Zverev Vladimir A.,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
“I’ve Been Recognized as a Good Worker”. The Son of Migrant Peasants Talks About His Family, His Parents’ Farm and His Growth as a Person
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2020-4-4
The work looks at the publication of a historical source of personal origin that also acts as the ego-source of a memoir nature. These are fragments from the memoirs of Vasiliy Yermolenko (1893–1970), which he wrote in Novosibirsk in the late 1960s, shortly before his death. The memoir fragments to be published tell the story of a descendant of impoverished Zaporozhian Cossacks, the son of migrants from the Poltava Governorate, who describes the origin of his ancestors, the circumstances under which his parents moved to Altai in 1894, and how they settled into their new place in the migrant village of Asinkritovka in Loktevskaya parish in Zmeinogorodsky district of the Tomsk Governorate. The main subject that the author writes about and reflects on is his growth as a person through childhood and adolescence in the early twentieth century, when he worked in Zmeinogorsky and later in Biysky counties as an apprentice to the manager in a village store, as an unskilled laborer for rich neighbors, and as a raftsman on the river while continuing to strive for a higher social status and becoming a clerk. He describes in his autobiography a key moment in his life when his neighbors and older family members began to regard him as a good worker, which had been made possible by his deliberate and focused efforts during the harvest when he worked as a hired hand for a neighbor. The publisher previously released two large fragments of V. Yermolenko's edited memoirs, so it seems that the time has come to publish his memoirs in full together with the preparatory materials from the family archive of the memoirist's descendants.
Publishing: 29/08/2020
How to cite: Zverev V.A. “I’ve Been Recognized as a Good Worker”. The Son of Migrant Peasants Talks About His Family, His Parents’ Farm and His Growth as a Person // Historical Courier, 2020, No. 4 (12), pp. 43–56 [Available online:] http://istkurier.ru/data/2020/ISTKURIER-2020-4-04.pdf
Links: Issue 4 2020
Keywords: the late 19th to the early 20th century; Zmeinogorsk county; Biysk county; Ukrainian immigrants; peasant yard; social ideal; self-development of personality; memories; ego-document