhimovsky in his 2019 study of Russian peasant language, which is better known as “letters to power” in Russian historiography—this paper explores what these texts reveal and what they cannot reveal about the Qazaq nomads who orally dictated them and ensured their production and delivery in writing. Using these sources, we acknowledge the “social distance” between the Qazaq authors and official Russian recipients, which allows us to capture fragments of a nomadic world that existed outside of the Russian bureaucracy and structures, even as it built bridges with representatives of that bureaucracy. The letters depict social and political stances of the Qazaq authors and their communities, their relationships to written forms of communication and the multi-vectored cultural influences on the production and content of this genre of text. By analyzing characteristics of these texts, we can also identify some limitations to our historical understanding of issues around literacy, language contact and the steppe language environment in general in this time period.