E-mail: tanyar_2@mail.ru Tel.: +7 (863) 250-98-16
41, Chekhova av., Rostov-on-Don, 344006, Russian Federation
PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, Laboratory of Philology, Federal Research Centre the Southern Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The research was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research as a part of the scientific project No. 21–09–43097, “Don Cossacks in the USSR.”
This article deals with the matchmaking and betrothal rites of the Don Cossacks, their regional peculiarities, as well as their transformation in the twentieth century. Traditional rituals of the Don Cossacks in Soviet times are poorly studied and the large array of expeditionary materials containing recollections about weddings of this period call for scholarly scrutiny. The author uses pre-Revolutionary descriptions and field materials of various years from the Rostov and Volgograd regions — territory that was a part of the Don Cossack Host before the Revolution — to analyze marriages from the first half of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth. The author determines that matchmaking was well preserved in the structure of the ritual up to the 1960s. Ritual speech formulas, the comical search for a bride, manipulations with treats brought by matchmakers and ritual actions that symbolize the consolidation of the marriage contract demonstrate its stability until the mid-twentieth century. The preliminary visit of the groom’s representatives to the bride’s house before matchmaking which was apparently common in certain Don districts before the revolution is rarely mentioned in the field materials. The process of betrothal was significantly reduced in Soviet times. The tendency to merge it with matchmaking apparently had its origins even before the Revolution, and the difficult years of the 1930s‑1940s accelerated the decline of the betrothal ritual in the structure of wedding ceremonies.
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