Okay, it may seem strange to reference an Erykah Badu song in the same breath as the early 20th-century Buryat intelligentsia, but that's how I roll. What I'm getting at is the hidden side in all the lives of the great Buryat men of letters: Their wives.
Finding women in historical documents is both ridiculously easy and mindnumbingly frustrating. We all know there had to women in the picture, and you can even find a few names. But discovering more about who they were, how they thought, what their lives were like... that's a tall order. Buryat women were notoriously undereducated, even though there were a few girl's schools among the Western Buryats near Irkutsk starting as early as the 1860s. Yet even the literate women didn't seem to have the time or perhaps the inclination to write about themselves. Unless there are sources in the archives somewhere I haven't seen. I hope there are.
That said, you can sometimes catch a brief glimpse of the amazing women who shared their lives with early Buryat intellectuals. Writer and scholar Bazar Baradin, for example, was married via arranged marriage in his teens to a literate young woman from Aga, Khandama Tsydenova. She was sent to a women's labor camp in Kazakhstan after her husband was arrested in 1937 during the psycho Stalinist witch hunt, and died there.
Tsyben Zhamtsarano, another lion of Buryat letters and thought, also had an extraordinary wife,Varvara Vladimirovna Vampilova who hailed from a progressive family from Alar (W. Buryat). Many of her relatives were respected teachers.
She was one of the first, if not the first, Buryat woman to attend the Leshaft Courses for Higher Education in St. Petersburg, a leading site for women's education in the 1900s and 1910s, which, I believe, Buryat Bolshevik bad-ass Maria Sakhianova also went to. She then went on to become a trained midwife, studying at the Imperial Clinical Gynological Institute, also in St. Petersburg. However, Vampilova died tragically young.
Prof. A. Rudnev, an important Mongolist at the time, wrote her obituary in the journal Zhivaia starina (1914) and described her thus:
"A Buryat by birth, V.V. Vampilova was one of the first women of that nation to strike out on the path of European education and, having achieved significant success, used the knowledge she had acquired for the good of her people.
"With her smarts and surprisingly warm and responsive personality, Varvara Vladimirovna charmed everyone who came in contact with her. She was an extraordinarily intelligent person and an excellent comrade. She gave herself over wholeheartedly to the interests of her native country and her people, and her soul ached at their need.
"Varvara Vladimirovna had a wonderful voice and knew many Buryat songs, the majority of which were recorded onto phonographs. [Wow! Anybody heard of these?] She became the wife of Prof. Zhamtsarano.
"At the height of her energies and career as a midwife, she died in Urga [Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia] during the campaign to combat typhoid fever in 1914."
Sad. Did Varvara write letters? Diaries? I wish I knew. I'd love to find out more about her.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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