Free steppe. Kalmykov A. Yu.

The hereditary Cossack Alexei Yuryevich Kalmykov 28 years of his life devoted to the study of the pedigree of his ancestors and the history of the Cossack people. On the pages of this book, the author reliably sets out the life of the Cossack people on the example of the Cossack family of the Kalmykovs, based on the materials of the family archive, numerous publications about Cossacks and information from state archives. In the form of ordinary living speech, the author of the book partially restores the Cossack speech lost on the Don at the end of the XVIII beginning of the XIX centuries, modernizing it by the author’s language. At the end of the book, a short Don Dictionary was attached. The study of the vocabulary of the Don Cossacks and the “Don dialectical dictionary”, the material of which was collected by an ethnographic expedition in the Don villages and farms from 1917 to 1927, helped the author in writing this book. A special place in the book is given to the spiritual essence of the Cossacks, their free freedom -loving temper. This book will be interesting not only to the Cossacks and their descendants, but to all readers interested in the history of the Cossack people.