E. A. IKONNIKOVA

Sakhalin State University (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk)

Harbin Normal University (China)

Keywords: Far East, Harbin, "Churin", literature, Arseny Nesmeloe

Chain stores are now no surprise to anyone. However, most of the trademarks in the minds of the average Russian are associated with stores that emerged in the wake of the 1990s and early 2000s. But few people know about the network companies of the past, including domestic companies represented abroad.

In modern, multi - million - dollar Harbin, the center of Heilongjiang Province, shops with the quirky Russian surname "Churin"are popular. The name of the retail chain, which has a history of more than a hundred years, is due to the entrepreneur from Siberia Ivan Churin (1833-1895).

NAME OF A RUSSIAN MERCHANT IN RUSSIA AND CHINA

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Churin & Co. trading house was well known: department stores of the same name were located in many cities of the Russian Far East (Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, etc.). The trading house Churin & Co. did not ignore Sakhalin during the hard labor period. In the port of Alexandrovsky, one of the most remote locations of Churin's company, at the very end of the XIX century, its own branch appeared. Thanks to this retail network, Sakhalin residents could purchase not only food, but also a variety of basic necessities. It is believed that representatives of Churina & Co., along with another well - known trading company, Kunst & Alberts, were the main suppliers of the Sakhalin Economic Fund and had a monopoly right to sell alcoholic beverages on the convict island. At the same time, the prices of the "Churinsky" branches were not inflated, but were calculated mainly for middle-income buyers.

After the death of the Russian entrepreneur in 1895, the trading house's activities did not stop. "Churinskaya" company passed into the hands of new owners, who left the name of the founder in the name of the trading house and launched trade far beyond the borders of the Russian Empire.

Initially, Ivan Churin's successors conducted commercial affairs in the regions bordering Siberia and the Far East. At the very beginning of the 20th century, the main emphasis was placed on trade support for workers employed in the construction of the China-Eastern Railway (CER). The Churin & Co. Trading House represented its interests first in Manchuria, then in Harbin, later in Port Arthur, Dalian, in the Liaoning Province's Yingkou City District, in the Yimianpo Railway village, and elsewhere.

In the "Churinsky" branches, the staff sold consumer goods: warm clothes, durable shoes, long-term storage products and, of course, vodka, with which Russia was strongly associated in the minds of the CER workers. Later, unusual products appeared on the" Churinsky "counters, for example, Christmas toys and ladies' hats from Europe. It was in the "Churinsky" stores that you could buy only mass-used technical equipment (siphons, typewriters, etc.) or books in Russian - fiction, scientific and other literature. The expression "bought in Churin" ("at Churin's") meant, on the one hand, high quality goods, on the other-a memory of a distant homeland.

The scale of the trading house was enviable for Chinese merchants: every year the "Churinsky" turnover acquired an increasingly large scale, not limited exclusively to buying and selling. Russian emigrants and the Chinese population were involved in the trading house's activities. The trading House Churin & Co. directly and indirectly performed various educational functions. A large number of diverse literature-

books in Russian, exhibitions of artists, quaintly designed storefronts that carry this or that information about Russia and Western Europe-all this and much more attracted ordinary customers to Churin, as well as people with certain intellectual and creative needs.

Along with the length of the CER, the number of "Churinsky" stores grew, and interest in them did not fade either with the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, or later, when many entrepreneurs calculated the losses caused by the devastation. However, after the October Revolution, the activity of the Churin & Co. trading house collapsed. Deliveries of goods stopped in all regions of Russia, and the new owners of the trademark settled in Harbin, where the company had a lot of trials.

At the very beginning of the 1950s, the government of the USSR (and the Churinskaya company eventually became part of Vneshtorga of the Soviet state) transferred the rights to the company to the People's Republic of China. But in the new format, the work of the trading house, due to various circumstances, declined, and later completely ceased to exist. Only in 1984 did Churin stores reappear on the streets of Harbin (not only in the center, but also in new districts) and other Chinese cities. The old slogan that allowed the company to earn the respect of customers at the beginning of the XX century is adopted: "The buyer comes first, service comes first, and the high reputation of the company comes first" - such laws are obeyed by every new employee of a company that has stepped into the XXI century1.

CHURIN TRADEMARK IN LITERATURE

The popularity of the Churin & Co. trading house in the Far East was so high that it could not but be reflected in a number of literary works devoted to the Russo-Japanese War and Russian emigration in China. Constant references to "Churin" are found in diaries, memoirs, interviews of a significant part of the Harbin emigration, mainly among the creative intelligentsia.

Thus, one of the fragments of the Memoirs of the writer and publicist V. N. Ivanov (1888-1971), published in 1991, tells about the purchase of a pair of trousers and a jacket in the "beautiful store of I. Ya.Churin". It is noteworthy that V. N. Ivanov does not keep in mind the name of the Harbin hotel where he stayed, but perfectly remembers the name of the store where the necessary clothes were bought for the writer.

According to the idea of Valentin Pikul (1928-1990), two Japanese heroes of the historical novel "Wealth" (1977) Furusawa and Kabayashi once began their careers "in the Churin trading company" in Vladivostok, where they "polished the purity of pronunciation" of Russian words. Occasionally, Valentin Pikul also writes about the founder of the "firm", the "pervogildeysky Churin" from Irkutsk - a man who managed to put trade for the benefit of many people.

The famous poet, novelist and journalist Arseny Nesmeloe (real name - Arseny Mitropolsky, 1889-1945), far beyond the borders of the "Russian" Harbin, mentions Churin's name twice in his poem "Stroechniki"² ("The Beards are smoky...", 1938)³. The first lines of the poem refer to the "old men" - the builders of the CER, the Russian founders of Harbin:

 
 
 Beards are smoky,
A sad look, 
 On Churin's benches 
 The old men are sitting... 
 
 

Arseny Nesmelov paints a typical picture of Harbin in the 1920s and 1930s. "On the benches at Churin's "(near the central store" Churin " in Harbin), people of different ages really often rested, exchanged news, and made appointments. However, more often than others, it was the elderly who could be seen "on the benches". Such are the heroes of "Stroechnikov", they live out their days in a foreign country, their youth has passed, their strength is exhausted:

 
 
 ... Mossy old men 
 On the bench of a stranger- 
 Their heads are white 
 All families are the same. 
 
 Less every year 
 Dear old people, -
A whirlwind of devastation 
 Between their rows. 
 
 No Ivan Vasilich, 
 Okunev is not here!.. 
 Who will cure you of cancer 
 At sixty-five? 
 
 Ask-and frowningly,
In a voice of longing: 
 "They took me away for Churin!" - 
 The old people will say. 
 
 

THE LAST SHELTER "ZA CHURIN"

"To carry away (or take away) for Churin" - this stable expression, which was common in the speech of Russian Harbin residents, meant to bury them, to see them off on their last journey. It was behind the Churin store, which was located on the corner of Novotorgovaya Street and Bolshoy Prospekt, that the "Russian" cemetery stretched out - many Russian residents of Harbin found their last shelter there. This cemetery was first called "New", but this name did not take root. The poem "Strojechniki" also mentions the very first one, "an old, small cemetery" ⁴, which received still unforgettable comrades, whose portraits hang in the" bedrooms " of the old people of Harbin. The new burials, located "beyond Churin", were known to all Russian residents of Harbin: both those who still dreamed of returning to Russia, and those who no longer connected their future with the motherland.

The use of the expression "for Churin" in poetic speech (namely, as a determinant, an indicator of the place of a new burial)

Arseniy Nesmelov shows up in at least two other works of the poet: in the poem "The Old Man" ("In the newspaper and this and that", 1944) and in the poem " Nina Granina. The Tale of Old Harbin "(1944).

"How do elderly Russian residents of Harbin live?" - this is the question asked by the poet in the poem "The Old Man". The nameless hero of The Old Man, like other people of his age, reads the newspapers in the morning, "gasps" and "crosses his forehead", because he finds mourning words about a close, familiar person with whom he recently met "at Churin's":

 
 
 "Ivan Ivanych... Vanya! 
 Yes, can you think that... "
Not yet a week has passed 
 (Now what's it like for the family!), 
 How close they sat together 
 Churin's on the bench. 
 
 

Churin was simultaneously associated with various contradictory concepts - Homeland and foreign land, joy and sorrow, life and death. The vicinity of the main Churin store in Harbin was a place where the past intersected with the present, and the mature with the young. It is at the "Churinsky" store that the young narrator hears from the lips of an old man the story of the beautiful Harbin Nina (from the poem "Nina Granina"). Near the" Churinsky "benches, funeral "drogs" are always heard, and old people who are resting, and among them many "builders", readily confess to random interlocutors. The life story of Nina Granina remains incomplete, it ends at the most intriguing moment. The narrator is waiting for the continuation and therefore:

 
 
 And again I sit at Churin's 
 And waiting: and late or early, 
 But the end of the novel 
 I'll wait and tell you about it. 
 
 

Arseny Nesmeloe himself, who more than once saw off his Harbin acquaintances "for Churin", finished his journey in December 1945 in the Primorsky Territory.

RETURN - "CHURINA "

The previously suspended activity of Churin stores has found a second wind. Signs with the Russian surname "Churin" are now much more numerous on the streets of Harbin than in the days of Arseny Nesmelov. However, the "Churinsky" range is mainly limited to food products.

Currently, under the Churin brand (or in the English version Churin Food) in the center of Heilongjiang province, famous products are sold that are prepared according to the recipes of Russian cuisine: bread and various flour products (mainly pastries), sausage, jam, honey, desserts, kvass and other drinks. In the "Churinsky" stores you can buy products of modern Russian manufacturers. But among Harbin residents, white puffy bread and sausage "Litovskaya" (in Chinese-"Lidofusy") are mostly popular. In the morning hours of delivery of these products to the central stores, huge queues line up in front of Churin, and the smells of freshly baked bread and freshly cooked sausage are clearly felt in the air - and all this attracts new customers of Churin products even more. Some lucky people leave the walls of stores with large packages, while others eagerly move forward to get to the counter as soon as possible. At the same time, Churin stores always have not only the freshest products, but also bread and sausage that retain their taste qualities for a long time: bread is sold in dense canvas bags, and sausage is sold in souvenir boxes.

Nowadays, on the advertising products of the Churin store, you can see a mustachioed chef with a rolling pin in his hands, and on the packaging of individual goods - characters of Russian history or laconic inscriptions in Russian. And if suddenly Russian tourists do not manage to visit any of the "Churinsky" stores, then they will certainly see the products of the trading house at Harbin airport - after all, most often, it is "Churinsky" products that are brought as a gift by both Chinese and visiting foreigners.

The realities of the "Churinsky" environs of the 1920s-1930s are already completely unrecognizable in the center of modern Harbin. The legendary Churinsky benches and the well-known expression "carry away for Churin" have sunk into oblivion. However, today, as many decades ago, the word "Churin" (in Chinese pronunciation - "Qiulin")is still used. it is definitely recognized by the native inhabitants of Harbin in the stream of unfamiliar words uttered by Russian tourists.

* * *

It so happened that Ivan Churin had no direct descendants, but the name of the enterprising Siberian continues to live in the name of the famous trading house (which has changed its owners more than once) and in everything that is directly or indirectly connected with it - both in commerce and in literature. Through the Churin & Co. trading house, there is also a thin thread of history connecting the Russian cities of the past and Harbin of the present. Modern "Churinsky" stores are still associated with everything Russian and therefore continue to be another reliable bridge of friendship and mutual cooperation between Russia and China.

¹ A detailed description of the activities of the Churin & K trading House can be found in the electronic edition of G. V. Melikhov's book " White Harbin. Mid-20s" (2003).

² The poet calls the builders of the CER and the Russian builders of Harbin "builders".

³ This poem and all subsequent works of Arseny Nesmelov cited in the article were not included in the poet's lifetime collections.

⁴ The corpus of works by Arseny Nesmelov contains numerous references to the" first " Russian cemetery in Harbin. In addition, the poet also wrote a three-part poem "Old Cemetery" (1943), dedicated to "the memory of the builders of Harbin".