This essay traces the history of the Doukhobours in Canada from the time of their arrival in 1898 until 1950. This era marks the most important processes of social adjustment and conflict of the Russian Doukhobours. The Doukhobours had been part of a rural, non-literate group whose rules for behaviour were oral and traditional in Russia. In Canada, they found a strange land with customs and language foreign to them and a land with an increasingly industrial literate culture. The essay makes an interpretive analysis of the literature on the Doukhobours and synthesizes the written articles that dealt with the Doukhobours and their problems of assimilation between 1898-1950.
