Every time I write articles about the real history of our beloved city, I’m faced with a dilemma: what should I call its residents in the text?
If I write our traditional term “Kharkivtsi” (people from Kharkiv), I’ll immediately find out from the experts in the comments that:
1) I’m crazy—that word never existed and doesn’t exist.
2) I came up with that nasty word myself (of course, purely to tease the people around me).
Sometimes it got downright absurd. Once, some extremely persistent readers kept demanding for a long time that I remove a certain offensive term from the article. But I categorically refuse to use the word “Kharkiv residents.” It’s not in my vocabulary. So I have to walk a fine line…
I know perfectly well who the “Kharkivets” are. Yes, that’s exactly what the residents of our city have been called for centuries. Alas, no matter how much I might want to, I cannot claim to have coined this term—otherwise, I’d have to be considered Methuselah.
If we open pre-revolutionary books, magazines, and newspapers, or look through historical documents, we’ll see that there are no such mythical “Kharkivets” to be found there. For example, in 1910, an advertising newspaper called “Sputnik Kharkovtsa” was even published in our city for a while. But we only became “Kharkiviany” relatively recently—in the 1930s.
From a philological perspective, I haven’t studied the terms “Kharkiviany” and “Kharkivtsi”—I confess, I’m at fault.
I also humbly believe that if our great compatriots, of whom we are so proud (D. Bagaley, A. Beketov, members of the Alchevsk family, and many others) heard us say that they are “people from Kharkiv,” they simply wouldn’t understand us.
However, I’ll answer the quite predictable question right away: “If the residents of Kharkiv were called ‘Kharkivtsi,’ what were the female residents called?” The fact is that women in the 18th through early 20th centuries did not have the same rights as they do today. Therefore, the feminine form of this word simply did not exist.
Well, now let’s go back in time…
This is an exceptionally interesting book in six volumes, containing a total of about 2,000 dictionary entries,
which hasn’t heard of any Kharkiv residents. However, you can find this characteristic phrase there:
It is extremely important to note that Maksimovich’s work was one of the first geographical dictionaries in the empire. In addition to geographical information, the dictionary also contained a wealth of material on local history. The descriptions and characteristics of our city found there are also quite interesting. For this reason, we will certainly return to this book in future articles.
An ordinary children’s storybook from 1844 with the not-at-all-original title *One Fairy Tale After Another*.
In the Kharkiv textbook *Course in International Law*, published in 1863 by Dmitry Ivanovich Kachenovsky, we read:
Two years after the death of the great writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (in 1881), the book *Biography, Letters, and Notes from F. M. Dostoevsky’s Notebook* was published.
It featured the texts of telegrams from Kharkiv in which our fellow townspeople expressed their deepest condolences on the writer’s death.
“Kharkiv, January 31, 1881.
Kharkivtsi are deeply saddened by the death of the unforgettable Fyodor Mikhailovich. Tomorrow, we will gather at the university church to honor his memory. Sykhra.”
Many residents of our city love the Cathedral of the Dormition. A historical and statistical account of it was published in 1894. Who do we encounter in the pages of this fascinating book?
Or this: “Kharkivtsi who remained loyal to the government drove out the rebels.”
I don’t think anyone would take issue with E. A. Albovsky’s outstanding study, “The History of the Kharkiv Sloboda Cossack Regiment (1651–1765),” published in 1895?
N. I. Pirogov’s memoir, published in 1900, which also mentions our fellow townspeople:
“By the end of the 1827 semester, the last members of our faculty had arrived—four professors, Kharkivtsi.”
A. Vinogradov’s travel notes and impressions, *In Faraway Lands*, published in 1901, informed readers:
“Straight from Selamlik, I went to ‘Moscow.’ Don’t be surprised, reader, that this name—so dear to every Russian—can be found in a distant foreign land. ‘Moscow’ in the Turkish capital is the name of the only Russian tavern, run by two Kharkivtsi. Here, every compatriot can get tea, Russian vodka, beer, and even something resembling blini…”
From documents dating from 1901 issued by the Society for the Support of Needy Students in Elementary Schools in Kharkiv, we learn that:
The former Bishop of Kharkiv and Akhtyr (1874–1879) Savva (born Ivan Mikhailovich Tikhomirov) compares the residents of our city to the ancient Romans in the fifth volume of his autobiographical memoirs, *Chronicle of My Life*:
In honor of Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnya—a linguist, literary scholar, and philosopher so beloved by many tour guides, literary scholar, philosopher, and the empire’s first major linguistic theorist, Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnya, not only has a street in Kharkiv named after him but also the Institute of Linguistics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
In the early 20th century, quite a few books were also dedicated to him. For example, the following:
The author writes, verbatim:
“I think that every Russian university, without even realizing it, reflects the unique characteristics of its region. We, Kharkivtsi, don’t notice our own uniqueness as long as we only see ourselves.”
From the 1909 book *Social Movements in Russia at the Beginning of the 20th Century*, edited by L. Martov, P. Maslov, and A. Potresov, we learn that: “In general, the years 1903–04 differed little from 1902. Poltavatsi and Kharkivtsi, who had been brutally suppressed, were temporarily sidelined…”
Kristina Danilovna Alchevskaya, beloved and revered by many residents of our city, makes no mention of any “Kharkivian” in her memoirs, *Imagined and Experienced*, published in 1911. Instead, she recalls:
The Soviet era had begun. Naturally, former revolutionaries began writing memoirs with romantic titles. For example: N. S. Genkin, *Through Prisons and Convoys*, 1922. Presumably, something went wrong in the author’s head during his stay in the aforementioned institutions, since he writes about one of our city’s residents:
In the stenographic report of the “15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (B)” from 1928, we read about the “comrades-Kharkivtsi.”
In the 1930s, however, “Kharkivtsi” and “Kharkiviany” still coexisted peacefully on the pages of various books.
“Young poets are also exploring this theme in new and fresh ways. In their chorus, we hear voices that are not yet fully formed or established, but are full of promise: Boris Ruchiev from the Urals (“Second Homeland”), Y. Cherkassky from the Donbas (“Rafters”), A. Reshetov from Leningrad, V. Nepomnyashchikh from Siberia, and I. Muratov from Kharkiv (“Poems”)…”
In his *Pedagogical Poem*, published in 1935, Anton Makarenko writes: “The people of Kharkiv were very surprised by our Komsomol troubles…”
It appears that by the late 1930s–early 1940s, the term “Kharkiv residents” had been completely phased out. In the 1942 edition of the “Tashkent Almanac,” a publication by Soviet writers from Uzbekistan, it was written:
One could cite examples from hundreds or even thousands of books from the 18th through the early 20th century where this seditious term appears. But I am certain of one thing—these irrefutable arguments are unlikely to change the minds of those who find our traditional name jarring. So, whether to call oneself an “old-time Kharkivtsi” or a relatively new, Soviet-era “Kharkiviany” is up to each individual to decide. After all, both terms have a right to exist.
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