Publishing in Tsarist Russia: A History of Print Media from Enlightenment to Revolution 9781350109339, 9781350109360, 9781350109346

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: The entangled history of publishing in Russian
Notes
Part One
1 The Russian language as a vehicle for the enlightenment: Catherine II’s translation projects and the society striving for the translation of foreign books
Establishment of the Society and the linguistic background
Marmontel on the Volga: The ‘Russification’ of the Enlightenment discourse
A language ‘proper to all’ in the empire
Translators seeking the Russian language of the new era
Conclusion
Notes
2 The making of the Russian classic
Theoretical premises
The term ‘classic’ in Russian culture
The prehistory of the Russian classic
The first stage of the formation of the Russian classic
The literary authorities of magazine reviewers
The authorities of compilers of educational readers
Normative consolidation of the classic corps
Ways to maintain the prestige of the classic
Conclusion
Notes
3 ‘The period of stagnation’ fostered by publishing: The popularization, nationalization and internationalization of Russian literature in the 1880s
Changes in the production and consumption of literary works
Attempts to spread the reading of literary works among the masses
The canonizations of Russian literary classics and their authors in the secondary school curriculum, literary scholarship and public literary events
Worldwide recognition of Russian literature as a significant achievement of human culture
Conclusion
Notes
Part Two
4 Transnational architects of the imagined community: Publishers and the Russian press in the late nineteenth century
New media and readership in late nineteenth-century Russia
European publishers and nationalistic publications
The Orthodox journalist and the European medium
The Russian publisher and commercial media
Conclusion
Notes
5 The evolution of a Buddhist culture through Russian media: Kalmyks, orientalists and pilgrimages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Introduction
The complementary relationship between the Oirat manuscripts and Russian Orientology
The Kalmyks’ use of Russian-language media
The cultural backstream toward the Russian heart
Conclusion: A cooperative framework for Kalmyk Buddhists in the Russian Empire
Notes
6 A collateral cultural revolution: Russia’s state-driven papermaking and publishing efforts and their effects on Volga–Ural Muslim book culture, 1780s–1905
Introduction
Volga–Ural Muslim literary culture, 1552–1800
The first Russian Muslim print revolution, 1787–1860
The impact of Russian papermaking, 1770s–1860s
From printing and paper to vernacularization, 1860s–1905
The outcome of the revolutions
Conclusion
Notes
7 Ethnic minorities speak up: Non-Russian clergy and a Russian Orthodox journal in the middle Volga region in the late imperial period
Introduction
The emergence of non-Russian intellectuals from missionary schools
Kazan Diocese publications in the late imperial era
Non-Russian clergy as the object of a Russian Orthodox journal
Non-Russian clergy as the subject of a Russian Orthodox journal
Conclusion
Notes
Part Three
8 ‘News from the War’: Print culture and the nation in First World War Russia
The wartime rise in print media
Reaching rural Russia
Reception of the news
Censorship and other constraints
Revolutionizing news
Conclusions
Notes
9 Jewish nationalism in the Russian language: The imagined provinciality among Siberian and far eastern Zionists at the time of the imperial collapse
Russian Jewish periodicals in the late imperial period
Zionism in Siberia10
Zionism in Harbin
Conclusion
Notes
10 Conclusion: A history of a soft infrastructure
Notes
Further reading
Index

Citation preview

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

i

Library of Modern Russia Advisory Board: Jeffrey Brooks, Professor at Johns Hopkins University, USA Michael David-Fox, Professor at Georgetown University, USA Lucien Frary, Associate Professor at Rider University, USA James Harris, Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK Robert Hornsby, Lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK Ekaterina Pravilova, Professor of History at Princeton University, USA Geoffrey Swain, Emeritus Professor of Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic, Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester, UK Vladislav Zubok, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, UK Building on Bloomsbury Academic’s established record of publishing Russian studies titles, the Library of Modern Russia will showcase the work of emerging and established writers who are setting new agendas in the field. At a time when potentially dangerous misconceptions and misunderstandings about Russia abound, titles in the series will shed fresh light and nuance on Russian history. Volumes will take the idea of ‘Russia’ in its broadest cultural sense and cover the entirety of the multi-ethnic lands that made up imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Ranging in chronological scope from the Romanovs to today, the books will: ● ●

● ● ● ● ●

●

●

ii

Re-consider Russia’s history from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. Explore Russia in its various international contexts, rather than as exceptional or in isolation. Examine the complex, divisive and ever-shifting notions of ‘Russia’. Contribute to a deeper understanding of Russia’s rich social and cultural history. Critically reassess the Soviet period and its legacy today. Interrogate the traditional periodizations of the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Unearth continuities, or otherwise, among the tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Reappraise Russia’s complex relationship with Eastern Europe, both historically and today. Analyse the politics of history and memory in post-Soviet Russia.

● ●

Promote new archival revelations and innovative research methodologies. Foster a community of scholars and readers devoted to a sharper understanding of the Russian experience, past and present.

Books in the series will join our list in being marketed globally, including at conferences – such as the BASEES and ASEEES conventions. Each will be subjected to a rigorous peer-review process and will be published in hardback and, simultaneously, as an e-book. We also anticipate a second release in paperback for the general reader and student markets. For more information, or to submit a proposal for inclusion in the series, please contact: Rhodri Mogford, Publisher, History (Rhodri.Mogford@ bloomsbury.com).

New and forthcoming Fascism in Manchuria: The Soviet–China Encounter in the 1930s, Susanne Hohler The Idea of Russia: The Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev, Vladislav Zubok The Tsar’s Armenians: A Minority in Late Imperial Russia, Onur Onol Myth Making in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia: Remembering World War II in Brezhnev’s Hero City, Vicky Davis Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space, Cynthia Ruder Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease and the Environment under Romanovs and Soviets, John Davis Soviet Americana: A Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists, Sergei Zhuk Stalin’s Economic Advisors: The Varga Institute and the Making of Soviet Foreign Policy, Ken Roh Ideology and the Arts in the Soviet Union: The Establishment of Censorship and Control, Steven Richmond Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin, Alun Thomas The Russian State and the People: Power, Corruption and the Individual in Putin’s Russia, Geir Hønneland et al. (eds) The Communist Party in the Russian Civil War: A Political History, Gayle Lonergan Criminal Subculture in the Gulag: Prisoner Society in the Stalinist Labour Camps, Mark Vincent iii

Power and Politics in Modern Chechnya: Ramzan Kadyrov and the New Digital Authoritarianism, Karena Avedissian Russian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land: Piety and Travel from the Middle Ages to the Revolution, Nikolaos Chrissidis The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lara Douds, James Harris and Peter Whitehead (eds) Writing History in Late Imperial Russia, Frances Nethercott Translating England into Russian, Elena Goodwin Gender and Survival in Soviet Russia, Ludmila Miklashevskaya (Elaine MacKinnon transl. and ed.) Publishing in Tsarist Russia, Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi (eds)

iv

Publishing in Tsarist Russia A History of Print Media from Enlightenment to Revolution Edited by Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi

v

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi, 2020 Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Series design by Tjaša Krivec Cover Image: A Sunday Reading in a Village School, 1895. Nikolai Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky (1868–1945) (© World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0933-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0934-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-0935-3 Series: Library of Modern Russia Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

vi

Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of contributors

Introduction: The entangled history of publishing in Russian Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi

ix xi xiii

1

Part One

1

The Russian language as a vehicle for the enlightenment: Catherine II’s translation projects and the society striving for the translation of foreign books Yusuke Toriyama

15

2

The making of the Russian classic Abram I. Reitblat

37

3

‘The period of stagnation’ fostered by publishing: The popularization, nationalization and internationalization of Russian literature in the 1880s Hajime Kaizawa

69

Part Two

4

5

6

7

Transnational architects of the imagined community: Publishers and the Russian press in the late nineteenth century Yukiko Tatsumi

95

The evolution of a Buddhist culture through Russian media: Kalmyks, orientalists and pilgrimages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Takehiko Inoue

123

A collateral cultural revolution: Russia’s state-driven papermaking and publishing efforts and their effects on Volga–Ural Muslim book vulture, 1780s–1905 Danielle Ross

141

Ethnic minorities speak up: Non-Russian clergy and a Russian Orthodox journal in the middle Volga region in the late imperial period Akira Sakurama

171

vii

viii

Contents

Part Three

8 9

‘News from the War’: Print culture and the nation in First World War Russia Melissa K. Stockdale

195

Jewish nationalism in the Russian language: The imagined provinciality among Siberian and far eastern Zionists at the time of the imperial collapse Taro Tsurumi

225

10 Conclusion: A history of a soft infrastructure Taro Tsurumi

247

Further reading Index

253 257

Illustrations 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

The cover of the first number of Niva (1870). The cover of Russkii Palomnik (1888). ‘Fyodorov Mother of God’ (Russkii Palomnik, no. 33, 1886). ‘Departure of tsarevna Anna from Constantinople to Korsun’ (Russkii Palomnik, no. 29, 1888). 4.5 ‘Celebratory consecration organized in Kiev on 15 July 1888’ (Russkii Palomnik, no. 35, 1888). 4.6 The growth and fall in subscriptions to Soikin’s magazines (1900–9). 4.7 ‘Types of Criminals’ (Priroda i liudi, no. 16, 17 February 1905). 4.8 ‘Soap Bubble on a Flower’ (Priroda i liudi, no. 13, 13 January 1902). 4.9 ‘Types of Great Russians’ (Niva, no. 7, 16 February 1876). 4.10 ‘Luminous Fishes in the Bottom of the Ocean’ (Niva, no. 27, 7 July 1890). 4.11 ‘Types of Viennese People’ (Illustrated London News, 2 August 1873). 4.12 ‘The Sea-Bear at Cremorne Garden’ (Illustrated London News, 10 June 1865). 6.1 IIaLI manuscripts by date of production (1500–1950). 6.2 IIaLI manuscripts by language (1600–1950). 8.1 ‘News from the war’, by N. Bogdanov-Bel’skii (Niva, no. 42, 18 October 1914). 8.2 ‘News from the War. The Newspaper in the Village’, by M. I Ignat’ev (Niva no. 1, 2 January 1916). 8.3 ‘Listening to News from the War’, by E. M. Cheptsov (Niva, No. 30, 25 July 1915).

98 106 108 109 109 111 113 113 114 115 116 117 152 156 196 198 206

ix

x

Acknowledgements Our project for this book began in 2014 when the editors started to think of “print capitalism” in the Russian Empire, and have a few meetings with relevant scholars in Japan including Norihiro Naganawa. As part of this project, we organized a panel at the ICCEES (International Council for Central and East European Studies) convention held at Makuhari (near Tokyo) in 2015, where Melissa, with whose paper at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in 2014 Taro was impressed, joined us. Thomas Stottor, then editor of I. B. Tauris at London found our panel and contacted us. At first, we were skeptical about his proposal in two respects: we have heard about predatory publishing that targets academic conferences and were afraid that our project was still at a premature stage. But it turned out that he was a real editor at a famed publisher (and now we much appreciate his encouragement), and we began to believe that this would be a good opportunity to accelerate our project. We held several workshops and conferences with our Japanese colleagues, where Danielle, whom Norihiro introduced to us as a promising candidate to cover non-Russian regions, also joined us. With the participation of Abram Iliich, who has long stimulated and encouraged Yukiko’s work, our book became finally crystallized. In this transnational process, we owe to a lot of people involved in these meetings. Aside from people mentioned above, the editors would like to express their thanks to Kenta Hayashi, Akiko Kurata, Nobuko Maeda, Marsha Siefert, Willard Sunderland, Kazuhiko Takahashi, and the anonymous reviewer of the early draft, for their helpful comments and encouragement. The editors are also grateful to people at Bloomsbury: Rhodri Magford, who succeeded Tom and supported our endeavor, and Ronnie Hanna, Merv Honeywood, and Laura Reeves, who made this book much more sophisticated than it originally was. We would like to thank Ayako Kaji for creating the index. We accept full responsibility for any errors or weakness that remain. Finally, we would like to mention several grants and institutions that have made this transnational publishing endeavor possible: Slavic and Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University Grant for general research on Slavic and Eurasian regions; KAKENHI Grants, Japan Society for the Promotion of xi

xii

Acknowledgements

Science (project numbers: JP16H05930, JP25770262, JP26885012, JP16K20880); Institute of Global Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Research and Development Bureau at Saitama University, and Department of Area Studies at The University of Tokyo.

Contributors Takehiko Inoue is Specially-Appointed Lecturer at Faculty of Education, Osaka Kyoiku University. His research focuses on Kalmyk History, Russian Buddhist Culture. He is the co-editor, together with Yumiko Ishihama, Makoto Tachibana, and Ryosuke Kobayashi, of The Resurgence of “Buddhist Government”: TibetanMongolian Relations in the Modern World (Osaka: Union Press, 2019). He has also published Yumiko Ishihama and Takehiko Inoue, ‘Roshia Kagaku Akademii Kobunshokan Shozo Chibettobun San Shokan no Rekishiteki Igi’, in Inner Asian Studies (The Nairiku Ajiashi Kenkyu) 33, 2018, pp. 99–117 [Historical Significance of the Three Tibetan Letters Attributed to A. Dorzhiev in SPbF ARAN; in Japanese]; Takehiko Inoue, ‘Dambo Uriyanofu “Budda no Yogen” to Roshia Bukkyo Kotei Zo’, in Slavic Studies 63 (Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaid University), 2016, pp. 45–77 [Dambo Ul’ianov’s Prophecies of Buddha and His Interpretation of Russian Monarchs as Buddhist Emperors; in Japanese]. Hajime Kaizawa is Professor at Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University. His research and publications have been in the area of history of Russian literature, culture and thought. His publications include ‘Rasprostranenie chteniia sredi naroda i formirovanie natsional’ noi identichnosti v Rossii (1870– 1917)’ in Tetsuo Mochizuki (ed.), Beyond the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2008), pp.  189–213 [Dissemination of Reading among Ordinary People and Formation of National Identity in Russia; in Russian]; ‘The Formation of the Concept of “National Literature” in Russia and the Works of Aleksandr Pypin’ in Hayashi, Tadayuki (ed.), The Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2003), pp. 169–84. Abram I. Reitblat is a member of the editorial board of Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New Literary Observer). His research focuses on historical sociology of Russian literature and publishing. He is the author of Ot Bovy k Bal’montu i drugie rabot po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009) [From Bova to Balmont and Other Works on the xiii

xiv

Contributors

Historical Sociology of Russian Literature; in Russian]; Faddei Venediktovich Bulgarin: Ideolog, zhurnalist, konsul’tant sekretnoi politsii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016) [Thaddeus Venediktovich Bulgarin: Ideologue, Journalist, Consultant to the Secret Police; in Russian]; ‘The Reading Audience of the Second Half of the 19th Century; The Book and the Peasant in the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Century: from Illiteracy – to the Religious Book – to the Secular Book’ in Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena (eds.), Reading Russia. A History of Reading in Modern Russia (Milano: Disegni, forthcoming in 2020). Danielle Ross is Assistant Professor at Department of History, Utah State University. She specializes in history of Muslim peoples of Russia’s Volga-Ural region and Kazakhstan. Her publications include ‘Domesticating 1916: The Evolution of Amangeldi Imanov and the Creation of a Foundation Myth for Kazakh SSR, 1916–1939’ in Aminat Chokobaeva, Cloé Drieu, Alexander Morrison (eds.), The Central Asian Revolt of 1916 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp.  325–53; Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, forthcoming in February 2020). Akira Sakurama is an independent researcher who has published on ethnology of peoples in Middle Volga region. His most recent works are Gendai Roshia ni okeru Minzoku no Saisei: Posuto-Soren Syakai to shite no Tatarusutan Kyōwakoku ni okeru “Kuryashen” no Esunisitī to Syūkyō-Minzoku Katsudō (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2018)[Ethnic Revival in Contemporary Russia: Ethnicity and ReligiousCultural Activity of Kriashens in the Republic of Tatarstan as a Post-Soviet Society; in Japanese]; ‘Tōhō Senkyō Katsudō no Genzai: En Voruga Chiiki ni okeru Seikyōkai no Katsudō to Minzoku Bunka’ Roshia-shi Kenkyu 9 (2017), pp. 66–93 [Missionary Activity toward East: Activities of Orthodox Church and Ethnic Culture in Middle Volga Region, in Japanese]. Melissa K. Stockdale is Brian and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor and Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in late imperial and revolutionary Russia, with research interests in nationalism, gender, and war and society. She is the author of Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), co-edited Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–1922. 2 vols. (Bloomington: Slavica, 2014) with Murray Frame, Steven Marks and Boris

Contributors

xv

Kolonitskii, and is the editor of Readings on the Russian Revolution: Debates, Aspirations, Outcomes (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming in 2020). Yukiko Tatsumi is Associate Professor at Institute of Global Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Her research focuses on history of Russian publishing and reading. She is the author of Tsari to Taishu: Kindai Roshia no Dokusho no Shakaishi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2019) [Tsar and the Masses: A History of Reading in Imperial Russia; in Japanese]; ‘Russian Critics and Obshchestvennost’, 1840–1890: The Case of Vladimir Stasov’ in Yasuhiro Matsui (ed.), Obshchestvennost’ and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia: Interface between State and Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Yusuke Toriyama is Associate Professor at Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. His research and publications have been in the area of 18th and early 19th century Russian literature. His publications include ‘Reka kak “tsaritsa, mat’ ”: stikhotvorenie N. M. Karamzina “Volga” ’ in Kochetkova, N. D., Veselova, A. Iu., Baudin, R. (eds.), Karamzin-Pisatel’: Nikolaï Karamzin écrivain: Kollektivanaia monografiia (St Petersburg: Pushkinskii Dom, 2018), pp.  131–45 [The River as “Queen, Mother”: Karamzin’s poem “The Volga”, in Russian]; ‘ “Angliiskii sad” kak metaphora v sochineniiakh N. M. Karamzina’, Russian Literature 75(1–4), 2014, pp. 477–90 [“English Garden” as a metaphor in the works of N. M. Karamzin, in Russian]; ‘Images of the Volga River in Russian Poetry from the Reign of Catherine II to the End of the Napoleonic Wars’, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter 1, 2013. Taro Tsurumi is Associate Professor at Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He specializes in Russian Jewish history and historical sociology. His works include ‘Jewish Liberal, Russian Conservative: Daniel Pasmanik between Zionism and the Anti-Bolshevik White Movement,’ Jewish Social Studies 21(1), 2015; ‘ “Neither Angels, Nor Demons, But Humans”: AntiEssentialism and Its Ideological Moments among the Russian Zionist Intelligentsia’, Nationalities Papers 38(4), 2010; Eds with Kenneth Moss and Benjamin Nathans, From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

xvi

Introduction: The entangled history of publishing in Russian Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi

Publishing in Russian was launched at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a state project. Peter I’s efforts to Westernize the Russian Empire required the introduction of European knowledge accumulated since the Renaissance and developed through the scientific revolution and early modern state building. To translate and disseminate this knowledge in Russia, the modern press and a secular language were essential. During his stay in Amsterdam in 1697–8, the Tsar attempted to establish Russian presses, and after returning to Russia, he founded new publishing houses in Moscow and St Petersburg, where such intellectuals as Fedor Polikarpov and Vasily Kipriyanov were involved. At the same time, Peter introduced a new civil orthography in 1708, convinced that Church Slavonic, which had been used in printed books in Russia until then, was not suitable for expressing modern ideas. Using the newly created civil script, the Tsar himself vigorously promoted several publications, including Vedomosti (News), the first printed newspaper in Russia, expecting the development of new words, expressions, concepts – the birth of a new linguistic system for Westernization.1 Thus Peter’s project created the official language of the empire, and the publications written in this lingua franca in the making, as well as those in French and German, let the thoughts of the Enlightenment reach Russia throughout the eighteenth century. In the age of nationalism, language in Europe was generally the focus of each nationality. Especially in Central and Eastern Europe, languages were often deeply associated with ethnic nations. Did the Russian press then also become the media for ‘the Great Russians’? Benedict Anderson suggested such when he stated that in the early nineteenth century, facing popular national movements with the potential to threaten dynastic rule, the Romanov autocracy and other European monarchies adopted a single vernacular language as the state language in order to ‘stretch the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’. Actually, as he emphasized, Russifying measures were taken against nonRussian communities. In 1887, in the region of the Baltic Germans, Russian was 1

2

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

made compulsory for the first time as the language of instruction in all state schools and later in private schools as well.2 Moreover, throughout the nineteenth century, censorship suppressed publications in non-Russian languages such as Lithuanian, Polish, Tatar and Yiddish. In addition, the state authority gradually destroyed the tradition of printing in Kiev and other cities in south-west Russia by the eighteenth century. Then, the Valuev Circular in 1863 and the Edict of Ems in 1876, which prohibited the use of the Ukrainian language in a majority of publications, notoriously aimed to prevent the development of the local nationalist movement.3 It may be reasonable to assume that in Russia as well, Russian publishing would be patronized by the state authority and become associated with Russian nationalism. Previous studies on the history of publishing in Russian in the imperial period apparently follow the framework established by Anderson, which assumes a correlation between the development of Russian print media and that of the consciousness of the Russian nation or the imperial subjects, when they investigated how the Russian press developed in Russian society and how it enabled readers to share the notion of the Russian national culture. Jeffrey Brooks’s When Russia Learned to Read is a landmark in the study of Russian publications for its focus on general readers of these publications in imperial Russia, rather than on the intelligentsia’s literary activities.4 The comprehensive series on the history of Russian books, edited by the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, described in detail the publishers, writers and readerships of the late imperial period with rich quantitative data.5 One of the most recent works concerning Russian publications in the imperial period, Reading in Russia: Practices of Reading and Literary Communication 1760–1930, edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena, persuasively demonstrates how readers responded to the contents in various ways and contributed to the study of Russian literature in terms of its reception.6 These works usually suppose writers, publishers and readers to be ethnic Russians and confine the history of Russian publishing to that part of the supposed Russian nation.7 This association of language community with national community is also evident in works on publications in non-Russian languages in the empire, which revealed how ethnic presses gradually appeared from the mid-nineteenth century and how they grew rapidly after the 1905 Revolution. Prominent works on this topic include those of Abrar Karimullin, which described the history of Tatar publishing from the birth of publishing activity in Kazan, and the struggle to establish periodicals in Tatar under the censorship of the imperial authority, to the prosperity of Tatar national media at the beginning of the twentieth

Introduction

3

century.8 By comparatively examining the Yiddish press in the Russian Empire and the Ladino press in the Ottoman Empire – that is, media in the Jewish ethnic language – Sarah Stein demonstrated that although the Jewish people were exposed to modernization, they struggled to continue their traditions at the turn of the twentieth century.9 Likewise, various works featured newspapers and magazines that were issued in ethnic languages among non-Russian communities – Polish, German, Finnish, Latvian, Estonian and so on – in St Petersburg, the imperial capital city, and pointed out that they also played a role as the incubator of each ethnic community.10 These studies on non-Russian publications more or less suggest that in the Russian Empire, ethnic public spheres were separately constructed through each ethnic-language media, reflecting each community’s desire to highlight its ethnonational identity, while the Russian government forced them to learn the Russian language and to read Russian publications. However, especially since the 1990s, growing Russian imperiology began to provide alternatives to Anderson’s view of Russification, which mostly relies on R. W. Seton-Watson’s work. In reality, Russification was hardly intended for ethnically converting non-Russians into Russians, as inclusive (or civic) nationalist projects would do, or sharpening the distinction between Russians and non-Russians, as exclusive (or ethnic) nationalist projects would do. It was mostly intended to make the state apparatus work more efficiently.11 Despite the accumulation of historiography with such a new perspective, we have yet to learn how Russian publishing, initially paralleled by the project for the diffusion of the imperial lingua franca, developed throughout the empire until its collapse. It was the technological development in printing and transportation during the second half of the nineteenth century that contributed to widening the outreach of publications in the Russian language. Printing machines from Europe, such as rotary printing presses, enabled publishers to issue low-cost periodicals with plenty of pictures, which attracted the new readers who appeared after the emancipation of the serfs. A type of book trade developed as well; publishers in the capital and provincial cities called for subscribers from autumn to winter, and bookshops mediated between them by sending subscription fees paid by local inhabitants for publishers.12 The publications spread around the empire with the help of developments in the railways and postal services, even though it required a considerable amount of time. During the 1860s–70s, it took ten to fifteen days to deliver publications from the capital cities to Kazan,13 twenty to twenty-five days from Moscow to Tomsk, and several months to deliver to Irkutsk.14 Along with the railways, the telegram network developed as well, and newly founded Russian news agencies were able to connect with European

4

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

ones.15 As a result, a new mediasphere appeared in society, where publishers, book shoppers and readers from various social and ethnic backgrounds used the Russian language as a kind of lingua franca in pursuit of their own interests. Although the state initiated the development of Russian publishing, it was unable to fully control how people were involved in it. Considering this situation, we should not overlook the actual range of Russian publishing, which may have extended beyond the boundaries of the Russian nation in terms of both content and practices. In other words, when we focus on the actual function of Russian publishing in imperial society from the age of Enlightenment to the age of nationalism, rather than on the purpose of the state authority, the history of Russian publishing is not confined to the history of Russification and the development of Russian nationalism: it also includes the history of the nationalism of non-Russians. By no means does the present volume suggest that the Russian language was a language for the ‘fraternity of peoples’, as the Soviet authorities put it. Ethnic Russians were undoubtedly more comfortable and privileged in the use of Russian than most non-Russians. The language used in the press was not necessarily shared by any strata of Russian society; in fact, Russian peasants were mostly illiterate throughout the imperial period. Furthermore, as Ross’s chapter on Tatar publishing reveals, the Russian press did not expand throughout the empire. This book does not present a story of the national language in which a standardized Russian became prevalent throughout the Russian Empire, but examines the kind of people that were involved in the development of Russian publishing networks. They included, for example, Tsars, Russian intellectuals, Polish publishing entrepreneurs, non-Russian ethnic elites and non-Russian nationalists, whose primary language was Russian. From the perspective of ethnic Russian history, such a development was a local phenomenon while also being an international one, with the involvement of numerous non-Russians (both non-Russian imperial subjects and those outside Russia). In other words, Russian publishing had its own history, sharing some, but not all, events with the empire’s history, and with significant foreign involvement. With its own history, it did not merely remain a tool of imperial rule: sometimes, it became a catalyst for new historical developments in the empire and among its subjects. From the Enlightenment to the Revolution, the Russian language was of great significance in the cultural and intellectual history of imperial Russia and formed the canon of what was later called national literature. After the introduction of the press in Russia from Western Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, linguists tried to explore how the Slavic languages historically developed,

Introduction

5

and how the Russian language evolved from them. The fundamental works of those days, such as Mikhail Lomonosov’s The Russian Grammar and the Dictionary of the Russian Academy, introduced a new vocabulary and concepts and created a linguistic system for the Russian language. During the nineteenth century, there was a continuous endeavour to investigate the characteristics and functions of the language: the essential references, including Vladimir Dahl’s The Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, and men of letters, like Nikolai Karamzin and Alexander Pushkin, attempted to elaborate their own words and expressions and contributed to the birth of a set of literary works which constituted the genre presently called ‘Russian literature’. Originally, such literature was created locally in rather small circles of writers, critics and publishers, and then shared more widely, coinciding with the development of the Russian school system in the second half of the nineteenth century. As the following chapters demonstrate, the seemingly domestic development of the Russian press was actually a result of interactions with several foreign factors. The founder of the press in Russia, Peter I, was enthusiastic about Western civilization, and the Russian Academy of Science, which was in charge of the press in the reign of the next Tsars, was the institution in which scholars of German origin played a significant role, especially during its first stage. The intellectuals, and even the Empress Catherine II, engaged in translating French and German works into Russian, thus enriching the contents of the Russian press. Throughout this period, Western European book traders and publishers had a great impact on the style of publications and the business practice of Russian merchants. Moreover, this also coincided with the growing popularity of Russian literature abroad, thus establishing of a particular type of Russian literature as the most authentic form. By focusing on people involved in Russian publishing from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century – publishers, writers, scholars, translators and public figures – without overly distinguishing between Russians and nonRussians, the following chapters depict the complex history of publishing in Russian. These chapters show several phases of Russian publishing in which the publications in the newly developed language gained authority as classics and defined ‘Russian’ culture; people of various backgrounds led Russian publishing, which constituted an autonomous field with its own dynamics; and Russian publishing, in the end, moved beyond the control of the empire, stimulating various emotions of Russian subjects or even departing from the imperial context. The book is divided chronologically into three parts. Part 1 deals with the period between the late eighteenth and the second half of the nineteenth century,

6

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

in which the culture of the Russian language evolved through publication. The most typical and most internationally acclaimed part of Russian culture is Russian literature. But a few geniuses alone could not have given Russian literature such prestige. First of all, the Russian language had to be rich enough to convey literal representations. Featuring the activity of the Society Striving for the Translation of Foreign Books, which was founded by Catherine II in 1768, Chapter  1 by Yusuke Toriyama illustrates the process in which the Russian language was cultivated so that it could be the Empire’s lingua franca, suitable for the Enlightenment. The society translated into Russian a number of Frenchlanguage books and encyclopedia articles covering numerous fields, including literature, history, geography and nature. By doing so, the society attempted not only to convey European ideas to Russians but also to enrich the linguistic scope of the Russian language. In Chapter 2, Abram I. Reitblat interrogates the origin of what are presently acclaimed as Russian literary classics. Reitblat argues that for any given writer to achieve fame, several kinds of actors, including critics, journalists and fellow writers, had to promote their work. Interest grew in setting some sort of basis for the evaluation of literary works. Only by the 1860s, when the concept of the ‘classic’ established itself in Russia, were the candidates for domestic literary authorities narrowed down and the body of what we currently understand as Russian classics formed. This process was connected to the reform of the school system. For example, teachers at gymnasiums (academically oriented secondary schools) were involved in the development of literature as a subject taught in their school. Through the publication of classic works and their distribution to secondary and primary schools, a canon of classics was maintained. In Chapter 3, Hajime Kaizawa re-evaluates the 1880s in the history of Russian literature. Traditionally, this decade has been considered the ‘Period of Stagnation’, in which hopelessness and paralysis gripped society following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and in which prominent writers such as Dostoevsky and Turgenev passed away. As the previous chapter demonstrates, the list of Russian classics was almost completed. However, in terms of the publishing and reading of Russian literature, this period witnessed dramatic development. For example, literary works were distributed among the masses, and in secondary education, academic scholarship and at public literary events, certain writers were canonized. The 1880s also marked the beginning of a worldwide boom for Russian literature. Part 2 focuses on the practices of publishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for which the development of the publishing system paved

Introduction

7

the way. In Chapter  4, Yukiko Tatsumi examines the involvement of foreign agents and those from traditional sectors of Russian society in the development of Russian publishing. Led by entrepreneurs with German and Polish backgrounds, the Russian publishing business grew rapidly in the 1870s, when general publishing companies and the mass-circulation press appeared. The Russian press shared human resources, commercial trade policy and the topics of publications such as national geography, ethnography and literature with the European press. This somewhat transnational culture of publishing contributed to the expansion of publications by Russian nationalists, who adopted the same publishing format. Chapter  5 by Takehiko Inoue demonstrates how Russian publications provided media for the Kalmyks’ activity as Buddhists. Part of the Oirat Mongols and followers of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Kalmyks lived in the Lower Volga steppe. Although the October Revolution has long drawn scholars’ attention as a catalyst for the emergence of Kalmyk nationalism, Inoue demonstrates that after the Kalmyks were incorporated into the Russian Empire and their ethnic language was weakened, Kalmyk culture was preserved in Russian translations, often by ethnic Russian Mongolists and Orientologists. As Kalmyk intellectuals acquired Russian and had access to the Russian world, through their connection with Russian society and the government, they resumed the relationship with Tibet, which had almost been lost as a result of the conflict with the Dzhungar khanate. Thus, although it fit into the imperial framework, the so-called Russification of the Kalmyks actually provided several integral conditions for the emergence of Kalmyk nationalism at the time of the Russian Revolution. Focusing on the Muslim Tatars’ publishing in the Volga–Ural region, Chapter  6 by Danielle Ross deals mainly with publishing in non-Russian languages, simply because publishing in Russian among Muslim Tatars was, unlike the case of the protagonists in the previous chapters, not influential. Although the imperial government did not abandon its policy of Russification of these people, the Tartars, who had a comparative advantage in Asian trade and were mostly Muslim with a desire to acquire knowledge transmitted in Arabic and Persian, were hardly motivated to engage in Russian publishing. However, Ross does not claim that Russian customs in publishing were never influential. On the contrary, the system developed in Russian publishing, including papermaking, significantly affected publishing in the Arabic, Turkic and Persian languages. And yet, publishing in the Volga–Ural region retained its unique culture: manuscripts continued to play an important role even after the expansion

8

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

of mass printing – as inexpensive paper became available, manuscript production increased in the nineteenth century. For example, copying out textbooks became a standard part of madrasa (Islamic school) students’ education. Of course, as publishing became easier, publishers increased book publishing. But this did not make the ‘national’ language dominant. Instead – albeit with a shift in balance among Arabic, Turkic and Persian – linguistic diversity was maintained with the multi-channel intellectual environment. It would be wrong, however, to assume that non-Russians in the Volga–Ural region never showed any interest in Russian publishing. Chapter  7 by Akira Sakurama examines the publishing activity of those who were commonly called ‘baptized Tatars’ in the Middle Volga region in the closing days of the Russian Empire. Their history has been far less researched in the context of Tatar history and Tatar–Russian relations, where Muslim and Islamic issues – and more relevant to this book, media in their ethnic languages – are the focus. Baptized Tatars, or a ‘people in between’, had a motivation to represent themselves in Russian media, since like Orthodox Christians, they shared (at least from their perspective) common values with other Orthodox Russians, while Islam dominated Tatar society, as it does today. Non-Russian clergy got involved with an Orthodox journal initiated by Russian Orthodox clergy. As in the case of the Kalmyks, non-Russians, who were initially the object of Russian missionary activity, began to speak up in the journal in defence of their community. Some of them began calling themselves ‘Kreshen’ and distinguishing themselves from Muslim Tatars. For these ‘Kreshen’, the Russian media paradoxically functioned as an ethnic media in the Tatar context. Part 3 focuses on the period of the collapse of the Russian Empire, in which Russian publishing matured enough to reach beyond the empire. In Chapter 8, Melissa Stockdale examines Russian publishing during the First World War, when the media of the various combatant countries played a crucial role in mobilizing their citizens behind their respective war efforts. Analysing several periodicals, which often included war-related photos and drawings, Stockdale depicts the interaction between the public, hungry for information on the war, and the press, eager to satisfy such a demand. Since the vast majority of the imperial population were peasants, who were mostly illiterate and uneducated, the press needed to figure out how to attract their attention. For this purpose, the government-subsidized paper, for example, included free supplements such as war-related maps and posters, information on the situation of rural soldiers’ families and instructions on how to send letters to the front. Unlike the old tropes of uninformed and uninterested villages, such

Introduction

9

media provided peasants a concrete sense of connection to local war-time experiences and efforts with the larger, national enterprise. After the February Revolution, once full freedom of speech was granted, war information began to be more critical of Russia’s performance in the war. Public enthusiasm for the war was now replaced by aversion to the war, which the Bolsheviks exploited most effectively. Chapter 9 by Taro Tsurumi examines Zionist periodicals published in Siberia (Irkutsk) and the Far East (Harbin) in Russian at the time of the imperial collapse. Although the ‘national’ language of the Zionist movement was Hebrew, Zionists in Siberia used Russian for Zionist publishing. They did so not only because they were broadly acculturated into Siberian society, but also because they defined the Zionist movement not necessarily as a migration movement to Palestine but as a way to stay connected with other Jews while remaining part of Siberian society and the Russian polity. After the collapse of the empire, they moved to Harbin and mostly lost their connection – both imagined and actual – with Russia. But the Russian media continued to function as the Siberian and Far Eastern Jewish media. Through their Russian-language periodicals and Zionist activity, they maintained their connection with Jews who remained in Siberia and the Russian Far East, while simultaneously having a sense of being part of world Jewry. The concluding part of the book discusses Russian publishing’s place in history and what it reveals to us about history.

Notes 1

2 3 4

Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 20–4. On Russian publishing history in the eighteenth century, see S. P. Luppov, Kniga v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973); S. P. Luppov, Kniga v Rossii v poslepetrovskoe vremia. 1725–1740 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976); A. Iu. Samarin, Tipografshchiki i knigochety: ocherki po istorii knigi v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka (Moscow: Pashkov dom, 2013). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1983), pp. 85–8. A. I. Miller, Ukrainskii vopros v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.) (St Petersburg: Aletejya, 2000). Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

10 5

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

I. I. Frolova (ed.), Kniga v Rossii 1861–1881, 3 vols (St Petersburg: Kniga, 1990); I. I. Frolova, Kniga v Rossii 1881–1895 (St Petersburg: Kniga, 1997); I. I. Frolova, Kniga v Rossii 1895–1917 (St Petersburg: Kniga, 2008). 6 Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena (eds), Reading in Russia: Practices of Reading and Literary Communication 1760–1930 (Milan: Ledizioni, 2014). 7 Other major significant works concerning the history of Russian publishing in the nineteenth century include B. I. Esin, Puteshestvie v Proshloe (Gazetnyi mir XIX veka) (Moscow : Izdatel’stvo MGU, 1983); A. I. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: ocherki po istorii chteniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1991; rev. edn, 2009); I. E. Barenbaum, Knizhnyi Peterburg: tri veka istorii: ocherki izdatel’skogo dela i knizhnoi torgobli (St Petersburg: Kul’t Inform Press, 2003); E. A. Dinershtein, Rossiiskoe knigoizdanie (Konets XVIII–XX v.) (Moscow : Nauka, 2004); Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Community: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry 1867–1907 (Berkley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); Miranda Remnek (ed.), The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). 8 Abrar Gibadullovich Karimullin, Tatarskaia kniga poreformennoi Rossii (Kazan’: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1983); Abrar Gibadullovich Karimullin, Tatarskaia kniga nachala XX veka (Kazan’: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1974). As a classic work on the Muslim press in the Russian Empire, see A. Bennigsen and C. LemercierQuelquejay, La presse et le movement national chez les musulmans de Russie avant 1920 (Paris: Mouton, 1964). 9 Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Some works also depict the emergence of a given ethnic identity by analysing its press, such as Lisa Khachaturian’s Cultivating Nationhood in Imperial Russia: The Periodical Press and the Formation of a Modern Armenian Identity (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 10 T. M. Smirnova, Natsional’nost’ – piterskie: natsional’noe men’shinstva Peterburga i leningradskoi oblasti v XIX veke (St Petersburg: Sudarynya, 2002), pp. 349–69; V. Musaev, Ingermanlandskii vopros v XX veke (St Petersburg: Nestor, 1999); Mare Lott, A Brief History of the Estonian Book (Tallinn: National library of Estonia, 2000). 11 For an early study indicating such a point, see S. Fredrick Starr, ‘Tsarist government: the imperial dimension’, in Jeremy R. Azrael (ed.), Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New York: Praeger, 1978). For a recent overview of linguistic

Introduction

12

13 14 15

11

Russification, see Aneta Pavlenko, ‘Linguistic russification in the Russian Empire: peasants into Russians?’, Russian Linguist 35, no. 3 (2011): 331–50. The number of bookshops increased not only in the capital cities (in St Petersburg from 75 in 1865 to 125 in 1880; in Moscow from 105 in 1868 to 179 in 1883), but also in the provinces (205 in 1866, 364 in 1871, 596 in 1876, 873 in 1881). Kniga v Rossii 1861–1881, vol. 1, pp. 32–4. Knizhnik. 1866. No. 1. p. 49. Dvadtsatipiatiletie sibirskogo knizhnogo magazina P. I. Makushina v Tomske (19 fevralia 1873–1898 g.) (Tomsk: n.p., 1898), p. 1. Marsha Siefert, ‘ “Chingis Khan with the Telegraph”: Communications in the Russian and Ottoman Empires’, in J. Leonhard and U. von Hirschhausen (eds), Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 80–110.

12

Part One

13

14

1

The Russian language as a vehicle for the enlightenment: Catherine II’s translation projects and the society striving for the translation of foreign books Yusuke Toriyama

The reign of Catherine II (1762–96) was a time of Russian enlightenment. Promoting Russia’s modernization in general, as Peter I did, the Empress actively encouraged the proliferation of art and letters in the empire, often through her own patronage. Moreover, this modernization practically meant Europeanization – a process based on cultural import from the West, in which the role of the medium, which enabled communication between different cultural spheres, was crucially important. In this respect, the significance of the role of translation and publication was certain. Note that the 1760s heralded the sudden growth of publication in Russia: 262 Russian books were published in 1756–60, 805 in 1761–5, 767 in 1766–70, and 958 in 1771–5.1 From this viewpoint, the creation of the Society Striving for the Translation of Foreign Books (in Russian, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode inostrannykh knig, hereafter referred to as the Society) in 1768 had a symbolic meaning. This organization, established by Catherine, was focused on the translation by intellectuals of important foreign books into Russian, an endeavour she supported with an annual subsidy of 5,000 rubles from her own pocket. The Empress also influenced the choice of work for translation. For fifteen years until 1783, the Society published 112 translations including many representative works of the age of Enlightenment, for example, selections from the Encyclopédie, Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois and works by Corneille, Racine, Voltaire and J. J. Rousseau, among others. Gary Maker defined the Society as ‘probably the leading Russian voice for the French Enlightenment’ in its day.2 15

16

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

At the same time, the Society faced many problems. Isabel de Madariaga wrote, ‘the numbers and the titles published far outpaced the capacity of the reading public to absorb them, and the problem of marketing translations became crucial. It must be remembered that most cultured nobles and nonnobles could read the classics of the French and German Enlightenment in the original languages.’3 The Society faced challenges in selling and circulating their publications to the extent that the Empress ordered that the books be peddled around the city to ensure their distribution.4 Moreover, the cluster of most educated Russians at this time capable of understanding the contents of the Society’s books likely did not need translation, although the majority of Russians remained monolingual (and many were uneducated and illiterate).5 Another crucial fact regarding the history of Russian-language publishing is that many Russian intellectuals considered the Russian literary language of this time as still developing. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was perceived as ‘unfinished’, ‘unrefined’ and not fit for purpose as a literary language for scholarship – although the notion of an ‘unsuitable’ or ‘unfinished’ language is untenable from a linguist’s viewpoint.6 Through the activities of the Society, the Empress tried to use Russian as a vehicle for the ideas of the Enlightenment. However, bearing in mind that her contemporaries considered the language ‘incomplete’, we cannot take her decision as a matter of course What motivated Catherine to establish the Society and what made her choose Russian as a vehicle for the Enlightenment despite its disadvantages? Searching for an answer to these questions, in this chapter we discuss the expectations for the roles and functions of Russian-language publishing and the Russian language in the first half of Catherine’s reign. For this purpose, we examine the discourse of those who engaged in the activities of the Society and other translation projects she initiated, focusing on linguistic issues. Furthermore, like the authors of the above-cited article, we adopt the theoretical basis suggested by social scientists since the ‘linguistic turn’. We conceive language not as being a purely referential tool for describing objects, but also a constructive force.7 This viewpoint benefits the discussion on the eighteenth century in Russia, which was marked by the evolution of the Russian language and the development of a new worldview by many Russians. Illustrating the standardization of vernacular languages in Europe in the early modern period, partly for pragmatic (to facilitate communication between regions) and partly for honorific (to give them some of the prestige or dignity associated with Latin) reasons, Peter Burke stated that ‘civilization implied following a code of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour’.8 It is reasonable to assume that Catherine, motivated to make her

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

17

empire civilized after European models, likewise sought to create a code for the empire’s lingua franca based on the vernacular language, in this case, Russian. Vladimir Semennikov’s monograph, which was published in 1913, along with the complete list of books published and planned for publication by the Society, provides an insight into the history and legacy of this organization.9 Aside from this comprehensive work, there are few studies of this subject, although the research of Marker and de Madariaga includes concise overviews of the Society as a promoter of the Russian Enlightenment in the cultural context of that time.10 Jones’ account of the Society is short, but includes important remarks. Significant is his suggestion that Diderot’s view that a civilized nation needs to have a perfected language might have influenced Catherine to establish the Society.11 Our aim is to discuss the significance of the Society and other translation projects in the cultural context of the early reign of Catherine, focusing on the role and function of the Russian language. After outlining the activities of the Society and linguistic background of the time in the first section, the next two sections will describe the Empress’s thoughts on the potential of the Russian language. In the second section, based on the discussion by Victor Zhivov and Marcus C. Levitt about the functions of the Russian and Church Slavonic languages, we examine the notion that using Russian was beneficial for integrating the European Enlightenment within Russia’s indigenous ecclesiastical culture.12 In the third section, we show that publishing in Russian was justified by the ideas of the Enlightenment and required standardization of the language. Following this, in the fourth section, we examine the text of the Society’s publications written by translators (for example, the translator’s preface), clarifying their mission to enrich Russian and create a new norm corresponding to the policy of the Empress, a goal which they shared. This approach clarifies the role and function of the Russian literary language of this time and the factors that motivated Catherine to choose Russian as the empire’s lingua franca.

Establishment of the Society and the linguistic background The Society, which depended on the private sponsorship of the Empress, was not part of the Academy of Sciences, although their activities often overlapped. The Empress used the Academy press as her primary medium, and many Academy translators and minor employees participated in the Society. Since the line between the translators of the Society and Academy often crossed, there was confusion about the status of the Society within the Academy.13 No official

18

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

information exists about the establishment of the Society, and only in October– November 1768 did the capitals’ presses report on the topic.14 In December of that year, shortly after Catherine’s command that it be established, the Society set about its first translation. The work was the Russian version of Frederick II’s (King of Prussia) Dissertation sur les raisons d’établir ou d’abroger les lois. This was followed by Voltaire’s Candide; Montesquieu’s Le temple de Gnide; Beccaria’s works on virtue and reward; Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence; several articles from the Encyclopédie such as those on ‘Greece’, ‘Turkey’ and ‘Sparta’; and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.15 Semennikov classified the Society’s translations into the following four groups: 1) Works of modern (particularly eighteenth-century) authors like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Mably, Saint-Pierre, Swift, Tasso, Corneille, Fielding, Gellert, Goldoni and so on. 2) Works of classical antiquity, which was considered an important field for the Society’s activities. In a letter to Voltaire on 7 (18) October 1770, expressing her hope to learn Greek at a university in the future, Catherine mentioned that Homer was currently being translated into Russian. 3) Books on history and geography. The latter was an especially important contribution by the Society as there had been almost no Russian books on this subject, except for a few textbooks. 4) Books on natural science including mathematics, physics, chemistry and natural history.Apart from these publications, the Society aimed to publish Russian translations of dictionaries in foreign languages; however, it succeeded in publishing only the first volume (for the letter ‘A’) of the Russian version of Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française in 1773.16 In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, books on religion comprised the highest percentage of all Russian-language titles published (46 per cent), an even higher proportion than in the Petrine period (42 per cent).17 In the third quarter of the century, this percentage decreased to 20. However, titles on history and geography increased from 6 to 10 per cent, and those on secular philosophy from 2 to 11 per cent.18 The line-up of the translations of the Society roughly corresponds to the general tendency of the period. It lacks works on military affairs, though already in the second quarter of the century they were not so actively published as in the Petrine period. Likewise, it lacks traditional books of faith which was hitherto the main subject of Russian publication. The Society did not publish books on old orthography, which totalled 21.6 per cent of the Russian-language books published in 1761–5.19 However, the cultural tradition of the Orthodox Church was not completely ignored by intellectuals of the Catherine period. Levitt defined the period from the mid- to the late eighteenth century as a time of rapprochement between the

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

19

‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in Russia. At the beginning of the century, Peter I introduced a ‘civil’ script for Russian literary language, which would be suitable for the requirements of the new era. This language was to be newly created, while the Slavonic language, hitherto the unique literary language in Russia, would be used exclusively for ecclesiastical or religious subjects. In 1740–90, the linguistic heritage of the Church Slavonic was reaccepted as part of a new synthetic discourse that came to be known as the Slaveno-rossiiskii (Slaveno-Russian) language with vernacular elements.20 It was expected to be a polyfunctional language, and its usage was not to be confined to secular matters. It is interesting that this idea was rooted in Europe. In a treatise of 1745, Trediakovsky idealized a linguistic situation in which the same language covered all spheres of activity from the palace to the street, to the court of law and the Church. In this regard, he praised French as a language able to express both religious and secular subjects. For him, the perfection of European literary language was determined by the polyfunctionality thereof.21 This background is important in considering the significance of the translation projects and Russian-language publications in the period of Catherine II.

Marmontel on the Volga: The ‘Russification’ of the Enlightenment discourse In October 1768, having allocated 5,000 rubles a year as private sponsorship for the translation programme, Catherine entrusted this sum to the supervision of the three courtiers Grigorii Kozitskii, Count Vladimir Orlov and Count Andrei Shuvalov when the Society was established. However, Semennikov suggested that the idea of founding an organization such as this had emerged earlier. He was referring to two translation projects in 1767 led by the Empress: the translation into Russian of selected parts of the Encyclopédie and Jean-François Marmontel’s famous novel Bélisaire (1765).22 The translation group for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie was formed in Moscow a few months later after Catherine completed her voyage to the Volga region from May to June 1767. Five members of the group, including Count Andrei Shuvalov, were part of her entourage on this voyage. In the same year, they published translations of the Encyclopédie in three volumes.23 Noteworthy is that Shuvalov became one of the directors of the translators of the Society. He published many translations of articles from the Encyclopédie and continued the activities of the Moscow group (thirteen of thirty books published by the Society in 1767–71), which enabled Semennikov to see the relation between the two

20

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

translation projects.24 The subjects of the articles selected for the three-volume translation was varied, covering a wide sphere of life ranging from ‘history’, ‘geography’, ‘nature’, ‘the economy’ and ‘mineralogy’ to ‘sneeze’, ‘bath’, ‘hammock’ and ‘finger’. From our viewpoint, it is remarkable that the translation included articles on philology, namely ‘Narratsiia’ (Narration) and ‘Slovoproizvedenie’ (etymology). The latter deals with the derivation of words based on the idea that ‘all nations living on earth have mixed in various ways, and a mixture of languages is the necessary consequence of the mixture of nations’.25 These concepts were likely relevant to Russians who were trying to improve the Russian language by exploiting the vocabulary and expressions of foreign languages. Bélisaire was translated during Catherine’s voyage to the Volga region by a group comprising the Empress and nine courtiers, including Kozitskii and Orlov. Moreover, the dedication of the translation to Archbishop Gavriil was written by Shuvalov, showing the continuity of this project and the activities of the Society.26 The purpose of her journey, with 2,000 attendants, along the Volga through Tver, Kazan, Simbirsk and other cities was to confirm imperial authority in the territory and expand support for her policies to other ethnic regions. The opening of the Legislative Commission in July that year would likely have included members from broad social groups, including fifty-four deputies from the non-Russian tribes. Marmontel’s novel is based on the story of the famous Byzantine general Belisarius, who was imprisoned and blinded after losing the favour of the Emperor Justinian at the instigation of envious courtiers. The novel tells how the hero, returning home as a beggar, meets many people and preaches to them the basic ideas of national law. The ninth chapter, translated by Catherine, contains the idea that sovereigns should be concerned with the ties between them and their subjects, while the eleventh chapter states that sovereigns need to come into direct contact with the people and know the circumstances of their lives and their real needs. The ideological importance of these matters for the Empress on the eve of the opening of the Legislative Commission cannot be underestimated. Certainly, the Empress had a strong desire to distribute this translation across the empire. The Russian minister to Paris, Dmitrii Golitsyn, wrote to Marmontel that ‘Bélisaire is being published in Moscow, and the Empress wishes to disseminate it widely in Russia with the purpose, in the words of Her Majesty, for her subjects to be aware of the bonds that tie Her with them.’27 Another point raised in Bélisaire was religious tolerance, the focus of the fifteenth chapter. It was banned in France after being criticized by Sorbonne. Ibneeva found provocative significance in Catherine taking the initiative in translating such work.28 The idea of tolerance was ‘almost a leitmotif of her

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

21

voyage along the Volga in 1767’. Furthermore, it was suggestive that the collective translated Bélisaire while facing the ethnic diversity of Russia and published it with the subtitle ‘translated on the Volga’ in 1768. Like Belisarius, the Empress was ready to recognize as ‘humans’ non-Russian people in the empire, in other words, inorodtsy.29 She required tolerance of these tribes, but the dedication to Archbishop Gavriil by Shuvalov also demonstrates the sovereign’s attitude towards Christianity: We know very well your virtues, namely meekness, humility, modesty, and your enlightened piousness, that dwell in you and that should adorn the soul of every Christian, especially a priest of your standing. Moral edification is necessary for all people and in any state of life. Bliss in society depends on the good behaviour of its members. It is important to remind them of their duty as men and citizens and provide examples of goodness to ignite their hearts with zeal to follow the great men that have lived before them. . . . We frankly admit that Bélisaire ruled over our hearts, and we are sure that Your Eminence will like this work because Your Eminence is comparable to Bélisaire in virtue and thought.30

The author praised Gavriil for his ‘enlightened piety’, expecting him to be a model for all nations and people through his Belisarius-type mind and virtue. As Zhivov wrote, he was obligated to profess the worldview that attracted Catherine (such as deistic religious toleration).31 Wishing to propagate Enlightenment ideology around the empire by publishing the Russian version of Bélisaire, Catherine intended not to reject Christian teaching but to assimilate it. This is an example of rapprochement between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ mentioned above. In the Russian context, the Western discourse on ‘religion’ or ‘Christianity’ is applicable to the position of the Orthodox Church. The sovereign wanted Gavriil to ‘dress up’ Enlightenment ideology ‘in words familiar to the Orthodox ear’.32 Instructive in this regard is a detail in the Russian translation of the fifteenth chapter, where Belisarius, denying blind religious faith, states that God does not need the Emperor to be his defender. Responding to the Emperor Justinian, who disapproved of Belisarius’ rejection of the monarch’s religious zeal, he referred to the monarch’s important duty of ensuring his people love God. In the original French text, the Emperor’s words are as follows: Ce qui m’en afflige, dit l’Empereur, c’est qu’il rend le zéle d’un Prince inutile à la religion.33 [What afflicts me, said the Emperor, is that he renders the zeal of a prince useless to religion.]

22

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Count Vladimir Orlov translated this passage into Russian: Mne to tol’ko ne priiatno, govoril Imperator, chto revnost’ po Boze v Gosudare delaet vovse pravoslavnoi vere bezpoleznoiu.34 In the Russian version, the term la religion is translated as pravoslavnaia vera, which means the Orthodox faith. Identifying religion with Orthodoxy, the translator adapted the novel to Catherine’s intention of introducing the ideas of the Enlightenment without contradicting the teaching of the Orthodox Church. Arguably, the setting of this novel in the Byzantine Empire supported this association. Remember that the common Orthodox faith of the Byzantine Empire and Russia was a frequent motif in Russian poetry at the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74.35 A little later, in the Russian version of Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, which was translated and published in 1769 by the Society, the translator Aleksei Polenov added annotations to the translated text to correct the misunderstandings of the French author about the ‘Greek-Russian faith’. He provided the following note in the preface. Following the path shown by the great men, I find it wise to warn the reader that there are quite a few places in this work that warrant special attention if we are to forestall further confusion. The false conception of the Greek-Russian faith that is common among foreigners, and the superficial knowledge of its religious rites, were the reasons for the bad judgement that we find in this book; the lack of trustworthy knowledge about Russia in foreign countries shall excuse the errors made by the author.36

This indicates that Russian intellectuals of the time considered the Orthodox faith so essential for Russia that it could be a component of her national identity. Translators of Bélisaire were expected to bear this in mind. The idea to translate this novel into Russian was a consequence of the linguistic argument from the mid-eighteenth century on that Russian needed to be polyfunctional and applicable for both secular and religious themes. Publishing Bélisaire in Russian was part of Catherine’s project of spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment without contradicting the Orthodox faith, and of cultivating the Russian language as the best instrument for this important mission.

A language ‘proper to all’ in the empire Catherine’s preference for Russian-language publishing was not only conditioned by Russia’s religious and linguistic culture, but, as noted above, was also a consequence of the adoption of the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

23

Jones noted that the Society was established partly as a response to a general awareness of the weakening of the hegemony of French culture. Furthermore, there was a growing awareness of other languages in French-speaking culture, best represented by Denis Diderot.37 In a letter to Falconet delivered in St Petersburg at the end of September 1767, he outlined a project in which linguists would compile a ‘dictionary’. He thought this idea would appeal to Catherine and benefit under-developed people. Such work would produce two significant results at a stroke; firstly to transmit from one people to another the total sum of knowledge acquired in the course of centuries; secondly to enrich the impoverished language of an uncultivated people with all the expressions, and consequently all the exact and precise notions, be it in the sciences or the mechanical or liberal arts, of a rich and widely spoken language of a cultured people.38

The Empress did not accept his project. However, according to Jones, Diderot’s views on vernacular language as a force in the transference of the Enlightenment and establishment of culture might have been taken to heart by Catherine.39 The Empress was keen that the merit of Russian be recognized. In a letter of 15 (26) March 1767, she complained to Voltaire that ‘the richness and conciseness’ of Russian were missing in the French version of her manifesto of 14 (25) December 1766, a summons to the All-Russian Legislative Commission of 1767. As you appear, Sir, to take an interest in what I am doing, I attach to this letter the French translation of the manifesto published on 14 December last year, the translation of which in the Dutch gazettes has been so distorted that we could not see well what it must mean. In Russian, it is an esteemed piece, the richness and conciseness of our language have made it so, and the translation was all the more painful for it.40

Agreeing, Voltaire responded, ‘I do not know Russian at all, but I can judge from the translation that you sent me that Russian has inversions and a turn of phrase lacking in ours.’ In addition, he declared his sympathy for multilingualism: ‘I am not like the lady of the court of Versailles who said: It is regrettable that the adventure of the Tower of Babel has produced the confusion of the languages, otherwise everyone would always speak French.’41 Voltaire was ready to accept that a language unknown to him could be more suitable for the Enlightenment. This acknowledgement corresponded with his assumed role as a promoter of cosmopolitanism.42 Voltaire’s statement was also in accord with Catherine’s intention to make Russian a vehicle of the Enlightenment.

24

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

At the same time, the orientation towards universality was essential in the age of the Enlightenment. In this sense, the language must be comprehensible to a broad range of people. Leading the translation of Bélisaire, Catherine was concerned about how people would accept it. In the letter to Voltaire (29 May 1767), she reported that they tested the quality of the translation in Kazan, letting the local people, who had no knowledge of any language but their own (undoubtedly, Russian) listen to the book, which was read aloud. Its translation is finished and it will be published shortly. To test the translation, it was read to two local persons who only understood their own language. The one exclaimed: let my sight be lost, provided I am Bélisaire, I shall be rewarded enough for it! The other said, if it were real, I would be envious of it.43

Catherine was not concerned with the degree of sophistication of the text, but whether it was comprehensible to the common people. As there was no standard for Russian literary language at the time, the translation might not be perceived as Russian. However, if the language was to be a tool for the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas across the empire, it had to be understood by all subjects. In terms of establishing a universal system for the empire, Catherine’s legislative projects merit attention. She formulated the strategy of translating foreign literature and introduced it almost simultaneously with the preparations to open the All-Russian Legislative Commission. She focused particularly on drafting the well-known Nakaz (Instruction), the statement of legal principles composed as a guide for the representatives. In the letter from Kazan on 29 May 1767, the Empress wrote to Voltaire about the difficulty of creating a legal system suitable for both Europe and Asia, regions with vast differences in climate and culture: The laws, of which so much has been spoken, are not yet done, after all, and who can guarantee that they will be good? It is the posterity, not us, who will be able to decide this question. Imagine, I ask you, that they must serve for Asia and Europe, and what a difference of climate, of people, of habit, even of ideas!44

Being in Asia and finding there a miniature copy of the empire’s ethnic diversity, Catherine compared the establishment of a legal system in Russia to ‘making a dress that would be proper to all’. Here I am in Asia; I wanted to see it with my eyes. In this city, there are 20 different peoples, who are not similar at all. However, we have to make a dress that would be proper to them all. They can be well with the general principles,

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

25

but the details? And what details! I would say – It is almost to create a world, unite it, conserve it, etc.45

The introduction of a common legal system to the empire as an all-embracing norm requires standardized language. The Nakaz includes the statement, ‘Each Law ought to be written in so clear a Style, as to be perfectly intelligible to everyone; and, at the same Time, with great Conciseness’ (article  448).46 Catherine’s own draft of her Nakaz was written in French and later translated into Russian by her literary secretary Grigorii Kozitskii. As such, we can consider the French text as expressing most truly her thoughts and intention. Furthermore, the primary sources from which Catherine copied her maxims – especially Montesque’s Esprit des Lois and the French translation of Beccaria’s Delle delitte e delle pene – were written in French.47 This suggests that Catherine had good reasons to issue the Nakaz in Russian along with the versions in other languages. Essentially, Russian, which absorbed Church Slavonic idioms, could relate the secular law with religious contexts. Note that in the eighteenth century, Russian people learned to read using the Church alphabet, while the civil alphabet was learned by small social groups as a supplement. To change this, the Legislative Commission suggested establishing schools where literacy would be taught ‘both by church books and civil laws’, though this project was not implemented.48 Traditionally, while in Catholic countries Latin was assimilated via grammar and a dictionary, in the Slavic Orthodox world, Church Slavonic was learned by heart using a psalter and prayer book.49 Zhivov describes how it was thus proposed to unite legal with religious indoctrination. According to the authors of this new education project, a person educated in this system would recall the laws punishing transgression as automatically as they remembered formulations from the psalter when evaluating life situations. By using this mechanism the secular power was trying to create a new state discourse parallel to the religious.50 The law was an important matter for the empire in the process of modernization. The Russian language in its standardized and polyfunctional form was expected to be a medium of knowledge in this field. It is symbolic that the first work submitted by the Society shortly after its inauguration by the Empress was the translation of Frederick II’s Dissertation sur les raisons d’etablir ou d’abroger les loi (1749). The lawyer Aleksei Polenov, who translated it from French into Russian, stated in the preface that the translation was meant to serve devotees of ‘civic wisdom [grazhdanskaia mudrosti]’, defining jurisprudence as not exclusively concerned with litigation but as providing scholarship to protect innocent citizens and maintain peace in society. Thus, he tried to

26

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

distinguish this study from the complex knowledge of specific cases, emphasizing its significance for society and linking it to civic values, implicitly juxtaposing it with religious ones.

Translators seeking the Russian language of the new era Undoubtedly, the main aim of the Society was to convey the European Enlightenment, in other words, transferring information and ideas from the West to Russia. From this viewpoint, the foundation of the Society was motivated by the fact that so few people understood languages other than Russian. Kosma Frolinskii, who translated Pierre Joseph Macquer’s Elemens de chymie-pratique, published by the Society in 1774, explained his aim in this translation in the introduction to the book. . . . It is for this reason that I decided to translate it into the Russian language, with the one goal of assisting with my works those Russian youth who do not know foreign languages in their studies of this discipline, thus being useful to society. It is with this intention that I present my translation for enlightened fellow citizens to judge.51

Frolinskii’s remark implies that at this time, even some youth capable of comprehending chemistry did not know foreign languages, making his reference to the ‘enlightened fellow citizens’ a natural one. There is another interesting comment in the introduction to Book Five of the translation of Greek historian Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca historica, which was published by the Society in 1774. A graduate of the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, Ivan Alekseev, who translated this series, here criticized ignorant people who dismissed the significance of the translation of foreign books, and emphasized the benefit of translating books on the arts and sciences for Russian society, noting that not everyone had mastered a foreign language. It is hard to imagine how useful this translation is for scholars of science and the arts because not everyone is knowledgeable in the foreign languages in which these books were written; but, with the help of translation, those also could succeed in science and the arts.52

On the other hand, in the introduction to Book One, praising Catherine’s enterprise, Alekseev defined the benefit of establishing the Society by emphasizing that ‘those who know several languages and those that do not could use books translated from all other languages into their native one’.53 The Society published

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

27

translations both as substitutions for the originals and as works with their own value. Actually, there was no guarantee that reading in Russian was easy even for learned Russian readers. The notion that the Russian language was not sufficiently standardized and still ‘unsuitable’ for conveying Western ideas was widely accepted. The Russian language therefore became the object of attention. Above all, the lack of Russian expressions to match the terms in foreign-language texts was a common concern for translators. Kosma Frolinskii reported how he struggled with technical terms: I was greatly confused in my translation because of the absence of chemistryrelated words in the Russian language; however, the shortage or lack of technical words did not turn me away from this enterprise. I strove to the best of my ability to descriptively convey the words, borrow words from books on metallurgy, or ask scientists and other knowledgeable people, and I kept the words that I could not find or correctly translate in the original.54

Translators contributing to the Society dealt with this problem in various ways. The writer Mikhail Popov, who actively worked for the Society and translated Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Liberated from French, also referred to the absence of Russian equivalents to some French expressions. In translating this admirable and complex piece of art, which the Poem is, we are bound to encounter many words and expressions that either do not exist in our language or are unknown to us. Because we do not take pains to delve into the copious and rich Slavic language, which is the origin and beauty of Russian, and which over time certainly will not yield in its abundance to any other language in the world. I, too, should have fallen victim to these difficulties. Also, there was no way for me to relieve myself of them other than by looking into the Spiritual Books or the Newly-translated works for words and expressions similar to those that I found in French, or I translated them anew because the Poem does not tolerate unnecessary foreign words nor should they be tolerated elsewhere.55

Despite different approaches to the problem, both translators found Russian lacking the expressions needed, and tried to overcome this situation by rearranging the language. To transmit the ideas of the European Enlightenment, they rebuilt the tool needed to do so. After the above quoted text, Popov included a long list of newly translated words with the meanings in French such as Oruzheinitsa (Arcenal), Vodoiom (Bassin) and Somnitsa (Bataillon). The words taken from other books are indicated in italic and distinguished from the newly

28

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

translated words. To some of the former he gave references to places in the Bible.56 Popov’s orientation to Church Slavonic books was inherited from the mid-century literary professionals’ linguistic policy, which became part of Catherine’s general policies to align the ideas of the Enlightenment with the traditions of the Orthodox Church.57 It is significant that almost all Greek-to-Russian translators who worked for the Society had religious knowledge. Alongside Ivan Alekseev and others, Semennikov identified Ivan Sidorovsky (1748–95) as a notable figure. Sidorovsky studied at the Kostroma seminary and in 1773 became a priest of the Voskresensky Novodevichy monastery through the good offices of the above mentioned Gavriil, and then a teacher of theology at Smolny Institute for girls of the nobility.58 In 1783, he joined the Academy and participated in editing the Dictionary of Russian Etymology and the Dictionary of the Russian Language.59 With another teacher at the Smolny Institute, Matvei Pakhomov (1745–92), Sidorovsky participated in the Society’s colossal project of publishing the first Russian version of the complete works of Plato, and translated the Laws and other oeuvres.60 In ‘the introduction from [the] translators’ in the first volume, they explained the style of their translation: Some people might believe the style of translation is not suitable to spoken language, especially if it is compared with the style used by previous translations of a few articles of the same author, because they will find many words and expressions more appropriate to an oratory style than a spoken language. The reason for this is that Plato used a middle style between prose and poetry. Thus, it required keeping that style of translation and to approach somewhat the character of the Slavonic language. We also included in some places words borrowed from Old Slavonic and words created anew, but we did not diverge from their original meanings because we were imitating a writer who had either imitated Old Hellenic or created words anew.61

This account shows translators’ conception about the use of Church Slavonic idioms. First, they could be used with other linguistic elements in a unified language. Second, in this translation, they were used as equivalent to the ancient Hellenic expressions in the Greek original. Translators proficient in Greek no longer confined Church Slavonic to a biblical context, but tried to make it a component of the newly standardized polyfunctional Russian language. As Zhivov wrote, they ‘evidently relied on Trediakovsky’s practice’.62 These discourses imply that some translators of the time were aware of their mission as mediators of ideas and knowledge from abroad as well as reformers

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

29

of the Russian language. As such, they were creators of the language that would correspond to Russia’s changing cultural context. In the preface to ‘Jerusalem Liberated’, Popov explained the policy of his translation: My main concern was to convey the author’s ideas correctly and clearly. I tried to keep the style that was in accord with the nature and standing of the Poem with its glory, love, and tenderness. Whether I succeeded in my intentions, I leave for the enlightened readers to judge. But, I also do not want to convince anyone that I am correct about the eloquence of Russian; still few of us have mastered this art. I am only asking that the readers generously forgive me for those things, with respect to the huge size of the translation and the inimitable elegance of the work, because translations like this one, even for nations famous for their science, do not attain perfection overnight. My intentions in translating this Poem were not to masquerade as . . . enriching Russian eloquence, but to serve those Russians who, while not understanding foreign languages, have a commendable weakness for reading fine books.63

Like the translators mentioned above, Popov also bore in mind Russian readers who did not know foreign languages and needed translations of exceptional books. Meanwhile, stressing that his main concern was to express the author’s thoughts exactly, clearly and fairly, he insisted that his intentions were not to show that he was enriching the oratory of Russian. That he emphasized this, regardless of whether it truly reflected his thoughts, implies the existence of the context wherein translation from foreign languages into Russian was expected to improve the latter. The linguistic issue was of great concern to the Society, as indicated by the fact that one of its activities was to publish translations of foreign-language dictionaries, even though it only succeeded in publishing the first volume (for the letter ‘A’) of the Russian version of Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française in 1773. The Russian title shows that the French original was the fourth edition published in 1762. This translation was not published through funding from the Academy of Sciences, as was usually the case for the Society’s publications, but through funding from the Society itself. The foreword to ‘the benevolent reader’ in the Russian version explains the Society’s motivation for engaging in such projects. Conscious of the lack of adequate dictionaries for Russian youth, the Society considered it an obligation to publish foreign dictionaries newly translated into Russian.64 The author of the foreword further explained the aims of this publication:

30

Publishing in Tsarist Russia . . . [The] above-mentioned institution, in an attempt to satisfy public curiosity, found it worthwhile to publish the first letter of this dictionary, ‘A’, with the intention that, just as the youth studying French in translating from French to Russian could look up words unknown to them that start with ‘A’, those who want to know what a particular word of art or science is in Russian, or how a French proverb is expressed as a Russian proverb, this letter would be useful.65

According to this account, the Russian version of the dictionary was to serve the needs of translators. This may be referring to the large number of young cadets or officers (recent graduates of the corps) who translated romances or moral tales and wished to publish them.66 This suggests that the translation and publication of the dictionary was meant to be help improve the understanding of French texts and the translation of them into Russian, ultimately improving the Russian text circulating throughout the empire. Furthermore, the author of the foreword notes that the dictionary could be consulted by users to find Russian words matching the French technical terms in science or art, as well as Russian proverbs corresponding to those in French. That is, the Russian version of Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française was intended to help readers increase their knowledge of Russian and produce texts in this language. This foreword was concluded by the editor’s apologies for possible imperfections in the translation, and a call to readers for their cooperation in improving its contents: [I]t is not surprising, and it also is forgivable, that a person working on a translation of the letter ‘A’ might fail to correctly express some difficult French words in Russian or in other equally difficult discourses might make mistakes in meaning. So, if the benevolent reader finds some shortcomings in the translation of this letter, by virtue of his kindness, he could report them to the Imperial Academy of Science for future corrections and perfections of the dictionary.67

The reference to the difficulty of an exact translation of French words into Russian indicates that this request to readers was motivated by an awareness that Russian was not yet ‘complete’ and needed development. The readiness of this book for amendment by responding to the reactions of its readership was a reflection of the instability of the Russian literary language of the time.

Conclusion Based on the discussion above, we conclude that translation projects carried out in the first half of the reign of Catherine II at her initiative – specifically

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment

31

publications by the Society – entailed both the importing of European ideas and knowledge as well as the enrichment or the creation of its vehicle, namely the Russian language. The Empress believed that the fruits of the European Enlightenment (for example, the introduction of a unified legal system) should be enjoyed by all her subjects. However, many Russians were monolingual and the Russian literary language was not sufficiently standardized for universal use within the empire. Therefore, by establishing the Society, Catherine expected to contribute to making Russian the lingua franca of the empire, publishing numerous Russian translations of Western books. Moreover, Russian had the advantage of being able to easily absorb linguistic elements of Church Slavonic, which was helpful in creating a new unified language by using these elements in the religious discourse. In this way, considering the polyfunctionality of Russian, the Empress and intellectuals of the time searched for the ideal form of Russian language that would be suitable for use as the lingua franca of the empire. The activities of the Society were appreciated by Russian intellectuals of the time and later, such as Nikolai Novikov and Mikhail Dmitriev.68 However, it experienced financial difficulties after mismanagement by Sergei Domashnev (President of the Academy from 1775), the poor condition of the press and delayed payments from the Empress’s cabinet. While some translations were successfully marketed, including the works of Euler and Comenius, Voltaire’s Candide, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, fewer than 200 copies of other translations were sold over a period of forty years. The Society published an annual average of just four titles from 1780 to 1783.69 In January 1783, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova assumed the post of the President of the Academy of Sciences and in the summer of that year, she suggested that the Empress establish an Academy with the purpose of perfecting the Russian language. To fund this project, she relied on 5,000 rubles the Empress provided as a subsidy for the translation of foreign books. When the Society was dissolved in 1783, its role were assumed by the Russian Academy (Akademiia Rossiiskaia), the newly established research institute for the Russian language and literature – the Russian version of the Académie Française.70 This transition suggests that contemporaries perceived the activities of the Society as contributing to standardizing the Russian language. Before long, the translation project was abandoned, as the Russian Academy was primarily engaged in the compilation and publication of the Dictionary of the Russian Language.71 This six-volume dictionary (1789–94) contained 43, 257 words and was the first explanatory and normative dictionary of the Russian literary language. Contributors included renowned writers such as Denis

32

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Fonvizin and Gavrila Derzavin, and as such, the publication had historic significance. However, Catherine’s previous intention was not totally abandoned with the dissolution of the Society. In the preface to the first volume of the dictionary, the author, praising the Empress for having the foresight to recognize the benefits of providing Russian youth with knowledge in their native language, wrote that without such a dictionary, it would be impossible to affirm the abundance, beauty, importance and strength of the language and to use it properly.72 The publication of the dictionary, which illustrates the stylistic and etymologic diversity of Russian words, was intended to contribute to the creation and establishment of the new norm for Russian (referred to as Slavenorossiiskii, or Slaveno-Russian) as a polyfunctional language. Thus, some aims of the Society were assumed by the new project in the second half of Catherine’s reign.

Notes 1

Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 72. 2 Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, pp. 91–2. 3 Isabel de Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 206. 4 V. P. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode inostrannykh knig, uchrezhdennoe Ekaterinoi II. 1768–1783 gg. (St Petersburg: Tip. “Sirius”, 1913), p. 20. 5 Gesine Argent, Derek Offord and Vladislav Rjéoutski, ‘The Functions and Value of Foreign Languages in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Russian Review 74, no. 1 (2015): 1. 6 Argent, Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘The Functions and Value of Foreign Languages’, p. 14. 7 Argent, Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘The Functions and Value of Foreign Languages’, p. 2. 8 Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 89. 9 Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode. 10 Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, pp. 91–2; Madariaga, Politics and Culture, pp. 206, 295. 11 W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov: Enlightener of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 82–4. 12 Victor Zhivov, Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia, transl. Marcus Levitt (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009); Marcus C. Levitt, Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), pp. 269–93.

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42

33

Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, p. 91. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 6. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 8. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, pp. 13–15. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, p. 60. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, pp. 60, 73. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, p. 72. Levitt, Early Modern Russian Letters, pp. 274–5. Zhivov, Language and Culture, pp. 218–20. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 6. Perevody iz Entsyklopedii, Parts 1–3 (Moscow: Pech. pri Imp. Mosk. un-te, 1767). Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 6. Perevody iz Entsyklopedii, Part 1, p. 93. Perevody iz Entsyklopedii, Part 1, p. 6. V. A. Bilbasov, ‘Pokhody Ekateriny II po Volge i Dnepru (1767 i 1787)’, Russkaia starina 88, no. 1 (1898): 427–8. G. V. Ibneeva, Imperskaia politika Ekateriny II v zerkale ventsenosnykh puteshestvii (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 2009), pp. 327–8. Ibneeva, Imperskaia politika Ekateriny II, p. 330. Velizar, sochineniia g. Marmontelia, chlena Frantsuzskoi akademii, pereveden na Volge (Moscow: Pech. pri Imp. Mosk. un-te, 1768). Zhivov, Language and Culture, pp. 304–5. Zhivov, Language and Culture, p. 304. Jean-François Marmontel, Bélisaire (Paris: Merlin, 1765), p. 253. Velizar, p. 259. Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvukhglavogo orla . . . Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII–pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), pp. 31–64; Vera Proskurina, Mify imperii. Literatura i vlast’ v epokhu Ekateriny II (Moscow : Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), pp. 147–94. Aleksei Polenov, ‘Predislovie’, Razmyshleniia o prichinakh velichestva Rimskago naroda i ego upadka (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1769), l, pp. 2–3. Jones, Nikolay Novikov, pp. 82–3. Jones, Nikolay Novikov, p. 83. Jones, Nikolay Novikov, p. 84. Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, pp. 175–6. W. F. Reddaway (ed.), Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767 in the English Text of 1768 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971), p. 17. Stephen Bruce, ‘The Pan-European Justification of Multilingual Russian Society in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav

34

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53

54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Publishing in Tsarist Russia Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent (eds), French and Russian in Imperial Russia: Language Use among the Russian Elite, vol. 2, p. 20 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, vol. 10 (St Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad. nauk, 1872), p. 205. Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, p. 204. Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, p. 204. Reddaway, Documents of Catherine the Great, p. 283. Madariaga, Politics and Culture, p. 49. Zhivov, Language and Culture, p. 11. Zhivov, Language and Culture, p. 7. Zhivov, Language and Culture, p. 11. Kosma Florinskii, ‘Preduvedomlenie ot trudivshagosia v perevode’, Gospodina Makera Nachal’nyia osnovaniia umozritel’noi khimii, Part 1 (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1774), l. 1. Ivan Alekseev, ‘Preduvedomlenie k chitateliu ot trudivshagosia v perevode’, Diodora Sikiliiskago istoricheskaia biblioteka, Part 5 (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1775), ll. 4–5. Ivan Alekseev, ‘Preduvedomlenie k chitateliu ot trudivshagosia v perevode’, Diodora Sikiliiskago istoricheskaia biblioteka, Part 1 (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1774), l. 3. Florinskii, ‘Preduvedomlenie ot trudivshagosia v perevode’, ll. 1–2. Mikhail Popov ‘Izvestiia’, Osvobozhdennyi Ierusalim, iroicheskaia poema, Italiianskago stikhotvortsa Tassa, perevedena s frantsuzskago Mikhailom Popovym, Part 1 (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1772), l. 10. Popov ‘Izvestiia’, l. 11. My attention was drawn to this source by Zhivov, Language and Culture, pp. 344–5. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 15–16. L. M. Ermolaeva, ‘Sidorovskii, Ivan Ivanovich’, Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, Issue 3 (Leningrad: Nauka, 2010), pp. 123–4. Evgenii Miroshnichenko, Ocherki po istorii rannego platonizma v Rossii. Stat’i po istorii russkoi filosofii (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2013), p. 36. ‘Preduvedomlenie ot perevodivshikh’, Tvorenii velemudrago Platona, Part 1 (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1780), pp. xii–xiii. Zhivov, Language and Culture, p. 345. Mikhail Popov, ‘Predislovie’, Osvobozhdennyi Ierusalim, l. 5–7. ‘Blagosklonnomu chitateliu’, Slovar’, Frantsuzkoiu Akademieiu sochinennyi i chetvertym tisneniem izdannyi v Parizhe 1762 goda, a v Sanktpeterburge napechatannyi s pribavleniem Rossiskago iazyka v 1773 godu (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1773), l. 1.

The Russian Language as a Vehicle for the Enlightenment 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

35

‘Blagosklonnomu chitateliu’, l. 1–2. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, p. 81. ‘Blagosklonnomu chitateliu’, l. 2. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 26. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 21. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 23. Semennikov, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode, p. 25. ‘Predislovie’, Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, Part 1 (St Petersburg: Pri Imp. Akad. nauk, 1789), pp. v–vi.

36

2

The making of the Russian classic Abram I. Reitblat (With translation assistance from Susie Garden)

Theoretical premises The literary classic has played an extremely important role in Russian culture (as, indeed, in German and French cultures, in contrast, for example, to the United States). However, the study of how the classic was created and subsequently added to and transformed is only beginning. Very few, however valuable, works address the specific aspects of this problem.1 If the majority of Russian literary critics are to be believed, the classic arose from nowhere, suddenly, and of its own accord. This simply happened because authors created ‘works of high artistic merit’. Researchers write about the classic without problematizing this concept,2 as if Pushkin and Gogol were born as classical writers. From a sociological point of view, this is, of course, untenable. A phenomenon like the classic arises at a certain stage in the development of literature, and is initially formed by the literary figures of this stage. But let’s start with the definition of the classic. In an academic literary reference book, M. L. Gasparov describes the authors of classics as ‘writers who are recognized as the best and exemplary’.3 With such an impersonal definition, it is not clear who actually recognizes them as ‘the best’. If now, say, tens of thousands of people in Russia recognize the works of Alexandra Marinina or Boris Akunin as the best, does this mean that they are classics or that they will become classics? In our opinion, in academic literature the term ‘classic’ can be used only if its definition is supplemented by an indication of those who consider these authors and works to be the best. From a sociological point of view, the classic is a coordinated representation of the opinions of critics, researchers of literature, educators and readers concerning who the key figures of national literature are. 37

38

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

There are a variety of approaches to studying the classic.4 In our understanding of the classic we are building upon the research conducted by the Russian sociologists of literature B. V. Dubin and L. D. Gudkov, who took into account, in turn, studies of the phenomenon of the classic conducted by J. F. Kermode, G. E. Grunebaum, G. Guillory and others. According to Dubin and Gudkov, the classic is the basis of the institution of literature in general: The spatio-temporal boundaries of history, culture, and literature proper – in their necessity and even finality as a whole, which is thereby ordered in its unity and successive ‘development’ – are established, through reference to the ‘past’ conceived as ‘high’ and ‘exemplary’. Classical literature becomes the basis for orienting literature that is emerging as an independent sphere, for the writer seeking social independence and cultural credibility, and becomes the measure of his own output, a source of topics, of rules for constructing a text, of norms of its reception, interpretation and evaluation. Thus, the formation and assimilation of the idea of the ‘classic’ is in fact the first immanent, ‘internal’ mechanism for the integration of an autonomous literary culture, and, consequently, of an independent social system, the institution of literature in its ‘internal’ complexity and coherence, as well as the social significance and ‘external’ cultural influence.5

The classic provides the semantic basis for the social institution of literature and thus structures it: it is a key element of literary culture, providing its representatives with a common system of coordinates. For writers, it offers examples to follow; for critics, the basis for interpreting and evaluating contemporary literature; and for teachers, material for teaching language and literature. In literature, the classic provides continuity (tradition). As emerging innovative groups reject it, the classic stimulates literary dynamics (in the future, opponents of the classic can themselves be included in the classical canon). Moreover, the classic serves as a basis for general socialization, providing both the material and language for the discussion of cultural values in the course of education; and literary socialization, acquainting one with the concepts of literature, genre, verse size and other literary norms and conventions. The classic appears not of its own accord, but is created by certain groups: . . . an appeal to the masterpieces and authorities of the ‘past’ with which the relations of ‘inheritance’ were established, constituted an effective means of selfdetermination of groups that are specific in their composition and interests, in the conditions of intensive social mobility and, accordingly, the democratization of prestige, widespread literacy, reading, book printing, the literature of mass print and circulation.6

The Making of the Russian Classic

39

In our opinion, works and their authors are included in the classic, if two factors exist: appropriate content in the works, on the one hand, and the purposeful actions of those who are responsible for creating and adding to the classic canon, on the other. Writers so classified create works in which there is a complex combination of different, often contradictory values and which can therefore be interpreted in different ways. As Jan Mukařovský has shown, some works satisfy more prerequisites than others for the emergence of ‘aesthetic value’ in the process of interaction between the text and the reader, and ‘the independent value of the artistic object rises in proportion to the cluster of extra-aesthetic values the object possesses, and its ability to make the relationship between them dynamic’.7 Similar works can be devoted to different topics, and it is important that they contain problematic value conflicts that are relevant to their contemporaries. That being said, . . . cultural groups of ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ intellectuals, specializing in the reception, selection and reproduction of . . . only ‘high level’, approved models, retrospectively select as classic transitional works that are synthetic in their semantic composition, in the conflicts they contain and ideas they problematize, in the functional structure of the text and its address to the reader. Substantive values and ideas referring to the new, the modern, and even the topical always combine in such models with elements of the traditional (traditionalist) image of the world in its integrity, its unity with the ‘primordial’ and ‘high’, and with corresponding constructions of space-time and expressive means, such as aesthetic conventions, and language norms. Such works are almost never marked either by ideological radicalism or by the expressive extremes of artistic rebellion and innovation. Neither of them are characterized by distinct characteristics of ultimate mass character. More often than not, we do not find in them an exceptional emphasis on contemporary thematic diversity, or minimalizing of the author’s presence (the impersonal ‘objectivity’ of narration), while the hero, who is in principle of steady character, by his actions in unexpected situations – when faced with maximum pressure – might forcibly engage the reader into the topic. Finally, we cannot find here something common to popular forms of art – an inconceivable image of ideological positivity of proposed role model that is unchanging and unquestioning, nor can we find the ethical unambiguity of the original image of the world.8

But preconditions of a different kind – external, institutional – are also important. For a classical canon to emerge, society must have an idea of a national classic, that is, the importance of literature as such, and of the significance of national

40

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

literature in particular, and, in addition, the need to have a group of the best national writers should be acknowledged. An author’s behaviour is also important, as is their social reputation, which can contribute to or hamper the success of their works, as well as their activity in promoting their books. In order to become authors of the classic, these writers should acquire fame in their lifetime. A key role in the formation of the classic is played by experts: critics, journalists and fellow writers, who can ‘promote’ a representative of their circle or just a friend, teachers of literature and so on. The prerequisites for a writer’s inclusion in the classics canon in their own lifetime may be the following (some of which may not be fulfilled): the publication of critical articles, and, ideally, books written about the writer; criticisms and a number of positive reviews in periodicals about him; reprinting of their books; the inclusion of their works in the textbooks; an edition of their collected works; publication of a biography and portrait; the presence of dramatized adaptions of their works; the celebration of their birthday. But not all writers who have gained wide popularity during their lifetime acquire the status of a classic writer. Of these, a certain set of authors stands out, separated from the others. In this case, a writer who becomes a classic one, after their death, passes (in several stages) through a process of canonization9 (if not all stages, then at least part of them). The mechanisms of canonization echo, in many respects, the scheme that applies in the canonization of saints. However, there is a detailed procedure for canonization, and the composition of the saints is clearly defined and inscribed in the church calendar. When writers are canonized, there is no such procedure, as there is no firm list. Furthermore, there are figures with intermediate status, while the status of being a classic writer is not always eternal – in time, some may be excluded from the canon. Nevertheless, there is much in common: a biography similar to a hagiography is also written, portraits are also distributed – an analogue of religious icons. There is also something like a menology – provided by school programmes and collections of biographies of classic writers. The process for the canonization of saints was first transferred to royal personages, military commanders and so on – and then to writers. This included a solemn funeral, the publication of detailed posthumous articles and memoirs and the publication of biographies; but writers were also given something new, specific to literature – the publication of a posthumous collection of works, the publication of works in a series of classical books and the inclusion of works in the school curriculum.

The Making of the Russian Classic

41

The term ‘classic’ in Russian culture Before proceeding to the history of the formation of the Russian classic, let us point out that the present name for the phenomenon of the classic appeared relatively recently. The adjective ‘classical’ made its way into the Russian language in the second half of the eighteenth century, influenced by the French word ‘classique’ (in turn borrowed from Latin) for the description of exemplary ancient writers, but it was not often encountered. In 1792, in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy, it was defined as follows: ‘Classical, adj. It is only said about those writers whose works are accepted for models worthy of imitation in educational establishments. Aristotle, Cicero, Titus Livius and others are classical writers.’10 But a little later, some local authors began to be called ‘classical’. Thus, in 1809, V. A. Zhukovsky mentioned ‘the works of old or long-known classical writers of ours’ and wrote in 1810: ‘Kantemir belongs to the few classical poets of Russia’.11 In 1819, N. I. Grech stipulated that the numerous examples he cited in the textbook from Russian literature did not represent ‘a pantheon of literature, in which all classical works are represented’.12 However, in the 1820s, in connection with the heated debate over Romanticism, which was opposed to Classicism, the words ‘classical’ and ‘classic’ become multivalued and to an extent returned to their original meaning. From then on, they were usually applied to writers who adhered in their orientation to ancient poetics (including local ones). For example, F. V. Bulgarin criticized the ‘French classical school’, referring to the drama of Racine, Corneille and other writers.13 In 1832, N. A Polevoy wrote that ‘Classical literature is generally speaking ancient literature, that is, Greek and Latin, as well as literature created according to falsely understood models of ancient literature, that is, French, which other nations have imitated.’14 More often than not, when the subject arose of those whom it was now customary to call Russian classics, the phrases of reference included ‘exemplary writers’ and ‘exemplary works’.15 It is typical that F. I. Buslaev – a professor at Moscow University (and future academician) – uses the term ‘classic’ with reference to antiquity, and ‘Russian exemplary writers’ when referring to Russian literature.16 After the reform of gymnasium education in 1871, which greatly increased the emphasis on studying classical languages (as will be discussed below), the word ‘classic’ was often used in the sense of ‘a teacher of classical languages.’ And only in the late nineteenth–early twentieth century did the words ‘classic’ and ‘classical’ – as applied to Russian writers – become fixed in the modern sense.17

42

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

The prehistory of the Russian classic The Russian classic did not coincide with the appearance of literature, but much later, since in order to make classic, a certain distance from the ‘beginning’ of literature is necessary. ‘Old’ writers should accumulate a symbolic authority. In addition, a group of ‘classic shapers’ must be formed, who will make efforts to create the classic. The first literary works began to be printed in Russia in the 1730s, and there were very few of them. We can speak about literature in Russia starting from the middle of the eighteenth century, and from the sociological point of view, from the last third of it, when the professionalization of literary work was beginning and the delineation of individual roles – a writer, a bookseller (simultaneously a publisher) or a journalist – had taken place and readership was growing. While literature was in service to the state, and writers were engaged in espousing the deeds of emperors and significant nobles, lyric poetry had very low status and the classic was not needed. Only with the autonomization of literature, with its separation from the state (a landmark here was Catherine II’s decree concerning independent printing houses in 1783, according to which individuals were allowed to set up print shops), literature began to have a need for self-regulation, in particular in the classic. However, there were few books and writers in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. The newspapers Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow Bulletin) and the Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (St Petersburg Bulletin) published advertisements regarding new editions, catalogues of booksellers and paid libraries were printed, plus active readers communicated among themselves, but in general the practice of reading was rather haphazard, many read anything that they got their hands on. Based on his analysis of book publishing, V. V. Sipovsky showed that in Russia ‘in the 18th century the novel was the most important literary genre, the most liked and popular’,18 but this genre and its authors had low prestige amongst leading writers and critics. In addition, in the eighteenth century there were no fundamental ideological and aesthetic divisions among writers (at least until the 1790s), and disputes tended to be about secondary issues, as these writers were classicists and recognized the authority of Aristotle, Horace and Boileau. The unifying principle was the rules, not the patterns. As in any literature, there was a need for a certain set of exemplary writers and works, but the role of writers of the classic was then played in Russia by writers from antiquity and French writers. It was customary to equate (in terms of high praise) the best local writers with the ancient and French: Sumarokov

The Making of the Russian Classic

43

was ‘the northern Racine’; Fonvizin, ‘the Russian Boileau’; Lomonosov, ‘the Russian Pindar’, and so on.19 The few local writers were mostly known to readers, and their reputation was formed mainly through the patronage of the court and patrons, as well as in reading circles and salons. Therefore, the first attempt to publish the history of Russian literature was written not in Russian, but in German. In 1768 the Leipzig journal Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste carried an anonymous article (by I. A. Dmitrevsky) entitled ‘A Report on Some Russian Writers’, which prompted the journalist and writer N. I. Novikov to publish a book entitled A Historical Glossary of Russian Writers in 1772, which contained information on more than 300 authors. Novikov stressed that ‘all the European nations made an effort to preserve the memory of their writers, for without this, the names of all the men who gloried their names in writing would have been lost’.20 The publication of this glossary shows that by this time there was a feeling that Russian literature had become rich enough and had its own traditions. From the late 1770s, literary criticism began to play a role in the formation of literary traditions and the ‘protoclassic’ model, but there were few literary journals at that time, and their audience was very small, and besides which, each of these journals did not survive for long (mostly one or two years) and did not manage to become well known. Mostly they were dominated by brief information about new books, but from time to time both the descriptions of writers’ oeuvres and reviews of their books appeared. The review genre was established in the 1770–1780s,21 but at the same time, individuals who systematically published literary criticism and reviews were almost non-existent. By the end of the century, the question of the need to have specifically Russian literature had already been raised, and a set of respected and revered (‘exemplary’) Russian writers was being formed, while a few writers appeared in the publications as authorities: A. D. Kantemir, M. V. Lomonosov, A. P. Sumarokov, M. M. Kheraskov, D. I. Fonvizin, V. I. Maikov, Y. B. Knyazhnin, I. F. Bogdanovich, V. A. Ozerov, I. A. Krylov, N. M. Karamzin, I. I. Khemnitser and V. P. Petrov. But this ‘protoclassic’ phase was mainly ‘intrashop’ – that is, it was shared amongst literary circles, because society as a whole did not read and did not appreciate Russian literature. At that time, it was important to raise the social prestige of literature as a whole, especially the national literature, so the main efforts of the literati and teachers of the Russian language were focused on this. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Karamzin stated that ‘We still have had so few true writers that they have not yet managed to provide us with samples in many genres, or to enrich words with subtle ideas; they have not

44

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

shown how to express some thoughts, even ordinary ones, pleasantly.’22 A few years later, Zhukovsky wrote about the same idea: ‘[W]e are not yet rich in excellent works; our literature has hardly begun to emerge from infancy; there are very few original Russian books (I am only speaking of good ones) . . .’23 In the early 1810s this view was echoed: ‘Our literature has not yet been formed, at least in some areas; our young writers do not yet have enough examples before them, they do not know what to avoid and what to follow.’24 In the last decade of the eighteenth century, sentimentalism was spreading in Russia, and debates about language were beginning. Karamzin’s language reform of the late eighteenth–early nineteenth century, in fact, questioned and made archaic previous literature, which was now difficult to format as classic, because it could not serve as a role model. With the growing popularity of Karamzin, the authority of classicists faded – they could not pretend to be exemplary. Although they continued to be regarded as very good writers, from the 1820s their books became less widely read. The polarization of the literary community began. A ‘Colloquy of the lovers of the Russian word’ (1815–18) was directed against the Karamzinists, and they in turn formed the literature society ‘Arzamas’ (1815–18), in opposition to the ‘Colloquy’. Moreover, from the last decades of the eighteenth century, low literature and low-level publishing developed in Russia, which were seen by representatives of ‘high’ literature as competitors in the struggle for readers.25 Given the situation in the 1810s, and especially after the war of 1812, which served as an impetus for the formation of a national ideology, the need for a domestic classic as a stabilizing factor was growing.

The first stage of the formation of the Russian classic Representatives of a narrow, highly educated stratum of the population of Russia (according to our estimates, its number from one period to another did not exceed several thousand people) dreamed that Russian national literature would become one with the literature of other European peoples. Imagining Russia as a young nation with a great future ahead of it, they regarded literature as a civilizing principle and as an expression of the national spirit. In 1819, A. F. Merzlyakov asserted, for example, that language and literature are ‘the immortal sign of the nation’s greatness, more important than countless triumphs and conquests. They bestow upon one holy glory in life and a voice that resounds for posterity after death from coffins and ruins. They are the main power of the

The Making of the Russian Classic

45

mind, the organ of science, the instrument of teaching and morals, the order and structure of a civil society, and the preaching of truth, light and God!’26 A quarter of a century later, A. V. Nikitenko similarly praised literature, calling it ‘an important force in society’ because it ‘acts through the word – and the word possesses great power, the power to complete a formation of a human being. Only literature makes possible the process and the full formation of thought in him – this final step toward the Kingdom of God, this solemn entry into the first rank among the creatures of the universe.’27 Putting such hopes on literature, representatives of this environment waited, tensely, for its flourishing in Russia. The same Merzlyakov had already written in 1813 that ‘Maybe some will say that our literature is still very poor and cannot meet all needs of the society; that criticism still lacks an abundant field for itself, hence it’s too early to engage in it. But is it true that we are so poor? Why offend ourselves?! We already have excellent writers in almost every kind of literature!’28 He then goes on to name Derzhavin, Lomonosov, Bogdanovich and Kheraskov. In fact, at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were several competing projects in the classic. They were: ●

●

●

the classicists, who had remained as an inheritance from the eighteenth century. A. S. Shishkov, whose views were largely shared by A. S. Sturdza, M. L. Magnitsky and others, who represented an aesthetic retrospectivism based not on classical antiquity or French classicism, but on the domestic archaic Church Slavic tradition (the Bible, Byzantine and Russian spiritual writers and so on). Occupying the post of Minister of Public Education, in 1824 Shishkov pointed out in one of the ministry orders that ‘the Slavic language, that is, the high language, and classical Russian literature must be introduced and encouraged everywhere’.29 the Karamzinists (Arzamasians), who demonstrated a somewhat compromised character.30 The Karamzinists had no domestic predecessors, so with the aim of self-legitimation they included in their ‘canon’ a number of old authorities whose classicist features were less distinctly expressed (the list of authors they respected included the likes of Karamzin, Dmitriev, Derzhavin, Khemnitser, Ozerov, Bogdanovich, Krylov and M. N. Muraviev). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Karamzinists made a lot of efforts to establish traditions for and the ‘canonization’ of a number of Russian writers. In 1801–2, a new edition appeared in Moscow with indicative name A Pantheon of Russian authors (four issues). Each issue

46

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

included five portraits with brief references by N. Karamzin on the faces depicted. Tellingly, they included mythical figures such as Boyan, and political figures, spiritual writers and scholars. From the realm of literature, there were only Simeon Polotsky, Theophan Prokopovich, Kantemir, V. K. Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, F. A. Emin, Maikov, N. N. Popovsky, M. I. Popov and I. S. Barkov. Special articles about revered writers now began to appear (mostly in magazines) written mainly by Karamzinists, such as ‘About Bogdanovich and his writings’ (1803) by Karamzin; ‘On the Fable and Fables of Krylov’ (1809) and ‘On the Satyr and Satyrs of Kantemir’ (1810) by Zhukovsky; ‘On the Life and Works of Ozerov’ (1817) and ‘Derzhavin’ (1816) by P. A. Vyazemsky; and ‘Letter to I.M. M[urav’ev]-A[postol]. On the writings of Mr. Muravyov’ (1814) and ‘Evening at Kantemir’ (1817) by K. N. Batiushkov. Some literature textbooks of the time included short essays on the history of Russian literature,31 but more importantly, they were accompanied by a large number of examples, taken from the works of famous Russian writers, who thus became very familiar to schoolchildren. In the same period, an attack began on a number of older authorities. A. F. Merzlyakov published an article in 1815 entitled ‘“Rossiyada”, an epic poem by Mr. Kheraskov’, which, along with a respectful discussion of the poem, contained some criticism, which caused a scandal. And in the same year, P. M. Stroyev wrote much more sharply: ‘Undoubtedly, Sumarokov was the only poet of his time, but who will now admire his writings? Meanwhile Sumarokov is considered an exemplary poet, worthy of our imitation’, and concerning Kheraskov’s ‘Rossiyada’ – one of the most famous books of the eighteenth century – he said, ‘it is a pity . . . that it cannot stand alongside works that immortalize the names of their authors. I think that few of us had the patience to read it.’32 In parallel, preparatory work on the creation of the classic was represented by the publication in the 1810s of multi-volume anthologies of the best works of Russian poetry and short prose, which were put together by writers who also acted as critics. In 1810–11, the Collection of Russian poems taken from the works of the best Russian poets and many Russian magazines published by Vasilii Zhukovsky began publication (in six parts, St Petersburg, 1810–15), which did not, however, limit itself to presenting only the best poems. This edition also advanced to process of canonization since not only were the poems of particular poets included, but also a portrait (one in each volume). In this publication, the portraits of Derzhavin, Lomonosov, Karamzin, Dmitriev, Kheraskov and

The Making of the Russian Classic

47

Bogdanovich were featured. Even more important was the publication in 1815– 17 of A collection of exemplary Russian works and translations in twelve volumes, edited by A. F. Voeikov, V. A. Zhukovsky and A. I. Turgenev (six volumes devoted to poetry, six to prose).33 This publication featured the portraits of Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Dmitriev, Krylov, Bogdanovich, Ozerov in the volumes devoted to poetry, and Metropolitan Platon (Lenshin), Kheraskov, Muravʹev, Karamzin, Kniazhnin and Fonvizin in the volumes devoted to prose. These anthologies, extremely popular at the time, were oriented towards the Karamzinist version of the classic,34 but due to their nature (a large number of works, the fear of sharply breaking with established notions, a commercial focus and, related to this, the need to please different tastes, and so on) they were quite eclectic and to a greater or lesser extent gave prominence to representatives of all aesthetic orientations. Therefore, although these factors played a role in the formation of the classic, the contribution of the critics in the next stage was of greater significance. In the 1820s, the desire to dominate in the present and sum up the development of literature in the past led to the emergence of literary magazines with departments of criticism and bibliographies and, accordingly, to the emergence of the literary critic and the reviewer. Such journals combined various general aesthetic ideas with new problematic literary phenomena. Here, in a free exchange of opinions about books and authors before the public, evaluations and interpretations were developed (and then assimilated by the public), and as a result, a hierarchy of both contemporary writers and authors of previous generations came into being. Since the mid-1810s, overviews of the books of the year had been published in journals and almanacs,35 and in the early 1820s, a system of reviewing new works developed. However, at that time there were few reviews, their place in the journal was not clearly defined, and in form they were represented by a literarycritical article, a reader’s letter, information concerning the publication and the content of the book. In fact, criticism hit its stride from the mid-1820s, when the circulation of magazines increased substantially (from 300–500 copies to several thousand). Several journals with permanent departments of review and criticism came into existence, which facilitated the evaluation and interpretation of books, and provided space for discussion of relevant issues. A distinctive group holding literary opinions was also formed – professional critics/journalists (as a rule, they also worked as writers). The emergence of journalism and literary criticism, the growth in the number of readers, and attempts to create the classic were closely interrelated and testified

48

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

that the process of autonomization and professionalization of the literary sphere had begun. Most of the leading critics of the 1820s and 1830s (N. A. Polevoy, K. A. Polevoy, F. V. Bulgarin, N. I. Nadezhdin, O. I. Senkovsky, N. I. Grech, O. M. Somov, V. S. Mezhevich) were somewhat socially marginalized. They were professional writers and thus already had a low status in Russian society, but in addition, some of them were not noblemen, some were not Russian and some did not possess a position of rank. In England in the eighteenth century, critics could raise their social status thanks to their success in salons,36 but in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, the status of literature itself was not high; one could sometimes promote oneself through literary works (as, for example, was the case with M. N. Zagoskin and N. V. Kukolnik), but not through criticism. However, criticism allowed a person to raise their status within the literary system itself – through control of the literary field. The ability to clearly express their thoughts, their knowledge of older works of national literature and the ability to rely on this to assess contemporary works gained cultural capital, through which critics could not only earn money, but also gain respect in the literary environment and with reading audiences. Therefore, these critics were interested in the formation of the national classic, which was an important resource for them in the struggle for recognition. With the emergence of criticism, the old ‘exemplary’ writers were largely confined to the sphere of education, but most of them were ‘cancelled out’ by modern journalism. Moreover, with the spread of Romanticism, the very idea of absolute authorities, the need to follow rules and orientation toward patterns became archaic – a genius sets rules for himself. Compare this with N.A. Polevoy: ‘it is not for the poet to ask the writers of poetry textbooks whether it is allowed to do this or that! His imagination flies without consulting poetry textbooks: if he falls, then celebrate the victory of school rules; if, however, his flight is astounding, if it enchants heart and soul, then let us enjoy the new triumph of the human mind.’37 At the same time, the ideas of historicism and nationality still penetrated literature, and a need arose to build a genealogy of Russian literature. There are works in which an attempt is made to give this type of review. In 1822, An Attempt at a Short History of Russian Literature by Nikolai Grech was published, representing the fourth part of his Textbook on Russian literature, but also published in a separate edition. Biographical references about writers are given prominence, and the book indeed resembled a biographical dictionary, but there were, nevertheless, elements of generalization: periods were singled out, the

The Making of the Russian Classic

49

development of literature was noted as being dependent on the system of education, and so on. At the end of that same year, 1822, the almanac The Polar Star for 1823 featured an article by A. A. Bestuzhev entitled ‘A Look at the Old and New Literature in Russia’, in which certain trends in the development of literature were listed, plus an evaluation of writers. A decade later, Polevoy’s articles on Derzhavin, Zhukovsky and Pushkin (1832–3) appeared, as did V. T. Plaksin’s ‘Guide to the Knowledge of the History of Literature’ (1833), and a long article on ‘Literary Dreams’ (1834) by V. G. Belinsky in the newspaper Rumor, in which the revision of the literary hierarchy is dealt with.

The literary authorities of magazine reviewers In order to trace the formation of the classic in detail, I have utilized further the research that B. V. Dubin and I carried out together.38 This research aimed to trace the structure and dynamics of the literary authorities of reviewers, using for this purpose a specific guide – mentions in journal reviews of a new literary work published in a separate edition, the names of those authors with whom the peer-reviewed writer is somehow compared in the reviews of Moscow and St Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad) literary magazines that were published not more than three times a month over a two-year period with a twenty-year interval, from 1820–1 to 1900–1. A similar comparison is demonstrated by the juxtaposition of the two components. When evaluating a new work, the reviewer refers to names that are for him important, demonstrating and thereby reinforcing the importance of his own judgement. However, the reviewer’s assessment can only be evaluated in any meaningful way when the potential points of view of other participants in the literary field are taken into account. After all, if the writers classified by the critic as authoritative are unknown to the readers, or they radically disagree with his assessment, there is no sense in referring to them. Therefore, one can consider the reference to a significant name as a symbol of other roles (publisher, writer, reader) or other groups of participants in the literary process (associates, partners, competitors, etc.) that are relevant to the reviewer. The boundaries of the significance of the writer can be determined in such a case by measuring the symbolic potential of the indicated name – their place in the hierarchy, according to the number of references. Correlation with already existing phenomena forms a stable construction of literary assessments and self-assessments, group and individual creative

50

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

programmes, that is, an effective cultural form that underlies almost any interaction within the social institution of literature. Accordingly, the set of classical writers should not be very large, relatively constant and clearly separated from other writers, since it should allow us to correlate and unite the growing diversity of meanings and patterns, to serve as a means of translating them into each other, that is, a way to separate ‘good’ literature from ‘bad’ literature, and separate literature from non-literature. The analysis of the data from the first measurement (1820–1) showed that the necessity to justify a literary evaluation with reference to authority was already very strong (the saturation of reviews by references is the highest out of all the years surveyed), but the set of significant names is fairly homogeneous: they are mentioned, when this is with a positive evaluation, only as representatives of the ‘real’ literature of the past. There are no upper figures of literary authority, as there is no disqualification of a particular sample (for each-two year period, the order of the writers listed was determined by the number of references they received in literary magazines): I. Dmitriev – 9; K. Batiushkov – 7; V. Zhukovsky – 7; I. Krylov – 6; I. Bogdanovich, G. Derzhavin and M. Lomonosov – 3. It is interesting to note that the leaders mentioned over this period never subsequently entered the leading group. Later, the structure of the literary authorities of reviewers underwent cardinal changes, which indicates that in this period, the classic was not yet properly formed. But even in this list, the number of classicists is minimal, and they do not occupy the top places. The following is a typical passage by N. A. Polevoy in 1829, showing that the authorities of the era of Classicism meant nothing to him: There were examples in our literature and those of other nations of literary fame that seemed to be enormous, that amazed contemporaries, but also the fame that seemed instant, transient, which for not too distant generations became a matter of jokes or a funny example. Let us recall the Frenchmen Ronsard, or our Sumarokov and Kheraskov. Didn’t they write about Sumarokov that he was Russian Racine, that he had surpassed Lafontaine in fables? Wasn’t Kheraskov called Omir? And where is now our Racine, and our Omir?39

Even Karamzin is important only for his time: he ‘can no longer be the model of a poet, novelist, or even a prose writer of Russia’.40 In the 1830s, only a few authors of the previous era entered the list of literary authorities, and (with the exception of Lomonosov and Derzhavin) they do not represent the leading genres of Russian Classicism – the ode and epic. In Plaksin’s book of 1833, noted earlier, the list of the key figures is as follows: Lomonosov,

The Making of the Russian Classic

51

Derzhavin, Bogdanovic, Karamzin, Fonvizin, Kniazhnin, Khemnitser, Krylov, Ozerov, Zhukovsky, Batiushkov, Griboedov and Pushkin. The following year, Belinsky offered a similar list of esteemed contemporaries: Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Bogdanovich, Kheraskov, Petrov, Karamzin, Dmitriev, Khemnitser, Krylov, Ozerov, Batiushkov, Zhukovsky, Griboedov, Pushkin, Baratynsky et al.,41 and having examined them, came to the conclusion that, by and large, in Russian literature one can only speak about four writers: Derzhavin, Pushkin, Krylov and Griboedov.42 In 1835, he wrote: How many of the most prominent authorities in literature have fallen from 1825 to 1835? Now even the gods of this decade, one by one, are losing place on their altars and perishing in Lethe, as a consequence of the gradual spread of the true aesthetic ideas, and familiarity with foreign literature. Trediakovsky, Popovsky, Sumarokov, Kheraskov, Petrov, Bogdanovic, Bobrov, Kapnist, Voeikov, Katenin, Lobanov, Viskovatov, Kriukovsky, S.N. Glinka, Bunina, the brothers Izmailov, V. Pushkin, Maikov, Shalikov – all these people were not only read and admired, but even revered as poets. More than that, some of them were known as geniuses of the first rank, such as Sumarokov, Kheraskov, Petrov and Bogdanovich. Others were then awarded an honorary but now meaningless title of exemplary writers. Now – alas! – the names of some of them are known only by the legends about their existence, others only because they are still alive as people, not as poets.43

This opinion was widespread. The writer and critic N. A. Melgunov, the principal opponent of Belinsky’s critical views, also wrote about the ‘decline of the literary authority’ in Russia and that ‘when the gods of our poor literary Olympus were still alive, a handful of the brave [i.e. modern critics] boldly drove them from their empyrean dwelling and forced them to descend to the earth’.44 In the analysis of the reviews of the years 1840–1, we recorded a fundamentally different picture (in comparison with the 1820s): the set of the most frequently mentioned writers had completely changed, with A. S. Pushkin occupying first place: Pushkin – 28; G. Derzhavin, A. Orlov and A. Sumarokov – 8; N. Karamzin and M. Komarov – 7; Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, N. Gogol and M. Lomonosov – 6. The writers for the lower estates, A. Orlov and M. Komarov, are on the list as antiauthorities, or negative examples for comparison, but Sumarokov and Derzhavin were also often mentioned for ironic or negative assessments. This period was marked by a significant variety of literary attitudes, demonstrating the breadth of coexisting tastes and programmes. N. Polevoi wrote in 1842:

52

Publishing in Tsarist Russia As regards literature and knowledge, the present time is sad and desolate. True, we completely destroyed the old, limited, and incorrect aesthetic theory and the previous tribunal of counterfeit literary criticism, but did we establish a new, more legitimate one? Did we establish a new, more correct, theory? Not at all. Now we have ten autocratic courts, each one contradicting another, which replaced the single one we used to have. Each of these courts writes its own rules, publishes its own decrees, destroys them, then publishes new ones, to which others do not listen. If one were to capture the present state of our theory and literary criticism in one word, then the most correct word for this would be: anarchy.45

The creation of the classic was to change this situation, by introducing a structured beginning and providing a basis for the evaluation of new literary phenomena. The most important role in the formation of the classic was played by Belinsky’s articles, which in the 1840s summed up the disputes of the 1820s–1830s and elaborated a conceptual interpretation of the history of Russian literature. Selecting writers on the criteria of ‘nationality’ and ‘loyalty to reality’, he singled out Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Fonvizin, Krylov, Karamzin, Griboedov, Batiushkov, Zhukovsky and Pushkin from the literature of the past. However, it was not Russian literature’s past that was important for him, but its future, thus he focused on the ‘ranking’ of modern literature, singling out those writers who were (to a large extent under his influence) later introduced into the corps of the classic: Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky and Herzen. It is striking that Belinsky’s influence also effectively barred ‘unrealistic’ tendencies from inclusion in classical literature. For example, writers of fantastical stories and novels, such as V. F. Odoevsky, O. I. Senkovsky, A. F. Veltman or N. D. Akhsharumov (the author of Citizens of the Forest (1867), which anticipated both the plot and value conflict of Orwell’s Animal Farm by some eighty years), were not selected. The formation of the classical canon was also influenced by the series The Complete Works of Russian Authors (1846–55), published by A. F. Smirdin. In this collection, which had no equivalent in Russian publishing either earlier or later, the works of more than thirty writers were included: A. O. Ablesimov, K. N. Batiushkov, I. F. Bogdanovich, D. V. Venevitinov, N. I. Gnedich, N. I. Grech, A. S. Griboedov, D. V. Davydov, G. R. Derzhavin, I. M. Dolgoruky, Catherine II, A. E. Izmailov, A. D. Kantemir, V. V. Kapnist, N. M. Karamzin, Y. A. B. Kniazhnin, I. I. Kozlov, E. I. Kostrov, M. V. Kriukovsky, N. V. Kukol’nik, M. Iu. Lermontov, M. V. Lomonosov, M. V. Milonov, M. N. Murav’ev, A. N. Nakhimov, V. A. Ozerov, A. Pogorel’sky (A. A. Perovsky), V. L. Pushkin, N. R. Sudovshchikov, V. K. Trediakovsky,

The Making of the Russian Classic

53

D. I. Fonvizin and I. I. Khemnitser. Of living authors, only Batiushkov, who had written nothing for a long time, as well as Grech and Kukol’nik were included. The series, as well as its discussion in criticism, contributed both to the assimilation of the idea of Russian classic by the public, and to the formation of the classics’ corps. It should be noted that the books of several authors (for example, Pushkin and Gogol) could not be released in this series because Smirdin was unable to acquire the copyright to them. Again, the situation was to change radically. According to our research, in 1860–1 the notions of domestic literary authorities were already highly coordinated: the number of them as a whole was small, but the frequency of the mentions of each was much higher than for all other measurements: I. Turgenev – 26; A. Pushkin – 25; N. Gogol – 23; I. Goncharov – 20; A. Pisemsky – 15; M. Lermontov – 14; A. Kol’tsov – 13; N. Nekrasov – 11; A. Ostrovsky – 8; A. Maikov, A. Fet and N. Shchedrin – 7; A. Griboedov and L. May – 6. As we can see, contemporaries prevailed in the references – only Pushkin, Griboedov, Gogol and Lermontov were writers from the past. But almost all the authors mentioned entered the corps of Russian classics in the future. Almost all of them would also be honoured in due time by Belinsky’s approval. From the 1860s, the basic structure of reviewers’ orientations remained constant. Most domestic authors, were in the ‘older’ age category: classics and ‘candidates’ in the classics. Those attracting the greatest number of mentions tended not to change, and were not replaced by other contemporaries. It was during this period that the essential features of Russian literary culture were most clearly defined and expressed. The form of national literature established at this time would ultimately serve as the standard for the evaluation of contemporary literature. In 1880–1, the main body of authorities comprised authors who had been significant in the previous period, with the respective mentions as follows: N. Gogol – 16; I. Turgenev – 14; F. Dostoevsky – 12; L. Tolstoy – 11; G. Uspensky – 9; I. Goncharov – 8; N. Shchedrin – 6; N. Nekrasov, A. Ostrovsky, A. Pisemsky and A. Pushkin – 5. The period 1900–1 might be regarded to be the one when Russian literature exhibited its most pronounced classicalist orientation. For the reviewers of this era, the normative composition of highly significant Russian literature of the past is securely established, with the respective mentions distributed as follows: L. Tolstoy – 20; F. Dostoevsky and A. Pushkin – 12; M. Lermontov and N. Nekrasov – 11; I. Turgenev – 10; N. Gogol and A. Fet – 7; P. Boborykin and A. K. Tolstoy – 6; S. Nadson and G. Uspensky – 5.

54

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

As can be seen, the body of the Russian classic was formed by the 1860s and since then has not undergone any significant changes.

The authorities of compilers of educational readers Analysis of criticism, and description of changes in the composition of the corps of literary authorities, gives us an awareness of the development of a set of classics and the modification that occurs over time. But for the creation of the classic it is also important to familiarize readers – initially the younger generation – with the classic, using a model developed by experts/critics. We can gain an insight into this process and the resulting image of the classic by accessing another empirical study – in this case, an analysis of the composition of school readers (chrestomathies) carried out by a group of Tartu researchers as part a project entitled ‘The Formation of the Russian Literary Canon’. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian literature was not taught in gymnasiums as a separate subject (there was only rhetoric), but was part of the curricula of some educational institutions.46 In the 1810s, it began to be taught in some gymnasiums (in St Petersburg in 1811 and in a few commercial gymnasiums in Odessa and Taganrog, for example). The charter of the gymnasiums only formally introduced the teaching of Russian literature in 1828, and it was not until in 1832 that a single curriculum was approved for all gymnasiums, which included a ‘Course of Russian Literature’.47 After that, many textbooks on the history of Russian literature48 and readers for students were published, which played an important role in producing an agreed view of the past of Russian literature and its classic. In the twenty-year period from 1829, fourteen Russian-language anthologies of Russian literature appeared, some of which ran into second editions, and the most popular of them, The Russian Chrestomathy for Children by A. D. Galakhov, first published in 1843, had four editions. This was a powerful channel for popularizing Russian literature and shaping the notion of its ‘gold fund’. Particularly important was the Complete Russian Chrestomathy, again published in 1843 by Galakhov,49 which was subsequently revised and reissued in total of forty editions up to 1918. Texts from the eighteenth century did not feature prominently in this textbook, much of the space being devoted to the works of contemporary writers. An analysis of the eight most popular anthologies of the first half of the nineteenth century reveals that they include the works of more than 200 authors,

The Making of the Russian Classic

55

but some writers feature more often than others. All eight books include the works of K. N. Batiushkov, P. A. Viazemsky, F. N. Glinka, A. A. Del’vig, G. R. Derzhavin, I. I. Dmitriev, V. A. Zhukovsky, N. M. Karamzin, I. A. Krylov, M. V. Lomonosov, A. F. Merzliakov, A. S. Pushkin, while seven of them also feature E. A. Baratynsky, A. F. Voeikov, N. I. Gnedich, I. I. Khemnitser and N. M. Iazykov. It is significant that only three of these most popular authors (Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Dmitriev) had received recognition as early as the eighteenth century.50 Interestingly, not one single text is found in all the surveyed readers, indicating that the canon had not yet taken its final form. It is also revealing that ‘most of the works found in various readers of the 1820s–1840s were no longer reprinted in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the names of their authors (such as, for example, S. S. Bobrov, A. I. Turgenev, D. I. Khvostov, P. I. Shalikov, A. S. Shishkov, S. A. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, V. L. Pushkin and others, as well as the authors of numerous speeches, eulogies, and sermons) fell out of the textbook knowledge forever and became known only to writers and specialists’.51 But by 1843 (when the first edition of Galakhov’s anthology was published) a set of authors had been formed, which henceforth found their place in every textbook: K. N. Batiushkov, P. A. Viazemsky, F. N. Glinka, A. A. Delvig, G. R. Derzhavin, I. I. Dmitriev, V. A. Zhukovsky, N. M. Karamzin, I. A. Krylov, M. V. Lomonosov, A. F. Merzliakov and A. S. Pushkin. Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Dmitriev were the authors who appeared most frequently in the readers published in these years, and in the second third of the nineteenth century they were joined by Zhukovsky, Batiushkov, Pushkin, Baratynsky and Gnedich.52 The formation of a sufficiently stable, ‘nuclear’ set of authors and works, gradually supplemented and passed from one reader to another, was accomplished only in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was due to a number of factors: first, the gradual formation of a general idea of the classics, the luminaries of literature and their programmatic works; second, the emergence of curricula containing recommended lists of works (partly formed on the basis of older readers); and third, the reform of the school system, which resulted in a significant increase in the publication of educational and pedagogical literature, with the compilers of new readers being guided to a greater extent than previously by already published readers.53 Overall, this research is in accord with our own findings – the formation of a stable body of authoritative writers by the end of the 1840s, which was, in our view, largely the result of Belinsky’s activities.

56

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Normative consolidation of the classic corps As demonstrated, critics and compilers of educational readers laid the foundation for the creation of the classic, but this was not the end of the process. A further stage was necessary – the normative consolidation of its corps, and the differentiation of classics from non-classics. These tasks were assisted by the educational programmes developed in the early 1850s by teachers of literature in secondary schools. It is curious that this was initiated not within the general education system, which was under the control of the Ministry of Public Education, but in the autonomous system of military schools, run by the liberalminded Y. I. Rostovtsev (who had had poems published in his youth). There, for the first time, a course on the study of the Russian language and Russian literature was developed by two recognized specialists: Professor F. I. Buslaev of Moscow University, who had experience teaching in the gymnasiums; and A. D. Galakhov, an experienced teacher and historian of literature. The course designers wrote that as part of their education, students should ‘become acquainted only with well-known writers, and as for other writers, closer to our time, then only with those works that can serve as models to this day’.54 Hence this programme, so essential to the final shape of the Russian classic, would conclude with Lermontov and Gogol and feature the most important figures in Russian literature: Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, Krylov, Zhukovsky and Pushkin (the only writers whose biographies were studied). The main role in the creation of this literary programme department was played Galakhov (Buslaev developed the part concerning language), who was a fan of Belinsky and a literary critic and writer for Otechestvennye zapiski (Fatherland Notes) and later for Sovremennik (Contemporary), where the main critic was Belinsky himself. A. Vdovin and R. Leibov believe that: . . . with the activities of the Ministry of State Property, the General Staff (where Y. Rostovtsev served), and the Naval Ministry are connected major modernization processes, the architects and driving force of which were liberal bureaucrats. Their implicit ideology in the 1840s–1850s suggests a systematic study of all aspects of the life of the empire (cataloging, censuses, etc.), the overcoming of the technological backwardness of the country in various fields (with a focus on European models), and the standardization of legislation and of the methods of rule. The task of making military education more liberal and humanistic, which was led by Y.I. Rostovtsev and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, demanded close cooperation of officials with literary pedagogues and university professors. The close contacts of Galakhov and Buslaev with liberal bureaucracy

The Making of the Russian Classic

57

and the creation of the first literature curriculum thus seem to be entirely predictable.55

In our opinion, liberal bureaucrats only created the conditions for the unification of training and, thus, the crystallization of the classic, while the main driving force behind the development of the programme for teaching Russian literature, and soon the creation of its model and the gymnasium course, were teachers and critics (Galakhov, by the way, combined both these roles). The classical corps presented in the programme reflected the already established cultural hierarchy, moulded to a large extent by the influence of criticism and now cemented in place. It is significant that on the Millennium of Russia monument, erected in Veliky Novgorod in 1862 to mark the millennium of the establishment of the Russian state by Rurik, one of the friezes depicts the writers M. Lomonosov, D. Fonvizin, G. Derzhavin, N. Karamzin, I. Krylov, V. Zhukovsky, N. Gnedich, A. Griboedov, M. Lermontov, A. Pushkin and N. Gogol. We can assume that this is an officially approved list of the leading classical authors, which ends, like the school programme, with Pushkin and Gogol. The formation of the Russian classic was completed by gymnasium teachers, though not forgetting the contributions of Belinsky, A. Grigoriev and other leading critics. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the number of gymnasiums grew rapidly, pedagogical journals appeared and teacher conferences began to be held. Self-awareness among teachers as a specific group responsible for the education and upbringing of the younger generation also began to form.56 At the same time, great attention was paid to the teaching of Russian literature as a means of making learning less formal and scholastic. After a period of diversity in the approach to teaching literature, in the 1860s the Ministry of Public Education began to standardize the courses taught. Teachers of Russian language and literature, striving to raise the prestige of their discipline and, thereby, their own status, published texts emphasizing the importance of studying literature. The subject was seen as a means of mental, aesthetic and moral education.57 Although as a result of the reform of gymnasium education carried out by Minister of Education D. A. Tolstoy in 1871, a new type of classical gymnasium was introduced in which the focus was on the teaching of Latin and Greek to the exclusion of natural science and a reduction of the time devoted to the study of the Russian language and literature, a standardized programme was introduced which incorporated the teaching of the history of Russian literature on a university course model. This development raised the status of the discipline,

58

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

equating it with mathematics, history and geography (it was previously been considered primarily as a means of learning the language and teaching the ability to express one’s thoughts in writing).58 The programmes of 1871 and 1877 in Russian language and literature devoted much space to folklore and medieval literature, but the material studied ended in the 1840s (Lermontov and Gogol). In 1879, A. D. Galakhov’s textbook for secondary schools, The History of Russian Literature, appeared, which would become very popular and be republished many times. A special series of books of classics were also created for students, containing notes and articles, including Classroom Library (1869–81), Russian Classroom Library (1884–1915), edited by A. N. Chudinov, and Classroom Library (1913–15) by I. M. Grinzer. In order to compete with the study of ancient Greek and Latin in schools, teachers strove to raise the status of Russian literature and made every effort to glorify the domestic classic. This emphasis on the values of Russian culture was very much in harmony with the ideological ‘patriotic’ programme of the reign of Alexander III. Classic writers during this period ‘joined the pantheon of the Russian national heroes with generals, tsars, and church fathers’.59 The change in attitude by the authorities towards classic writers also had a positive impact. While previously the state had been cautious, and in many respects negative, towards writers, now, after some hesitation but having realized the significance and influence of literature, government organizations decided to co-opt the classics, taking part in commemorative events and using this literary creativity to their advantage (as a loyal power, patriotic and full of Christian values). The usefulness of Russian classics in this respect was emphasized by teachers themselves. F. I. Buslaev wrote in 1866: The question of teaching the native language in our schools is closely connected with the question of Russian nationality and of centralization and separatism, which are topics that especially interest the journalism of our time . . . The dominant state language lawfully and firmly prevails over the local languages of the regions not because all the gymnasium subjects are taught in it, but because the very literature in this language [is] necessary to know by all educated people. . . . Any Russian language program, whether it be for real or classical gymnasiums, should declare full honoring of the Russian nationality in the person of its best writers.60

In this sphere the authorities did a lot to promote the Russian language and the Russian classic on its ‘national borders’, in particular in Poland and the Baltic provinces. For example, many textbooks on Russian literature were designed for

The Making of the Russian Classic

59

local students.61 Yet, while many translated books were published in Russia, the literary works of other non-Russian peoples of the empire (for example, Georgian and Armenian) tended not to be translated (An exception was translations from Polish, but only part of Poland was in the Russian Empire, and Polish literature was perceived as foreign.) Armenian poets and prose writers began to be translated in Russia only from the end of the nineteenth century, and translations from Georgian of the masterpiece by Shota Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, appeared in Polish and German in the second half of the nineteenth century and in English in 1912, but a full Russian translation was only published in 1933.

Ways to maintain the prestige of the classic In addition to creating a classics corps, it was necessary to have a means to maintain it (that is, a mechanism of memory). The main role here was played by secondary and primary schools, the number of which grew rapidly in the last third of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, especially in rural areas. As the level of literacy among the population increased rapidly and the number of those who received at least primary education rose, some of them became readers and to some extent became acquainted with the classics and with their authors. This was facilitated, from the 1870s, by the publication of classical books by various charitable organizations (such as the St Petersburg Literacy Committee, the Moscow Literacy Committee, etc.), while what we might call the publisher-enlighteners printed numerous cheap editions of books by classic authors.62 To this list might be added the numerous articles on classical writers, along with their portraits, that appeared in illustrated magazines and cheap mass-circulation newspapers.63 Preservation of the memory of the classics was also facilitated by celebrations of the anniversaries of writers, the installation of monuments, the creation of memorial museums, the republishing of works and especially the collected works of writers, to say nothing of the reproduction of the portraits of classic Russian writers on school notebooks and candy wrappers. In Russia, the first monuments were built by to M. V. Lomonosov in Arkhangelsk (1832), N. M. Karamzin in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) (1845), and G. R. Derzhavin in Kazan (1847). In 1855 a monument to I. A. Krylov was unveiled in St. Petersburg, and in Voronezh in 1868 a monument was dedicated to A. V. Koltsov. But most of the monuments in the pre-revolutionary period were established in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early part

60

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

of the twentieth century. The opening of the monument to A. S. Pushkin, held in Moscow in 1880, was a major public event, followed by monuments in St Petersburg (1884), Tsarskoe Selo (1900), Tula (1901), Vologda (1904) and elsewhere. Notable monuments included those to Zhukovsky in Petersburg (1887); to Lermontov in Pyatigorsk (1889 and 1915), Penza (1892) and Petersburg (1896 and 1916); and to Gogol in Nezhyn (1881), Petersburg (1896), MogilevPodolsky (1898), Moscow and Kharkov (1909), Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd) and the village of Bolshie Sorochintsy (1910). Krylov was the first writer to have his birthday celebrated by the state, in 1839, and a similar practice was adopted with the Pushkin holiday of 1880, developing in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century into regular celebrations marking both the birthday of writers and the anniversary of their death.64 Lermontov’s death was marked in 1881 (40th anniversary), 1891 (50th) and 1901 (60th), while the centenary of his birth was commemorated in 1914. The 50th anniversary of the publication of Gogol’s The Government Inspector was celebrated in 1886, while the 50th anniversary of the author’s death was marked in 1902 and the centenary of his birth marked in 1909. In 1916, the centenary of the death of Derzhavin was remembered.65 Also essential was the publication of biographies of classics writers as separate books66 and the issue of complete collections of their works. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, complete collections of works of classics were published by members of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences or well-known historians of literature, including by G. R. Derzhavin (1864–83), M. V. Lomonosov (1891–1902), N. V. Gogol (1889–96), I. A. Krylov (1904–5), A. N. Ostrovsky (1904–9), A. V. Koltsov (1909), A. S. Griboedov (1911–17), E. A. Baratynsky (1915), M. Iu. Lermontov (1916) and N. M. Karamzin (1917). It is interesting that the official (state) censorship did not interfere in either the formation of the classics or the maintenance of the classical canon. Instead, internal censorship by literary critics and scholars played an important role. In an attempt to criticize authors who had already become part of the canon, both the editorial boards of periodicals and the pedagogical community tried every means to stop them. It was only at moments of increased social and ideological tension in the country (such as in the 1860s) that these censorship norms became weak and publications appeared that contained harsh attacks on classical authors. D. I. Pisarev, for example, wrote in 1865: ‘We hope to prove to our society that old literary idols are falling apart from their disrepair when facing severe criticism for the first time.’ He argued that Pushkin was ‘a frivolous versifier, entangled in

The Making of the Russian Classic

61

trifling prejudices, immersed in contemplation of insignificant personal feelings, and completely incapable of analysing and understanding the major social and philosophical problems of our age’. Another radical critic, V. A. Zaitsev, stated in 1863 in a review of the reprinting of Lermontov’s works that this author had ‘many absurdities’ and ‘the main works reveal . . . inconsistency of ideas and images . . . [and] pettiness of content’. The almanac of the Futurists, A slap in the face of public taste, published in 1912, claiming that ‘the Academy and Pushkin are more incomprehensible than hieroglyphs’ and that they need to ‘throw away Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on from the Steamship of Modernity’. However, such arguments were rare and did not have a significant impact on society or ultimately affect the composition of the classical canon.

Conclusion As has been demonstrated, the creation of the Russian classic was a long and complex process. Literature is a social institution (like the state, religion, etc.). In any institution, sociologists distinguish social roles, the interaction of which ensures the functioning of the social institution. In literature, these are the writer, publisher, bookseller, literary critic, literature teacher, reader, and so on. In this chapter I have attempted to show how the classic was created by the interaction of critics, teachers and others. At the start (in the eighteenth century), the classic was confined to ancient Greek and Roman and contemporary French writers, but when in the late eighteenth–early nineteenth century, literature became autonomous from the state, a need arose for the national classic, and the classics canon gradually began to form as a result of articles, reviews and literary circle discussions. This process was significantly modified by the newly fashionable influence of Sentimentalism and then (during the period of 1820–30) was undermined by Romanticism, which rejected the classical heritage as false and lacking artistic value, and generally denied the need for the existence of the classic. In these years, through the disputes of critics in the magazines and journals (Polevoy, Bulgarin, Nadezhdin, Senkovsky, Shevyrev, etc.), a set of the most authoritative writers was gradually formed. In the 1840s, this was mostly popularized by Belinsky. A list prepared by critics (concluding with Lermontov and Gogol) was laid out by teachers as the basis for textbooks and then the curricula of secondary schools, which became the basis for learning in the second half of the nineteenth

62

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

century. For much of the nineteenth century the Russian state had been wary of Russian literature, but with the growth in its popularity, the state began to make efforts to use literature for their own purposes – in effect as another pillar of the regime. In addition to its introduction into the curricula, this was facilitated by the installation of monuments, the celebration of anniversaries and so on. The intelligentsia also made considerable efforts to popularize the classics, publishing cheap books of classics in large editions, arranging public readings and in propagating them in magazines and newspapers designed for the masses. The effort of various social forces enabled the Russian classic to become known to a significant part of the country’s population and gave it great authority as a source of wisdom, moral values and so on. After the writers of the second half of the nineteenth century (Turgenev, Goncharov, Ostrovsky, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy) were included in the gymnasium programme in 1905, the process of creating the classic, which lasted almost a century, in effect ended: not only was the corps of the classics formed, but, most importantly, the idea was now rooted in society that literary classics are the quintessence of national wisdom, one of the foundations of Russian identity. Following this, the set of classics changed very slowly and very little. The state and the state school system sought to preserve it, and the opposition forces (both political and cultural) supported it both before the Revolution and throughout the existence of the USSR. The call of the Futurists in 1912 to ‘throw the classics from the Steamship of Modernity’ found no support, nor did attempts in the 1920s to build a purely proletarian culture, completely divorced from Russia’s cultural heritage. The call to ‘learn from the classics’ ultimately prevailed. In the future, discussion of this subject might concern conflicting interpretations of classical works, but their essential composition would not change. During the Soviet and post-Soviet period, the key figures of the classics remained, secondary ones left and few were later added, but these changes were not of a fundamental nature.67 There have been no attempts to create an alternative or parallel canon.

Notes 1

Jeffrey Brooks, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics’, in I. Banac, J. G. Ackerman and R. Szporluk (eds), Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich, pp. 315–34 (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1981); Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1989); Paul

The Making of the Russian Classic

2

3 4

5 6

7

8

9 10 11 12

13

63

Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Stephen Moeller-Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife: The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press., 2002); Andrea Lanu, ‘Formirovanie kanona russkogo romantizma’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 51 (2001): 35–67; A. Vdovin and R. Leibov (eds), Acta Slavica Estonica IV: Khrestomatiinye teksty: russkaia pedagogicheskaia praktika XIX v. i poeticheskii literaturnyi kanon (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2013); A. Vdovin and R. Leibov, ‘Pushkin, v shkole: curriculum i literaturnyi kanon v XIX veke’, Lotmanovskii sbornik (2014): 249–61. See, e.g., V. B. Kataev, Igra v oskolki: Sud’by russkoi klassiki v ehpohu postmodernizma (Moscow : Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 2002); V. E. Halizev, Tsennostnye orientacii russkoi klassiki (Moscow: Gnosis, 2005); E. D. Tolstaia, Igra v klassiki: russkaia proza XIX–XX vekov (Moscow : Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017). Literaturnaia ehnciklopediia terminov i ponyatii (Moscow : Intelvak, 2001), p. 362. See, e.g., J. F. Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York: Viking Press, 1975); J. Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone Press, 1991); J. Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Th. D’Haen, D. Damrosch and L. Papadima (eds), The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). L. D. Gudkov, B. V. Dubin and V. Strada, Literatura i obshchestvo: Vvedenie v sotsiologiiu literatury (Moscow : In-t evropeiskikh kul’tur RGGU, 1998), p. 38. B. V. Dubin, N. A. Zorkaya, ‘Ideia “klassiki” i ee social’nye funkcii’, in B. V. Dubin, Ocherki po sociologii‘ kul’tury, p. 204 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017). Ia. Mukarzhovskii, ‘Esteticheskaia funksiia, norma i tsennost’ kak sotsial’nye fakty’, in Ia. Mukarzhovskii, Issledovaniia po estetike i teorii iskusstva, p. 116 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994). B. V. Dubin, ‘Slovesnost’ klassicheskaia i massovaia: literatura kak ideologiia i literatura kak tsivilizatsiia’, in B. V. Dubin, Ocherki po sotsiologii kul’tury, pp. 328–9 (Moscow : Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017). Regarding this, see Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature, pp. 223–30. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1792), part 3, p. 591. V. A. Zhukovskii – kritik (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1985), pp. 74, 85. N. I. Grech, Uchebnaia kniga rossijskoi slovesnosti, ili Izbrannie mesta iz russkih sochinenii i perevodov v stihah i proze s prisovokupleniem kratkih pravil ritoriki i piitiki i istorii rossijskoi slovesnosti (St Petersburg: n.p., 1830 (1819)), part 1, p. v. A. F. [F. V. Bulgarin], ‘Mezhdudeistvie, ili Razgovor v teatre o dramaticheskom iskusstve’ in Russkaia Taliia, pp. 335–6 (St Petersburg: n.p., 1825).

64

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

14 N. A. Polevoi, O romanah Viktora Gyugo i voobshche o noveishih romanah, in N. A. Polevoi and Ks. A. Polevoi, Literaturnaia kritika, p. 108 (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990). 15 See, e.g., K. A. Koz’min and V. I. Pokrovskii, Biografii i harakteristiki otechestvennyh obrazcovyh pisatelei (Moscow: n.p., 1883); S. Podoprigora, Kratkaia teoriia slovesnosti i biografii obrazcovyh russkih pisatelei (Ekaterinoslav: n.p., 1888); V. P. Ostrogorskii, Dvadcat’ biografii obrazcovyh russkih pisatelei (St Petersburg: n.p., 1890). 16 See F. I. Buslaev, ‘Otzyv o programme russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, sostavlennoi uchiteliami gimnazii Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga na s’ezde 1866 g., v Moskve’, in Sbornik Obshchestva liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti na 1891 god, p. 91 (Moscow: n.p., 1891). 17 See, e.g., P. A. Budagov, ‘Iz istorii semantiki prilagatel’nogo klassicheskii’ in Rol’ i znachenie literatury XVIII veka v istorii russkoi kul’tury, pp. 443–8 (Moscow: Nauka, 1966); A. Vdovin, ‘Poniatie “russkie klassiki” v kritike 1830–50-h gg.’, in Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu, vol. 5, part 1, pp. 40–56 (Tartu: Tartu ülikooli kirjastus, 2011). 18 V. V. Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkoi literatury XVIII veka. Opyt statisticheskih nablyudenii (St Petersburg: n.p., 1901), p. 33. 19 Russkaia literaturnaia kritika XVIII veka (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1978), pp. 194, 160, 329. 20 N. I. Novikov, ‘Opyt istoricheskogo slovaria o rossiiskih pisateliah’, in N. I. Novikov, Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1951), p. 277. 21 See Ocherki istorii russkoi literaturnoi kritiki (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1999), pp. 127–8. 22 N. M. Karamzin, ‘Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskih talantov?’ [originally published in 1802], in N. M. Karamzin, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 2, p. 185 (Moscow and Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964). 23 V. A. Zhukovskii ‘O kritike’ [originally published in 1809], in V.A. Zhukovskii – kritik, p. 74. 24 D. V. Dashkov, ‘Nechto o zhurnalah’ [originally published in 1812], in Literaturnaia kritika 1800–1820-kh godov, p. 107 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980). 25 See V. V. Sipovskii, Ocherki iz istorii russkogo romana, vol. 1, part 1 (St Petersburg: n.p., 1909), pp. 21–31; V. B. Shklovskij, Matvej Komarov zhitel’ goroda Moskvy (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929); A. I. Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: Istorikosotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kul’ture Pushkinskoi ehpohi (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), pp. 157–81; Ocherki istorii russkoj literaturnoj kritiki, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1999), pp. 98–109. 26 A. F. Merzliakov, ‘Rech’ o nachale, hode i uspekhah slovesnosti’, in Russkie esteticheskie traktaty pervoi treti XIX v., vol. 1, p. 151 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974). 27 A. Nikitenko, Opyt istorii russkoi literatury. Vvedenie, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: n.p., 1845), pp. 34, 13.

The Making of the Russian Classic

65

28 A. F. Merzliakov, ‘Ob iziashchnoi slovesnosti, ee pol’ze, celi i pravilah’ [originally published in 1813], in Literaturnaia kritika 1800–1820-kh godov, p. 140. 29 Sbornik rasporyazhenii po Ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniya, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: n.p., 1824), p. 535. 30 Regarding this, see M. Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope: Literaturnoe obshchestvo ‘Arzamas’ i rossiiskii modernizacionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), pp. 531–99. 31 See, e.g., I. M. Born, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k rossiiskoi slovesnosti (St Petersburg: n.p., 1808), pp. 131–62; N. Iazvickii, Vvedenie v nauku stihotvorstva, ili Rassuzhdenie o nachale poezii voobshche i kratkoe povestvovanie vostochnogo, evreiskogo, grecheskogo, rimskogo, drevnego i srednego rossiiskogo stihotvorstva (St Petersburg: n.p., 1811), pp. 79–127. 32 P. M. Stroev, ‘O “Rossiiade”, poeme g. Heraskova’ [originally published in 1815], in Literaturnaia kritika 1800–1820-kh godov, p. 211. 33 Sobranie obrazcovyh russkih sochinenii i perevodov v stihah (St Petersburg: Obshchestvo Liubitelei Otechestvennoi Slovesnosti, 1815–17), chaps 1–6; Sobranie obrazcovyh russkih sochinenii i perevodov v proze (St Petersburg: Obshchestvo Liubitelei Otechestvennoi Slovesnosti, 1815–17), chaps 1–6. 34 See Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope, pp. 583–9. 35 N. Grech was the first to publish this overview: N. Grech, ‘Obozrenie russkoi literatury 1814 goda’, Syn Otechestva 1–4 (1815); N. Grech, ‘Obozrenie russkoi literatury 1815 i 1816 godov’, Syn Otechestva 1–2 (1817); N. Grech, ‘O proizvedeniiah russkoi slovesnosti v 1817 godu’, Syn Otechestva 1 (1818). 36 See J. R. Kramer, ‘The Social Role of the Literary Critic’, in M. C. Albrecht, J. H. Barnett and M. Griff (eds), The Sociology of Art and Literature, pp. 437–54 (London: Duckworth, 1970). 37 N. A. Polevoj, ‘ “Evgenii Onegin”, roman v stihah. Sochinenie Aleksandra Pushkina’ [originally published in 1825], in N. A. Polevoi and Ks. A. Polevoi, Literaturnaia kritika, p. 18 (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1990). 38 See B. Dubin and A. Rejtblat, ‘O strukture i dinamike sistemy literaturnyh orientacii zhurnal’nyh recenzentov (1820–1878 gg.)’, in Kniga i chtenie v zerkale sociologii, pp. 150–76 (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1990); B. Dubin and A. Rejtblat, ‘Literaturnye orientiry sovremennyh zhurnal’nyh recenzentov’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 59 (2003): 557–70. 39 N. A. Polevoi, ‘Poezie Adama Mickiewicza (Stihotvoreniia Adama Mickevicha)’ [originally published in 1829], in N. A. Polevoi and Ks. A. Polevoi, Literaturnaia kritika, p. 27. 40 N. A. Polevoi, ‘Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, sochinenie N.M. Karamzina’ [originally published in 1829], in N. A. Polevoi and Ks. A. Polevoi Literaturnaia kritika, p. 36.

66

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

41 V. G. Belinskii, ‘Literaturnye mechtaniia’ [originally published in 1834], in V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, pp. 22, 24 (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1953). 42 Belinskii, ‘Literaturnye mechtaniia’, p. 100. 43 V. G. Belinskii, ‘Sochineniya v proze i stihah Konstantina Batiushkova’ [originally published in 1835], in V. G. Belinskii Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, pp. 164–5. 44 N. A. Mel’gunov, ‘Zhurnal’nye vyderzhki’, Literaturnye pribavleniia k Russkomu invalidu, 6 May 1839, p. 415. 45 N. A. Polevoi, ‘Neskol’ko slov o sovremennoi russkoi kritike’, in N. A. Polevoi and Ks. A. Polevoi Literaturnaia kritika, p. 328. 46 See Ia. V. Tolmachev, Russkaia poeziya v pol’zu iunoshestva, obuchaiushchegosia v Har’kovskom kollegiume (Moscow: n.p., 1805); A. S. Nikol’skii, Osnovaniia rossijskoi slovesnosti: Izdany pri Gosudarstvennom Admiralteiskom departamente dlia morskih uchilishch, 2 vols (St Petersburg: n.p., 1807); I. M. Born, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k rossiiskoi slovesnosti (St Petersburg: n.p., 1808), which was for the Main School of Saint Peter’s. 47 See T. E. Ben’kovskaia, ‘ “Klassicheskoe” i “real’noe” napravleniia v metodike prepodavaniia literatury XVIII–XIX vekov (Istoriko-bibliograficheskii aspekt)’, Izvestiia Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo pedogogicheskogo instituta imeni A.I. Gercena, 5, no. 12 (2005): 266. 48 See: V. T. Plaksin, Rukovodstvo k poznaniiu istorii literatury (St Petersburg: n.p., 1833); A. G. Glagolev, Umozritel’nye i opytnye osnovaniia slovesnosti, chap. 4, Plan istorii russkoi literatury (St Petersburg: n.p., 1834); P. E. Georgievskii, Rukovodstvo k izucheniiu russkoi slovesnosti, soderzhashchee v sebe: Obshchie poniatiia ob iziashchnyh iskusstvah, Teoriiu krasnorechiia, Piitiku i Kratkuiu istoriiu literatury, chap. 4 (St Petersburg: n.p., 1836); V. I. Askochenskii, Kratkoe nachertanie istorii russkoi literatury (Kiev: n.p., 1846); A. P. Miliukov, Ocherk istorii russkoi poezii (St Petersburg: n.p., 1847); N. D. Mizko, Stoletie russkoi slovesnosti (Odessa: n.p., 1849). 49 See A. D. Galahov, Polnaia russkaia hrestomatiia, ili obrazcy krasnorechiia i poezii, zaimstvovannye iz luchshih otechestvennyh pisatelei, parts 1–2 (Moscow: n.p., 1843). 50 A. Sen’kina, ‘Iziashchnaia slovesnost’ kak didakticheskii material: k istorii russkoi literaturnoi hrestomatii (pervaia polovina XIX v.)’, in Acta Slavica Estonica IV: Khrestomatiinye teksty: russkaia pedagogicheskaia praktika XIX v. i poeticheskii literaturnyi kanon, p. 50 (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2013). 51 Sen’kina, ‘Iziashchnaia slovesnost’ kak didakticheskii material’, p. 51. 52 See A. Vdovin and R. Lejbov, ‘Khrestomatiinye teksty: russkaia poeziia i shkol’naia praktika XIX stoletiia’, in Acta Slavica Estonica IV: Khrestomatiinye teksty: russkaia pedagogicheskaia praktika XIX v. i poeticheskii literaturnyi kanon, p. 13 (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2013). 53 Sen’kina, ‘Iziashchnaia slovesnost’ kak didakticheskii material’, p. 51.

The Making of the Russian Classic

67

54 Konspekt russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti dlia rukovodstva v voenno-uchebnyh zavedeniiah, sostavlennyi A. Galahovym i F. Buslaevym na osnovanii Nastavleniia dlia obrazovaniia vospitannikov voenno-uchebnyh zavedenii, vysochaishe utverzhdennogo 24 dekabrya 1848 goda (St Petersburg: n.p., 1852), pp. 3, 14. 55 Vdovin and Lejbov, ‘Hrestomatiinye teksty’, p. 14. 56 See Andy Byford, ‘Between Literary Education and Academic Learning: The Study of Literature at Secondary School in Late Imperial Russia (1860s–1900s)’, History of Education 33 (2004): 640. 57 See, e.g., V. Stoiunin, O prepodavanii russkoi literatury (St Petersburg: n.p., 1864). 58 Byford, ‘Between Literary Education and Academic Learning’, p. 658. 59 Brooks, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature’, p. 316. 60 Buslaev, ‘Otzyv o programme russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, sostavlennoi uchiteliami gimnazii Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga na s’ezde 1866 g., v Moskve’, p. 95. 61 See Vdovin and Lejbov, ‘Hrestomatiinye teksty’, pp. 20–5; Sen’kina, ‘Iziashchnaia slovesnost’ kak didakticheskii material’, pp. 41–2. 62 For more on this, see H. Kaizawa, ‘Rasprostranenie chteniia hudozhestvennoi literatury sredi naroda i formirovanie nacional’noi identichnosti v Rossii (1870e–1917)’, in Tetsuo Mochizuki (ed.), Beyond the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context, pp. 189–213 (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2008). 63 See Brooks, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature’, pp. 324–30. 64 See A. Vdovin, ‘Godovshchina smerti literatora kak prazdnik: k istorii tradicii v Rossii (1850–1900-e gg.)’, in Festkultur in der russischen Literatur (18. bis 21. Jahrhundert) , pp. 81–93 (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2010). 65 For more on the teaching of literature in gymnasiums and government measures concerning the elevation of the classics, see the chapter by Hajime Kaizawa in this book. 66 See, e.g., P. A. Vyazemskii, Fon-Vizin (St Petersburg: n.p., 1848); P. A. Kulish, Opyt biografii N.V. Gogolia (St Petersburg: n.p., 1854); E. N. Serchevskii, Kratkii ocherk politicheskoi i literaturnoi zhizni A.S. Griboedova (St Petersburg: n.p., 1854); P. V. Annenkov, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin v Aleksandrovskuiu epohu. 1799–1826 g. (St Petersburg: n.p., 1874); Ya. K. Grot, Zhizn’ Derzhavina po ego sochineniyam i pis’mam i po istoricheskim dokumentam, 2 vols (St Petersburg, 1880–3); I. S. Aksakov, Biografiya Fedora Ivanovicha Tyutcheva (Moscow: n.p., 1886); P. A. Viskovatov, Mihail Yur’evich Lermontov: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: n.p., 1891). 67 Concerning the school canon in the Soviet and post-Soviet period, see M. Pavlovec, ‘Shkol’nyi kanon kak pole bitvy: istoricheskaia rekonstrukciia’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas 2 (2016): 71–91; M. Pavlovec, ‘Shkol’nyi kanon kak pole bitvy: kupel’ bez rebenka’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas 5 (2016): 125–45.

68

3

‘The period of stagnation’ fostered by publishing: The popularization, nationalization and internationalization of Russian literature in the 1880s Hajime Kaizawa

In studies on the history of Russian literature, the 1880s have traditionally been called the ‘Period of Stagnation’ (bezvremen’e). After the collapse of the populist movement in the 1870s, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and the subsequent political repression and strengthening of censorship under the new Tsar, Alexander III, Russian society was enveloped by a mood of hopelessness and stagnation. In such circumstances, literary life also lost its former energy. In the 1880s, prominent writers of the nineteenth century, authors of the famous masterpieces of Russian literature, left the stage one by one. F. Dostoevsky (1881) and I. Turgenev (1883) died, Lev Tolstoy, after his spiritual crisis in the 1880s, stopped writing long novels, while future masters of the next generation, such as Chekhov, Gorky and the Symbolists, were only young debutants or had yet to debut at this time. Thus, the 1880s was a transitional period that was unfruitful for the history of Russian literature, a period in which it is difficult to find great novelists or outstanding masterpieces – a view that still prevails in many works on the history of Russian literature. In general, the Russian word ‘bezvremen’e’ means ‘hard times’ or ‘the time of social, cultural stagnation’. For instance, in Tsarist Russia this word was used as an expression of social and cultural stagnation under the strict regime of Tsar Nicholas I after the Decembrist uprising. Populist critic N. K. Mikhailovsky published his essay on the poet M. Lermontov under the title The Hero of Bezvremen’e (1891). By at least the beginning of the twentieth century, the word was already used to denote the era of social and cultural stagnation of the reign of Alexander III. The idea that the 1880s were an age of ‘bezvremen’e’ for the 69

70

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

history of Russian literature can be found, for example, in A. Izmailov’s The Motley Banners: Literary Portraits of Bezvremen’e (1913),1 or in 20th Century Russian Literature, edited by the literary scholar S. Vengerov from 1914 to 1918.2 In the revised edition of Essays on the History of Russian Culture (1930–7), the historian P. Milyukov called the 1880s ‘bezvremen’e’.3 In many subsequent works on the history of nineteenth-century Russian literature, until the end of the Soviet period and even until recently, the 1880s are often described under the heading of ‘bezvremen’e’.4 Nevertheless, is such a traditional view of the 1880s in relation to the history of Russian literature correct? In fact, if we reconsider this period from the point of view of the history of literary production and consumption, the generally accepted notion of the 1880s as an age of ‘bezvremen’e’ could be completely refuted. When viewed from this perspective, we could argue that the 1880s was simply the middle decade of a thirty-year period – from the 1870s to the 1890s – in which widespread and historically very important radical and dramatic changes occurred in terms of the production, distribution and consumption of literary works in diverse areas of Russian society. In this sense, it would be more appropriate to call this period a very important historical turning point, rather than an era of ‘Stagnation’ (bezvremen’e). From the point of view of the history of literary production and consumption, the important historical change in this period is particularly clearly expressed in developments such as the beginning of the mass production, distribution and consumption of books; the emergence of a mass readership; various attempts to spread reading among the ordinary people; a strong desire to canonize writers; the introduction of Russian literary classics to the curriculum in secondary education; the general promotion of literary scholarship and public literary events; and the first signs of worldwide recognition of Russian literature as the highest achievement of human culture, heralding an international boom in Russian literature at that time. The rapid growth of literacy, the appearance of mass editions of cheap books and the consequent popularization and dissemination of literary works among ordinary people in Russia at that time greatly expanded the readership, turning the Russian literary classics into national treasures for the broad mass of readers. Throughout Russia, in the provinces as well as in towns, there was a concerted effort to organize public readings and create libraries or reading rooms for the mass of readers from the lower class, and in such attempts, the works of Russian literature often played an important role. In academic studies on the history of Russian literature, the canonization of the great masters of nineteenth-century Russian literature also made significant progress from the 1870s to the 1890s.

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

71

Furthermore, the history of Russian literature was fully integrated into the curriculum of the gymnasium as a school subject in the second half of the 1870s. Remarkably, the 1880s also witnessed the beginning of a great worldwide boom in Russian literature. Prominent novelists of the nineteenth century, like I. Turgenev, F. Dostoevsky and L. Tolstoy, now became idols of the worldwide reading public, their works becoming part of the world’s cultural heritage. Thus, in terms of the history of Russian literature, the 1880s, or, more broadly, the three decades from the 1870s to the 1890s, are undoubtedly a period of significant historical change. During these years, the Russian literary classics became the property of a national mass reading public, including readers from the lower classes. Moreover, these classic works began to gain wide recognition as valuable parts of the Russian national cultural tradition, not only in different levels of Russian society, but also in many countries around the world. Bearing in mind the preceding points, Russian literary life in the 1880s that has typically been represented in studies on the history of literature needs to be re-evaluated. In order to clearly describe this new perspective, based on the significant changes in the production and consumption of literary works in this period, this chapter intends to examine the literary life of Russia at that time in more detail. After reviewing the major changes in the production and consumption of literary works, we will examine three particular developments in Russian literature, for which such changes paved the way: first, the various attempts to spread the reading of literary works among the masses; second, the canonization of the authors and classic works of Russian literature and their inclusion in the curriculum of secondary education, in academic scholarship and at public literary events; and third, the worldwide recognition of Russian literature as a high achievement of human culture and the beginning of the international boom in Russian literature. This approach to Russian literary life in the 1880s will help to elucidate the great historical change of that time and to understand and evaluate its significance in both a Russian and international context.5

Changes in the production and consumption of literary works In Russia, the literacy rate increased sharply in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially from the 1870s to the 1890s, leading naturally to the development of a mass readership and the mass publication of inexpensive books. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, only a very limited number of people

72

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

were literary readers in Tsarist Russia, reflecting its low literacy rate and limited provision of primary education, certainly compared to Western countries. However, in the 1860s and 1870s, with the beginning of the ‘Great Reforms’, the literacy rate rose rapidly and the number of readers increased dramatically, although the number was still significantly lower than that in Western European countries. By the 1860s, the literacy rate of the male peasantry in six provinces was only 6 per cent and the literate population in twenty towns of four provinces was around 25 per cent. Nevertheless, in the 1880s, male peasant literacy in twenty-two provinces reached 15 per cent, and in 1897, the figure for male literacy in the cities stood at 64 per cent.6 As Reitbrat has noted, the literacy of the rural population rose from around 5 or 6 per cent in the 1860s to 23.8 per cent by 1897. According to his estimates, the total readership in Russia in the early 1860s was less than 1 million, but had increased to 8 or 9 million by the end of the century.7 Along with this progress, from the 1870s to the 1890s, methods of production, distribution and consumption of books began to change dramatically. In an effort to attract new readers who now potentially existed thanks to the growth in literacy during this period, from the 1870s onward inexpensive illustrated weekly magazines were published, attracting about 100,000 subscribers by the end of the 1880s. As Reitblat has observed, these illustrated magazines played a key role in inculcating the broad mass of the common people with the skills of reading, familiarizing them with literature, modern scientific knowledge and the fine arts.8 Newspapers also entered the era of mass publication in the period of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8.9 According to N. Rubakin, the annual production of books, which stood at around 18 million volumes in 1887, had risen to 58 million by 1901, that is to say, for those 15 years, the production of books tripled.10 In these circumstances, some publishers began the large-scale production and sale of low-cost versions of Russian literary classics using the new printing technology introduced at that time. For example, the literary critic and owner of the very popular newspaper Novoe Vremia, A. Suvorin, who in 1877 imported from France the first high-speed rotary press employed in Russia,11 began to publish a series of cheap Russian and world literary classics from 1879. In this series, no fewer than 400 titles were issued, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the total circulation of such books reached more than 4 million copies.12 This series also included the ten volumes of the complete collection of Pushkin’s works, published in 1887 for only one rouble and fifty kopecks. This collection of Pushkin’s work was reissued several times, reaching a total circulation of 95,000 copies.13 Suvorin’s inexpensive editions of the classics undoubtedly played an

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

73

important role in spreading and popularizing the works of Russian writers among the newly formed and rapidly growing broad mass of readers in Russia at that time. From the 1890s, Suvorin was also one of the first publishers to gain an exclusive right to sell his newspapers and books at Russian railway stations.14 A. F. Marks, the founder of the famous illustrated journal Niva, began distributing multi-volume collections of works by famous Russian writers, such as Gogol, Lermontov, Chekhov and others, for free to subscribers to the magazine. E. Dinershtein has noted that Marks’s main contribution to Russian culture was the production of a whole library of collected works from the best Russian writers, distributed for an unmatched low fee, resulting in an ever-expanding readership of his magazine.15 Marks also began to use electricity in his production process from the 1880s, particularly for operating the large high-speed rotary press imported from Germany. As Dinershtein points out, at that time, this type of machine was found only in Germany, England and the United States.16 Another outstanding publisher of the time, D. Sytin, was originally a supplier of ‘Lubok-Books’, cheap booklets of popular fiction for peasants. In the early 1880s, he became actively engaged in publishing textbooks for rural schools and pocket books of more serious content for peasants.17 Then, from the middle of the decade, he became involved with the Posrednik publishing house, which had been created by L. Tolstoy in 1884 in order to distribute good books to peasants at low prices.18 Using the ‘Lubok-Books’ sales network of peddlers, Sytin was the first person to really popularize literary works and other serious books, including Tolstoy’s, in rural Russia.19 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the spread of the rotary printing press, typesetting machines, feeders and other new printing technology increased the production of printed material in Russia.20 Thus, the beginning of the mass production of inexpensive books and their spread into the broad strata of society contributed to the rapid dissemination and popularization of the masterpieces of Russian literature among those who had never read books before.

Attempts to spread the reading of literary works among the masses The 1880s was also a period when educational activities helped popularize reading among the lower classes in both urban and rural areas, including attempts to make the Russian literary classics accessible to a new mass readership. Such movements had begun in the 1870s and reached their peak in the 1880s

74

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

and 1890s. Although the effort to improve the literacy rate and popularize reading in rural areas had its origins in the Great Reforms of the 1860s, this development only began to spread rapidly and widely throughout Russia from the 1880s. In 1880, the Petersburg Literacy Committee began publishing inexpensive books that were specifically made for peasants, including literary works. In 1882, the publisher V. Marakuev created the Peoples Library publishing house to cater for the emerging mass readership market. However, the most significant event in terms of the distribution of literary classics among peasants in this period was undoubtedly the publication of Kh. Alchevskaya’s What should the people read? in 1884. Alchevskaya had headed the Sunday school for peasant children in Kharkov since 1870, and, along with her colleagues, had tried to read and discuss the masterpieces of Russian literature with the pupils. Collected records of such discussions, What should the people read? had a profound influence on the popularization of literary classics in Russia. In her book, which was considered to be the first attempt in Russia to study readers from the lower classes based on direct data,21 Alchevskaya showed how peasant children, who were generally considered incapable of understanding any classical literary works, were able to discuss Turgenev or Dostoevsky. What should the people read? not only influenced the decision of Lev Tolstoy to create the Posrednik publishing house,22 but also increased public interest in expanding reading among the lower classes. Large-scale surveys on reading in rural areas were subsequently organized by D. Shakhovskoy (1885), A. Prugavin (1887), N. Rubakin (1889) and others.23 The Moscow Literacy Committee also resumed its printing of books for peasants in 1885. Free libraries and reading rooms for the masses now began to appear in towns and rural areas. In Tomsk, a public library for lower-class readers was created in 1884, while in Moscow, the first reading room of this kind appeared in 1885, followed by a second in 1888. In Petersburg, the first two free public libraries for a mass readership opened in 1887. The following year, in the village of Markovo in Kharkov, a library was opened on the initiative of the peasants themselves.24 Public readings also began to be organized in various locations. A. Prugavin reported that during the 1887–8 school year, 190 public readings were held in eight official reading rooms in Moscow, attended by more than 75,000 people. In 1887, forty-three public readings were organized at the people’s hall in Odessa, with an aggregate audience of over 29,000. In Kiev, the first public reading for a lower-class audience took place in 1882 and, by 1 January 1888, 122 further readings had been arranged. In the reading room of Yaroslavl city, 302 readings were held between 1883 and 1885. Readings in rural areas were reported to

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

75

attract audiences of between 200 and 500 people for each event by the end of the 1880s. At these readings, the works of classical writers like Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev and Nekrasov, among others, were often read and received with great interest.25 In these libraries and reading rooms or at public readings, the classic works of Russian literature were very popular with ordinary readers and were seen as playing an important role in their education and enlightenment. The schoolteacher E. Nekrasova stressed that acquaintance with the works of Russian literature and with the writers’ personalities had a positive morality impact on the readers.26 Another famous educator, V. Ostrogorsky, asserted that reading literary classics in primary schools or in the people’s reading rooms helped ‘sow the seed of good and truths among the people and [helped] . . . humanise them’, therefore the popularization of reading among the lower classes was ‘a matter of real necessity’ for Russian society.27 As J. Brooks has pointed out, for those teachers and educators who made the effort to spread and popularize the reading of literary classics by ordinary people, ‘nineteenth-century Russian literature and its creators were something more than a source of prestige and an educational tool’, since for them ‘appreciation of literature was an entrée into the collective national identity’.28

The canonizations of Russian literary classics and their authors in the secondary school curriculum, literary scholarship and public literary events In 1877 the government adopted a new curriculum for gymnasiums, which at that time were the main institutions for secondary education. The new curriculum included, for the first time, the history of Russian literature, from the Middle Ages to Gogol. All but excluded from the previous curriculum of 1871, the history of Russian literature became an obligatory subject in gymnasiums from the sixth to the eighth grades.29 From the 1880s to the 1890s, the teaching of the history of literature in gymnasiums was strictly controlled on political grounds. In particular, the very title of the ‘history of Russian literature’ was excluded from the new programme of 1890, and it was practically forbidden for teachers to interpret works of literature from a historical perspective.30 However, due to a growing public awareness of the importance of teaching the history of literature in gymnasiums and due to the inadequacy of the current programme in this respect, the government began to consider revision of the programme in the late 1890s. In

76

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

1899, in a circular letter to the inspectors of educational districts, the Minister of Education, N. Bogolepov, referred to the complaints of parents and schoolteachers about the inadequacy of the course on Russian literature in secondary schools.31 By the early 1900s the government had decided to expand the course on the history of Russian literature in the secondary school curriculum. In 1905, the scientific committee of the Ministry of Education published a new draft of the curriculum, which, for the first time, included a full course on the history of nineteenth-century Russian literature from Pushkin to Dostoevsky and L. Tolstoy.32 In fact in this area Russia did not lag far behind the West. For example, the Minister of Education, Jules Ferry, had only introduced French literature into the curricula of primary and secondary education in 1882.33 In fact, many of the famous educators of that time supported the idea that in school education classical writers of nineteenth-century Russian literature were the most appropriate for cultivating national awareness among students. P. Smirnovsky, the author of a well-known literary textbook widely used in secondary schools in this period, had, by 1871, already claimed that study of the literary history of the fatherland should have priority in Russian schools.34 The literary historian A. Nezelenov also insisted that teaching the history of national literature in secondary schools was undoubtedly the most useful way for students to understand the historical development of their nation.35 For A. Tsarevsky, professor at the Kazan Theological Academy, the study of the history of Russian literature was key to initiating and developing national awareness in education. In his book on the Importance of Russian Literature in the National Russian Education (1893), Tsarevsky stressed that Russian literature was not only the glory and pride of the Russian people, but also the only, and essential, means of fostering national awareness and patriotism.36 The importance of nineteenthcentury Russian literature in literary education in general was emphasized by many educators and literary scholars up to the end of the Tsarist era. In a speech in 1916, the prominent literary scholar S. Vengerov asserted that nineteenthcentury Russian literature was ‘the central manifestation of the Russian spirit, which placed us on the same level as the great cultural nations of the West’. Therefore, ‘at least 2/3 of the entire course of teaching the history of Russian literature in secondary schools should be given to the mastery of literature of the nineteenth century’.37 This view is indicative of the canonization of nineteenth-century Russian literary classics and the recognition of their national value that occurred at this time. This process is even more obvious in academic studies on the history of Russian literature. New perspectives on the historical development of nineteenth-

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

77

century Russian literature were presented and became part of the process of canonization by literary scholars during the period between the 1870s and the 1890s. Many important works on the history of Russian literature emerged in the field of academic literary scholarship during this period, for example ‘Problems of Literary History and Its Research Methods’ (1878) by Professor N. Tikhonravov of Moscow University; the History of Contemporary Russian Literature (1885) and volume 1 of the Critical-Biographical Dictionary of Russian Writers and Scholars (1886) by S. Vengerov; ‘On the Historical Formation of the Russian Ethnicity’ (1884) and the History of Russian Literature in four volumes (1898–9) by the well-known literary historian, A. Pypin, et al. As Pypin himself admitted in the preface to his History of Russian Literature, studies on the history of literature were considered to be a part of a new field of scholarship.38 According to another literary historian, A. Arkhangelsky, in Russia ‘the history of literature in the sense of a coherent historical exposition of literary masterpieces did not exist not only in the 18th century, but even for a long time in the 19th century’.39 Indeed, the history of Russian literature was still regarded as a young discipline at that time, which only began to shape itself into an authoritative academic discipline and become one of the most important fields of study in the Russian human sciences in the 1880s. The appearance of this discipline can also be viewed as being deeply connected to historical changes, such as those discussed above, including the popularization of Russian literary classics and the emergence of the desire to canonize them within the framework of Russian national cultural traditions. It was in this context that Pypin insisted that works of academic research on the history of Russian literature should also be readily accessible by the broad masses of readers and that the purpose of the historical study of literature was ‘to acquaint ordinary people with the general character of the works of Russian literary classics’ and ‘to hand over the results of study from the specialist’s office to the educated mass of readers’, concluding that ‘the history of literature is a science for all’.40 The history of Russian literature as an academic discipline was therefore institutionalized in the context of the widespread popularization of literary classics among a mass readership, a context which led naturally to the subsequent canonization of the classics within the historical perspective of Russia’s cultural traditions. As A. Byford has correctly noted, the creation of Russia’s literary academy went hand in hand with urgent nation-construction that typified Tsarist cultural endeavours of the time.41 The 1880s was also a time when classical writers of the nineteenth century, for the first time, became the subject of public literary celebrations. The famous opening ceremony of the monument to the poet A. Pushkin, which took place in

78

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Moscow in 1880, was the first large-scale public literary memorial event in Russia, in which organizations such as the Society of Lovers of Russian Letters, Moscow University, the Moscow City Duma and even the Orthodox Church were involved.42 The Pushkin Celebration of 1880 became a model for subsequent similar events, such as the Pushkin Centennial Celebration in 1899, initiated by the government on the direct order of Tsar Nicolas II,43 or the Gogol jubilee in 1909, organized primarily by the Society of Lovers of Russian Letters.44 In his study of the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, M. Levitt focused his attention mainly on its role in the political neutralization and reconciliation of the conflict between state and nation, conservative nationalists and liberal intellectuals of this era.45 From our perspective, however, it seems no less important to consider it in the wider context of the popularization of Russian literary classics and their canonization at various levels of Russian society. Viewed in this context, public literary memorial events that began in the 1880s can be regarded as important manifestations of the Russian reading public’s growing familiarity with the Russian literary authors of the nineteenth century, and in this respect, these events made an important contribution to the nationalization of Russian literary classics. Naturally, therefore, the national and/or popular character of these writers and their works were emphasized at such celebrations. Indeed, in his speech at the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, Tikhonravov, linking the poet’s work with the romantic awareness of nationality in Russia after the war with Napoleon, stressed that Pushkin ‘creates the way for literature to become the need of the narod’ (people/nation).46 Dostoevsky’s famous speech at the same event idealized Evgeny Onegin’s heroine, Tatyana, as a representative figure of Russian narod and called Pushkin a ‘great writer of the narod’ who, for the first time in the history of Russian literature, ‘found positively beautiful Russian types in the Russian narod’.47 Turgenev, on the same occasion, described the poet as ‘an indicator of the essence of the narod’.48 However, a feature of these evaluations of classical writers’ national character is the contrast often drawn with Western literature and their writers. For instance, Turgenev, comparing Pushkin with Greek and Western national poets, asks the following question, ‘But can we rightly call Pushkin a national poet, in the sense of the universal (these two expressions often coincide), as we call Shakespeare, Goethe, Homer?’49 Dostoevsky goes even further in asserting that the most important aspect of the Russian national spirit, which is clearly manifested in Pushkin’s work, is simply a desire for universality and an embrace of all humanity: ‘What on earth is the power of the spirit of the Russian nationality if not the desire for universality and all-humanity in the ultimate goals of its own?’

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

79

According to Dostoevsky, ‘the mission of Russian people is indisputably allEuropean and universal’ and therefore, ‘to become a real Russian, maybe, means only . . . to become the brother of all people’. In this respect, he considered Pushkin much greater than any Western national poet: ‘In fact, in European literature there were enormous quantities of artistic geniuses – Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller. However, please point out at least one of these great geniuses who would have such an ability to respond from the grobal point of view like our Pushkin. And he shares this ability, the main ability of our nationality, with our people, and . . . more importantly, he is a narodnyi [people’s/national] poet.’50 As is clear from these examples, the national spirit of Russian classical writers is both emphasized and contrasted with Western literature and its national poets, especially the claim that Russian literature is diffused with morality and spirituality, something difficult to find in Western literature. Dostoevsky explained that it was ridiculous for Russian people to ‘develop themselves economically, scientifically and civically’ as the people of Europe did because ‘the Russian soul, the genius of the Russian people is perhaps the most capable, of all nations, to contain in themselves the idea of universal unity, brotherly love, a sober view that forgive the hostility and . . . remove conflicts’.51 In other words, the Russian national spirit embodied by Russian literature went beyond the economic and civil values that were the basis of Western society. Academic studies of literary history, as detailed below, also emphasized high morality and spirituality as key aspects of the national feature of Russian literature in sharp contrast to the bourgeois-civic values of Western society. In order to better understand why such a perception emerged, we must consider another element of the great changes of the 1880s in terms of the popularization and canonization of the Russian literary classics, namely the worldwide recognition of nineteenth-century Russian literary classics as a notable achievement of human culture.

Worldwide recognition of Russian literature as a significant achievement of human culture It was after the 1880s that Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century suddenly began to attract attention all over the world and had a significant influence on the literature and cultures of other countries. The first boom in Russian literature in Western Europe began in France in the 1880s and spread not only in Western Europe, but also throughout the whole world, including the

80

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

United States, Japan, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Before that time, the works of Russian literature were, with a few exceptions, almost unknown outside Russia. Thus, the fact that nineteenth-century Russian literature suddenly acquired a worldwide recognition and reputation greatly boosted national pride in Russian literature and, therefore, undoubtedly became the main factor in raising the national value of Russian literature. The global boom in Russian literature beginning in the 1880s complemented the contemporary trends of popularization and nationalization in respect of Russia’s literary classics of the nineteenth century. Before the 1880s, there had already been several attempts to introduce Russian literature to the reading public in the West. From the 1850s to the 1870s some works of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and L. Tolstoy were translated into French, English and German. Céleste Courrière’s Histoire de la littérature contemporaine en Russie appeared in France in 1875.52 In 1878, at the International Literary Congress in Paris, Turgenev declared that Russian literature had acquired the rights of citizenship in Europe.53 The following year, the first French translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace appeared. Nevertheless, at that time Russian literature had not yet enjoyed widespread popularity or great fame in Western European countries. Dostoevsky complained in 1877 that European readers would not read Russian novelists for a long time, and even if they were to read them, they would not understand or appreciate them for a long time.54 This situation changed radically in the mid-1880s, when the French diplomat E.-M. de Vogüé published a notable book on Russian literature. Very familiar with Russian literature from his service in the French embassy in St Petersburg from 1876 to 1882, de Vogüé began to produce a number of articles on Russian writers in the French journal Revue des Deux Mondes, from 1879, and then released them in a separate edition entitled Le Roman russe in 1886. This book was well received, not only in France but throughout Europe, and played an important part in popularizing nineteenth-century Russian literature throughout the world, raising its status within world literature. De Vogüé’s book soon reached Britain, America, Italy, Spain and other countries, spawning many followers and imitators. Thanks to Spanish critic E. Pardo Bazán’s bestseller, La revolución de la novela en Rusia (1887), Russian novelists now began to feature in the Spanish literary press, although according to P. Boulogne, Bazán would today be accused of plagiarizing de Vogüé’s original.55 Another literary critic who played a prominent role in popularizing Russian literature in Europe was the Dane, Georg Brandes. He contributed to the emergence of the Russian vogue in the naturalist circle in Germany and was considered the most influential critic of Russian

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

81

literature in Germany and the Scandinavian countries in the early 1880s.56 In Belgium, the writer and socialist Eugène Hins also penned a number of articles on Russian literature in journals like Revue de Belgique and La Société Nouvelle from 1881, and tried to acquaint Belgian readers with Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and other Russian writers.57 At almost the same time as de Vogüé’s articles on Russian writers were published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, translations of the works of nineteenthcentury Russian literature began to appear in various languages and with increasing frequency. Translations of Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov and other Russian writers of the nineteenth century were welcomed enthusiastically by the reading public of Western Europe. However, the writers most in demand among were Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. From 1880 to 1890, especially in Germany and France, almost all the major works of these two novelists were published in translation. Nietzsche accidentally read and highly appreciated one such translation of Dostoevsky, published in Paris in 1886.58 During this time, the boom in translating Russian literary classics also reached other countries like Britain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Czechoslovakia. By the end of the 1880s, all the well-known Russian novelists were represented in an English version, and most of their major works had been translated.59 In the 1890s, Constance Garnett, who later became famous for English translations of Dostoevsky’s works, had already begun her early attempts to translate the works of Goncharov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Tolstoy. Such was the enthusiasm for Russian literature in the 1880s and 1890s, that even translations of third-rate writers appeared.60 The main reason why Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century were so sought after in Western Europe is that their religiosity, morality, spirituality and insightfulness on human psychology were perceived by European intellectuals as exposing the shortcomings of their own literature as an expression of bourgeois society. According to de Vogüé, the main advantage of the Russian novel over its French counterpart is its innate religious character, moral spirit of compassion and deep insight into the soul of man. He noted that Western, especially French, novelists ‘ignore the possibility of a Divine Power governing and directing what is beyond our understanding’. Literature, he contended, was ‘of all arts, most in need of the religious sentiment’. In his opinion, the Russian novel completely met these requirements. De Vogüé admired the Russian novel for its ‘complete . . . understanding of the inner man’ and ability to ‘satisfy the permanent needs of the human soul’.61 Brandes also focuses on the emotional and spiritual characteristics of Russian literature, particularly compassion, and

82

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

sees in it a kind of religious or philosophical mysticism, which, in his opinion, is always combined with a specifically Slavic melancholy.62 For English psychologist and critic Havelock Ellis, what inspired Russian novelists was humanity. He thought that for a Russian writer, a human being was sacred and continually interesting.63 However, as N. Berkovsky has pointed out, the international view on Russian literary classics should not be understood as a response to individual writers, but rather to all Russian literature as a national phenomenon: ‘Regardless of which novelists, whether it is Turgenev, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, the West responded to, it was a response to Russia, readers in the West sought in each novelist not so much the novelist himself as the nation and culture that gave him birth.’64 Russian literary scholars were very aware of the prestige that Russian literature had attained in the late nineteenth century. In 1886, Pypin had described the reception of Russian literature abroad as ‘a success that can often be called [a] real triumph’. According to him, ‘a whole rain of translations from Russian literature poured in’ and that ‘all the remarkable names of the newest period, from Gogol to Lev Tolstoy, took their place’.65 In the introduction to his History of Russian Literature, Pypin concluded that the popularization of Russian literature in the West indicated ‘the completion of its old attitude to European literature’ and the rise of ‘independent national creativity’.66 Later, Arkhangelsky, in his Introduction to the History of Russian Literature, also argued that this ‘triumph of Russian literature . . . justifies Russian literature’ and its unique ‘historical development’ in the eyes of the world.67 Academic study of the history of Russian literature now clearly extended to analysis of its triumph over European literature. According to Vengerov, the main reason for this triumph was the idealistic, moralistic and religious character of Russian literature. Speaking about the boom in Russian literature in Europe, he asserted that it ‘stands certainly above modern Western European literature’, going on to explain its success in terms of its idealism ‘about which even the [greatest] . . . European realists do not even have a word’.68 Elsewhere, Vengerov also declared that ‘The main task of all the history of the modern [i.e. nineteenth-century] Russian literature is, after all, to show how in a modern Russian literature, aesthetics and ethics, artistic perfection and moral power are highly and harmoniously combined.’69 The popularization of literary classics among the broader reading public in Russia and its canonization in academic studies and in secondary education from the 1880s were developments that were stimulated and influenced by this ‘triumph of Russian literature’ abroad. It seemed to be particularly valued for its

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

83

moralistic or religious spirituality and the humanistic ideal of harmonious unity, which were at variance with the bourgeois-civic middle-class values of the Western world, such as individualism or rationalism.

Conclusion The nationalization of Russian literature and consciousness of the end of literary history We have seen that, around the 1880s, a series of developments occurred that led to the popularization and canonization of nineteenth-century Russian literary classics, although, as noted, the conventional history of Russian literature tends to dismiss the period as an ‘era of stagnation’ (bezvremen’e), with the result that it has been overlooked. However, in the process of the canonization of literature in Russia, there was a tendency to place particular emphasis on the apocalyptic nature of the framework of the history of literature itself. In general, in any country, the history of national literature is constructed on the basis of a somewhat fixed pattern of a ‘mythical’ story about the development of a national spirit, from its origins in the Middle Ages to its highest achievement with the birth of the great national poet in modernity. This narrative perspective of the history of national literature not only has a beginning, but its ending has been written in advance, because the history of literature is always constructed from the viewpoint of how the great achievements of national poets or novelists have featured in the historical process of the national cultural tradition. Indeed, if the golden age has already arrived due to the appearance of Shakespeare or Goethe, and if the highest achievement of the national spirit has already been accomplished, what exactly will the subsequent historical process be? In the history of literature, the subsequent era has to remain within the framework of the tradition of the national spirit that has already reached its climax. Therefore, there remains only two possibilities: to remain forever enclosed within the walls of existing traditional ideals and forms, or to destroy the tradition, in order to get rid of it. In fact, in nineteenth-century Germany, where studies of the history of literature by G. Gervinus, H. Hettner, J. Schmidt and others canonized Goethe and Schiller as classical national poets, the literature of Weimar Classicism began to be regarded as the peak of the golden era of German literature,70 which inevitably led to a relatively low estimation of later times.

84

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Herein lies an explanation as to why the 1880s in Russia was regarded as ‘the age of stagnation’ – because it was seen as a retreat or decline from the golden age of nineteenth-century Russian literature. It is easy to understand how a sense of the ending of the great historical era of Russian literature spread among critics and intellectuals in this period, when, as we have noted, the basic perspective on the history of Russian literature was established and the representatives of the golden age, like Dostoevsky, Turgenev and L. Tolstoy, had departed the stage. In the early 1890s, D. Merezhkovsky spoke of the ‘decline of Russian literature’71, while Chekhov confessed in a letter that, compared to previous eras, ‘this time is friable, sour, boring’.72 In his lecture in 1911, Vengerov captured perfectly the mood of the end of the great era in literary history: We are now at the turn of an unknown literary future. The last great representative of the Russian literary word left and, no one knows, whether it still falls to the lot of Russian literature to draw the world’s attention to itself again . . . By giving the world literature such geniuses as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, we can be sentenced to whole centuries of small literary vegetation. A period of 150 years passed, and in Germany no one equal to Goethe was born. In England, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death will soon be celebrated, and no one has replaced him.73

These words convey the sense of ‘bezvremen’e’ (the period of stagnation). The perceived ‘decline of Russian literature’ in the 1880s reflected the completion of the historical narrative of modern Russian literature – the great era of Russian literature had been confirmed and, therefore, had become the historical past.

The simultaneous process of the nationalization of literature in Russia and Western Europe The period under consideration almost exactly coincides with what E. Hobsbawm referred to as the era of the ‘mass production of traditions’ in Europe, from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War, when the ‘nationalization’ of literary classics swept across many countries of Western Europe, but also extended to Russia and Eastern Europe as well.74 It is surprising that in Russia this ‘nationalization’ of literary classics kept pace with Western European countries, bearing in mind Russia’s relative sluggishness in other areas, such as economic performance. As we have already seen, France in particular experienced a rapid nationalization of literature after the 1870s, while in Germany, P. Hohendahl has observed that ‘the educated had agreed by about 1870 that, like their European

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

85

neighbors, the German possessed a corpus of classic authors and works which gave them a legitimacy as a “civilised people” ’.75 According to S. Collini, even in Britain, where enthusiasm for nationalism and interest in national literature were relatively weak, the nationalization of literature had progressed by the end of the nineteenth century and literature had become ‘one of the central symbolic expressions of the “imagined community” of the English People’.76 These developments were roughly paralleled by the establishment of the historical perspective on the Russian literary tradition by literary historians, the rapid canonization of Russia’s literary classics, the mass-marketing of cheap editions of the classics for a general readership, and the advent of various campaigns to popularize classical literary works among the lower classes. Thus, the ‘mass production of tradition’, which became something of a global phenomenon from the 1870s, did not come to Russia as late as might have been expected in comparison with the advanced Western capitalist countries. Perhaps this suggests that the process of the nationalization of literature in Russia was not the result of the emergence of a national state, the establishment of middle-class values in the newly emerging civil society or the bourgeois-capitalist commercialization of culture that characterized the Western world at that time. In other words, in Russia the desire for the nationalization of literature appeared earlier than the formation of the nation state or the maturity of civil society. Rather, the very idea of national literature probably functioned as a driving force for the popularization and nationalization of culture and, in this way, promoted the formation of civil society in a previously backward Russia.

The strange connection between the anti-civic values and masspopular nature of the nationalization of literature in Russia One of the most important features of the nationalization of Russian literary classics is its inherent criticism of modern civil society. As already noted, both foreign admirers and domestic supporters of Russian literature stressed its moralistic-humanistic idealism and religious spirituality, which were perceived by Western observers to be an implicit criticism of their own bourgeois society and its middle-class values such as individualism or rationalism. In its nationalized form, Russian literature presented a paradox role in that it rejected modernization and bourgeois middle-class values that are often considered to be prerequisites for the nationalization and popularization of literary classics. According to P. Bürger, ‘both the genesis and the recognizability of art as an institution are a function of the development of art in bourgeois society’,77 and as

86

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

G. Jusdanis has also pointed out, ‘literature, the art of telling stories, was valorized in the English, French and German public spheres as an effective means of socializing people into the values of the middle class and national culture’.78 Thus in Western Europe the nationalization, canonization and institutionalization of literature were developed mainly on the basis of the middle-class values of bourgeois society. However, in Russia, national literature seems to have functioned as a kind of cultural agent for religious, ethical and spiritual values, at odds with the secularization and commercialization of bourgeois literature in Western society. The essential features of the nationalization of literature in Russia appear in sharp relief when juxtaposed with the national literature of other countries. Again, the paradoxical nature of the nationalization of literature in Russia is evident, reflecting a birth process with complex and contradictory characteristics that was trying to restore the cultural value that had been lost due to the popularization and commercialization of culture in modern society – a process which utilized the tools of this very same society. The process of popularization and nationalization of Russian literary classics in the 1880s was one with an acute awareness of the rivalry with Western European literature. If, as P. Casanova argues, ‘literatures are . . .not a pure emanation of national identity; they are constructed through literary rivalries, which are always denied, and struggles, which are always international’,79 one could interpret modern Russian literature’s emphasis on spirituality and religiosity as precisely the type of myth or stereotype that arose from the rivalry and struggle with Western literature. Furthermore, as noted earlier, the narrative of the myth of the ‘history of literature’ formed in the historical process of nationalizing Russian literary classics also created an eschatological sense of stagnation called ‘bezvremen’e’ – a sense that the golden age of Russian literature had already come to an end. Thus, the essential anti-modernity of modern Russian literature, widely shared even in our time, was formed in this period. Arguably this myth which emphasized anti-modernity became one of the bases for the emergence of new trends in the early twentieth century, such as Russian Symbolism and the avant-garde, which sought to radically reconstruct the traditions of modern Western and Russian literature and the arts. In any event, it is clear that in a relatively short period beginning in the 1880s, radical and wide-ranging changes occurred in many areas of literary life in Russia. This included not only the large-scale transformation of the publishing and distribution systems, but also reform of the educational system to generate readers, the employment of various methods to popularize literary works, the canonization and nationalization of literary classics through academic research,

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

87

and so on. Overall, this was a big event involving a wide variety of social institutions and fields that were related to the production and consumption of literature. In this sense it could be said to have been a major breakthrough for the history of literature in Russia.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

A. Izmailov, Pestrye znamena. Literaturnye portrety bezvremen’ia (Moscow: T-vo I.D. Sytina, 1913). S. Vengerov, Russkaia literatura XX veka (Moscow: Respublika, 2004), pp. 29–32, 320–35, 413–18. P. Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress, 1994), pp. 317, 320. See, for example, Istoriia russkoi literatury, 4 vols, vol. 4 (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningr. otd-nie, 1983), p. 6; Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX veka (Vtoraia polovina) (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1991), pp. 229, 452; Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX veka: 70–90-e gody (Moscow: Izd-vo MGU, 2001), pp. 666–70; Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX veka, 3 vols, vol. 3 (Moscow: VLADOS, 2005), pp. 325–528. On the formation of Russian literary classics and its relation to the rise of literacy, the development of the mass publication of literary works and public literary events in the last third of nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, see Abram Reitblat, ‘The Making of the Russian Classic’, in this collection. Boris N. Mironov, ‘The Development of Literacy in Russia and the USSR from the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, History of Education Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 234–5. A. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: Ocherki po istorii chteniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo MPI, 1991), pp. 10, 17. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu, p. 98. B. Esin, Russkaia dorevoliutsionnaia gazeta, 1702–1911 gg., Kratkii ocherk (Moscow: Izd-vo MGU, 1971), p. 29. N. Rubakin, ‘Knizhnyi potok’, Russkaia mysl’ 3 (1903): 4–8. Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII–XIX vekov (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1963), p. 490; Effie Ambler, Russian Journalism and Politics: Writings and Publications of A. S. Suvorin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), pp. 119, 177. Ambler, Russian Journalism and Politics, p. 177. E. Dinershtein, A. S. Suvorin: Chelovek, sdelavshii kar’eru (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), p. 150. B. Esin, Puteshestvie v proshloe: Gazetnyi mir XIX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo MGU, 1983), p. 142.

88

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

15 E. Dinershtein, ‘Fabrikant chitatelei’: A. F. Marks (Moscow: Izd-vo Kniga, 1986), pp. 11, 38–9. 16 Dinershtein, ‘Fabrikant chitatelei’, p. 83. 17 Charles A. Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851–1934 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990), p. 26. 18 Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur, pp. 29–37; E. Dinershtein, I. D. Sytin (Moscow: Izd-vo Kniga, 1983), pp. 27–48. See also Robert Otto, Publishing for the People: The Firm Posrednik, 1885–1905 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987). 19 E. Nekrasova, ‘Narodnye knigi dlia chteniia v ikh 25-letnei bor’be c lubochnymi izdaniiami’, Severnyi vestnik 7 (1889): 11. 20 400 let russkogo knigopechataniia, 1564–1964 (Moscow: Izd-vo Nauka, 1964), pp. 511–12. 21 V. Kogan, ‘Iz istorii izucheniia chitatelei v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii’, Problemy sotsiologii pechati 1 (Novosibirsk: Nauka, Sib. otd-nie, 1969): 37. See also B. Bank, Izuchenie chitatelei v Rossii (XIX v.) (Moscow: Izd-vo Kniga, 1969), pp. 98–122. 22 Dinershtein, I. D. Sytin, p. 28. 23 Bank, Izuchenie chitatelei v Rossii, pp. 140–55. See also H. Kaizawa, ‘Rasprostranenie chteniia sredi naroda i formirovanie natsional’noi identichnosti v Rossii (1870-e –1917)’, in Tetsuo Mochizuki (ed.), Beyond the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2008), pp. 197–208. 24 V. Devel’, Gorodskie i sel’skie biblioteki i chital’ni dlia naroda (St Petersburg: Russkaia shkola, 1892), p. 44. 25 A. Prugavin, Zaprosy naroda i obiazannosti intelligentsii v oblasti umstvennogo razvitiia i prosveshcheniia (Moscow: T-vo Kushnerev, 1890), pp. 53–81. 26 Nekrasova, ‘Narodnye knigi dlia chteniia’, p. 7. 27 V. Ostrogorskii (ed.), Sistematicheskii obzor russkoi narodno-uchebnoi literatury (St Petersburg: Tip. M. Stasiulevicha, 1878), pp. 176–7. See also Kaizawa, ‘Rasprostranenie chteniia sredi naroda i formirovanie natsional’noi identichnosti v Rossii’, pp. 192–7. 28 Jeffrey Brooks, ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics’, in Ivo Banac, John G. Ackerman and Roman Szporluk (eds), Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 328. 29 ‘Uchebnye plany predmetov, prepodavaemykh v muzhskikh gimnaziiakh Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia’, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 7, no. 192 (1877): 60–2; A. Skaftymov, ‘Prepodavanie literatury v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole (Sorokovye i shestidesiatye gody)’, Uchenye zapiski Saratovskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta 3 (1938): 231.

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing

89

30 Uchebnye plany i primernye programmy predmetov, prepodavaemykh v muzhskikh gimnaziiakh i progimnaziiakh Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia (St Petersburg: Tip. Akademii nauk, 1890), p. 24. 31 S. Stepanov, Obozrenie proektov reform srednei shkoly v Rossii, preimushchestvenno v poslednee shestiletie (1899–1905 gg.) (St Petersburg: Senat. tip., 1907), pp. 19–20. 32 ‘Ot uchenogo komiteta Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia’, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 360 (1905): 40–79, 114–44. 33 Mortimer Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 72. 34 P. Smirnovskii, ‘Zametki o programme russkoi slovesnosti’, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 153 (1871): 88. 35 A. Nezelenov, O prepodavanii russkoi slovesnosti (St Petersburg: Tip. i khromolit. A. Transhelia, 1880), pp. 44–5. 36 A. Tsarevskii, Znachenie russkoi slovesnosti v natsional’nom russkom obrazovanii (Kazan: Tipo-lit. Un-ta, 1893), pp. 3–5. 37 S. Vengerov, Russkaia literatura v srednei shkole, kak istochnik idealizma (Petrograd: Kn-vo ‘Prometei’ N.N. Mikhailova, 1917), pp. 7–8. 38 A. Pypin, Istoriia russkoi literatury, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: Tip. M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1898), pp. v, 33. 39 A. Arkhangel’skii, ‘Trudy akademika A. N. Pypina v oblasti istorii russkoi literatury’, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 2 (1904): 76. 40 Arkhangel’skii, ‘Trudy akademika A. N. Pypina, p. 119. 41 Andy Byford, Literary Scholarship in Late Imperial Russia: Rituals of Academic Institutionalisation (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), p. 9. 42 See Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). 43 Marcus C. Levitt, ‘Pushkin in 1899’, in Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (eds), Cultural Mythology of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1992), p. 185. 44 Byford, Literary Scholarship in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 63–4. 45 Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, pp. 3–6. 46 N. Tikhonravov, Sochineniia, vol. 3 (Moscow: M. i S. Sabashnikovy , 1898), p. 518. 47 F. Dostoevskii, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 26 (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningr. otd-nie, 1984), pp. 143–4. 48 ‘Rech’ I. S. Turgeneva, chitannaia v publichnom zasedanii Obshchestva liubitelei Rossiiskoi Slovesnosti po povodu otkrytiia pamiatnika A. S. Pushkinu v Moskve’, Vestnik Evropy 7 (1880): v. 49 ‘Rech’ I. S. Turgeneva’, p. viii. 50 Dostoevskii, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 26, pp. 145,147–8.

90

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

51 Dostoevskii, Poln. sobr. soch., p. 131. 52 Roland Mortier, ‘La pénétration de la littérature russe à travers les revues belges entre 1880 et 1890’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 45, no. 3 (1967): 777. 53 I. Turgenev, Poln. sobr. soch. i pisem, vol. 12 (Moscow: Izd-vo Nauka, 1986), p. 333. 54 F. Dostoevskii, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 25 (Leningrad: n.p., 1983), p. 200. 55 Pieter Boulogne, ‘Europe’s Conquest of the Russian Novel: The Pivotal Role of France and Germany’, in Theresa Seruya and Hanna Pięta (eds), IberoSlavica, Special Issue: Translation in Iberian–Slavonic Exchange (Lisbon: CompaRes/ CLEPUL, 2015), p. 191. 56 Boulogne, ‘Europe’s Conquest of the Russian Novel’, pp. 189–90. 57 Mortier, ‘La pénétration de la littérature russe à travers les revues belges entre 1880 et 1890’, p. 782. 58 Boulogne, ‘Europe’s Conquest of the Russian Novel’, pp. 187–8. 59 Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel in English Fiction (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1955), p. 35. 60 P. Berkov, ‘Izuchenie russkoi literatury vo Frantsii’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vols 33–4 (Moscow: Izd-vo AN SSSR, 1939), p. 748. 61 Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, Le Roman russe (Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme, 1971), pp. 44, 60–1. 62 G. Brandes, ‘Chetyre lektsii Georga Brandesa v Peterburge i Moskve’, Vestnik Evropy 11 (1887): 324–6. 63 Harold Orel, ‘English Critics and the Russian Novel: 1850–1917’, Slavonic and East European Review 33-81 (June 1955): 460. 64 N. Berkovskii, O mirovom znachenii russkoi literatury (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningr. otd-nie, 1975), p. 21. 65 A. Pypin, ‘Russkii roman za granitsei’, Vestnik Evropy 9 (1886): 301. 66 Pypin, Istoriia russkoi literatury, vol. 1, p. 33. 67 A. Arkhangel’skii, Vvedenie v istoriiu russkoi literatury, vol. 1 (Petrograd: Tipo-lit. akts. o-va ‘Samoobrazovanie’, 1916), p. 22. 68 S. Vengerov, Osnovnye cherty istorii noveishei russkoi literatury (St Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1909), p. 8. 69 S. Vengerov, V chem ocharovanie russkoi literatury XIX veka? (St Petersburg: Kn-vo ‘Prometei’ N.N. Mikhailova, 1912), p. 8. 70 Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 197–8. 71 D. Merezhkovskii, ‘O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh russkoi literatury’, in D. Merezhkovskii, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 18 (Moscow: Tip. T-va I.D. Sytina, 1914), pp. 157–76. 72 A. Chekhov, Sobr. soch., vol. 11 (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1963), pp. 581–2. 73 Vengerov, V chem ocharovanie russkoi literatury XIX veka?, pp. 15–16.

‘The Period of Stagnation’ Fostered by Publishing 74 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Tradition: Europe, 1870–1914’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 263–307. 75 Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, p. 196. 76 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 354. 77 Peter Bürger and Michael Shaw, ‘The Institution of “Art” as a Category in the Sociology of Literature’, Cultural Critique 2 (Winter, 1985–6): 17. 78 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 122. 79 Pascal Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 36.

91

92

Part Two

93

94

4

Transnational architects of the imagined community: Publishers and the Russian press in the late nineteenth century Yukiko Tatsumi

The print media of modern times is often investigated in its relation to nationalism, because of the influence of the ‘print capitalism’ theory conceptualized by Benedict Anderson. The theory supposed that the rapid expansion of print media standardized national languages and popularized knowledge of national history, geography, ethnicity and traditional culture, which led to the emergence of national identity and the struggle to build nation-states.1 In Russia, the second half of the nineteenth century was the period when the national culture was invented: Peredvizhniki (The Wanderers) drew Russian scenery, which had not been regarded as an appropriate subject for fine arts; Moguchaia Kuchka (The Mighty Handful) composed music, borrowing melody from folk songs; and the artists in the Abramtsevo colony produced furniture, ceramics and textiles with folklore-inspired motifs. When critics, such as Vladimir Stasov, attempted to disseminate the works of these artists widely in society and insisted on promoting Russian national culture, the press worked as a vehicle for spreading their writings and, supposedly, contributed to the construction of ‘the imagined community’. However, when we focus on media devices and people involved in publishing, we must make explorations beyond the nation. The modern time was also the period when the process of globalization intensively began and information and human resources have vigorously flown beyond national boundaries. Arjun Appadurai explained this international flow by using the concept of mediascape in his five ‘scapes’ theory.2 This theory specifies that the newly invented masscirculation press, including newspapers, magazines and electronic media such as TV and radio, spread similarly patterned content (e.g., news, serial stories and advertisements) all over the world and created the transnational media world where the audience in any country and region can obtain a certain type of 95

96

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

information, although perceptions differ depending on the local cultural codes. The fact that the mass-circulation press emerged and set off the beginning of informational globalization in the nineteenth century encourages us to examine the publications of modern times in a transnational context. The mass-circulation press originated in Europe and was introduced into Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. Various significant works on the history of Russian publications refer to the growth of publishing and readership during this period. However, they usually examine this change within the framework of ‘Russia’, not paying attention to the existence of migrant nonRussian entrepreneurs who introduced the mass-circulation press,3 and the fact that, to begin with, Russian publishers, journalists and book traders were not fully familiar with the new type of publications. As the previous chapters of this book have argued, in the late eighteenth century Russian intellectuals elaborated the Russian language and Russian literary works gained authority as ‘classics’ throughout the nineteenth century. Then, what happened when the global print media moved from Europe to Russia and their Russian versions circulated in the empire? Who engaged in the publishing business and how did the publications influence the creation of ‘the imagined community’? In an attempt to answer these questions, this chapter first, describes the general circumstances of the Russian press and readership in the second half of the nineteenth century; and second, introduces several publishers who produced the mass-circulated publications treating nationalistic subjects but who were not considered as typical actors in the print capitalism theory. Although each case has its own context, the exploration will indicate that the new print media brought in from Europe blurred the ‘Russian’ boundaries and the search for popular content contributed to the fostering of narratives about ‘the imagined community’ quite unintentionally.

New media and readership in late nineteenth-century Russia The Russian print media drastically changed throughout the nineteenth century. In the first half of the century, two types of publications were popular: the lubki and the ‘thick’ journals. The lubki, similar to the French canard, were booklets with illustrations and short texts, printed from wood blocks or copper plates. They were usually brought by peddlers from capital cities to provinces and sold to the peasantry at local markets.4 In contrast, the thick journals, such as Sovremennik (The Contemporary), Otechestvennye Zapiski (Annals of the

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

97

Fatherland) and Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe), were edited by the intelligentsia and contained literature, art and social criticism for intellectual readers. At the beginning of the 1860s, certain editors of the thick journals began to issue political newspapers, such as Valentin Korsh’s St. Peterburgskie Vedomosti (St. Petersburg News) and Mikhail Katkov’s Moskovskie Vedomosti (Moscow News).5 These publications had been published by state institutions, such as the Academy of Science and Moscow University, as their official papers, but were then rented to private individuals because of the financial difficulties experienced by their owners. In the 1860s, a practical method for private citizens to issue periodicals was not to found and run their own companies but to use the equipment and privileges granted by government authorities. The real appearance and growth of private publishing in Russian society occurred after the 1870s. As the previous chapter examined in detail, Russian publishing grew dramatically in this period and the mass-circulation press began to be distributed in society: illustrated weekly magazines, paperbacks, children’s books, fashion magazines, calendar books and so on. Among them, the illustrated magazines sold extremely well and spread all across the empire by the end of the nineteenth century. The number of illustrated magazines rose from seven at the end of the 1870s to eighteen in 1880, twenty-nine in 1890 and finally forty-one in 1900,6 and the most important one, Niva (Cornfield; see Figure 4.1) sold 235,000 copies in 1900.7 Illustrated magazines as well as the other types of mass-circulation press were introduced into Russia from Europe. The earliest illustrated weeklies appeared in Britain. Charles Knight’s The Penny Magazine, founded in 1832, was the first such, and Herbert Ingram’s Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, quickly gained more popularity, selling as many as 130,000 copies in 1855. Similar publications emerged in the countries of continental Europe as well. One of the representative examples in France was Édouard Charton’s L’Illustration (1842–1944), published in Paris. As for German magazines, Verlag J. J. Weber’s Die Illustrirte Zeitung (1843–1944) emerged in Leipzig, and Ernst Keil’s Die Gartenlaube (1853–1944) gained much popularity, with an annual circulation of around 382,000 copies by 1875. These magazines were laid out attractively with serialized novels, domestic and international landscapes, copied masterpieces of art and popular science articles. The illustrated magazines entertained readers with articles written in a plain manner and with many pictures. It was the innovation of print technology that caused these changes: the introduction of the cylinder press and, later, the twin-cylinder rotation press respectively, enabled the release of publications with pictures quite economically.8

98

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Figure 4.1 The cover of the first number of Niva (1870).

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

99

The mass-circulation publications were introduced by non-Russian entrepreneurs who migrated from Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. According to the statistical data, in Russia, in 1908, 1,335 firms and individuals were engaged in publishing activities. Among them, 268 private publishing houses could be considered as large companies, and 227 of them were located in St Petersburg and Moscow, although the publishers in Moscow were half as many as in St Petersburg. Kniga v Rossii (Book in Russia), the most comprehensive reference on imperial Russian book history, edited by the Russian National Library, picked seven companies as the most influential and largest publishers launched in the 1860s–70s: M. O. Volf, M. S. Stasyulevich, A. F. Marks, N. P. Karbasnikov, A. S. Suvorin, I. D. Sytin and A. A. Kaspari; and six companies of similar standing launched in the 1880s–90s: F. F. Pavlenkov, P. P. Soikin, Brockhaus–Efron, the Savashnikovs, the Granats and Prosveshchenie. Of these, three were developed by entrepreneurs from Europe and two were joint enterprises with European publishers.9 These businesses emerged after the biggest Russian publishers of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Aleksander Smirdin and the Bazunovs, went bankrupt one after another in the 1850s.10 The reason foreign publishers became involved in Russian publishing in the late nineteenth century was presumably Russia’s geographic location and the policy of the era, ‘the Great Reforms’. Since the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire had annexed the kingdom of Poland, which functioned as an economic mediator between Western Europe and Russia. Although Poland lost its political autonomy after being partitioned in the late eighteenth century, it retained its independence economically under the constitution of 1815 and remained part of the European economy. Moreover, the relationship between the Polish and Russian markets was strengthened, because both countries shared a customs area.11 Such conditions encouraged Western entrepreneurs, who were seeking new markets, to move from Poland to Russia in various industrial fields, including publishing. Reform of the merchant guilds in the 1860s also accelerated this process. During the era of the Great Reforms, the government adopted a positive policy towards foreigners in order to attract investors, merchants, engineers and skilled workers from Europe and to advance Russian industrialization. For that purpose, in 1860, the government declared that all foreigners who moved to Russia to engage in trade, agriculture and industry would be granted the same rights enjoyed by Russian subjects.12 In addition, a law in 1863 allowed foreigners to enter the merchant guilds, which had hitherto only been open to those of the Russian merchant class.13 These reforms enabled foreign entrepreneurs from the

100

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

West to settle and integrate into Russian society. In fact, among the non-Russian publishers we would see later, M. O. Volf attained the prestigious social status of being a member of the first merchant guild in St Petersburg. A. F. Marks entered the merchant guild as well, which allowed him to become a subject of the empire, move upward to the class of distinguished hereditary citizen in the soslovie system, and finally, become a member of the hereditary nobility.14 Thus, nonRussian publishers were encouraged to engage in business in the Russian Empire, which established the mass-circulation press in Russia. The development of private publishing businesses spurred the Russians to produce their mass-circulation press while the intellectuals’ ‘thick’ journals were gradually losing their political influence because of the new censorship laws since the mid-1860s. One prominent figure, Aleksei Suvorin, began his career as part of the editorial staff of various ‘thick’ journals and then became an owner of the newspaper Novoe vremia (Modern Time). Non-Russian entrepreneurs sometimes assisted in the establishment of new enterprises. For example, when Suvorin purchased the publishing rights of Novoe vremia, Volf introduced him to a banker in Warsaw for financing. Additionally, Volf loaned Suvorin money to open a bookshop in St Petersburg.15 Another prominent figure, Ivan Sytin, formerly a publisher of the lubki, later engaged in publishing the newspaper Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), and Peter Soikin was successful with the publication of the popular science illustrated magazine Priroda i liudi (Nature and People). Moreover, non-secular publishing flourished in this period, as the case of Alexander Popovitsky, the son of an Orthodox clergyman, would show. We will examine the business of Soikin and Popovitsky in more detail below.16 The appearance of the new print media coincided with a change in the makeup of the readership. Because of the educational reforms of the 1860s, various types of elementary schools were founded in cities and the countryside. The main targets of these schools were the former serfs, who were emancipated in 1861. The intelligentsia also attempted to improve literacy among the peasantry and engaged in editing textbooks and teaching. The best-known form of activity was the ‘to the people’ movement of the 1870s. As a result, literacy rates increased in the late nineteenth century: 8 per cent (more than 30 per cent in the cities and 5–6 per cent in the countryside) at the end of the 1860s until the beginning of the 1870s,17 compared with 21.1 per cent (45.3 per cent in the cities and 17.4 per cent in the countryside) in 1897.18 Moreover, the educational reforms enabled students from all social classes to receive secondary education, which increased the number of literate people and encouraged more reading in Russian society.

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

101

The statistical data illustrates that in St Petersburg in 1900, a third of male workers and 10 per cent of female workers read newspapers.19

European publishers and nationalistic publications The immigrant non-Russians who contributed to the development of publishing in the late nineteenth century were eager to produce publications about Russia, which generated a situation which does not conform to the theory of ‘print capitalism’. We look at three European publishers and their publications in the early stages of Russian mass-circulation publishing. The first is the publishing company M. O. Volf. The company’s founder, Mavrikii Volf, was born in Warsaw in 1825 and began work in a bookshop. Volf then moved to Paris, aiming to learn about the European book trade. However, the bookshop where he worked in Paris was soon purchased by Brockhaus, a German-based multinational printing house, which encouraged Volf to learn about the publishing industry in Leipzig. After Volf gained experience in the centres of European publishing, he began his own Polish publications business in Krakow, Lviv and Vilnius. He then moved to the imperial capital, St Petersburg, and opened a bookshop in Gostiny Dvor, a department store, in 1853. He abandoned his first plan to deal exclusively in Polish publications and turned to trading and producing Russian books and periodicals. This led his business to become a success in both selling and publishing. He then moved his facilities to the large district of Vasilyevsky island. In 1883, when the founder died, the publishing house was a stock company with about 200 workers.20 With a deep knowledge of the European publishing industry, Volf introduced new publications to Russia. As his diversified publishing enterprise was superior to the traditional bookshops, Russian merchants often criticized him, saying, ‘Volf knows all about Western publishers and he readily uses this to his advantage. But why on earth does he disturb the Russian fellow traders’ business?’21 Among the largest projects of the Volf Company was the twelve-volume album Zhivopisnaia Rossiia (Picturesque Russia), with the subtitle ‘the significance of land, history, ethnicity, economy and daily life of our fatherland’, issued as supplements to the illustrated journal Nov’ from 1881.22 Volf invited Peter Semenov, a leading geographer in Russia at the time, to act as supervisor for the series and gathered contributors to each volume. They prepared the articles that described in detail the geography, history and ethnicity of every region of the Russian Empire, including newly gained areas, such as the Caucasus

102

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

and Central Asia, with many pictures. Zhivopisnaia Rossiia gained popularity and earned a reputation as the representative encyclopaedia of Russia,23 which led certain scholars in later years to consider the album an expression of Russian nationalism. However, Volf originally intended to publish a geographic album on Poland, his true ‘fatherland’, by imitating a German publication. Geographic albums were a popular genre of the European pictorial press in the nineteenth century.24 In Leipzig, Friedrich Körner’s Illustrirte geographische Bilder aus Öesterreich: In Schilderungen aus Natur, Geschichte, Industrie und Volksleben (Illustrated geographical pictures from Austria: Descriptions of nature, history, industry and folk life; 1856–8) gained popularity. Körner’s Unser Vaterland: Land und Leute, Geschildert für Schule und Haus (Our fatherland: Land and people, portrayed for school and home) was also well known among book traders in Russia.25 Although Volf changed his business strategy from dealing with Polish books to concentrating on Russian publications, his original was not entirely abandoned. He invited Adam Kirkor to be a contributor to the third volume, Lithuania, Belarus, and this patriotic author born in the western province of the Russian Empire, that is, from the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, admired their common fatherland, citing a passage from Adam Mickiewicz’s work, ‘O Lithuania, my country, thou art like good health’.26 Zhivopisnaia Rossiia was an earlier example of a typical nationalistic publication, though it was edited by a nonRussian entrepreneur who did not hesitate to call Russia the ‘fatherland’ as a business strategy, imitating the style of the European albums. The second publisher to be considered is the company A. F. Marks. Adolf Marks was born in Szczecin, Prussia, in 1838, and began work in a bookshop in Berlin. He met Ferdinand Bitepazh, a Russian broker in Leipzig, and moved with him to St Petersburg to seek business opportunities in 1859, even though he did not know Russian. In 1864, Marks was appointed to a job in the German books section of the Volf company, but clashed with the owner and went independent in 1869. His business succeeded on a par with Volf: the Marks company became one of Russia’s major publishing houses, employing 700 workers and 150 printers.27 Marks owed his success mostly to the illustrated weekly journal Niva. As this type of journal had not yet spread to Russia, the publisher attempted ‘to create an entirely new reader-group’,28 and he succeeded. As previously mentioned, 235,000 copies of Niva were sold by subscription in the empire in 1900, making it the most popular Russian illustrated magazine.29 As indicated in the previous chapter, Marks edited anthologies of Russian literary works as free supplements to Niva. As this was the period when the

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

103

copyright of authors from the first half of the nineteenth century was beginning to expire, he could issue anthologies quite cheaply. The first collection that the Marks company published was two volumes of M. Iu. Lermontov’s works (1891), which sold 130,000 copies. The authors whose works were published as anthologies during the following decade included A. S. Griboedov, M. V. Lomonosov, D. I. Fonvizin, F. M. Dostoevsky, I. S. Turgenev and I. A. Goncharov.30 Moreover, Marks published the complete works of A. P. Chekhov, one of the most popular authors still alive at that time. It has been argued that the dissemination of Marks’ literary collections as supplements to hundreds of thousands of copies of the journal spread literary works nationwide as ‘the Russian classics’.31 However, when Marks contracted Chekhov in 1899, he had not read any of his works; and by the time of his death, he had still not mastered Russian fully.32 The third publisher to be considered is the Brockhaus–Efron joint stock company, which is popular to this day for publishing an eighty-six volume comprehensive Russian encyclopaedia (1890–1917). The Brockhaus company was a multinational corporation based in Germany. In 1805, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus began business as a book trader and publisher in Amsterdam and later moved to Leipzig. His sons opened branches in Vienna and Berlin. In 1808, at the Leipzig Book Fair, Brockhaus bought the rights to the publication of the Conversations-Lexikon, which was originally issued by Renatus Gotthelf Löbel and Christian Wilhelm Franke in 1796. Brockhaus modified the ConversationsLexikon and made it an extraordinarily popular publication; specifically, the 13th edition gained a reputation as the most useful modern encyclopaedia.33 The Brockhaus company’s business soon expanded beyond Germany. In 1889, a joint enterprise with a Russian publisher, the Brockhaus–Efron company, was founded in St Petersburg with the initial objective of publishing a Russian version of the Conversations-Lexikon. Ilya Efron was a converted Jew, born in Vilnius in 1847. He launched a publishing house in St Petersburg in 1880 that became famous for medical publications. For a Russian-language encyclopaedia of the new joint-stock company, Efron installed new printing facilities, found editors, translators and contributors and placed advertisements. Meanwhile, Eduard Brockhaus, a member of the founder’s family, offered original texts and illustrations from the 13th edition of the encyclopaedia.34 With Germanbased articles gradually replaced by original Russian articles, at the request of subscribers, the encyclopaedia increased in popularity, from 12,000 copies sold in 1890 to 27,000 copies in 1897.35 The Brockhaus–Efron encyclopaedia became an authoritative reference for Russian geography, history, ethnicity and culture;

104

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

in other words, a collection of knowledge to help shape the Russian national identity. Thus, the content that could facilitate the development of Russian nationalism was expanded by non-Russian entrepreneurs – and one of the entrepreneurs in question did not have a good command of the Russian language. In the early stages of Russian publishing, the newly introduced European presses allowed foreign entrepreneurs, who knew the equipment well, to offer content that focused on Russian nationalism.

The Orthodox journalist and the European medium The development of publishing businesses encouraged Russians to start magazines and newspapers, and a very Russian institution, the Orthodox Church, was also involved in this movement. Compared with Western churches, the Russian Orthodox Church traditionally held a negative view of the press, as suggested by the fact that Ivan Fedorov, a pioneering publisher in Moscow in the sixteenth century, was persecuted for blasphemy.36 The introduction of the modernized printing press and the emphasis on secular publications since the Petrine reform also discouraged the Russian Orthodox Church from involvement in publishing.37 However, the late nineteenth century saw the appearance of the Russian Orthodox press inspired by the introduction of European publications and the success of private publishing companies. It generated a unique combination between a Religious publication and an illustrated format of European medium. In the 1860s, while the Great Reforms were underway, reform of the Russian Church was also a pressing concern. Reformist clergymen in the Church considered it an important mission to spread morality amidst the modernization. Therefore, Orthodox institutions began to plan publications that would appeal to society. In 1860, the Holy Synod began to allow each eparchy to issue the newspaper Eparkhiar’nye vedomosti (Diocesan Herald), and from 1888 to 1918, the Synod itself published the weekly journal Tserkovnyi Vestnik (Church’s Herald). Individual journalists from the clergy also engaged in publishing. This trend occurred because, in the 1860s, the sons of clergymen left the hereditary clergy in large numbers and entered the professions and political movements in order to implant traditional faith and values in Russian society through the dissemination of information on Orthodoxy, with some even producing their own periodicals.38 Consequently, the number of Orthodox periodicals increased

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

105

from six in the period of 1821–55 to sixty-four in 1855–81, ninety-three in 1881–1905 and eventually 201 in 1905–17.39 Orthodox periodicals accounted for 13.8 per cent of all Russian periodicals in 1875, and 13.2 per cent in 1880.40 One of the journalists involved in this work was Alexander Popovitsky, who was born in 1826 in the Astrakhan province into a clerical family and studied at the Astrakhan Seminary. Although he entered the St Petersburg Theological Academy in 1845, as an elite clergyman, he chose to leave the Church after graduation. Popovitsky moved to France, where he was employed as a Russian language teacher for the children of Prince Kurakin, a diplomat working at the Russian embassy in Paris. He spent four years in Paris, attending lectures at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, while he also occasionally engaged in debates or arguments with priests in Catholic churches.41 After returning to Russia, Popovitsky became a supporter of the reformist movement in the Orthodox Church and decided to become a ‘theological journalist’.42 From this point, he founded a series of periodicals, the first of which was the Sovremennyi Listok (Modern Paper), published from 1863 to 1874 while he was working as a French language teacher in St Petersburg’s Third Classical Gymnasium. After suspending Sovremennyi listok, Popovitsky started the newspaper Tserkovno-Obshchestvennyi vestnik (Church and Society Herald) in 1874.43 The inclusion of the term obshchestvo (society) in the title indicated his intention to integrate the clergy into modern society. As he asked in the newspaper, ‘Why should clergymen stay away from social problems?’44 However, because of its engagement with politically sensitive topics – the reform of seminaries, advocacy of an election system in the Orthodox Church and the improvement of the living standard of parish clergy45 – TserkovnoObshchestvennyi vestnik was censored in 1883. Moreover, the subscribers were mainly priests, which meant a circulation limited to the hundreds.46 Thus, Tserkovno-Obshchestvennyi vestnik faced financial as well as political difficulties, and Popovitsky suspended publication in 1886. After losing his own newspaper, he decided ‘to concentrate on other publications, other than political and social critiques’.47 Thus, he founded the Orthodox illustrated magazine Russkii Palomnik (Russian Pilgrim; see Figure 4.2), a type of publication that had never previously existed in Russia.48 Popovitsky believed that the style of the illustrated weeklies, which were gaining a mass readership, was suitable for achieving his objective of making religious and moral issues relevant to a secular society. His experiences in France had also familiarized him with the new print media now being introduced into Russia from Europe. Popovitsky’s idea surprised his acquaintances,49 but the magazine

106

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Figure 4.2 The cover of Russkii Palomnik (1888).

successfully started with about 6,000 subscribers in 188550 and came to be called ‘religious Niva’.51 The magazine’s contents were designed to encourage its readers’ faith. The title Russkii Palomnik means ‘Russian pilgrims’, referring to those who visited the Eastern holy places, including Palestine, with the title page featuring a picture

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

107

of a man travelling to an Orthodox church with a cupola. Since the early nineteenth century, the Russian government had sought to wield influence over Palestine, so as to prevent the expansion of British and French power in Jerusalem. In 1882, during the reign of Alexander III, the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society was founded, and pilgrimage to Eastern holy places became a social phenomenon.52 The number of pilgrims rose from 2,009 in 1880 to 3,817 in 1889, and then to 4,852 in 1896.53 Popovitsky considered the pilgrimage an important way for Russians to retain their Orthodox faith. Therefore, Russkii Palomnik advertised the booklet produced for pilgrims by the Palestine Society. It contained coupons, valid for one year from the day of purchase, for accommodation on the journey from Russia to Jaffa, near present-day Tel Aviv – that is, in Moscow, Kursk, Kiev, Odessa, Rostov-na-Donu, Taganrog, Istanbul and Jaffa – as well as for transportation by railway and ship with the Russian Steam Navigation and Trading Company (ROPiT) in Odessa.54 The magazine also published stories of the pilgrims who used the booklet55 and the annual reports of the Palestine Society.56 Russkii Palomnik also used illustrations to encourage its readers’ Orthodox faith. For example, printed pictures of icons, such as the ‘Kholm Miraculous Icon of the Mother of God’,57 the ‘Fyodorov Icon of the Mother of God’ (see Figure 4.3)58 and the ‘Saint Panteleimon’,59 were featured, sometimes as free supplements. Furthermore, the series titled the ‘Illustrated Bible’ depicted biblical scenes such as ‘Noah’s Flood’,60 the ‘Three Angels Visit Abraham’61 and the ‘Judgement of Solomon’.62 The advantage of the illustrated medium was that visual images enabled readers to understand the content easily. Russkii Palomnik, a unique Orthodox illustrated magazine, made the most of the value inherent in this type of media. The quality of illustrations, paper and printing gradually improved,63 and it was later said that this magazine contributed to the development of religious illustration in Russia.64 Moreover, Russkii Palomnik demonstrated a strong awareness of the potential of pictures to make a connection with the common people. In its article ‘The Religious Picture among narod’ (1891), the magazine claimed that intellectuals should respect publications with pictures as these were easier for narod readers to understand.65 The extensive use of illustrations gained popularity among secular readers, particularly peasants and street vendors66 – the readership Popovitsky most wanted to attract. As these examples indicate, the articles and pictures in Russkii Palomnik emphasized faith. At the same time, this magazine along with the other illustrated journals gave readers a substantial amount of information on Russian national history and culture. For example, the article ‘Moscow’ (1885) featured the

108

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Figure 4.3 ‘Fyodorov Mother of God’ (Russkii Palomnik, no. 33 1886).

Kremlin, describing it as the ‘living history of Russia for 500 years of its existence’, and went on to present a basic history of the city from its foundation to the time of the Troubles in the seventeenth century, and then the Patriotic War of 1812.67 In 1888, the 800th anniversary of the Christianization of Kievan Rus was celebrated. The pages of Russkii Palomnik, as well of other illustrated magazines, were filled with articles about the history of Christianization and memorial events,68 supplemented with pictures such as the ‘Departure of tsarevna Anna from Constantinople to Korsun’ (see Figure 4.4)69 and the ‘Celebratory consecration organized in Kiev on 15 July 1888’ (see Figure 4.5).70 The role of religious publishers like Popovitsky, whose main aim was to retain the presence of the traditional faith and Church, have been underestimated

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

Figure 4.4 ‘Departure of tsarevna Anna from Constantinople to Korsun’ (Russkii Palomnik, no. 29 1888).

Figure 4.5 ‘Celebratory consecration organized in Kiev on 15 July 1888’ (Russkii Palomnik, no. 35 1888).

109

110

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

within the secularized framework of the imagined community theory. However, the fact that he used the European mass-circulation media led to information with a national inclination being disseminated as a byproduct. Thus, Popovitsky became part of the construction of ‘the imagined community’, and the articles about Russian history offered by his magazine, which championed the traditional faith and life, proved to be quite attractive to readers.

The Russian publisher and commercial media Tracing the history of Russkii Palomnik to the turn of the twentieth century, we encounter another publisher who does not fit neatly into the print capitalism theory. His name was Peter Soikin, a Russian entrepreneur who purchased Russkii Palomnik and expanded its circulation. Although he was Russian, his initial objective was not to foster Russian nationalism but rather to seek quality content to increase sales. Soikin was born in 1862 into an Orthodox family of former serfs in a village north of St Petersburg. Although the son of an emancipated peasant, he attended the Third Classical Gymnasium in St Petersburg after the educational reforms of the 1860s which opened secondary education to students of all social classes. After graduation, Soikin studied at a vocational school and then landed a job as an accountant at a printing company, whose customers included railway companies and banks. While working at the printers, Soikin became interested in publishing and later bought a small printing office in St Petersburg in 1885.71 This venture proved to be a great success, with the launch of Priroda i Liudi in 1889, Russia’s first illustrated popular science journal. As noted earlier, the successful publishers of Western origin were followed by Russian publishers such as A. Suvorin and I. Sytin in the 1880s, and Soikin also belonged to this generation of Russian publishers, becoming one of the major entrepreneurs in this field at the turn of the century. In the 1890s, when Russkii Palomnik began to lose subscribers and experienced financial difficulties, Soikin decided to support Popovitsky, who had been his teacher at the Petersburg Third Gymnasium.72 In 1896, Soikin purchased the publishing rights of the magazine, retaining Popovitsky as an editor.73 Even after the death of Popovitsky in 1904, Soikin continued to publish Russkii Palomnik and indeed expanded its circulation, previously limited to Petersburg and its neighbouring provinces, into the provinces of the western region (Vilno), central

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

111

Figure 4.6 The growth and fall in subscriptions to Soikin’s magazines (1900–9). The bestseller was Priroda i liudi followed by Russkii Palomnik.

112

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Russia (Tambov, Poltava, Saratov), Crimea (Sevastopol), Siberia and the Far East (Ekaterinburg, Khabalovsk) and Central Asia (Tashkent).74 The Soikin company transformed Russkii Palomnik into a mass-circulation publication, advertising its new acquisition in Priroda i liudi75 (and advertising that magazine in Russkii Palomnik).76 The diagram showing the subscriptions to Soikin’s magazines (see Figure 4.6)77 demonstrates that both magazines rose and declined in synchrony, suggesting a common readership of the two magazines. Indeed, Priroda i liudi and Soikin’s other scientific publications, such as Znanie dlia Vsekh (Knowledge for Everyone), were said to be highly popular among migrant workers, overlapping with the readership of Russkii Palomnik. It would be possible to say the expansion of the religious magazine was promoted by the new owner’s bestselling secular magazine. This ‘reasonable popular science magazine for family reading’78 carried articles in five categories: (1) biographies of famous scientists, explorers and inventors; (2) adventure novels; (3) geography; (4) comments on the natural sciences; and (5) news of adventures, discoveries and inventions.79 Generally, the purpose of these articles was to enlighten readers. Articles included ‘What is electricity?’,80 ‘Electricity in Home Life’,81 ‘Anthropometry: Application of the phrenological method in the identification of the perpetrator’, with pictures of ‘Types of Criminals’ (see Figure 4.7) attached,82 and the ‘Struggle for existence: according to Darwin’.83 Scientific phenomena and modern technologies were explained in simple language complemented by pictures. At the same time, the magazine also featured articles whose primary purpose was not enlightenment. For example, ‘Giants’ described very tall human beings,84 ‘Experiments with soap bubbles’ sought to amuse readers’ eyes with pictures such as a ‘Soap Bubble on a flower’85 (see Figure 4.8) and ‘Morimoto’ introduced a Japanese entertainer’s performance of unusual faces.86 These articles smacked of curiosity shows, whose aim was not to teach the audience but rather to entertain them. Priroda i liudi did not invent the ‘enlightenment’ and ‘amusement’ styles of articles by itself – in fact it was emulating the practice of European illustrated magazines. In this period of modernization, science was one of the most popular subjects in the press, helping increase the number of subscribers. Articles of this type – instructive texts with amusing pictures – can be found in Niva, which A. F. Marks founded in Russia as an imitation of German journals, including instructional pieces such as ‘Types of Great Russians’ (see Figure 4.9), a typology by a scientific method,87 articles on rare animals such as frilled lizards,88 ‘Luminous Fishes in the Bottom of the Ocean’ (see Figure 4.10),89 guidance on

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

Figure 4.7 ‘Types of Criminals’ (Priroda i liudi, no. 16, 17 February 1905).

Figure 4.8 ‘Soap Bubble on a Flower’ (Priroda i liudi, no. 13, 13 January 1902).

113

114

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Figure 4.9 ‘Types of Great Russians’ (Niva, no. 7, 16 February 1876).

new technology and inventions such as the speaking tube90 and an article featuring ‘deformity’91 that might stimulate readers’ curiosity. It is also possible to trace this popular scientific content to European illustrated magazines, such as the articles in the Illustrated London News titled ‘Types of Viennese People’ (see Figure 4.11),92 a typological analysis of the people in the

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

115

Figure 4.10 ‘Luminous Fishes in the Bottom of the Ocean’ (Niva, no. 27, 7 July 1890).

city, and ‘The Sea-Bear at Cremorne Garden’ (see Figure 4.12),93 which explained the animal’s features and habitat in detail, with an attractive picture. Unfortunately, we do not have any record of why Soikin, who published a perfectly Europeanized periodical, decided to help Popovitsky and Russkii Palomnik. Perhaps his upbringing as the son of emancipated peasants stirred a deep sympathy with the Orthodox faith. However, it is equally plausible that Soikin supported Popovitsky’s magazine because a religious publication was likely to be a bestseller in the climate of religious revival and mysticism that reached its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, Soikin published books whose topic matched another trend of the times: Marxism. Vladimir Lenin’s article, ‘The economic content of Narodism and the criticism of it in Mr. Struve’s book’, appeared in the anthology Material for a Characterisation of Our Economic Development published by his company in 1895, while Soikin’s monthly scientific journal, Nauchnoe Obozrenie (Scientific Review), featured the articles ‘A note on the question of the market theory’ and ‘Once more on the theory of realisation’ in 1899, and ‘Uncritical criticism’ in 1900.94 Soikin’s motivation for publishing this material was not sympathy for Marxism, but their potential to bestsellers in the light of current trends and people’s interests.95 Soikin probably considered both religion and popular science as good content for attracting subscribers, hence his support for Russkii Palomnik.

116

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Figure 4.11 ‘Types of Viennese People’ (Illustrated London News, 2 August 1873).

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community

117

Figure 4.12 ‘The Sea-Bear at Cremorne Garden’ (Illustrated London News, 10 June 1865).

Conclusion This chapter has depicted the transnational aspect of Russian publishing in the late nineteenth century, the period when the mass-circulation press moved from Europe to the Russian Empire. Publishers of European origin had an advantage with their knowledge of the then-new print media and produced popular publications about Russian history, geography, ethnography and literature. A journalist from the clergy, who wanted society to retain its traditional faith and values, created an influential Orthodox illustrated weekly by imitating the European pictorial press and at the same time provided knowledge about traditional Russia. A Russian publisher helped this Orthodox magazine to spread across the empire, while giving priority to increasing the sales of his publications and adopting the practices of immigrant European entrepreneurs. None of these individuals have been fully investigated by the previous works in the framework of the theory of print capitalism. However, they were not supporting players, but rather major entrepreneurs in the Russian publishing world. Russian nationalism was taking shape in the second half of the nineteenth century, and publications with a nationalistic inclination contributed to this movement, but many publishers took part in the construction of ‘the imagined community’ quite unintentionally. The Russian press was not exactly a national media, but it was influenced by the process of informational globalization.

118

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

The transnationality of the Russian publishing world began to disappear when the First World War broke out. In 1915, the Ministry of Trade decreed that citizens from enemy nations could not operate or conduct business or own company property and that they had to resign from all company positions. This forced Brockhaus–Efron, the above-mentioned multinational corporation, to cease its publishing operation. The company was reorganized as the publishing house Izdatel’skoe delo,96 but the number of its subscribers declined during the war and it went out of business in 1917.97 The war was followed by the October Revolution and the Civil War. On 27 October 1917, the Bolshevik government issued a decree outlawing ‘the bourgeois press’. Private publishing companies were nationalized, forcing most of the owners to leave Russia. The period of private publishing was at an end. The Russian mass-circulation press would play a part in helping consolidate the new order, that is, the Soviet state – but that requires a different investigation.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1983). Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 33–7. For example, Kniga v Rossii, the comprehensive history of Russian books edited by the Russian National Library (RNB), pointed out that certain publishers at that time were from the West, but did not regard it unusual that foreigners played a significant role in the Russian publishing world. See I. I. Frolova (ed.), Kniga v Rossii 1861–1881, 3 vols (St Petersburg: Kniga, 1990); I. I. Frolova (ed.), Kniga v Rossii 1881–1895 (St Petersburg: Kniga, 1997); I. I. Frolova (ed.), Kniga v Rossii 1895–1917 (St Petersburg: Kniga, 2008). Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 1st pub. 1985), pp. 62–4; P. K. Simoni, ‘O knizhnoi torgovle i tipakh torgovtsev na starom Apraksinskom rynke (do pozhara 1862 goda)’, Novyi zhurnal 3 (1995): 157–67; Kniga v Rossii 1861–1881, vol. 2, p. 143. Louise McReynolds, The News Under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-circulation Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 34–6. A. I. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: ocherki po istorii chteniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1991), pp. 97–8. Niva 50 (1904): 997.

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community 8

9 10

11

12 13

14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

119

Sam G. Riley (ed.), Consumer Magazine of the British Isles (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 89; Michele Martin, Images at War: Illustrated Periodicals and Constructed Nations (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 12–24; Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 20–1, 30. Kniga v Rossii 1895–1917, pp. 54–89, 110–84. T. Grits, V. Trenin and M. Nikitin, Slovesnot’ i kommertsiia Knizhnaia lavka Smirdina (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929); S. F. Librovich, Na knizhnom postu (Petrograd and Moscow: To-vo M. O. Vol’f, 1916), pp. 244–50. L. A. Berezhnaia, M. D. Dolbilov, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), pp. 86–7; Ekaterina Pravilova, ‘From the zloty to the ruble: the kingdom of Poland in the monetary politics of the Russian empire’, in Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen and Anatolyi Remnov (eds), Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, pp. 295–319 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 49–50. Polnoe sobranie zakonov №39118 (1 January 1863); Lohr, Russian Citizenship, p. 53; N. A. Ivanova and V. P. Zheltova, Soslovno-klassovaia struktura Rossii v kontse XIX–nachale XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), p. 81. E. A. Dinershtein, Rossiiskoe knigoizdanie (konets XVIII–XX v.): Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), pp. 75–177, 183; E. A. Dinershtein, ‘Fabrikant’ chitatelei A. F. Marks (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), p. 206. Librovich, Na knizhnom postu, pp. 66–72; Dinershtein, Rossiiskoe knigoizdanie, p. 150; Kniga v Rossii 1861–1881, vol. 2, p. 20. An earlier version of the analysis of these two publishers appears in Yukiko Tatsumi, Tsari to Taishu: Kindai Roshia no Dokusho no Shakaishi (Tsar and the Masses: A History of Reading in Imperial Russia) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2019), pp. 111–43. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu, p. 10. Ivanova and Zheltova, Soslovno-klassovaia struktura, p. 248. Kniga v Rossii 1895–1917, pp. 635, 646. Librovich, Na knizhnom postu, pp. 443–55; Dinershtein, Rossiiskoe knigoizdanie, pp. 133–41. Rossiiskaia Bibliografiia 49, no. 50 (1879): 247–8. P. P. Semenov (ed.) Zhivopisnaia Rossiia: Otechestvo nashe v ego zemel’nom, istoricheskom, plemennom, ekonomicheskom i bytovom znachenii, 12 vols (St Petersburg and Moscow: To-vo M. O. Vol’f, 1881–1901). Librovich, Na knizhnom postu, pp. 475–6.

120

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

24 Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1984). 25 Friedrich Körner, Illustrirte geographische Bilder aus Öesterreich: In Schilderungen aus Natur, Geschichte, Industrie und Volksleben (Leipzig: O. Spamer, 1856–8); Friedrich Körner, Unser Vaterland: Land und Leute, geschildert für Schule und Haus (Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1854); Dinershtein, Rossiiskoe knigoizdanie, p. 187. 26 Zhivopisnaia Rossiia, vol. 3, part 1: Litovskoe i Belorusskoe poles’e (St Petersburg and Moscow: To-vo M. O. Vol’f, 1882), p. 2. As for Adam Kirkor, see N. Yanchuk, A. K. Kirkor: kratkii ocherk zhizni i deiatel’nosti (Moscow: Tip. A. I. Mamontova i Ko., 1888). 27 A. D. Toropov, Sistematicheskii ukazatel’ literaturnogo i khudozhestvennogo soderzhaniia zhurnaly ‘Niva’ za XXX let (s 1870–1899 g.) (St Petersburg: A. F. Marks, 1902), p. 9. 28 Niva 50 (1904): 1006. 29 Niva 50 (1904): 997. 30 Dinershtein, ‘Fabrikant’ chitatelei A. F. Marks, pp. 92–147. 31 Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu, pp. 104–6. 32 Solntse Rossii 3, no. 154 (1913): 14; I. P. Viduetskaia, A. P. Chekhov i ego izdatel’ A. F. Marks (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 21. 33 Kirsten Belgum, ‘Documenting the Zeitgeist: How the Brockhaus recorded and fashioned the world for Germans’, in Lynne Tatlock (ed.), Publishing Culture and the ‘Reading Nation’: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 90–3. 34 Portletnaia galereia redaktorov i sotrudnikov ‘Entsiklopedicheskogo clovaria’, (St Petersburg: F. A. Brokgauz, I. A. Efron, 1904), p. 61. 35 S. V. Belov, ‘Izdatel’stvo “Brokgauz i Efron” ’, Kniga: Issledovanii i material 84 (2005): 186–90; I. E. Barenbaum, Knizhnyi Peterburg: tri veka istorii (St Petersburg: Kul’t Inform Press, 2003), pp. 301–3. 36 E. L. Nemirovskii, Ivan Fedorov. Nachalo knigopechataniia na Rusi: Opisanie izdanii i ukazatel’ literatury: k 500-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia velikogo russkogo prosvetitelia (Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2010). 37 Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 38 Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), pp. 3–4. 39 K. E. Netuzhilov, Tserkovbnaia periodicheskaia pechat’ v Rossii XIX stoletiia (St Petersburg: Izd-vo S.-Peterburgskogo Universiteta, 2008), p. 46. 40 Netuzhilov, Tserkovnaia periodicheskaia pechat’, p. 110. 41 RGIA (Rossiyskiy Gosudarstvennyy Istoricheskiy Arkhiv), f. 802, op. 5, d. 11815.l.1; Russkii Palomnik 14 (1904): Pribavlenie, p. III.

Transnational Architects of the Imagined Community 42 Russkii Palomnik 14 (1904): Pribavlenie, p. II. 43 Dlia druzei. Aleksandr Ivanovich Popovitskii. Dva iubileia ego literaturnoi deiatel’nosti 1845–1885–1895. Izdanie sotrudnikov Tserkovno-Obshchestvennogo vestnika i Russkogo palomnika (St Petersburg: Izd. sotrudnikov TserkovnoObshchestvennogo Vestnika i Russkogo Palomnika, 1895), pp. 5–6, 34, 42, 65. 44 Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik 1 (1874): 2. 45 Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik 2 (1874): 1–2. 46 Dlia druzei, p. 7. 47 Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik 26 (1886): 1. 48 Dlia druzei, p. 7. 49 Netuzhilov, Tserkovbnaia periodicheskaia pechat’, p. 186. 50 Dlia druzei, p. 7. 51 Dvadtsatipyatiletie tipografsko-izdatel’skoi deiatel’nosti Petra Petrovicha Soikina 1885–1910 (St Petersburg: n.p., 1910), p. 28. 52 A. A. Dmitrievskii, Imperatorskoe pravoslavnoe palestinskoe obshchestvo i ego deiatel’nost’ za istekushuiu chetvert’ veka: 1882–1907 (Moscow:Izd-vo. Olega Abyshko, 2008). 53 ‘Palomnichestvo’, in F. A. Brokgauza and I. A. Efrona (eds), Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 44, pp. 643–5 (St Petersburg: F. A. Brokgauz, I. A. Efron, 1897). 54 Russkii Palomnik 2 (1885): 16. 55 Russkii Palomnik 12 (1885): 94–6. 56 Russkii Palomnik 51 (1886): 685. 57 Russkii Palomnik 14 (1885): 108. 58 Russkii Palomnik 33 (1886): 336. 59 Russkii Palomnik 43 (1896): 687. 60 Russkii Palomnik 8 (1891): 117. 61 Russkii Palomnik 11 (1891): 165. 62 Russkii Palomnik 18 (1896): 277. 63 Dvadtsatipyatiletie, p. 28. 64 Dvadtsatipyatiletie, p. 27. 65 Russkii Palomnik 5 (1891): 76. 66 Russkii Palomnik 16 (1904): 274–5. 67 Russkii Palomnik 7 (1885): 49–52. 68 Russkii Palomnik 31 (1888): 368–70, 375–6; 32: 387–8; 33: 394–6, 399–400. 69 Russkii Palomnik 29 (1888): 344–5. 70 Russkii Palomnik 35 (1888): 416–17. 71 Kratkii ocherk razvitiia i deiatel’nosti tipografii P. P. Soikina za desiat’ let ee sushchestvovaniia 1885–1895 (St Petersburg: n.p., 1895), pp. 3–7, 11. 72 Dvadtsatipyatiletie, pp. 8, 28. 73 Russkii Palomnik 46 (1896): 734.

121

122 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Russkii Palomnik 17 (1904): 297. Priroda i liudi 35 (1907): 535. Russkii Palomnik 12 (1885): 192. Dvadtsatipyatiletie, p. 12. Dvadtsatipiatiletie, p. 5. Dvadtsatipiatiletie, pp. 21–4. Priroda i liudi 21 (1890): 334–6. Priroda i liudi 6 (1905): 91–2, 94. Priroda i liudi 16 (1905): 244. Priroda i liudi 17 (1890): 269–71; 18: 286–7. Priroda i liudi 10 (1892): 159–62. Priroda i liudi 3 (1902): 48. Priroda i liudi 1 (1891): 12–13. Niva 7 (1876): 121. Niva 17 (1880): 348–9. Niva 27 (1890): 692. Niva 15 (1878): 268. Niva 24 (1873): 377–9. Illustrated London News, 2 August 1873. Illustrated London News, 10 June 1865. Nauchnoe obozrenie 1 (1899): 37–45; 8 (1899): 1564–79; 5 (1900): 945–54; 6 (1900): 1061–7. 95 S. V. Belov, Izdatel’skaia deiatel’nost’ P. P. Soikina. Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata filologicheskikh nauk (Moscow: n.p., 1973), pp. 9–10. 96 Katalog izdanii aktsionernogo obshchestva ‘Izdatel’skoe delo’, byvshee ‘BrokgauzEfroni’ (Petrograd: Tip. AO Brokgauz-Efron, 1915). 97 Belov, Izdatel’stvo “Brokgauz i Efron” ’, pp. 187–98.

5

The evolution of a Buddhist culture through Russian media: Kalmyks, orientalists and pilgrimages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Takehiko Inoue

Introduction Russian literacy occasionally led a Kalmyk to Tibet. Ovshe M. Norzunov (1874–?), from Kalmyk lower nobility (zayisang) in Iki-Dörbet district (ulus) in Stavropol province, was famous as the first person to take photographs of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1901.1 Norzunov wrote in his memoir that his mother sent him to the local technical school (uchilishche) to learn Russian grammar, even though his father had died in Norzunov’s early childhood. He implied that he could work as an official interpreter owing to his Russian literacy and could see Agvan Dorzhiev, a famous Buriat monk from Tibet, who visited Iki-Dörbet district in 1898. Dorzhiev sent Norzunov to the 13th Dalai Lama and Norzunov filled his role.2 This case suggests that the Russian language enabled the Kalmyks to encounter their ethnic tradition, that is, Tibetan Buddhism, and the Russian language became necessary even within the Tibetan Buddhist community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Kalmyks, who formed part of the Oirat Mongols and mostly followed the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, dwelled in the Lower Volga region of the North Caucasian foreland, in the European part of Russia, where they had gradually migrated from Dzungaria in Central Asia in the first half of the seventeenth century. This chapter uses the term ‘Oirats in the Lower Volga steppe’ to distinguish them from the other Oirats in Central Eurasia, for example the Dzungars, and to identify the Oirats who remained on the Lower Volga steppe and continued to be Russian imperial subjects even after 1771 as the 123

124

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Kalmyks. The Oirats on the Lower Volga steppe gradually lost their independence in the eighteenth century. Most of them left for Dzhungaria in 1771. Those who remained in Russia after 1771 were eventually divided into three administrations: Astrakhan province, Stavropol province and the Don Cossack Host. Previous research, inspired by Soviet historiography, has focused on the influence of the October Revolution on Kalmyk ethnic self-determination and the significance of the new ethnic printing culture in Kalmyk nationalism. However, these perspectives underestimated Kalmyk activities in the prerevolutionary Russian newspapers and journals and regarded the newspapers Oiratskie izvestiia (1917–18) and Ulan Khalimag (1919–20) as ethnic achievements published for the first time in the Kalmyk language.3 This view emphasized the crucial effect of the Revolution of 1917, while it ignored the continuity with the Russian Empire. Indeed, it would have been a great achievement for an ethnic group to develop their own printing culture in their ethnic language. However, we should also pay attention to how a small ethnic group that did not have enough power to develop its own industrialized printing culture expressed its own opinions in publications in a more prestigious language (that is, Russian). In this chapter, we will analyse how Kalmyk modernization and their new Buddhist ideas developed in the imperial context, rather than limiting our focus to Kalmyk ethnic culture as though their nationalism developed independently. We will also explore the cooperation in printing between the Kalmyks and Russian intellectuals, who were interested in Tibetan Buddhism and the Mongolian people, including the Kalmyks. Due to this cooperation, the Kalmyks’ printing culture, which was once lost, was restored, albeit in a different form. At that time, Russian literacy and Russian cooperation were vital. The Kalmyks were a disadvantaged and small ethnic group in the Russian Empire. Indeed the Russian people regarded them as a ‘vanishing people’ in the mid-nineteenth century.4 Nevertheless, the Kalmyks began to take a tactical approach to the hegemony of the Russian language and make use of Russians’ interest in Buddhist Asia.

The complementary relationship between the Oirat manuscripts and Russian Orientology From 6 to 8 September 1940, the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Jangar Epic.5 The Jangar was a traditional

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

125

epic poem of the Oirats and Kalmyks. Many Mongolists like Nicholas N. Poppe (1897–1991) and Soviet intellectuals in the Union of Soviet Writers also sent the Kalmyks their congratulations for preserving the ethnic epic. The ceremony made the Jangar Epic a historical cornerstone of Kalmyk ethnicity. The varied heroic epic was traditionally recited by a special singer (jangarchi) and was passed down via word of mouth. Benjamin Bergmann (1772–1856), a German explorer from Livonia province, ‘discovered’ the epic and the singer on the Kalmyk steppe and published a record of this in 1804. Aleksei A. Bobrovnikov (1821/2–65), a Mongolist and Orthodox missionary from Kazan Spiritual Academy, translated the Jangar Epic into Russian in 1855, and then Konstantin F. Golstunskii (1831–99), a Russian Mongolist and professor at St Petersburg Imperial University, compiled and published a part of the epic in Oirat script in 1862. Moreover, Nomto O. Ochirov (1886–1960), one of the leading Kalmyk intellectuals, took an epic singer, Eelian Ovla (1857–1920), through ten chapters of the Jangar Epic in 1908, when Ochirov was a student in the Faculty of Oriental Studies in St Petersburg.6 Thus, modern Kalmyk intellectuals, including Nomto Ochirov, re-evaluated their ethnic cultural heritage and, in the process, gained the cooperation of Russian Orientologists. In the following part, we will review the historical background of the cultural cooperation between Kalmyks and Russian society, and the role of Russian Orientologists, which complemented the declining Oirat traditional cultural activities in the nineteenth century.

The decline of Oirat manuscript culture Before the late fourteenth century, the Oirats, the ancestors of the Kalmyks, who lived in the Altai region of western Mongolia, spoke one of the Mongolian languages and used the common Mongolian script, which they later came to call ‘traditional’ (hudum). However, by the seventeenth century the traditional script had become quite different from the Oirat oral language, and the Oirats could no longer understand Tibetan Buddhist texts in traditional scripts. In 1648, Zaya Pandita Namkhaijamts (1599–1662), a Buddhist monk of Oirat origin, established an improved Oirat script called ‘clear’ (todo) and the Oirat written language.7 The new Oirat script greatly developed Oirat culture. Its influence spread across various categories from the legal code to Buddhist scriptures and secular literature. Zaya Pandita and his students eagerly translated various Buddhist works to spread the teachings of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism

126

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

among the Oirats. The number of these new translated Buddhist works ran to 209, ranging from sutras of the Buddha and Prajnaparamita canons (central concepts in Mahayana Buddhism) to commentaries and ceremonial texts. These translation projects introduced various Tibetan terms into the Oirat language, which had already absorbed a number of terms originating in Sanskrit and Uyghur before the clear script was established.8 Even in the mid-seventeenth century, Oirat political leaders and Buddhist monks could relatively freely visit Lhasa. The mobility of the Oirats across Central Eurasia enabled cultural interactions between the Oirats, the Mongols and the Tibetans. However, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Oirats on the Lower Volga steppe found themselves in conflict with the Dzhungar khanate, part of the same Oirat khanate on the Central Eurasian steppe. As a result, the Oirats on the Lower Volga steppe could no longer visit Tibet by travelling across the Central Eurasian steppe. Now they had to make a long detour across Russian Siberia, meaning their contacts with Lhasa depended on the Russian government’s permission to pass through Siberia. Thus, Buddhist pilgrimages between the Lower Volga steppe and Tibet ceased for over a century, with the last pilgrimage taking place in 1755–7.9 The subjugation of the Dzhungar khanate by the Qing Empire between 1755 and 1758 further complicated the pilgrimages from the Lower Volga steppe. The disruption of the association with Lhasa and Ikh Khüree gradually hindered the publishing and distribution of Oirat and Tibetan manuscripts among the Oirats on the Lower Volga steppe. A century later, Kalmyk Buddhist monks had to recite the worn-out scriptures, and by the nineteenth century the intellectual activities of the Kalmyk elites had declined significantly.10 Kalmyk printing presumably gained momentum in response to the resumed pilgrimage to Tibet at the end of the nineteenth century.11 Furthermore, the 1905 Revolution led to religious tolerance in the Russian empire. The government granted the Buddhist followers the right to have their own printing presses in their temples and to carry Buddhist literature from outside the area without censorship.12

Russian Orientology and the preservation of Kalmyk manuscript culture Like other Asian peoples, the Kalmyks were investigated, collected and published by Europeans, including ethnic Russians, unilaterally. Kalmyk studies advanced dramatically when the Moravian (Herrnhuter) colony Sarepta was established

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

127

on land 38 kilometres south of Tsaritsyn (present Volgograd) in 1765. The Kalmyk steppe now became a gateway to North Caucasus and Central Asia, and Sarepta served as its starting point.13 Isaak Jakob Schmidt (1779–1847) launched a full-scale research project on the Kalmyk, Mongolian and Tibetan languages. In Sarepta, Schmidt made a credit loan to the Kalmyks while mastering the Kalmyk and Mongolian languages. He translated the Bible into Kalmyk at the request of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the London Missionary Society, who were interested in missionary work in Russia and Asia at that time. Furthermore, Schmidt published many linguistic works including a Mongolian– Russian–German dictionary in 1835.14 Academic research on Asia generally developed at Kazan Imperial University in the first half of the nineteenth century, which hired the first European professor of Mongolian in 1833. The university also had plans to add Tibetan, Hebrew and Kalmyk to the curriculum. Moreover, the Kazan Theological Academy began to teach Tatar, Arabic, Mongolian and Kalmyk in 1844.15 Thus, Kazan played a crucial role in the formation and development of education and science relating to the Kalmyks. In the field of linguistics, Alexander V. Popov (1809–65) and A. Bobrovnikov advanced research into Kalmyk grammar. Also, as already noted, Bobrovnikov and Golstunkii collected and published the Oirat traditional epic. In 1855, St Petersburg University established an Oriental faculty, while the central institution for Orientology including Kalmyk studies moved from Kazan to St Petersburg. The Orientalists in St Petersburg valued the living tradition of Asian people,16 hence, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, many Russian Orientologists conducted surveys in the Kalmyk steppe and began to publish various Kalmyk texts in their original language. For example, Aleksei M. Pozdneev (1851–1920) published an anthology of Kalmyk folk stories in Oirat script with a Russian translation in 1889, while Pozdneev also published the travelogue of a Kalmyk monk, Baaza-Bagshi, who journeyed to Tibet (described below), with a Russian translation in 1897.17 Menko Bormanzhinov (1855–1919), the Lama of Don Kalmyks, was a leading promoter of publishing Oirat Buddhist manuscripts and translating them into Russian.18 Thus, lithographers and Orientologists, especially in St Petersburg, supported printing in Oirat script at the turn of the twentieth century. Russian Orientology contributed to the preservation of the vanishing original texts because the Kalmyk printing culture had already fallen into decline. This cooperative framework provided a foundation on which Kalmyk intellectuals could later develop their opinions in Russian.

128

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

The Kalmyks’ use of Russian-language media Russian was not necessarily the dominant language on the Kalmyk steppe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Russian literacy only gradually became significant. The Kalmyks maintained close relationships with various neighbouring Turkic groups, namely the Crimean Tatars (and Ottoman Empire), the Nogais, the Turkmens, the Bashkirs, the Kazakhs and others. Some Nogai groups were assimilated into Kalmyk society. Thus, naturally, Turkic languages played a large role in intercommunication with Turkic-speaking people for the Kalmyks. The neighbouring Kabardas and the Chechens also used their own languages, which differed from Turkic. In addition, Armenians also gained considerable influence over the economy in south Russia. Indeed, the Kalmyk steppe remained under the indirect rule of the Kalmyk nobles, and ordinary Kalmyks had little opportunity to have contact with the Russian people. In one case, a Kalmyk noble did not recognize Russia, even St Petersburg, as a part of Europe and did not necessarily regard Russia as the centre of modern values.19

Changing significance of Russian education Nevertheless, the Russian language gradually became more important to the Kalmyks in the nineteenth century. Kalmyk nobles acknowledged that their children needed to study Russian grammar for the sake of their future, especially in relation to military service. The Kalmyk nobles Serebjab Tumen of Khoshut district and Erdeni-taishi Tundutov of Baga-Dörbet district, who had received a Russian education, planned to establish technical schools on the Kalmyk steppe as early as 1821.20 The Russian government also hoped to train Kalmyk children as translators, interpreters and low-level officials literate in Russian so that they could become intermediaries between the Kalmyks and Russian society and the state. Therefore, the government promoted the spread of Russian literacy among the Kalmyks, especially in response to new legal regulations for the Kalmyks that were decreed on 23 April 1847. The technical school was aimed mainly at the children of Kalmyk nobles, of people in service and in office, of other honorary people, and orphans. The subjects taught at the school were the Russian and Kalmyk languages, arithmetic, some geography, history (in general and specifically of the Russian state), calligraphy (sketching, painting) and Buddhism.21 A gymnasium was also established in 1856. However, there were only 210 students in eight primary schools, out of a total population of about 138,000, in Astrakhan province in 1870.22

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

129

Most Kalmyks – not only the common people but also nobles, were illiterate,23 with the Russian imperial census of 1897 showing that only 3.7 per cent of Kalmyks in the Astrakhan province were able to read and write. Most of the literate population were Buddhist monks, who numbered 1,810 people based in twenty-three small temples and fifty-three large ones, reflecting the fact that Buddhist society had a distinct educational system. In fact, the literacy rate among the Kalmyks improved under the Soviet Union, rising to 9.6 per cent in 1926 and 58.7 per cent in 1939.24 Regarding literacy in the Russian language, the census of 1897 showed that 326 out of 4,317 literate Kalmyk males and twentynine out of 411 literate females had Russian language skills, among a total of 128,573 Kalmyks in the Astrakhan province.25 Indeed, the new secular educational system gradually produced a new type of Kalmyk intellectual who was literate in Russian. Filled with a desire for further education, especially in medicine and veterinary science, some people moved to large cities such as St Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Kharkov, Saratov and Astrakhan. Their studies were financially supported through the patronage of Kalmyk nobles and by a common service charge (obshchestvennyi kapital) levied on the local Kalmyk community. Mikhail V. Badmaev (Dik Badmaev), who was from a lower noble family in the Yandik-Mochagi district, graduated from a technical school in Astrakhan in 1884 and after entering Kazan Veterinary School, attended the Faculty of Medicine of Kazan University in 1889. In 1893, Badmaev joined the Medical Examiner Commission as a physician and provided the Kalmyks with a prophylaxis against a cholera epidemic in the same year. Badmaev also taught Kalmyk at the Kazan Theological Academy between 1884 and 1894 and in the latter year, with co-author Bobrovnikov, the director of the Kazan Teachers’ Seminary for the Aliens (inorodtsy), produced a textbook and primer on the Russian language for Kalmyk students. He also planned to compile a Russian–Kalmyk dictionary. Badmaev received a stipend of 400 roubles per year for nine years from the common service charge of his home district.26 Badmaev’s story demonstrates that the local Kalmyk community supported him and he repaid them with medicine and education. Russian education became significant not only for those who were educated but also for all of the beneficiaries of such education on the Kalmyk steppe.

The Kalmyks’ debut in the Russian public sphere Educated Kalmyk nobles began producing articles about Kalmyk society for local newspapers and journals in Russian in the 1880s. For instance,

130

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Emgen-Ubushi Dondukov (1840–1902), a lower noble from Baga-Chonos village (ayimag) in Baga-Dörbet district in Astrakhan province and one of the largest horse breeders on the Kalmyk steppe, wrote articles about horse farms for the Zhurnal konnozavodstva (Journal for Horse Breeding) in 1885. Likewise, the Kalmyk noble (noyon) Mikhail M. Gakhaev (Dordzhi Ubushaev, 1858–1907), lower noble Andre Mikhailov-Iderov from Iki-Dörbet district in Stavropol province and other Kalmyk literates contributed to local newspapers like the Severo-kavkazskii krai (North Caucasian Region) from the 1890s onwards. They acted as correspondents, providing local information on political and social themes such as the economy, administration, land issues and duties. In the twentieth century, the Kalmyks, more self-assured as a result of their educational progress and knowledge of Russian, were not satisfied with being mere correspondents but sought to engage in debate in the press and in journals. This was illustrated by an argument in the pages of Grazhdanin (Citizen) in 1901 in which the Kalmyk noble Tundutov took the lead in making the Kalmyks important actors in the Russian public sphere. Grazhdanin was a conservative political and literary magazine/newspaper published in St Petersburg by Prince Vladimir P. Meshcherskii (1839–1914), who was also its founder and published and a contributor of articles that had some influence on the Russian government and society. A 1901 issue of Grazhdanin published a piece entitled ‘The Diary of Prince V. P. Meshcherskii. Saturday, 21 February 1901’, which conveyed his observations on ‘the poor Kalmyks’ (vednye kalmyki), based on his travels. Meshcherskii considered that the Kalmyks in Astrakhan and Stavropol provinces were undeservedly and unjustly unhappy, despite the Russian emperor’s guarantee of their nomadic lands for 101 years. Meshcherskii regarded the occupation of fertile lands by the Russian agricultural immigrants created as an injustice to the Kalmyks. However, his criticism focused particularly on the local authorities and their indifference, inaction and legal violations. Visiting the Kalmyk steppe, a number of previous Ministers of State Domains, who had jurisdiction over the administration of the Kalmyks, judged this occupation by the Russian peasants to be illegal and adopted a measure to make them return the lands in question. Nevertheless, the illegal occupation of Kalmyk lands continued because the rulings that had been made were circumvented by local authorities. Meshcherskii claimed that compared to the dramatically improved situation of most Russian subjects, including serfs, the guarantee of the rights, education and medical care of Kalmyk society was still at a preliminary stage.27

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

131

Mikhail A. Gazenkampf, the Astrakhan governor (1895–1903), contributed an extended criticism of Meshcherskii’s description of Kalmyk society. Gazenkampf challenged Meshcherskii’s assessment of governmental policy toward the Kalmyks, contending that it was perfectly legitimate. In fact, Gazenkampf went on the offensive by accusing several former Kalmyk nobles28 by name (and Kalmyk Buddhist monks) of being the root cause of the poverty and suffering among the ordinary Kalmyk people.29 According to Gazenkampf, these were the men to blame for mismanagement of the Kalmyk administration. Criticism of former rulers was a typical tactic employed by Russian officials in this era. After Gazenkampf ’s argument was aired, a Kalmyk wrote to Prince Meshcherskii to make his own case. Tseren-David Ts. Tundutov (1860–1907) was a leading Kalmyk noble from the Baga-Dörbet district. He finished his advanced education at the Imperial Lycee in Moscow, better known as the ‘Katkov Lycee’, in 1879 and he attended several lectures from universities in Western Europe. Tundutov was a patron of Buddhism and was committed to rebuilding the relationship with Tibet. Subsequently, in 1906, he was elected to the first Imperial Duma as a representative of the nomadic people of Astrakhan and Stavropol provinces, and appeared before the Agricultural Committee. In refuting Gazenkampf ’s argument, Prince Meshcherskii not only exposed the inaccuracy of the Astrakhan governor’s information, but also revealed the letter Tundutov had sent to Grazhdanin. In the letter, Tundutov, who was in fact one of the former nobles named by Gazenkampf as responsible for the plight of the Kalmyk, refuted Gazenkampf ’s claims more logically and more moralistically. Although Meshcherskii had never met Tundutov, his letter persuaded Meshcherskii to stand with the former Kalmyk noble. Meshcherskii described Tundutov as an ‘educated [he had finished a course at Katkov Lycee], calm, quiet, good person’ who ‘not only was not embittered toward but also . . . [spoke] respectfully about the very governor [Gazenkampf] who portrayed him [Tundutov] as a bit of a rebel and his personal enemy’.30 While not completely convinced of the errancy of Gazenkampf that Tundutov had alleged, Meshcherskii did not hesitate to give Tundutov his full backing.31 What this episode is most notable for, however, is the profile it gave to the Kalmyks, with readers of Grazhdanin appreciating that they were clearly fit to be part of Russian public life. Russian society valued the type of persuasive rhetoric deployed by Tundutov and at the same time found the irresponsible remarks by Gazenkampf to no longer be acceptable, even toward minorities like the Kalmyks, who many Russian people had viewed as ‘aliens’ (inorodtsy).

132

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

The cultural backstream toward the Russian heart Acquisition of the Russian language thus provided non-Russian people with an opportunity to enter Russian society. Importantly, the accessibility to Russian society also entailed close relationships between Kalmyk Buddhist society and Russian society. Furthermore, this accessibility led to the rebuilding of the relationship between the Kalmyks and Tibet via Russia and resulted in new Buddhist ideas and a new historical perspective spreading in Kalmyk Buddhist society.

Social accessibility to Russian society and resumed pilgrimages Although making a pilgrimage was a core component of the relationship between the Lower Volga steppe and Tibet, as noted previously, pilgrimages ceased for over a century, with the final Oirat pilgrimage from the Lower Volga steppe taking place between 1755 and 1757. The Kalmyks who resumed making pilgrimages in 1877 were the Don Kalmyks, also known as the Buzavs, who were a minority group distinct from Astrakhan Kalmyks and who served the cossacks in the Russian military in the Don Host Oblast.32 A political, social and economic alignment with Russian society was a characteristic of the Don Kalmyks. Furthermore, their accumulation of wealth from the livestock industry and transportation developments helped make it possible for pilgrimages to resume, news of which soon spread throughout Kalmyk society, resulting in the resumption of Kalmyk Buddhist pilgrimages.33 The pilgrims brought back various Buddhist ritual implements and texts to the Kalmyk steppe. For example, Tseren-Bal’dzhir, the widow of TserenUbushi Dugarov, returned from her pilgrimage in 1880 with more than 1,500 Buddha statues, Tibetan Buddhist canons (four sets of the Kangyur, two sets of the Tengyur), many Buddhist altar fittings and Buddhist writings.34 Don Kalmyk pilgrimages to Tibet resumed earlier than those of the Astrakhan Kalmyks for three reasons. First, a new religious leader, Arkad Chubanov (1840– 94), appeared on the scene in the Don Kalmyk Buddhist community in 1873. Chubanov was elected the Lama of the Don Kalmyks, and his service in the religious administration continued until his death in 1894. He promoted Russian-style education among young Don Kalmyks, and in 1875 he had personal contact with Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (1856–1929), grandson of Nicholas I.35 Second, the Don Kalmyks witnessed an upsurge in pilgrimages among the neighbouring Russian Orthodox Christians and Muslims: during the nineteenth century, the number taking part in Orthodox pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Muslim pilgrimages

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

133

(Hajj) to Mecca increased annually.36 Third was an economic factor. The Don Kalmyks bred horses to supply the Russian army, and the Don Kalmyk district became a leading horse-breeding area in the Don Cossack Host in the 1870s. Indeed, the Don Kalmyk district was one of the highest regions in the Russian Empire in the number of horses bred per person.37 Moreover, the Don Kalmyks also produced cattle and sheep for the Russian meat market. This commercial activity meant they could afford to spend large sums of money on their pilgrimages.

Russian support for Kalmyk expeditions/pilgrimages to Tibet The close connection with Russian society opened the way for Kalmyk Buddhists to visit the sacred Buddhist cities of Lhasa and Ikh Khüree (Urga, in present-day Ulan Bator). The expedition/pilgrimage of Naran Ulanov and Dambo Ul’ianov from the Don Kalmyks in 1904 provides a good case study for assessing the meanings and achievements of the resumed pilgrimages. As we shall see later, the expedition/pilgrimage in 1904 eventually provided Kalmyk Buddhist society with new Buddhist ideas and a new historical perspective. The man who planned the 1904 expedition/pilgrimage was Naran Ulanov (1867–1904) from the Don Kalmyks, who served in Moscow as a Cossack junior esaul (Pod”esaul, equivalent to a captain) in the 1st Don Cossack Regiment of Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov, Count of Rymnik and Prince of Italy. In 1901, Ulanov was sent to St Petersburg as an interpreter for the Tibetan delegation. He would later explain that this work as an interpreter led him to develop a great deal of interest in Tibet.38 With a good command of Russian and Kalmyk, the Russian authorities expected Ulanov to bridge the gaps between Russia and Tibet and Russia and the Kalmyks. Inspired by the Tibetan delegation, Ulanov applied to the General Staff to be dispatched to Lhasa, and the General Staff duly trained him to become a surveyor in Tibet. On 5 August 1902, Ulanov was enrolled in the main directorate of the General Staff as a free student for the 1902–3 school year, attending the Nicholai Academy of the General Staff. Ulanov’s training and the preparation for his expedition was greatly influenced by Petr P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, a famous Russian geographer who had managed the Imperial Russian Geographical Society for some time and supported many expeditions to Inner Asia made by Nikolai M. Przheval’skii, Petr K. Kozlov and others. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii wrote that it was necessary to study all aspects of Tibet and search for routes between Central Tibet and Central Asia. He also believed that the expedition was made more meaningful because of the fact that the Kalmyks were both Asian and Buddhist.39

134

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Russian Orientologists were very supportive of Ulanov’s training both because of their academic interest in Tibet and the government’s concerns about international relationships involving Tibet. The famous Buddhologist Sergei F. Oldenburg (1863–1934), the permanent secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was actively involved in the training of Ulanov. It was through Oldenburg that Ulanov met two Buriat students, Bazar B. Baradiin (1878–1937) and Tsyben Zhamtsarano (1880–1942), from St Petersburg University and another famous Buddhologist, Fedor I. Shcherbatskoi (1866–1942). Supervised by Oldenburg, Ulanov studied the geography, history, ethnography and travel writings of Central Asia, especially Tibet. The linguist and Orientologist Vladislav L. Kotvich (1872–1944) gave Ulanov a Tibetan grammar compiled by Schmidt of the Moravian Church and, moreover, taught Ulanov Mongolian. The explorer Petr K. Kozlov (1862–1935) also gave Ulanov much detailed advice about the expedition to Tibet.40 Although Ulanov’s training was of relatively short duration, it was of high quality, involving many specialists from various fields, who imparted their professional knowledge and skills.41 Ulanov and his entourage left for Tibet in February 1904, but two months later he died of an endemic disease near Karashar, a city in Xinjiang in the Qing Empire. Ulanov’s place as leader of the expedition was now taken by the Buddhist monk Dambo Ul’ianov, who led the remaining members of the party to Lhasa, which they reached on 20 May 1905. However, by this time, the 13th Dalai Lama had already fled to Ikh Khüree in Mongolia, and lacking the training and skills of Ulanov, the remaining Kalmyks in the expedition were unable to acquire the information that the Ministry of War and the Imperial Russian Geographical Society had been seeking.42 Nevertheless, in terms of culture, the expedition/ pilgrimage of 1904–5 bore some fruit. The general experience that had been gained and some of the goods purchased, including various Buddhist texts, encouraged the monk Ul’ianov to write a book entitled The Prophecies of the Buddha about the House of Romanov and a Short Essay on My Journey to Tibet in 1904–1905, which was published in St Petersburg in 1913. With its new historical perspective on the 300-year relationship between the Kalmyks and Russia, the book was a milestone in the history of Kalmyk Buddhism in the Russian Empire.

From Gautama Buddha to Mikhail Romanov (rather than Genghis Khan) Ul’ianov’s book The Prophecies of the Buddha is complicated and seems quite odd and dense for those not familiar with the Buddhist view of the world and

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

135

Buddhist narratives. The Saint-Petersburgskie Vedomosti described it as a ‘mysterious book’ in its obituary notice for Ul’ianov in 1913.43 However, given that it was published in the Russian capital and bearing in mind the long history of Buddhism among the Kalmyks, which was unexpectedly rejuvenated by its connection with the Russian-speaking world, this was a publication of some importance. The author Dambo Ul’ianov (1844–1913), a Buddhist monk from the Don Kalmyks, was a member of the first resumed pilgrimage in 1877 and remained in Ikh Khüree to study Tibetan medicine. After moving to St Petersburg in 1901, Ul’ianov attended the lectures of the Military Medical Academy. Furthermore, he translated some Tibetan medical texts into Russian44 and pointed out in his report to the General Staff that while in Lhasa he had ‘succeeded in getting very important medicine for external application against syphilis’.45 Indeed, Ul’ianov, who was proficient in Russian, believed that Tibetan medicine had something of value to offer the Russian Empire. At the same time, his strong commitment to Tibetan Buddhism gave him new ideas on the relationship between the Russian Tsars and the Buddhist faith. Russian intellectuals in St Petersburg were supportive of Ul’ianov’s venture into publishing. Part of his travelogue was translated into Russian and published in 1906 in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti, whose owner, Prince Esper E. Ukhtomskii, was fascinated by the myth of the White Tsar and the Buddhist world and who had been a supporter of Buddhists in the Russian capital since the 1880s.46 Tibet attracted much interest from Russian intellectuals in a variety of disciplines, including music, art, philosophy, the social sciences, the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as from military officers. Russian intellectuals in St Petersburg who were interested in Buddhism met regularly at a particular cultural salon in the late nineteenth century.47 Russians’ positive attitude towards Tibetan Buddhism was influenced partly by the Theosophical Society, which was established by Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–81),48 a Russian esoteric philosopher, in New York in 1875. A number of articles about the theosophical movement appeared in the book catalogue of the Buriat intellectual Tsyben Zhamtsarano, who referred to the movement as ‘neo-Buddhism’.49 The great Buriat lama Agvan Dorzhiev visited Russia in 1898 and then went on to Paris and London, where his rituals were very popular, before returning to Tibet. The Prophecies of the Buddha details a number of omens connected to its author after his return to Russia. For example, in January 1907, Ul’ianov received relics of the Buddha (sarīra) from the fifth monarch of Siam under the House of Chakri, Chulalongkorn (Rama V) and then discovered four predictions about

136

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

the reincarnations of Gautama Buddha, Padmasambhava (an eighth-century Indian Buddhist master and founder of Tibetan Vajrayana (tantric teachings), Ulanov and Ul’ianov himself in some Buddhist texts that he had bought in Lhasa. In interpreting these predictions, Ulanov was inspired by the Buddhist story that after his enlightenment Buddha met two traders and brothers named Trapusa and Bhallika from a foreign land, who became his first lay followers. In The Prophecies of the Buddha, after a detailed analysis of the Buddhist texts, Ul’ianov concluded that Michael, Tsar of All Rus’, and Nurhaci, Khan of the Later Qing dynasty, must have been reincarnations of the two traders and brothers and, therefore, the Russian Tsars must have been the reincarnations of Bodhisattvas. ln his interpretation, Ul’ianov viewed the European part of the Russian Empire as a legendary Buddhist kingdom (Shambhala) where Tibetan Vajrayana was to be developed and which could be as great as the Qing Dynasty or could be an alternative to the Qing Dynasty as a patron of Tibetan Buddhism. He asserted that the Romanov Tsars were to rule ethically and benevolently over the whole world as Chakravartin, to show compassion and to save all living things as Bodhisattvas until Maitreya appears on Earth in the future. Of the present Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, he wrote: . . . our Great Sovereign Emperor Nicholas the Second also, according to his own divine purpose to render vast blessing to all mankind, called on all the peoples of the world to The Hague Peace Conference to establish the basic principle to continually aim at the human good as the goal of state activity in general, regardless of nationality and religion.50

Ul’ianov thought that the first Hague Conventions of 1899, which were the initiative of Nicholas II and the first formal statements on the laws of war and war crimes, was an expression of the Tsar’s charity towards all people as a reincarnated Bodhisattva. The Prophecies of the Buddha also presented a new historical perspective in which Ul’ianov associated Gautama Buddha with Mikhail Fiodorovich Romanov, but with no reference to Genghis Khan. Many Mongolian chronicles had emphasized the continuity from Gautama Buddha to Genghis Khan, and the History of Dorben Oirats (Dörbön oyiradiyn tüüke), compiled in 1819 by BaturUbashi Tumen from the Khoshut district of Astrakhan province, showed that Tumen’s family and the Kalmyks enjoyed a peaceful life thanks to the mercy of Catherine II and emphasized the legitimacy and historical continuity of Gautama Buddha, Genghis Khan and Tumen’s family.51 However, Ul’ianov did not refer to Genghis Khan in The Prophecies of the Buddha, but instead acknowledged the

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

137

new legitimacy of the Romanov dynasty in Buddhism and regarded Tibetan Buddhist followers in the Russian Empire as no longer subject to the Chingisid principle, which was the rule of legitimate inheritance derived from a direct male line of descent from Genghis Khan in the Mongolian and Turkic worlds. In Ul’ianov’s interpretation, the Russian Tsars were reincarnations of Bodhisattvas who had come to save not only the Kalmyks but also all Buddhist followers.

Conclusion: A cooperative framework for Kalmyk Buddhists in the Russian Empire The printing culture of the Oirats in the Lower Volga steppe (the Kalmyks) gradually went into decline as the Russian Empire subsumed them in the eighteenth century. At the same time, Russian Orientologists investigated the Kalmyk culture and helped preserve the original texts of the Oirat manuscripts, which were in danger of being lost forever. Orientologists often arbitrarily researched and helped preserve ethnic traditions, but their work also created a cooperative framework which new Kalmyk intellectuals would use to disseminate their opinions in Russian. The Russian language became increasingly important in Kalmyk society from the 1870s on. Some literate Kalmyks began to write about themselves in Russian in newspapers and journals, while the controversy concerning Prince Meshcherskii, Astrakhan Governor Gazenkampf and former Kalmyk noble Tundutov was a turning point in terms of Kalmyk involvement in Russian public life and society. Most importantly, new Kalmyk cultural activities were now developed in cooperation with the intellectual community of imperial Russia, and Kalmyks now trained to use the Russian imperial printing system. Overall, the Kalmyks, once a small and disadvantaged minority in the Russian Empire, formulated their own strategy to survive under the imperial order and reshaped their ethnic culture in doing so.

Notes 1 2

Gombozhab Ts. Tsybikov, Buddist-palomnik i sviatyn’ Tibeta, 2nd ed. (Nobosibirsk: n.p., 1991), p. 116. RGO. F. 90. Op. 1. D. 42. L. 1–7b.

138 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15

16

17 18

19

Publishing in Tsarist Russia For example, see Viacheslav A. Stoianov, Razvitie pechati Kalmykii v XX veke (Elista: Dzhangar, 2012). Il’ia I. Mechnikov, ‘Zametki o naselenii Kalmytskoi stepi Astrakhanskoi gubernii’, Izvestiia Imperatorskogo Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 9, no. 1–10 (1873): 335. Izvestiia, 6 September 1940. Uriubdzhur E. Erdniev, Kalmyki. (Konets XIX–nachalo XX vv.): Ist.-etnogr. ocherki (Elista: Kalmizdat, 1970), pp. 6–7, 224–6. El’za P. Bakaeva and Natal’ia L. Zhukovskaia (eds), Kalmyki (Moscow: Nauka, 2010), pp. 382–4. Bakaeva and Zhukovskaia, Kalmyki, pp. 387–8. Arash Bormanshinov, ‘Kalmyk Pilgrims to Tibet and Mongolia’, Central Asiatic Journal 42, no. 1 (1998): 6. Oirat manuscript culture did not completely disappear and Kalmyk nobles and monks continued to transcribe important materials. For example, Batur-Ubashi Tumen from Khoshot district collected valuable historical material on the Kalmyk steppe and compiled the History of Dorben Oirats (Dörbön oyiradiyn tüüke) in 1819. Stephen A. Halkovic, The Mongols of the West (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), pp. 22–40. Takehiko Inoue, ‘Reigniting communication in the Tibetan Buddhist world: The Kalmyk pilgrimages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in Yumiko Ishihama et al. (eds), The Resurgence of ‘Buddhist Government’: Tibetan–Mongolian Relations in the Modern World (Osaka: Union Press, 2019), pp. 69–82. RGIA. F.821, Op.133, D.414. Otto Teigeler, Die Herrnhuter in Rußland. Ziel, Umfang und Ertrag ihrer Aktivitäten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 400–58; Dittmar Schorkowitz, ‘Die Brüdergemeine von Sarepta. Innenansichten und Außenkontakte einer deutschen Kolonie an der Unteren Wolga’, Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher, New Series, 22 (2008): 227. Charles R. Bawden, Shamans, Lamas, and Evangelicals: The English Missionaries in Siberia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 30–46. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 104. Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 102–8. Aleksei M. Pozdneev, Skazanie o khozhdenii v Tibetskuiu stranu Malo-Dörbötskogo Bāza-bakshi (St Peterburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1897), pp. i–viii. Arash Bormanshinov, The Lamas of the Kalmyk People: The Don Kalmyk Lamas (Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1991), p.17. RGADA. F.186, Op.1, D. 88.

The Evolution of a Buddhist Culture through Russian Media

139

20 NARK. F. 1. Op. 1. D. 181. 21 PSZ-II. T. 22:1. S. 372. No. 21145 (1847). 22 Konstantin N. Maksimov and Nina G. Ochirova (eds), Istoriia Kalmykii s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, vol. 3 (Elista: Gerel, 2009), pp. 369–70. 23 Bakaeva and Zhukovskaia, Kalmyki, p. 206. 24 Maksimov and Ochirova, Istoriia Kalmykii, vol. 2, pp. 728–9. 25 Maksimov and Ochirova, Istoriia Kalmykii, vol. 3, p. 363. 26 RGIA. F. 1291. Op. 85. D. 132. 27 Grazhdanin (1901), pp. 1–5. 28 In 1892, the government issued an act that absolved the ordinary Kalmyk people from the legal rule of the Kalmyk nobles (noyons and zayisangs). However, the former nobles maintained, to some extent, their political, social and economic influence on Kalmyk society. Aleksandr N. Komandzhaev and Natal’ia P. Matsakova (eds), Reforma 1892 goda v Kalmykii (Elista: Izdatel’stvo FGBOU VPO ‘KalmGU’, 2011), pp. 141–70. 29 Grazhdanin (1901), pp. 5–12. 30 Grazhdanin (1901), p. 14. 31 Grazhdanin (1901), pp. 13–38. 32 Bormanshinov, ‘Kalmyk Pilgrims to Tibet and Mongolia’, pp. 7–8. 33 In 1891, the Astrakhan Kalmyk Buddhist monk Baaza-bagshi Menkedzhuev went on a pilgrimage to Lhasa. It was the first pilgrimage by a Kalmyk to Lhasa in 135 years. Pozdneev, Skazanie, p. 1. 34 Aleksei M. Pozdneev, Mongoliia i mongoly: Rezul’taty poezdki v Mongoliiu, ispolnennoi v 1892–1893 gg., vol. 1. (St Peterburg: Izdanie Imperatorskogo Russkogo Geograficheskogo Obschestva, 1896), pp. 563–4; Pozdneev, Skazanie, p. 122. 35 RGIA. F. 821. Op. 133. D. 404; Bormanshinov, The Lamas of the Kalmyk People, p. 11. As proof of their friendship, the Grand Duke ordered a set of the Tibetan Buddhist canon (Kangyur) for the Russian embassy in Beijing, which he presented to Lama Chubanov in 1884. 36 Daniel Brower, ‘Russian Roads to Mecca: Religious Tolerance and Muslim Pilgrimage in the Russian Empire’, Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996): 567–84; Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 37 Kim P. Shovunov, Kalmyki v sostave Rossiiskogo Kazachestva (Elista: Soiuz kazakov Kalmykii, Kalmyk Institute obshchestvennykh nauk, 1992), pp. 180–93. 38 RGVIA. F. 401. Op. 5/929. D. 124. See also Arash Bormanshinov, ‘A Secret Kalmyk Mission to Tibet in 1904’, Central Asian Journal 36, no. 3–4 (1992): 161–87. 39 RGVIA. F. 447. Op. 1. D. 77. L. 2. 40 Sergei. V. Dmitriev, ‘Ekspeditsiia pod”esaula N. E. Ulanova i lamy Dambo Ul’ianova v Tsentral’nuiu Aziiu’, Kiunerovskii sbornik: matelialy vostochnoaziatskikh i iugo-

140

41

42 43 44

45 46

47

48

49 50 51

Publishing in Tsarist Russia vostochnoazitskikh issledovanii: etnografiia, fol’klor, iskusstvo, istoriia, arkheologiia, museevedenie, 2011–2012, 7 (2013): 51. Kozlov recommended that Ulanov go to the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory to study astronomy and master the art of photography. However, the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory pointed out that Ulanov lacked basic knowledge and understanding of astronomy and said it was unwilling to train him. RGVIA. F. 447. Op. 1. D. 77. L. 24–24b. RGVIA. F. 447. Op. 1. D. 77. St Peterburgskie vedomosti, 4 July 1913. Dambo Ul’ianov, Podstrochnyi perevod 1-i chasti Tibetskoi meditsiny ‘Zavi-dzhiud’: (Filosofo-teologo-meditsin. entsikl.) (St Peterburg: skoropechatnia ‘Vostok’, 1901); Perevod iz tibetskikh meditsinskikh sochinenii Dzhe-duning-nor, gl. 91 i Khlan-tab, gl. 30: Lechenie chumy, kholery i prokazy (St Peterburg: parovaia skoropech. ‘Vostok’ M.M. Gutzats, 1902); Pervaia chast’ Tibetskoi meditsiny. Ch. 1. Zavi-dzhiud ili Malliga (chetki iz goluboi lazuri), raz”iasniaiushchaia chetyre rassuzhdeniia, ukrashennye mneniem Manly (Buddy), kommentatora Saiagdzhi-Dzhamtso: (Filos.-teol. -med. ektsikl.) (St Peterburg: tip. ‘Trud i pol’za, 1903). RGVIA. F. 447. Op. 1. D. 77. L. 65–65b. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); Marlène Laruelle, ‘ “The White Tsar”: Romantic Imperialism in Russia’s Legitimizing of Conquering the Far East’, Acta Slavica Iaponica 25, no. 1 (2008): 113–34 Aleksandr I. Andreev, Ot Baikala do Sviashchennoi Lkhasy: Novye materialy o rus. ekspeditsiiakh v Tsentr. Aziiu v pervoi polovine XX v. (Buriatiia, Mongoliia, Tibet) (Samara: Agni, 1997), p. 25; Adele Di Ruocco, ‘The Buddhist World in Modern Russian Culture (1873–1919): Literature and Visual Arts’, PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2011. Blavatsky (Blavatskaia) spent her childhood in Astrakhan province because her grandfather, Andrei M. Fadeev (1789–1867), served as the first Chief Guardian for the Kalmyks in 1837–9 and became governor of the neighbouring Saratov province from 1841 to 1846. Blavatsky lived with her grandparents for most of her girlhood before 1844. Andrei M. Fadeev, Vospominaniia Andreia Mikhailovicha Fadeeva. 1790–1867 gg. (Odessa: Tip. Vysochaishe utverzhd. Iuzhno-Russkogo Obschestva Pechatnogo Del, 1897), pp. 123–31. AV IVR RAN. F. 62. Op. 1. D. 114. Dambo Ul’ianov, Predskazaniia Buddy o dome Romanovykh i kratkii ocherk moikh puteshestvii v Tibet v 1904–1905 gg. (St Peterburg: Tsentr. tipo-lit., 1913), p. 105. Andrei V. Badmaev (ed.), Lunnyi svet: kalmytskie istoriko-literaturnye pamiatniki (Elista: Kalmytskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2003).

6

A collateral cultural revolution: Russia’s state-driven papermaking and publishing efforts and their effects on Volga–Ural Muslim book culture, 1780s–1905 Danielle Ross

Introduction The other chapters in this book have examined the spread of Russian-language publishing among the various peoples of the empire and the power of Russianlanguage printed material to inculcate loyalty to the imperial state as well as provide a lingua franca by which non-Russians could discuss their identity, community politics and future within the empire. Unlike some of the other ethnic groups discussed in this volume (Kalmyks, Jews, baptized Tatars), the Muslims of the Volga–Ural region did not embrace the Russian language as a major medium for education, periodical press or community discourse. The existence of a well-developed Turkic-language literary culture in the Volga–Ural region before the mid-1800s, the relative linguistic homogeneity of the Volga– Ural Muslim population and Volga Muslims’ association of Russian language and culture with Orthodox Christianity mediated against Volga–Ural Muslims adopting the Russian language as a language of community life. That said, the development of Russian-language publishing, papermaking and book production also had an indirect but profound effect on textual production and reading habits in some of the empire’s non-Russian languages. The history of the production of Arabic- and Turkic-language1 books under Russian rule provides a clear example of this phenomenon. In the late 1700s and 1800s, the Russian government undertook a variety of strategies to nativize papermaking and foster the growth of a domestic publishing industry. Arabicscript publications comprised only a small part of the output of Russian presses, 141

142

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

which were focused primarily on producing texts in Russian and other European languages. Where papermaking was concerned, Russian rulers and their advisors did not even include their Muslim subjects’ paper-consumption habits in their calculation of Russia’s paper needs. Nonetheless, the Russian government’s development of both these spheres (printing and papermaking) revolutionized book production and dissemination, reading habits and patterns of language usage, and, ultimately, education and religious culture in the Muslim communities of the Volga–Ural region. This revolution was collateral, a side effect of the Russian government’s efforts to promote Russian papermaking, publishing and literacy. Historians of Islam in the Russian Empire have emphasized the 1905 Revolution and the issuing of the October Manifesto as pivotal moments in the empire’s Arabic-script book culture. Starting in 1906, the collapse of the imperial censorship system and the loosening of previous restrictions on privately-owned printing houses led to the founding of dozens of new periodicals and a multitude of presses and publishing firms and a rapid increase in the production of Arabic-, Turkic- and Persian-language books.2 Although much of this post-1905 print activity was concentrated in the towns of the Volga basin and the Ural Mountains, its effects reached into Central Asia and the Kazakh steppe.3 Historians have attributed to the post-1905 Muslim print revolution increased popular literacy and the development of discourses on modernity, empire and nation.4 By contrast, pre-1905 Muslim written culture is often lost in the shadow of 1905. The history of state-sponsored Arabic-script publishing continues to be a catalogue of firsts (the first Arabic-script book printed in Russia, the first printed Qurʾān, etc.). This approach elides different kinds of printing, with the result that all these early projects come across as equal in their social and cultural impact.5 In addition, the history of Muslim book culture in Russia is viewed primarily as the history of publishing. While individual manuscripts have been the subject of intense study,6 the manuscript book as a format and the problems of manuscript production have received much less analysis than printed books.7 When one shifts one’s focus from post-1905 book culture to its pre-1905 predecessor and brings together manuscripts with printed books, a different view of the pre-1905 Muslim book culture emerges. While the Russian government had previously experimented with Arabic-script printing for official purposes, the creation of the Asiatic Press, a publishing operation focusing on the production of Arabic, Turkish/Tatar and Persian-language Muslim religious and didactic books, in St Petersburg in 1786 marked the beginning of a new era in Volga–Ural Muslim intellectual life. For the first time, the Russian government mass-produced a work that was of deep cultural relevance to its Muslim subjects.

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

143

Unlike, the earlier translations of official decrees, the Qurʾāns printed in St Petersburg were meant to be read, valued and become a permanent addition to their owners’ lives. Once the press was relocated from St Petersburg to Kazan, it became an instrument for the dissemination of popular Muslim didactic and Sufi works. The list of titles that the Asiatic Press in Kazan printed was limited to Qurʾāns and Islamic law books, Sufi poetry and religious primers. Nonetheless, it increased the number of certain kinds of works in circulation and definitively shaped the patterns of literacy in the Volga–Ural Muslim community. Even before the founding of the Asiatic Press, a combination of growing merchant wealth and advancing papermaking technology, first abroad and then in Russia, drove an increase in local manuscript production. Production accelerated in the 1770s and 1780s and continued to increase through most of the nineteenth century, even as more titles became available in mass-printed form. This increase had consequences for the role of the written word in Volga– Ural Muslim culture. Islamic education, legal culture and rituals became more closely entwined with the written (or printed) word. Literacy and book-based education spread rapidly. This expansion occurred not only in Turkic-language texts, but also in the production of Arabic- and Persian-language works. Far from being intellectually stunted or caught in some form of cultural stagnation, between the late 1600s and mid-1800s, Volga–Ural Muslim society experienced an unprecedented growth of written culture and literacy. Once printing technology was introduced into the region, printed and manuscript texts circulated side by side. Rather than being rendered obsolete by mass print, manuscript production continued, but evolved to fill niches that printing did not. The combination of early print culture and an expanding manuscript culture created a market for the myriad publications that appeared after 1905. They also fuelled a range of disputes over doctrine, legal culture and scholarly authority in the pre-1860s Volga–Ural region that historians have only partially pieced together. The statistical information presented in this chapter is based upon a portion of the manuscript collection at the Tatarstan Institute of Languages, Literature, and Art in Kazan (Institut Iazyka, Literatury i Iskusstva – Akademia Nauk Respubliki Tatarstan, hereafter IIaLI). This collection contains around 9,000 volumes.8 The present chapter focuses on 2,214 volumes containing 3,388 discreet texts, which were catalogued between 2010 and 2014 as part of an inventory of manuscripts and rare books collected from cities and villages across Tatarstan and Bashqortostan from 1972 to the early 2010s.9 The collection continues to grow as the institute coordinates manuscript-collection expeditions

144

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

and as individuals donate family books. Unlike the manuscript collection of the Lobachevskii Library at Kazan Federal University, which was developed, in part, by imperial and Soviet Orientalists attempting to preserve what they viewed as valuable antiquities and historically-significant materials, the policy of the IIaLI collection has been to retain and catalogue everything they receive. Thus, badly damaged texts and ephemera that might otherwise have been disposed of have been preserved alongside the higher-quality material. The texts examined in this chapter have been catalogued according to intake date or location of discovery rather than in order of age, language or quality of preservation. Thus, these IIaLI inventories provide a relatively well-rounded picture of Volga–Ural literary life before 1917. Like other Oriental manuscript collections in Russian, the IIaLI collection is not without certain problems. Many of its texts are missing covers and front leaves, and their content has yet to be conclusively identified. Some of the texts inventoried remain undated. Still, the inventories provide enough information about a random selection of a few thousand texts to begin to draw broader conclusions about Volga–Ural Muslim manuscript production and consumption.

Volga–Ural Muslim literary culture, 1552–1800 Muslim historians of Kazan and Orenburg, writing in the 1890s and early 1900s, lamented the lack of primary sources relating to the history of their community. Theories of document destruction became a standard part of Volga–Ural history. Kazan-based historian Shihab al-Din al-Marjani (1818–91) blamed the breakdown of order in the region following the Mongol invasion.10 Historian and mufti Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov (1858–1936) attributed the loss of vital historical documents to the burning and destruction that followed the Russian conquest of Kazan.11 H.usayn Amirkhanov (1815–93) gives an account of the Tsar’s order to burn all the Muslim books in Moscow in the 1680s.12 In local and international scholarship, it has become the accepted wisdom that the Volga– Ural region possessed a rich and ancient written culture that was all but eradicated between the mid-1200s and the mid-1700s.13 There are many reasons to be sceptical of the burned book theory. First, as there are few sources that tell us about manuscript production in this period, there are also few reliable sources from the time that record specific instances of destruction of mosques, libraries and books. Second, while more documents relating to the history of Muscovy and the Russian Empire from this period have

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

145

been preserved, historians are also aware that much has been lost due to historical accidents, especially urban fires.14 The Russian case suggests that there can be reasons for a thin documentary record beyond the intentional destruction of a conquered people’s culture by the conqueror.15 The two factors that have most affected the preservation of Arabic-script documents in Russia have been: (1) the lack of a system of well-coordinated repositories for collecting and managing material related to the history of Russia’s Muslim communities, and (2) the Soviet policies, including the anti-religion policy of the late 1920s and the shift from Arabic to Latin and, finally, to Cyrillic script, which caused Arabic-script books to be seen as anti-Soviet and, later, as incomprehensible and, thus, no longer worth saving. Also, the paucity of Muslim sources on the pre-1800s Volga–Ural region has been overstated. Some of the Sufi works composed during the Golden Horde era were still being read in the 1800s: The Book of the Severed Head (Kisekbash kitab), Mahmud bin ʿAli al-Saraī’s Nahj al-farādīs and Qutb’s Khosraw and Shirin, to name a few such works.16 Manuscript collections in Russia contain books copied down in the Volga–Ural region during the 1500s and 1600s, although most are copies of the Qurʾān, Hanafi law books or books of Arabic grammar.17 Biographical dictionaries composed in the late 1800s and early 1900s provide references to additional locally-produced manuscripts, some of which have not survived to the present day. Most of the titles are law books, books of Arabic grammar or commentaries on Arabic and Persian-language textbooks and law digests.18 These were not, perhaps, the kinds of written sources that early twentiethcentury Tatar historians hoped to find, but they do reveal things about the culture of the pre-1770s Volga–Ural region. The IIaLI manuscript collection includes twelve manuscripts dated to the 1600s and twenty-five more identified as being produced before the end of the seventeenth century. This includes eleven copies of the Qurʾān, Allamah Quhustani’s Jāmiʿ al-Rumūz (an Arabiclanguage book of Hanafi jurisprudence), Sharh. al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafiyya (an Arabic-language book of Islamic doctrine), at least five poetic works in Persian, including the writings of medieval Sufi poet Farid al-Dīn ʿAttar, Kamal al-Din Turkmani’s commentary in Mahmad al-Jaʿmani’s book of astronomy, tales of the prophets written in Turkic, two hadith collections and assorted unidentified books of Islamic law and Turkic-language literature. While this is certainly not a complete list of the all works read in the 1600s and early 1700s, it does demonstrate that Muslim intellectual life was not paralyzed even when Russia’s anti-Muslim policy was supposedly at its height. Education in the Volga–Ural

146

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

region was still adequate to maintain at least a small educated elite able to read in the Arabic and Persian languages and sophisticated enough to take interest in Sufi poetry, Islamic law, theology and astronomy. Historians have presented the years from the 1680s to the 1760s as an especially difficult period for the Muslims of the conquered Kazan Khanate. Repeated ukazes ordered Muslim aristocratic families to convert to Christianity or forfeit their titles and property.19 Uprisings shook the South Urals in the 1710s, the 1730s, the 1750s and the 1770s. In 1740, the Office for the Affairs of the Newly Baptized (Kontora Novokreshchenskikh Del) was charged with promoting conversion to Christianity in the Volga Basin and preventing apostacy and relapse to Islam. According to later missionary writings, hundreds of mosques were closed or destroyed, and Muslims were forbidden to build new ones.20 The IIaLI collection holds roughly 150 books produced in this seventy-year period, compared with forty for the previous two centuries. Qurʾāns, law books, Arabic grammars, hadith collections, lives of the prophets and Persian-language Sufi poetry account for a large percentage of these books.21 However, new kinds of texts appeared in this period. A small but significant number of Ottoman works circulated (The Tale of the Holy Warrior Sayyid Battal (Qis. s. a-i Sayyid Battāl Ghāzī), Shams al-Din Sivasi’s Mirror of Ethics (Mirʾāt al-Akhlāq), Muhammad Çelebi’s Muhammadiyya). So, too, did Chagatai-language poetic works from Central Asia, including The Tale of Sayf al-Muluk (Qis. s. a-i Sayf alMulūk) by late fifteenth-century Khivan poet Majlisi, the poems of Khorasani writer ʿAlisher Navai (1441–1501) and the poems of Khivan Sufi saint Qul Sulayman Baqırgani (d. 1186).22 The first seventy years of the eighteenth century also witnessed the production of a new local literature. The oldest examples of Qul ‘Ali’s Book of Joseph date from this period. Some of the earliest written examples of Tatar ballads (bayet) and folk medical books were copied down during the early and mid-1700s.23 This period also offers some of the earliest examples of local historical and religious-didactic texts composed in a very simple form of vernacular Turki-Tatar.24 The range of manuscript books that circulated in the Volga–Ural region from the 1680s to 1760s does not suggest a culture attempting to defend itself against annihilation. Rather, educated Volga Muslims had sustained contact with neighbouring Muslim societies through trade, pilgrimage and education. The presence of at least a small number of folk and vernacular texts in this period suggests either an effort to increase literacy or the emergence of a Muslim population that could read and, perhaps, write, in the vernacular, but was not

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

147

trained in Arabic or Persian. This growth in manuscript production occurred simultaneously with Russia’s economic and territorial expansion south and east, but the correlation between these two developments is still not clear, nor is the precise nature and extent of the cultural movement unfolding in the villages and urban quarters of Kazan province. More research is required to answer these questions. However, two things seem clear: (1) manuscript production and consumption in the Volga–Ural region increased from the early 1600s to the mid-1700s, and (2) that increase was not driven by Catherine II’s policies of toleration of other faiths, which did not begin until 1767. Historians credit several acts by Catherine II with driving an Islamic revival in Russia. These included the closing of the Office for the Affairs of the NewlyBaptized (1767), granting permission to construct mosques (1767) and the foundation of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (1788).25 IIaLI holds about eighty-four texts copied between 1700 and 1799, compared with the 150 texts from the previous seventy years (1700–70).26 The titles being copied also closely resemble those copied in the first half of the eighteenth century. A large part of manuscript output was still in the Arabic language, although Ottoman, Chagatai and Turki writings were also present. A small sampling of vernacular texts, mostly religious songs, folk medical texts and didactic works, were also being written down. There is nothing in the manuscript culture of the late eighteenth century to suggest a monumental shift in response to Catherine II’s policies. Manuscript production was consistent throughout the 1700s in terms of quantity, quality and content.

The first Russian Muslim print revolution, 1787–1860 While the impact of Catherine’s policy of religious toleration on Muslim book culture is questionable, another of her polices was transformative: her promotion of publishing. In 1776, Johann Yakob Weitbrecht (1744–1803) and Johann Karl Shnor received permission from Catherine II to open a private press that would print books to order in Russian and foreign languages.27 Shnor took on the printing of books in Oriental languages and, in 1785, he divided the Oriental languages division of the press from the rest, setting up a separate printing house to print ‘decrees and Korans’ in the Tatar language. Shnor hired Tatars, primarily soldiers, to work as typesetters and copy editors. The Russian government permitted these men to take up occupation in the printing house in place of

148

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

more conventional military service. This was the beginning of the Asiatic Press.28 The largest of the press’s early customers was the Russian government. In 1786, Catherine ordered a printing of the Qurʾān at the government’s expense. She seems to have imagined that selling Qurʾāns or distributing them for free in the Kazakh steppe and Crimea would win Russia favour among its Muslim subjects. To this end, the officials in charge of the project took measures to appeal to a Muslim readership. A calligrapher was hired from the Volga–Ural Muslim community to design the typeface, and an Islamic scholar was appointed to proofread the text before it went to press.29 Starting in 1787, the press produced new print-runs, each numbering between 1,200 and 3,600 copies, every few years.30 By the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution, Catherine II began to rein in Russia’s private presses. Shnor, who had earlier assisted Aleksander Radishchev in opening his own press, was forced to cease his publishing activities.31 The Asiatic Press’s equipment became the property of the Senate and part of the Senate Press. The Senate Press continued to take orders for Arabic-script books, printing 20,000 copies of a Tatar primer-Muslim prayer book. But Emperor Paul (reigned 1796–1801) took an aggressive stance against private and semi-private printing. He gave permission to warrant officer ʿAbdullah Burashev to open a privately-owned Arabic-script press in Kazan and, then, subsequently forbade him to do so.32 By 1798, the Senate Press ceased its Arabic-script printing activities, with the 1798 printing of the Qurʾān stalled mid-production.33 St Petersburg publishers now relocated to the provinces to distance themselves from imperial supervision. In 1800, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Paul again gave permission for the opening of private Arabic-script presses in Kazan, Orenburg and Ufa for the printing of Qurʾāns, prayer books and similar works.34 In 1801, the Asiatic Press’s equipment was divided and part was shipped to Kazan at Burashev’s personal expense.35 Several Tatar members of the press received official permission to be relocated to Kazan together with the press equipment. Burashev set up shop at the Kazan First Gymnasium and, in 1805, the press became part of the newly founded Kazan University.36 Ongoing conflicts between Burashev and Kazan province’s governor slowed the press’s output for the next five years.37 In Kazan, the Asiatic Press resumed its printing of Qurʾāns. The press’s imprint of the Qurʾān became known as the ‘Kazan Qurʾān’. By 1859, the press had produced 150,000 copies of the Qurʾān.38 Some of the Kazan Qurʾāns reached their intended destinations in Crimea and the Kazakh Steppe. A few made it into Central Asia and, perhaps, further, as the Kazan Qurʾān was the

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

149

only mass-printed version of the Qurʾān produced for a Muslim audience until a lithograph version of the Qurʾān was printed in Tehran in 1828.39 However, the main market for Kazan Qurʾāns was the Volga–Ural region. There are no statistics on the number of Kazan Qurʾāns sold in Russia’s various provinces, but the distribution of manuscript Qurʾāns in the IIaLI collection suggests the impact made by the dawn of the mass-production of Muslim texts. The collection contains one manuscript Qurʾān dated to the 1600s and eleven more identified as being produced between the late seventeenth century or the early eighteenth century. Eighteen of the collection’s Qurʾāns were copied down between 1700 and 1770. Nineteen more were produced between 1771 and 1833. By contrast, the collection contains only two manuscript Qurʾāns copied after the early 1830s.40 The Kazan Federal University Library collection contains more manuscript Qurʾāns than the IIaLI collection, but they follow the same pattern. The greatest number of the KFU Library’s manuscript Qurʾāns were produced between the 1770s and the 1830s. The next largest group were produced between 1700 and 1770. A few come from before 1700 or after the 1830s. The decline in manuscript Qurʾān production occurred at a time when overall manuscript production was increasing across the Volga–Ural region and Siberia.41 It also occurred against the backdrop of the rapid expansion of maktabs (Muslim grammar schools) and madrasas (Muslim seminaries) during the nineteenth century. With the higher literacy, greater financial resources and expanding religious and cultural institutions of the mid-nineteenth-century Muslim community, there is no clear internal cause for the decline in manuscript Qurʾān production. However, the Kazan Qurʾān offers an explanation: Muslims in the Volga–Ural region stopped copying out the Qurʾān by hand because it became easier and cheaper for Muslim scholars to buy the mass-printed version, which had, in any case, been designed and vetted by their own colleagues. Having purchased the Kazan Qurʾān, they could devote their time to copying other texts. Other texts printed by the Asiatic Press show the same pattern of decline of production in the manuscript sphere. Allahiyar Sufi’s poetic cycle T-abāt alʿAjizīn (The Steadfastness of the Weak) was first published in 1802.42 The part of the IIaLI collection examined here includes only four manuscript copies of the work, two from the early 1800s, one from the 1830s and one from the 1840s. The same is true for Haft-i yak (a book containing one-seventh of the Qurʾān and often used to teach children the most commonly-recited Qurʾānic verses), which came to press for the first time in 1801.43 Only four manuscripts appear in the inventoried texts, the most recent being from the 1840s. Fawz al-Najāt (The

150

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Success of Salvation), which first came to press in 1802, appears to be entirely absent from the inventoried IIaLI manuscripts. Only a single manuscript copy of the religious primer Imān Shārtı (The Terms of the Faith), which was published in runs numbering in the tens of thousands in the early 1800s, has been conclusively identified in the collection.44 The Tale of Sayf al-Mulūk was first printed in 1807.45 The most recently-produced manuscript copy inventoried at IIaLI dates from 1813. Of the nineteen manuscripts of Qul ʿAli’s Book of Joseph held at IIaLI, one was produced in the 1600s, four between 1700 and the 1770s, and fourteen between the 1780s and 1840s. The collection does not hold any manuscript copies of the Book of Joseph produced after 1840.46 The first published edition of the Book of Joseph, based upon ʿAbd al-Rahim Utız-Imani al-Bulghari’s (1754–1835) earlier manuscript redaction, was printed by the Asiatic Press in 1839.47 All the Sufi poems and Muslim didactic texts listed above had been widely read in the 1700s and they remained popular in the 1800s. Any cache of prerevolutionary Tatar books contains multiple printed copies of these works. They are alluded to repeatedly in Volga–Ural poetry and prose down to 1917, suggesting that they were still quite well known in the early 1900s. Therefore, their diminishing presence in the manuscript would appear anomalous. If they were not present in manuscript form for most of the nineteenth century, the only explanation would appear to be that Volga–Ural Muslims were buying published copies of them. The cases of the Kazan Qurʾān and the other books listed above demonstrate several points about Russian Muslim print culture in the late 1700s and early 1800s that have been overlooked or downplayed. First, they show that the output of the Asiatic Press did, indeed, have an impact on Muslim textual consumption. Not only did Muslims purchase these state-produced books, but they did so at a rate that reshaped manuscript production across the region. Second, these cases demonstrate that the shift from manuscript to printing press was not a zero-sum game in the Muslim community. Printing technology did not obliterate manuscript culture but evolved in symbiosis with it. As popular books became available in print, the labour required for manuscript production was shifted to reproducing other texts. Once the Asiatic Press moved to Kazan, its services were for sale to anyone willing to pay for them. Private citizens, particularly merchants, brought texts to the press and put up the money to finance their printing.48 For example, in 1821, Chistopol merchant Sayyid Burkhanov sent a copy of T-abāt al-ʿAjizīn for publication.49 The project then went to the press’s administrators, who determined

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

151

whether it complied with the limits that the imperial censors placed upon Arabic-script printing. In Burkhanov’s case, the printing of T-abāt al-ʿAjizīn was approved, as the work had previously been published by the Asiatic Press in 1807.50 Sponsors of printing projects chose which printing projects to finance based on prospective profits. In 1805, Kazan merchant Yunus Apanaev received permission to print a run of 3,000 copies of Haft-i yak.51 He might have seen this undertaking as a sacred matter, but he also would have counted on a popular demand for what was essentially an abridged Qurʾān. Merchants involved in early nineteenth-century printing and bookselling targeted known markets rather than trying to create new ones. The result was amplification of the reading tastes of the eighteenth century. Texts that were already popular by the second half of the 1700s became even more widely read in the first half of the nineteenth century. The list of Turkic titles published by the Asiatic Press expanded over the course of the nineteenth century. Qul Sulayman Baqırgani’s Akhırzaman, yaki Taqi Gajap (The Book of the End Times, or Yet Another Wonder) was printed for the first time in 1847.52 By the mid-1800s, Arabic-script printing was renewed in St Petersburg, and in 1847, Taj al-Din Yalchıgol’s Risāla-i ʿAzīza (The Treatise of Glory), a commentary on T-abāt al-ʿAjizīn, was printed at the St Petersburg press.53 In late 1844 or early 1845, the Asiatic Press made its first foray into Islamic legal texts with the publication of the Hanafi law book Mukhtas. ar alWiqāya (The Synopsis of Protection).54 Muslim legal scholars and students purchased copies of the printed Mukhtas. ar al-Wiqāya, read it in the madrasas, and added marginal commentary in the same way they had previously done with manuscript copies of the text.

The impact of Russian papermaking, 1770s–1860s Between 1787 and 1860, the Asiatic Press began to mass-produce texts that had already gained popularity in manuscript form. Mass printing enabled more Muslims to own personal copies of these texts and provided reading material to an increasingly literate population. However, printing in no way heralded the death of manuscript culture. On the contrary, in the decades after the founding of the Asiatic Press, manuscript production in the Volga–Ural region increased. Judging by the chronological distribution of the IIaLI collection, manuscript production skyrocketed in the early 1800s.

152

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

1500—1599 1600—1699 1700—1749 1750—1799 1800—1849 1850—1899 1900—1950

Figure 6.1 IIaLI manuscripts by date of production (1500–1950).

Production continued to increase through the 1850s, but by the 1860s, growth appears to have levelled. By the early 1900s, manuscript production was still higher than it had been in the late 1700s, but it was in decline from its peak in the 1850s. The downturn in the early 1900s correlates with the rise of commercial printing in Russia’s Muslim communities in the 1880s–1890s and the deregulation of publishing across Russia in 1905. However, the increases that took place in the early 1800s and the 1860s were likely driven by a different factor: paper. Historians of European book culture have long been aware of the relationship between papermaking and printing. The cost of printing books was determined, in part, by the price of paper, and the price of paper was determined by the price of rags that served as raw material and by the cost of production.55 In the 1500s, Europeans began to use already widespread watermills to stamp paper mechanically rather than by hand, an innovation that dramatically increased production and allowed Europe’s papermakers to dominate the international market by the seventeenth century.56 European paper was imported to Russia, where the native papermaking industry was small and lagged behind its northern and western European counterparts in terms of technology.57 Most of Volga–Ural Muslim manuscripts from the seventeenth and eighteenth century were composed on imported European paper. The expense and limited supply of paper imposed a limit on book production in the region. When Mullah Murad was investigated for agitating against the imperial government in Orenburg in the late 1760s, officials found only three books and a few pieces of paper in his house.58 In 1773, during Pugachev’s Revolt, a copy of The Book of

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

153

Joseph was considered important enough to be included on an inventory of war booty, though not of enough monetary value to be forwarded to the rebels’ treasury.59 As late as the 1770s and 1780s, manuscript makers repurposed damaged or unwanted texts by pasting their pages together and binding them in leather to create book covers. A late eighteenth-century Qurʾān held in Kazan University’s Lobachevskii Library is bound in a cover composed of discarded imperial decrees and reports.60 Little is known about the technical side of manuscript production in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Volga Basin, but copying texts does not appear to have been undertaken lightly. The manuscripts of the 1600s and 1700s were generally of high quality, carefully laid out and copied in a professional, very legible hand. When possible, multiple colours of ink were used and small illuminations were included. High-culture texts and sacred texts, such as the Qurʾān, the major Hanafi law guides, and Chagatai and Persian poetry, were privileged over mundane texts, such as contracts, wills, folk songs and folk medicine/magic. Many of the surviving works of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were composed in Arabic or Persian rather than the Turki vernacular. These production patterns suggest a society in which reading and writing was an elite activity limited to those who could afford it. By the second half of the eighteenth century, households of more modest means could permit themselves one or two volumes, most likely something of religious and cultural importance, such as the Qurʾān or one of the major Sufi poetic works. Two developments altered Volga–Ural book culture at the end of the eighteenth century. The first was the spread of innovations in European papermaking, including the Hollander beater, by the 1770s. These innovations simultaneously increased production rates and lowered prices.61 The second was the ongoing effort by Russia’s monarchs to free themselves from dependence on European paper producers by encouraging the growth of the Russian paper industry. This effort was begun by Peter the Great in the early 1700s, but the Russian government only began to achieve self-sufficiency in papermaking by the early 1800s.62 These two developments transformed Muslim manuscript production in the Volga Basin. Cheaper and more plentiful paper allowed Muslim cultural elites to produce more books and enabled non-elite readers to consume more paper than they had previously. From the 1780s to the 1850s, Muslims produced more manuscripts than they had in the previous 200 years. Turkic and Persian literary works were produced in larger numbers. Copying out textbooks became a standard part of madrasa students’ education and a growing number of Muslim

154

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

legal scholars built personal libraries. Scriptoria or ‘calligraphy factories’ appeared in the region by the 1830s.63 Affordable paper expanded the range of works being copied and circulated. By the early 1800s, dozens of volumes on folk medicine, spells and charms and dream interpretation appeared. Folk songs, spirituals and prayers were also committed to paper. Dowry agreements, business contracts and records of village politics were recorded in writing more often than in previous decades. The appearance of these new sources suggests not only an expansion of manuscript production into new genres, but the emergence of new groups of writers and copyists. Their presence is testified to most clearly in the sharp decline in the quality of manuscripts produced in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Some manuscripts produced in these years were still of high quality, but many were poorly executed: written on cheap, low-quality paper, composed in sloppy handwriting and/or riddled with grammatical errors, misspellings and regionally specific vocabulary. Words were crossed out, margins were uneven and lines of text were written crookedly. All of this suggests a category of people who knew the basics of writing but were neither professional calligraphers nor beneficiaries of an Arabic and Persian-heavy madrasa education. They copied down existing texts to the best of their ability and transcribed oral culture into writing, but they produced texts for their own use rather than for consumption by a cultural elite. Several texts from the 1720s–1750s composed in easily-readable vernacular Turkic suggests efforts by the Muslim legal scholars to educate common Muslims in the Volga Basin. However, paper prices and availability likely would have limited the extent of this outreach. By the end of the eighteenth century, cheaper paper facilitated the Muslim scholars’ mission to enlighten the non-madrasaeducated through written texts. From the 1780s to the 1860s, texts on the basics of Islamic doctrine and ritual, tales of the prophets, and guides to morality and ethics proliferated. So, too, did handbooks composed by Sufi masters for their disciples. This explosion of manuscript production combined with the opening of the Asiatic Press created a situation in which written texts became more available in the Volga–Ural region than ever before. Education in maktabs and madrasas became increasingly tied to reading and writing. Muslims could also self-educate by acquiring and reading texts. Reading and writing also played a central role in communal religious rituals and folk magic. According to a report from newspaper Kazanskii vestnik in 1816, Kazan Muslims considered the inability to read and write a cause for shame.64

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

155

By the 1860s, papermakers in Europe and Russia shifted from using rags to using wood pulp as the main raw material for paper manufacture. With this shift, the last major limit on papermaking – the availability of rags – was removed.65 While manuscript production began to decline after the 1860s, the production of mass-printed books in Russia and abroad continued to rise. The low cost of paper and the increasing availability of popular books in mass-printed form meant that paper could be used for more personal and temporary kinds of writing. Madrasa students sewed together leaves of paper and used them to take notes and write poems. Peasants wrote down songs and prayers, the daily temperature and the progress of their crops, while merchants recorded commercial transactions and debts. By the eve of the 1905 Revolution, writing had gone from being a method for transmitting sacred knowledge to a part of daily life.

From printing and paper to vernacularization, 1860s–1905 In the book culture of the pre-1905 Volga–Ural region three languages coexisted and filled separate niches. Arabic was the main language of learning. Arabic-language instruction was critical to madrasa education, for, until a student mastered Arabic, he or she could not comprehend the Qurʾān and the hadiths, nor read texts on other subjects (jurisprudence, doctrine, logic, mathematics, astronomy, etc.). Persian sometimes appeared as a second language of scholarship but was also a crucial language for poetry and Sufism. Knowledge of Persian allowed Volga–Ural Muslims access to the works of the major Sufi poets and philosophers. Tatar-Turki was the language of genealogies, local histories, poetry and documents relating to business transactions and life events. The table below shows the distribution of the portion of the IIaLI collection examined in this paper by language across time. In the 1600s, Arabic-language books dominated, with Tatar-Turki in second place and Persian taking a distant third. That balance shifted in the first half of the 1700s, when books in Turkic languages seemed to have equalled, if not slightly surpassed, those composed in Arabic. Persian continued to account for only a small fraction of written material. The parity between Arabic- and Turkic-language texts continued in the second half of the eighteenth century, with Persian-language texts continuing to compose a relatively small fraction of the overall manuscript production for the region.66

156

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 1600—1699

1700—1749

1750—1799 Arabic

1800—1849

Persian

1850—1899

1900—1950

Turkic

Figure 6.2 IIaLI manuscripts by language (1600–1950).

The growth in the paper supply and the introduction of printing in the first half of the 1800s magnified the linguistic trends of the eighteenth century. Production of Arabic- and Turkic-language manuscripts increased roughly tenfold from the second half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century. Arabic manuscript production still outstripped production of Turkic manuscripts, but, if the output of the Kazan and St Petersburg presses, which published primarily popular poetic and didactic texts in Turki, is taken into consideration, it is likely that from 1800 to 1850, there were far more Turkiclanguage books in circulation than Arabic-language books. Arabic-language texts continued to be produced and consumed by the madrasa-educated. The greater portion of early nineteenth-century Arabic texts were guides to Arabiclanguage grammar, books of jurisprudence, hadith collections, books on logic and philosophy, and works in specialized fields such as mathematics and astronomy. Turkic-language texts, many of them primers for learning the basics of Islam, histories of Islam and tales of the Prophet, Sufi handbooks, miracle stories and apocalyptic texts, were the main medium through which Muslims learned about and engaged with their faith. As with the Arabic language, Persian was still taught and read only in the madrasa. While the overall percentage of Persian texts in circulation (compared with Arabic and Turkic texts) did not change from the late 1700s to the mid1800s, the number of Persian texts circulating increased and readers enjoyed a wider selection of authors and works. Also, there were efforts to make Persianlanguage literature accessible to readers who did not know Persian. Manuscripts of Persian poems were prepared with interlinear translations into Turki.67 In some cases, Persian literary works were translated or adapted and presented in

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

157

Turki without the original Persian text.68 These translations and reading aids suggest the existence of a readership who were interested in the works of medieval Sufi poets Farid al-Din ʿAttar and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, but did not know enough Persian to read them in their original language. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the balance among Arabic, Persian and Turkic texts shifted. Turkic-language texts now accounted for the largest portion of manuscripts being produced. Arabic now stood in second place. Persian, still limited in use to the educated elite and less strongly affected than Turkic and Arabic by trends in printing and papermaking, remained a distant third. Overall manuscript production declined between 1850 and 1900, as presses in Kazan and St Petersburg continued to release new titles. Also, by the 1890s, more non-government-owned presses had opened. More and more of the Arabic- and Turkic-language works that had formed the core of the regional literary culture came into print. With these texts readily obtainable through bookshops, catalogues and itinerant booksellers, diaries, accounting books, personal song collections, prayer books and other daily-life documents came to make up a large percentage of Turkic-language manuscript production. These trends continued in the early twentieth century.

The outcome of the revolutions Mass printing by the Asiatic Press, the growing supply of cheap paper and the vernacularization that they facilitated transformed the culture of Volga–Ural Muslim society over the course of the nineteenth century. These changes occurred in multiple spheres: (1) literacy levels and reading habits, (2) popular religious sentiments and practices, and (3) Muslim religious and cultural institutions. The most immediate impact of the growing availability of written texts was an increase in popular literacy. As books became cheaper and more plentiful, more Muslims could afford to own them. For many Muslims, book ownership likely began with obtaining a copy of the Qurʾān. Although it was incomprehensible to those who did not read in Arabic, Volga–Ural Muslims believed that it carried a sort of talismanic power, and that even single verses written on cloth or paper could bring protection or blessing. From there, they may have accumulated copies of locally authored Sufi poetic works, such as The Tale of Joseph, Badavam or Risāla-i ʿAzīza. More avid readers could acquire literary works in Ottoman Turkish, including Muhammad Çelebi’s Muh. ammadiyya, Aḥmad Bican’s Anwār

158

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

al-ʿAshīqīn, Qis. s. a-i Sayyid Battāl Ghāzī, and in Chagatai, such as Baqırgan Kitabı, Qis. s. a-i Sayf al-Mulūk and T-abāt al-ʿAjizīn. By the mid-1800s, Turkic-language translations and adaptations of Persian-language Sufi poetry were also available. The transformation of Volga–Ural Muslims from intensive readers to extensive readers began in the first half of the nineteenth century. From the early 1800s, reading and writing were used to transmit knowledge at all levels of society. School-aged children encountered primers for reading in the Arabic alphabet, didactic poems and basic guides to the Islamic faith. Men in the Sufi orders copied and circulated handbooks containing their masters’ teachings on morality and salvation. By the mid-1800s, women copied down information on Sufi rituals and Islamic law. Both men and women undertook the transcription of knowledge on folk medicine, charms, angelic/saintly intervention, dream interpretation and soothsaying. In the 1800s, texts were not yet the disposable objects they would become by the early 1900s. Nonetheless, the variety of reading material available from 1800 to the 1850s suggests a society that was reading not only for ritual purposes, but to gain new information. In the 1860s, H.usayn Fayzkhanov estimated the literacy rate among Tatar women to be between 30 per cent and 60 per cent.69 Volga–Ural Muslims’ penchant for reading was noted by Karl Fuks in the 1840s and Evfimi Malov in the 1890s.70 Reading was a characteristic repeatedly attributed to Volga Tatars. For Muslim cultural reformers and Russian bureaucrats working in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the greatest educational challenge was not teaching Tatars to read but encouraging them to read the ‘right’ texts.71 Rising literacy among the non-madrasa-educated Muslims of the Volga–Ural region transformed religious culture. Literacy became a measure of piety, and reading became an integral part of religious rituals. Devotional activities came to involve reading of sections of the Qurʾān or popular Sufi works in private and in gatherings of community members or Sufi disciples. Scraps of cloth and paper inscribed with Qurʾānic verses or Sufi odes were central to rituals of blessing and protection. They were used to ward off illness and evil and bring good fortune. Popular Sufi texts provided Muslim men and women with a common set of allusions and symbols through which to discuss their relationship to God and their experiences with the Islamic faith.72 Sufi handbooks and poetry laid out a path by which any Muslim, rich or poor, could attain paradise. Written texts promised salvation in return for moral behaviour, obedience to God, respect for the learned and generosity to the needy. These values became the foundation for an economy of charity that supported mosques, education and poor relief.73 These same texts circulated through the Volga–Ural region, reaching baptized

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

159

inorodtsy communities and contributing to the mass apostacies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.74 The increasing number of manuscripts and books and the accompanying popular interest in matters of spirituality reshaped the Muslim institutional landscape in the Volga–Ural region. Madrasas and maktabs expanded to meet the growing demand for education. Some parents sought education so that their children would become literate and, by extension, better Muslims and more respected members of the community. The more ambitious saw the acquisition of sacred knowledge as a path to wealth and social mobility. Guided by Sufi masters and morality texts, merchants donated money for the construction of new mosques. From 1833 to 1916, the number of mosques in the Volga–Ural region doubled.75 The rise in the number of mosques and madrasas created more employment for imams and teachers, and the number of Muslim legal scholars licensed by the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly increased more than threefold by the end of the nineteenth century.76 The rural and urban landscapes of the Volga–Ural region were inscribed with a new spiritual geography consisting of mosques and madrasas, but also holy sites: ruins, saints’ graves, sacred springs and other places of otherworldly power. A robust popular written literature circulated, mapping these sites, explaining their significance and weaving them into new, Islam-centric narratives of regional history.77 Russian state-organized publishing in Arabic and Turkic and the creation of a Russian papermaking industry in the late 1700s and 1800s planted the seeds for the Muslim cultural reform movements that began in the 1860s and gained momentum by the 1880s and 1890s. High rates of literacy created a ready readership for new kinds of literature. The growth of the madrasas and the ongoing demand for education led inevitably to a divergence of opinions among teachers, madrasa directors, sponsors and parents as to what kind of education was most useful and most effective. Non-madrasa-educated Muslims’ acquisition of Islamic knowledge, and Muslim scholars’ insistence that all Muslims master such knowledge, ultimately raised questions about the nature of Islamic law and the role of Muslim scholars. Were Islamic law and scripture bodies of arcane knowledge to be mediated by a small group of specialists or should they be made accessible and comprehensible to all members of the Muslim community? If the latter, what was to be role of Muslim legal scholars and theologians in a society in which any Muslim could read and interpret the sacred texts? Were the rulings established by the classical Islamic legal schools (madhhabs) still binding, and, if not, who was to determine which new legal interpretations were valid and which were not?78

160

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

The Islamic identity fostered by the proliferation of Sufi texts and Bulghar histories in handwritten and printed forms inflected the nation-building projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even as Tatar historians derided the Islamic histories of the nineteenth century, they continued to imagine Bulghar, glorified in the nineteenth-century histories as the site of the region’s first encounter with Islam, as the beginning of their ethno-confessional group’s history.79 In his 1904 apocalyptic novel, Extinction after Two Hundred Years, ʿAyaz Ish.aqi symbolized the disappearance of the Bulghars/Tatars through the depiction of abandoned mosques.80 Islam permeates the futuristic world presented in Fatih. Amirkhan’s Reverend Fath. ullah, from the use of the Muslim calendar to its a Shariabased law enforcement system.81 Legal scholars such as Musa Bigiev, ʿAbdullah Bubi, Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov, ʿAbdullah bin Sulayman and Fakhr al-Banat Sulaymaniya wrote proposals on how to structure schools, businesses, charitable foundations, households and families in ways consistent with Islamic law.82 Finally, the development of government-sponsored Arabic-script printing in the late 1700s and the early 1800s had long-term consequences for the imperial government’s promotion of the Russian language among the Muslims of the Volga–Ural region in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By the 1860s, some Russian officials, including Minister of Education Dmitri Tolstoy, hoped to use the Russian language as a means of cultivating Muslims’ loyalty to the empire.83 However, Volga–Ural Muslims, possessing an abundance of manuscript and printed books in their native tongue and writing in a language that was somewhat intelligible to Turkic speakers from the Ottoman Empire to Bukhara, felt little need to adopt the Russian language as a mode of communication with their coreligionists. Having learned the principles of Islam primarily through TatarTurki, they associated Turki-Tatar closely with Islam and the Russian language with Orthodox Christianity. Despite the government’s efforts in the 1860s and 1870s to open schools and classes for teaching the Russian language and to legislate Russian-language courses in the madrasas, the spread of Russian language into Volga–Ural Muslim communities was slow. It only gained momentum in the 1890s and 1910s when a handful of madrasa directors began to promote the mastery of Russian as the language of official and interethnic communications within the empire and as a means to access European writings on politics, philosophy, literature and science.84 Even then, Tatar-Turki remained the primary language of written communication within the Volga–Ural Muslim community to the end of the imperial period. The Volga–Ural Muslims’ refusal to publish in Russian complicated the work of the police, gendarme officials and school inspectors, all of whom sought to

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

161

survey affairs in Muslim communities in the early 1900s. The Kazan Provisional Committee on Printing Affairs (Kazanskii vremennyi komitet po delam pechati), founded in 1906, was charged with, among other things, monitoring the output of the city’s Muslim presses, but it never possessed enough Tatarfluent members and staff to monitor the expanding Tatar commercial press industry.85 Lacking adequate bilingual staff, the Ministries of the Interior and Education were forced to rely on faculty members from Kazan University, native interpreters and a handful of Tatar-trained staff to provide translations of Volga–Ural Muslim texts. Police officials might wait days, weeks or, in some cases, months to receive translations of Tatar-language newspaper articles. In the wake of the 1905 Revolution, the difficulties created by this linguistic barrier between Russian-speaking officials and Tatar-speaking Volga–Ural Muslims fed officials’ suspicions that educated Muslims were engaged in anti-government activities.86 Ironically, the Russian state’s facilitation of Arabic-script printing in the late 1700s and early 1800s had laid the foundations for the robust, but seemingly impenetrable Tatar print culture that confounded early twentieth-century Tsarist officials. Gendarme officials came to rely heavily on agents within the community (Russian language-teachers at the madrasas, school inspectors and Muslims themselves) to report ‘anti-government’ views expressed in specific books and newspaper articles.87 The pre-1905 censorship system of government officials and institutions severely limiting which Tatar- and Arabic-language works went to press was never re-established. Officials did not take any measures to halt the development of print capitalism within the Muslim communities of the Volga– Ural region, nor did gendarme investigations of individual authors and books decrease the output of the Muslim commercial presses, which grew steadily until 1917. Instead of shutting down private commercial publishing in the Muslim community, Russian officials sought to compete in the market by producing their own publications which would promote a strong pro-government message. However, these official efforts were woefully small and underfunded when compared to the Muslim commercial presses.88 In the end, censoring of the Muslim press after 1905 often fell to Muslim commercial publishers themselves. Muslim printers and editors understood that if they printed radical antigovernment rhetoric, they risked arrest and the loss of their businesses. To avoid this fate, they tended to self-censor and avoided printing potentially inflammatory material. Those authors who wished to circulate anti-government writings avoided such censorship by circulating their material in oral or manuscript form.89

162

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Conclusion The Russian government’s promotion of publishing and papermaking facilitated rapid growth in manuscript production and the circulation of mass-printed books among the Muslim communities of the Volga–Ural region from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. Turkic- and Arabic-language works of cultural importance to the Muslim community circulated in large numbers and reading was transformed from an elite activity into a mass one. The predominance of Islamic scripture, law books and Sufi texts in the newly produced manuscripts and books meant that rising popular literacy also brought about increased popular interest in acquiring Islamic knowledge, applying it in daily life and, ultimately, disputing it. The textual revolutions of the early 1800s laid the foundation for the cultural reform movements and the expansion of the Muslim press from 1905 to 1917. In late 1905 and early 1906, within months of Nicholas II issuing the October Manifesto, new privately-owned commercial Muslim presses and publishing houses proliferated. The Muslim publishing houses that opened in the 1880s and 1890s, such as H.usaynov, Karimov and Co, in Orenburg, Karimov Bros. Press in Kazan, and Terjuman Press in Bakchasarai, expanded their output and added newspapers and journals to their inventory. The privately-owned presses established at the end of the nineteenth century had begun to promote new genres of Tatar-language literature (newspapers, novels, mathematics and science textbooks, Russian-languages primers) and the presses established after 1905 continued this trend.90 However, many of these private presses also continued to produce large print runs of Sufi poetry, Arabic-language primers, law books, prayer books, hadith collections and Qurʾāns, for which there was high demand among the ever more literate Muslim population. The gains in literacy made from the late 1700s to the late 1800s created a reliable market for twentieth-century Tatar commercial publishers and, at the same time, facilitated the introduction of new ideas and information into Muslim society through the written word. The history of Muslim print and manuscript culture in the Volga–Ural region also highlights the shifting constellation of power over the generation and dissemination of knowledge in one of Russia’s ethnically non-Russian communities. In the 1780s, the Russian state enjoyed a great deal of power over Muslim publishing, as it owned or tightly monitored the few Arabic-script presses in the empire. By the 1890s, with the appearance of a growing number of commercial Arabic-script presses, and even more so after 1905, the Russian

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

163

government yielded much of its control over the content of Muslim publications and private press owners and editors. At the same time, the replacement of manuscript with mass-printed books signifies a different kind of power shift, one in which convenience gradually won out over beliefs in the sacral act of hand-copying a text. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Muslims, the power of manuscripts lay not only in their content, but in the labour-intense process of writing or copying a text. Copying out law books, devotional texts and scripture conveyed moral and spiritual benefit to the copyist. Hand-copied books were handed down from parents to children not only because of their rarity and expense, but because Muslim readers perceived writing, copying and reading as holy or sacred.91 To possess copies of sacred or devotional texts was understood to confer cultural authority and divine protection. The desire to lay claim to such authority and protection initially led nineteenth-century Muslims to acquire cheaper, mass-printed editions of Arabic-script books. Eventually, Muslim readers came to see the contents of books (rather than the process by which they were reproduced) as the main source of their power. By the early 1900s, a change in mentality enabled mass-printed books to replace manuscripts as the primary medium for transmitting written information about the Islamic faith.

Notes 1

2

3

Throughout this chapter, the author uses the term ‘Turkic’ to refer to texts written in Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai and Volga–Ural Turki as well as texts that combine elements of these various languages. Serge A. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal LemercierQuelquejay, La Presse et la Mouvment National chez les musulmans de Russie avant 1920 (Paris: Mouton, 1964); Azade-Ayşe Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience. (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986); Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). James H. Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian–Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Mustafa Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Zh. Shalgynynbai, Istoriia kazakhskoi knizhnoi kultury (XIX v.-1917 g. – 1991–2001 gg.) (Almaty: Baspalar uyı, 2009), pp. 33–45.

164 4

5

6

7 8

9

10 11 12

13

14 15

Publishing in Tsarist Russia Rorlich, The Volga Tatars, pp. 60–72; Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La Presse et la Mouvment National; Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims, pp. 154–6; Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 41. On these early projects, see A. G. Karimullin, ‘Vozniknovlenie rossiiskogo knigopechataniia arabskim shriftom’, Narody Azii i Afriki 3 (Otdel’nyi ottpisk) (Moscow: n.p., 1969), pp. 95–103; A. G. Karimullin, U istokov tatarskoi knigi: ot nachala vozniknovleniia do 60-x godov XIX veka (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1992) pp. 37–102. Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780–1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Allen J. Frank, Bukhara and the Muslims of the Russian Empire: Sufism, Education, and the Paradox of Islamic Prestige (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Karimullin, U istokov tatarskoi knigi, pp. 5–36. M. Akhmatjanov, Miraskhana: Fond ham kollektsiialar kursatkeche (Kazan: Akademiia nauk respublikai Tatarstan, Institut iazyka, literatury i iskusstva im. G. Ibragimova, 2005), p. 55. Marsel’ Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia: Otchety o rezul’tatakh arkheograficheskikh ekspeditsii (1972–2010), chasti I & II (Kazan: Akademiia nauk respublikai Tatarstan, Institut iazyka, literatury i iskusstva im. G. Ibragimova, 2011); Marsel’ Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia: Opisi rukopisei, sobrannikh vo vremia arkheograficheskikh ekspeditsii (1972–2012 gg.), chast’ tret’ia (Kazan: Akademiia nauk respublikai Tatarstan, Institut iazyka, literatury i iskusstva im. G. Ibragimova, 2013); Marsel’ Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia: Opisi rukopisei, sobrannikh vo vremia arkheograficheskikh ekspeditsii (1972–2012 gg.), chast’ 4-aia (Kazan: Akademiia nauk respublikai Tatarstan, Institut iazyka, literatury i iskusstva im. G. Ibragimova , 2014). Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī, Al-qism al-awwal min kitāb mustafād al-akhbār fī akhwāl Qazān wa Bulġar, (Kazan: Tipo-litografiia Imperatorskago Universiteta, 1897), p. 5. Rizaeddin bin Fakhreddin, Asar, ed. Raif Mardanov and Ramil Mingnullin (Kazan: Rukhiyat, 2006), p. 4. Khusain Amirkhanov, Tavarikh-e Bulgariia (Bulgarskie khroniki), trans. A. M. Akhunov, ed. A. Iu. Khabutdinov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo dom Mardzhani, 2010), p. 15. Karimullin, U istokov tatarskoi knig, p. 26; M. I. Akhmatjanov, ‘Tatar adabiyatı tarikhın oyranuda chıganaq bularaq kul’yazma kitap’, Kitapka khitab (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1994), pp. 46–7. Matthew Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of the Russian Empire, 1552–1671 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), p. 61. The debate over the existence and fate of historical documents is not limited to the Volga Basin or Russia. It is also ongoing in the fields of Middle Eastern history and

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

165

Islamic studies. See Juergen Paul, ‘Archival Practices in the Muslim World prior to 1500’, in Alessandro Bausi et al. (eds), Manuscripts and Archives. Comparative Views on Record-Keeping (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2018), pp. 339–60. Tatar adabiyatı tarikhı, vol. 1, ed. N. G. Yuzeev et. al. (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1984), pp. 158–312. Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia, vols 1–4. Rizaeddin bin Fakhreddin, Asar. Aidar Khabutdinov, Millet Orenburg dukhovnogo sobraniia v kontse XVIII–XIX vekakh (Kazan: Iman, 2000), p. 3; Rorlich, The Volga Tatars, p. 40, Aidar Nogmanov, Samoderzhavie i Tatary, Ocherki istorii zakonodatel’noi politiki vtoroi poloviny XVI–XVIII vekov (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2005), pp. 49–62. Rorlich, The Volga Tatars, pp. 38–41; Allen J. Frank, Islamic Historiography and ‘Bulghar’ Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 28–30. Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia, vols 1–4. Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia, vols 1–4. Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia, vols 1–4. Kazan (Privolzh’skii) Federalnyi Universitet-Otdel’ Rukopisei i Redkikh Knig, 4199 T; K(P)FU-ORRK, 5979 T. Khabutdinov, Millet Orenburg dukhovnogo sobraniia, pp. 7–8; Rorlich, The Volga Tatars, p. 42; Frank, Islamic Historiography, pp. 31–5. Khabutdinov, Millet Orenburg dukhovnogo sobraniia, pp. 7–8. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, p. 89. For a complete treatment of the various publishing projects spearheaded by Weitbrecht and Shnor, see Genadii Aleksandrovich Fafurin, ‘Knigoizdatel’saia i knigotorgovaia deiatel’nost’ Iogann Yakoba Veitbrekta (1744–1803)’, PhD diss., St Petersburg, 2004. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, pp. 89–90. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, pp. 95–8; E. A. Rezvan, ‘Koran v Rossii’, in R. A. Nabiev (ed.), Islam na evropeiskom vostoke: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, p. 169 (Kazan: ‘Magarif ’. 2004). Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, p. 96. Radishchev was arrested and sentenced to death for his critiques of Russian government and society in his novel A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790). His death sentence was reduced to exile and he was sent to Siberia. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, p. 103. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, pp. 98–9. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, pp. 106–7. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, pp. 106–7 Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, pp. 108–9. Karimullin, U Istokov tatarskoi knigi, p. 110.

166

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

38 Rezvan, ‘Koran v Rossii’, p. 169. 39 Gy. Kaldy-Nagy, ‘Beginning of Arabic-Letter Printing in the Muslim World’, in The Muslim East: Studies in Honour of Julius Germanus (Budapest: Lóránd Eötvös University, 1974), p. 203. The first printing of the Qurʾān in India occurred in Lucknow in 1850 and first Qurʾān printed in Indonesia came to press in Batavia in 1855. These and the Iranian Qurʾān were lithograph editions. See Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, trans. and ed. E. S. Hartcourt and Fakhir Hussain (London: Paul Elek, 1975), p. 106; I. Proudfoot, ‘Early Muslim Printing in Southeast Asia’, Libri 45 (1995): 217. The Qurʾān was not printed in the Ottoman Empire until the 1870s. See M. Brett Wilson, ‘The Quran after Babel: Translating and Printing the Quran in Late Ottoman and Modern Turkey’, PhD diss., Duke University, NC, 2009, p. 18. 40 Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia, vols 1–4. 41 Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia, vols 1–4. 42 K(P)FU-ORRK 4175/no. 1, p. 1. 43 K(P)FU-ORRK 4175/no. 1, p. 1. 44 Karimullin, U istokov tatarskoi knigi, p. 110. 45 K(P)FU-ORRK 4174, p. 2. 46 Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia Arkheografiia, vols 1–4. 47 Fazıl Faseev, ‘Kol Galineng “Qissai Iosıf ” poeması’, Kol Gali: Qissai Iosıf (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1983), p. 30. 48 Karimullim, U istokov tatarskoi knigi, p. 116. 49 K(P)FU-ORRK 4173/no. 6, p. 1. 50 K(P)FU-ORRK 4174, p. 2. 51 Karimullim, U istokov tatarskoi knigi, p. 116. 52 ‘Bakyrgani’, Tatar Entsklopediia Suzlege, ed. M. Kh. Khasanov (Kazan: Institut Tatarskoi Entsiklopedii, 2002), p. 78. 53 ‘Yalchygol’, Tatar Entsklopediia Suzlege, p. 803. 54 Michael Kemper, ‘ “Adat against Sharīʾa”: Russian Approaches toward Daghestani “Customary Law” ’, Ab Imperio 3(2005): 151. Mukhtas. ar al-Wiqāya is a synopsis and commentary on Burhān al-Dīn Marghinānī’s Al-Hidāya fī Sharh Bidāyat al-Mubtadī (Guidance in Commentary on The First Step of the Novice), a famous Hanafi compendium of Islamic law commonly used among the Muslims of Russia, the Ottoman Empire and India. Mukhtas. ar al-Wiqāya was widely used in the madrasas of the Volga–Ural region, the Kazakh steppe and Central Asia to teach Islamic jurisprudence. 55 David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 183. 56 Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943).

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

167

57 Olga Mashkina, ‘The Pulp and Paper Industry Evolution in Russia: A Road of Many Transitions’, in Juha-Antii Lamberg et. al. (eds), The Evolution of Global Paper Industry, 1800–2050: A Comparative Analysis (New York and London: Springer, 2012), pp. 285–306. 58 I. M. Gvozdikova, Bashkortostan nakanune i v gody krest’ianskoi voiny pod predvoditel’stvom E. I. Pugacheva (Ufa: ‘Kitap’, 1999), p. 238. 59 Vozzvaniia i perepiska vozhakov pugachevskogo dvizheniia v Povolzh’e i Priural’e, ed. M. A. Usmanov (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo Kazanskogo Universiteta, 1988), p. 130. 60 K(P)FU-ORRK, A 2263. 61 Hunter, Papermaking, pp. 265, 346. According to Hunter, by 1800 ‘Germany operated 500 paper mills, producing 1,250 tons of paper a year; Spain had 200 mills, Sweden, 24, and Russia, 26. The largest Russian mill of this period operated 28 “Hollanders” and 70 vats, with a production of 1,100 reams of paper a week. The consumption of rags of this Russian mill was 800 tons annually.’ 62 Mashkina, ‘The Pulp and Paper Industry Evolution in Russia’. 63 Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī, Al-qism al-t-ānī min kitāb mustafād al-akhbār fī akhwāl Qazān wa Bulghār, p. 103. 64 ‘Tatarskie uchilishcha’, Istoriia Kazani v dokumentakh i materialakh XIX vek: Obrazovanie: vysshee, srednee, nachal’noe, kniga 4 (Kazan: Tatarsko knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2012), p. 519. 65 Hunter, Papermaking. 66 The Persian language was less widely used as a literary language in the Volga–Ural region than in Central Asia due to the lack of a Persian-speaking population in and around Kazan. From the 1770s to the 1860s a significant number of Muslim scholars from the Volga–Ural region travelled to Kabul, Bukhara and other Persianate destinations to pursue an education. The decline in the production of Persian-language manuscripts from the 1860s to the 1900s can be explained by several factors. First, maktab and madrasa teachers placed growing emphasis on the need for education to be carried out in the vernacular language of the students (Tatar-Turki). Second, by the second half of the nineteenth century, certain scholarly networks in the Volga–Ural region became increasingly critical of Central Asian education and encouraged their students to pursue their education in their native region. Finally, the decline in the use of the Persian language in the Volga– Ural region was part of a larger decline of the prestige of Persianate culture across Inner and South Asia in the late 1800s and 1900s as educated elites in various regions sought to promote local cultures and national identities. See James Robert Pickett, ‘The Persianate Sphere during the Age of Empires: Islamic Scholars and Networks of Exchange in Central Asia, 1747–1917’, PhD diss., Princeton University, NJ, 2015; Samuel Hodgkin, Claire Pogue Kaiser, Kelsey Rice, James Robert Pickett and Sergey Salushev, ‘Persianate Cultural Legacies in the Russian Empire and USSR’

168

67 68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80

Publishing in Tsarist Russia (Roundtable), Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, Philadelphia, November 20, 2015. See, for example, Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia arkheografiia, chast’ tret’ia, pp. 82–3. A. A. Khasavnekh, Filosofsko-eticheskie motivy v sufiiskoi poezii Abdulmanikha Kargalyi (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo AN RT, 2015). Khosaen Faezkhanov, ‘Islah.-i madaris’, Khosaen Faezkhanov, Tarikhi-dokumental’ jıentıq, ed. Raif Märdanov (Kazan: Rukhiyat, 2006), p. 39. Karl Fuks, ‘Kazanskie tatary v statisticheskom i etnograficheskom otnosheniiakh’, Karl Fuks: O Kazani, Kazanskom krae (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo ‘Zhien’, 2005), p. 158. For example, in 1911 the school inspector assigned to Kazan district recommended that the zemstvo open a Tatar-language newspaper into order to provide Muslims with ‘useful’ information, encourage support for the empire’s Russian–Tatar schools and counteract the pernicious effects of the Tatar-language literature then in circulation among the Muslims. See Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan, f. 199, op. 1, del. 771, l. 238ob-39. Agnès Kefeli-Clay, ‘Constructing an Islamic Identity: The Case of Elyshevo Village in the Nineteenth Century’, in Daniel Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, pp. 271–91 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Agnès Kefeli-Clay, ‘The Role of Tatar and Kraishen Women in the Transmission of Islamic Knowledge’, in Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (eds), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversions, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, pp. 250–73 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Agnès Kefeli-Clay, ‘The Tale of Joseph and Zulaykha on the Volga Frontier: The Struggle for Gender, Religious, and National Identity in Imperial and Post-revolutionary Russia’, Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (2011): 373–98. Danielle Ross, ‘Muslim Charity Under Russian Rule: Waqf, Sadaqa, and Zakat in Late Imperial Russia’, Islamic Law and Society 24 (2017): 77–111. Agnès Nilufer Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy and Literacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Il’dus Zagidullin, Islamskie instituty v Rossiiskoi imperii: Mecheti v evropeiskoi chasti Rossii i Sibiri (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2007), p. 143. Zagidullin, Islamskie instituty v Rossiiskoi imperii, p. 143. Frank, Islamic Historiography, pp. 67–75, 115–19. See, for example, ʿAbd Allāh Būbī, H. aqiqāt, yaki Tugrılıq, 4 vols (Kazan: LitoTipografiia I. N. Kharitonova, 1904–5); ʿAbd Allāh Būbī, Zaman-i ijtihād munqirād.mı, tugelme? (Kazan: Elektro-Tipografiia ‘Milliat’, 1909). Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī, Al-qism al-awwal min kitāb mustafād al-akhbār fī akhwāl Qazān wa Bulġār, pp. 7–31 Muh.ammad ʿAyad.al-Iskhaqi, Ike yoz yıldan song inqirād. (Kazan: Tipo-Litografiia Imperatorskago Universiteta, 1904).

A Collateral Cultural Revolution

169

81 Fatikh Amirkhan, ‘Fatkhulla Khazrat’, Fatikh Amirkhan, asarlar durt tomda: 2 tom, Povest’lar, roman ham drama asarlar (Kazan: Tatarsko knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1985), pp. 2, 21–4. 82 ʿAbd Allāh Būbī, H. aqiqāt; Rizaʾ al-Dīn bin Fakhr al-Dīn, ʿAʾila (Orenburg: Tipografiia gaz. ‘Waqt’ v Orenburge, 1912); [n.a.], Tormısh darese, yaki tarbiyale ata. (Kazan: Elektro-tipografiia Milliat, 1915); Fakhr al-Banāt Sulāymānīya, Aʾila Dareslare (Kazan: T.D. Br. Karimovykh, 1913); ʿAbd Allāh Sulāymān, Waʿz. lardan Zakāt (Kazan: Tipo-litografiia Umid, 1915). 83 Ahmet Temır, Türkolojı Tarıhınde Wilhem Radloff Devrı: Hayatı – İlmî Kışılığı – Eserlerı (Ankara:Atatürk kültür, dıl ve tarıh yüksek kurumu, 1991), pp. 9–19, 23; Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 140–3. 84 Shahr Sharaf, Marjānī (Kazan: Magārif, 1915), pp. 133–4; Islam na evropeiskom vostoke: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Kazan: Magarif, 2004), p. 323; Gabdulla Bubi, ‘Bubi madrasaseneng qısqa tarikhı’, Bertugan Bubilar ham Izh-Bubi madrasase (Kazan: Rukhiyat, 1999), p. 39. 85 Natalya G. Patrusheva, ‘Tsenzurnye uchrezhdeniia Rossiiskoi imperii i sistema karatel’noi tsenzury v nachale XX v. ’, Knizhnoe delo: vchera, segodnia, zavtra: XVIII Smirdinskie chteniia, Tom 213 (St Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi institute kul’tury, 2016), pp. 79–84. 86 The sense of cultural and linguistic distance that officials felt between themselves and Volga–Ural Muslims was expressed in a complaint by a Ministry of Education official who said that despite their living beside the Russians for 300 years, the ‘Tatars’ had remained culturally distinct and showed no inclination to communicate with their Russian neighbours. See Natsionalnyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan, f. 199, op. 1 del. 771, l. 237. Suspicions concerning the loyalty of the Volga–Ural Muslims to the empire reached such heights by 1910–12 that gendarme officials began to accuse their own Tatar–Russian translators, Khakas Nikolai Katanov and Tatar Gaineddin Akhmerov, of mistranslating documents to save Muslim suspects from imprisonment. Both Katanov and Akhmerov were placed under police surveillance (NART f 199, op. 1, d. 2086, l. 110; NART f. 199, o. 1, del. 792, l. 112-112ob). 87 An example of the Ministry of Internal Affairs using Russian-language teachers and school inspectors to collect intelligence in the madrasa can be found in Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Orenburgskoi Oblasti f. 10, Op. 4, Del. 420, l. 61–62ob. 88 See, for example, an effort by the Kazan zemstvo to open a Tatar-language newspaper in 1911 to encourage Tatar support for the empire. See Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan fond 199, opis’ 1, delo 771, list’ 239ob. 89 Examples of the use of manuscripts and oral transmission to disseminate material that would not have been passed by the censors can be seen in the ‘student notebooks’ (shakird daftarlare), collections of songs and poems transcribed by

170

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

madrasa students in the late 1800s and early 1900s. On student notebooks, see Rostam Mahdiev, ‘Shakert daftarlare’, Madrasalarda kitap kishtase: Mashhur magrifat uzaklare tarikhınan (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1992), pp. 224–32. For examples of the use of student notebooks to record and disseminate revolutionary songs, see Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan, F. 41, Op. 11, Del. 4. 90 For a detailed discussion of the new genres that were introduced into Tatar society by Russia’s first Muslim commercial presses in the 1880s and 1890s and which were produced in greater quantities after 1905, see Meyer, Turks Across Empires, Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims, and Rorlich, The Volga Tatars. 91 Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia, pp. 72–3.

7

Ethnic minorities speak up: Non-Russian clergy and a Russian Orthodox journal in the middle Volga region in the late imperial period Akira Sakurama

Introduction The Middle Volga region is well known as a multinational and multi-religious area of Russia. The Finno-Ugric people preserved their traditional beliefs, while the Turkic people accepted Islam in the ninth century. After the conquest of the Volga region in the sixteenth century, many Russians migrated here, and nonRussians joined the Russian Orthodox Church. Their competition became prominent at the end of the imperial era, when the influence of Islam became stronger and the Russian Orthodox Church, in cooperation with the Russian authorities, reinforced its missionary activities. Many analysts have examined this border region between the ‘Russian Centre’ and the ‘East’, which seemed to reflect the multicultural structure of the empire. At first, many scholars focused on the fact that the imperial authority and Russian Orthodox Church constrained non-Russian peoples and forcibly baptized them.1 More recently, historians, studying the development of ‘imperiology’, have revealed that the Russian authorities institutionalized and manipulated religious diversity, and have related the active interaction between the Russian authorities and subjects in the empire. Matthew Romaniello has emphasized that missionary policy in the Middle Volga region changed based on the priority of internal policy and the regional situation,2 while Robert Crews has shown that Muslims always acted within the imperial law.3 Paul Werth has demonstrated the meaning of religious and ethnic belonging and how it shifted in the late imperial era,4 while Agnès Kefeli has revealed how Baptized Tatars 171

172

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

preserved their Muslim identity through trade with Muslims and the transmission of Islamic folk tales by women at home.5 Norihiro Naganawa has considered various activities by Muslims in the Middle Volga region and their effort to create a ‘Muslim public sphere’ in the Russian state.6 However, these studies have focused on Muslim society and its relationship with the Russian authorities, without fully examining non-Russian people who were baptized under the missionary policy of the Russian Orthodox Church or, in other words, people in between. Although Christianization has often been connected with ‘Russification’, in actuality, many baptized non-Russians kept their ethnic identity. Missionary activity in the nineteenth century proceeded through school education in various ethnic languages, led by Nikolai Il’minskii, which succeeded in implanting Russian Orthodoxy in non-Russian communities and developed intellectuals from ethnic minorities. Many historians have examined this education policy, but without paying close attention to the activities of ethnic clergy.7 Throughout the Soviet period, Orthodox missionary activity was equated with suppression by the Russian autocracy and the Russification policy. Il’minskii was regarded as a symbol of this policy and described as ‘a missionary of the “Black Hundreds” [chernosotentsy] who formulated the special system of oppression and Russification imposed on colonized peoples in Tsarist Russia’.8 Although scholars from every ethnic group have studied their own history and culture, they have tended to focus on ‘traditional religion’, regarding Christianization as a part of the national ‘Russification’ policy. When investigating the work of ethnic intellectuals who were educated in Il’minskii schools, current researchers have focused on their secular work after the Russian Revolution. The development of these ex-clergy’s nuanced ethnic identity in the imperial period, when they often wrote in Russian, and their connection with the Russian Orthodox Church have not been fully examined.9 The present chapter investigates the arguments made by non-Russian clergy in a Russian Orthodox Church journal, a Russian publication that has mostly been ignored in research focusing on media in ethnic languages. Indeed, most non-Russian clergy at the end of the imperial era became secular ethnic activists after the Russian Revolution. Previous research has emphasized their role in developing ethnic culture as secular intellectuals.10 However, intellectuals from ethnic minority groups also worked as Orthodox clergy during the imperial era, attempting to establish an equal position to the Russians in the Russian Orthodox Church, on the one hand, while seeking to improve the status of non-Russian people in the empire on the other. Therefore, non-Russian clergy learned Russian and debated with Russians in Russian-language journals. As this chapter will

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

173

show, these discussions seem to more clearly reveal their position in the imperial order. Furthermore, these arguments demonstrate how ‘Russification’ worked for non-Russian clergy in the imperial era. By examining these ‘in between’ people, this study will reveal the place of ethnic identity among those who contributed to maintaining the imperial order. The main sources used in this work come from the Reports of Kazan Diocese (Izvestiia po Kazanskoi eparkhii). This journal was published by the Kazan Theological Academy and included various articles by local clergymen, including some who were non-Russian. The readers of this journal were clergymen in the Kazan archdiocese, so it functioned as a common discussion space for Russian and non-Russian Christians. Many non-Russian clergymen contributed articles to this journal, and the character of these articles changed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This change seems to have reflected the evolving position of non-Russian clergy in Russian society. This chapter first provides a historical overview of missionary activity among non-Russians in the Middle Volga region between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, we pay attention to school activity not only as a historical background to the cultural development among non-Russian people, but also as a contested ground between Russians and non-Russians in the journal. We then discuss the publishing activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kazan, in which some non-Russian clergy wrote their works. After that, we analyse articles in the Reports of Kazan Diocese, written by non-Russians from the nineteenth to twentieth century. Finally, the chapter will probe the cultural development process among non-Russians and clarify the role of Orthodox Church journals in communication between non-Russians and Russian society.

The emergence of non-Russian intellectuals from missionary schools Religious affiliation was one of the most important identity markers of subjects of the Russian Empire, in which Russian Orthodoxy occupied a superior position. The Russian Orthodox Church cooperated with the Russian imperial government in promoting missionary activity which targeted non-Russian peoples. Therefore, local people often equated conversion to Russian Orthodoxy with ‘Russification’. The authority, as well as the locals, often associated the ethnic identity of people in the Middle Volga region with their religious affiliation: Tatars as Muslims and other ethnic groups as animists, for example. In this

174

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

context, missionary activity in this region changed the identity of the local people. People in the region tended to regard baptized non-Russian ethnics as ‘Russified’, often seeing them in a negative light. Besides, the Russian Orthodox Church provided baptized non-Russians with a school education that became an important precondition for the growth of non-Russian intellectuals in the region. On the one hand, these intellectuals were actively involved in the Russian Orthodox Church, but on the other hand, by the late imperial era, they began to recognize their unique ethnic identity which distinguished them from Muslims of the same ethnic origin. To help explain the process and factors that shaped their complex identity, we will briefly review the history of missionary activity in the Middle Volga region, in which non-Russian clergy emerged through a unique educational system. The Middle Volga region became one of the northernmost Muslim regions after a Khan of Volga-Bulgaria converted to Islam in the ninth century. VolgaBulgaria and its successive governments established the region as an Islamic polity and developed a strong trading relationship with various Middle Eastern countries, although ordinary local people preserved their indigenous beliefs and customs. After the fifteenth century, the Russian state began to intervene in the governance of this region. Under Ivan the Terrible, the Russian army conquered Kazan, the capital of the Kazan Khanate, in 1552. The Kazan Diocese was established in 1555, with Gurii (Rugotin) serving as its first Archbishop. The Russian authorities attempted to exert control of the local inhabitants through Christian missionary activity, with Gurii offering them certain privileges, including tax exemption. This strategy led to the baptism of many local residents, particularly from the Finno-Ugric community.11 The Russian authorities’ attitude towards missionary activity changed throughout the imperial era. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Office for the Affairs of New Converts (Kontora novokreshchenskikh del) engaged in active missionary work under Luka (Konashevich), the Archbishop of Kazan and Sviiazhsk. Again, local people were offered incentives to become Christian, and the Russian Orthodox Church duly baptized thousands of local nonRussians. However, missionaries found that these converts adopted Christianity only superficially and continued to follow the tenets of Islam and other local beliefs. The Russian authorities now cracked down on Muslims and destroyed mosques, causing local Muslims to feel an aversion towards Russia.12 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great, feeling that Muslim antipathy might pose a threat to her rule, attempted to integrate Muslims into the state order. She established the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

175

(Orenburgskoe magometanskoe dukhovnoe sobranie) and institutionalized Muslim society. She also prohibited missionaries from attempting to convert non-Christian people.13 The recognition of Islam in the imperial order helped to develop the Muslim identity of Tatars in the Middle Volga region. Alarmed by these developments, the Russian Orthodox Church in Kazan, in cooperation with government administrators, augmented missionary activity among baptized non-Russians. In 1867 the Brotherhood of St Gurii was established to support the missionary activities, and Orientalists who studied at Kazan Imperial University and the Kazan Theological Academy used their knowledge to assist the Brotherhood of St Gurii. A key figure in this development was Nikolai I. Il’minskii, the son of a priest from the Penza district, who had studied not only theology but also Oriental languages, including the Tatar language. After graduating from the Theological Academy, he studied in the Middle East and settled in the Tatar district of Kazan. These experiences made Il’minskii recognize the importance of learning about the life and culture of local communities before engaging in missionary work. He also discovered that baptized Tatars had adopted the Christian religion only superficially, without understanding ‘true Christianity’.14 To increase genuine Christian belief in such communities, Il’minskii translated religious texts into local languages and maintained that the Cyrillic alphabet should be used in translations, because it helped non-Russians develop sympathy for Russia. Using these texts, Il’minskii promoted education for non-Russians in their native languages. Although he did not deny the importance of the Russian language, which was taught in his schools, he believed that for non-Russians to be successfully integrated into the Russian order, it was important to focus on the internal assimilation. In a letter to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the chief procurator of the Holy Synod, Il’minskii expressed his suspicion of Tatars who spoke Russian, arguing that Tatars with university educations were the worst of all Tatars.15 His views were supported by conservatives at the centre of the Russian Empire, including Pobedonostsev and Dmitry Tolstoy, the Minister for National Enlightenment. The educational and missionary method that employed local languages was called the ‘Il’minskii system’, which, in accordance with the Regulation on Schooling the Eastern Nationalities of 1870, was also adopted in other parts of the empire.16 In the Middle Volga region, the Il’minskii system was used to educate all nonRussian people. With assistance from Evfimii Malov, a professor at Kazan Theological Academy, and Vasilii Timofeev, a baptized Tatar priest, Il’minskii translated Church texts into the Tatar language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. Timofeev established the School for Baptized Tatars in Kazan, where students

176

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

lived and studied Christianity in their mother tongue. Graduates of this school became priests, returning to their homes or to other villages to found schools and work as teachers. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Brotherhood of St Gurii established a number of schools for non-Russians, including Chuvashes, Maris, Mordovas and Udmurts, in which lectures were delivered in the students’ native languages. The Kazan Teachers’ Seminary was established to train non-Russian teachers for these schools, with Il’minskii serving as its first director.17 Students who studied at these schools ultimately served as teachers and priests in the villages of each ethnic group, working always in the mother language of the latter. Despite this progress, the Il’minskii system was not without criticism. For example, after the emergence of a large number of apostates in the Middle Volga region following the Declaration of Religious Freedom (1905), many Russian clergymen blamed the system for its failure to ensure that baptized non-Russians internalized Christianity. Despite such criticism, several schools continued to use the Il’minskii system until the Russian Revolution, helping create a nonRussian intelligentsia who, along with engaging with Orthodoxy in their native languages, acquired literacy in the Russian language. Distinguished graduates of these schools included Ivan Iakovlev from Chuvashes, Pavel Glezdenev from Maris and Ivan Mikheev from Udmurts, all of whom are now regarded as the fathers of enlightenment in these ethnic groups. They acquired modern knowledge and published journals as well as books in their native languages.18 The intellectuals participated in the Congress of Missionary Activists (Missionerskii s”ezd) and argued that school education under the Il’minskii system had succeeded in fostering belief in Russian Orthodoxy among the nonRussian people.19 During the Russian Revolution, such intellectuals promoted autonomous ethnic movements, in opposition to the Muslims, who also sought a high degree of autonomy. Intellectuals educated under the Il’minskii system attempted to develop their own ethnic cultures while preserving their Orthodox identity and hoped to achieve cooperation with other Orthodox peoples. In 1917, participants in the General Conference of Representatives from Smaller Peoples in Volga region (Obshchee sobranie predstavitelei melkikh narodnostei Povolzh’ia), held in Kazan, discussed their quest for autonomy. The conference resolution spoke of the need for all Orthodox peoples to cooperate against the Muslims (Tatars) and praised Il’minskii’s contribution to developing the nonRussian peoples.20 Broadly speaking, it was in such a context that non-Russian clergy in this region were more or less in favour of the Russian state system which could mediate between their community and Russian society, especially the Orthodox Church.

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

177

In the imperial era, such non-Russian clergy felt an affinity with Russian society as their fellow Christians. However, as indicated above, they did not identify themselves with Orthodox Russians or Muslim Tatars, but with unique ethnic groups that fell in between. The existing literature, especially that with a retrospective view from the Soviet period, when the use of ethnic languages was emphasized, has focused on their history of publishing in their ethnic languages. However, as we will see below, it was publishing in the Russian language, including contributions to Orthodox journals, that most typically represented the complex identity of the ‘in between’ people.

Kazan Diocese publications in the late imperial era Kazan has an established reputation as an important centre for publishing in Russia. Kazan Imperial University, established in 1804, had a press section that produced scientific publications by scholars at the university, while Muslim Tatars were engaged in publication in the Tatar language in Arabic script. The Russian Orthodox Church was also a major publisher in Kazan in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as it was throughout the Russian Empire, with every archdiocese and theological academy publishing a journal that would debate not only theological and missionary topics but also those concerning art and science.21 The Kazan Archbishop, Grigorii (Postnikov), launched a new journal, the Orthodox Interlocutor (Pravoslavnyi sobesednik), published by the Kazan Theological Academy. It was described as an ‘academic journal’, and most of its contributors were professors from the Kazan Theological Academy, but its main purpose was to support missionary activities, particularly those directed at Old Believers.22 In this journal, Il’minskii and Malov also wrote articles on missionary activities among Muslims.23 In 1867, the Kazan Archbishop, Antonii (Amfiteatrov), set up a new journal entitled Reports of Kazan Diocese. In the 1860s, every archdiocese began to publish journals, which played an important role in internal communication,24 and Reports of Kazan Diocese was such a journal. It was published twice a month until 1903, and weekly after 1904. Every diocese within the Kazan archdiocese was obliged to purchase the Orthodox Interlocutor and Reports of Kazan Diocese, the circulation for each of which was around 1,000 copies.25 In contrast to the Orthodox Interlocutor, Reports of Kazan Diocese, as ‘an academic journal’, had a more general character, which seemed to attract a wider readership among the

178

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Russian Orthodox people of the region. So, we would expect articles in the Reports of Kazan Diocese to reflect the desire of non-Russian clergy to present a positive self-image to wider Russian society. Reports of Kazan Diocese consisted of two sections: an ‘official part’ and an ‘unofficial part’. Articles in the ‘official part’ typically comprised announcements of imperial laws relating to the Orthodox Church and decisions by the archdiocese, as well as reports of activities in the archdiocese, and personnel matters. In contrast, the ‘unofficial part’ included articles on Orthodox theology, moral lessons for baptized people and reports on missionary activities. Because the Kazan archdiocese monitored missionary activities across the whole eastern area, the journal included articles on missionary work from the Caucasus to the Far East.26 However, the majority of articles concerned missionary activities among nonRussians in the Middle Volga region and were designed to provide information relating to missionary work to members of the clergy in the Kazan archdiocese. Most of the authors of articles in the ‘unofficial part’ of the journal were missionaries or professors and students at the Kazan Theological Academy, but non-Russian clergymen also made contributions. From the nineteenth into twentieth century, the number of articles from non-Russian clergymen increased, as did the content, reflecting cultural developments and the changing position of non-Russians in Russian society. We will now move on to explore these articles and analyse the arguments put forward by non-Russian clergymen.

Non-Russian clergy as the object of a Russian Orthodox journal From the outset, articles about missionary activities directed towards aliens (inorodtsy)27 in the Middle Volga region were published in the ‘unofficial part’ of the Reports of Kazan Diocese. In 1868, its second year of publication, the journal included pieces on missionary work among baptized Tatars, Chuvashes and Maris. A priest who served in a village of baptized Tatars described the occurrence of apostasy since 1868 and the countermeasures taken against it.28 A priest serving in a Chuvash village described the religious life of his villagers,29 while a clergyman living in a Mari village reported that he had persuaded the villagers to merge their traditional rituals with Orthodox feasts.30 Nikolai Zolotnitskii, who understood the Chuvash language and led the missionary work among the Chuvashes, published a report on Chuvash and Mari schools for the Brotherhood of St Gurii.31

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

179

There were three main themes to the contributions to the journal: 1) the extent of apostasy among non-Russians adopting Islam; 2) the religious lives of non-Russians (in particular the practice of customs derived from ‘ancient beliefs’); and 3) the real status and influence of schools adopting the Il’minskii system. These topics also reflected the main interests of the Russian Orthodox Church in relation to missionary work among non-Russians. Even during its formative period, Reports of Kazan Diocese featured articles by non-Russian holy men, such as the 1873 piece about a lecture for Mari inhabitants given by Ivan Moliarov, a teacher from a mountain Mari community.32 Moliarov introduced the history of Christianization among the Maris and explained how ‘true Christians’ dealt with local customs, such as Kiremet.33 In this lecture, he referred to the inhabitants as ‘we’, identifying himself with that community.34 This article also included the equivalent of a preface by Il’minskii, who gave some background on Moliarov and his experience of Christianization. According to Il’minskii, Moliarov first worked in agriculture and craft production before entering a school run by the Brotherhood of St Gurii. After his education, Moliarov devoted himself to Church life, teaching children during the day, leading missionary discussions with adults on Sundays and holidays and spending the rest of his time studying Christianity. Il’minskii declared that Moliarov’s work would show the clergy how to effectively remove ancient customs and better understand the relationship between descriptions of sacred texts and real life. He also pointed out that the article not only explained the local religious and educational situation, but also provided ethnographic information.35 Il’minskii’s commentary was an indication that there were few non-Russian clergymen at that time and that they were seen as a novelty by some and regarded with suspicion by others. Perhaps the most important point was that Il’minskii, a Russian intellectual, had enabled Moliarov, a non-Russian representative, to publish his work in this journal. Non-Russian members of clergy were not able to represent their own opinions, but were only expected to provide information about the customs and religious conditions of local ethnic groups. Subsequent articles written by non-Russian priests had a similar character. In particular, in the nineteenth century, we find many letters and reports from nonRussian clergymen translated by Russians,36 a pattern which suggests that nonRussians were only considered able to provide original information to Orthodox society with the assistance of Russian representatives.

180

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

In 1876, an article about myths and traditional healing in Chuvash villages appeared in the journal. It was attributed only to ‘M. F.’, but the author was believed to be Mikhail Fedorov, a Chuvash priest from a peasant family, later known as a writer and ethnographer. The article referred to ‘our ancestors’, indicating that the author was also a Chuvash. Appended to this work were notes by ‘V. M.’, supposedly Vasirii Magnitskii.37 Magnitskii was born in a Chuvash village to the local priest and he too would make his name as an ethnologist and illuminator of Chuvashes. These types of article again suggest that non-Russians, particularly those from ordinary families, were expected to provide original information about the local situation to Russians (or local people with connections to Russian society) for the latter to interpret and analyse. Other priests produced articles about the history and contemporary customs of local ethnic groups, generally drawing on their own experiences.38 In some articles, non-Russian clergymen emphasized their devotion to Christianity. In 1874, Stepan Danilov, a priest from the baptized Tatar community, reported a discussion about belief he had had with a Muslim Tatar man. He emphasized the distinction between the baptized Tatars and Muslim Tatars and noted that the Muslim execrated him for having become ‘worse than the Russians’.39 In 1881, Mikhail Apakov, a deacon from the baptized Tatar community, wrote an article about the effectiveness of missionary activities carried out through schools using the Il’minskii system. Apakov emphasized his own commitment to missionary work among local people who had been strongly influenced by the Muslim Tatars.40 His article revealed a strong devotion to Christianity among the baptized Tatars, who were also enthusiastic about missionary work. Missionary advances were reported not only by priests from the baptized Tatar community, but also by clergymen from other ethnic groups. The standard account was that local people retained customs derived from ‘ancient beliefs’, but that school education and the experience of hearing the liturgy in their native language had planted the seed of Christianity.41 During this period, some authors focused not on their own ethnic groups, but on other groups. For example, Porfirii Rufimskii, the son of a village deacon from Chuvash and a famous torchbearer for the Chuvash people, reported on the religious state of Maris that he met during his travels.42 Such articles suggested that non-Russians acted not only as representatives of their own ethnicities but also as representatives of the Church, with a special perspective on ‘others’. Rufimskii’s article made no reference to the fact that he was Chuvash, possibly indicating that non-Russian clergymen were keen to assimilate with Russian society. Rufimskii’s upbringing

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

181

in a Church family may also have influenced his position, but the description he provides, based on direct observation, also confirms him in the traditional role of a non-Russian informant for the Russians. During this period, at least one non-Russian clergyman attempted to change the normal pattern. In 1896, Aleksei Rekeev, a priest from a Chuvash farming family, contributed an article about the myths and beliefs of the Chuvash people. At the start of the article, Rekeev criticized the academic work of Europeans – including Karl Fuks, who had written about ethnic groups in the Volga region during the first half of the nineteenth century – arguing that their studies were superficial. Whereas Fuks had claimed that the traditional religion of the Chuvash people was polytheistic, Rekeev argued that their religion had a monotheistic character from the beginning.43 By attacking ‘superficial’ European studies, Rekeev attempted to communicate his own viewpoint to readers, including the Russian clergy. However, the journal editors printed a comment next to the article, asserting that Rekeev’s statement was wrong, but that his work represented important material produced by a non-Russian observer and providing historical and ethnographic information.44 So here we have an instance where a Chuvash priest attempted to communicate his own views to readers, contradicting Russian arguments, but the Russians maintained their higher status, not just observing and analysing the actions of non-Russians, but passing judgement on them. While non-Russian clergy contributed articles to Church journals in the nineteenth century, these articles suggest that the non-Russian clergymen, in particular those from ordinary families, were still regarded as ‘objects’ by Russians. By the end of the century, some non-Russian priests attempted to represent themselves as actors, but Russians still saw non-Russian authors as objects to be supported by Russian authority. Nevertheless, most of these nonRussians would make their own mark as ethnographers and writers from local ethnic groups – and their position in relation to such journals would change in the twentieth century, notably after 1905.

Non-Russian clergy as the subject of a Russian Orthodox journal In 1892, Il’minskii passed away, which was a signal for even more intense criticism of his educational system. His opponents argued that the use of nonRussian languages in education separated non-Russian people from Russian

182

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

society. At the beginning of the twentieth century, anticipation of a revolution extended across the Russian Empire, penetrating non-Russian communities. In particular, Muslim Tatars actively pursued enhanced autonomy and the right to participate in the Russian parliament. At the same time, the religious situation was also changing. The Russian government promulgated the Declaration of Religious Freedom in 1905, which allowed imperial subjects to adhere to their ‘traditional beliefs’. Thousands of non-Russian Christians in the Volga region who regarded Islam as their ‘traditional belief ’ petitioned for apostasy and recognition as Muslims. Of course, not all non-Russians in the Middle Volga region converted to Islam, and non-Russian priests argued for Christianity in Orthodox journals. Ivan Mikheev, an Udmurt priest and graduate of the Kazan Teachers’ Seminary (later known as an ethnographer and illuminator), contributed a report on the religious life of the Udmurt people in 1900. Mikheev argued that although local people kept ‘non-Christian’ customs, school education could change the situation. In particular, he argued that teachers from baptized Tatar and Udmurt communities could encourage devotion to and understanding of Christianity through education and prayer in native languages.45 In 1906, A. Prokop’ev, a priest from a Chuvash community, described how after leaving home, he grew as a true Christian at school, although his mother and grandmother maintained a traditional lifestyle based on ‘ancient beliefs’. He also showed discussion with people who kept traditional belief, and insisted that the discussion had gradually changed their opinion. As an example, Prokop’ev wrote that his mother, who had objected to his attendance at a state school, later started to attend a monastery.46 These arguments emphasized the impact of the Il’minskii system and the religious development of non-Russians in the Middle Volga region. In this way, non-Russian clergy attempted to demonstrate the utility of education in nonRussian languages and their devotion to Christianity. In 1905, David Grigor’ev, a bishop from the baptized Tatar community, published a direct response to a report which was produced by an anti-Muslim missionary from the Kazan archdiocese the previous year. The missionary had suggested that the ‘alien clergy’ actually supported apostasy towards Islam. Grigor’ev emphasized the contribution made by non-Russian clergy to Orthodox missionary activities, and in response to criticism that non-Russian clergy were not proficient enough in the Russian language, Grigor’ev argued that they might not know Russian now, but had the motivation to study it and improve. Grigor’ev also echoed the views of Il’minskii by putting more emphasis on belief than on Russian literacy.47 This exchange suggests that although there was a negative

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

183

image of ‘alien’ clergy among Russians, those same clergy were able to mount an effective counter-argument. The Revolution and the Declaration of Religious Freedom in 1905, which sparked significant apostasy in the Middle Volga region, revived the debate among non-Russian clergy about their position in Russia. Grigor’ev attempted to replace the negative image of ‘baptized Tatars’ with a more positive identity in the eyes of readers, particularly Russians, in an article entitled ‘Please call me “Kreshchen” ’ in 1906. He complained that baptized Tatars still carried the designation ‘Tatars’ – which they disliked – even though their ancestors had converted to Christianity 350 years earlier and they referred to themselves as ‘Kreshchen’. According to Grigor’ev, Russification (obrusenie) was advancing among these people, especially intellectuals, whose clothes, food and lifestyle were now closer to those of Russians. He expressed frustration that the ‘Kreshchens” present situation was not acknowledged and that their selfdesignation was not respected. He asked his readers to call his community not ‘Tatars’ but ‘Kreshchens’.48 Il’minskii had also discovered that baptized Tatars called themselves ‘Kreshchons’, but he continued to call them ‘baptized Tatars’.49 Grigor’ev’s article can be seen as an attempt to resist Russian classifications and place Russians and non-Russians (in this case the ‘Kreshchens’) on an equal footing. His article also relayed the message that non-Russian clergy attached more weight to education in native languages and devotion to Christianity, although they regarded learning the Russian language and acquiring a Russian lifestyle to be significant attainments. Mikhail Vasil’ev, a priest from the baptized Tatar community, wrote his autobiography in 1904. He emphasized that school education had enabled him to acquire a broader knowledge and noted the importance of educating people in their native language, while also suggesting that Russian literacy had advanced his understanding of the world.50 This was a non-Russian cleric expressing a positive attitude towards ‘Russification’, acknowledging the value of acquiring Russian literacy and to living as an Orthodox Christian. Vasil’ev also wrote many ethnographic works during this period, studying not only the baptized Tatars, but also other ethnic groups including the Chuvash and Mari communities. He based his writings not only on his own observations, but also on reports produced by the Brotherhood of St Gurii and materials from the archives.51 Thus, Vasil’ev not only harnessed his own experience as a non-Russian representative, but also used other studies to support his arguments, much like a Russian academic specialist. Vasil’ev’s scholarship was not restricted to the Volga–Ural region or even to Russia, for he had wide-ranging interests, reflected,

184

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

for example, in his work on missionary activity and religious conditions in Japan and Korea.52 During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, Vasil’ev issued a call for cooperation in which he did not refer to his own ethnic origin, but targeted all Christians, regardless of their ethnicity. This is an indication that Vasil’ev, even as a non-Russian representative, hoped to play an active role as a subject of the Russian Empire.53 Other clergy displayed their patriotism towards Russia through their Orthodox beliefs. Gavriil Spiridonov, a priest from the Chuvash community, gave a positive description of the growth of Christianity among Chuvashes, pointing out that the ability to pray in the Chuvash language was an important factor in this development. At the same time, he argued that people who had been loyal to their local beliefs should be welcomed by the Church, since such local beliefs could easily be transformed into devotion to Russian Orthodoxy. He emphasized that people who abandoned their fundamental beliefs could receive Christian enlightenment only at a superficial level, describing them as ‘bad Christians’ and arguing that they would be particularly susceptible to the lure of revolutionary propaganda. Spiridonov asserted that truly pious Chuvashes were also patriots, who addressed the Tsar as ‘God on the ground’.54 Spiridonov claimed that the most important foundation for connecting people was religion, not language. As an example, he argued that Russians and Poles were close to each other in terms of language, but were eternal rivals, while the Greeks, who were different from the Russians in terms of ‘nation’ (natsiia) or national identity, had sympathy for, or a bond with, Russians.55 Spiridonov recognized that ethnic criteria, including language, was what distinguished people – for example, the Chuvash people were clearly distinct from Russians – he put more emphasis on the religious connection as something that united people: in the case of the Chuvash and Russians, their common Christianity. In describing the Chuvash as ‘patriots’, he was referring to their strong Christian association with Russia, while at the same time considering them ‘alien’ from an ethnic point of view. Such articles – on belief, life, school education and so on – by non-Russian clergymen appeared in the Reports of Kazan Diocese until it ceased publication in 1918. In 1914, the journal had included a report on the 50th anniversary ceremony for the School for Baptized Tatars, in which an unnamed teacher had emphasized the importance of school education.56 In 1916, V. Eslivanov, a priest from the Mari community, called on Maris to get baptized, emphasizing the truth of Christianity while also noting that many people had returned to traditional rituals during the trauma of the war. The article was his own

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

185

translation of a piece he had originally written in the Mari language, therefore giving it a special connection to Mari beliefs and the Maris’ critical situation. At the same time, Eslivanov expressed his sympathy for Mari people as his own brothers.57 Eslivanov clearly felt a close connection with ordinary Maris and was attempting to act as a mediator between them and the Russians. We have seen that in the twentieth century, non-Russian clergy began to express their opinions in the Reports of Kazan Diocese and that their arguments were often juxtaposed with pieces by other commentators (often Russian). The article by Grigor’ev referred to earlier was typical in the sense that he reacted to an earlier work as a non-Russian representative. His argument reflected the cultural development of non-Russians through religious education, but he was also anxious to portray their positive identity in imperial Russia. Clearly, these non-Russian clergy regarded ‘Russification’ positively – indeed, as evidence of their own enlightenment. Russian-language literacy enabled them to acquire broader knowledge and to engage in debate with Russians in Russianlanguage journals. At the same time, they recognized that they were members of ethnic minority groups, distinguished from ethnic Russians. Yet while acknowledging that their ethnic background made them different from Russians, these clergy sought to claim a place in the Russian state, based on a common religious belief. Non-Russian clergy acted as a bridge between non-Russian Christians and the Russian state by championing patriotism or appealing that non-Russian clergy be viewed as equal subjects alongside Russians in the empire.

Conclusion This chapter has examined arguments among non-Russian clergy from the end of the imperial era. Non-Russian clergy published articles in Church journals from their inception, but the character of those articles changed over time, reflecting the evolving social and political situation in the region. Early journal articles by non-Russians were translations of texts in their ethnic languages; they described the religious and cultural conditions of inhabitants which they observed, and Russian intellectuals translated the descriptions and added their own commentary. Some clergymen attempted to present their opinions, but Russian editors regarded these as simply another type of ethnographic and religious material to be analysed by Russian intellectuals. This pattern suggests that non-Russian clergymen, especially those from peasant

186

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

families, were considered ‘objects’ to be viewed and analysed by Russians. During this period, missionary education had not yet achieved its full impact, and non-Russians did not have a platform from which to express their own opinions. In the twentieth century, particularly after 1905, non-Russian clergy began to have actively their work published more extensively. They more readily acknowledged their ethnic particularity and began to challenge Russian viewpoints. This new approach was made possible by the expansion of missionary education. Although researchers have paid more attention to secular activities by ethnic intellectuals during the Soviet era, this study has shown that non-Russian clergymen in the Russian Empire also attempted to establish themselves as ethnic minority representatives within the Russian Orthodox Church. They believed that their position in the Church strengthened their connection with the empire. Such clergymen participated as key figures in the General Conference of Representatives from Smaller Peoples, in which emphasis was placed on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the cultural development of nonRussian peoples. In this way, these non-Russian representatives, including some who are now regarded as having been the fathers or leaders of their ethnic groups, developed their own ethnic identities within the framework of the Russian Orthodox Church. Studies of non-Russian education have focused on the use of non-Russian languages as a reflection of cultural development. The ethnic clergy themselves emphasized the importance of (and the demand for) school education in their native languages. At the same time, in their writings, non-Russian clergymen acknowledged the important role played by the Russian language in their progress. They saw ‘Russification’ in a positive light, but this did not mean that they regarded themselves as ethnic ‘Russians’. Non-Russian clergy believed that ‘Russification’, which they equated with learning the Russian language and getting baptized, would make them more culturally advanced. Moreover, the acquisition of a working knowledge of Russian enabled them to demand that Russians appreciate their ethnic identity, which was neither Russian nor Muslim-dominant like the Tatars. Russian Orthodox Church journals, including the Reports of Kazan Diocese, acted as a communication space in which nonRussian clergy were able to express their opinions and self-identification vis-àvis Russian society. Exploration of their publishing history in the Russian language rather than in their ethnic languages is thus an effective way to reveal their nuanced identity and understand their effort to communicate with Russians.

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

187

Notes 1

Azade-Ayşe Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986); Yamauchi Masayuki, Surutangariefu no Yume: Isuramu Sekai to Rosia Kakumei (Sultangaliev’s Dream: The Islamic World and the Russian Revolution) (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1986). 2 Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 3 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 4 Paul W. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 5 Agnès N. Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 6 Naganawa Norihiro, Isuramu no Rosia: Teikoku, Syukyo, Kokyoken 1905–1917 (Islamic Russia: Empire, Religion, and Public Sphere 1905–1917) (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2017). 7 Isabelle T. Kreindler, ‘Educational Policies toward the Eastern Nationalities in Tsarist Russia: A Study of Il’minskii’s System’, PhD diss., Columbia University, 1969. 8 O. Iu. Smidt (ed.), Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 17 (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1933), p. 786. 9 This vision was apparently reflected in the official historiographies of each ethnic autonomous republic which were published in between 1950 and 1960. See Kh. G. Gimadi and M. K. Mukhariamov (eds), Istoriia Tatarskoi ASSR (s drevneishikh vremen do Velikoi Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii) (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1955); I. D. Kuznetsov, Istoriia Chuvashskoi ASSR (Cheboksary: Chuvashskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1967). Recently, Mari scholars have been more actively engaged in ethnographic studies, focusing on ‘traditional beliefs’. See Mariitsy: istoriko-etnograficheskie ocherki (Ioshkar-Ola: MarNIIIaLI, 2013). By contrast, Chuvash researchers have begun to study the activities of Chuvash clergy during the imperial era. See Leonid A. Taimasov, ‘Religioznoe dvizhenie za osnovanie pravoslavnykh monasterei sredi kreshchenykh nerusskikh narodov Kazanskoi eparkhii vo vtoroi polovine XIX–nachale XX vekov’, in R. A. Nabiev (ed.), Pravoslavie v polikonfessional’nom obshchestve, pp. 207–33 (Kazan: Magarif, 2006). 10 Paul Werth illustrates the development of ethnic identity among Kriashens (baptized Tatars) from the end of the imperial era to the beginning of the Soviet regime. His work also focuses on their activities during the 1920s. However, arguments from the imperial era are not fully examined. See Paul W. Werth, ‘From “Pagan” Muslims to “Baptized” Communists: Religious Conversion and Ethnic

188

11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24

25

26

Publishing in Tsarist Russia Particularity in Russia’s Eastern Provinces’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 3 (2000): 497–523. Matthew Romaniello summarizes Russian governance of the Volga region after the conquest of Kazan, including missionary activity among non-Russians. See Romaniello, The Elusive Empire. Iskhak M. Lotfullin and Faizulkhak Islaev, Dzhikhad tatarskogo naroda: geroicheskaia bor’ba mamar-musul’man s pravoslavnoi inkvizitsiei na primere istorii Novokreshchenskoi kontory (Kazan: n.p., 1998). Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths, pp. 38–9. Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 47–85. Pis’ma N. I. Il’minskogo k ober-prokuroru Konstantinu Petrovichu Pobedonostsevu (Kazan: Tipo-litografiia Imperatorskogo universiteta, 1895), pp. 174–5. Wayne Dowler, Classroom and Empire: The Politics of Schooling Russia’s Eastern Nationalities, 1860–1917 (Montreal, Kingston, London and Ithaca, NY: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001), pp. 62–84. Geraci, Window on the East, p. 61. The intellectuals began publishing the following works: News (Khupar, 1906–) in Chuvash, Mari Calendar (Marla kalendar’, 1907–) in Mari, and Udmurt Calendar (Udmurt kalendar’, 1905–) in Udmurt. Missionerskii s”ezd v gorode Kazani 13–26 iiunia 1910 goda (Kazan: Tsentral’naia tipografiia, 1910), pp. 609–15. Protokol pervogo obshchego sobraniia predstavitelei melkikh narodnostei Povolzh’ia (Kazan: Tovarishchestvo tsentral’noi tipografii, 1917). Konstantin E. Netuzhilov, Tserkovnaia periodicheskaia pechat’ v Rossii XIX stoletiia (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Sanktpeterbugskogo universiteta, 2008), p. 41. Netuzhilov, Tserkovnaia periodicheskaia pechat’, p. 96. Typical articles include Evfimii A. Malov, ‘Pravoslavnaia protivomusul’manskaia missiia v Kazanskom krae’, Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, 1868–70; Nikolai I. Il’minskii, ‘O tserkovnom bogosluzhenii na inorodcheskikh iazykakh’, Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, 1883. Eduard V. Letenkov, Gubernskie, oblastnye, voiskovye, eparkhial’nye vedomosti 1838–1917 (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Sanktpeterbugskogo universiteta, 2005), pp. 19–20. Aleksandr V. Zhuravskii, Kazanskaia akademiia na perelome epoch (1884–1912 gg). (Moscow: Ph.D. Thesis. Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2002), p. 148. ‘Obrashchenie kalmykov v khristianstvo v Astrakhanskoi gubernii’, IKE 22 (1877): 625–6 (reprinted from another journal); Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Iaponiia: Kratkie svedeniia v Iaponii’, IKE 7 (1904): 199–202.

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

189

27 ‘Inorodets’ was the legal category of people who needed special treatment because of their ‘backwardness’ and their unique lifestyle. Originally, this category included ethnic groups in Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as Jews. Later, non-Russians in the Volga–Ural region were also referred to as ‘inorodtsy’ in discussions of education. 28 Sviashchennik P. Men’shikov, ‘Achinskii prikhod Laishevskogo uezda, v nastoiashchem sostave’, IKE 16 (1868): 442–60. 29 S. A. A., ‘Sluchai iz praktiki prikhodskogo sviashchennika u shuvash’, IKE 7, 9, 13 (1868). 30 Sv. A. A., ‘Prazdnik u cheremis’, IKE 15 (1868): 428–430. 31 Bratchik Nikolai Zolotnitskii, ‘Doklad Sovetu Bratstva sv. Guriia bratchika N. Zolotnitskogo’, IKE 11, 12 (1868). 32 The Mari included three ethnic sub-groups: the Meadow Mari, Mountain Mari and Eastern Mari. Of these three, we know that the Mountain Mari were the first to receive Christianity. 33 Kiremeti are spirits believed in by local ethnic groups in the Middle Volga region. They offer these spirits animals or porridge to bring rain and successful harvests. In their reports, missionaries often described the kiremeti as a form of superstition that should be eradicated. 34 ‘Besedy cheremisam Kuznetsovskogo prikhoda, Kuznetsovskogo shkol’nogo uchitelia Ivana Iakovleva Moliarova’, IKE 7, 8, 9 (1873). 35 ‘Besedy cheremisam Kuznetsovskogo prikhoda’, pp. 209–11. 36 ‘Vstrecha i razgovor kreshcheno-tatarskogo mal’chika: vospitannika Kazanskoi kreshcheno-tatarskoi shkoly s mukhammedaninom’, IKE 6 (1877): 173–7; ‘Pis’mo sel’skoi uchitel’nitsy kreshcheno-tatarskoi devitsy, Feodory Gavrilovoi, k sviashchenniku Vasiliiu Timofeevu ot 7 favralia 1872 goda’, IKE 22 (1877): 615–23; ‘Iz pis’ma sviashchennika sela Elysheva Kosmy Prokop’eva (dostavleno N. I. Il’minskin)’, IKE 14 (1882): 369–74. 37 M. F., ‘Predaniia Chuvash Bachurinskogo prikhoda Cheboksarskogo uezda, i sposoby lecheniia u nikh boleznei’, IKE 21 (1876): 647–52. 38 Mikhaik Apakov, ‘Razskazy kreshchenykh tatar dereven’ Tavelei i Alekseevskogo vyselka Iamashevskogo prikhoda, chistopol’skogo uezda, o proiskhozhdenii kiremeti’, IKE 11 (1876): 322–37; Semen-Maksimov, ‘Ostatki drevnikh narodnotatarskikh (iazycheskikh) verovanii u nyneshnikh kreshchenykh tatar Kazanskoi gubernii’, IKE 19 (1876): 565–618. 39 Stepan P. Danilov, ‘Missionerskoe sobesedovanie khristianina iz starokreshchennykh tatar s mukhammedaninova’, IKE 17 (1874): 479–500. 40 Mikhaik V. Apakov, ‘Missionerskie besedy s kreshchenymi i nekreshchenymi tatarami i votiakami Kazanskogo kraia’, IKE 13 (1881): 330–43. 41 ‘Doklad Sviashchennika sela Murirmy, Tsivil’skogo uezda, Danika Filimonova o blagochinnomu 2-go Tsivil’skogo okruga sviashchenniku sela Kovalei Viktoru

190

42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49

50 51

52 53 54 55

Publishing in Tsarist Russia Petrovichu Il’inskomu’, IKE 3 (1890): 67–77; ‘Raport Sviashchennika Tsivil’skogo uezda, sela Koshelei, Voznesenskoi tserkvi Viktora Zaikova o blagochinnomu 1 tsivil’skogo okruga, o protoiereiu Troitskogo sobora Aleksandru Petrovichu Vasil’evskomu’, IKE 8 (1890): 167–77; Grigorii Filippov, ‘Chuvashi Bichurinskogo prikhoda’, IKE 4 (1891): 124–8. Porfirii Rufimskii, ‘Puteshestvie uchenikov na Bogomol’e v cheremisskuiu obitel’, IKE 16 (1892): 450–6. Sv. Rekeev, ‘Iz chuvashskikh predanii i verovanii’, IKE 15–16, 18, 21 (1896). Rekeev, ‘Iz chuvashskikh predanii’, pp. 293–4. Ivan Mikheev, ‘Iz religioznoi zhizni Kazanskikh votiakov’, IKE 20 (1900): 894–903. A. P. Prokop’ev, ‘Prosvetiteli i zashchitniki khristianstva sredi chuvash i cheremis Koz’modem’ianskogo uezda (Iz zapisok i vospominanii sel’skogo uchitelia)’, IKE 11 (1906): 325–36. Sv. D. Grigor’ev, ‘Polozhenie sviashchennika sredi otstupnikov: po povodu otcheta Kazanskogo protivomusul’manskogo eparkhial’nogo missionerstva. Izv. po Kaz. eparkhii’, IKE 32 (1905): 960–8. Sviashch D. Grigor’ev, ‘Zovite nas kreshchenami’, IKE 14–15 (1906): 450–4. Kazanskaia tsentral’naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola: materialy dlia istorii khristianskogo prosbeshcheniia kreshchenykh tatar (Kazan: Tipografiia V. M. Kliuchnikova, 1887), p. 9. They were acknowledged as an independent ethnic group by the Soviets in 1920s, but later merged into the ‘Tatar nation’. After perestroika, some intellectuals launched an ethnic restoration movement, which reached its peak during the 1st All Russian Census. See Sergei Sokolovskii, Kriasheny vo Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniia 2002 goda (Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk Institut etnologii i antropologii im. Milkukho-Maklaia, 2004). Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Iz moego detstva: vospitaniia kreshchenogo tatarina’, IKE 20 (1904): 639–48. Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Sviatki u cheremis’, IKE 2 (1904): 43–51; Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Cheremisskaia maslenitsa’, IKE 5 (1904): 145–8; Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘O kiremetiakh u chuvash i cheremis’, IKE 8 (1904): 237–62; Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Iazycheskie predstavleniia chuvash o zagrovnoi zhizni’, IKE 14 (1904): 431–43; Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Chuvashskie pominki’, IKE 15 (1904): 464–75; Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Vesennie prazdniki u cheremis’, IKE 24 (1904): 768–81; Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Rozhdestvenskie sviatki v kreshcheno-tatarskoi derevni’, IKE 1, 2 (1905): 16–50. Vasil’ev, ‘Iaponiia: Kratkie svedeniia’; Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Koreia: Kratkie svedeniia o Koree’, IKE 7 (1904): 202–5. Mikhail Vasil’ev, ‘Voina i nashe dukhovenstvo. Odna iz pastyrskikh obiazannostei vo vremia voiny’, IKE 11 (1905): 321–8. Gavriil Spiridonov, ‘Iz proshlogo v zhizni chuvash’, IKE 39 (1910): 1089–94. Spiridonov, ‘Iz proshlogo v zhizni chuvash’, p. 1094.

Ethnic Minorities Speak Up

191

56 Ochevidets, ‘K piatidesiatiletiiu Kreshcheno-tatarskoi shkoly’, IKE 4 (1914): 108–19. 57 V. Eslivanov, ‘Iz missionerskoi deiatel’nosti sredi cheremisskogo naseleniia Tsarevokokshaiskogo uezda’, IKE 10 (1916): 201–5. Maris were called ‘Cheremis’ during the imperial era. After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet authorities, respecting their autonomy, began to call them ‘Maris’. The Udmurts were also called ‘Votiak’ during the imperial era.

192

Part Three

193

194

8

‘News from the War’: Print culture and the nation in First World War Russia Melissa K. Stockdale

On 18 October 1914 the cover of the popular illustrated weekly Niva (Cornfield) featured a drawing of peasants in a dimly lit room, listening intently to a young man reading a newspaper aloud. Simply titled ‘News from the War’, it is both intimate and striking.1 A shaft of light from the open window illuminates the newspaper, which almost shines in the gloom. The features and garb of the peasants are thrown into relief, capturing the intensity with which they listen and their sober dignity, despite their shabby clothes. The viewer has no doubt that this audience, however simple or uneducated, understands and appreciates the gravity of national events being conveyed by the printed page. This drawing, by prominent illustrator N. Bogdanov-Bel’skii, was by no means unique: Niva published at least five other renderings of peasants absorbing news from the war between 1914 and 1916.2 The appeal of such images is easy to understand. After the debacle of the unpopular Russo-Japanese War, Russian publishers and the Russian educated public were keen to believe that the people were behind this new European conflict, that they perceived the nation’s war to be a just one and cared deeply about the outcome. And for a country whose population was approximately 80 per cent peasant, images of informed and quietly determined rural dwellers – the authentic ‘people’ (narod) – had significant power. But in subsequent decades, following Russia’s humiliating withdrawal from the war, memoirists would rather bitterly question the accuracy of such representations, doubting that the peasantry had in fact been informed on the conflict, or were even capable of imagining themselves as part of a national community. As General Anton Denikin put it in the 1920s, the ‘illiterate masses of the population’ went off to the war without any concept of ‘abstract national principles’. Others charged that the imperial government had abjectly failed to instruct the population about the war and its national significance. How could 195

196

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Figure 8.1 ‘News from the war’, by N. Bogdanov-Bel’skii (Niva, no. 42, 18 October 1914).

‘News from the War’

197

people be expected to fight and die when they knew nothing of their country or its cause?3 For historians, these powerful images of Russian peasants listening to news of the war suggest several lines of inquiry. At the most basic level, we need to scrutinize memoirists’ allegations concerning rural Russians’ abysmal ignorance about the struggle, investigating what kind of access the countryside did have to news of the war and war effort, and what kind of information and narratives print culture was conveying.4 We can also try to explore how humble citizens used the printed material available to them. People don’t necessarily choose to consume the information that media provide them, nor are they blank slates. The hardest task for the historian – as E. J. Hobsbawm reminds us – is trying to discern how ordinary people understood the elites’ carefully crafted messages.5 Questions about ‘news from the war’ are historically significant in other respects as well, and not only in the way suggested by Peter Holquist and David Hoffman, who persuasively demonstrate continuities between wartime developments and Soviet practice in state efforts to mould and mobilize popular opinion via the mass media.6 The nexus of newspapers and the national imaginary has been influentially argued by Benedict Anderson, who shows the critical role of print capitalism in making it possible to imagine a national political community. He dwells not so much on dissemination through mass media of inspiring histories and myths of the nation, though these are important: nations, after all, inspire deep attachments, even ‘profoundly self-sacrificing love’.7 Rather, Anderson’s focus is on the ways in which print capitalism helped transform consciousness of identities, allowing rapidly growing numbers of people to believe themselves meaningfully connected to huge numbers of other people, whom they had never met and never would meet, in a bounded and sovereign community. One way that newspapers created this sense of connection was by reporting on events occurring across the nation’s territory, through ‘homogenous empty time’, thus enabling each reader of a daily paper to realize that other members of the community were, simultaneously, experiencing or learning about these events. In effect, the very act of engaging with news of the nation helped constitute the imagined national community.8 War is one type of national experience that scarcely figures in Anderson’s discussion of print capitalism, or indeed his explorations of the changing consciousness of belonging. But other scholars have devoted considerable attention to the ways in which war can help forge modern national identity, whether in a people’s victory or its shared defeat. Historians Michael Howard

198

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

and George Mosse have explored how the experience of a shared common threat and shared common sacrifice – as well as public commemoration of that sacrifice – can help define the nation.9 Speaking more directly to the Russian experience are Mark von Hagen, who has demonstrated how the war mobilized national consciousness among Russia’s Ukrainian population, and Eric Lohr, who contends that nationalism can be as much the product of an ‘event’ – such as war or state collapse – as the result of long-term developments. The crucible of war can forge national consciousness.10 I would like to suggest that the case of Russia, captured in images of peasants gleaning war news from the press, provides a singularly powerful conjunction of these two nationalizing influences: the First World War increased not only the extension of a nationalizing print media into the far-flung Russian countryside, but also engagement by a not-profoundly-literate rural population with that nationalizing media as never before.11 In the short space of one chapter, it would be impossible to martial all the positive evidence, or fully explore all the exceptions, caveats and contrary evidence, germane to this thesis. I can only sketch the broad outlines for the argument that war and print capitalism, both of which are productive of a modern sense of national belonging, can mutually amplify and accelerate formation of mass national identity. I will consider various products of print culture, including books and graphic images, but the main

Figure 8.2 ‘News from the War. The Newspaper in the Village’, by M. I Ignat’ev (Niva no. 1, 2 January 1916).

‘News from the War’

199

emphasis will be on the periodical press, with particular attention to four selected publications: Russkoe slovo (Russian word), Russia’s highest circulation daily paper; Niva, one of its most popular illustrated weeklies; and two non-commercial daily papers produced with an eye to village audiences, Sel’skii vestnik (Village Herald) and Prikhodskii listok (Parish News).

The wartime rise in print media The decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War saw newspapers at the height of their popularity and influence. In industrialized and industrializing states, government commitment to elementary education had vastly expanded the pool of potential readers of the press, while technological developments in fields such as telegraphy and off-set printing had expanded the reach and lowered the productions costs of newspapers and illustrated magazines. Print media had little in the way of competition, since radio did not come into its own as a purveyor of news and information until the late 1920s.12 With the outbreak of war in 1914, rural as well as urban populations turned to the periodical press in greater numbers – and perhaps with greater trust – than ever before. Germany, for example, saw skyrocketing demand for news of the war, and a corresponding increase in press consumption. This war-driven trend was typical in most combatant countries.13 Russia did not enjoy the extensive media networks of its more developed allies and rivals, but as Jeffrey Brooks and other historians have shown, literacy, publishing and print culture had been growing steadily in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.14 The Revolution of 1905 was a major watershed. Reforms introduced in the wake of the Revolution ended preliminary censorship, making it easier to launch new papers and periodicals – and easier for publications to survive the censors’ zeal. Moreover, the legalization of political parties and less onerous rules for associational activity saw the creation of hundreds of new societies and organizations that generated their own newspapers, trade journals and special interest publications; Russia’s media space was not only expanding, but diversifying. The legislature’s 1908 law mandating introduction of universal primary education contributed to the further expansion of the reading public, although it had yet to take full effect when the war began (literacy rates in Russia in 1914 hovered around 40 per cent, among the lowest in Europe.)15 Publication statistics for these years convey the scale of growth. While the number of periodicals published in Russia in 1905 was 1,350, by 1908 there were 2,028, and

200

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

in 1913, on the eve of the war, the figure had reached 2,915. Importantly, the expansion of the press was geographic as well as numerical, since almost 2,000 of these periodicals were published outside of Petersburg and Moscow.16 The outbreak of the First World War fueled explosive growth in the print media in Russia.17 This development is not surprising, given that almost 4 million men were mobilized into the army in just the first three months of the conflict, ensuring that millions of families scattered over the country’s great expanse had a direct and personal interest in information about the causes and conduct of the war. In Russia, as elsewhere, citizens of every social class proved to be hungry for news. The government, as well as a diverse array of public and private organizations, appreciated the importance of instructing and informing the population about the war. Commercial publishers saw a vast and lucrative market to be satisfied. Again, the numbers are telling. In 1914 alone, 431 new newspapers appeared in Russia, 186 of them devoted entirely to the war. Overall, 871 new periodicals began publication in 1914 and 1915, and another 350 in 1916.18 Many of these new periodicals were short-lived, lasting a few months to a year. Saturation of a suddenly crowded market probably explains the disappearance of some publications; poor quality could also have played a role. Some organs did little more than string together dozens of undigested briefs about the war, culled from the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, as was true of Kurganskii vestnik (Kurgan Herald) from Siberia; this kind of news delivery was particularly hard for marginally literate and uneducated people to understand.19 The speedy demise of other periodicals may have had more to do with strict wartime censorship than with audience. Perceived criticism of Russia’s war was of course not tolerated by censors, but even unambiguously patriotic publications could run into trouble. Such was the fate of Geroi voiny (Heroes of the war), a cheap, semi-weekly paper – ‘undistinguished by literary merit’, a military censor complained – which came under fire for its stories four times in September 1914. Although one official report acknowledged that ‘the exploits of our heroes are described with sufficient brightness and patriotic animation’, this orientation was not enough to save Geroi voiny; it was terminated in early autumn.20 But the relatively short life of many war-related publications does not mean that interest in news of the war was of correspondingly brief duration. A number of the new periodicals that focused on the war enjoyed continued readership and healthy sales until late 1916 or into 1917. These included expensive illustrated weeklies with high production values, such as Letopis voiny (Chronicle of the War), which lavished attention on the royal family, generals and the aristocracy;

‘News from the War’

201

and daily or twice-weekly papers catering to more humble citizens, such as Voennaia letopis: listok dlia voisk i naroda (The war chronicle: a news sheet for the troops and the people) and Voennyi vestnik (The Wartime herald), published in Ekaterinodar.21 Just as significantly, many dailies and weeklies established prior to the war also devoted enormous attention to the war’s conduct and progress, and continued doing so into 1917. The most telling example comes from Russia’s highest circulation daily, the progressive Moscow-based Russkoe slovo. It covered, enthusiastically and in detail, the re-embrace of ‘tsar and people’ on 20 July 1914 when, following news of Germany’s declaration of war, an assembled throng of some 250,000 citizens in front of the Winter Palace greeted the appearance of the sovereign by falling to their knees and singing the national anthem. It celebrated the historic one-day special session of the Duma on 26 July, when representatives of fourteen different political parties and national groups proclaimed the cessation of differences and embrace of national unity in the face of the common foe.22 It painted touching scenes of reservists bidding farewell to wives and children as they marched off to mobilization points all over Russia. And it further reinforced the sense of a vast nation simultaneously enacting such scenes by publishing dozens of telegrams from cities and towns, great and small, recounting large crowds taking part in patriotic parades, prayer services – in mosques and temples, as well as Orthodox churches – and send-offs of the troops.23 Taken all together, these scenes helped establish a national narrative of ‘sacred union’, depicting the entire population unified in a just cause. No one was left out or excluded from this narrative, which insisted upon the patriotism of national minorities, the humble and the mighty, the city and the village. As Russskoe slovo’s popular columnist V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko enthused, ‘The Pole, Russian, Jew, Latvian, Georgian and Tatar stand shoulder to shoulder . . . All are children of a common motherland.’ However dreadful war might be, he concluded, ‘How good it is to be alive in such moments!’ 24 Stories invoking familiar narratives of past victories against aggressors, most especially the 1812 Fatherland War against Napoleon, suggested that Russia would win in this conflict, too. As the war dragged on, more critical stories appeared, hinting at governmental incompetence by profusely praising the war work of non-governmental organizations like the Union of Cities, and indignantly covering profiteering on the home front.25 But whatever its tone, Russkoe slovo never wavered in its support for Russia’s war effort and confidence in ultimate victory, which it

202

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

believed would also result in welcome reforms benefiting common citizens. And as Louise McReynolds demonstrates, the war vastly increased the paper’s audience: its already impressive daily circulation figures – 325,700 for 1913 – skyrocketed to 619,500 in 1914, 739,000 in 1916, and 1,013,000 in 1917. It is worth noting that Russkoe slovo’s outsize influence was not confined to cities, since it was perhaps the most widely-circulated paper in rural areas.26 Niva provides another example of the degree to which war-related material dominated even general-interest publications. Established in the 1870s, Niva had built a large and loyal middle-class following by offering a mix of short articles, photo spreads, and paintings and drawings on topics ranging from picturesque landscapes to educational efforts to popular actors and singers.27 But from September 1914, with rare exceptions, its graphics focused squarely on the war.28 In addition to photos of Russian and allied generals and leaders, rank-and-file soldiers fording rivers or manning guns, and exciting modern technologies, such as planes, motorcycles and armoured vehicles, Niva also ran pictures of Russian medics and nurses treating wounded soldiers, refugees fleeing their homes, and towns reduced to rubble by enemy bombardment. A surprisingly large number of photos and drawings depicted burials of fallen soldiers or their make-shift graves.29 Niva’s audience would have no doubt of the enemy’s awfulness and the suffering inflicted upon the nation, as well as Russians’ brave resistance. Niva’s photos, paintings and drawings are interesting in two other respects. Besides demonizing the enemy and his atrocities (an approach typical of print media in every combatant country during the war), they also offered numerous positive depictions of Russian soldiers outside the realm of combat: relaxing together as comrades, attentively caring for their horses and dogs, and even treating wounded enemy soldiers with compassion.30 A second pervasive theme is the engagement of the home front in the war effort and with the nation’s defenders. In addition to images of men and women aiding refugees, helping rural families bring in the harvest and ministering to soldiers’ medical needs, others depict Russians collecting and distributing holiday gifts for the army, and giant bundles of mail sent to the front, awaiting dispersal. Delighted soldiers receive these gifts, pore over letters or copies of newspapers and intently compose letters they send back to the ‘motherland’.31 A generous, far-flung people and its fine troops are deeply connected, these images suggest, and their strong reciprocal ties include letters, gifts and consumption of news about Russia’s war.32 These two publications – Russkoe slovo and Niva – testify to a broader phenomenon: the continued appeal of commercial periodicals devoted largely to the war. Attentive coverage of the war and its reverberations within the

‘News from the War’

203

country sold papers, which belies the common picture of a Russian public whose interest in the war had petered out by late 1915. (Niva’s circulation increased by approximately 25 per cent over the course of the war, reaching 250,000 by summer 1917.)33 Although people in Russia, as well as all over Europe, were indeed growing weary of the conflict and its mounting hardships, if ordinary Russians had not been actively seeking news of the war well into 1917, they would not have kept buying, in large numbers, periodicals that focused upon it. However sceptical they might have been of the contents of this coverage (an important issue about which we have little data), people continued to purchase and consume print media. 34 Periodicals were not the only products of print culture to feature the war and attract a broad audience. Books, leaflets and pamphlets (along with public lectures, whose contents were often subsequently published in pamphlet form) were important means for mobilizing the public.35 Although some elites worried that Russia was lagging behind its allies and Germany in producing literature meant to inform and sustain the national mood, an expansive literature on the war was actually being published, often in large editions.36 Some of this literature came from the imperial government’s new Committee on Popular Publications, which in the first fifteen months of the war produced over a dozen pamphlets in editions averaging more than a million copies each.37 But the commercial press exceeded these numbers: the intersection of patriotism and popular demand could serve the cause of public enlightenment quite well. A public hungry for information was ready to buy texts about the war, and publishers hastened to supply this profitable market. In the first months of hostilities, besides the dozens of new newspapers and magazines devoted to the conflict, there appeared hundreds of books and pamphlets, short and long, sensational and serious. The Moscow-based publishing firm of I. N. Kushnerov released a series called ‘War and Culture’, sponsored by the Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge, that contained forty-seven titles by 1915. It covered every major combatant and various Slav peoples, as well as topics closer to home, such as the public organizations involved in war relief, the cooperative movement and ‘The Jews and Russia’. Other series included Zadruga’s ‘War and Labour’, Nekrasov’s ‘Library of the War’ and Rodnoe Slovo’s five- kopek booklet series ‘Our Friends and Enemies’. Illustrated albums and anthologies – of war stories, newspaper articles and ‘eyewitness accounts’ – were quite popular. Ivan Lazarevskii’s The Great War in Images and Pictures, for example, went through six editions by 1916; well into 1917, publishing giant D. I. Sytin put out a monthly illustrated collection called The World War in Stories and Illustrations.38

204

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

And of course, in addition to written texts there was a rich array of graphic images, a particularly powerful means of communication given Russia’s low levels of literacy. Stephen Norris and Hubertus Jahn have documented the massive production of brightly-coloured prints of giant battles, thrilling aerial dogfights and Cossack feats of bravery, particularly in the first months of the conflict. Whether sardonically mocking the Kaiser, sentimentally celebrating heroes or simply reproducing battlefronts on giant coloured maps, these prints were ubiquitous, observable in peasant huts, working-class cafes and school classrooms.39 Besides the battle prints, vernacular woodcuts (lubki), leaders’ portraits, postcards and illustrated calendars with war-related graphics that were popularly purchased or given away for free, citizens would also encounter striking imagery of the war effort in railway stations, post offices and other public spaces, thanks to the production of millions of copies of handsome posters advertising wartime philanthropic activities or selling domestic war loans.40

Reaching rural Russia In Russia’s war, the most important audience to supply with information, and explanations of its meaning and consequences, was the rural narod: the peasantry – ethnically Great Russian or otherwise – who furnished the overwhelming number of soldiers for the army.41 This demographic reality is one reason why Niva’s recurring images of peasants listening to news of the war carried such symbolic weight. Yet the peasantry were the subset of the population whom it was hardest to reach, given the small numbers of educated people in the villages and often inadequate lines of communications linking Russia’s vast expanse. What was actually being done to reach rural citizens, to keep them abreast of the war and feeling connected with the nation’s fight? The government-subsidized paper Sel’skii vestnik (The Village Herald) provides an interesting case study. Sel’skii vestnik had been in existence since the 1880s, but with a miserly budget and little attention paid to the specific needs and reading patterns of its rural audience, it had failed to build a mass readership.42 That changed at the start of the war, when the new Committee for Popular Publications decided to invest considerable resources in improving this daily newspaper, which it identified as ‘the most important and reliable instrument for influencing the rural reader’. The paper now offered expansive reporting on the war; provided all sorts of free supplements to subscribers, such as war-related

‘News from the War’

205

maps and posters; attentively covered the situation of rural soldiers’ families; and answered readers’ letters about practical issues, such as how to send letters to the front. Sel’skii vestnik’s circulation stood at 34,053 in July 1914; by May 1915 it had grown to 86,731 paid subscriptions, and by early 1916 circulation was expected to exceed 150,000 (including free subscriptions delivered to the army and hospitals).43 While these figures are not small, when we consider that any given issue of a popular publication was typically read to or by many individuals, the probable audience of the paper is clearly much larger.44 Sel’skii vestnik offered a fairly traditional understanding of Russian patriotism. Articles from the initial weeks of war spoke of devotion to ‘Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland’. A slight variant to this theme stated that ‘We are defending the Motherland, the Tsar, our wives and daughters, we are defending our entire existence.’45 The paper also emphasized the widespread support for the war, thanks to the justness of Russia’s cause: the patriotic demonstrations that occurred in numerous cities around the country and the success of the general mobilization were offered as proof of popular support. And almost every article reminded readers that Germany had attacked Russia, that Russia’s war was a defensive one. 46 But a major theme in Sel’skii vestnik during the first year of the war, as with most periodicals in Russia, concerned the ‘sacred union’: the united resolve to defend the country that transcended class, faith, nationality and party. On 23 July 1914 the paper proclaimed that ‘All classes of Russian society, the entire Russian people, have merged into a single spirit.’47 Articles about the historic one-day session of the legislature on 26 July celebrated the end of divisions by party and the national minorities’ display of loyalty: ‘All have become fiery sons of our common, great Motherland’, prepared for ‘any sacrifice for her’.48 This theme of the unity of the peoples of Russia was by its nature a more modern and inclusive construction of the patriotic national community, one depending on loyalty to a common geographic territory and ruler rather than on race, social class or religion.49 Orthodox Church authorities, like the secular authorities, appreciated the power of the printed word during the war. The Synodal presses – among the very largest in Russia – published devotional literature for distribution to soldiers, as well as mass editions of war-related leaflets such as ‘What We Are Fighting For’.50 More remarkably, the Synod launched an ambitious national publication, its first-ever daily newspaper. Debuting in September 1914, Prikhodskii listok (Parish news sheet) stated that its goal was to provide the reader with timely and accurate information about current events and discussion of them ‘on a church

206

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Figure 8.3 ‘Listening to News from the War’, by E. M. Cheptsov (Niva, No. 30, 25 July 1915).

and state foundation’.51 The scale of the undertaking was enormous, requiring purchase of new presses, hiring additional press workers and creating a transport and distribution system. The size of print runs was also ambitious, ranging from 45,000 to 47,500 copies a day, enough for every parish, rural as well as urban, to receive at least one copy daily.52 The front page of each edition of Prikhodskii listok was devoted to news about the course of the war, both on Russia’s fronts and those of its allies. Beyond military briefs, regular features included ‘The Clergy and the War’, ‘Schools and the War’, ‘The War and the Parish’ and ‘Readings about the War’. Here was the real heart of the paper: news from and about the wartime activities and needs of parishes all over the empire. The reader – or citizens who had the paper read to them – would learn details about what parish guardianship councils were doing to assist soldiers’ families, the kinds of patriotic fund-raisers undertaken by pupils in church schools and the outfitting of hospitals by monasteries and convents. Village priests and teachers sent in descriptions of the wonderful peasant response to the weekly readings on the war that they had arranged.53 In this way, Prikhodskii listok provided the clergy with material for sermons,

‘News from the War’

207

information teachers and clerics could disseminate to pupils and congregants hungry for news about the war, and models for charitable and patriotic undertakings. This publication also reinforced readers’ sense of belonging to a far-flung national-religious, patriotic community. They could see that the problems they confronted were faced by others, or be reminded that the same prayer services for the troops that they took part in were simultaneously being enacted everywhere in Russia.54 Given that approximately 70 per cent of Russia’s population were Orthodox, this was a significant audience indeed. It is quite possible that periodicals produced by other religiously or ethnically-affiliated institutions played a similar role for the millions of citizens of Russia who practiced other faiths.55

Reception of the news Producing information and crafting stories about the nation’s war were critical steps in attempting to reach the countryside, but narratives cannot inform views if they are not consumed. Print media had to be conveyed to market towns and larger villages, and made readily available to rural audiences. And would rural people wish to read those texts – or, more typically, listen to others read them aloud – if they were on offer? Although data about rural engagement with print media is fragmentary, the evidence that we do have suggests a genuine wartime transformation in readership. Contemporaries were nearly unanimous in reporting how favourably the war had affected reading and reading habits in the village. Russkoe Slovo noted that in Kursk, with the advent of war, ‘an unusual interest in events has appeared in the villages’, prompting some local agricultural cooperatives to take out subscriptions to newspapers to disseminate amongst the population. A correspondent to Nizhegorodskii listok wrote that ‘Newspapers have now become a usual and indispensable attribute of the village.’ Many villagers went to the local tea house in the evenings to read the papers and discuss the news – tea house proprietors would subscribe to several local and national papers, and have maps of the theatres of war on the wall, where customers would use matchsticks to trace out the course of military developments. In villages too small to have a tea house, the local inhabitants might band together to subscribe to one or more newspapers; these would be passed around from house to house, as a correspondent to Smolensk vestnik reported, and then ‘the entire village gathers at one hut and reads them aloud. Often, the women cry while the newspapers are being read.’56

208

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Bigger villages and rural towns fortunate enough to boast libraries reported significant increases in usage. Peasants coming in for market day, upon concluding their business, would flock to the library as never before; they were most interested in newspapers and books on geography and history. The Society for the Dissemination of Popular Education in Nizhnyi Novgorod province reported that numbers of library subscribers had risen all over the province, especially among women, as had the number of books being borrowed. For example, the people’s library in Sormovsksii had 60 per cent more books checked out since the start of the war.57 In Ufa province, zemstvo librarians reported increases in library usage ranging from 100 to 500 per cent in the first year of the war. Scott Seregny’s detailed study of this province shows that zemstsy were remarkably quick to respond to and cultivate peasant interest in the war, organizing lectures and slide shows in libraries of the big market towns, and acquiring new titles for people’s libraries.58 Historians V. P. Minakova and I. V. Fomichev paint a similar picture for a number of other provinces – among them Voronezh, Penza, Stavropol and Iaroslavl – noting that despite huge demands on zemstvos’ overstretched wartime budgets, spending on popular libraries and construction of the so-called ‘reading huts’ – which brought newspapers and topical reading matter even to small villages – was not only not reduced, but expanded.59 Nor were zemstvos the only entities responding to the new rural thirst for knowledge. In 1915, the Moscow Literacy Society created a special commission to help get newspapers into the hands of rural people. Societies of People’s Universities devoted time and money to organizing reading rooms and lectures series aimed at popular audiences, as did cooperative societies, whose institutional numbers and membership grew exponentially during the war. Many cooperatives published their own periodicals, while the secretariat of the Union of Cooperatives became one of the largest book publishers in Russia by 1917.60 Topics covered in pamphlets and lectures sponsored by such entities included the causes and aims of the war, descriptions of all the belligerents, and the inevitable disquisitions on German militarism. But they also included titles such as ‘Russia’s borderlands in the current war (Poland, Finland, the Baltic, and Caucasus)’ and ‘Great Russia and the peoples inhabiting her’, as well as the causes of rising prices or shortages. Educators and rural activists thus used peasant interest in the war and related issues, which apparently cut across gender and age groups, to instruct audiences more broadly on the history and geography of their country, its populations and institutions.61 In this fashion, they clearly hoped, rural people would not only become more informed but more ‘conscious’: better

‘News from the War’

209

knowing their motherland, they could love her better. In effect, they would now be able to imagine themselves as part of a national community worthy of their loyalty and sacrifice. 62 It is, of course, easier to establish that people wanted news of the war than it is to determine what they made of that news. Evidence is mainly anecdotal for a period when most ordinary people did not keep diaries or write memoirs, official censorship was severe and mass polls of public opinion had yet to be created. Yet we do have a few tantalizing glimpses into reception of war news by humble Russians. One source is the diary of peasant farmer A. Zamaraev, from the district of Tot’ma in Vologda province. Zamaraev clearly followed news of the war attentively. He observed the multiple hardships that the war caused locally, rejoiced at Russian and allied victories reported in the press and cursed the Germans – ‘truly, they are fiends from hell!’ – interspersing these comments with remarks on the weather, crops, religious services and rising prices. Although his tone became increasingly somber as the conflict dragged on, he continued to hope that ‘sooner or later, we’ll manage to break or wear out the Germans and their allies and this horrible and bloody war will come to an end’.63 We also have several isolated cases of formal investigation into alleged ‘unpatriotic’ sentiments on the part of ordinary Russians in 1915. These inquiries, conducted by both religious and secular authorities, reveal peasant villages avidly engaged in war news from the press, supporting the victory of Russian arms, but not always fully grasping the news that was being read to them.64 Finally, there are the regular reports compiled by the Tsarist secret police on the ‘mood’ of the population – reports which are themselves inflected by certain assumptions and biases – depicting a population basically supportive of the nation’s war effort into late 1916, but moved in their behaviour just as much by unsubstantiated rumour or class suspicions as by information gleaned from the press.65 It is clear that Russia’s citizenry, with no end to the war in sight, was becoming less and less resigned to enduring profound emotional loss and material hardship. But it is also worth stressing that war-weariness – or mounting indignation over unequal sacrifice in the nation’s war – was by no means synonymous with failure to identify with the nation itself.

Censorship and other constraints In challenging the common representation of the mass of the population as having little access to news of the war, I do not intend to minimize the multiple

210

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

obstacles that people faced in procuring steady and reliable sources of information. These obstacles were both formidable and shifting. The biggest barriers related to news about military developments. In Russia, as elsewhere, censorship of anything touching on the course of battles, command and leadership, and the like, was so severe that a public desperate for information was forced to fall back on rumour, invention ‘and all sorts of rubbish’, as one exasperated contemporary put it.66 Eventually, even the military authorities acknowledged the counterproductive nature of excessive censorship. An October 1915 memo from the General Quartermaster’s office registered concern that the ‘extreme paucity, vagueness and incorrectness of the information’ given the press meant it had ‘absolutely no possibility of satisfying the public’s questions’. New policies were instituted to allow for fuller reporting from and about the front.67 Censorship was complicated by a feature of Russian government that was all too familiar to citizens: endemic arbitrariness (proizvol’). As numerous frustrated provincials wrote to liberal Duma deputy Pavel Miliukov, imploring his intervention, local authorities often over-zealously enforced wartime censorship regulations, or ignored them in favour of their own gut instincts. News items that were passed by the censors in Moscow, for example, might be quashed in Kursk or Novgorod, while transcripts of speeches given by deputies in the Duma – protected by law from censorship – were nonetheless suppressed by conservative provincial governors who took exception to their overt or implied critiques of government policy.68 The national minority press, particularly in the Baltic region and parts of present-day Ukraine, was subject to more unforgiving or capricious censorship than were organs aimed at a Great Russian audience.69 Thanks to a general tightening of non-military censorship over the course of 1915, readers increasingly encountered white spaces on the pages of their papers: rather than replacing material deleted by censors, editors chose to leave the offending space blank, thereby signaling that the authorities were suppressing information the paper had endeavoured to share. The nationalist paper Kievlianin (The Kievan) provides an especially ironic example of this tactic in a June 1915 article by N. Pogodin, ‘The Role of the Press in Wartime’. Pogodin applauds the wartime patriotism displayed by the press and its enormous role in mobilizing the population, but notes that it must be permitted to do its job in order to continue helping this mobilization. A sentence that begins ‘Censorship in war time is of course absolutely necessary, but----’ breaks off abruptly and is followed by a paragraph’s worth of white space before the article resumes, revealing that the censor has censored the discussion of excessive censorship!70 Although some writers and some publications managed to evade the censors with surprising

‘News from the War’

211

success, in general, articles deemed critical of Russia or its war rarely made it into print.71 Transport posed a different kind of obstacle. Russia’s railroad network was simply not as well developed as those of many other belligerents in the war. As the conflict wore on, breakdowns or competing claims on the overstretched transportation system sometimes meant that publications intended for rural readers never reached their destination, or did so only intermittently. The same could be true for the front. Revealingly, in late 1916 the Ministry of the Interior entered into communication with the Ministry of War about its plans for increasing the supply of printed material to the active army, a need it characterized as ‘critical’ to the support of military morale. The War Ministry agreed with this assessment, but pointed out the pressure such plans would impose on the already overtaxed railroads; if faced with the hard choice of supplying the army with food and munitions, on the one hand, or books and newspapers, on the other, the military authorities were quite clear on their priorities. They regretfully blocked the proposal to better supply the army with printed material.72 Finally, from 1916 on, all publications were hampered by paper shortages, due to the German occupation of Poland, Kurliand, Grodno and other areas, which had collectively produced some 30 per cent of Russia’s paper. In 1917, the Provisional Government’s effort to address the problem by limiting the amount of newsprint that could be used for any given periodical was not effective; by the summer of that year publishers were fighting over inadequate stocks of greyish, poor-quality paper that resulted in smudgy and scarcely readable editions.73 Publishers also faced soaring costs not just for the dwindling supply of paper, but also for all elements of production, forcing them to increase their prices or even close their doors. By August, even a periodical as popular as Niva was hemorrhaging money; in an apology to subscribers, it cited wildly escalating costs as well as unpredictable revolutionary conditions to explain why it was missing publication deadlines for the first time in its 50-year history.74

Revolutionizing news The enormous impact of the 1917 February Revolution on the print media deserves a monograph in its own right. Here, I can only touch upon the way that the Revolution spectacularly opened up Russians’ access to news – of every kind, not just news from the war – and the consequences of that sudden and largely unregulated transparency.

212

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Laws promulgated between 3 March and 26 April 1917 by the new Provisional Government essentially eliminated censorship of the press outside the war zones.75 Hundreds of newspapers proliferated in civilian space, but also became an important means of reaching soldier audiences. From March to October 1917 no fewer than 167 military newspapers appeared, about fifty of which were soldiers’ papers produced at the front.76 One new paper was Soldat-Grazhdanin (The Soldier Citizen), a popular daily which the Moscow Soviet of Soldier’s Deputies began publishing shortly after the Tsar’s abdication. For the soldiers who edited Soldat-Grazhdanin, the most crucial issues in 1917 were consolidation of soldiers’ civil and political rights, transformation of the war into a purely defensive one and persuading fellow soldiers of their civic duty to continue defending the fatherland and freedom.77 A similarly ‘defensist’ approach, but aimed at a more educated audience, was taken by Voina i mir (War and peace), a ‘military and political’ daily launched in June. The paper advocated a speedy and just end to the war, but insisted that Russians must unite against an enemy intent on re-enslaving them: ‘We’ve achieved our liberty, and the fate of the motherland is in our hands.’78 But of course, the new freedoms which revolutionary citizens were urged to defend included the freedom to speak against the war and its horrific costs. Thanks to the Revolution’s removal of censorship outside the military zones in Russia in 1917 – a significant way in which Russia’s experience of the war differed sharply from all other belligerents’ – the population was now exposed to every conceivable critique of the war, the discredited Tsarist government that had launched it and the new government conducting it. Particularly potent were class-based arguments, advanced above all by the Bolsheviks, contending that soldiers’ sacrifices were wasted on unworthy ends, or that denied any meaningful foundation for ‘national unity’ given the opposing interests of the propertied classes and the working masses. As Lenin put it in a Pravda article in June, the real enemies of the people were not Germans but Russia’s own capitalists, ‘who are making thousands of millions in profits from the imperialist war, that is, a war for the division of capitalist spoils and profits’.79 The media free-for-all that was Russia’s public space in 1917 was an important factor in the undermining of the army’s morale (for which there were all too many other contributory causes, among them staggeringly high casualty rates and the abrupt removal of the legitimizing figure of the Tsar).80 The abolition of civilian censorship also exposed the expanded reading public to disheartening reports on skyrocketing inflation, disintegrating city services and widespread banditry and violence attendant upon the abolition of the old police.81 Russians

‘News from the War’

213

were already personally experiencing the descent into chaos of their respective towns or regions, but now newspapers made clear that this implosion was a national phenomenon. As peasant A. Zamaraev wrote in his diary in October 1917, ‘I pity poor Russia, all tormented and ruined. Turmoil and anarchy everywhere.’82 Just as media coverage of the war could consolidate readers’ sense of belonging to a far-flung national community, united in ‘service and sacrifice’, coverage of the collapse of the Russian military effort and the Russian state itself could convince many ordinary Russians that continuing to sacrifice and fight for their country had now become pointless. Small wonder that one of the first initiatives of the Bolsheviks, upon seizing power in October 1917, was to reinstitute press censorship.83 In such conditions, allowing people unfettered access to news of their country and news of the war could be both delegitimizing and denationalizing.

Conclusions The Russian state’s experience of revolution, defeat in the First World War and descent into civil war have understandably deflected attention from citizens’ interest in, and engagement with, wartime print culture. But obstacles notwithstanding, it seems evident that the mass of the population – including rural inhabitants in many parts of Russia – had greater access to wartime print culture than we have typically assumed. Newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, posters and portraits and maps, were produced on an unprecedented scale, circulated widely and eagerly purchased. The sustained popular interest in the war and its conduct, well into 1917, and the vigour of official, public and commercial efforts to satisfy that interest, means we must reconsider old tropes of the memoir literature concerning the uninformed and uninterested village. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that rural people, as well as urbanites, actively sought information about the war that so profoundly impacted their lives. Meanwhile, the products of print culture helped those people connect their own, localized experience of the war with the larger, national enterprise. Contemporaries sometimes complained – with cause – about issues thwarting the popular demand for news of the war, but many were profoundly struck by the depth and endurance of that demand. They believed the experience of the war had fundamentally transformed the mass of the population’s attitudes towards and consumption of print culture. What had once seemed a dispensable luxury to poor and largely illiterate rural people was now regarded

214

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

as a necessity, and actively sought out. Circulation figures for the press, as well as anecdotal evidence from libraries, cooperative societies, reporters and other eyewitnesses, corroborate these impressions. And the wartime press, in covering patriotic parades, national days of prayer, volunteerism and war relief, all across the immense territory of Russia and on the part of every social class, was reinforcing the sense of simultaneous shared experience across ‘homogenous, empty time’ that Anderson identifies as critical to creation of imagined national political communities. Moreover, the patriotic narratives disseminated through print media were attractive and appealing (in part due to censorship constraints, which made any other approach a non-starter). These narratives drew on both history and a projected, better future to present an inclusive national community where the courage, service, sacrifice and generosity of all citizens – of all classes and faiths – was valued and rewarded. It is much easier to imagine yourself a member of a community where you are accorded a worthy place. In sum, the war did not create modern Russian national identity – that project had been underway for some time. But it did accelerate the formation of a mass sense of national community that the products of print culture – increasingly available to and consumed by even humble rural dwellers – helped to limn and reinforce. For a population that was not broadly literate, the intersection of a modern, industrial war and modern, industrial print culture proved especially dynamic. In First World War Russia, popular engagement with ‘news from the war’ operated on multiple and nationalizing levels.

Notes 1 2

‘Vesti s voiny’ (‘News from the war’), by N. Bogdanov-Bel’skii, Niva 42 (18 October 1914), cover. Other artistic renderings from Niva depicting peasants absorbing the news include the drawing ‘Vesti s voiny’, by I. A. Vladimirov (Figure 8.2), 34 (23 August 1914): 677; ‘Vesti s voiny’, by M. Baburin, showing male and female peasants listening to a newspaper being read aloud, 12 (21 March 1915): 231; ‘Slushaiut vesti s voiny’ (‘Listening to news from the war’), by E. M. Cheptsov (Figure 8.3), 30 (25 July 1915): 576; ‘Vesti s voiny. Gazeta v derevne’ (‘News from the war. The newspaper in the village’), by M. I Ignat’ev, showing a school girl reading the paper to her peasant family, 1 (2 January 1916): 2; and ‘Telegramma ot Verkhovnogo Glavnokomanduiushchago’ (‘A telegram from the Supreme Commander’), by

‘News from the War’

3

4

5

6

215

N. Bogdanov-Bel’skii, depicting a group of eight peasants standing in a field as an older peasant man reads to them from a newspaper. Various other photos and drawings depict soldiers reading newspapers or having them read to them. Anton Denikin, The Russian Turmoil: Memoirs Military, Social, and Political (London: Hutchinson and Co., n.d.), pp. 21–2. For similar sentiments, see also A. A. Brusilov, A Soldier’s Notebook, 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1930), pp. 38–40; Nicholas N. Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1931), pp. 244–5; and Iu. N. Danilov, Rossiia v mirovoi voine, 1914–1915 gg. (Berlin: n.p., 1924), pp. 112, 115–16. We have several excellent studies of literacy and the mass press in late imperial Russia and for the early Soviet period, but exploration of the press and print media in Russia’s First World War is more fragmentary. Studies that touch on the war years are Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass Circulation Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) and S. Ia. Makhonina, ‘Russkaia legal’naia zhurnalistika XX v. (1905–fevral’ 1917)’, in B. I. Esin (ed.), Iz istorii russkoi zhurnalistiki nachala XX veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo moskovskogo universiteta, 1984). See also Irina Zhdanova, ‘Press/Journalism (Russian Empire)’, 1914–1918Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/pressjournalism_russian_ empire?version=1.0. For the early Soviet period, see Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 1–100. A thoughtful discussion of the press and censorship in the first months of the war is Eric Lohr, ‘The Russian Press and the “Internal Peace” at the beginning of World War I’, in Troy R. E. Paddock (ed.), A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion, and Newspapers in the Great War, pp. 91–114 (Westport, CT: Prager, 2004). The only full-scale studies of the Russian press in the war are A. F. Berezhnoi, Russkaia legal’naia pechat’ v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Leningrad: Leningradskii gosudastvennyi universitet, 1975) – an informative but ideologically constrained study – and T. A. Belogurova, Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat’ i problemy vnutrennei zhizni strany v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–fevral’ 1917) (Smolensk: Gody, 2005). On news in the village, see Corinne Gaudin, below. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 11, and E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe 1870–1914’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, pp. 263–307 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For example, Peter Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History 69,

216

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

no. 3 (1997): 415–50, and David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 7, 141. 8 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 24–6, 33–6, 44–6. This is in addition to print capitalism’s important role in promoting a stable vernacular language that can transcend local dialects, thus aiding in unification. On the role of the daily press in ‘flagging’ the national homeland for its readers, see Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: SAGE, 1995), pp. 93–127. 9 Anderson discusses the remembering and forgetting associated with the nation’s ‘fratricidal massacres’ and civil wars, but not the impact of interstate wars (pp. 199– 206). On the ways that war can be productive of both nations and national identity, see Michael Howard, War in European History, updated edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 94–115; George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 70–106; and John Horne’s exploration of how wartime mobilization of the home front both galvanized and consolidated national sentiment: ‘Mobilizing for “Total War”, 1914–1918’, in John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, pp. 1–18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also John Hutchinson, Nationalism and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 57–61, who helpfully distinguishes between the nationalizing effects of experiencing war and commemorating it. 10 Mark von Hagen, ‘The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity’, pp. 34–50, and Eric Lohr, ‘War Nationalism’, pp. 91–107, in Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov and Mark von Hagen (eds), The Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014). In contrast, one scholar argues that the war was destroying older, unifying worldviews before the new, more state-minded ones disseminated in the media could be internalized by most peasants: O. S. Porshneva, Krest’iane, rabochie i soldaty Rossii nakanune i v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), pp. 68–103. In the field of American history, different scholars identify different wars as nationally formative; for example, James McPherson, The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1–14. 11 The Russo-Japanese War heightened rural Russians’ interest in the news, but not to the degree of the First World War. See Leonid Heretz, Russia on the Eve of Modernity: Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 146. 12 Troy R. E. Paddock, ‘Introduction: Newspapers, Public Opinion, and Propaganda’, in Troy R. E. Paddock (ed.), A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion, and Newspapers in the Great War, pp. 1–13 (Westport, CT: Prager, 2004).

‘News from the War’

217

13 David Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 1914–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 30. 14 Britain had 2,400 newspapers on the eve of the war; Germany had 4,000, of which almost 2,000 were dailies. France, in contrast, had fewer than 500 dailies: Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, p. 29. The United States was the real outlier, with over 20,000 daily and weekly newspapers in 1913: Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914–1918 (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Co., 1996), p. 12. For the development of the Russian reading public and popular literature, see the seminal work by Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 27–56, 109–35, 237–45. 15 Literacy rates in the Russian Empire rose from 21 per cent of the population in 1897 to an estimated 40 per cent on the eve of the war: Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, p. 4. However, these low figures are slightly misleading, since people under age 30 were significantly more literate than older generations, and literacy rates among rural women were far lower than those for men. 16 Figures come from Makhonina, ‘Russkaia legal’naia zhurnalistika’, pp. 9–10, and are not broken down by province or region. The expansion of press outlets could be uneven, geographically as well as along ethnic or linguistic lines. As of 1913, Russian-language periodicals dominated, with 2,137 out of 2,915 periodicals appearing in Russian. There are patchy statistics for circulation figures and street sales in this period: see McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, Appendices, Tables 3, 5–8. 17 In countries where print culture was already well developed, the war’s impact tended to be felt in higher circulation figures for existing periodicals: see, for example, Welch, Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, pp. 29–30, and J. P. Flood, France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990). 18 Lohr, ‘The Russian Press’, pp. 91–104; Belogurova, Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat’, pp. 41–2; and Berezhnoi, Russkaia legalnaia pechat’, p. 41. 19 An excellent discussion of how peasants read newspapers is provided by Corinne Gaudin, ‘Circulation and Production of News and Rumor in Rural Russia during World War I’, in Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks and Melissa K. Stockdale (eds), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–1922, Book 2, pp. 55–72 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014). Russia’s capital was renamed Petrograd in September, from the vaguely Germanic-sounding St Petersburg, in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm; the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency was correspondingly renamed at the same time. 20 Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter, RGIA), Main Administration for Press Affairs, f. 776, op. 10, d. 1597, ‘Obzor pechati 1914’, ll. 154–5.

218

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

21 Additionally – though these organs are not evidence of popular demand for war news – several fronts of the Russian army began publishing periodicals for their own officers and troops, such as Golos fronta (Voice of the front), issued by the executive committee of the South-Western front from 10 August 1914 into mid-1917. 22 ‘Ob”iavlenie manifesta i slova Gosudarstva’, Russkoe slovo (21 July 1914): 1–2; and ‘Istoricheskoe zasedanie Gosudarstvennoi dumy’, Russkoe slovo (27 July 1914): 2–3. 23 For example, under the heading ‘Manifestatsiia’, Russkoe slovo (21 July 1914): 2, are grouped brief descriptions of patriotic parades in ten cities, including Kostroma, Sevastopol, Omsk, Tiflis (Tbilisi), Eisk and Nizhnii Novgorod. Similarly, for parades, prayer services held by various denominations, and throngs of men volunteering in other cities, see (20 July 1914): 3; (25 July 1914): 4; and ‘V Odesse’ (21 July 1914): 2. 24 V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, ‘Vchera i segodnia’, Russkoe slovo, reprinted in the special edition of Russkie vedomosti (1 January 1915): 95. 25 As inflation mounted and shortages grew, labour strikes and war-profiteering commanded increasing attention. For example, Russkoe slovo (22 October 1915): 3; (27 January 1916): 3, 4; I. M. Goldshtein, ‘Dorogovizna, sokrytie zapasov i spekulatsiia’ (28 January 1916): 1; and ‘Baryshi sakharnykh ‘korolei” (25 February 1916): 3. 26 McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, pp. 228–44, and Table 8, p. 300. 27 A thoughtful appraisal of illustrated periodicals featuring wartime photography is provided by Chris Stolarski, ‘Press Photography in World War I Russia’, in Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks and Melissa K. Stockdale (eds), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–1922, Book 1 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014). 28 For the purposes of this chapter, my sample covers every issue of August–November 1914, and two issues from December; every issue of 1915; the first twenty-six issues of 1916, with scattered issues thereafter; and intermittent issues from 1917. I did not have access to the few issues appearing in 1918 before Niva was shut down by the Bolshevik regime. 29 Niva 11 (12 March 1916): 181–2; 14 (2 April 1916): 248. 30 Niva 8 (21 February 1915): 143; 24 (13 June 1915): 479; ‘Kak my khoronit nashiikh vragov’, 46 (14 November 1915): 839; ‘Iz deistv. Armii’, 35 (29 August 1915): 660–2; 31 Niva 38 (20 September 1914): 739; 2 (10 January 1915); 5 (31 January 1915): 85–7; 19 (9 May 1915): 372; 33 (15 August 1915): 624; ‘Iz deistv. Armii’, 35 (29 August 1915): 657–9; 52 (December 1915): 954, 974. 32 Another point worth mentioning for this particular publication is the relative paucity of images of ethnically non-Russian soldiers, other than ‘exotic’ warriors from the Caucasus. 33 ‘Nashim podpischikam’, Niva 33 (19 August 1917): 1. 34 I am not suggesting that the Russian public’s interest in press coverage of the war did not decline from the initial surge in 1914, but rather seek to situate that trend

‘News from the War’

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

219

within a broader context. See Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War, 2nd edn (New York and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 2011), who chronicles how public interest in war news diminishes in virtually all belligerent nations as conflicts stretch on. Newspapers announced – and frequently reported on – hundreds of public lectures on war-related subjects organized by societies, municipal administrations, zemstvos and educational institutions, both in the capitals and in the provinces. For example, in a public lecture in early 1915, liberal leader Pavel Miliukov contended that Russia needed to follow the example of other countries, where hundreds of individuals were writing and discussing ‘questions such as how to relate consciously to this war we’re conducting, who began it and who is to blame, why we’re fighting and whether it’s worth it’. An active war effort had to be an informed one. P. N. Miliukov, ‘Doklad: Voina i evropeiskaia intelligentsiia’ (January 1915), Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (hereafter, GARF), f. 579, op. 1, d. 2098, ll. 1–2, 24. The Committee on Popular Publications was created in July 1914 by the Main Administration for Press Affairs, a unit within the Ministry of the Interior that also operated the civilian censorship apparatus. For details on mass edition, governmentpublished pamphlets aimed at ordinary Russians, see Melissa K. Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), esp. pp. 85–94 and 108–18. Velikaia voina v obrazakh i kartinakh, Pod. Red. Iv. Lazarevskogo, Izd. 6-e (Moscow: n.p., 1916) and Mirovaia voina v rasskazakh i illiustratsiakh. Ezhemesiachnyi illiustr. sbornik (Moscow: Sytin, 1915). See Hubertus J. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in World War I Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Steven Norris, Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). Many of these posters – with English glosses of the Russian text – are featured in the handsome catalogue by N. I. Baburina, Russkii plakat pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: “Isskustvo i kul’tura,” 1992). The peasantry made up the bulk of the army, but not all nationality groups in the empire were equally subject to conscription. On the make-up of the army in 1914, see Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), pp. 65–77, and David R. Stone, The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), pp. 32–44. On the history of the paper, see James H. Krukones, To the People: The Russian Government and the Newspaper Sel’skii Vestnik (‘Village Herald’) 1881–1917 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987). Krukones takes a rather dimmer view of the paper’s effectiveness.

220

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

43 RGIA, f. 1276, op. 11, d. 1418 (1915), ll. 4–5. 44 Scholars offer different estimates of the number of individuals who read any popular publication, but given the common practices of communal subscriptions to newspapers and reading papers aloud to groups, it’s clear every issue had multiple readers. McReynolds estimates that each issue of Russkoe slovo was read or heard by at least seven people, while Boris Esin suggests that every issue of popular (narodnye) papers was consumed by an average of ten (quoted from an interview by Krukones, To the People, pp. 248–9). 45 Sel’skii vestnik (22 July 1914): 4; (17 July 1914): 1; (23 July 1914): 1, ‘We stand strongly, all as one, for Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland’: and (13 August 1914): 3. 46 Sel’skii vestnik (15 July 1914): 1; (17 July 1914): 1. See also (18 July 1914): 2; (19 July 1914): 3; (22 July 1914): 4; and (24 July 1914): 3, where Duma Deputy N. L’vov of Saratov remarks that ‘In general, war with the Germans is extraordinarily popular.’ 47 Sel’skii vestnik (23 July 1914): 1. The parallels with the Napoleonic War of 1812, when ‘every social estate responded with high patriotic feeling and gave their all for defense of the Motherland’ were often noted, as on 30 May 1915. 48 Sel’skii vestnik (29 July 1914): 2, 3–4; (10 May 1915): 1; (21 July 1915): 2; (24 July 1915): 1. 49 The exception to this harmonious picture is the paper’s treatment, from summer 1915, of Russian Germans, traitors who did not ‘consider themselves Russian’; for example, Sel’skii vestnik (4 September 1916): 3. 50 On the Orthodox Church’s publishing activities in the war, see S. G. Runkevich, Velikaia otechestvennaia voina i tserkovnaia zhizn’ (Petrograd: n.p., 1916), pp. 270–2. 51 Prikhodskii listok (1 September 1914): 2. According to one contemporary, Church leaders had for some time discussed the desirability of publishing a popular daily to combat the influence of the commercial penny press, but it was the outbreak of war that finally brought the idea to fruition: Sergei Runkevich, Velikaia otechestvennaia voina (Petrograd: n.p., 1915), pp. 270–2. 52 RGIA, f. 800, op. 1, d. 590, ‘O pechatanii ‘Prikhodskogo listka’, ll. 12, 20, 50, 113. The price of 1 kopek per issue made it competitive with other mass circulation dailies. 53 ‘Ot redakstii’, Prikhodskii listok (1 September 1915): 4. This announcement reminded would-be contributors to provide the name of their village and the names of all people mentioned in their articles. 54 For example, I. Popov, ‘V derevne v dni voine’, Prikhodskii listok (7 June 1915): 2; G. P., ‘Kak narod molit’sia vo dni voiny’, Prikhodskii listok (22 July 1915): 3; and K. V. El’nitskii, ‘Voina i shkol’nye deti’, reprinted from Narodnoe obrazovanie in Prikhodskii listok (18 October 1915): 4. 55 There is little research in English or Russian on wartime papers aimed at specific religious groups, although the upsurge in publishing intended to mobilize national minority groups for war-relief suggests such periodicals might well have existed. See

‘News from the War’

56

57 58

59 60

61 62 63

64

65

221

Peter Gattrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2005), esp. pp. 49–72. On the religious make-up of the empire at this time, see Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow, UK, and New York: Pearson Education, 2001), who remarks that the Muslim press was quite vigorous during the war. Other chapters in the present volume shed light on printing in languages other than Russian in the imperial period overall. Quoted in A. Borisov, ‘Cherty narodnykh otnoshenii k gosudarstvennemu delu’, Russkie zapiski 2 (December 1914): 345–6. See also V. Bystrenin, ‘ “Prezhde i teper”: Pis’mo iz derevni’, Russkaia mysl’ (November 1916): 1–8. Similar contemporary testimony is cited in Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, p. 29. ‘Voina i narodnie biblioteki’, Russkoe vedomosti (9 May 1915): 7. Scott J. Seregny, ‘Zemstvos, Peasants and Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and World War I’, Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 301–13. On peasant interest in and attitudes towards the war in Viatka province, see Aaron B. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 32–52. V. P. Minakova and I. V. Fomichev, Obshchestvenno-pedagogicheskoe dvizhenie v Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Voronezh: Institut MMiF, 2003), pp. 133–40. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, p. 351, and Eugene M. Kayden and Alexis N. Antsiferov, The Cooperative Movement in Russia During the War: Consumers Cooperation and Credit and Agricultural Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1931), pp. 6–18, 229. Minakova and Fomichev, Obshchestvenno-pedagogicheskoe dvizhenie, pp. 33-35, 133–40. Sel’skii vestnik (31 May 1915): 3, and (16 September 1916): 1. V. V. Morozov and N. I. Reshetnikov (eds), Dnevnik totemskogo krest’ianina A. A. Zamaraeva, 1906–1922 gody (Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 1995), pp. 120. Zamaraev’s diary entries frequently comment on ongoing battles and the deeds of various heroes, clearly gleaned from press reporting, as well as lamenting the war’s bloodshed and burdens. See, for example, pp. 91, 95, 101–2, 110, 123. Records of the two investigations, from Novgorod and Stavropol provinces, are preserved in the archive of the Russian Orthodox Church. Records from the Ministry of Justice – presumably including many more cases – were destroyed during the February Revolution; see Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation, pp. 101–4. See Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation, esp. pp. 98–103, 206–10. Colleen Moore draws on surveillance reports of the ‘mood’ in Moscow province in her discussion of peasant expectations about the war: Colleen Moore, ‘Peasants and the

222

66

67

68

69

70 71

72 73

Publishing in Tsarist Russia Land Question in World War I Russia’, in Christopher Reed (ed.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–1922, Book 3 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2018) . See also Heretz, Russia on the Eve of Modernity, pp. 202–06, who suggests that peasants understood press reports in ways entirely unintended by articles’ writers. The quote comes from the diary entry of 18 August 1914 by Baron Nikolai Vrangel: N. N. Vrangel’, Dni skorbi. Dnevnik 1914–1915 godov, ed. A. A. Murashev (St Petersburg: Zhurnal ‘Neva’, 2001), p. 43. The main provisions of the wartime press statute, ‘Vremennoe polozhenie o voennoi tsenzure’, are excerpted in Vlast’ i pressa. K istorii pravovogo regulirovaniia otnoshenii 1700–1917. Khrestomatiia (Moscow: Izd. RAGS, 1999), pp. 204–10. For an overview of the 1914 censorship provisions, see Berezhnoi, Russkaia legal’naia pechat’, pp. 19–21 and Lohr, ‘The Russian Press’. RGVIA, f. 2003, d. 1484, ‘Biuro pechati’, ‘Proekt’ of 28 oktiabria 1915, l. 3. Mark Lemke, the officer at military headquarters tasked with working with journalists, felt the new policies were not particularly successful: Berezhnoi, Russkaia legal’naia pechat’, pp. 69–70. GARF, f. 579, op. 1, d. 2950,” “Soobshcheniia o zakrytykh gazet i drugikh primer tsenzury,” ll. 1-4. A different kind of example comes from Odessa, where riots by soldiers’ wives – and in fact any protests involving women – were kept out of the press until March 1917: Ieugen Dzhumyga, ‘The Home Front in Odessa during the Great War (July 1914–February 1917): The Gender Aspect of the Problem’, Danubius 31 (2013): 226–7. Newspapers published in German were subject to especially stringent censorship, or simply shut down. See Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation, especially chapters 1 and 6. N. Pogodin, ‘Rol’ pechati vo vremia voiny’, Kievlianin (23 June 1915): 1. Even censors could have a sense of humour, apparently. Berezhnoi, Russkaia legal’naia pechat’, pp. 51–3, mentions the ability of Demian Bednyi to bypass censorship by disguising critiques of the war as ‘Aesopian’ fables in 1915 in the Kharkov paper Utro; such use of Aesopian language had a long pedigree in Tsarist Russia. A few journalists – such as Social-Democrat Nikolai Sukhanov – managed to sneak openly anti-war sentiments into legally-printed publications prior to 1917. On the anti-war movement and efforts to outfox the censors, see Michael Melancon, The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Anti-War Movement, 1914–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990). Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA), f. 2003, op. , d. X (2016): l. A study of the situation in Siberia comes from E. N. Kosykh, Periodicheskaia pechat’ Sibiri (mart 1917–mai 1918 gg.) Iz istorii ideino-politicheskoi bor’by (Tomsk: Izd-vo Tomskogo universiteta, 1994), p. 19. Unfortunately, the press in many provincial

‘News from the War’

74 75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

223

areas, and regions populated predominantly by nationalities other than Great Russians, still awaits scholarly treatment for 1917–18. ‘Nashim chitateliam’, Niva 33 (19 August 1917): 1. Censorship in military zones and pertaining to strictly military developments still existed after the February Revolution, though it was hard to enforce; governmental censorship in civilian areas essentially ended. However, de facto censorship could be exercised by various groups, most importantly the press workers (often Mensheviks or Menshevik-leaning): they quickly shut down the most right-wing periodicals and forced conservative nationalist papers like the Novoe vremia to alter their tone if they wanted to keep publishing. V. A. Zhurvalev, Bez very, tsaria i otechestva. Rossiiskaia periodicheskaia pechat’ i armiia v marte-oktiabre 1917 goda (St Petersburg: Ministerstvo obrazovaniia rossiiskoi federatsii, 1999), pp. 42–4. For example, see Soldat-Grazhdanin (15 March 1917): 1; (22 March 1917): 3; (28 April 1917): 3; (6 May 1917): 4; and (16 May 1917): 3. The paper characterized itself as socialist in orientation, supporting a strictly defensive war; no information is available about the editors, other than their self-identification as ‘simple, rank and file soldier citizens’. Voina i mir 1 (6 June 1917): 1, and 4 (9 June 1917): 1, 4. For a brief discussion of the ‘non-party military organization’ that produced this paper, see Matthew Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 5. On soldiers and the Bolshevik press in 1917, see Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 52–4. The June 1917 article by Lenin is printed in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1975), pp. 306. A contemporary overview of the left-leaning provincial press is provided by A. Kudriatsev, ‘Revoliutsiia i provintsial’naia pechat”, Letopis’ 5–6 (June 1917): 27–78. Figures vary widely, the most recent and highest coming from A. E. Stepanov, ‘Obshchie demograficheskie poteri naseleniia Rossii v period pervoi mirovoi voiny’, in Pervaia mirovaia voina. Prolog XX veka (Moscow: n.p., 1998), pp. 474–84, who estimates 10.7 million military casualties by the end of 1917, for approximate losses of 60 per cent in the armed forces. On the army’s troubled state by autumn 1916, see Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldier’s Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 107–15. A sobering sample of the mounting tide of bad news comes from a governmental department’s overview of the press: GARF, f. 9505, op. 2, d. 8, ‘Kratkii obzor pechati’ (13 September–24 October 1917): ll. 1–66. Zamaraev, Dnevnik, entry of 26 October 1917, p. 165.

224

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

83 The texts of the relevant decrees, of 27 October, 7 November, 1 December and 29 December 1917, are contained in B. I. Esin and Ia. N. Zasurskii (eds), Russkaia zhurnalistika v dokumentakh. Istoriia nadzora (Moscow: Aspekt press, 2003), pp. 252–6. For a discussion of this censorship, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Power in Petrograd (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007).

9

Jewish nationalism in the Russian language: The imagined provinciality among Siberian and far eastern Zionists at the time of the imperial collapse Taro Tsurumi

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities demonstrated that vernacular languages played an important role in promoting nationalism in Europe. However, as he noted, nationalisms in the Americas shared languages with European colonial nations.1 In early Spanish-American nationalism, through local newspapers in Spanish that covered events in the world as well as in other Spanish colonies, the double nature of ‘its alternating grand stretch and particularistic localism’ was established.2 The boundary of the language thus did not coincide with that of the community; it was not the commonality of language but the ‘provinciality’ of community within the same linguistic world that was a key for the development of nationalism. The language provided people with contexts in which their community was imagined, or a sense of which part of the network they were positioned on. As some chapters of this volume reveal, Russian did not only shape Russian nationalism, but also functioned as a medium for other nationalisms among non-Russians. Jewish nationalism was no exception, and there were several Russian newspapers and journals published by Jewish nationalists, like Zionists and liberals, who emphasized Jewish nationality (‘nationality’ here means a somewhat politicized ethnicity). In this chapter, taking the case of the Siberian and Far Eastern Zionist movement, I will show that Russian media was not just a tool for the proliferation of nationalist ideas, but that it helped Jewish nationalists feel their ‘provinciality’, though in different senses through time, which drove their nationalism.

225

226

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Russian Jewish periodicals in the late imperial period The mainstream of Jewish history in the Russian Empire began at the time of the partition of Poland, when the empire incorporated Poland’s Jews into its territory. In the 1897 census, the Jewish population of the empire was about 5.2 million, almost all of whom were Yiddish speakers, although some also spoke other languages including Russian and Polish.3 The emergence of Jewish nationalism has generally been understood as the emergence of Jewish collective consciousness in secular and, to an extent, political terms. The haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement, whose beginning is represented by Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a German-Jewish philosopher, began to shape modern Jewish collective consciousness. While in Germany the haskalah tended to push Jews toward assimilation into German society, or an understanding of Judaism as compatible with German nationality like Protestantism and Catholicism, in Eastern Europe, including Russia, where Jews lived more densely, the haskalah sometimes paved a way for the development of Jewish nationalism.4 From the beginning, the Russian government was very suspicious about Jews in its territory and believed that they exploited Russian peasants. Regarding Jewish reform based on the haskalah to have been a success in Germany, the Russian government attempted to make Jews reform by themselves – and in cooperation with the government, some enlightened Jews as well as Jewish bankers in the capital reformed Jewish education. Considering Jewish merchants, traders and shopkeepers who were closely connected with agricultural villages to be a negative influence, the government promoted ‘useful’ Jews – for example, by granting to Jewish merchants of the first guild and graduates of Russian universities certain rights and privileges including the freedom to reside outside the Congress of Poland and the Pale of Jewish Settlement, which roughly overlaps with present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.5 In this context, Jews themselves began to promote enlightened ideas through their periodicals in Russian and Hebrew. Periodicals in both languages were first published in 1860, and with several intervals, such periodicals gradually developed with the emergence of a Jewish intelligentsia. Periodicals in Yiddish also began to appear, and in 1903 the first Yiddish daily started publication in St Petersburg. Some writers only wrote one language, but many, along with their readers, were multilingual. According to Yehuda Slutsky, who carried out detailed research on Jewish periodicals in Russian of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Hebrew periodicals targeted beit midrash (Jewish study hall) students and Zionists; periodicals in Yiddish aimed at a broader readership and women;

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

227

and those in Russian were directed towards maskilim (Jewish enlighteners) who spoke in Russian and those readers who were educated in Russian schools.6 In general, periodicals in Russian were more affirmative of Jews’ integration into the empire than those in Hebrew or Yiddish. Yet it is noteworthy that several Zionist – in other words, pro-Jewish independence – periodicals were published in Russian, and in the Imperial period, the Zionist weekly Rassvet (Dawn, whose name changed a number of times, but with similar editors and authors) was the longest-running of Zionist periodicals in all three languages. Although Zionists often accused non-Zionist Russified Jews of being assimilationists, other Russian Jewish periodicals such as Voskhod (Rising) and Evreiskaia nedelia (Jewish Week), where Jewish liberals were mainly involved, did not necessarily approve of Jewish assimilation into the Russian population. In fact, voices urging Jewish assimilation were rare, and most authors in these periodicals produced articles based on the assumption that Jews would continue to constitute a separate body in the empire. Although only Zionists were calling for autonomy for Jews in Russia and the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, many Russian Jewish authors in these periodicals sought equal rights for Jews, not as Russians but as Jews.7 In the imperial period, not a vast distance separated the Zionist movement and Jewish liberals, who were now increasingly involved in politics as a result of the 1906 Constitution. In fact, Zionists as well as Jewish liberals had several delegates in the Duma, and as I discussed elsewhere, the Zionist project arose out of the debate over how to improve the collective status of Jews in the empire.8 Between 1906 and the First World War, censorship no longer targeted Jewish-language publications9 and Jews no longer had to fear publishing in Jewish languages. But many Jews published in Russian, not simply because Russified Jews comfortably read Russian, but, more importantly, because they discussed their nationalism in Russian contexts. The same was true in the case of Zionists in Siberia, who had to defect to China, especially Harbin, during the Civil War. Yet the collapse of the empire, which provided Zionists with contexts for their activity and thought, compelled them, as natives of the Russian language, to reconsider the ‘alternating grand stretch and particularistic localism’, or how to define their locality and translocality.

Zionism in Siberia10 For Western historians, Siberia may represent a land of exile. Hans Kohn, the Czech-born historian of nationalism, who was also known as a Zionist until

228

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

1929, spent a few years in Irkutsk as a captive in the First World War. During this period, he contributed a number of articles, mainly about Zionist thinkers, to the Siberian Zionist weekly Evreiskaia zhizn’ (Jewish Life), published from February 1919 until February 1920, under the White regime of Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak. After August 1919, when the Russian Zionist weekly Khronika evreiskoi zhizni (Chronicle of Jewish Life), which was published in Petrograd, was finally shut down by the Bolsheviks, it became the sole Zionist periodical published in Russia. However, aside from Kohn, it seems that many of the editors were originally from Siberia or had long lived in Siberia. In total, 34,477 Jews lived in Siberia in 1897, and they numbered about 50,000 on the eve of the First World War.11 The situation of Jews in Siberia was better than that of Jews in any other part of the Russian Empire. By the beginning of the First World War, the majority of Siberian Jews were financially stable and reasonably well integrated into the non-Jewish population.12 Kohn looked back on his stay in Irkutsk in 1919 as a profitable one, describing Irkutsk as ‘a very liveable and pleasant city of about 100,000 inhabitants’.13 Evreiskaia zhizn’ also presented the living conditions of Jews in Siberia ‘more favourably’ than those of Jews in any other part of Russia.14 In a word, despite the somewhat negative image of Siberia as the land of exile, many Siberian Jews lived rather successfully and comfortably. Yet, among the Siberian Jewish population, Zionism, which elsewhere might have been considered a reaction to Jewish hardship, was far more popular than any other Jewish political movement. The Zionist movement came to Siberia as early as 1898, with the first Siberian Zionist conference held in 1903 in Tomsk and the second in 1912 in Irkutsk. Branches of the organization were allowed to establish themselves in several cities in Siberia and the Ural region. Zionism in European Russia, the pogroms in 1905 and the suffering of Jews during the First World War also contributed to growth of the Zionist movement.15 The election for the All-Russian Jewish Congress, which was held in November 1917, demonstrated the popularity of Zionism among Jewish political parties in Siberia. Although voter turnout was low, Zionists far outnumbered other Jewish parties throughout Russia,16 and in Siberia and the Far East, this trend was even more pronounced: here the Zionists won 8,242 votes, while the Bundists (a Jewish socialist party) won 1,210, Poale Tsion (a socialist Zionist party) won 514, and others secured 498 votes.17 Zionists also dominated the National Council of Jews of Siberia and the Urals, which was established in 1919.18 Evreiskaia zhizn’ was published under Kolchak’s regime, which held power from the autumn of 1918 until January 1920, showing that Zionism still maintained

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

229

its popularity during this period. To understand the popularity of Zionism in Siberia, we have to analyse the meaning of Zionism in the context of Siberian Jews. Despite some archival research on Siberian Zionism, little is known about the views of Zionists, especially the context in which they discussed Zionism and which aspects of the movement they considered most important. This is where Evreiskaia zhizn’ can serve our purpose. The key individual in the Siberian Zionist movement was Moshe Novomeysky, who contributed numerous articles to Evreiskaia zhizn’. Born in a small village near Lake Baikal, Novomeysky is famous for founding the Palestine Potash Company in the Dead Sea area. Potash is the common name for several compounds containing potassium. He was involved in the mining and chemical industry around Lake Baikal. With the knowledge that the Dead Sea has a similar chemical composition to the Siberian lakes, he began to develop potash industries in the Dead Sea after he emigrated to Palestine in 1920. Novomeysky’s experiences in Siberia were described in his English memoir, My Siberian Life, though curiously, he hardly mentioned his Zionist activity there, only briefly referring to the establishment of the All-Russian Zionist Organization in Irkutsk.19 Why this reticence? It was perhaps because his involvement in Zionism in Siberia was somehow incompatible with his later life. He wrote several articles criticizing the Bolsheviks and supporting the Kolchak government, but in early 1920 he switched sides, denouncing Kolchak and becoming more neutral to the Bolsheviks.20 Moreover, the Zionist movement in Siberia was not solely an emigration movement to Palestine. While it stressed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as one of the most important aims of the movement, it was also involved in local politics in Irkutsk and Russia in general, both ideologically and practically. Novomeysky was chair of the Conference of the Jewish Community in Siberia and the Ural region, held in Tomsk on 26 December 1918, which only briefly mentioned Palestine, primarily discussing cultural activity and the establishment of an autonomous Jewish body in Russia.21 It seems that such Novomeysky was sensitive to the differences between Siberian Zionism and the Palestine-centred Zionism in Israel and also the image of the White movement as anti-Semitic. Nonetheless, Evreiskaia zhizn’’s articles illuminate the state of Zionism in 1919 under the Kolchak government. Alexander Yevzerov (Ezer), one of the paper’s editors and the vice-president of the Zionist Organization in Siberia and the Ural region, had already provided an overview of its publishing priorities, indicating a desire to cover a broad range of topics, such as the Paris Peace Conference; pogroms in Eastern Europe; Jewish autonomy and other minority

230

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

politics in Russia; Jewish cultural activity and education centred on the Tarbut organization; aid to prisoners of war; and the status of Palestine colonization. According to Yevzerov, the paper distributed 3,200 copies.22 However, he did not delve deep into the politics of nationality involving Jews in the empire, which the paper actually covered. It is important to examine this point to understand why Zionism became significant under the regime of Kolchak and at the time of fluctuation. Although Yevzerov did not mention it specifically, the anti-Bolshevik tendency of the paper should be noted. There were primarily two reasons for this characteristic. First, at that time the Bolsheviks were perceived to be opposed to defining Jews as a nationality, and indeed the Jewish Congress in Moscow was cancelled by the new regime. Moreover, the Zionists were concerned about the Bolsheviks’ anti-bourgeois policy to ban trade and annihilate the Jewish economy, which was heavily dependent on the Jews’ role as middlemen. A letter published in Evreiskaia zhizn’ from a correspondent in the city of Perm told of the damage done to the Jewish economy by the Bolsheviks, but that Jewish social and cultural life in the city had recovered with the arrival of the army of the provisional government. The article reported that the representatives of the Jewish community in Perm expressed their support for Admiral Kolchak.23 Conscious of the anti-Semitic discourse that equated Jews with Bolshevism, Evreiskaia zhizn’ stressed that the Jewish people suffered as much at the hands of the Bolshevik regime as other peoples.24 The paper claimed that the Bolsheviks had destroyed private trade, in which 40 per cent of the participants were Jewish.25 Even after the fall of the Kolchak government by the end of 1919, the paper remained openly concerned about Bolshevik anti-bourgeois policy.26 More broadly, as the first article of the first issue of the weekly signed by the editorial board contended, the disorder in Russian Jewry was mainly blamed on the break-up of Russian statehood. While the article maintained that the most important task was the establishment of Jewish statehood in Palestine, it also argued that along with other minority nations, Jews had their own interests in Russia and that ‘the fates of the Russian Jewry are inseparably connected with the fates of the Russian statewide democracy’. Here, the original term for ‘Russian’ is ‘rossiiskii’, which denotes the state framework of Russia, rather than ‘russkii’, denoting ethnic Russians. The paper defined one of its main tasks as ‘the advocacy of the right for the broad national autonomy of every people residing in Russia’.27 The continuation of Jewish life in Russia was an underlying premise of Siberian Zionism. This premise rested on another premise: the premise that Russia would be a democratic multinational state. Underscoring the necessity to

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

231

establish an all-Russian Jewish congress, another article maintained that the establishment of national autonomy in the galut and state-building in Palestine were the will of the Jewish people.28 Therefore, Zionists emphasized the distinction between statehood and nationhood in Russia. Criticizing liberals’ attitude toward Jews that only recognized the individual civil equality of Jews and undermined Jewish collective interests, one of the editors, G. Gitel’son, argued that Russia was a multinational state. In his view, ‘[p]atriotism is a sense of duty toward the country but not a submission to this or that group of the population’. He believed that Russian statehood would rest on the relationship between all its nationalities based on ‘friendship, trust, cooperation and a general affection for the country’.29 Another article condemned the pogroms in the newly established Poland. The article criticized the Polish government for not taking action to prevent these outrages and for its oppression of Polish Jews just like Tsarist Russia: ‘Peoples who cannot manage their multiethnic population inevitably lose their state independence sooner or later.’30 The message was probably directed as much at Russia as it was at Poland. Siberian Zionists believed in the power of democracy to improve Jewish life. As a tactic, they joined the democratic bloc of minority nationalities and other democratic parties. Evreiskaia zhizn’ argued that only with the establishment of democracy would Russia revive and secure freedom, including Jewish civil and national equality.31 In the election for the municipal Duma of Irkutsk, the paper posted a list of ‘the Bloc of Minor Nationalities’, which included Zionists, Muslims, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians and Buryats.32 Unfortunately, they were unable to win even a single seat in the election on 25 May 1919.33 Despite the disappointing election result, the desire to make Russia a democratic state probably explains the Siberian Zionists’ support for the Kolchak government, which at first appeared to be the defender of democracy. Historians are now well aware of the anti-Semitic and autocratic nature of this government, as well of the White regime in general, but the Siberian Zionists had invested their hopes and belief in Kolchak, and Evreiskaia zhizn’ ran a number of articles informing readers of the admiral’s pledge to combat anti-Semitism. One such piece, titled ‘Admiral Kolchak on the Jewish problem’, quoted Kolchak as saying, ‘I am against national abuse . . . I believe that with the general pacification of the country, the urgency of the national problem will disappear.’34 Another article, titled ‘A Step Forward’, reported that ‘Admiral Kolchak declared that both he and his government are absolutely . . . [committed] to [dealing with] the Jewish problem and that they struggle . . . [against] anti-Semitic propaganda.’ The article also informed readers that the government considered the Jewish problem to be

232

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

a ‘state [gosudarstvennyi] problem’ because it ‘will badly affect the revival of the Russian statehood’.35 In the Siberian Zionist vision, Zionism had even more significance for Siberian Jews at this point. The key was the international political position of the Whites. Just like other White regimes, the Kolchak government heavily relied on support from Western governments. The ‘Step Forward’ article explained that the government considered the Jewish question to be a ‘state problem’ because any restrictions on Jews would attest to the reactionary character of the government. The international element of the whole matter was highlighted in the same article as it went on to give details of the meeting between Kolchak and Frank Rosenblatt, a representative of the American Joint Distribution Committee.36 Evreiskaia zhizn’ stressed that the willingness of the head of the Omsk government to talk with an American representative about the position of Jews in Russia was evidence of the political calculation behind Kolchak’s statements and that nonJewish peoples and governments were now beginning to acknowledge the unity of world Jewry more than previously done.37 As this article suggests, the unity of Jews began to be seen as evidence of the power of Jews in the international as well as the imperial arena. However, the emphasis on the unity of Jews was not necessarily aimed at attracting foreign aid. Perhaps reflecting the relatively good economic situation of Siberian Jews, as well as the positive state of local interethnic relations, Evreiskaia zhizn’ argued that such Jewish unity could enable and encourage Siberian Jews to offer aid from afar. In an issue celebrating its first six months of publication, the weekly paper proudly pointed out that its reporting on foreign (Jewish) affairs had helped create a spiritual connection between Siberian–Ural Jews and world Jewry. For example, it had engendered Siberian–Ural Jewish protests against the pogroms in Poland and inspired a movement to collect donations for the victims.38 Indeed, the pogroms in Poland and Galicia were covered in detail, with calls for a united Jewish protest against them.39 Another article in the same issue also highlighted this point. Defining the Zionist movement not simply as a movement to secure a homeland in Palestine, but also a movement for those who remained in the galut, Evreiskaia zhizn’ argued that the world war had created a new demand for interregional solidarity among Jews. To solve the Jewish problem, the article contended, the establishment of an all-Jewish congress was necessary.40 Zion was presented as a symbol of this solidarity, aimed at securing Jewish liberation. The article concluded, ‘So, as a result of the World War, today we are aware that Zionism is so comprehensive and great that it embraces every human suffering and every world sorrow,

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

233

sufferings and sorrow for which liberating words will perhaps appear from [thence] which they once came, from Zion.’41 Like other forms of Gegenwartsarbeit (the Zionist German term meaning ‘work in the present’) in Russian and East European Zionism, cultural activity and education were an integral part of Siberian Zionism. Siberian Zionists regarded these to be essential elements in the strengthening of Jewish solidarity. Regarding the Tarbut organization, which had been established in Moscow and run primarily by Zionists, Evreiskaia zhizn’ stressed that the function of Siberian Tarbut, which was more comprehensive in its outlook and operations than other branches of the organization, would include the resistance against assimilation. The paper argued that in order for Siberian Jews to remain a vital part of world Jewry, it was necessary that young people be exposed to Jewish national culture, especially the Hebrew language, since Siberian Jews tended not to emphasize Jewish traditions because of their relative freedom (in contrast to Polish and Lithuanian Jews) and because they lived closer to the land and to Russian peasants.42 This Russian Zionist periodical demonstrates that even with relatively little direct experience of anti-Semitism, Zionism made sense in a multiethnic polity in order to empower Jews through a worldwide network and make other peoples and the government aware of Jewish nationality.43 Indeed, this was also a characteristic of Zionism in European Russia.44 However, Siberian Zionism not only aimed to draw non-Jewish attention to Jewish interests or attract foreign aid, but also, not unlike American Jewish philanthropic movements, offered sympathy and support to Jews in other regions, especially Poland and Galicia, who were the victims of pogroms. (In a similar vein, Evreiskaia zhizn’ would also highlight the plight of Jewish prisoners of war in Siberia.) And yet we can detect an ambivalence among at least some Zionists. While an article in Evreiskaia zhizn’ argued that the need for a Jewish state had become even more imperative due to the endemic pogroms in Poland, Galicia, Ukraine and Belorussia; the economic plight of a broad mass of people; the restrictions on emigration to the United States; and, finally, the new wave of anti-Semitism,45 many Siberian Zionists believed, or perhaps wanted to believe, in a positive future under Kolchak. These hopes would be eroded by a growing awareness of Kolchak’s own anti-Semitism or that of his army. After the leader’s downfall, Novomeysky would reveal Kolchak’s anti-Semitism in his memoir, also observing that Kolchak lacked talent and that the cruelty of his administration were reminiscent of the Romanov regime.46 Novomeysky wrote about having ‘left the land of my birth, temporarily, as I thought, but, as it turned out, forever’.47 Ironically, the collapse of the allegedly

234

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

anti-Semitic White government eventually destroyed Siberian Zionism and compelled some of its most prominent figures to emigrate to Palestine.48 Nevertheless, papers like Evreiskaia zhizn’ had provided a network and fostered a sense of connection with other Jews while remaining conscious of their ‘provinciality’, which would be the foundation of the Zionists’ activity beyond Siberia.

Zionism in Harbin Shortly after the fall of the Kolchak regime, those Zionists who had been critical of the Bolsheviks had to leave Russia, while Evreiskaia zhizn’ ceased publication on 20 February 1920. Like other White émigrés, some of them settled in areas with deep ties to the Russian-speaking world. Abraham Kaufman, leader of the Zionist movement and Jewish community in the city of Harbin and the Manchuria region, recounted the story of these years after emigrating to Israel.49 According to his account, Novomeysky and Yevzerov, the central figures behind Evreiskaia zhizn’, first headed to Shanghai. A short time later, Novomeysky emigrated to Palestine and became prominently involved in the development of the Dead Sea mineral industry, as referred to earlier. He exhorted Yevzerov, who had remained in the Far East, to dedicate himself to Aliyah (emigration to Palestine) and the organization of the Zionists. On 1 October 1920, the first issue of the weekly magazine Sibir’-Palestina was published in Shanghai,50 and by the time its ninth issue was released, on 3 December, the magazine had already relocated to Harbin, where it continued to be published until 1943. It was illegally circulated as far as Siberia, including the city of Omsk,51 and became the longestrunning Zionist periodical published in the Russian language. Kaufman took the helm as editor-in-chief with the issue dated 4 March 1921 and reinforced the publication’s role as a bridge between multiethnic Harbin’s Jewish community and Zionism generally. An indication of both Harbin’s multiethnic milieu and the interaction between Jewish residents involved with the magazine and the local Japanese community was the publication in 1923 of Tadao Yanaihara’s travelogue about Palestine, which was a tacit approval of the Zionist project.52 Similar to the circumstances pertaining to the emigration of Jewish settlers to Siberia, the Russian government’s lenient policy toward Jews attracted them to the Harbin area, which by 1919 had a Jewish population of 15,000.53 Against the background of Russo-Japanese rivalry and having been granted the Chinese Eastern Railway concession in 1896, Russia had started developing the area.

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

235

However, Sergei Witte, then Russia’s Finance Minister, during a fact-finding tour of Manchuria in 1902 was shocked by the poverty of the Jewish settlers, prompting his recommendation that future Jewish settlement be restricted to merchants and veterans. However, conscious of the commercial aptitude of ethnic minorities, particularly Jews, Witte and his successors encouraged Jewish settlement in the area, and by 1903 the Jewish community had established its own committee. By 1922, Harbin’s total population had reached 485,000, including 300,000 Chinese, 120,000 Russians, 34,000 Koreans and 5,000 Japanese. The Jewish community accounted for just 3 per cent of the total population, but played a prominent role in business and the public sector.54 When Harbin’s provisional Jewish Committee convened on 30 April 1917, after the February Revolution, it consisted of thirty-one members, of whom thirteen were Zionists, four Conservatives (Orthodox Jews), two Bundists and twelve independents. As had been the case in Siberia, the Zionists were the dominant force.55 The early issues of Sibir’-Palestina sometimes featured articles drawn from other newspapers and focused on the state of affairs in various regions. Unlike previous Russian-language Zionist publications, the Zionist editorial content was sparse at first, although the guiding spirit was, to a certain extent, evident. In due course, however, the publication’s own brand of Zionist discourse became prominent. The main thrust of this periodical, as its masthead suggested, was to act as a bridge between the Far East and Palestine, that masthead describing Sibir’-Palestina – in English, it should be noted, reflecting a target readership of regional officials who were not literate in Russian – as ‘A weekly magazine aiming to enlighten readers in the Far East interested in immigration to, business opportunities in, and general information regarding Palestine’. What does this declaration of intent signify? In the Russian imperial era, Zionism had been tolerated on the basis that it was a movement solely aimed at the settlement of Jewish people in Palestine, with no bearing on domestic Russian issues. Reading between the lines of Sibir’Palestina’s masthead, we might conclude that Harbin’s Zionists display that same singular preoccupation with Palestine.56 To a certain extent, this faithfully reflected the realities of Harbin’s Zionism, which was explicitly marked by a diminished interest in Russia itself. While reports on the conditions of Jewish communities in Russia did occasionally appear in the magazine, news articles and opinion pieces on Russian politics and economics were virtually nonexistent. Although Russia was experiencing profound regime change, Sibir’Palestina hardly referred to the nature of the newly established Soviet regime. The introductory article in its first issue summarized its objectives as being ‘to

236

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

connect the remotely isolated Jewish people in the Far East with other Jewish people in the world’ and ‘to reflect completely and comprehensively the lives and the bustling . . . creative activities of Jewish people in Palestine’. The magazine was no supporter of the White Army, decrying the White Army’s pogroms under General Denikin’s command, which it argued led to the massacres and agonies inflicted on Polish Jews, and arguing that the Soviet regime was the only force physically capable of providing security for the beleaguered Jewish population, at the same time it denounced Soviet policies aimed at eradicating the Jewish middleman in the economy, something detrimental to the Jewish people as a whole. In another introductory article, Sibir’-Palestina began to conflate the struggle against ‘Galut’ (expulsion of the Jewish people) with revival of the concept of a Jewish Palestine.57 Thus, the underlying motif of this periodical was the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine, stressing in particular the importance of supporting the construction of Jewish settlements and helping sustain them. This objective may seem a glaringly obvious one for a Zionist publication to adopt. However, we have to put such an objective into the context that continued since the Russian imperial era: Siberian and Harbin Zionists conceived Zionism on the assumption that the restoration of Palestine as the centre of Jewish civilization would lead to the normalization of the Jewish diaspora. In other words, there was no strong personal desire to emigrate to Palestine. Rather, by supporting the Jewish population in Palestine, Harbin Zionists could discover some sense of significance in rescuing the Jewish diaspora, particularly their brethren in Russia and Europe, including Eastern Europe. One of the publication’s introductory articles proclaimed, ‘If Palestine can serve as a beacon shining light across the entire Jewish diaspora, then Palestine must be revived now, at this very moment.’58 Other occasional articles asserted that the bond with Palestine would link Jews all over the world to each other.59 One such piece urged Siberian Jews not to lag behind mainstream Jewry in a world of dizzying change, portrayed them as having been severed from their fellow Jews, dispersed and forsaken in the taiga and tundra of Siberia. While the Siberian Jews were lauded for having adapted resiliently to the most extreme conditions without abandoning their ethnic heritage, they were also compared unfavourably with their Polish and Ukrainian brethren, who at that time were fervently upholding their Jewish identity in the face of daunting adversity. The argument was that Siberian Jews, who were blessed with more favourable circumstances than Jews in Poland and the Ukraine, failed to appreciate the importance of participating in this critical moment in Jewish history.60

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

237

There were several means of supporting settlement in Palestine. First, some attempts were made to send manpower. For example, one news story proudly reported the first halutzim (Zionist pioneers) who left Shanghai and the Far East in April 1921.61 Second, and more importantly, Sibir’-Palestina produced a string of articles on the shekel (donations to the Zionist movement) fundraising campaign which was launched at this time. The magazine also encouraged donations to the Keren Hayesod, a fundraising foundation that sought to rationalize the financial affairs of Zionist organizations across the world, presenting such contributions as a ‘voluntary tax’ for the entire Jewish people, transcending party politics. Novomeysky’s report on the situation in Palestine had noted that while the political situation was favourable, Jewish Palestine was suffering from a cash shortage,62 although another article (reprinted from Israel Messenger, published in Shanghai) had pointed out that East European Jews were suffering from not only racial hatred but also poverty.63 What was termed ‘national capital’ had frequently been mentioned as necessary for the development of the Palestinian-Jewish community, and at the Far East Palestinian Conference on 29 December 1920, it was argued that the mobilization of both labour and capital was indispensable in order to rebuild Palestine and create a Jewish Palestine, which was the aim of the Jewish people around the world.64 What was at issue here was not the idea of investing capital in Palestine and utilizing (exploiting) the indigenous population to generate profits for the investors. Rather, the emphasis was on investing capital for what we might call an ‘ethnonational’ purpose. This is a topic related to the concept of the ‘Conquest of Labour’, a familiar idea in Zionist history. The ‘Conquest of Labour’ was a slogan promoting the employment of Hebrew (Jewish) labourers as opposed to inexpensive Arab labourers in order to eliminate the Arab workforce and establish the principle that land ownership could be claimed by those who cultivate the land. This was a slogan used by Zionist labourers in criticism of Jewish farm managers in Palestine. Yet an article in the first issue of the magazine to appear after Kaufman had replaced Yevzerov as editor-in-chief was entitled ‘The Socio-Economic Foundation of Palestinian Settlement’, which featured Keren Hayesod and raised the issue of the capitalist perspective on these matters. It sounded alarm bells for Palestinian development based on the contradictions of capitalist society, including human exploitation, warning of the possibility that Jewish people would be unable to attain satisfactory working conditions and a free society founded on social justice and harmony. While offering a capitalist perspective, the article issued its warning from the viewpoints of labourers in labour–management relations.65

238

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

In May 1921, a May Day demonstration by Palestinian Jewish workers provoked violence between Arabs and Jews, which became known as the Jaffa Riots and which claimed the lives of nearly fifty people. In the wake of this episode, several contributions to Sibir’-Palestina focused on the Arabs in Palestine, but also referred to the relevance of capital investment. For example, a report by the Far Eastern Division of the Zionist Organization summarized the events as a deliberate provocation by fanatics to lure ignorant Arabs into violence, concluding that now it was clear to world Jewry that only by Jews becoming a majority in Palestine could stability and peace be secured. The report observed that an urgent transfer of capital and human resources was necessary, emphasizing the current deficiency only in capital areas.66 The article was titled ‘Two Sacrifices’ and spoke of ‘two worlds’: the world of Jewish blood, suffering and degeneration, and the world of the fully satisfied bourgeois. Praising the self-sacrifice of halutzim, the article called for the involvement of Jewish capitalists in the Zionist project especially through Keren Hayesod, rather than individual donations.67 Here, intensive investment in one place – Palestine – was highlighted. Another article defined the Jewish ‘tragedy’ as the fact that Jews had been international, rather than national, financers.68 Another article reflected the likely objective of these pieces – to encourage readers to invest in the Zionist project – when it opined that ‘Jews of the Far East, who are under relatively better conditions than the entire Jews of Russia, are obliged to respond to our call and participate in this great urgent national cause.’69 Sibir’-Palestina was proud of the role of Far Eastern Jews in the Zionist project, which it regarded as the apex of world Jewry. In the imperial period, Zionism in the Russian language, including that in Siberia, placed itself in the broad Russian public context, conscious of what it had in common with the Russian public and what distinguished it from that wider public, but in Harbin the Zionists placed themselves in the context of world Jewry, identifying themselves as Jews and drawing a distinction between themselves and Jews in other parts of the world. In other words, they did not simply identify themselves abstractly as part of world Jewry, but were conscious of their place in the world Jewish network. For example – and this was also the case with other Russian Zionists – they were aware of how their opinions differed from those of American Zionists. An opening article referred to the fact that while American Zionists believed it important to industrialize Palestine and invest for that purpose, other Zionists believed that a much wider economic development in which the workforce was Jewish was the key to the Zionist project.70 Another article (reprinted from London-based Yiddish daily Die Zeit) was critical of American Zionists’ prioritization of

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

239

individual entrepreneurship and initiative over national and social entrepreneurship and initiative,71 while another piece criticized American Zionists’ business-like approach, emphasizing the importance of ‘morality’.72 The aforementioned article on ‘Two Sacrifices’ also criticized American bourgeois Jews. Their self-identification as Far Eastern Zionists was not simply due to their location in Harbin, but because they continued to write in Russian, not just because Harbin had many Russophone Jews but because they believed that they were among the Russian Jews remaining in the territory of the former Russian Empire. In December 1920, the Palestine Conference of the Far East was held in a Jewish gymnasium in Harbin, and the conference minutes were published in Sibir’-Palestina. The introduction to the journal indicated, ‘Far Eastern Jewry are accidentally positioned as the avant-garde of Siberian Jewry, who at this moment lack the possibility to show their will for Palestine.’73 Some issues of the magazine featured letters from subscribers, including ones from Siberia such as a communication from Omsk which appreciated the value of the journal: ‘Exactly for two years, we were completely detached from Zionist life and only thanks to Sibir’-Palestina, which reaches us, we, by fits and starts, got familiar with what is happening in the Jewish world.’74 A similar sentiment was expressed in a letter from Tomsk, indicating the sense of estrangement felt by the Jewish community there and its reliance on Sibir’-Palestina as almost the only Zionist source. The letter also noted that, despite the economic hardships experienced by their fellow Jews, they were excited by the news from Palestine and that many of them dreamed of resettling there.75 For these Zionists, who formed part of the Russian Jewish population, aid to pogrom victims continued to be important. Articles on this theme, including reports on the pogroms themselves, increased in 1922, as the Russian Civil War drew to a close. For example, a January 1922 issue of the journal carried a call to ‘Brothers Jews!’: ‘Hundred thousands of Jewish children-orphans, victims of pogroms in Ukraine and Belorussia, helpless, starved, diseased, abandoned in arbitrariness of savage fate . . . All our aid! Fulfil our conscience! Fulfil our national duty!’76 Elsewhere the magazine appealed to its readers to ‘Help your relatives in Russia.’77 These calls did not fall on deaf ears, and there are many references to contributions from Far Eastern Jews, for example the provision of some 2,000 dining tables for orphans in Ukraine .78 Sometimes, joint appeals were made – to aid Russian Jews in the West and develop Palestine. In the section ‘Appeal on Palestine Labour Fund to the Jewish Population of the Far East’, the following plea was made: ‘In the names of the lost comrades in Palestine and moaning and dying mass of Jewry of Ukraine,

240

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

Lithuania, and Poland, we ask you to make sacrifices.’79 Another article urged readers to ‘Rescue your brothers and sisters from the shame of the galut and slavery, from physical and spiritual extinction.’80 Presumably, this call was made on the assumption that those who rescued their ‘brothers’ would not migrate to Palestine themselves, but remain as donors to the emigration effort. In fact, Kaufman suggested that every Jewish community in the diaspora should have a commission for Palestine and that work in Palestine and in the diaspora should be connected organically.81 In the centenary issue of the journal, featuring the photos of Novomeysky and Yevzerov, the editor Kaufman wrote, ‘With a special feeling of internal joy, we note the significance of our journal for those estranged from the world of [the] Jews of Russia.’ Referring to letters he had received from various parts of Russia, he quoted one he had just received from an activist in West Siberia: We received three issues of the journal Sibir’-Palestina. That was really delightful, almost an event. For more than 4–5 months, we did not know about Palestine. We would ask you with a kind inquiry about the possibility . . . of sending . . . our city at least 10 copies of the journal. We know that you work in . . . very hard conditions – lack of money, people, and so on, but we will say to you, do not stop the journal and continue its publication with every possible means. This is very important and the most valuable thing, which we can and must do now. Your journal – it is the sole one, which can spiritually and ideally unite all who now lack the possibility . . . of actively participating in the work. The appearance of the blue front page with the title of ‘Sibir’-Palestina’ refreshes our ‘social’ atmosphere, brings us from a small circle isolated from the entire world, and makes it easier to begin breathing! For us, our journal is intimate and precious.82

In referring to this letter, Kaufman seemed to express his joy at standing between Zion and Siberia.

Conclusion In the historiography of European Jewry,‘Jewish’ languages have been highlighted as the media for the development of Jewish nationalisms, including Zionism and Bundism. Indeed, Jewish nationalists have emphasized the significance of Jewish languages: for Zionists, Hebrew; for Bundists, Yiddish.83 Symbolically, these languages no doubt played an important role, but functionally, they did not necessarily do so. As we have seen, Zionism was one way for Russian Jews to make their lives secure in their environment. Russian media were important

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

241

sources of information about developments outside the Jewish world, enabling Jews to contextualize their nationalism. Moreover, Zionists expressed their nationalism in Russian media, thereby making connections with other Russophone Jews. Siberian Zionists did not think of evacuating every Jew in the empire to Palestine, but rather assumed that Jews would continue to live in the empire while they laid the foundations of a Jewish ‘nation’ in Palestine. The collapse of the empire destroyed the political framework in which such media operated. However, the connection with Russian Jews as well as Jews in Palestine – both imagined and actual – already established through Russian media outlived the end of the empire. Although their identity as Russian Jews was now transplanted eastwards, they did not totally abandon Siberia. While they reinforced their Jewish identity through their contribution to Jewish settlements in Palestine, they also continued to be connected with other Russian Jews who experienced pogroms and with those who remained in Siberia, isolated from the rest of the Jewish world. In standard Zionist historiography, these Zionists might be defined as ‘Russified Jews’, but they were by no means assimilated into the Russian population. Rather, their use of Russian enabled them to acquire a certain sense of provinciality, which was not merely self-contained in Harbin but was a complex mix of Russian, Siberian-turned-Far Eastern and Jewish social spaces and ties. This provinciality was inseparable from their involvement in Zionism. Their sense of contributing to the Zionist project helped maintain their Jewish identity in this geographically isolated city within the Jewish world, and being Zionist, in their understanding at least, obliged them to stay in Harbin, the intersection of Zion and the Russian/Siberian Jews.

Notes 1 2 3

4

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), Chapter 4. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 62. For an overview of Russian Jewish history, see, for example, Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010–12), and Benjamin Nathans, ‘The Jews’, in Dominic Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, pp. 184–201 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Yosef Salmon, ‘The emergence of a Jewish collective consciousness in Eastern Europe during the 1860s and 1870s’, AJS Review 16, no. 1–2 (1991): 107–32.

242 5

6

7 8

9

10

11 12

13 14 15

Publishing in Tsarist Russia For such Russian policy toward Jews and the reaction to it by Russified Jews, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Yehuda Slutsky, Ha-’itonut ha-yehudit-rusit be-me’ah ha-tesha’-’esreh (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1970), p. 10. For 1900–18, see Yehuda Slutsky, Ha-‘itonut ha-yehuditrusit be-me’ah ha-‘esrim, 1900-1918 (Tel Aviv: Ha-agudah leheker toldot hayehudim, ha-makhon le-heker ha-tefutsot, 1978). Slutsky, Ha-‘itonut ha-yehudit-rusit be-me’ah ha-‘esrim. Taro Tsurumi, Roshia shionizumu-no sozoryoku: yudayajin, teikoku, paresuchina (The Imagination of Russian Zionism: Jews, Empire, and Palestine) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2012). See also Taro Tsurumi, ‘Was the East less rational than the West? The meaning of “nation” for Russian Zionism in its “imagined context” ’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 14, no. 3 (2008): 361–94; Taro Tsurumi, ‘Jewish liberal, Russian conservative: Daniel Pasmanik between Zionism and the anti-Bolshevik White movement’, Jewish Social Studies 21, no. 1 (2015): 151–80. Dmitrii Elyashevich, ‘A Note on the Jewish Press and Censorship during the First Russian Revolution’, in Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (eds), The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, p. 54 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). For the censorship of publications in the Russian Empire, see also Dmitrii Elyashevich, Pravitel’stvennaia politika i evreiskaia pechat’ v Rossii, 1797–1917: Ocherki istorii tsenzury (St Petersburg: Mosty Cultury, 1999). An early version of the part hereafter appears in my chapter in the Japanese volume: Taro Tsurumi, ‘Sozo-no nettowaku: Shiberia/Kyokuto yudayajin-niokeru aidentyityi-no autososhingu’, in Mikio Wakabayashi, Toshiki Sato and Shinya Tateiwa (eds), Shakai-ga arawareru toki, pp. 291–323 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2018). Michael Beizer, ‘Restoring courage to Jewish hearts: Frank Rosenblatt’s mission in Siberia in 1919’, East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 1(2009): 35–56, p. 37. Beizer, ‘Restoring courage’, p. 38. See also Vladimir Yulievich Rabinovich and Liubov Sergeevna Kletnova, ‘A Jew or a Siberian? Siberian Jews as an Ethnocultural Type (Irkutsk, the Second Half of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries)’, in Waldemar Szczerbiński and Katarzyna Kornacka-Sareło (eds), Jews in Eastern Europe: Ways of Assimilation, pp. 60–82 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History (New York: Trident Press, 1964), p. 114. Evreiskaia zhizn’ (Hereinafter ‘EZh’) 1 (14 February 1919): 3. L. V. Kal’mina, ‘Sionizm v sibiri v 1910-1920-kh godakh’, in Problemy evreiskoi istorii materialy nauchnoi konferentsii tsentra Sefer po iudaike (2009). Liliia Kal’mina indicates that while Siberian Zionism was a spiritual movement in 1917, after 1919

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36

243

it became a classic form of political Zionism, that is, Zionism seeking exodus. However, she did not examine the Zionist movement under the Kolchak regime, during which Evreiskaia zhizn’ was published. Simon Rabinovitch, ‘Russian Jewry goes to the polls: An analysis of Jewish voting in the all-Russian constituent assembly elections of 1917’, East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 2 (2009): 207. A. Mendel’son, ‘Izbiratel’nye kampanii’, EZh 13 (23 May 1919): 6. Beizer, ‘Restoring courage’, p. 38. M. A. Novomeysky, My Siberian Life (London: Max Parrish, 1956). Compare the first issue of the weekly with the last three issues in 1920. Irkutssk biulleteni 1 (31 December 1918), 3 (17 January 1919). A. Yebzerov, ‘Ha-itonut ha-tsiyonit be-sibir’, in Ktsir: kovets la-korot ha-tnua ha-tsiyonit be-rosiah, beit (Tel-Aviv: Masada, 1972), pp. 63–75. ‘Posle bol’shevikov (Pis’mo iz Permi)’, EZh 10–11 (9 May 1919): 22–3. N. S., ‘Ocherednoi navet’, EZh 17 (20 June 1919): 3–5. M. Gorskii, ‘Novaia volna’, EZh 34 (15 October 1919): 3. ‘M. Gorskii’ is Novomeysky’s pen name. See Yebzerov, ‘Ha-itonut’, p. 74. M. Gorskii, ‘K momentu’, EZh 2 (30 January 1920): 4; M. Gorskii, ‘Pered novymi ispytaniiami’, Evreiskaia zhizn’ 3 (20 February 1920): 3–4. EZh 1 (14 February 1919): 3–5. GIG, ‘Obshchinnyi s’ezd’, EZh 1 (14 February 1919): 16. G. Gitel’son, ‘ “Inorodtsy” ’, EZh 7 (28 March 1919): 4–6. M. G., ‘Stavka na istreblenie’, EZh 25 (15 August 1919): 3–4. Z. Sh. [Z. I. Shkundin], ‘K vyboram v gorodskiia samoupravleniia’, EZh 4–5 (13 March 1919): 7–8. The weekly defined the Kadet Party as reactionary, and its Jews considered only their own class interests as bourgeois. See Z. Sh. and N. S., ‘Sovremennyi blok’, EZh 18 (27 June 1919): 4–5. ‘K vyboram v irk. gorod. dumu’, EZh 10–11 (9 May 1919): 23, 31. According to the report in the paper, the turnout rate was 22 per cent. The Socialists won 40 per cent; Union of Homeowners, 30 per cent; Kadets, 25 per cent; and the National Minority Bloc, 5 per cent. The distribution of the seats was not in line with the distribution of the popular vote: Socialists 40 per cent, Homeowners 55 per cent, Kadets 5 per cent and no seats for the Bloc. See ‘Itogi vyborov v gorodskuiu dumu’, EZh 15 (6 June 1919): 19. In the section ‘Khronika evreiskoi zhizni’, EZh 16 (20 June 1919): 12. Z. Sh., ‘Shag vpered’, EZh 24 (8 August 1919): 3. For this meeting, see Beizer, ‘Restoring courage’, pp. 43–4. Rosenblatt, who was born in Ukraine in 1882 and emigrated to New York in 1903, was not a Zionist but a Bundist and, from 1914 to 1916, served as the general secretary of the Arbayter Ring (Workmen’s Circle).

244

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

37 Z. Sh., ‘Shag vpered’, p. 3. The paper ran another article on the details of this meeting. See ‘Predstavitel’ amerikanskogo evreiskogo komiteta pomoshchi zhertvam voiny d-r Rzenblat i admiral Kolchaka’, EZh 24 (8 August 1919): 8–10. 38 Z. Sh., ‘Za polgoda’, EZh 26 (22 August 1919): 3. 39 For example, G. Gitel’son, ‘Pogromy’, EZh 4–5 (13 March 1919): 4–5; M. Gorskii, ‘Protesty’, EZh 6 (21 March 1919): 3–4. In the second half of the paper, there often appeared a section on pogroms, which not only covered details of these episodes but also protest meetings in Siberia and the Far East. For example, ‘Pogromnaia volna v Pol’she i Galitsii’, EZh 4–5 (13 March 1919): 14–18. 40 Iokhanan, ‘Itogi i perspektivy’, EZh 26 (22 August 1919): 4–5. 41 Iokhanan, ‘Itogi i perspektivy’, p. 5. 42 Iokhanan, ‘Tarbut v Sibiri’, EZh 35 (24 October 1919): 6–9. 43 At this point, my conclusion contradicts Kal’mina’s conclusion. See note 15. 44 Tsurumi, Roshia shionizum. 45 Z. Sh., ‘Gosudarstvennyi masshtab’, EZh 18 (17 June 1919): 3–4. 46 M. Gorskii, ‘Posle perevorota’, EZh 1 (16 January 1920): 3–5; M. Novomeiskii, ‘Grazhdanin redactor’, EZh 3 (20 February 1920): 11–12. 47 Novomeysky, My Siberian Life, p. 322. 48 Yevzerov also left Siberia and temporarily moved to Harbin, where he founded the Zionist weekly Sibir’-Palestina. In 1921, he settled in Palestine. See ‘Aleksandr Yevserov’, in Entsiklopedyah le-halutse ha-yishuv u-vonav, vol. 3 (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat rishonim, 1971), p. 1348. 49 For an overview of the Zionist movement in China and especially its contribution to the entire Zionist project, see Yossi Katz, ‘The Jews of China and their contribution to the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century’, Middle Eastern Studies 46, no. 4 (2010): 543–54. 50 Although around the middle of 1926 the publication was renamed Evreiskaia zhizn’, Sibir’-Palestina continued to be concurrently used as an alternate name. 51 Abraham Kaufman, ‘Ha-itonut ha-tsionit be-mizrakh ha-rakhok’, in Ktsir: kovets la-korot ha-tenua ha-tsionit be-rosiah, beit (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1972), pp. 79, 81–2. 52 The background of this episode is unknown. 53 Kaufman, ‘Ha-itonut ha-tsionit’, p. 76. 54 Zvia Shichman-Bowman, ‘The construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the origin of the Harbin Jewish community, 1898–1931’, in Jonathan Goldstein (ed.), The Jews of China, vol. 1: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, pp. 187–99 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). 55 Boris Bresler, ‘Harbin’s Jewish community, 1898–1958: Politics, prosperity, and adversity’, in Jonathan Goldstein (ed.), The Jews of China, vol. 1: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, p. 203 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). For the formation

Jewish Nationalism in the Russian Language

56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

70

71 72

245

and activities of the Harbin Jewish community, see also Viktoriia Romanova, Vlast’ i evrei na Dal’nem Vostoke Rossii: istoriia vzaimootnoshenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.–20-e gody XX v.) (Krasnoiarsk: Klaretianum, 2001), pp. 192–236. The Chinese government was particularly wary of nationalist movements involving Russian citizens. Such organizations required government approval and were heavily taxed. Organizations that could prove they were authorized by the British government were exempt from these requirements (see Katz, ‘The Jews of China’, p. 548). Presumably, the use of English in the masthead may have reflected these circumstances. Sibir’-Palestina (hereinafter SP) 1 (1 October 1920): 3–4. SP 7 (12 November 1920): 4. SP 1 (1 January 1921): 3–4. SP 8 (19 November 1920): 3–4. SP 14 (10 April 1921): 17. For other examples, see Romanova, Vlast’ i evrei na Dal’nem Vostoke Rossii, p. 223. M. A. Novomeiskii, ‘Iz pis’ma M. A. Novomeiskogo’, SP 10 (10 December 1920): 7. Izrael’ Kouen, ‘Printsipy i predpolozheniia’, SP 10 (10 December 1920): 11. ‘Palestinskoe Soveshchanie Dal’nego Vostoka’, SP 4–5 (28 January 1920): 16. I. Klin, ‘Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskiie osnovy kolonizatsii Palestiny’, SP 9 (4 March 1921): 3–4. A contemporary historian also indicates that in the 1920s capital investment was lacking compared to the number of immigrants needed for the nation-building project. See Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2012), p. 105. ‘Tsirkuliar No. 5 Dal’nevostochnogo Raionnogo Biuro Sion. Organizatsii’, SP 26 (10 July 1921): 15. I. Klin, ‘Dve zhertvy’, SP 11 (24 June 1921): 4. Ieguda Leibovich, ‘Finansisty’, SP 29 (3 August 1921): 5. Dal’nevostochnoe Raionnoe Biuro Sionistskoi Organizatsii (Far Eastern Regional Bureau of the Zionist Organization), ‘K evreiam Dal’nego Vostoka’, SP 32 (26 August 1921): 4. SP 11 (17 December 1920): 3–4. Besides approaches to Palestine development, American Zionists and European Zionists quarrelled over several issues, including the governance of the Zionist Organization. The differences of approach over Palestine’s development became evident, especially when Americans began to work directly in Palestine in 1919. See Ben Halpern, A Clash of Heroes: Brandeis, Weizmann, and American Zionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 218. Borukh Tsukerman, ‘Sionistskaia delegatsiia i amerikanskoe evreistvo’, SP 17–18 (9 May 1921): 6. Ia. Budnevich, ‘Itogi’, SP 20 (23 May 1921): 3–4.

246 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83

Publishing in Tsarist Russia ‘Palestinskoe Soveshchanie Dal’nego Vostoka’, SP 4–5 (28 January 1921): 17. ‘Pis’ma iz Sibiri’, SP 26 (30 January 1922): 20. ‘Pis’ma iz Tomska’, SP 33 (18 August 1922): 19. SP 3 (20 January 1922): 15. SP 8 (24 February 1922): 16. SP 8, p. 17. For the Harbin Jewish community’s aid to pogrom victims and Sibir’ Palestina’s coverage of this topic in other issues of the journal, see Romanova, Vlast’ i evrei na Dal’nem Vostoke Rossii, pp. 219–21. ‘Vozzvanie o Palestinskom Rabochem Fonde’, SP 25 (4 July 1921): 16. A. Izgur, ‘Keren Gaisod i Dal’nii Vostok’, SP 24 (12 June 1922): 5. A. Kaufman, ‘Obshchina i stroitel’stvo Palestiny’, SP 17–18 (9 May 1921): 3–4. Dr K. (Kaufman), ‘ “Sibir’-Palestina” No. 100’, SP 38 (22 September 1922): 4. To name only a few works on languages in Jewish nationalism, on Hebrew, see Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); David Aberbach, Jewish Cultural Nationalism: Origins and Influences (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2008). On Yiddish, see Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement (New York: Shapolsky, 1987); David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

10

Conclusion: A history of a soft infrastructure Taro Tsurumi

The expansion of the use of Russian in the Russian Empire, paralleled by the development of Russian publishing, might be seen as a process of Russification, which was expected to increase the unity of the empire. But as indicated in the Introduction, the government did not have a consistent policy on Russification. Some people felt deeply oppressed by the Russification policy, while others were less vulnerable to it. Our book pays attention to the fact that not only did the policy of Russification change over time, but Russian – or to be more specific, the use of Russian – was itself changing and had its own social history. Among several kinds of linguistic activity, we have focused on publishing, through which we can trace the vestiges of that history. The chapters in this volume inquire especially into how Russian literary culture changed over time and how people were involved (or not involved) in publishing in Russian. Broadly speaking, our book makes the following three arguments. First, the Russian language, as well as its literary culture, was in the making until the nineteenth century, just like a process of infrastructure development. As we see in the Introduction and Toriyama’s chapter, the reform of written Russian and the enrichment of Russian linguistic culture through the translation of foreign sources started as state projects. Toriyama demonstrates that those involved in the state project attempted to make Russian useful for a broad range of enlightenment activity. This sort of process is analogous to the development of infrastructure such as railroads and communication networks. As linguistic culture as well as publications are movable and deeply embedded in the human mind, the publishing system could be defined as a ‘soft infrastructure’ as opposed to a ‘hard infrastructure’ (e.g. railroads and communication networks).1 Both were available to a broad range of people and could be exploited for a variety of purposes, enhancing human interaction. Reitblat indicates that as the literature of the Russian-speaking world blossomed, literary figures as well as publishers 247

248

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

and school teachers attempted to establish the classics of Russian literature. This shows that the creation of the core of Russian literary culture was a result of interaction among those involved in Russian publishing. Thus, the history of Russian literature should not be limited to purely literary activity. Kaizawa further demonstrates that the 1880s, which has been defined as a period of stagnation for Russian literature, was a period in which the Russian publishing system expanded as far as Western Europe with the worldwide boom in Russian literature. As this concluding chapter of Part 1 finds, the Russian publishing system now established itself as a soft infrastructure that attracted various kinds of people for the exchange of knowledge and arts. In Part 2, we present the second argument of our book: that the Russian publishing system was an autonomous field with its own dynamics. With various kinds of people involved, it was not necessarily controlled by the Tsarist policy of Russification: people with access to the Russian publishing system could make use of it for their own benefit. Just like hard infrastructures, which had both positive and negative effects on society, the Russian publishing system impacted in various ways on the people in the empire. Needless to say, because it was the language of the ruler, it gradually replaced local languages in non-Russian regions, especially if these regions were disadvantaged politically, economically and/or culturally. Nevertheless, it could hardly be said that Russian publishing controlled the social order in a unilateral way. First of all, as Tatsumi makes clear, people from a variety of backgrounds engaged in publishing – indeed it wasn’t even Russians who initially led popular publishing in Russia. As an infrastructure, it was open to Russian religious nationalists as well. Inoue shows that although Russian publishing more or less contributed to the decline of publishing in the ethnic language of the Kalmyks, the newly established connection with Russian academic institutions enabled this people to inherit their tradition. Moreover, the connection with the Russian centre paved the way for resumption of pilgrimages to Tibet and, at the same time, created a new theology associated with the Tsar. Ross’s chapter on Tatar Muslim publishing delineates the limit of Russian publishing as well as the Russian language in general. While Kalmyks gained certain benefits from the use of Russian publishing, Tatar Muslims were intellectually affiliated with the Islamic world and attracted to Arabic, Turkic and Persian publishing, including manuscripts, although the Russian publishing system influenced their way of publishing. This contrasts with the ‘baptized Tatars’ in Sakurama’s chapter. Wishing to be associated with Orthodox Russians, their clergymen wrote in Russian, distinguishing themselves from their Muslim co-ethnics. Although their conversion to Orthodoxy generations earlier was

Conclusion: A history of a soft infrastructure

249

effected by Tsarist rule in the region, once they acquired a unique identity as ‘baptized Tatars’ or ‘Kreshens’, Russian media provided them with a space in between. These stories suggest that, although Russification was not completed, the Russian publishing system had now matured as a soft infrastructure which was available for those who needed it but was not compulsory for those who did not. The most important difference between the historical perspective focusing on Tsarist Russification and that of the present volume focusing on the soft infrastructure is that, while the traditional perspective mostly assumes coercion from above, the present book assumes multi-directional communication and interaction. Even though the state launched the Russian publishing system, once it was established, the top-down flow of knowledge could sometimes be reversed. Kalmyks and Kreshens, who were initially merely objects of Russian study, began to make themselves heard in the same media, although, of course, we should not underestimate the asymmetry of the power relations between these minorities and the Russian rulers. The third point that our book deals with, in Part 3, emerges after this empirewide Russian publishing system was established. As a soft infrastructure, the publishing system, although somewhat dependent on hard infrastructures such as paper supply and barriers such as censorship, was flexible enough to grow rapidly beyond the authority’s expectations or be transplanted to new soil. From the Russian government’s viewpoint, the publishing system could suddenly threaten the government or liberate itself from the empire and be used outside the imperial context. Stockdale shows that while news coverage of the war could stimulate people’s sense of nationhood, as their desire to receive detailed information from the front increased, the authorities found it difficult to limit the range of that information. Once the government was replaced, information that would have been inconvenient for the Tsarist government now permeated the same media; this, in turn, might have stimulated people’s antagonism to the government. The Russophone Zionist activists featured in my chapter initially made use of Russian media as native residents of Siberia to make a connection to the White regime as well as other Jews in the empire. As that empire finally collapsed, however, they brought the soft infrastructure into the Russian and Chinese Far East, where the Russian Zionist newspaper became associated with their provincial identity as Russian Jews in the Far East. At that stage, except for Jews remaining in Russia, their Russian medium became estranged from Russia. In the final analysis, the focus on Russian publishing as a soft infrastructure provides us with a heuristic scope in history. Just as the railway system involved

250

Publishing in Tsarist Russia

a diverse range of people and various kinds of networks, through the history of Russian publishing, we have discovered what we would not have found out, for example, with a focus on ‘ethnic groups’. The loci of Kalmyks, Kreshens and Siberian-turned-Far-Eastern Jews in this book – people in between – can most thoroughly be traced through Russian media rather than their ‘ethnic-language’ media. Furthermore, through the focus on Russian literature as publications, we have observed the process by which specific works achieve fame as classics or are circulated worldwide. Readers were influenced not only by the content of each work but also by the choices of critics and educators, leading to the creation of the list of classics. Finally, the maturity of the publishing system paved the way for the proliferation of Russian literature into the West. Through the wartime media, which stood between the authorities such as the government and the Church and the ordinary people, we have become conscious of the gaps between them, and of when a people’s desire for information can exceed the authorities’ ability to control it. The focus on publishers rather than ethno-linguistic groups also reveals the extent and connections of ‘imagined communities’. The history of Muslim Tatars’ publishing shows that they never expressed themselves solely in Tatar but continued to acquire knowledge in Turkic and Persian. The change in the balance between these languages was an indicator of the process of community imaging. As a soft infrastructure relying on the humanities such as language, publishing did not leave concrete vestiges to the extent that railways did. Nevertheless, it was able to emerge, proliferate and then fade away, stimulating human minds and perhaps changing the course of history. The history of publishing, therefore, deserves further inquiry.

Notes 1

The term ‘soft infrastructure’ can be found sporadically in social science works, especially in the fields of economics and development studies. However, no standard definition has been set, and each work using this term defines it loosely. See, for example, William A. Niskanen, ‘The Soft Infrastructure of a Market Economy’, Cato Journal 11, no. 2 (1991): 233–8; Chris Benner, ‘Learning Communities in a Learning Region: The Soft Infrastructure of Cross-Firm Learning Networks in Silicon Valley’, Environment and Planning 35, no. 10 (2003): 1809–30; Brij Kothari and Joe Takeda, ‘Same Language Subtitling for Literacy: Small Change for Colossal Gains’, in Subhash Bhatnagar and Robert Schwar (eds), Information and Communication Technology for Development: Cases from India,

Conclusion: A history of a soft infrastructure

251

pp. 130–51 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000). Within the definition of this term, Niskanen includes the legal system, the accounting system and cultural attitudes in the market economy; Benner includes the formal activities of professional associations that facilitate learning in the Silicon Valley labour market; and Kothari and Takeda include literacy in developments in information and communication technologies.

252

Further reading Bank, B. Izuchenie chitatelei v Rossii (XIX v.). Moscow: Kniga, 1969. Belogurova, T. A. Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat’ i problemy vnutrennei zhizni strany v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–fevral’ 1917). Smolensk: Gody, 2005. Brooks, Jeffrey. ‘Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics’, in S. Vucinich, I. Banac, J. G. Ackerman and R. Szporluk (eds), Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich, pp. 315–34. Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1981. Budnitskii, Oleg. Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920. Translated by Timothy J. Portice. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Byford, Andy. Literary Scholarship in Late Imperial Russia: Rituals of Academic Institutionalisation. Oxford: Legenda, 2007. Choldin, Marianna Tax. A Fence Around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas Under the Czars. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985. Debreczeny, Paul. Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Dubin B. V. and Zorkaya, N. A. ‘Ideya “klassiki” i ee sotsial’nye funktsii’, in B. V. Dubin (ed.), Ocherki po sotsiologii kul’tury, pp. 203–44. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017. Frank, Allen J. Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education and the Paradox of Islamic Prestige. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Gaudin, Corinne, ‘Circulation and Production of News and Rumor in Rural Russia during World War I’, in Murrray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks and Melissa K. Stockdale (eds), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–1922, Book 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory, pp. 55–72. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014. Geraci, Robert P. Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Guchinova, Elza-Bair. The Kalmyks. Translated by David C. Lewis. London: Routledge, 2006. Iskhakov, Radik. Ocherki istorii traditsionnoi kul’tury i religioznosti tatar-kriashen. Kazan: Tsentr innovatsionnykh tekhnologii, 2014. Karimullin, A. G. U istokov tatarskoi knigi: ot nachala vozniknovleniia do 60-x godov XIX veka. Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1992. Kefeli, Agnès Nilufer, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy and Literacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.

253

254

Further Reading

Khodarkovsky, Michael. Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1711. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Kolonitskii, Boris I. ‘The Press and the Revolution’, in Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev and William G. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 381–90. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Levitt, Marcus C. Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Lohr, Eric. ‘The Russian Press and the “Internal Peace” at the beginning of World War I’, in Troy R. E. Paddock (ed.), A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion, and Newspapers in the Great War, pp. 91–114. Westport, CT: Prager, 2004. Maksimov, Konstantin M. Kalmykia in Russia’s Past and Present National Policies and Administration System. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008. Marker, Gary. Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. McReynolds, Louise. The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass Circulation Press. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Moeller-Sally, Stephen. Gogol’s Afterlife: The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Moss, Kenneth. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Nathans, Benjamin. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Offord, Derek, Ryazanova-Clarke, Lara, Rjéoutski, Vladislav and Argent, Gesine (eds). French and Russian in Imperial Russia: Language Use among the Russian Elite, vols. 1–2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Perlmann, Moshe. ‘Razsvet 1860–61: The Origins of the Russian Jewish Press’, Jewish Social Studies 24 (1962): 162–83. Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010–12. Reitblat, Abram. Ot Bovy k Bal’montu i drugie rabot po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009. Ruud, Charles A. Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851–1934. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Schorkowitz, Dittmar. Staat und Nationalitäten in Russland: der Integrationsprozess der Bujaten und Kalmücken, 1822–1925. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001. Tsyrempilov, Nikolai V. Buddizm i imperiia: buriatskaia buddiiskaia obshchina v Rossii (XVIII– nach. XX v.). Ulan-Ude: IMBT SO RAN, 2013. Tuna, Mustafa. Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire and European Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Val’dman, Batiia. Russko-evreiskaia zhurunalistika (1860–1914). Riga: Tsentr izucheniia iudaiki latviiskogo universiteta, 2008.

Further Reading

255

Vdovina, A. and Lejbova, R. (eds). Acta Slavica Estonica IV: Hrestomatijnye teksty: russkaya pedagogicheskaya praktika XIX v. i poehticheskij literaturnyj kanon. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2013. Werth, Paul W. At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga–Kama Region, 1827–1905. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Zhivov, Victor. Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Translated by Marcus Levitt. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009.

256

Index ʿAbdullah bin Sulayman 160 Abramtsevo colony 95 Académie Française 18, 29–31 Academy of Russian 31 Academy of Science 5, 17, 29, 30, 31, 60, 97, 134 Agricultural Committee 131 agricultural immigrants 130 Alchevskaya, Khrystyna 74 Alekseev, Ivan 26, 28 Alexander II 69 Alexander III 58, 69, 107 All-Russian Legislative Commission 23, 24 Altai 125 American Joint Distribution Committee 232 Amirkhan, Fatih. 160 Amirkhanov, H.usayn 144 Anderson, Benedict 1, 95, 197, 214, 225 animist 173 anthologies 46, 47, 54, 102, 103, 203 anti-Semitism 231, 233 Apanaev, Yunus 151 apostasy 178, 179, 182, 183 Appadurai, Arjun 95 Arab 237 Arabic 141–3, 145–8, 151, 153–63 Arkhangelsky, A. 77, 82 Armenians 128 Asia 24, 124, 127, 133, 142 see also Central Asia Asiatic Press 142, 143, 148–51, 154, 157 Astrakhan 105, 124, 128–32, 136, 137 Baaza-Bakshi 127 Badmaev, Mikhail 129 Bashkirs 128 Batiushkov, Konstantin 46, 50–3, 55 Batur-Ubashi Tumen 136 Bazunovs 99 Beccaria 18, 25

Belinskii, Vissaarion 49, 51–3, 55–7, 61 Bélisaire 19–22, 24 Belorussia 233, 239 Bergmann, Benjamin 125 Berkovsky, Naum 82 Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Alexander 49, 51 Bhallika 136 Bible, the 28, 45, 127 Bigiev, Musa 160 British and Foreign Bible Society 127 Blavatsky, Helena 135 Boborykin, Peter 53 Bobrovnikov, Aleksei 125, 127, 129 Bogdanovich, Ippolit 43, 45–7, 50–2 Bogolepov, Nikolai 76 Bolsheviks 9, 118, 212, 213, 228–30, 234 Book of Joseph 146, 150 Bormanzhinov, Monko 127 Boulogne, Pieter 80 Brandes, Georg 80, 81 Bitepazh, Ferdinand 102 Brockhaus, Eduard 103 Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold 103 Brockhaus-Efron 99, 103, 118 Brooks, Jeffrey 2, 75, 199 Bubi, ʿAbdullah 160 Buddha 126, 134–6 Buddhist Asia 124 followers 126 monks 126, 129, 131 Bukhara 160 Bulghar 160 Bundists 228, 235, 240 Burashev, ʿAbdullah 148 Bürger, Peter 85 Burke, Peter 16 Burkhanov, Sayyid 150 Byford, Andy 77 canonization of writers 45, 46, 70, 71, 75–9, 82, 83, 85, 86

257

258 capital cultural 48 wealth 226, 237, 238 Casanova, Pascal 86 Catherine II 5, 15–26, 28, 30–2, 42, 52, 136, 147, 148, 174 celebrations of the anniversaries of writers 59 censorship 69, 126, 142, 161, 199, 209–11, 212–14, 227 evasion of 161 internal (self) 60 laws on 100 and Russian classics 60 in wartime 200, 210 census, 1897 129, 226 Central Asia 127, 133, 134, 142, 146, 148 Central Eurasia 123, 126 Cervantes 79 Charton, Édouard 97 Chechens 128 Chekhov, Anton 69, 73, 84, 103 children books for 54, 97, 158, 163 education of 128, 149, 159 as a motif 201 and Russian writers 46, 74 Chinese Eastern Railway 234 Chingisid principle 137 cholera 129 Christianization 108, 172, 179 Chubanov, Arkad 132 Chulalongkorn (Rama V), the fifth monarch of Siam 135 Church Slavonic 1, 17, 19, 25, 28, 31 Chuvash 176, 178, 180–184 civil orthography 1 Civil War 118, 213, 227, 239 clergy(man) non-Russian (Tatar) 171–174, 176–8, 181–3, 185, 186 Russian 8, 104, 105, 117, 206 Collini, Stefan 85 Conversations-Lexikon 103 Courrière, Céleste 80 Crimea 112, 148 Dahl, Vladimir 5 Dalai Lama, the 13th 123, 134

Index Declaration of Religious Freedom 176, 182, 183 Derzhavin, Gavrila 45–7, 49–52, 55–7, 59, 60 dictionary 23, 25, 30–32, 41, 48, 127 Dictionary of the Russian Language 28, 31 Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française 18, 29, 30 Diderot, Denis 17, 19, 23 Die Gartenlaube 97 Die Zeit 238 Dinershtein, Efim 73 Dmitriev, Ivan 45–47, 50, 51, 55 Don Cossack 124, 133 Don Cossack Regiment, the 1st 133 Dondukov, Emgen-Ubushi 130 Dorzhiev, Agvan 123, 135 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 52, 53, 61, 62, 69–71, 74, 76, 78–82, 103 Dubin, Boris 38, 49 Duma 78, 131, 201, 210, 227, 231 Dzhungar khanate 126 Edict of Ems 2 Efron, Ilya 99, 103, 118 elites 126, 153, 197, 203 Ellis, Havelock 82 Encyclopédie 15, 18, 19 Enlightenment 15–17, 19, 21–4, 26–8, 31, 75, 112, 176, 185, 203, 226 see also haskalah Eparkhiar’nye Vedomosti 104 ethnic identity 172–4, 186 intellectuals 172, 186 Europeans 126, 152, 181 Evgeny Onegin 78 Evreiskaia nedelia 227 Evreiskaia zhizn’ (Irkutsk) 228–34 Faculty of Medicine 129 Fakhreddinov, Rizaeddin 144, 160 Farid al-Dīn ʿAttar 145, 157 Fayzkhanov, H.usayn 158 Fedorov, Ivan 104 Ferry, Jules 76 Fet, Afanasy 53 Fonvizin, Denis 32, 43, 47, 51–3, 57, 103

Index Frederick II 18, 25 Frolinskii, Kosma 26, 27 Fuks, Karl 158, 181 Gakhaev, Mikhail (Dordzhi Ubushaev) 130 Galakhov, Alexey 54, 56, 57 Galicia 232, 233 Garnett, Constance 81 Gautama Buddha 134, 136 Gavriil, Archbishop 20, 21, 28 Gazenkampf, Mikhail 131, 137 Gegenwartsarbeit 233 Gelug school 125 General Conference of Representatives from Smaller Peoples 176, 186 General Staff 56, 133, 135 Gervinus, Georg 83 Goethe 78, 83, 84 Gogol jubilee in 1909 78 Gogol, Nikolai 37, 51–3, 56–8, 60, 61, 73, 75, 80–2 Golstunskii, Konstantin 125 Goncharov, Ivan 52, 53, 62, 81, 103 Gorky, Maxim 69 Granats 99 Grazhdanin 130, 131, 212 Great Reforms 72, 74, 99, 104 Grech, Nikolay 41, 48, 52, 53 Griboedov, Alexander 51–3, 57, 60, 103 Gudkov, Lev 38 Gymnasium teachers 57 Haft-i yak 149, 151 Hague Conventions of 1899 136 Hajj 133 Halutzim 237, 238 Hanafi 145, 151, 153 Harbin 227, 234–6, 238, 239, 241 haskalah 226 Hebrew 127, 226, 227, 233, 237, 240 Hettner, Hermann 83 Hins, Eugène 81 History of Derben Oirats 136 Hobsbawm, Eric 84 Hohendahl, Peter 84 Holy Synod 104, 175 Homer 18, 78 hudum 125

259

Ibneeva, G. V. 20 Illustrated London News 97, 114 illustrated magazine 59, 72, 97, 100, 102, 105, 107, 108, 112, 114, 199 Illustrirte Zeitung 97 Il’minskii, Nikolai 172, 175–7, 179, 181–3 Il’minskii system 175, 176, 179, 180, 182 Imperial Duma 131 Imperial Lycee in Moscow 131 Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society 107 Imperial Russian Geographical Society 133, 134 Ingram, Herbert 97 inorodtsy 21, 129, 131, 159, 178 International Literary Congress in Paris 80 interpreters 128, 161 Irkutsk 228, 229, 231 Ish.aqi, ʿAyaz 160 Islam 171, 174, 175, 179, 182 education 143, 156, 158–60 historians of 142, 160 law books 143, 145, 151, 151, 158 revival of 147 scholar of 148 Islamic revival 147 Israel 229, 234 Israel Messenger 237 Izdatel’skoe delo 118 Izmailov, Alexander 51, 52, 70 Jangar Epic 124, 125 Jerusalem 27, 29, 107, 132 Jews 141, 203, 226–41 Jones, W. Gareth 17, 23 Jusdanis, Gregory 86 Kabardas 128 Kalmyk(s) 123–34, 137 languages 128 nobles 128, 129 steppe 125, 127, 128–30, 132 studies 126, 127 Kangyur 132 Karamzin, Nikolai 5, 43–47, 50–2, 55–7, 59, 60 Karashar 134 Karbasnikov, N. P. 99 Karimullin, Abrar 2

260 Kaspari, A. A. 99 Katkov, Mikhail 97, 131 Kaufman, Abraham 234, 237, 240 Kazakh Steppe 142, 148 Kazakhs 128 Kazan as a place of publication 143, 148–151, 156, 157, 161, 162, 177 (see also Reports of Kazan Diocese) as a centre of Kalmyk culture 127, 129 as a centre of Tatar culture 143–4, 147 and Catherine 20, 24 Derzhavin’s momument in 59 and Orthodxy 173–178 (see also Reports of Kazan Diocese) Kazan Provisional Committee on Printing Affairs (Kazanskii vremennyi komitet po delam pechati) 161 Kazan Spiritual Academy 125 Kazan Teachers’ Seminary for the Aliens 129 Kazan Theological Academy 76, 127, 129, 173, 175, 177, 178 Kazan University Kazan Federal University 144, 149 Kazan Imperial University 127, 153, 161, 175, 177 Kazan Veterinary school 129 Keil, Ernst 97 Keren Hayesod 237, 238 Kharkov 60, 74, 129 Khronika evreiskoi zhizni 228 Kipriyanov, Vasily 1 Kirkor, Adam 102 Knight, Charles 97 Kohn, Hans 227, 228 Kolchak, Alexander Vasilyevich (Admiral) 228–34 Koltsov A. 59, 60 Komarov M. 51 Körner, Friedrich 102 Korsh, Valentin 97 Kotvich, Vladislav 134 Kozitskii, Grigorii 19, 20, 25 Kozlov, Peter 52, 133, 134 Kreshen 183 see also Tatar, baptized Krylov, Ivan 43, 45–7, 50–2, 55–7, 59, 60

Index La revolución de la novela en Rusia 80 La Société Nouvelle 81 Lama of Don Kalmyks 127 Le Roman russe 80 Legislative Commission 20, 25 Leibov, Roman 56 Leipzig Book Fair 103 Lenin, Vladimir 115, 212 Lermontov, Mikhail 52, 53, 56–8, 60, 61, 69, 73, 75, 80, 103 Levitt, Marcus 17, 18, 78 Lhasa 133–6, 123, 126 L’Illustration 97 lingua franca 17, 31, 141 Literacy and education 25 literacy rate (or the increase of) 38, 59, 70–3, 100, 129, 158, 199, 204 Moscow Literacy Committee 59, 74, 208 Moscow Literacy Society 208 non-Russian literacy 143, 146, 149, 157–9, 162 Petersburg Literacy Committee 59, 74 Russian literacy in non-Russian regions 123, 124, 128, 142, 176, 182, 183, 185 Literary authorities of reviewers 50 classics 62, 70–86 criticism 43, 47, 52 lithographers 127 local beliefs 174, 184 Lomonosov, Mikhail 5, 43, 45–7, 50–2, 55–7, 59, 60, 103 London Missionary Society 127 Lower Volga steppe 123, 124, 126, 132, 137 lubki 96, 100, 204 Madariaga, Isabel de 16 Madrasa 149, 151, 153–6, 158–60, 161 Mahayana 126 Maikov, Apollon 43, 46, 51, 53 Maitreya 136 Maker, Gary 17 Malov, Evfimi (Evfimii) 158, 175, 177 maps 204, 207, 213 Marakuev, Vladimir 74 Mari 178, 179, 183–5

Index Marks, A. F. 73, 99, 100, 102, 103, 112 Marmontel, Jean-François 19, 20 Mecca 133 Medical Examiner Commission 129 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry 84 Meshcherskii, Prince Vladimir P. 130 Michael, Tsar of All Rus’ 136 Mikhailov-Iderov, Andre 130 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai K. 69 Military Medical Academy 135 Milyukov, Pavel 70 Ministers of State Domains 130 Ministry of War 211, 124 missionary activity 171–5, 177, 178, 180, 182, 184 modern values 128 Moguchaia Kuchka 95 Moldova 226 Mongolian 124, 125, 127, 134, 136, 137 Mongols 126 Montesquieu 15, 18, 22 Moravian Church 134 Moscow (as a place of publication) 20, 45, 49, 99, 104, 201, 203 Moscow City Duma 78 Moscow Literacy Committee 59, 74 Moscow University 41, 56, 77, 78, 97 Moskovskie Vedomosti 42, 97 mother language 176 Muhammadiyya 146 Mukhtas.ar al-Wiqāya 151 Murad, Mullah 152 Muslims 132, 141, 146, 149–51, 153–61, 163, 171–4, 176, 177, 182, 231 Nadson, Semyon 53 Nakaz 24, 25 Namkhaijamts, Zaya Pandita 125 Napoleon 78, 201 narratives (nationalist, patriotic) 96, 159, 197, 201, 214 National Community 195, 197, 205, 209, 213, 214 national identity 22, 75, 86, 95, 104, 197, 198, 214 Nauchnoe Obozrenie 115 Nekrasov, Nikolay 53, 62, 75 Nekrasova, Ekaterina 75 neo-Buddhism 135

261

newspapers 42, 59, 62, 72, 73, 95, 97, 101, 104, 124, 129, 130, 137, 162, 197, 199, 200, 202, 203, 207, 208, 211–13, 225, 235 increase in circulation of 72, 200 readers of 101, 195, 202, 212, 239, 240 Nezelenov, Alexander 76 Nicholai Academy of the General Staff 133 Nicholas I 69, 132 Nicholas II 78, 136, 162 Nietzsche, F. 81 Nikolaevich, Grand Duke Nikolai 132 Niva 73, 97, 98, 102, 106, 112, 195, 199, 202, 211 Nizhnyi Novgorod 208 Nogais 128 North Caucasus 127 Norzunov, Ovshe M. 123 Nov’ 101 Novoe Vremia 72, 100 Novomeysky, Moshe 229, 233, 234, 237, 240 Nurhaci, Khan of the Later Qing dynasty 136 Ochirov, Nomto 125 October Manifesto 142, 162 Office for the Affairs of the Newly Baptized (Kontora Novokreshchenskikh Del) 146, 147, 174 Oirat(s) 123–6, 136, 137 script 125, 127 written language 125 Oiratskie izvestiia 111 Oldenburg, Sergei 134 Omsk 232, 234, 239 Orenburg 144, 148, 152, 162, 174 Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly 147, 159 Orlov, Vladimir 19, 20, 22 Orthodox Church 21, 22, 28, 78, 104, 105, 176, 178 Orthodox journal 171, 178, 181 Ostrogorsky, Victor 75 Ostrovsky, Alexander 53, 60, 62, 81 Otechestvennye Zapiski 56, 96 Ottoman Empire 160 Ovla, Eelian 125

262 Padmasambhava 136 Palestine 106, 107, 227, 229–32, 234–41 pamphlets 203, 208, 213 Pardo Bazán, Emilia 80 Pavlenkov, Florenty 99 peasants and library 74, 208 literacy of 72, 100 as a motif 195, 197, 198, 204, 206, 209 and paper 155 publications for 73, 74, 96, 208 as a reader 107, 204, 206, 208 school for 74 Penny Magazine 97 Peredvizhniki 95 periodicals circulation of 202, 203, 205 numbers of 104, 105, 199, 200, 212 issuing of 97 Peter I 1, 5, 15, 19 Petersburg Literacy Committee 59, 74 Petrograd 49, 200, 228 see also St Petersburg pilgrimage 107, 126, 132–5 Pisemskii, Aleksey 53 pogrom 228, 229, 231–3, 236, 239, 241 Poland pogroms in 231–3 promotion of Russian culture in 58 translation of Russian classics in 81 Polenov, Aleksei 22, 25 Polevoi, Nikolai 41, 48–50, 51, 61 Polikarpov, Fedor 1 Popov, Alexander 127 Popov, Mikhail 27, 29 Popovitsky, Alexander 100, 105, 107, 108, 110, 115 Poppe, Nicholas N. 125 Posrednik publishing house 73, 74 Pozdneev, Aleksei 127 Prajnaparamita 126 print capitalism 95, 96, 101, 110, 117, 161, 197, 198 Priroda i Liudi 100, 110–12 Prosveshchenie 99 provinciality 225, 234, 241 Prugavin, Alexander 74 Przhevalʾskii, Nikolai M. 133

Index publishers non-Russian 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 117, 161, 162, 195 Russian 42, 49, 59, 61, 72, 73, 74, 96, 99, 100, 104, 108, 110, 117, 148, 177, 200, 204, 208, 211 Pugachev’s Revolt 152 Pushkin, Alexander 37, 49, 51–3, 55–7, 60, 1, 75–80 Pushkin Celebration of 1880 78 Pushkin Centennial Celebration in 1899 78 Pypin, Alexander 77, 82 Qing Empire 126, 134 Qurʾān 142, 145, 148–51, 153, 155, 157, 158 Rassvet 227 reading habits 141, 142, 157, 207 Reitbrat, Abram 72 relics of the Buddha (sarira) 135 Reports of Kazan Diocese 173, 177–9, 184–6 Revue de Belgique 81 Revue des Deux Mondes 80, 81 Risāla-i ʿAzīza 151, 157 Romanov, Mikhail 136 ROPiT (Russian Steam Navigation and Trading Company) 107 Rosenblatt, Frank 232 rotary printing press 3, 72, 73 Rubakin, Nikolai 72, 74 rural areas 59, 73, 74, 202 dwellers 195, 214 people 207, 208, 213 readers 211 Russian Academy 31 Russian imperial census of 1897 129 Russian Orientologists 125, 127, 134, 137 Russian Orthodox Church 104, 171–7, 179, 186 Russian Revolution of 1905 126, 142, 155, 161, 183, 199 of 1917 118, 124, 172, 176, 211, 235 and the press 211, 213 Russo-Japanese War 184, 195

Index St Petersburg (Petrograd) (as a place of publication) 46, 49, 99, 103, 110, 130, 134, 142, 143, 148, 151, 156, 157, 226 St Petersburg Imperial University 125 St Petersburg Theological Academy 105 St Petersburg’s Third Classical Gymnasium 105, 110 St Peterburgskie Vedomosti (SaintPeterburgskie Vedomosti) 42, 97 Sanskrit 126 Saratov 129 Sarepta 126, 127 Savashnikovs 99 Scherbatskoi, Fedor 134 Schiller, Friedrich 79, 83 Schmidt, Jacob 83, 127, 134 school curriculum (programm) 40, 57, 76 military 56 missonary (church) 174, 176, 178, 206 primary (elementary) 25, 59, 100, 128 readers (chrestomathy) 54 rural 73 for Russian language 160 secondary 56, 58, 61, 76 Sunday 74 system 55, 62 Selʾskii Vestnik 199, 204, 205 Semennikov, Vladimir 18, 19, 28 Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Peter 101, 133 Senate Press 148 Seton-Watson, Robert William 3 Shakespeare, William 78, 79, 83, 84 Shakhovskoy, D. 74 Shambhala 136 Shanghai 234, 237 Shchedrin, Nikolai (Saltykov, Mikhail) 53 Shekel 237 Shihab al-Din al-Marjani 144 Shnor, Johann Karl 147, 148 Shuvalov, Andrei 19–21 Siberia (as a place of publication) 112, 200 Sibirʾ-Palestina (Evreiskaia Zhiznʾ, Harbin) 234–40 Sidorovsky, Ivan 28 Slaveno-Russian 19, 32 Slutsky, Yehuda 226 Smirdin, A. 52, 53, 99

263

Smirnovsky, Peter 76 Social institution of literature 38, 50 Society of Lovers of Russian Letters 78 Society Striving for the Translation of Foreign Books 15 Soikin, Peter 99, 100, 110, 112, 115 soldiers, Russian 202, 204, 205, 212 Soviet historiography 124 Soviet Union 129 Sovremennik 56, 96 Sovremennyi Listok 105 Stasov, Vladimir 95 Stasyulevich, M. S. 99 Stavropol 123, 124, 130, 131, 208 Stein, Sarah 3 subject of publication 18, 20, 96, 112, 155 religious 19 secular 19 taught in school (gymnasium) 54, 58, 71, 75, 128 Sufi 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 153–60, 162 Sulaymaniya, Fakhr al-Banat 160 Sumarokov, Alexander 42, 43, 46 50, 51 Suvorin, A. S. (publishing company) 99 Suvorin, Aleksei 72, 73, 100, 110 syphilis 135 Sytin, I. D. 73, 99, 100, 110, 203 T- abāt al-ʿAjizīn 149–51, 158 Tale of Sayf al-Mulūk 146, 150 Tarbut 230, 233 Tatar(s) 173, 175, 176, 177, 180, 182, 186 ballads (bayet) 146 baptized 8, 141, 171, 175, 178, 180, 183, 184 commercial press (publishers) 161, 162 Crimean 128 as a language 127, 142, 146, 147, 148, 150, 158, 161, 162, 175, 177 Tatar-Turki 146, 155, 160 women 158 technical school 123, 128, 129 Tengyur 132 textbooks 18, 40, 46, 48, 54, 58, 61, 73, 100, 145, 153, 162 Theosophical Society 135 thick journals 96, 97, 100 Tibet 123, 126, 127, 131–5

264 Tibetan(s) 126, 133 Buddhism 123, 124, 125, 135, 136 language 126–7, 134–5 Tikhonravov, Nikolai 77, 78 ‘to the people’ movement 100 todo 125 Tolstoy, Dmitri 57, 160, 175 Tolstoy, Lev 61, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 80–2, 84 Tomsk 74, 228, 229, 239 traditional religion 172, 181 translation from Persian into Turkic 156, 157, 158 from Russian 126, 127, 143, 161, 175 into Russian 15–21, 23–31,37, 47, 59, 80–2, 185 translators 17, 19, 22, 26–30, 103, 128 Trapusa 136 Trediakovsky, Vasily 19, 28, 51, 53 Tsar (in general) 58, 136 Tsarevsky, Aleksei 76 Tsaritsyn 60, 127 Tseren-Balʾdzhir 132 Tseren-Ubushi Dugarov 132 Tserkovno-Obshchestvennyi Vestnik 105 Tserkovnyi Vestnik 104 Tundutov, Tseren-David Ts. 131 Turgenev, Ivan 47, 52, 53, 55, 62, 69, 71, 74, 75, 78, 80–2, 84, 103 Turkmens 128 Udmurt 182 Ufa 148, 208 Ukhtomskii, Esper 135 Ukraine 210, 226, 233, 236, 239 Ulʾianov, Dambo 133–5 Ulan Khalimag 124 Ulanov, Naran 133, 134, 136 Union of Soviet Writers 125 Urga (Ulan Bator) 133 Uspensky, Gleb 53 Uyghur 126 Vajrayana 136 Valuev Circular 2 ‘vanishing people’ 124

Index Vdovin, Alexander 56 Vedomosti 1, 42, 104 Vengerov, Semyon 70, 76, 77, 82, 84 Vestnik Evropy 97 village audiences in 199 and city 201 cultural movement in 147 as a place of reading 176, 204, 208, 209, 213 priests and teachers in 206 Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de 80, 81 Volf, M. O. 99–102 Volga Lower Volga 123, 124, 126, 132, 137 Middle Volga 171–6, 178, 181–3 as a region 19, 20 as river 20, 21 Volga–Ural region 141–55, 157–62 Voltaire 15, 18, 23, 24, 31 Voskhod 227 Weber, Johann Jacob 97 Weitbrecht, Johann Yakob 147 western Mongolia 125 What should the people read? 74 White Tsar 135 Whites (Civil War) 228, 229, 231, 232, 234, 236 Witte, Sergei 235 World War I 84, 118, 198, 199, 200, 213, 214, 227, 228 Xinjiang 134 Yanaihara, Tadao 234 Yevzerov (Ezer), Alexander 229, 230, 234, 237, 240 Yiddish 226, 227, 238, 240 Zhamtsarano, Tsyben 134, 135 Zhivopisnaia Rossiia 101, 102 Zhivov, Victor 17, 21, 25, 28 Zhukovsky, Vasily 46, 47, 49–52, 55–7, 60 Znanie dlia Vsekh 112