About

This website is dedicated to the study of vagrancy (brodiazhnichestvo) in the literature and culture of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Russian vagrants (brodiagi) are not just another itinerant literary character type. In the eyes of the law, they are, first and foremost, criminals, convicted in accordance with vagrancy laws, which the state began to develop in Russia since the 17th century. The legal punishment for vagrancy was severe. At different historical moments, it ranged from a forced conscription in the Russian military to a succession of knouting, branding with the letter “Б” for “бродяга” (brodiaga), several years of penal labor, and, finally, an exile in Siberia. Thousands upon thousands of people were convicted every year, either for having no identification documents or for venturing farther than 20 miles from their place of residence. In the 19th century, vagrants (brodiagi) became omnipresent not only in the Russian prisons but also in Russian literature and art. Russian writers, however, very rarely consider the legal realities of vagrancy in their texts about vagrants. Instead, they used vagrant characters to speak about what they saw as the exciting criminal underworld and enigmatic, remote Russian prisons. In fact, many Russian writers, among whom were Dmitrii Grigorovich, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Korolenko, and Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, often imagine vagrants as people with extraordinary abilities to escape even the most secure and remote Russian prisons. That said, most vagrant stories were used to make broad points about morality, freedom, or problems in Russian society. One thing is clear vagrant characters reveal much more about writers than writers reveal about vagrant characters. In my research of 19th- and 20th-century Russian culture, I ask the following questions: How did vagrancy laws form and evolve? What caused brodiagi to become such popular characters in the 19th century? What tropes and motifs formed around them? What did these tropes help reveal to the reader about 19th-century Russia? Did writers choose to speak about vagrants to help their cause or to vilify them? What can vagrant characters tell us today about the representation of the poor, particularly of the unhoused, and about Russian culture more broadly?

On this website, you can find lists of literary works and other cultural products (songs, films, paintings, photographs, etc.), which I found during my research. Feel free to alert me about other cultural vagrant sightings I may have missed.