Contributors who are used to bibliographical reference systems operating in the various countries of Central and Eastern Europ


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Vladimir S. Kliaus. Traditsionnaia kul�tura starobriadtsev (semeiskikh) Zabaikal�ia.  CD-Rom.  Required 

System: Pentium PC 233 MHz, 64 Meg RAM, 48x CD-ROM, Windows 98, Internet Explorer 5.5.  Flash Player 

and Flash Active X are provided on the CD.  Images, audio, video, a searchable full-text bibliography of 500 

titles.  2001.  $32.00. 

 

Compact disks are capable of holding an enormous amount of information and have the advantage of 

presenting data in a variety of formats.  Thus, the same CD can hold text, sound files, video and still images.  

Kliaus and his collaborators have utilized the capacity of digital technology to give us a treasure trove of Old 

Believer data on one CD.   

The CD under review has a short introductory essay.  It also contains a terrific bibliography that is 

divided into useful categories such as the history of Old Believer settlements, dialect studies, collections of 

folklore data, including children�s folklore, calendary and life cycle rituals, and collections of prose, song and 

incantation texts.  There are lists of studies that focus on material culture and studies that deal with Old Believer 

farming techniques.  Literary works that mention Old Believers are referenced, as are archives with repositories 

of Old Believer materials.  The bibliography goes beyond published and archival works to include lists of 

available audio and video recordings, Old Believer web sites and Old Believer organizations.  I am not an Old 

Believer specialist, but the bibliography seems marvelously complete.  Furthermore, in addition to giving 

citations, the bibliography allows the user to click on selected shorter pieces, usually articles, to view the full 

text.  According to the introduction, the provided articles are the ones that are hardest to find.  Thus the 

bibliography of this CD either directs the user to the source of a particular item or, in those cases where location 

is difficult, provides the item itself.  Finally, the CD has a Yandex search engine.  With a Russian keyboard 

installed, words can be typed, or pasted, into the search page where Boolean searches can be performed in any 

one of thirty different categories.  The search engine works beautifully, searching all of the text files, 

bibliographic citations, folklore texts and article texts on the entire CD.  This allows not only location of desired 

studies or texts; it allows actual research on the CD itself.  A scholar can type in a word or a phrase and see in 

which types of folklore texts it appears, and in which contexts.    

 The CD goes well beyond providing an excellent bibliography and search engine.  There are collections 

of photographs for twenty-two Old Believer villages and a set of photos of icons.  The sets of photographs 

contain both recent ones made by Kliaus and his colleagues on their expeditions to the Zabaikal region and 

copies of old photos. There are also fourteen sets of audio files from twelve villages and twenty-three short 

video clips.  The audio files offer a variety of genres.  Songs of various types are included and there are 

examples of prose texts such as tales and legends.  Some of these are transcribed; most are not.  Again, most are 

new recordings, but digitized versions of songs collected in the past are also included.  The short video clips 

show several types of healing rituals, baptisms, commemorations of the dead, and private and public prayers.  A 

selection of song and prose texts from published sources is included.   

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 The Old Believer CD may contain a vast quantity of information but it does have problems, both 

technical and scholarly.  For example, some materials are thoroughly documented and others are documented 

poorly.  The problem is most acute with the photographs.   We are told in which village they were taken, but 

often that is all of the information given.  Thus, we do not know who the people in the photographs are or what 

is important about them.  Are we supposed to notice their dress?  Are they the performers who are the sources of 

the songs or narratives in the audio files?  Are they performing a ritual?  I did notice the costumes and the ritual 

acts, but there may well be other things that I overlooked.   

Some of the old photographs that have been digitized for this CD do have captions, but the resolution is 

often so bad that the captions are virtually illegible.  In addition, the resolution of number of the new 

photographs, the ones taken by Kliaus and his team, is quite poor.  It seems that the members of the expedition 

learned to use their digital camera over time and the quality of some of the photos is good; however, most of the 

photos have huge pixels and thus are blurry.  The reflection off the icons often obscures the icon itself.  The 

copies of black and white photos have not been put through a filter to remove the frequent moiré effect.   

Similar problems appear elsewhere.  The lighting on a number of videos is bad and this makes it hard to 

see what is going on.  The videos are extremely short and, in addition to the many technical problems, one 

questions the editing of the clips.  Were these really the most important actions?  Should not a woman�s 

discussion of her aches and pains be cut so that we could see more of the wax ceremony she is doing?  Or is her 

complaint about her own problems relevant to an understanding of her as a folk healer?    

Probably the worst in terms of technical problems is the audio files section, in which one is supposed to 

click on the village in which the recordings were made.  A page then opens with a picture of the medium in 

which the recording originally appeared: a record, a CD, or a set of earphones, presumably meaning that the 

recording was on a tape or an audiocassette.  The user then has to run the cursor over the record or CD or 

earphones and a list of song titles should appear.  I say �should� because this does not always happen.  The 

cursor has to be dragged in a particular direction and that direction only and, sometimes, before the user has a 

chance to drag the cursor as far as the desired song title, all titles disappear and the process must begin anew.  In 

the case of one set of sound files, I never managed to get the song titles to come up at all.  Once the sound files 

are opened, they are quite good.  The source is always given.  If it is an existing recording, there is full 

bibliographic information.  If it is a new recording made by Kliaus and his team, we get the name of the 

performer or performers and a picture, the date of collection, and the name of the collector.  For a number of 

songs, there is a transcript of the song, story or other audio recording.  In short, if you can get the sound files to 

open, they are excellent and the selection is good, so that there are samples of all basic oral genres.  

 The next technical issue is one of venue.  The cute pictures of phonograph records, CD�s and earphones, 

as well as many of the other features of this disk, are done in Flash, which is a quirky program that makes this 

CD unusable in the classroom. Having discovered that there were good genre samples on this disk, I wanted to 

play them for my students.  This proved impossible because, while I could use the CD at home, the equipment in 

classrooms could not handle it and it routinely crashed.  The same proved true with the videos: I could watch 

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them at home, but not show them to my students unless I copied them over to another CD at home and played 

the videos off my own disk. 

 Somewhere between the problem of documentation and technical difficulties is the lack of directions on 

how to use the CD.  When the user puts this disk into the computer, it loads automatically.  What comes up is a 

map with some production credits and directions for exiting the CD; there are no directions for opening it.  

Because I am familiar with a variety of digital conventions, I soon understood that I was to click on the part of 

the map that showed the region where Old Believers live.  I am not so sure that someone with less familiarity 

with digital technologies would know where to begin.  Similar problems appear all the way through.  I 

discovered the library only recently and more or less by accident.  There are no directions to guide the user, who 

must then randomly click on objects to see what, if anything, happens. 

 With all of the technical difficulties this CD presents, I am still very glad I own it.  Even though I do not 

teach Old Believer folklore, the healing practices of this group are similar enough to mainstream Russian 

practices for me to use the video clips in class.  The same applies to the sound files.  As already noted, the 

various materials are not easy to use and need to be copied to make them run smoothly.  But having illustrative 

material of this sort adds so much to a course that it is worth the effort.  I am grateful for the photos, bad quality 

images included.  Even though they are too fuzzy to use in class, they are interesting as comparative material for 

my own research.   

 I should also add that, as someone who does fieldwork, I am most sympathetic to Kliaus and his team.  

In the countryside, lighting is not always good, the electricity may be switched off and batteries impossible to 

find.  Does that mean it is not worth photographing a ritual practice?  I would say one does the best one can; 

data, no matter how marginal, is infinitely preferable to no data at all.  I also work with digital technologies and, 

again, Kliaus and his team have my sympathies.  When working with digital formats, one tries to anticipate 

where users will look, what they will click on, how they will proceed through the assembled data.  My team and 

I are always looking for feedback so that we can improve our work.  I hope that this review will help Kliaus and 

his team produce an even better CD in the near future.   

   

Natalie Kononenko        

University of Virginia