and practised at Draguignan. In 1791 he went to Paris as deputy to the Legislative Assembly, but after the fall of the Girondists, to whose party he was attached, he had to go into hiding. He was, however, discovered and imprisoned in Paris. During his imprisonment he wrote his play Caton d'Utique (1794). Eléonore de Bavières and Les Templiers were accepted by the Comédie Française. Les Templiers was produced in 1805, and, in spite of the protests of Geoffrey, had a great success. Raynouard was admitted to the Academy in 1807, and from 1817 to 1826 he was perpetual secretary. He wrote other plays, in one of which, Les États de Blois (acted 1810), he gave offence to Napoleon by his freedom of speech, but, realizing that the public taste had changed and that the romanticists were to triumph, he abandoned the stage and gave himself up to linguistic studies. He was admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions in 1815. His researches into the Provençal dialect were somewhat inexact, but his enthusiasm and perseverance promoted the study of the subject. His chief works are Choix de poésies originales des troubadours (6 vols., 1816-1821), of which the sixth volume, Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours (1821), was separately published; Lexique roman (6 vols., 1838-1844). He spent the last years of his life at Passy, where he died on the 27th of October 1836.
RAZGRAD, the capital of the department of Razgrad, Bulgaria, on the river Bieli-Lom, 40 m. S.E. of the Danubian port of Rustchuk by the Varna-Rustchuk railway. Pop. (1906) 13,783, about one-third being Moslems. The railway station is at Inebektchi, 2 m. N. Razgrad possesses a fine mosque, built by Ibrahim Pasha in 1614. Many Turkish families emigrated after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, but since then the population has again increased, and the town has a thriving agricultural and general trade. Carpet-weaving and viticulture are important local industries. On the 13th of June 1810 and the 14th of August 1877 Razgrad was the scene of battles between the Turks and Russians.
RAZIN, STEPHEN TIMOFEEVICH (d. 1671), Cossack hetman and rebel, whose parentage and date and place of birth are unknown. We first hear of him in 1661 on a diplomatic mission from the Don Cossacks to the Kalmuck Tatars, and in the same year we meet him on a pilgrimage of a thousand miles to the great Solovetsky monastery on the White Sea “for the benefit of his soul.” After that all trace of him is lost for six years, when he reappears as the leader of a robber community established at Panshinskoe, among the marshes between the rivers Tishina and Ilovlya, from whence he levied blackmail on all vessels passing up and down the Volga. His first considerable exploit was to destroy the “great water caravan” consisting of the treasury-barges and the barges of the patriarch and the wealthy merchants of Moscow. He then sailed down the Volga with a fleet of thirty-five galleys, capturing the more important forts on his way and devastating the country. At the beginning of 1668 he defeated the voivode Jakov Bezobrazov, sent against him from Astrakhan, and in the spring embarked on predatory expedition into Persia which lasted for eighteen months. Sailing into the Caspian, he ravaged the Persian coasts from Derbend to Baku, massacred the inhabitants of the great emporium of Resht, and in the spring of 1669 established himself on the isle of Suina, off which, in July, he annihilated a Persian fleet sent against him. Stenka,[1] as he was generally called, had now become a potentate with whom princes did not disdain to treat. In August 1669 he reappeared at Astrakhan, and accepted a fresh offer of pardon from the tsar there; the common people were fascinated by his adventures. The semi-Asiatic kingdom of Astrakhan, where the whole atmosphere was predatory and nine-tenths of the population were nomadic, was the natural milieu for such a rebellion as Stenka Razin's. In 1670 Razin, while ostensibly on his way to report himself at the Cossack headquarters on the Don, openly rebelled against the government, captured Cherkask, Tsaritsyn and other places, and on the 24th of June burst into Astrakhan itself. After massacring all who opposed him, and giving the rich bazaars of the city over to pillage, he converted Astrakhan into a Cossack republic, dividing the population into thousands, hundreds and tens, with their proper officers, all of whom were appointed by a vyecha or general assembly, whose first act was to proclaim Stephen Timofeevich their gosudar (sovereign). After a three weeks carnival of blood and debauchery Razin quitted Astrakhan with two hundred barges full of troops to establish the Cossack republic along the whole length of the Volga, as a preliminary step towards advancing against Moscow. Saratov and Samara were captured, but Simbirsk defied all efforts, and after two bloody encounters close at hand on the banks of the Sviyaga (October 1st and 4th), Razin was ultimately routed and fled down the Volga, leaving the bulk of his followers to be extirpated by the victors. But the rebellion was by no means over. The emissaries of Razin, armed with inflammatory proclamations, had stirred up the inhabitants of the modern governments of Nizhniy-Novgorod, Tambov and Penza, and penetrated even so far as Moscow and Great Novgorod. It was not difficult to revolt the oppressed population by the promise of deliverance from their yoke. Razin proclaimed that his object was to root out the boyars and all officials, to level all ranks and dignities, and establish Cossackdom, with its corollary of absolute equality, throughout Muscovy. Even at the beginning of 1671 the issue of the struggle was doubtful. Eight battles had been fought before the insurrection showed signs of weakening, and it continued for six months after Razin had received his quietus. At Simbirsk his prestige had been shattered. Even his own settlements at Saratov and Samara refused to open their gates to him, and the Don Cossacks, hearing that the patriarch of Moscow had anathematized Stenka, also declared against him. In 1671 he was captured at Kagalnik, his last fortress, and carried to Moscow, where, on the 6th of June, after bravely enduring unspeakable torments, he was quartered alive.
See N. I. Kostomarov, The Rebellion of Stenka Razin (Rus.) (2nd ed., Petersburg, 1859); S. M. Solovev, History of Russia (Rus), vol. ii. (Petersburg, 1895, &c.); R. N. Bain, The First Romanovs (London, 1905). (R. N. B.)
RAZOR (O.F. rasor, mod. rasoir, from raser, to scrape, rase, Late Lat. rasare, frequentative of radere, to scrape), a sharp-edged cutting instrument, used for shaving the hair and beard. The typical razor consists of a blade, usually curving slightly backward, folding into a handle, to which it is fastened by a tang and rivet. The back of the blade is thick and the sides are hollowed or slope to the fine edge (see Cutlery). In modern times various forms of safety-razor have been invented, in which the blade fits into a fixed handle with a toothed or comb-like shield which protects the face from cutting.
RAZORBILL, or Razor-billed Auk, known also on many parts of the British coasts as the Marrot, Murre, Scout, Tinker or Willock—names which it, however, shares with the Guillemot (q.v.) and to some extent with the Puffin (q.v.)—a common sea-bird of the North Atlantic,[2] resorting in vast numbers to certain rocky cliffs for the purpose of breeding, and returning to deeper waters for the rest of the year. It is the Alca torda of Linnaeus[3] and most modern authors, congeneric with the Gare-fowl (q.v.), if not with the true Guillemots, between which two forms it is intermediate—differing from the former in its small size and retaining its power of flight, which that extinct species had lost, and from the latter in its peculiarly-shaped bill, which is vertically enlarged, compressed, and deeply furrowed, as well as in its elongated, wedge-shaped tail. A fine white line, running
- ↑ Steevy.
- ↑ Schlegel (Mus. des Pays-Bas, Urinatores, p. 14) records an example from Japan; but this must be in error.
- ↑ The word Alca is simply the Latinized form of this bird's common Teutonic name, Alk, of which Auk is the English modification. It must be therefore be held to be the type of the Linnaean genus Alca, though some systematists on indefensible grounds have removed it thence, making it the sole member of a genus named by Leach, after Aldrovandus (Ornithologia, bk. xix. chap. xlix.), Utamania—an extraordinary word, that seems to have originated in some mistake from the no less extraordinary Vuttamaria, given by Belon (Observations, i. c. xi.) as the Cretan name of some diving bird, which could not have been the present species.
