Identification by the Don Cossacks of the 19th Century of Their Place in the Ethnocultural Space of Eastern Europe

This article is an attempt to reconstruct how the Don authors of the 19t^h century imagined (defined) the place of Cossacks in the ethnocultural space of Eastern Europe. The author shows that the attempts to analyze the Don Cossacks using such categories as «ethnicity» and «subethnicity» led to contradictory results: while the most authoritative ethnographers (particularly, S.A. Tokarev) attribute part of the Don Cossacks to the Russian ethnicity and part – to the Ukrainian one, the most authoritative historians (particularly, V.M. Kabuzan) consider Cossacks a subethnicity of the Russian people. M.A. Ryblova offered a way out of this contradiction by studying the Don Cossacks as taking into account the «changing of sociocultural model». However, analyzing the Don Cossacks of the 18^th–19^th centuries, she did not quite understand the specificity of the Don authors, claiming that they considered Cossacks to be an «ethnosocial group». The article shows that, for Don authors of the 19^th century, the basis for self-identification was not belonging to the Cossacks, but belonging to the Don Host. At the same time, the Don Host didn’t possess any traits characteristic to an ethnicity or subethnicity in a traditional sense: various authors identified two or three groups of Don Cossacks differing in anthropological type, language and character. Moreover, the Don authors definitely considered the Don Cossacks a unity separate from Great Russians/Little Russians, but, at the same time, they constructed this unity not through ethnicity, but through corporatism, through their pride in history of the Don Host, which united people of different languages, origins and even faiths. Language, character and anthropological type, on the contrary, were used to distinguish different groups among the Don Cossacks, and the differences between them were emphasized – but, at the same time, didn’t break the historical and corporate unity.