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When Tolstoi made public his spiritual conversion at the beginning of the 1890s, he offered the world an unprecedented point of view on his person. In the following years, the crack that Tolstoi himself had opened gradually expanded: the audacity of the issues addressed in his new narrative and journalistic production, his involvement in charitable social activities, his public renunciation of the copyrights on his works published after 1881, his close criticism of governmental institutions a...

In the early part of the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), the emperor sought to reform Russia through the creation of new European-style institutions. The aim was to ensure that Russia’s great-power status would be retained through updating its institutions, in line with a reform impulse dating back to Peter the Great and before. Among the new institutions formed in the first few years of the nineteenth century were ministries, such as of education, based on the centralized French system, as...

Over the thirty years that separated his debut novel Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846) from his last masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1879-1880), Dostoevskii repeatedly had the chance to reflect on the role of the reader. While at the beginning of his career he tended to distrust the public (who “has an instinct, but lacks education”), in the 1860s his orientation toward the reader became a fundamental element of his creative method. This does not mean that Dostoevskii wro...

A paradox of reading is that as an inner, subjective experience it may be perceived in an intensely personal and unique way, while when seen from an external perspective it may appear overly determined (or even predetermined) by a myriad of social, political, cultural and other factors. As part of a reading public readers make up a special type of “imagined community,” Benedict Anderson’s well-known concept of the nation. According to Anderson, imagined communities owe their existence to “pri...

1. Purpose, Methods and Material of the Study The main purpose of this chapter is to describe the evolution of the reading practices of students of Russian gymnasiums and technical schools (real’nye uchilishcha) in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since there was no democratic educational system across classes before the reforms of 1915-1918, the students we consider are, first and foremost, boys of noble and petty-bourgeois descent and of eight to seventeen ye...

Let me start with a comment regarding the expression “Golden Age” as used in the text and the title of this chapter. Some epochs are remembered by dates; others, by names. As a name for an epoch, the phrase “the Golden Age” and the image harbored therein sounds almost too intuitive to call for a rigorous definition. This must be one of the reasons why literary scholars often seem hesitant to use such tags as “Golden Age” to define literary periods—and not of Russian literature alone. Another ...

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of changes took place in the way that Russia consumed literature. The readers, the type of texts that were read, and, of course, the way people read—all of these things changed. In a society still rigidly divided into estates, these changes took place reasonably slowly, but by the middle of the century, they were already clearly visible to contemporary observers. In this chapter I will first analyze the role that foreign novels played in s...

Peasants comprised the overwhelming majority of the population in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century—more than three quarters according to the census of 1897—and the extent of the spread and impact of the printed word in the country depended on their attitude to reading. In order to understand what the reading habits of the peasants were determined by, it is necessary to examine how writing in Russia originally arose and spread. It was during this initial period that many att...

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning “love story” that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The second volume of Reading Russia considers the evolution of reading during the long nineteenth century (1800-1917), particularly in relation to the emergence of new narrative and current affairs publications: novels, on the one hand, and daily newspapers, weekly magazines and thick journals, on the other. The volume examines how economic and social transformations, technological progress and the development of the publishing industry taking place in Russia gradually led to a significant expansion of the reading public. At the same time, in part due to the influence of new literature reading policies in schools, there was a greater cultural standardisation of Russian society, which was partially opposed by new forms of poetic reading.

This chapter is based on documents from the 1830s taken from an estate archive. These are letters, diaries, and notebooks of Kovrov district landowners in Vladimir province: Andrei Ivanovich Chikhachev (1798–1868); his wife Natalia Ivanovna Chikhacheva, Chernavina by birth (1799–1866); their son Aleksei (1826–after 1874); and Natalia’s brother Iakov Ivanovich Chernavin (1804–1845). The estates of the two noblemen lay at the heart of European Russia. Dorozhaevo, which belonged to Chikhachev, w...

Compared to other European countries, the production of original novels in Russia during the eighteenth century remained low: just slightly more than 100 such titles were published. In the same period, translations of European novels into Russian numbered eight times as many. The ratio between original and translated novels did not change significantly for the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1801 and 1829, only 46 Russian-language novels were published, as opposed to 48...

In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small part of Russia’s population was able to read, and for every reader there were at least twenty non-readers. In fact, readers represented only a very narrow section of the population. The social process that most factored into the growth of reading was the population’s gradual transition from a traditional, rural way of life to a modern, urban one. Historical experience shows that in Russia (as in other countries), books and reading were...

I wish to avoid the truism that the history of literature consists of the history of readers as much as the history of writers does; or, in other words, that the history of literature consists of the history of a past dialogue between speakers and listeners. If this is a paradox, then, at least in the Russian tradition, this paradox is already a century old, and we should thus proceed directly to the question of how to study the historical reader, that is, the one to whom writers once address...

The end of 1903 finds me in Moscow. I am in my second year of studying literature at university… The journals World of Art and New Path were my paths to a new world. I am becoming a ‘Decadent.’ I arrive for morning tea with a book and sit for a while, oblivious, as the tea grows cold. My aunt worriedly watches the clock. “Isn’t it time for you to go to class?”I get up, ride to the Ilinskii Gates, and from there head on foot to Mokhovaia street. Not to the University, but a little farther: to ...