Russian Population of the Kazan Province in Scientific Publications, Nonfiction Literature and Statistical Materials of the 19th century – early 20th centuries

Russian population of the region is becoming the object of research of the representatives of Kazan ethnographic school from the second half of the 1940s.By the early 1990s the material culture, features of family life and social relations had been thoroughly studied, local variations of the rituals of the life cycle and especially the wedding cycle were described in detail.The acknowledgement of the narrowness of the written source base, which was essential for the deep reconstruction of local Russian culture of the 19th century, became the common place of most publications.Thus, the key element of the ethnographic description was the authors' ''field'' material, which was obtained during regular ethnographic expeditions.The age of informants and the conservativeness of the rural environment made it possible to accurately recreate the "ethnographic present" of the late 19th -early 20th centuries.The analysis of the earlier period used to be mainly based on individual works of the pre-Soviet era.The purpose of this work is a comprehensive historiographic analysis of materials published between 1804 and 1917, containing information about the Russian population of the Kazan province and, it's ethnographic features.The object of study is the corpus of published materials of different genres, publications of scientific and cultural-educational nature in particular, as well as statistical and other documentary information about the Russian population of the Kazan province.Consideration of the published sources in combination will allow to compile a more accurate and complete picture of the representation of the Russian population in public space during the formation of ethnography in Russia as an independent field of scientific knowledge.