concept
"Инородцы" (inorodtsy) -- imperial-Russian bureaucratic ethnonym
inorodtsy
also: инородцы, инородческих, non-Russian natives
The Russian Empire's standard nineteenth-century administrative/legal term for non-ethnic-Russian subjects (literally "of another birth/origin"), used here of Siberian indigenous peoples targeted by the missionary conversion campaign Chekhov's brother describes. Not a slur in the source-language sense that жид is -- it is period bureaucratic and legal vocabulary, not a term of personal abuse -- but it encodes an imperial, othering classification of these peoples as outside the Russian ethnic-religious norm. Rendered plainly here as "natives," the period English administrative equivalent, without further in-text comment; flagged for readers as period terminology rather than a neutral modern ethnonym.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 23 February 1890. Moscow. §4 the natives don't get baptized
Renders "инородцы" (inorodtsy), the Russian Empire's standard nineteenth-century bureaucratic and legal term for non-ethnic-Russian subjects -- literally "of another birth/origin" -- used here of the Siberian indigenous peoples targeted by the missionary conversion campaign Chekhov's brother describes. Unlike жид (see the separate note at section 8), инородцы is not a slur in the source language: it is neutral administrative vocabulary, the period's ordinary legal classification, not a term of personal abuse. It nonetheless encodes an imperial, othering framework -- these peoples are defined by what they are not (Russian) -- and Chekhov's own sarcasm in this section is aimed squarely at the coercive missionary project the term's users are running, not at the peoples themselves ("read: by force"; "they don't know how to baptize anyone... they want the police and the militia to help them with fire and sword"). Rendered plainly as "natives," the period English administrative equivalent, without an in-text gloss.