Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse

Myroslav Shkandrij is head of the Department of German and Slavic
Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the editor of The Cultural
Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925–1926.

Persecuted in Russia for their pacifism, the Doukhobors immigrated to
Canada in 1899, settling in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. They
became known for their communal living, non-institutional religion, and
vegetarianism. However, when they resisted attempts at assimilation,
they also earned a bad press for their nude protests and barn burnings.
Living outside the educational and cultural mainstream,
Russian-speaking, and hostile to the materialist civilization that
surrounded them, the community in the B.C. interior remained “mentally
unassimilated,” as one observer put it, into the 1960s.

Little of the Doukhobor point of view has penetrated the press. Julie
Rak has culled various forms of autobiography from newspaper articles
and oral interviews in order to fill this gap. She argues that informing
these sporadic accounts is a symbolic structure that presents the
group’s own understanding of their identity. They view themselves as
persecuted sojourners or transients on a pilgrimage, which is a kind of
mystic journey from one destination to another. In 1902, more than 1,000
Doukhobors marched across the Saskatchewan prairie hoping to reach a
land “nearer the sun,” throwing away their money and any goods made
of animal skins, in this way demonstrating their refusal to exploit
animal labour and their rejection of materialism. They also earned
opprobrium by resisting other obvious marks of Canadian identity: they
refused payment of taxes, private ownership of property, military
service, English-language public education, and registration of births,
marriages and deaths. In the 1950s, the B.C. government imprisoned
community leaders, rounded up Doukhobor children in night raids, and
forced them into English schools. In the more recent autobiographical
statements, it becomes clear that, as the Doukhobors have moved into
much greater contact with the mainstream and away from Russian as their
primary language of communication, the self-imaging has become
multivocal, and more concerned with the group’s interaction with
others.

The stories told by members of the group do not focus on psychology or
interiority, but on recalling a collective history and reaffirming a
commitment to the simple (mostly rural) life, the community bond, and a
particular form of mysticism. Rak analyzes these statements using
contemporary critical tools, especially post-colonial, feminist, and
multicultural theory. In fact, the first third of the book is devoted to
various insights that can be gleaned from these and other theoretical
currents. The actual autobiographical primary sources prove to be
relatively sparse and lacking in vivid detail. Often they are summarized
by Rak, who provides an interpretation and contextualization.

Negotiated Memory is a very scholarly account of the Doukhobor
experience in Canada, and a pioneering investigation of the literature.