The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination 9781442686441

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures and Tables
Note on Transliteration
Preface
Introduction
1. Russian Eighteenth-Century Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce
2. Dinner at Smirdin’s: Forces in Russian Print Culture in the Early Reign of Nicholas I
3. The Proliferation of Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics in Pushkin and Baratynskii (1820s–1830s)
4. The Archaeology of ‘Backwardness’ in Russia: Assessing the Adequacy of Libraries for Rural Audiences in Late Imperial Russia
5. The Reading Culture of Russian Workers in the Early Twentieth Century (Evidence from Public Library Records)
6. Reading between the (Confessional) Lines: The Intersection of Old Believer Manuscript Books and Images with Print Cultures of Late Imperial Russia
7. The Moral Self in Russia’s Literary and Visual Cultures: The Late Imperial Era and Beyond
8. Books and Their Readers in Twentieth-Century Russia
9. Adapting Paratextual Theory to the Soviet Context: Publishing Practices and the Readers of Il’f and Petrov’s Ostap Bender Novels
10. Closing and Opening and Closing: Reflections on the Russian Media
Appendix: The Internet on the State of Mass Media in Russia
Contributors

Citation preview

THE SPACE OF THE BOOK PRINT CULTURE IN THE RUSSIAN SOCIAL IMAGINATION

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The Space of the Book Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination

EDITED BY MIRANDA REMNEK

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto  Buffalo  London

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©

University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011 Toronto  Buffalo  London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada



ISBN 978-0-8020-4102-0 (cloth)



Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.



Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication The space of the book : print culture in the Russian social imagination / edited by Miranda Remnek. (Studies in book and print culture series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4426-4102-0 (bound) 1. Books and reading – Russia – History.  2. Books and reading – Soviet Union – History.  3. Books and reading – Russia (Federation) – History.  4. Russia – Intellectual life.  5. Soviet Union – Intellectual life.  6. Russia (Federation) – Intellectual life.  I. Remnek, Miranda Beaven  II. Series: Studies in book and print culture Z1003.5.R9S63 2011   028’.90947   C2010-906544-1 University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). In the case of this volume, University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance of the University of Illinois Campus Research Board, and the Research and Publication Committee of the University of Illinois Library.

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables  vii Note on Transliteration  ix Preface  xi Introduction  3 miranda remnek 1 Russian Eighteenth-Century Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce  29 lina bernstein 2 Dinner at Smirdin’s: Forces in Russian Print Culture in the Early Reign of Nicholas I  54 george gutsche 3 The Proliferation of Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics in Pushkin and Baratynskii (1820s–1830s)  82 joseph peschio and igor’ pil’shchikov 4 The Archaeology of ‘Backwardness’ in Russia: Assessing the Adequacy of Libraries for Rural Audiences in Late Imperial Russia  108 ben eklof 5 The Reading Culture of Russian Workers in the Early Twentieth Century (Evidence from Public Library Records)  142 leonid borodkin and evgeny chugunov 6 Reading between the (Confessional) Lines: The Intersection of Old

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vi  Contents



Believer Manuscript Books and Images with Print Cultures of Late Imperial Russia  165 kevin m. kain

  7 The Moral Self in Russia’s Literary and Visual Cultures: The Late Imperial Era and Beyond  201 jeffrey brooks   8 Books and Their Readers in Twentieth-Century Russia  231 stephen lovell   9 Adapting Paratextual Theory to the Soviet Context: Publishing Practices and the Readers of Il’f and Petrov’s Ostap Bender Novels  252 anne o. fisher 10 Closing and Opening and Closing: Reflections on the Russian Media  281 marianna tax choldin

Appendix: The Internet on the State of Mass Media in Russia  301 svetlana stulova

Contributors  305

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Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 2.1  Frontispiece, Novosel’e, v. 1, 1833  69 Figure 2.2  Frontispiece, Novosel’e, v. 2, 1834  71 Figure 5.1  Certificate of graduation of Solomin Aleksandr Ivanov  145 Figure 5.2  Certificate of graduation of Iraida Poliakova  157 Figure 6.1  Patriarch Nikon, 1879  180 Figure 6.2  Patriarch Nikon, 1891  182 Figure 6.3  Patriarch Nikon at the New Jerusalem Monastery  183 Figure 6.4  Patriarch Nikon on Trial  184 Figure 6.5  Nikon Beats Holy Bishop Pavel for His Accusations  185 Figure 6.6  Nikon Enraged over the Holy Icons  186 Figure 7.1  General Adjutant Prince Gorchakov  205 Figure 7.2  The Return Home of a Chap from Iaroslavl  207 Figure 7.3  The Soldier’s Farewell  208 Figure 7.4  Song  209 Figure 9.1  Bender and Koreiko by Kukryniksy, 1971  274 Figure 9.2  Bender and Koreiko by Leonid Tishkov, 1989  275 Tables Table 4.1 Book Distribution: St Petersburg Literacy Committee, 1861– 1895  113 Table 4.2 Outlays on Extramural Education (in rubles)  117 Table 4.3 Kazan: How Long Has the School Library Been in Operation? (1903)  119 Table 4.4 Moscow: School Libraries (Zemstvo)  120

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viii  Figures and Tables

Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 5.1

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School Libraries, 1890  121 Library Book Holdings  122 Public Reading Halls (Non-school)  123 School-Public Libraries, Rural and Urban, 1911  125 School-Pupil Libraries for Take-Home Reading  126 List of Books Requested by Workers in 20 Free Public Libraries in Vladimir Province, 1903–1905 [Extract]  161

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Note on Transliteration

This volume uses the modified Library of Congress transliteration system for Russian names (omitting diacritical marks and ligatures), and, like LC, occasionally departs from the main scheme when using westernized spelling for authors found in major reference works (e.g., Tolstoy, not Tolstoi) – or according to preferred authorial practice (e.g., Evgeny Chugunov). The LC scheme has also been used for geographic names, although certain names have been westernized for the sake of readability, e.g., Kharkov instead of Khar’kov, Iaroslavl instead of Iaroslavl’.

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Preface

This volume originated in two events held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in June 2006. The first was a seminar entitled ‘Prostranstvo knigi: The Space of the Book in the Imperial Russian Social Imagination,’ sponsored by Illinois’s Summer Research Lab ‘Discussion Group on Reading Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia.’ The second was the annual Ralph and Ruth Fisher Forum entitled, in 2006, ‘Book Arts, Culture and Media in Russia, East Europe and Eurasia: From Print to Digital.’ The Fisher Forum is an annual event designed to honour Professor Ralph Fisher for his long-time devotion to the expansion of Russian and East European programs at Illinois. Both events drew scholars from across the country and abroad who presented papers on a range of topics concerning Russian book culture. This volume brings together papers from both gatherings. The essays presented here begin their coverage of this fascinating subject in the late eighteenth century, and move on up to the present. A word of acknowledgment must be addressed to two colleagues who participated in these events and contributed to the title for our volume. The notion of ‘the space of the book’ (prostranstvo knigi) was articulated by Dr Mikhail Afanas’ev, Director of the Historical Library in Moscow, who rightly saw the range of topics to be covered at the seminar as proof of the many physical as well as mental spaces in which evidence of Russian book culture can be found. The second part of the subtitle – ‘the Russian social imagination’ – was articulated by Professor John Randolph of the University of Illinois. Thanks are due to them both. Thanks are also due to International Programs and Studies at the University of Illinois for a William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Inter-

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xii  Preface

national Conference Grant as well as to the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center – then under Director Donna Buchanan and Associate Director Lynda Park – for generous financial support for the 2006 Fisher Forum. More recently, assistance with publication costs was gratefully received from both the University of Illinois Campus Research Board, and the Research and Publication Committee of the University of Illinois Library. Finally, sincere thanks are due to various members of the editorial and production staff of the University of Toronto Press.

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THE SPACE OF THE BOOK

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Introduction miranda remnek

There are few cultures in which printed texts have played a more pivotal role in promoting social cohesion – or, for that matter, in creating social divisiveness – than those of Imperial and Soviet Russia. Social spaces of all kinds have borne the hallmark of devotion to the printed word, to a degree not always encountered in other cultures. Whether we think of the predilection for books and disputation among Old Believer communities, the family reading groups of the pre-revolutionary nobility, the circles of young students and intellectuals at nineteenth-century universities, or the thirst for reading in overcrowded apartments of the Soviet era – in all these venues and a host of others, print materials were a daily lifeline that sparked the imaginations of distinctive Russian communities, and bound them more closely together.1 Indeed, the different forms of autocracy that marked the course of Russian history all fostered a need to uncover, understand, and belong, yet at the same time to escape and even rebel (when the political situation seemed to warrant it), in ways that only the printed word could satisfy. To be sure, much has already been written about the history of print culture in Russia – and a review of this history and scholarship follows. But the spaces in which Russian yearnings for print culture were fostered still require closer scrutiny, in ways that the freshly minted essays in this volume all capture. Indeed, the main goal of the current volume is to serve (in the absence of a magisterial history of print culture in Russia) as a leading introduction to new scholarship in the field – one which illuminates the contributions of different print culture communities in the light of new scholarly imperatives, and also brings these vibrant subcultures to a broader audience.

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4  Miranda Remnek

Russian Book and Print Culture The history of book culture in Russia has long attracted the attention of traditional scholarship, its contours following in large part the five broad periods of mainstream Russian history: Kievan, Muscovite, Imperial, Soviet, and now, the post-Soviet period.2 In terms of written culture, the Kievan and Muscovite eras (roughly the late ninth century to 1380, and 1380 to 1553, respectively) were in some regards more limited in their contributions than later periods, but even so the manuscript products of the monasteries played a truly seminal role in the development of early Russian culture, since the dominance of religion in Russian society was an even greater fixture in those early years. Especially important were the chronicles or annals (letopisi), including the so-called Primary and Kievan Chronicles – described as the ‘most valuable, original and interesting monument of Kievan literature.’3 These anonymous annals were the work of monks and lay bookmen, and, in Muscovite times, official scribes.4 With the coming of the first press in 1553 (which did not lag be-  hind its European counterparts by many years), the demand for books rose, in part from the expansion of religious culture due to missionary activity in newly conquered areas. To satisfy demand, manuscript production was increased, but printing did most to spread religiosity. Even so, between 1553 and 1600 only eighteen books were printed in Muscovy, and the normal print run produced fewer than one thousand copies. Moreover, 95 per cent of printed literature was devotional, and even this was inhibited in 1653 when Patriarch Nikon provoked the schism by reforming church texts on the basis of early originals. Thus, secular materials were mainly in manuscript, and when Peter I became tsar in 1698 he inherited a church-oriented system.5 Soon, however, important changes began to mark the landscape of Russian print culture. Peter’s westernizing tendencies resulted in the founding of the first printed newspaper, Vedomosti (News), in 1703, and a greater number of secular titles. After Peter’s demise in 1725 the pace of expansion slowed, but it revived in the late eighteenth century with the founding of Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News) in 1756 and especially with the activities of Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), whose work spanned the last decades of the century and included the publication of satirical journals. This period also saw a certain increase in the provincial book trade, which Novikov deliberately influenced in his position as director of Moscow University Press.6

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Introduction  5

The French Revolution helped render censorship a permanent fixture in Russia: A.N. Radishchev’s controversial Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow) in 1790 was confiscated, and Radishchev exiled. The situation improved in 1801 with the reign of Alexander I, but Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 again depressed cultural development, and despite a new interest in history, the reign ended with the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 and subsequent repressions. However, these gave way to commercial expansionism in the 1830s, when prices declined and editions grew in size. Other hallmarks were the flowering of Russian reference publications – often a sign of an expanding book trade – and also of journalism, with Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading), Otechestvennye zapiski (Fatherland Notes), and others that helped to shape the contemporary imagination.7 Print culture was hindered in the 1840s and 1850s by the economic downturn and worsening political situation, culminating in the Russian defeat in the Crimean War (1853–6). But the Emancipation Reform of 1861 led to a marked expansion in the distribution of print culture throughout the Empire, assisted by accelerating railroad construction from the late 1860s. Book production increased – for example, from 1,851 titles in 1862 to 3,366 in 1868 – and ever-growing audiences enjoyed the panoply of new serial titles characterized in part by popular weeklies like Niva (Cornfield) from 1870. The turn-of-the-century Silver Age was graced by journals like Mir iskusstva (World of Art) and Vesy (Scales); also notable were new satirical journals of 1905–7. Largecirculation newspapers achieved audience figures during this period that were closer to European totals, including A.S. Suvorin’s Novoe vremia (New Times), with 60,000 in 1900, and I.D. Sytin’s Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), which reached 750,000 by the First World War.8 Despite the privations of the early Soviet period, books were seen as propaganda tools and publishing houses were once more active – although censorship remained an abiding force, resulting in the notorious spetskhrany (locked collections), and also in samizdat (unauthorized private production). As the century progressed the output from Soviet publishers rose and fell, but it generally exceeded Western publishing in scope, while the infrastructure of Soviet publishing became highly regularized, with print runs in the thousands on predictable topics, especially Marx, Engels and Lenin. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of titles issued by Soviet publishing houses resulted from editorial discretion, not from the assignment of works they were instructed to publish.9

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6  Miranda Remnek

In the early years after the fall of communism, however, Russian publishing experienced true liberation; the entire infrastructure changed, as did the content from the new houses (which after 1991 produced a far higher proportion of detective fiction, mysteries, and other sensationalist output than in the Soviet years). But although prices are now much higher than in the heavily subsidized Soviet period, the Russians are still a nation of readers whose yen for print culture remains a terrain richly worthy of study.10 The Scholarly Literature Russian scholars have produced an extraordinarily rich literature on book culture (knigovedenie) that is in general insufficiently known.11 The majority of studies have emerged from scholars born in the late 1800s (many of whom published their major works just before and after the Revolution of 1917), or from twentieth-century researchers. A distinguished founder of knigovedenie in the late nineteenth century was N.M. Lisovskii, author of theoretical works and also a renowned bibliographer. Lisovskii considered one goal to be analysis of the book as the result of three processes (bibliographic, historical, and social) and divided its study into book production, distribution, and description.12 Additional authorities on the book in Russia include prominent names such as the early Soviet scholars V. Ia. Adariukov and A.A. Sidorov, and later I.E. Barenbaum.13 Other scholars to be noted in this brief survey dealt with specific themes or periods. On themes, late nineteenth-century writers A.S. Prugavin and N. A. Rubakin both published in the area of readership.14 Among Soviet scholars who studied the book trade are P.K. Simoni and later A.A. Govorov.15 On specific periods, noteworthy scholars (besides the above-cited B.V. Sapunov, N.N. Rozov and M.I. Slukhovskii) whose works have dealt with the early centuries include G.I. Vzdornov, who like Rozov has studied the important phenomenon of the manuscript book, and E.L. Nemirovskii, for example, on printing in pre-Petrine ecclesiastical type.16 No researcher on eighteenth-century book culture should miss the works of S.P. Luppov; also important are A.A. Zaitseva, and P.N. Berkov on journalism.17 Among studies on the nineteenth century are works by the early Soviet experts M.N. Kufaev and M.V. Muratov, and later, E.A. Dinershtein.18 Writers on the Imperial press, besides Berkov, include A.V. Zapadov and B.I. Esin.19 N.G. Malykhin produced a major study on publishing patterns during the Soviet period.20 Soviet

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Introduction  7

strictures produced noticeable characteristics in the field of book culture: studies often reflected a political agenda, with variations of the notion of ‘democratization’ appearing in many studies, especially from the 1950s.21 Moreover, in addition to their vaunted emphasis on detail, Soviet scholars were known for a positivist interpretation of cultural progress. For example, the early nineteenth-century publisher Aleksandr Smirdin was often described in terms that other scholars have found exaggerated.22 Recently a new generation of Russian scholars has made major contributions to the field. These include the prolific A.V. Blium, who has studied Imperial as well as Soviet Russia, and also A.I. Reitblat.23 On the earlier periods scholars include T.G. Kupriianova (on Petrine print culture), A.Iu. Samarin (on eighteenth-century readership), and N. Iu. Bubnov (on the Old Believers), while P.I. Khoteev and E.A. Savel’eva have examined eighteenth-century book collections and other topics.24 There is much recent work on Soviet Russia and the ensuing years; examples include the above-cited E. Ia. Zazerskii and other scholars: E.A. Dobrenko, T.M. Goriaeva, OV. Andreeva, and regional specialists like the Siberian knigoved S.A. Paichadze.25 In contrast to this wealth of Russian scholarship (only partially documented here), a smaller number of studies of Russian print culture have appeared in English. On broader themes the most significant, cited earlier, are Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800; Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861–1917; and Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras. Other full-length studies of note focus on particular themes; a sampling includes works on the publishers Novikov and Suvorin by Gareth Jones and Effie Ambler; on the publishing house Posrednik by Robert Otto; on censorship by Charles Ruud and Marianna Tax Choldin; and on fortune-telling and print culture by Faith Wigzell.26 But, as noted, a fullfledged English-language history of print culture in Russia remains to be written. The Theoretical Background Print culture studies represent an interdisciplinary field to which theories from the disciplines of history, literature, art history, and many other fields are applicable. Included are works on typography, book distribution, reading practices, and various other topics.27

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8  Miranda Remnek

Print Culture Theories A seminal debate has taken place on the extent to which the printing press has served in different cultures as an agent of change. This debate has dominated print culture studies since the publication in 1979 of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as An Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. The book was controversial when it appeared, and remains so, according to the editors of a new collection of essays published in 2007 and entitled Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein.28 In the Russian context, the notion of print culture as a driving force behind cultural expansion takes on new meaning – since the ubiquity of censorship in both the Imperial and Soviet eras at once derailed the power of the printed word, and acted as an agent of additional meaning, albeit often disguised (as the essays in this volume by Gutsche, Peschio and Pil’shchikov, and Choldin all indicate to varying degrees). Besides Eisenstein, a host of other scholars have written on topics of value for the study of print culture, including Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu.29 One interesting notion is the revolution in reading habits said to have occurred after 1750. The German scholar Rolf Engelsing posited the concepts of ‘intensive’ versus ‘extensive’ reading – the first a manner of reading used when books were still scarce, and the second a habit encountered when access to larger quantities of books became more prevalent in the late eighteenth century.30 True, the issue of whether the transition occurred as dramatically as posited by Engelsing has been questioned by some, especially Robert Darnton, who suggested that as the book trade expanded, intensive and extensive reading coexisted.31 In Russia the timing of the transition occurred at a later point; as the present volume shows, a stark contrast is noticeable between the intensive readings of Pushkinian poetry under Nicholas I (in the essay by Peschio and Pil’shchikov), and the extensive reading that began concurrently but developed fully in the late nineteenth century (in the essays by Eklof, Borodkin and Chugunov, and Kain). Even so, this is an intriguing concept, allowing the print culture historian to adumbrate more fully the many varieties of reading habits by probing such practices in different communities, as well as different periods. Reader-Response Theory A major component of print culture theory with a focus on literary ap-

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Introduction  9

proaches is reader-response theory, a field that began in its modern form in the 1960s and 1970s, and is populated by well-known scholars including structuralists (Jonathan Culler), stylists (Michael Riffaterre), phenomenologists (the German scholar Wolfgang Iser), psychoanalysts (Norman Holland), and post-structuralist theorists (Stanley Fish).32 It was Fish who developed the notion of ‘interpretive communities’ – a concept of special value for the study of Russian readers, who were for too long characterized as a single (elite) reading public. The concept is applied implicitly in this volume, especially in its second group of essays linked by a common focus on a plurality of reading communities. Also of value is the idea of a reader’s ‘horizon of expectations,’ a concept put forward by another German scholar, Hans Robert Jauss. This concept also applies to essays here, insofar as it can be posited that the extent to which different readers imagine different social realities (Kain’s nineteenth-century Old Believer artists, Fisher’s interpreters of Soviet publishing conventions) is predicated on their individual expectations.33 These applications should be no surprise since it has been suggested that literary criticism’s reader-response theory rests on psychological principles, and readily generalizes to the visual arts and history. Once again, the interdisciplinary nature of print culture studies is underlined – as are the possibilities for elaboration of themes presented here. Ongoing Historical Debates and New Concepts Perhaps the most salient and long-standing debate that relates to print culture concerns the traditional bipartite division into ‘elite’ versus ‘popular’ culture: whether this relates only to the modern era, and more important, whether it is justified at all. Writing in the 1930s, the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin certainly saw its existence in premodern Western culture, in the work of Rabelais. Bakhtin also saw culture as structured by plurality and difference – but in his case, still as the result of a binary opposition.34 In recent scholarship, the notion of plurality has expanded. Faith Wigzell notes that although the binary model was maintained by nineteenth-century Russian cultural historians and some later scholars, it has been questioned: ‘Jeffrey Brooks showed that … reading material for different classes … became increasingly varied, though the distinction between elite and popular culture remained widely held.’35 In fact, the terms ‘high’ and ‘popular’ are still to be found, but the conceptualization is changing as a result of the topics studied – as in Reitblat’s several essays on middle-class culture in the early nineteenth century, which was neither elite nor popular.36

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10  Miranda Remnek

Indeed, as suggested by Chartier, ‘The macroscopic opposition between ‘popular’ and high’ culture has lost its pertinence. An inventory of the multiple divisions that fragment the social body is preferable … Such differences could make sense of the plurality of cultural practices.’37 A second fruitful topic is the debate as to whether the agency of women in cultural development has been properly recognized, particularly as regards women’s education and the movement of women to male professions.38 Women’s involvement in formal education programs, informal reading, legal rights and ceremonies, and also community consciousness is touched on in more than one essay in this volume (Bernstein, Borodkin and Chugunov, Kain, Brooks); and it is an area in which conclusions in the field of print culture can be effectively applied to the larger realm of mainstream history. Probing now two recent concepts encapsulated in the title of this book, it is worth noting that spatial questions (the so-called ‘Spatial Turn’)39 constitute an important specialty within mainstream history. This focus is also relevant to print culture studies, in view of the noticeably spatial nature of differences of access and manners of reading amongst different social and regional groups. Readers of this volume are therefore encouraged to note the expanding panoply of venues and other spatial characteristics featured in this book, as well as the various topics that constitute examples of the Russian social imagination. This concept can indicate both the varied thoughts of individual readers, as well as a more unified program of social activism. But the more formal connotation resonates with the dimensions of Russian print culture even prior to the dictates of the Communist period; one thinks of the efforts to foster education in the ‘Going to the People’ movement of the 1870s, and those of other contemporaries encountered in the essays by Eklof, and Borodkin and Chugunov, in this volume. Again, readers should find helpful the notion of social imagination as reflective of the seriousness of purpose with which many Russians from all periods have viewed the importance of print culture in their daily lives. The Present Volume Despite the wealth of Russian print culture studies noted earlier, it is clear that there are more stories to be told, with findings that link them to a broader understanding of culture than that suggested by book culture alone.40 The essays offered here nicely illustrate existing methodologies, and supply new research perspectives – some couched in

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Introduction  11

theories and debates adumbrated above, and others forging new directions. First presented in 2006 at the University of Illinois, the essays all seek to lift the curtain on Russian book culture in ways that will strike the imaginations of a new generation of scholars (advanced undergraduates as well as newly established Slavists), and inspire them to apply these findings to broader themes in the study of Russian culture. The interpretations in this volume and the primary sources they adduce all promise a more comprehensive analysis of the disparate intellectual leanings that characterized Russian cultural communities, and stand  to foster a broader reconsideration of the worldwide significance of Imperial and Soviet Russian culture in its socio-economic setting. Commercialization and Social Engagement 41 In terms of chronology, the essays in this volume cover the period from the late eighteenth century to the early years of the twenty-first. Inside this framework, a number of themes are discernible. The first two essays, which concern the early years of the period under review, both relate book issues to the broader themes of commercialization and social engagement, an important area of socio-economic history that has not yet been fully explored.42 In a discussion of popular enlightenment literature on commerce in the late 1700s, Lina Bernstein shows how the second part of the eighteenth century witnessed in Russia ‘the rapid growth … as evidence of commercialization began to increase, of specialized literature on trade ethics and practices.’ This literature is richly deserving of further study because it signifies that Russia ‘had entered an age in which society was in flux,’ and its members began to need guidance in ‘correctly adapting themselves to the numerous social roles available.’ Among the treatises that appeared was Mikhail Chulkov’s Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommertsii (Historical Description of Russian Commerce) in seven volumes (1781–8). In thus writing for merchants Chulkov was inspired by Catherine II; both the writer and his sovereign wished to implement the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially Montesquieu’s assurance that ‘commerce will put an end to harmful prejudices.’ The same desire to educate and civilize moved other writers who wrote for merchants, and the merchant class appeared in these works not as a secluded caste but as a layer of society with a strong identity and desire to communicate with the outside world. As noted, Russian print culture is widely studied by Russian  scholars.43 But Bernstein’s focus on the eighteenth century in this and

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12  Miranda Remnek

earlier work is ground-breaking in part because Western print culture historians of Russia have tended to focus on later periods. Besides the seminal study by Gary Marker, the only other major studies include the works on the later 1700s by Gareth Jones and Faith Wigzell already cited.44 In broader terms, moreover, socio-economic historians like William Blackwell and Thomas Owen have chosen not to begin their study of the merchant and related issues until the early nineteenth century.45 Hence, new research that studies eighteenth-century print culture and places it in its socio-economic setting is both timely and welcome.46 The notion of social engagement among merchants as Russian commerce expanded is taken up by George Gutsche in an essay on the celebrated publisher-Maecenas, Aleksandr Smirdin. Smirdin’s educational level was not high, but there is no doubt that he played an extensive and deliberate role in the dramatic redefinition and expansion of book culture that occurred in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Smirdin’s role was pivotal, a long-held view that has recently been confirmed using quantitative data.47 Gutsche’s essay is part of a larger work on the increased complexity of publishing in the Pushkin era (raw materials, production, distribution, advertising, finances, storage, and compliance). In this piece he describes a seminal event in Smirdin’s meteoric rise, the house-warming party held by the publisher in February 1832 for Russia’s literary elite in his spacious new bookstore and reading library on Nevskii Prospekt.48 Gutsche is also concerned with the ever more vigilant censorship apparatus in the 1820s and 1830s, and its impact on Russian culture.49 Lastly, he makes reference to another major phenomenon of the 1830s – increasing varieties of readers – and this theme is taken up again by essays in the following section. Plurality of Reading Communities and Their Social Status The importance of recognizing a plurality of reading communities in Imperial Russia has already been acknowledged, but the notion receives additional attention in this volume.50 Moving from the socio-political arena, Joseph Peschio and Igor’ Pil’shchikov focus on the issue of elite writers and their publics; highlighting again the notion that Russian society promoted not one but multiple reading audiences, they describe how differences existed not only between, but even within, the separate cultural strata. Indeed, elite authors of the Pushkin period themselves wrote for different groups: their own inner circle on the one hand, and a wider intellectual audience on the other.

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A plurality of reading communities was also gaining strength among lower social groups – again, in part, the result of deliberate audience construction, though the variations were already in place in response to developing fissures in Russian society.51 Still, the tendency of intellectuals to mark such variations became ever more clear. For besides their recognition of different elite communities, elite authors were also aware of reading audiences lower in rank, and were frequently dismissive of them, as shown by the disparaging discussions of provincial readers in the press of the 1830s.52 But as the nineteenth century progressed, broader sections of the educated public sought to help lower communities.53 Even so, the expectations of the educated often remained unreasonable – a notion that comes to the fore as we move to a group of essays on the later 1800s. In his study Ben Eklof shows that although the educated public worked to support these communities in the form of libraries that catered to their needs (‘school,’ ‘teacher,’ and ‘public’ or ‘popular’ libraries), they also applied criteria that resulted in the marginalization of these same communities, particularly those supported by the Orthodox Church, and led to the formation of a concept of backwardness that according to Eklof was ‘grossly exaggerated in the minds of the educated public.’54 In a related essay that moves to a different reading audience (industrial workers), Leonid Borodkin and Evgeny Chugunov use evidence from Vladimir public library records published in the early 1900s to analyse in concrete terms the surprisingly diverse reading interests of this rapidly expanding group. Like Eklof, Borodkin and Chugunov use abundant material from the zemstvo (a network of organs of local selfgovernment in operation from 1864 to 1917), and stress the role of these institutions in developing workers as a cultural community. They also emphasize the importance of the intelligentsia in initiating sociological research on reading culture and social structure in Russian provinces in the late 1800s. As it happened, a substantial part of the library network featured factory libraries, which contained books published by another major publisher, I.D. Sytin. Sytin confronted the intellectual view that the people needed special texts, and instead published literary classics that became core components of the factory libraries.55 (The reading statistics adduced from Vladimir public libraries confirm Sytin’s view.) In sum, Borodkin and Chugunov note that all three groups – the zemstvo, the intelligentsia, and publishers like Sytin – were useful in the modernization process, and the importance of this research and its relevance to the broader question of Russia’s industrial development

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(at a time, from the 1890s, when her industrialization rate surpassed that of many other economies) need hardly be stressed. Community Intersections and Appropriations For all the importance of recognizing the existence of a host of reading communities in Imperial Russia (rather than a bipartite division into high and low culture), it remains a useful scholarly approach to divide the various groups into ‘higher and lower’ or ‘dominant and subordinate,’ and to examine the vertical intersections between them. It is also possible to compare distinctive features on a horizontal plane: between a wider/narrower social sample, or religious/secular social framework. In the current volume the next two essays – involving print and graphic materials – exemplify both these approaches.56 Whichever is used, the value of studying borrowings and reinterpretations between these groups is a powerful scholarly imperative. In some sense exemplifying a study of horizontal intersections between proximate social groups, the following essay by Kevin Kain investigates the religious culture of Old Believers in the late nineteenth century, and seeks to place their verbal and visual texts within the wider cultural space of Russian reading culture.57 Kain focuses on a subgenre of hand-written and hand-illustrated books entitled Istoriia o patriarkhe Nikone (History about Patriarch Nikon). His study views the intersections between several literary and artistic genres, and includes comparative literary and iconographical analyses of verbal and visual texts encountered in both Old Believer sources and wider Russian culture. He finds that Old Believer authors and artists transformed traditional religious tales by creating hybrid forms that integrated historical scholarship, popular fiction, and images published in thick journals.58 These manipulations of published materials constitute unique evidence of reader response to the Russian popular press by artists whose efforts to appropriate sections of the wider culture represent effective attempts to compete with it. A long-time connoisseur of Russian popular literature as distinct from the dominant culture, Jeffrey Brooks examines popular prints or lubki from the late nineteenth century, and, taking further the idea of separate communities with vertical intersections, identifies what they had in common with the artistic production of the higher cultural echelons.59 Russian society experienced a considerable transformation in the years after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and both promi-

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Introduction  15

nent and lesser artists engaged with the reality of their times. Works of genius are clearly different from the ‘formulaic artefacts’ of commercial popular culture, yet studying these lesser prints can inform our understanding of higher culture, especially with regard to the sharing of traditions between these groups. Brooks refers to works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and early Soviet writers, as well as graphic artists such as the peredvizhniki (wanderers), and then views the reflection of the issues they posed in works by ‘a cohort of semi-educated illustrators [who] invented the modern lubok.’ His goal is to explore the common themes of writers and artists at different levels of cultural production, especially their intersections and appropriations, and to suggest that the lower groups may have been similarly preoccupied with moral and ethical alternatives. Reader Response The remaining essays in this collection move more fully to the Soviet period and beyond, but each harks back to themes adumbrated earlier. In the next two essays, Stephen Lovell and Anne O. Fisher both deal at length with issues of reader response, a subject of recent interest to both literary and historical studies.60 But they examine its occurrence in a society where the sociology of reading operated under enormous constraints and the full diversity of reader response could never be acknowledged. To circumvent this difficulty they approach the theme from different points of view. In the case of Stephen Lovell, the approach is broad. The author’s main goal is to offer a general review of recent scholarship on the history of reading and print culture in Soviet Russia, including discussion of the following questions: what were some of the major publication categories?61 What did people read? How did they respond to what they read? In pursuing these issues he explores the major changes in Russia’s relationship to the printed word over the past century, and seeks to articulate questions for future research.62 Lovell also echoes another theme in this volume: reading communities and their social status. Complementing the detailed discussions of the 1800s, he returns to the audience differentiation that was present in the late tsarist period and explores the question of what happens when readers are presented with a culture whose mission was to obliterate social and cultural differences. He argues that such differences can never in fact be obliterated. In the case of Anne Fisher, the focus is more exclusively on reader re-

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sponse. In her essay based on an innovative study of over 150 different editions of the novels of Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, Fisher adapts the notion proposed by D.F. McKenzie that ‘various editions of the same book can themselves serve as evidence of actual, documented reader response,’63 and urges us to pay attention to the peritext, or secondary texts and apparati included in each book edition. She reminds us of the dual function of peritexts (to reveal, sometimes inadvertently, what publishers and producers thought their texts actually meant, and to influence readers to accept this meaning), and applies the method of diachronic editional comparison to the most programmatically influential peritext of all, the foreword. Fisher describes the ideological battles fought in forewords to Il’f and Petrov’s novels first published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and reveals the reactions of sophisticated Soviet readers to these obviously manipulative peritexts.64 The resulting picture shows that even intellectual readers were susceptible to peritextual influence, indicating that the separation between the reading practices of ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ readers isn’t always as distinct as we would like to think. Censorship and Communication Strategies Finally, the last essay in this collection – by Marianna Tax Choldin – is fully contemporary in its focus, with its consideration of the current situation regarding freedom of the press in Russia. Yet it too harks back to a theme encountered earlier that is fundamental to the Russian context, the notion of censorship and the communication strategies it fostered. These strategies were not only efforts to circumvent the all-powerful censorship machine that strove to prevent dangerous ideas from reaching the public (as noted by George Gutsche), but even became an intrinsic way of life (as described in the essay by Joseph Peschio and Igor’ Pil’shchikov that also deals with the inventive space of the book as far back as the early nineteenth century).65 In Choldin’s essay, consideration of the place of censorship during the various eras of Russian history comes fully to the fore. She reviews the censorship system in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet times, and discusses the themes that concerned the authorities throughout those periods. She then presents findings from a study of materials available from Radio Liberty/ Radio Free Europe since the year 2000. Her findings fall into four categories: the relationship between the government and the media; the role and condition of journalists; censorship issues; and the place of the Internet in Russian society. She concludes with ob-

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Introduction  17

servations that suggest the persistence of signs of ‘opening’ as well as renewed threats of ‘closing,’ and urges support of liberal forces that seek to promote such openness.66 In sum, the focus of this volume is the space of the book in the imagination and consciousness of Russia. It deals with a chronological range of almost three hundred years, and paints a variegated picture of the milieux studied.67 Some spaces are physical: offices, salons, libraries. Others are conceptual, and include the spheres and practices of different reading audiences: merchants, aristocrats, peasants, clerics, others. Yet together the essays present a strikingly unified overview of current themes in Russian readership studies, and also their relevance to general studies on Russian culture (formation of social identities, pluralities and their intersections, communication barriers and stratagems). Besides the currency of the themes, the authors represented here have presented a bevy of historical methodologies (text analysis, comparison of images, manuscripts and editions, data collection and interpretation) that allows this volume to serve a dual function. It serves both to depict thematically the state of the art in Russian readership studies, and also to engage younger students in the practice and evaluation of different historical methodologies. This duality ensures, we hope, that the volume will be of practical value to a broad range of students of Russian history even as it aims to serve as a theoretical starting point for research in the history of Russian print culture. New Directions in Humanities Scholarship and Print Culture Studies Before moving directly to the essays themselves, it may be valuable to pause for a moment to add a hint of new digital alternatives. The emerging specialty of digital humanities has several applications relevant to print studies, but the possibilities may seem daunting to the non-digitalist. One useful point de repère is a white paper prepared in 2000 that seeks to lay out a set of ‘scholarly primitives’: new imperatives or underlying methodologies that humanities researchers tend to share, and might therefore benefit from enhancement using tools applicable to a range of disciplines.68 Among such tools is a resource under development since the late 1980s by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. This scheme has been in frequent use by literary specialists, linguists, and medieval scholars, including

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Slavic specialists.69 An important addition to the digital humanist’s toolbox is Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, its recent emergence in the humanities closely linked to the so-called ‘Spatial Turn,’70 but also to its proven ability to provide a complex layering of different variables to promote new analyses previously less practicable. This technology is eminently applicable to print culture studies; the Canadian specialists Bertram MacDonald and Fiona Black are among those who have already used such techniques to superimpose variegated book trade data over geographic information with considerable success.71 Therefore, to further our second goal (to attract younger researchers to the study of Russian print culture, and to speak to a broader audience), plans are under discussion to digitize selected resources related to this volume and deliver them – together with reference materials on Russian print culture and the application of digital methodologies – from a web site already under construction that covers the entire period reflected in this volume, Print Culture in Russia from the Empire to the Present (http://www.library.illinois.edu/spx/rusprintcult/). The specimen data might include, but not be limited to, selected surrogates of primary sources used in these essays, such as: a. Sample press articles (journals and newspapers); b. Extracts from published library surveys; c. Representative provincial zemstvo publications and annual reports; d. Related literary texts and images. Initially the web site would carry most such surrogates as html texts. The eventual goal would be to offer the materials in various formats, making them susceptible to the kinds of added analysis increasingly employed by digital humanists.72 NOTES   1 Works with material related to these vignettes include Olga Glagoleva, ‘Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provincial Noblewomen (1750–1825),’ in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 129–46; Edward J. Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle, 1830–1840 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), and studies by Maurice Friedberg, including A Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954–64 (Bloomington: In-

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Introduction  19

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

diana University Press, 1977). Russian-language works providing a similar window on these reading spaces are too numerous to summarize, but examples include A.S. Prugavin, Staroobriadchestvo vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka: Ocherki iz noveishei istorii raskola (Moscow: Tip. I.D. Sytina, 1904); M. Aronson and S. Reiser, Literaturnye kruzhki i salony (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929); and E. Ia. Zazerskii, ed., Sovetskii chitatel’: 1920–1980–e gody: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (St Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gos. in-t kul’tury, 1992). The number may actually extend to six, since the Kievan and Muscovite eras are often divided into three periods. Daniel Kaiser and Gary Marker, in Reinterpreting Russian History: Readings, 860–1860s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), use this division: Kievan (Late ninth century to 1150); Post-Kievan (1150–1497); Muscovite (1497–1689). In Gregory L. Freeze, ed., Russia: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), the divisions differ: the Beginnings (to 1450); Muscovite (1450–1598); prePetrine (1598–1689). For book culture a third variation is advisable: Kievan (980–1380), Muscovite (1380–1553), and the Emergence of Printing (1553– 1689). D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900 (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 11. See also Samuel H. Cross, ‘The Russian Primary Chronicle,’ Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 12 (1930): 137–45. Major Russian studies on Kievan Russia and Muscovy include B.V. Sapunov, Kniga v Rossii v XI–XIII vv. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), and N.N. Rozov, Kniga v Rossii v XV veke (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981). Additional sources for this and other periods are discussed in the literature review that follows. General handbooks on Russian book culture are Knigovedenie, entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Kniga, 1982), and its sequel, Kniga: entsiklopediia (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1999). An English-language introduction is Miranda Remnek, ed., Books in Russia and the Soviet Union: Past and Present (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991). See S.P. Luppov, Kniga v Rossii v XVII v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1970), and M.I. Slukhovskii, Russkaia biblioteka XVI–XVII vv. (Moscow: Kniga, 1973). The figures appear in Miranda Remnek, ‘Pre-Revolutionary Russian Publishing,’ in Books in Russia and the Soviet Union, 11, 13. On the 1700s see works by Luppov including his Kniga v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973). A prominent English-language source is Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). On the modicum of provincial reading at the lowest levels, see A.V. Blium, ‘Massovoe chtenie v russkoi provintsii kontsa XVIII-pervoi chetverti XIX vv.,’ Istoriia russkogo chitatelia, 1 (1973): 37–57.

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20  Miranda Remnek   7 Ian Watt noted that as changes occurred in eighteenth-century England, booksellers first promoted ‘large works of information’; see The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 55. For Russia in the 1830s this is confirmed in N.I. Grech, ‘Istoriia pervogo entsiklopedicheskogo leksikona v Rossii,’ Russkii arkhiv VII (1870): 1247–72. A major source on censorship is M.K. Lemke, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tsenzury i zhurnalistiki XIX stoletiia (St Petersburg, 1904). On commercialism, see the seminal T.S. Grits, V. Trenin and M.   Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia: Knizhnaia lavka A F. Smirdina (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), and also André Meynieux, Pouchkine, homme de lettres et la littérature professionelle en Russie (Paris: Librairie des Cinq Continents, 1966).   8 Book production and circulation figures are drawn from Remnek, ‘PreRevolutionary Russian Publishing,’ 38, 45, 49. For recent Russian work on the later 1800s, see I.S. Zvereva, G.D. Nikol’tseva, and N.G. Patrusheva, comps., Kniga v Rossii, 1850–1917 gg.: Materialy k ukazateliu otechestvennoi literatury za 1990–1997 gg. (St Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, 2004); see also Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). A useful earlier booklet that describes Russian book production from 1810 to 1916 (and also the first decade of the Soviet period) was written by the celebrated bibliographer N.V. Zdobnov; see his Russkaia knizhnaia statistika: Iz istorii vozniknoveniia i razvitiia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1959).   9 On publishing, see Gregory Walker, Soviet Book Publishing Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). On reading see Zazerskii, ed., Sovetskii chitatel’: 1920–1980–e gody, and Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000). Another booklet that summarizes Russian book production for fifty years from the beginning of the First World War   is Sovetskaia pechat’ k 400–letiiu russkogo knigopechataniia: Statisticheskie materialy (Moscow: Kniga, 1964). 10 See especially Stephen Lovell and Birgit Menzel, eds., Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective (Munich: Sagner, 2005). 11 The British journal Solanus: International Journal for Russian & East European Bibliographic, Library & Publishing Studies – edited for many years by Christine Thomas – has been the main channel for English-language studies. Edward Kasinec is also a distinguished connoisseur of knigovedenie; among his many publications see, for example, Slavic Books and Bookmen: Papers and Essays (New York: Russica, 1984), and ‘The State and Decline of Book Studies in the Soviet Union,’ Book History 2, no. 1 (1999): 254–65.

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Introduction  21 12 Besides his major work, Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat’, 1703–1900 (Petrograd: Izd. avtora, 1915), Lisovskii published theoretical works on knigovedenie from 1884 onwards, including Knigovedenie kak predmet prepodavaniia, ego sushchnost’ i zadachi (1922). 13 V.I. Adariukov and A.A. Sidorov, eds., Russkaia kniga. Ch. 1: ‘Ot nachala pis’mennosti do 1800 goda.’ Ch. 2: ‘Deviatnadtsatyi vek.’ (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo., 1924–5); I.E. Barenbaum, Istoriia knigi, 2. izd. (Moscow: Kniga, 1984). 14 A.S. Prugavin, Zaprosy naroda i obiazannosti intelligentsii v oblasti umstvennogo razvitiia i prosveshcheniia (Moscow, 1890); N.A. Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike: Fakty, tsifry i nabliudeniia (St Petersburg, 1895). 15 P.K. Simoni, Knizhnaia torgovlia v Moskve XVIII–XIX st. (Leningrad: Izd. Leningradskogo obshchestva bibliofilov, 1927); A.A. Govorov, Istoriia knizhnoi torgovli (Moscow: Kniga, 1982). 16 G.I. Vzdornov, Iskusstvo knigi v Drevnei Rusi: Rukopisnaia kniga SeveroVostochnoi Rusi XII-nachala XV vv. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980); E.L. Nemirovskii, Istoriia slavianskogo kirillovskogo knigopechataniia XV-nachala XVII veka (Moscow: Nauka, 2003). 17 Luppov was a theorist; besides works on the 1600s and 1700s, he wrote, for instance, ‘Istoriia knigi kak kompleksnaia nauchnaia distsiplina,’ Problemy rukopisnoi i pechatnoi knigi (Moscow: Nauka, 1976). Zaitseva produced several volumes on the 1700s, including, most recently, Knizhnaia torgoulia v Sankt-Peterburge vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (St Petersburg: BAN 2005). See also P.N. Berkov, Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII veka (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk, 1952). 18 M.N. Kufaev, Istoriia russkoi knigi v XIX v. (Leningrad: Nachatki znanii, 1927); M.V. Muratov, Knizhnoe delo v Rossii v XIX i XX vekakh. Ocherk istorii knigoizdatel’stva i knigotorgovli, 1800–1917 gg. (Moscow: Gos. sotsial’noekonomicheskoe izd-vo, 1931); E.A. Dinershtein, A. P. Chekhov i ego izdateli (Moscow: Kniga, 1990). 19 See A.V. Zapadov, ed., Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII-XIX vv. (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1963), and B.I. Esin, Puteshestvie v proshloe: gazetnyi mir XIX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo un-ta, 1983). 20 N.G. Malykhin, Ocherki po istorii knigoizdatel’skogo dela v SSSR (Moscow: Kniga, 1965). This work is updated by B.V. Lenskii, Knigoizdatel’skaia sistema sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 2001). 21 See, for example, V.D. Kuz’mina, Russkii demokraticheskii teatr vosemnadtsatogo veka (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1958). 22 William Mills Todd III commented: ‘[My] negative assessment of Smirdin’s efforts – necessary to illustrate their differences from … the regnant scholarly descriptions of them – should not obscure his historical role, which was essentially one of consolidation less than one of innovation’; see his

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Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 94. Blium has written many works since the late 1960s, especially on censorship, including, most recently, Ot neolita do Glavlita: dostopamiatnye i zanimatel’nye epizody, sobytiia i anekdoty iz istorii rossiiskoi tsenzury (St Petersburg: Izd-vo N.I. Novikova, 2009). Major studies by Reitblat are Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: Ocherki po istorii chteniia v Rossiii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo MPI, 1991) – recently reprinted with various new works under the title Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: I drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009) – and Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kul’ture Pushkinskoi epokhi (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001). T.G. Kupriianova, Pechatnyi dvor pri Petre I: monografiia (Moscow: MGUP, 1999); A. Iu. Samarin, Rasprostranenie i chitatel’ pervykh pechatnykh knig po istorii Rossii, konets XVII-XVIII v. (Moscow: MGUP, 1998); N. Iu. Bubnov, Knizhnaia kul’tura staroobriadtsev: stat’i raznykh let (St Petersburg: BAN, 2007); P.I. Khoteev and E.A. Savel’eva, Kniga v Rossii v seredine XVIII v.: Biblioteki obshchestvennogo pol’zovaniia (St Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi AN, 1993). E.A. Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia: sotsial’nye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi literatury (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1997); T.M. Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura v SSSR: 1917–1991 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002); O.V. Andreeva, Kniga v Rossii, 1917–1941 gg.: Istochniki izucheniia: monografiia (Moscow: Moskovskii gos. un-t pechati, 2004); S.A. Paichadze, Knizhnaia kul’tura za Uralom: Issledovaniia kontsa XX–nachala XXI stoletii (Omsk: Variant-Omsk, 2008). See Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov: Enlightener of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Effie Ambler, Russian Journalism and Politics, 1861–81: The Career of Aleksei S. Suvorin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972); Robert Otto, Publishing for the People: The Firm Posrednik, 1885– 1905 (New York: Garland, 1987); Charles Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); Marianna Tax Choldin, A Fence Around the Empire: Russian Censor-ship of Western Ideas under the Tsars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985); Faith Wigzell, Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender and Divination in Russia from 1765 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). A useful resource is SHARP Web from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (http://www.sharpweb.org), with

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35 36

listings such as Archives & Collections, Research Tools, Series & Journals, Online Exhibits & Blogs, Scholarly Societies, and more. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as An Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin, eds., Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). These include the material history of books (Robert Darnton), oral literature and literacy (Roger Chartier), the public sphere (Jürgen Habermas), authorship (Michel Foucault), print and cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu). Chartier’s notion of the ‘referential text’ and its significance for a given period – as noted in his ‘Text, Printings, Readings,’ in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 166 – is well worth examining in terms of Russian print culture; one thinks of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (1816) and Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? (1863), among others. Rolf Engelsing, ‘Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit. Das   statistische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre,’   Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, X (1969), cols. 945–1002; and his Der Bürger als Leser. Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974). Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading,’ in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), 154– 87. A convenient introduction is Jane Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Fish discusses interpretive communities in ‘Interpreting the Variorum,’ in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane Tompkins, 164–84; Jauss discusses horizon of expectations in ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,’ New Literary History 2, no.1 (1970): 7–37. These notions have informed my own work; see Miranda Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading   Audiences, 1828–1848’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1999). See M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). See also Peter Goodall, High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995). Wigzell, Reading Russian Fortunes, 3. See, for example, A. I. Reitblat, ‘F.V. Bulgarin i ego chitateli,’ in Chtenie v

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37 38

39

40

41

42

43

44 45

dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Moscow: Gos. b-teka im. V. I. Lenina, 1992), 55–66. Chartier, ‘Text, Printings, Readings,’ 169. On Russia, see B. Norton and J. Gheith, eds., An Improper Profession: Women, Gender and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). For more on this shift in cultural history in the 1990s and also in other disciplines, see Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009). An earlier volume that sought to ‘tell new stories’ was Jane Burbank and David Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Its approach nicely foreshadowed one intent of the current volume: ‘an embracing of methodologies from different disciplines … an opening of Russian history to questions and insights gleaned from other histories, and pluralism in topics and approaches’ (Theodore R. Weeks, ‘Review of Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire,’ H-Russia, H-Net Reviews, April 1999 http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=5845924881113). The concept of social engagement is preferred to civic engagement, although merchants in particular were active supporters of civic institutions. But several papers in this collection refer to the degree to which different classes ‘engaged’ with the broader socio-cultural realities of their time. Significant earlier studies include William L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); and Thomas C. Owen, The Corporation Under Russian Law, 1800–1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Among recent contributors on the eighteenth century, A. Iu. Samarin – like G. Iu. Semenova on the seventeenth century – uses new quantitative techniques to analyse reading patterns; see Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka po spiskam podpischikov (Moscow: Izd-vo MGUP, 2000), and Semenova, ‘Ob interesakh chitatelei XVII veka po materialam zapisei v knigakh: Opyt primeneniia korreliatsionnogo analiza,’ Otechestvennaia istoriia 1994, no. 1: 169–78. Jones, Nikolay Novikov; Wigzell, Reading Russian Fortunes. There is a scattering of recent work on the socio-economic status of Russia in the eighteenth century, including studies on state enterprise and finance by Ian Blanchard and George Munro in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 1997 (Fall 1997), and the relevant sections of the seminal Russian study by

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46

47 48

49

50

Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917, ed. and trans. Ben Eklof. 2 vols. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). But more studies on eighteenth-century socio-economic forces are needed, especially those that emphasize their intersection with print culture such as Owen’s own study for the mid-nineteenth century: ‘The Moscow Merchants and the Public Press, 1858–1868,’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 23, no. 1 (1975): 26–38. An exception for the 1700s is recent work by David Ransel; see A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov, Based on his Diary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Such intersections in the eighteenth century have, however, stirred the interest of Russian scholars; see V.P. Kovalev, ‘O dvizhenii ekonomicheskoi mysli v russkoi periodike kontsa XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX veka,’ Vestnik Leningradskogo universiteta 1974, no 14: 92–9. They also form the basis of other work on the early nineteenth century; see Remnek, ‘Russia, 1790– 1830,’ in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and America, 1760–1820, ed. H. Barker and S. Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 224–47. Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences,’ 403. See also note 22. Reading libraries became an important new space for access to books in the early nineteenth century; see A.A. Zaitseva, ‘“Kabinety dlia chteniia” v Sankt-Peterburge kontsa XVIII-nachala XIX veka,’ in Russkie biblioteki i chastnye knizhnye sobraniia XVI-XIX vekov (Leningrad: Biblioteka Akademii nauk SSSR, 1979), 29–46. Public libraries did not become a fixture of Russian life until later, although the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg was opened in 1814, and did provide added reading space; see N.A. Efimova, Chitateli publichnoi biblioteki v Peterburge i organizatsiia ikh obsluzhivaniia v 1814–1917 gg. (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennaia Publichnaia Biblioteka, 1958). But libraries were not the only social spaces offering increased access to print materials; as in Europe the coffeehouse became a popular place for enjoying new literature (see A.D. Galakhov, ‘Literaturnaia kofeinia v Moskve v 1830–1840 gg.,’ Russkaia starina, 50, no. 4 (1886): 181–98). Important studies on nineteenth-century Russian censorship are Choldin, A Fence Around the Empire, and Ruud, Fighting Words. See also Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Much of the research on diversification has dealt with the late nineteenth century (see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read). But more scholars are pointing to the early nineteenth century; besides recent work by Remnek,

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51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

earlier studies have included Nurit Schleifman, ‘A Russian Daily Newspaper and Its New Readership: “Severnaia pchela,” 1825–1840,’ Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 28, no. 2 (1987): 127–44, and Reitblat, ‘F.V. Bulgarin i ego chitateli.’ As with middle-level groups, the phenomenon was beginning to occur prior to the late nineteenth century; see, for example, A.V. Blium, ‘Massovoe chtenie v russkoi provintsii.’ The journal most associated with provincial readers – and castigated for it – was the thick journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia, founded in 1834. For a new study that emphasizes elite interests and responses, see Melissa Frazier, Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers and ‘The Library for Reading’ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). For a useful study on this period, see L.P. Burmistrova, Provintsial’naia gazeta v epokhu russkikh prosvetitelei: gubernskie vedomosti Povolzh’ia i Urala, 1840–1850 gg. (Kazan: Izd-vo Kazanskogo un-ta, 1985). Eklof has long studied issues of rural education in nineteenth-century   Russia; see his Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). In this connection the efforts of the publishing house Posrednik (the Intermediary) are of note. Founded in 1884 by Lev Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov, with involvement from Sytin, this venture lasted for a quarter for a century, and produced cheap editions of high-quality literature for the mass reader; see especially Otto, Publishing for the People. In their emphasis on graphic material these two essays not only illustrate the blending of methodologies from other disciplines (in this case from art history), but also exemplify a new trend in Slavic studies that looks at the importance of studying images for their contribution to the reinterpretation of previously noted phenomena. See especially Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). For recent works on the Old Believers see Irena Paert, Old Believers: Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), and Roy Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995). Old Believer concepts of gender discussed recently by Paert resurface in Kain’s essay in this   volume. A major resource on the phenomenon of the ‘thick journal’ and the unique political role it played in the absence of a free press is the collection edited by Deborah Martinsen, Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Introduction  27 59 For more on the space of the lubok in late nineteenth-century Russia, see A.V. Blium, ‘Russkaia lubochnaia kniga vtoroi poloviny XIX veka,’ Kniga: issledovaniia i materialy 42 (1981): 94–114, and Gunther Schaarschmidt, ‘The “Lubok” Novels: Russia’s Immortal Bestsellers,’ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 9, no. 3 (September 1982): 424–36. 60 See also Lovell and Menzel, eds., Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia, in which the wealth of fictional genres suggests a move from intensive to extensive reading similar to the Leserevolution after 1750 noted by Engelsing (Der Burger als Leser). 61 A recent example is Barbara Walker, ‘On Reading Soviet Memoirs: A History of the “Contemporaries” Genre as an Institution of Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790s to the 1970s,’ Russian Review 59, no. 3 (2000): 327–52. 62 One category is children’s reading, a topic of enduring interest in view of its political ramifications – from the earlier study by Felicity O’Dell, Socialisation Through Children’s Literature: The Soviet Example (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) to the new Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, eds. Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008). Lovell highlights this category with reference to Catriona Kelly’s ‘“Thank-You for the Wonderful Book”: Soviet Child Readers and the Management of Children’s Reading, 1950–1975,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005): 717–53. He thereby highlights a methodology that has proven rewarding since the fall of the USSR allowed the opening of many archives: the analysis of letters to newspaper editors as a gauge of reader response (a tool likewise used by Fisher in her essay in this volume, but for different purposes). 63 Even the concept of the paratext is not yet widely encountered in area studies research, although there are a few applications; see Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), especially the section entitled ‘Paratext: Commentaries, Ideology and Politics.’ 64 A new Russian monograph on sources for the study of Soviet readership in the early years is Andreeva, Kniga v Rossii, 1917–1941 gg. 65 Other scholars who have dealt with circumvention tactics in the twentieth century include Kathleen Parthé; see her Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). General sources are Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973), and Valeria Stel’makh, ‘Reading in the Context of Censorship in the Soviet Union,’ Libraries and Culture: A Journal of Library History 36, no. 1 (2001): 143–51. 66 The fact that historians of Russia have been able to take the concept of

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68

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openness and effectively query its rise and fall at watershed periods of Russian history indicates the extent to which this alternation will continue to dominate the Russian media for years to come; see, for example, W. Bruce Lincoln, ‘The Problem of Glasnost’ in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russian Politics,’ European Studies Review 11 (1981): 171–88. No Western scholar has attempted a pluralistic history of reading in Russia that covers more than a century, making the availability of this volume all the more important. But a definitive history is clearly needed. John Unsworth, ‘Scholarly Primitives: What Methods do Humanities Researchers have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?’ Symposium on ‘Humanities Computing,’ King’s College, London, 13 May 2000. http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5–00/primitives .html See Miranda Remnek, ‘Adding Value to Digital Texts: Approaches for Scholars and Librarians,’ Slavic & East European Information Resources 6, nos. 2/3 (2005): 151–67. Recent TEI developments include the June 2010 announcement of an innovative program called AccessTEI, designed to facilitate use of the TEI for smaller scholarly projects; supported by the Mellon Foundation and developed in cooperation with Apex CoVantage,   a premier data conversion company, AccessTEI (http://www.tei-c.org/ AccessTEI/) ‘makes it easy and affordable for members of the TEI consortium to create and encode the full text of valuable academic and research collections or even individual works and documents in preparation for online or other forms of digital publication.’ Note also the July 2010 announcements of (1) TEI By Example (http://www.teibyexample.org), which offers a series of freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI, and (2) the inaugural issue of The Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative (http:// journal.tei-c.org. See, for example, Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., ‘Introduction: Special Issue: Historical GIS: The Spatial Turn in Social Science History,’ Social Science History 24, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 451–70. Bertrum H. MacDonald and Fiona A. Black, ‘Using GIS for Spatial and Temporal Analyses in Print Culture Studies: Some Opportunities and Challenges,’ Social Science History 24, no. 3 (Fall 2000): [505]-36. A recent symposium on New Directions in Digital Humanities Scholarship held at the University of Illinois in February 2009 (http://www.library. uiuc.edu/hpnl/news/new_ directions.html) made clear the extent to which historians are showing increasing interest in such technologies,   especially GIS.

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1 Russian Eighteenth-Century Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce lina bernstein

Editor’s Note In keeping with our volume’s first goal – to highlight current research in Russian book studies by presenting new interpretations from various disciplines that often lead to conclusions beyond the sphere of print culture proper – Lina Bernstein’s essay, which introduces the first of five thematic divisions in our volume (‘Commercialization and social engagement’), is typical of history scholarship in that it provides in-depth analysis of evidence found in traditional primary sources (periodicals, compilations of laws). But it is also ground-breaking for the eighteenth century, not only in its use of more specialized sources for the study of commercialization (literature on trade ethics, books on bookkeeping, dictionaries of commodities, practical manuals) but also in that it blends the study of specific print culture developments with broader economic processes. There is much to be learned about questions that also affect mainstream Russian history (state involvement in economic development, formation of new identities), and the points discussed should indeed be of interest to researchers outside print culture itself. To promote our second goal – to attract younger scholars by suggesting methodologies now in use by digital humanists – it is worth noting that the types of sources used by Bernstein are also candidates for digital approaches such as the analysis allowed by the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.* The TEI is most widely applied by literary scholars, but it has been used for legal texts (hence might apply to the laws and contracts included in Bernstein’s literature on trade practices), and historians too make use of its possibilities. Humanities scholars increasingly perform TEI structural encoding to retrieve identical sections of texts like the prefaces Bernstein uses to compare expressions of respect by publishers

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30  Lina Bernstein

for readers; one might also use such encoding to facilitate comparison of the letter-writing models found in different published manuals. Further, linguistic encoding might allow analysis of the business terminology found in these sources, while content encoding might permit markup of the personal inscriptions Bernstein finds in surviving copies of the manuals to extract and compare the information contained, especially as the corpus grows – much of this in line with the emphasis on contextual encoding planned for upcoming workshops on Scholarly Text Encoding funded by NEH Institutes in Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities, and sponsored by Brown University’s Women Writers’ Project. There is nothing more necessary than commerce; it makes states prosperous. It is an inexhaustible source of the state’s riches… For states to become firmly established, and great and prosperous, commerce is more effective than arms. – Karl Berens, Kupets, ili vseobshchee rassuzhdenie o torgovle (The merchant, or a general discussion of trade), 1793

Until a couple of decades ago, Russian merchant culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was largely ignored as a field of enquiry, in part due to a lack of agreement as to whether such a culture existed at all.1 This confusion led cultural historians to write off, for example, the significant genre of merchant portraits as amateurish, and to pay relatively little attention to such historically important writers as Matvei Komarov and Mikhail Chulkov – let alone to consider books written specifically for merchants such as letter-writing manuals, instructions on how to conduct business, and bookkeeping manuals. The past twenty years, beginning perhaps significantly around the time of the demise of the Soviet economic system, has seen growing interest among scholars in Russian merchant culture of this period. This essay focuses on the rapid growth in the second half of the eighteenth century, as evidence of commercialization began to increase, of specialized literature on trade ethics and practices. Books on bookkeeping, dictionaries of trading commodities, reference books on market schedules and roads, and compilations of laws and business contracts all appeared, both by Russian authors and translated from other languages – continual complaints of the publishers of these books about the dearth of such literature notwithstanding. Here one can also consider such periodicals as the Academy of Sciences’ Ezhemesiachnye

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Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce  31

sochineniia (Monthly articles) of 1755–64, Nikolai Novikov’s Pribavlenie k Moskovskim vedomostiam (Moscow news supplement) of 1783–4, and I.A. Krylov’s Zritel’ (The spectator) of 1792, where original and translated articles on commerce (mostly in the form of letters from merchants) and reviews of foreign literature on trade issues were regularly published. A great part of this literature belongs to the vast literary output of various manuals – conduct manuals, medical manuals, letter-writing manuals, child-rearing manuals, etc. – and other books of popular enlightenment that endeavoured to bring the fruits of civilization to a broader public. Such literature signified that Russia, like other European countries, had entered an age in which society was in flux and its members, rather than having social roles that were defined and predictable from their stations at birth, began for the first time to need guidance in defining themselves and correctly adapting themselves to the numerous social roles available to them. Indeed, as indication of their increasing social engagement, merchants were entering the ranks of readers in disproportionately large numbers, and becoming important consumers of the steadily growing book market – in the development of which they were also participating by underwriting publications and distributing them around the country.2 The growing book market of specialized publications available to merchants described the ethnography of the marketplace and was directed at developing in its readers an understanding of what makes a good merchant, encouraging in them a sense of belonging to an important stratum of society, and showing them the kind of education that was necessary for commercial success. Literature for merchants amplified and reflected phenomena, such as the desire to acquire knowledge of the wider world, that had already taken root among Russian merchants and that were propelled by many social and political forces, for example, by Russia’s desire to become a strong presence in the world’s trading arena.3 A number of well-known and lesser-known or even anonymous writers and translators appealed to the growing self-awareness of the Russian merchant by proposing an ideal to which a merchant could aspire. The image of the merchant as the lifeblood of the world became rather a common one in such literature. Books for merchants promoted practical knowledge of the trading world and acquainted their readers with a set of ‘civilizing’ values. It is unclear to what extent they contributed to how merchants actu-

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32  Lina Bernstein

ally acted and conducted their business. However, it is clear that there was a market for these books: although the printing of such books was encouraged and sometimes even commissioned by the government, most of the publishers were private companies concerned with their bottom line. Both authors and publishers expressed respect for their merchant readers, indicating their expectation that those to whom they directed their publications would profit by them.4 Thus Christian Ludwig Vever, the publisher and translator of Jean-Pierre Ricard’s Le Négoce d’Amsterdam (Amsterdam trade), which appeared in Russian in 1762, wrote in his dedication (in a flowery and elevated style that I shall attempt to reproduce in translation), ‘The publisher of this exceedingly difficult and exceedingly useful composition on the Amsterdam market dedicates it to the merchantry of the first guild as a sign of his high esteem for this merchantry and his eagerness to be of service [Vsemu pervoi gil’dii kupechestvu sie pretrudnoe i prepoleznoe sochinenie ob amsterdamskom torge, v znak svoego k nim vysokopochitaniia i okhotnosti ko uslugam ikh prinosit i posviashchaet onago izdatel’].’5 In The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout, Arcadius Kahan writes, ‘[Russian merchants of the eighteenth century] had no knowledge or ability to arrange insurance, shipping facilities, or quality control. They had no network of information gathering and other important ancillary services necessary for efficient trading in a world market.’6 The eighteenthcentury books on trade aimed at changing this situation by introducing their readers to such notions as insurance, efficient banking, and modern bookkeeping, while promoting a merchant’s duties and responsibilities and ethical business practices. They frequently introduced new commercial institutions and business terminology to Russian merchants. They championed general education and the study of foreign languages as a tool for ‘information gathering’ and as a prerequisite for participation in the global market. Such books, in the words of Andrei Volchkov, applied to his translation of Savary des Bruslons’s famous Dictionnaire du Commerce, promised their ‘commerce-loving readers’ a description of trading practices ‘of the entire earthly sphere.’7 Trade was increasingly conducted by correspondence, and therefore a merchant’s ability to express himself clearly in writing acquired great importance. Almost every instructional manual for merchants emphasized that a merchant aiming at success must first of all acquire good penmanship and a knowledge of spelling, grammar, and epistolary style. As if in answer to this demand, in the last third of the eighteenth century there appeared a number of letter-writing manuals, most of

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which were translations from French or German, though some were original works.8 We can see that merchants were among the target audience from the fact that almost all of them sported the epithet kupecheskii (merchant) or kommercheskii (commercial) in their long titles, and even those rare works that did not have this designation in the title nevertheless contained some merchant model letters. Merchants and other traders not of the nobility (townspeople, peasants) who were engaged in commerce in Russia were, perhaps, the largest group of users of the letter-writing manuals (this is supported by many personal inscriptions in surviving copies).9 Even where they did not deal directly with business issues, these manuals taught correct writing and explained matters of epistolary etiquette, which was important for those who did not have access to a systematic education. The growing importance of commercial sections in letter-writing manuals is reflected by the increasing prominence given to business correspondence. The Moscow manual of 1765 entitled Nastavlenie, kak sochiniat’ i pisat’ vsiakie pis’ma … (Instruction on how to compose and write different letters …) had only one merchant letter, which was placed among other polite letters without any comment on the peculiarities of business writing. A manual of 1793, Vseobshchii sekretar’, ili novyi i polnyi pis’movnik (General secrétaire, or new and complete letterwriting manual), expanded its commercial section in each of its two new editions of 1796.10 By the 1808 edition, this section, almost half of a large volume (over six hundred pages), included, along with model business letters, an encyclopedic essay on Russian and foreign commerce, instructions on bookkeeping, a glossary with detailed explanations of accounting terminology, a table of correspondence of foreign and Russian currencies, postal schedules for St Petersburg and Moscow, and rules for using post-chaises. In great part, this book is a compilation. The anonymous author (probably Ivan Iakovlevich Novikov)11 freely borrows from earlier letter-writing manuals12 but supplies his own original sections to address aspects of Russian and European trade. These business sections turned Vseobshchii sekretar’ into a veritable reference guide. Here one could learn the names, schedules, and specificity (what kind of goods were bought and sold) of all the main Russian iarmarki (markets) as well as of all main European markets (thirty-four European cities in all).13 Readers could learn that Amsterdam, Genoa, and London were the main banking cities; that banks and trading companies were based on shareholding (for example, the Dutch East India company, founded in 1772, consisted of forty-five hundred shares

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offered at five hundred thalers each; the author explained how shares functioned); that exchange in many markets was accomplished by bank drafts; and that many banks lent money at low interest. They could also learn that international trade prospered where taxes for foreign merchants were not higher than for the local population (e.g., Hamburg and Leipzig), and that Hamburg had a privileged insurance company that daily sent ships to all European ports. To ease business transactions between Russian and foreign merchants, tables of correspondence between Russian and foreign currencies, weights, and measures were provided. Thus, a merchant wishing to break into a new domestic market or enter foreign trade would be well served by this guide. He would also have seen that foreign financial systems, which offered a variety of banks that fulfilled various transactions, were much more developed than their domestic counterparts.14 To a modern-day historian, texts like Vseobshchii sekretar’ provide an interesting picture of common social interactions, in that they depict business situations that routinely took place in the life of the country. Thus, the 1796 edition of of Vseobshchii sekretar’, Section III, Part 2, offers examples of business contracts of all kinds and between parties of different social origins. They are written out in great detail to prevent any foreseeable grievances from the parties involved, and deal with a wide variety of situations such as selling goods or serfs, hiring free or serf labour, renting a house or a store, apprenticing a serf boy to a notary for him to acquire knowledge of laws and court procedures (the contract forbids the use of the boy for household services; such a clause is present in all contracts of this type when an apprentice is sent to a master to acquire a skill).15 Elsewhere in the same text letters of complaints, appeals, and announcements add to this picture, describing highway robbery of merchant caravans, transfer of a merchant of the first guild to the third guild with typical explanations (bankruptcy of the debtor, dishonesty of the assistants, or impossibility of collecting debts).16 The social status of the signatories to the contracts and other documents varies from nobility to merchants to peasants, some of whom wish to assign themselves to the merchantry. These signatures show the involvement of the whole of society in business relations.17 Vseobshchii sekretar’ also takes upon itself the task of explaining Russian law in a practical way. It offers a separate section on how to write promissory notes (veksel’) according to the Veksel’nyi ustav (Law of promissory notes). All examples are then analysed in detail, and reference is made to the article of Russian law that applied to particu-

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lar examples. The exchange of promissory notes (veksel’nyi torg) receives special treatment in one of the letters borrowed from Petr Bogdanovich’s letter-writing manual.18 The letter gives an account of the Moscow markets, eleven in all, one of which was devoted to veksel’nyi torg. Thus, in regard to merchants and others in trade, Vseobshchii sekretar’ serves as a textbook not only on how to write private and business letters but also on how to conduct business according to contemporary standards and Russian law. To a greater or lesser extent, almost all Russian letter-writing manuals of this period, along with instructions on style and propriety of language, fulfilled a civilizing function that went beyond their stated purpose of offering a collection of model letters. Some of them, even within their model letters, sought to portray high ethical norms in personal conduct and in business.19 Others gave practical examples on how to write promissory notes and trade agreements.20 Such books generally went through multiple editions, which suggests that there was a market interested in what they had to offer. Unlike the first Russian letter-writing manual ordered by Peter I and addressed to a nonexistent, purely imagined polite society, these books were aimed at an audience in need of useful information. But it was not only letter-writing manuals that served as guides to commerce. In the course of the second part of the eighteenth century there appeared a number of books that offered encyclopedic essays on specific markets in Europe, Asia, America, and Africa, and touched on issues of the role of commerce in history and politics. Examples include Ekstrakt Savarieva Leksikona o kommertsii (Extract from Savary’s dictionary of commerce), a translation by Sergei Volchkov in 1747 of part of a work by Savary des Bruslons; or a later translation of a different portion of the same dictionary with additions from other more modern sources and original articles on Russian products by Vasilii Levshin entitled Slovar’ kommercheskii (Dictionary of commerce), 1787–92.21 Other examples include Kratkoe opisanie rossiiskogo torga, otpravliaemogo sukhim putem s Kitaem, Bukharieiu, Kalmykami, Kurliandieiu i Pol’sheiu (Short description of Russian trading goods conducted overland with China, Bukharia, Kalmykia, Courland and Poland) by Kapiton Bocharnikov, 1782; a translation of Les progrès du commerce by Honoré Lacombe de Prézel, entitled in Russian O uspekhakh kommertsii (On commercial successes), 1796; Opisanie o torgakh sibirskikh (A description of Siberian trade), 1756, by G.F. Mueller, which included a description of trade with China, Mongolia, and Bukhara; Petr Bogdanovich’s Kratkaia istoriia o torgovle i more-

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plavanii drevnikh (Short history of ancient trade and seafaring), 1788; and Carl Günther Ludovici’s two-volume Nachertanie polnoi kupecheskoi sistemy (Outline of the complete merchant system), 1789 (827 pages!), translated by Fedor Sapozhnikov.22 Finally, other similar contributions that served as guides to commerce include Karl Berens’s Kupets, ili vseobshchee rassuzhdenie o torgovle (The merchant; or general discussion of trade), 1793; Mikhail Chulkov’s monumental work Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommertsii pri vsekh portakh i granitsakh ot drevnikh vremen do nastoiashchego (Historical description of Russian commerce at all ports and borders from ancient times to the present), published in seven volumes in twenty-one books, 1781–8, along with his other publications on commerce; and Nikolai Novikov’s translated and original articles on commerce in his journal Pribavlenie k Moskovskim vedomostiam, including his article ‘O torgovle voobshche’ (On trade in general), which appeared serially in thirty-eight issues of the journal in 1783. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, many of these books were sent, free of charge, to provincial magistrates (ratushi) in order to popularize new ideas and information among the local merchants. It is not unusual even today to find these rare books in regional (oblastnye) libraries, where they were deposited after the closing of merchant organizations. Dissemination of specialized literature on trade bespeaks Catherine II’s desire not only to promote modern business practices but also to influence the development of the merchant class. Unlike Peter’s nonexistent polite society, Russian merchants constituted an important social layer that was a target of Catherine’s efforts at social organization. Nikolai Novikov’s stated goal vis-à-vis merchants for his new publication can also be applied to books for merchants: ‘Russian merchants can gain greatly from Pribavlenie because from this reading they will acquire knowledge about all products and wares, where they can avail themselves of [such wares] in large quantities and with great profit.’23 These publications were consistent with the desire of Russia to broaden its participation in foreign markets and further develop its domestic trade. They appealed to the imagination of literate and energetic readers, and pointed out to them the important role of commerce in the welfare of their country. These books made a connection between the spread of civilization and the geographical expansion of commerce, thereby demonstrating the positive role of colonization, which brings the idea of peaceful prosperity to ‘barbarians.’ Expansion of commerce was treated by many authors as a project of popularization of Enlightenment values and as a

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moral duty of the civilized world.24 Thus, Lacombe de Prézel, author of Les progrès du commerce, speaking through his Russian translator ‘A.K.’ in O uspekhakh kommertsii,25 investigates a process by which different nations have developed from barbarians into peaceful members of the world community, and proposes that they have achieved peaceful prosperity by means of commerce, which favours safe roads and stability over the waging of war. Trading nations, in his opinion, produce enough wealth for their members to make barbarian methods of acquiring riches, namely, the robbing of neighbouring peoples, unattractive. Thus, it is in the interest of the civilized nations to involve barbarian nations in commerce; in fact, it is their duty. De Prézel emphasizes the importance of foreign trade and the importation of foreign goods in particular: economic isolation leads to the impoverishment of the nation (as happened in ancient Egypt). Countries that embark on foreign trade give employment to their populations, develop their fleets and technology, discover other continents, and make contributions to the knowledge of geography and world history. By their example such nations demonstrate to barbarian nations, who live by warfare rather than by exchange, the advantages of trade. In the original 1761 edition of his book de Prézel looked at European history through the lens of commercial expansion of the Italian city states, Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, and Scandinavia. He also considered Africa and some countries in Asia (India, Turkey, Persia). He suggested that even countries with meagre natural resources and land, such as Portugal and Holland, had been able to reach prosperity through commerce, aggressively exploring and developing (colonizing) other continents. But he did not write about Russia. However, in the Russian translation of 1796 this omission was corrected, a chapter on Russian foreign trade being written and added to the main text of O uspekhakh kommertsii by Ivan Ia. Novikov, who was well equipped to write it, being an employee of the Russian foreign trade office in Moscow. The years separating the original publication of the book and its translation coincided almost exactly with the reign of Catherine II, during which Russia followed the road toward ‘civilization’ as outlined by de Prézel by acquiring new ports, leasing and engaging more foreign vessels for commercial use, and allowing its merchants more freedom in foreign and domestic trade with the goal of promoting commercial relationships. The translation of de Prézel’s book was extremely timely, and Ivan Novikov’s chapter was a hymn of praise to Russian commercial successes that were achieved by applying

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the experience of European nations, thus ending Russia’s isolation as it joined the family of civilized European countries.26 The notion, put forward by de Prézel, of peace and prosperity founded on commercial ties was not new to Russian readers. In 1788, Petr Bogdanovich, in his book Kratkaia istoriia o torgovle i moreplavanii drevnikh, while discussing the ancient world around the Mediterranean Sea, described the rise to prosperity and cultural blossoming of the nations with advanced commerce and social freedoms. He wrote about international ties among the ancient states, development of sea exploration, widening of geographical horizons, and acquisition of ethnographic knowledge for which commercial interest was responsible. All this was given as an example for Russia to emulate. Bogdanovich, publisher and translator of Voltaire and Erasmus, propagator of the Enlightenment, wrote, ‘The more freedoms citizens enjoy, the better and stronger is their commerce.’27 The long titles of eighteenth-century books speak eloquently about their content and often address their readers directly. Here is just one example of such a title, which lists many topics offered by other books of this genre: Nachertanie polnoi kupecheskoi sistemy, kupno s nachal’nymi osnovaniiami torgovoi nauki, i s priobshcheniem kratkoi istorii o torgovle, vodoiu i sukhim putem otpravliaiushcheisia, iz kotoroi mozhno pritom usmotret’ nastoiashchee sostoianie Evropeiskoi torgovli, proizvodiashcheisia i v drugie chasti sveta, k uslugam prilezhashchikh k torgovle, sochinennoe Karlom Ginterom Liudovitsiem, i v pol’zu rossiiskogo kupechestva perevedennoe nadvornym sovetnikom Fedorom Sapozhnikovym (A complete outline of the merchant system with elementary foundations of the science of trade and with additions on a short history of trade, conducted by sea and by land, from which one can see the present state of European commerce, conducted as well in other parts of the world, for the benefit of those who are engaged in trade, composed by Karl Günter Ludovici and translated for the benefit of the Russian merchantry by the court councilor Fedor Sapozhnikov).28 The publication consists of two thick volumes and covers all the themes announced in the title and more. The first volume deals with the philosophy and practices of commerce; while the second offers a historical survey of world commerce from ancient times to the contemporary period. The book is well organized, with cross-references that direct the reader to paragraphs within its volumes and to other books relevant to the subject at hand. Although the title addresses only the merchantry, the text states explicitly (see page 5, for example) that the book could be useful to state policy-makers and

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judges as well, since law should be based on private business practices and not on abstract principles.29 The volume entitled Nachertanie polnoi kupecheskoi sistemy fulfilled, in large part, goals similar to those that were set out by Nikolai Novikov for his articles in Pribavlenie k Moskovskim vedomostiam. It acquainted Russian merchants with a broad variety of commodities available in world markets, with rules and customs of different lands, with their monetary systems, and with major commercial centres; it situated their own country within the world trading community, which provided a clear view of Russia’s standing relative to other countries.30 Such books educated Russian merchants in the importance of their enterprise for the well-being of their country and encouraged them to extend their trade abroad. But the majority of them preferred to stay within the boundaries of their own country, where one currency was used and a familiar set of laws operated. However, Russia comprised a huge territory that produced a variety of goods. Russian markets offered timber and furs from Siberia and northern Russia, grain from southern Russia, and farm products from Ukraine, commodities which taken together approximate foreign trade in scope and territorial span. In fact, in Opisanie o torgakh sibirskikh, academician G.F. Mueller makes a clear distinction between Russian goods sold in Siberia and goods from Siberia imported into European Russia, as well as between Russian merchants and various trading Siberian tribes. Mueller makes it clear that Russia was still carrying out the cultural and commercial colonization of Siberia.31 Opisanie o torgakh sibirskikh is a veritable encyclopedia of Siberian commerce, with a road directory that includes mileage (‘verstage’), road conditions, information on water transportation, as well as a description of all large and small markets (which in time might become more important), and a detailed description of merchant wares (domestic and foreign) brought to Siberia from European Russia and vice versa, with instructions on how to evaluate them, and especially on how to distinguish all kinds of furs and determine their quality. Separate chapters provide an equal amount of detail, and with special attention to quality control (for example, of such goods as cotton cloth, silks, and tea), concerning Chinese, Bukharan, and Mongol markets.32 Mueller clearly places merchants in the centre of Siberian life: trade brings together different parts of this vast territory, and connects it to the rest of the world. It also shows new ways of life to the indigenous peoples and creates a demand for Russian goods. In the spirit of de

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Prézel’s book and not unlike the English in India or the Portuguese near the Chinese shores described by him, Russian merchants were European discoverers (colonizers) of Siberia, the Far East, and the northwestern shores of North America, contributing to their own wealth and the welfare of their country, but also to geographical and ethnographical knowledge. In fact, the colonization of Siberia in the sixteenth century was in large part financed and carried out by the merchant family Stroganov, who paid, for instance, to send the Cossack chieftain Ermak and his detachment against the Siberian khan Kuchum.33 Perhaps the best-known books written by a Russian merchant about his own experiences in the exploration of new lands and different trading practices are the accounts by Grigorii Shelikhov, in Rossiiskogo kuptsa Grigoriia Shelikhova stranstvovanie (Wanderings of the Russian merchant Grigorii Shelikhov) and its continuation, which described his travels to the northwestern shores of North America.34 In these two books, the Irkutsk merchant Shelikhov portrayed himself as being as much a merchant as an explorer and a champion of his country, for whose glory he undertook his expeditions. In fact, Shelikhov showed himself a talented ethnographer, leaving an invaluable account of the native peoples of the lands to which he travelled, and a politically minded citizen who tried to win the sympathies of the natives by building schools and profiting by the exchange of goods rather than by plunder.35 A frequently occurring theme in books directed at Russian merchants is an exhortation to such enlightened activities in the interest of obtaining the goodwill of local trading populations. In fact, abuses in the dealings of Russian authorities with Siberian tribes have been documented, as have dishonesty and cruelty among merchants. Such behaviour was condemned by the writers of instructional books for merchants. Thus the editor and the author of the preface to Shelikhov’s book, B.P. Polevoi,36 wrote that Shelikhov had endeavoured to establish a good relationship with the people of the islands off the coast of Alaska, an especially difficult task because of the memories of cruelty and hostage-taking left by his predecessors. Bogdanovich, in a very interesting logical twist, insisted in his above-mentioned Kratkaia istoriia o torgovle i moreplavanii drevnikh that Alexander the Great’s wars had been waged to unite all peoples by commercial ties, which would bring prosperity and peace to the world. He noted that Alexander’s envoys in India adhered to ethical norms of behaviour and established friendly relations with the local populations, unlike the Spaniards in America. Elsewhere, in his essays on Latin American countries, Bogdanovich

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condemned the Spanish conquistadors for their cruelty toward the Indians and their religious intolerance. In the same publications he described the riches of American colonies and their main trading commodities, pointing out that Spanish greed had no limits and had all but destroyed the local cultures.37 Among books for merchants there were publications devoted exclusively to practical bookkeeping. Most of them were translations from German. Publishers and translators emphasized the importance of learning a foreign language if only for reading books on bookkeeping, since there was a shortage of them in Russian. ‘It is not surprising to find the head of a large family firm in the habit of recording business transactions,’ writes David Ransel, who adds, ‘Even if this runs counter to the intelligentsia stereotype of illiterate merchants who die with all their accounts in their heads.’38 P.M. Ponomarev, translator and publisher of Pochtennyi kupets, ili bukhgalteriia (The esteemed merchant, or a treatise on accounting), prefaces this translation from German with a passionate introduction in which he compares a merchant ignorant of keeping books to a traveller who stumbles along the road without a clear understanding of how to reach the end. And even if the end is reached, such a merchant cannot analyse what mistakes might have been made along the way, or what successful operations, useful for future transactions, may have helped him. A merchant skilled in bookkeeping sets out on a journey with open eyes and can at any time correct his course.39 Ponomarev also published a book on bookkeeping by Mikhail Chulkov, Nastavlenie neobkhodimo-nuzhnoe dlia rossiiskikh kuptsov (Outline of needed information for Russian merchants) – an extract from Chulkov’s seven-volume study Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommer­ tsii, which was commissioned by Catherine II.40 Similar to Pochtennyi kupets, ili bukhgalteriia, Chulkov’s Nastavlenie is a textbook on accounting and bookkeeping. Both books explain the origins of ‘merchant science,’ referring to the Italian system of conducting business. Both publications introduce bookkeeping terminology and offer a large number of concrete examples of commercial transactions and various ways of recording them. From the merchant instructional literature one can glean the scope of an ideal merchant education and a portrait of an ideal merchant. A book by an anonymous German writer published in Russian in 1797 as Pis’ma ot ottsa k synu, v kotorykh opisyvaiutsia vazhneishie dolzhnosti kupecheskogo sostoianiia, i potrebnye znaniia k otpravleniiu torgovli s vygo-

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doiu (Letter from a father to his son, in which are described the most important obligations of the merchant social stratum, and needed knowledge for the successful conduct of trade) by Ivan Iakovlevich Novikov (the likely author of Vseobshchii sekretar’) mapped out such an education and offered an image to which young merchants should aspire.41 This book appeared along with other collections of letters, which styled themselves as letters from a parent or other relative to a child. For the most part these letters were fictitious, but sometimes they in fact belonged to real personalities.42 Such collections capitalized on the intimacy and sincerity of a private letter. A number of these collections, translated mostly from French, addressed the upbringing and education of children of the nobility.43 They belonged to literature that endeavoured to shape the behaviour of young Russians and, along with translated works of such writers as Diderot, Voltaire, Fénelon, as well as conduct manuals, disseminated educated discourse of civic responsibility and virtue. As suggested, Ivan Novikov’s translation was designed to excite the social imagination of young merchants. However, the education proposed here by a merchant father to his son was not much different from that suggested in other manuals for scions of noble families, knowledge of history, languages, and arts being its cornerstone.44 Such education was promoted not as a means for climbing up and out of the merchant class, but for becoming a better merchant and a responsible citizen. Ivan Ia. Novikov studied in the commercial school of the Vospitatel’nyi Dom in Moscow. As a thirteen-year-old in 1781, he took part in the collective translation of the article ‘Commerce,’ from the French Encyclopédie: French and German were a part of the school’s curriculum.45 One of the most forceful letters in the anonymous collection translated by Novikov, Pis’ma ot ottsa k synu, is devoted to the importance of the knowledge of foreign languages. Besides letters on penmanship and grammar and the love of reading, the father insists that his son learn French, ‘the most important and useful [language] nowadays,’46 but also other languages. In fact, the more languages a merchant knows, the more advantage he has over others trading in foreign countries. In his footnote, the translator comments on the necessity for an educated merchant to learn foreign languages in order to read foreign books, especially books on trade, which were not yet numerous in Russian.47 In the letters themselves the father (writer of the letters) wishes to see his son broadly educated. The son must not only acquire useful skills such as the knowledge of foreign languages, arithmetic, and bookkeep-

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ing, but be able to draw, which can be both useful and pleasurable, and he must develop his love for reading, especially books on geography and history, because ‘history of adventures in the world is also a history of commerce.’48 ‘Reading good books is the greatest pleasure that I know for the young and for the old. It enlightens one’s mind, making our thoughts clear and full. A merchant should not read just about commerce, but rather, his curiosity should spread itself on knowledge of the world and human deeds. The more he researches, the more he will become sure that there are not many things that would not have ties with commerce and that at any rate could not be used profitably for it.’49 In fact, the majority of instructional books for merchants, as we have seen, address various aspects of history (ancient and modern) and geography. The authors of the books discussed above are concerned with law and state policies on trade. These writers draw merchants’ attention to political issues that directly affect commerce. However, they approach them in many different ways. Vseobshchii sekretar’ includes a practical manual on applying the Veksel’nyi ustav; De Prézel sees law and honesty as the only guarantees against corruption and the downfall of trading nations.50 De Prézel and especially Nikolai Novikov, in his articles for Pribavlenie k Moskovskim vedomostiam, point out the relationship between commerce and state policies, addressing policy-makers as much as merchants. The same is true for Bogdanovich, who makes a connection between the political freedom of citizens and the flourishing of commerce. Carl Günther Ludovici calls on merchants to obey the law, and on policy-makers to base law on actual practices. Instructional literature for merchants closely connects lawfulness with patriotism and promotes philanthropy as a means of redistribution of wealth, since imbalance in wealth and its unequal distribution create instability and the danger of a reversion to barbarism.51 As we have seen, books for merchants touched on many topics, from bookkeeping to history and geography, to law and the study of markets, to moral questions and education. All of them were published to assist merchants in their trade and to promote more efficient ways of conducting business to make it more profitable. The profit, however, was understood not only as a personal enrichment but also as an enterprise beneficial to the fatherland. Even in the book he published on bookkeeping, Pochtennyi kupets, ili bukhgalteriia, P.M. Ponomarev wrote in his preface52 that he had made the book available not for merchants who traded blindly, without any understanding of all the transactions,

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and thus wasted their time, but for those ‘who, being real sons of the fatherland, measure their days by the amount of public good they generate.’53 The same reason was given in Kratkoe opisanie rossiiskogo torga for the establishment of commercial ties with China.54 A number of books recommended selling manufactured goods rather than raw materials or selling Russian goods abroad and bringing capital back to Russia, because such trade was better for the state.55 In Kupets, ili vseobshchee rassuzhdenie o torgovle Karl Berens defined the goal of commerce as beneficial ‘to as many people in the state as possible,’ and called merchants ‘sons of the fatherland.’56 The phrase ‘sons of the fatherland’ found its way into many publications for merchants. It added a moral dimension to books on accounting. Among the volumes of literature on trade that appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century, one collection stands out in its ambition and scope. Mikhail Chulkov (1740–93), a prolific writer in various genres and a secretary of the Senate, produced as mentioned above a monumental work in seven volumes comprising twenty-one books entitled Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommertsii pri vsekh portakh i granitsakh ot drevnikh vremen do nastoiashchego. Chulkov’s work combined topics that were dispersed among other books of this genre, and thus can be viewed as representative of the kind of information that was in demand or considered useful for commerce. If Russia was to become part of global trade, Russian merchants had to become knowledgeable about their own vast markets. Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommertsii synthesized literature on domestic trade that had appeared prior to 1781 and presented Russian merchants with a full picture of Russian markets, complete with laws and ordinances to be applied in commerce. As remarked earlier in note 40, Mikhail Chulkov’s volumes deserve a separate essay. However, the reasons that inspired him to write for merchants and that he offered in the introduction to his magnum opus are worth mentioning here. These reasons are typical and common for others who issued similar books. Chulkov, according to his own confession, was inspired ‘to compile a full system of commerce of ancient times as well as of modern’ by Catherine II, who wished to systematize ‘all classes and state affairs’ by social reorganizations.57 Both the writer and his sovereign wished to implement the ideas of the Enlightenment; both used the ideas of Montesquieu as theoretical underpinnings for their practical endeavours. Montesquieu’s assurance that ‘commerce will put an end to harmful prejudices’ was taken by Chulkov as a motto and developed by him to illustrate that engagement in trade instils

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order and peace in society.58 Thus, Chulkov explicitly defined his work as a product of the Enlightenment. The same desire to educate and civilize moved other writers who wrote for merchants. The merchant class appeared in these works not as a secluded caste but as a layer of society with a strong identity and desire to communicate with the outside world. NOTES Research for this essay was supported by a short-term grant from the Kennan Institute, and by a summer travel grant from Franklin & Marshall College.   * For more on the TEI and other applications, see Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).   1 Arcadius Kahan expressed a similar idea when he wrote, ‘Special attention must be paid to the role of the merchant in Russian trade in the eighteenth century, for their position in the trade picture has evoked a debate that has persisted through the succeeding centuries. To a large extent the problem has been due to semantics, definitional unclarities, and the cultural attitudes one brings to the question: “Who was a Russian merchant?”’ The Plow, The Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 262.   2 On the growing readership among merchants, see Viktor Shklovskii, Matvei Komarov – zhitel’ goroda Moskvy (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929), 33–4. Shklovskii maintains that Russian readership was steadily widening to include a large number of merchants and peasants. He quotes the serf-author Matvei Komarov, who, addressing his readers, writes in the introduction to Obstoiatel’nye i vernye opisaniia zhizni slavnogo Rossiiskogo moshennika Van’ki-Kaina i frantsuzkogo moshennika Kartusha (Moscow, 1779) that ‘not only nobility, but middle and lower ranks of people, and especially merchantry, indulge with great pleasure in reading of all kinds of books.’ Shklovskii also remarks that transfer signatures show that many merchants possessed books (90–1). My own research on letter-writing manuals confirms Shklovskii’s observation. For example, I have used a copy of Polnyi vseobshchii pismovnik ili podrobnoe i iasnoe nastavlenie (Moscow, 1798) which has a long inscription in the well-practised hand of a peasant – Egor Mikheev’s son Leshchov, who received this copy of the book as a present

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46  Lina Bernstein in 1815. (I am grateful to Olga Glagoleva for help in reading this inscription.) Ivan Krylov, echoing Nikolai Novikov, who wrote earlier about his readers from the ‘srednii rod liudei’ (people of the middle estate), writes in letter 26 of his journal Pochta dukhov (1789), ‘Who reads Plato’s works on duties/obligations, his instructions to politicians, his [opinion] on the state of the peasants, and on the calling of a nobleman? – Merchants and town dwellers do; and noble readers read fairy tales, childish fantasies, and funny fables.’ Quoted in N.K. Gudzii, ed., L.B. Lekhtblau, comp., Russkie satiricheskie zhurnaly XVIII veka (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebnopedagogicheskoe izd-vo narkomprosa RSFSR, 1940), 27. At the same time, as noted by Gary Marker, ’By far the largest group to enter into publishing in the last quarter of the eighteenth century consisted of the aforementioned merchants and artisans who had had experience in some aspect of printing or bookselling; fully three-quarters of all publishers came from their ranks’; see his Publishing, Printing, and the Origin of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 109.   3 Nikolai Karamzin singled out merchants and meshchane (townspeople) as a group eager to know ‘what they write from the foreign lands.’ Even the poorest and the illiterate among them subscribed to newspapers, which were not popular even among the nobility; see ‘O kniznoi torgovle i liubvi ko chteniiu v Rossii,’ Vestnik Evropy 9 (1802): 58. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter suggests that ‘in contrast to official depictions of Russia’s putatively absent middle class, tales and proverbs from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries place honorable and intelligent merchants, together with their chaste and competent wives, in a setting that values trade, money, and profit making and that energetically transmits business skills and capital to respectful and worldly sons. Similar portraits abound in the literature and memoirs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’ See her Social Identity in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 74.   4 I am taking an approach close to that of Jeffrey Brooks in When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Brooks’s discussion of popular literature, for example, considers the kind of culture that might have brought such literature to life and utilized it. In emphasizing the importance of recovering forgotten literature to elucidate culture, he writes, ‘Yet this popular literature can be the basis for a major reformulation of our views of modern Russian culture and literature’ (xx).   5 Jean-Pierre Ricard, Torg Amsterdamskii, trans. Christian Ludwig Vever (Moscow, 1762). Original title: Le Négoce d’Amsterdam, contenant tout ce que doivent

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  6   7   8

  9 10

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savoir les marchands et banquiers, tant ceux qui sont établis à Amsterdam, que ceux des pays étrangers… Fait, sur le plan de celui de Le Moine de l’Epine (Rouen, 1723). Le Négoce d’Amsterdam was reviewed in Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia in 1761 and suggested as worthy of translation. Catherine II paid for its translation and publication by Moscow University Press and ordered two thousand copies to be distributed through the main Magistrate, free of charge, to merchant guilds ‘for the benefit of Russian merchantry.’ The book came to Russia with some delay. Still, it introduced new concepts into the commercial reality of Russia. Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout, 263. Sergei Volchkov, trans. and ed., Ekstrakt Savarieva Leksikona o kommertsii (St Petersburg, 1747), 3. For more on eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals, see Gabriele Scheidegger, Studien zu den russischen Briefstellern des 18. Jahrhunderts und zur ‘Europäisierung’ des russischen Briefstils (Bern: Peter Lang, 1980); Anna Joukovskaia, ‘La naissance de l’épistolographie normative en Russie,’ Cahiers du monde russe 40, no. 4 (1999): 657–90; L. Bernstein, ‘The First Published Russian Letter-Writing Manual: Priklady, kako pishutsia komplementy raznye …’ Slavic and East European Journal 46, no. 1 (2002): 98–124, and ‘Merchant “Correspondence” and Russian Letter-Writing Manuals: Petr Ivanovich Bogdanovich and His Pis’movnik for Merchants,’ Slavic and East European Journal 46, no. 4 (2002): 659–82. See note 2. As regards Russian commerce, the author gives a short history of Russian trade from Old Rus’ to modern times. In his opinion, lands along the Volga were especially successful in trade under the Mongols, ‘when their princes ruled all southern and southeastern Asia and took care to ease trading communications for the mutual profit of their subjects’; see Vseobshchii sekretar’, ili novyi i polnyi pis’movnik (Moscow, 1796), 3:2. Ivan Iakovlevich Novikov, a bookkeeper in the foreign trade office in Moscow, author and translator of a number of books on trade, and the founder of a private commercial school in Moscow, wrote and translated a number of books for merchants. One of them, Podrobnoe opisanie o inostrannykh monetakh, vesakh i merakh, ili Sokrashchennyi Gamburgskii kontorist (Detailed description of foreign currency, weights and measures, or the abridged Hamburg bookkeeper), a translation from German, could have substantiated his authorship of Vseobshchii sekretar’, ili novyi i polnyi pis’movnik because a substantial section on the same topics is included in this book. However, there is no known extant copy of Podrobnoe opisanie. Easily identifiable borrowings come from the Moscow letter-writing

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manual of 1765, Ivan Sokol’skii’s manual of 1788 (Kabinetskii i kupecheskii sekretar’), and Petr Bogdanovich’s St Petersburg manual of 1791 (Novyi i polnyi pis’movnik). Schedules often followed church calendars, and iarmarki opened during important church holidays both in Russia and abroad. Thus, in his book Opisanie o torgakh sibirskikh (A description of Siberian trade), published in St Petersburg in 1756, G.F. Mueller of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg writes that ‘every large settlement [in Siberia] opens its market when celebrating its annual church holiday’ (Opisanie o torgakh sibirskikh, 10). Pis’movnik directs its readers to Mikhail Chulkov’s Slovar’ uchrezhdennykh v Rossii iarmarok i torgov (Dictionary of markets and trading stations established in Russia), published in St Petersburg in 1788–9. In Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 53, Arcadius Kahan remarks that even in the nineteenth century ‘Russian internal trade suffered from a relative shortage of capital and credit’ and that ‘merchants [tried] to obtain credit from commercial banks that started to operate in Russia only during the postemancipation period.’ Further, he writes, ‘We know that there was hardly any tradition of banking (except for land banks) providing loans to an economy that was diversifying and industrializing, where capital was scarce relative to the economically advanced countries of Western Europe.’ See also Kahan’s The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout, 311–21. In Catherine II’s Charter to the Towns of 1785, a number of clauses (52–57) define the relationship between master (or journeyman) and apprentice, leaving the door open for grievances from the latter. See David M. Griffiths and George Munro, trans. and eds., Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns (Bakersfield, CA: Charles Schlacks, 1991), 45. Vseobshchii sekretar’, 1796, 296 ff. Peasant signatures – a sign of literacy – are not infrequent in this manual. More evidence of peasant literacy is provided by portraits of peasant traders in which they are depicted with letters in hand. See L. Bernstein, ‘Russian Eighteenth-Century Merchant Portraits in Words and in Oil,’ Slavic and East European Journal 49, no. 3 (2005): 407–29. P.I. Bogdanovich, Novyi i polnyi pis’movnik (St Petersburg, 1791). See Bernstein, ‘Merchant “Correspondence” and Russian Letter-Writing Manuals’; Bogdanovich, Novyi i polnyi pis’movnik; Ivan Sokol’skii, Kabinetskii i kupecheskii sekretar’ (Moscow, 1788). For examples, see Pis’movnik, soderzhashchii raznye pis’ma … (St Petersburg, 1789); Raznye pis’ma po delam khoziaistvennym, sudebnym, torgovym, veksel’nym, dolgovym i dogovornym; Takzhe veriushchie na raznye sluchai (St Petersburg, 1791).

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Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce  49 21 On Jacques Savary des Bruslons (1657–1716), see the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13489a.htm. 22 A review of the German original, Grundriss eines vollständigen KaufmannsSystem nebst den Anfgangs Gründen der Handlungs-Wissenschaft und angehängten kurzen Geschichte der Handlung zu Wasser und zu Lande, appeared in Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia (1757), 51. In 1755 and in 1757 Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia published a series of letters on commerce. The January letter offered a review of foreign merchant literature that was recommended for translation. Ludovici was also mentioned here as an author of a fivevolume dictionary of commerce. 23 V.N. Bogoliubov, Novikov i ego vremia (Moscow, 1916), 303. 24 The ideology of colonization promoted and strongly advocated in these books helps to explain a familiar portrayal of the peoples of the Caucasus in Russian romantic literature. It makes clear why Lermontov’s Maxim Maximich, who was acclaimed as a type of a decent Russian soldier by readers from Belinsky to Nicholas I, holds such unflattering views and behaves cruelly toward the people whom he calls ‘savages.’ See Peter Scotto,‘Prisoners of the Caucasus: Ideologies of Imperialism in Lermontov’s “Bela,”’ PMLA 107, no. 2 (1992): 246–60. 25 Honoré Lacombe de Prézel, Les progrès du commerce (original publication 1761); Russian translation O uspekhakh kommertsii, trans. A.K. (Moscow, 1796). 26 Novikov gives some numbers concerning foreign trade: in 1795, 917 foreign ships came to St Petersburg’s port; in 1794, Russian export through St Petersburg alone comprised 25,565,676 rubles and 34 kopeks. A remark of a more recent researcher confirms Novikov’s praise: ‘The growth of Russian exports between 1742 and 1793 was spectacular’ (Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout, 265). 27 P.I. Bogdanovich, Kratkaia istoriia o torgovle i moreplavanii drevnikh (St Petersburg, 1788), 23. Bogdanovich affirmed de Prézel’s assessment of the geopolitical situation of Egypt in the ancient world. While the country continued being hostile to foreigners and their desire for trade, it was not prosperous and could not compete with the lands ruled by more internationally minded leaders. Prosperity came to it once Egypt had become a partner in trade with Greece and Phoenicia. Thus, in his discussion of the ancient world, Bogdanovich addresses issues important for modern Russia as well. (To avoid censorship, couching a discussion of issues of importance to Russia in terms of other countries was a standard practice for Nikolai Novikov and other writers of the period. For more on prerevolutionary Russian censorship, see the final essay in this volume by Marianna Tax Choldin.)

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50  Lina Bernstein 28 Fedor Sapozhnikov, trans., Nachertanie polnoi kupecheskoi sistemy (Moscow, 1789). German title: Grundriß eines vollständigen Kaufmanns-Systems, nebst den Anfangsgründen der Handlungswissenschaft, und angehängten kurzen Geschichte der Handlung zu Wasser und zu Lande … by Carl Günther Ludovici (Leipzig, 1756). 29 Russia, meanwhile, was engaged in creating abstract laws with little consideration of reality. Catherine’s Charter to the Towns (1785), for example, had very little to do with urban customs. See Griffiths and Munro, Catherine II’s Charters of 1785. In his introduction, David Griffiths writes, ‘If the Charter to the Nobility suffered mildly from abstraction and symmetry, those to the towns and the state peasantry suffered much more severely, to the point where those charters frequently corresponded little with existing reality’ (lxiii). 30 Nachertanie polnoi kupecheskoi sistemy provides many curious details pertaining to trade, such as, for example, women’s rights in trade (v. 1, 313–14, paragraph 475) or the position of Jews (who were thought detrimental to commerce) in different countries (v. 1, 316, paragraph 481). The chapter on Russia was expanded by the translator to include the period since 1759, the year of the original German publication (chapter 11, O rossiiskoi torgovle, v. 2, 281–308). Although the chapter is useful and has some interesting facts, its tone is excessively laudatory, clearly doctored by the translator, and it is less informative than chapters on other countries or descriptions of Russian trade in other publications. 31 G.F. Mueller, Opisanie o torgakh sibirskikh (St Petersburg, 1756). 32 Mueller writes in a clear and flowing language. He supplies a story about the mammoth, an animal believed by local hunters to be living underground. Mueller explains the mammoth bones found in Siberia by equating the mammoth with the elephant, which left for India because of climatic change. 33 Cf. N.M. Karamzin: ‘Three merchants and a fugitive chieftain of the Volga robbers dared, without the tsar’s command, to conquer Siberia in the name of Ioan,’ quoted in A. Andreev, Stroganovy (Moscow: Belyi volk – Kraft, 2000), 9. 34 Grigorii Shelikhov, Rossiiskogo kuptsa Grigoriia Shelikhova stranstvovaniia (St Petersburg, 1791); Shelikhov, Rossiiskogo kuptsa Grigoriia Shelikhova prodolzhenie stranstvovanii (St Petersburg, 1792). See also Rossiiskogo kuptsa Grigoriia Shelikhova stranstvovaniia, ed. B.P. Polevoi (Khabarovsk: Khabarovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1971). Shelikhov (Shelekhov) published one more book: Rossiiskogo kuptsa imenitogo ryl’skogo grazhdanina Grigoriia Shelikhova pervoe stranstvovanie s 1783 g. po 1787 g. iz Okhotska (n.p., 1793).

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Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce  51 35 A number of Russian merchants had undertaken the exploitation of the far reaches of America in the same spirit of profit, adventure, and glory even before Shelikhov. Thus in 1745, the merchants Afanasii Chebaevskii and Nikifor Trapeznikov went to the Aleutian Islands. They were followed by Petr Bashmakov and Maxim Lazarev in 1756. The first Russian fur merchants appeared near Alaska in 1761; see Shelikov, Rossiiskogo kuptsa (1971), 18. But the development of new markets became especially active in the 1770s and 1780s when expedition after expedition was financed by a number of Russian merchants, many of whom took part in the explorations themselves. 36 Shelikhov, Rossiiskogo kuptsa (1971), 21. 37 ‘O Amerike,’ in Akademicheskie izvestiia (1781), 255–71 and 646–72. 38 David Ransel, ‘Enlightenment and Tradition: The Aestheticized Life of an Eighteenth-Century Provincial Merchant,’ in Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 38. 39 P.M. Ponomarev, Pochtennyi kupets, ili bukhgalteriia (Moscow, 1790), iii. 40 Mikhail Chulkov, Nastavlenie neobkhodimo-nuzhnoe dlia rossiiskikh kuptsov (St Petersburg, 1788); Chulkov, Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommertsii pri vsekh portakh i granitsakh ot drevnikh vremen do nastoiashchego (St Petersburg, 1781–8). Chulkov’s writings on commerce warrant a separate study, especially his Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommertsii, which served as source material for many other publications by various authors. 41 Ivan Ia. Novikov, trans., Pis’ma ot ottsa k synu, v kotorykh opisyvaiutsia vazhneishie dolzhnosti kupecheskogo sostoianiia, i potrebnye znaniia k otpravleniiu torgovli s vygodoiu (Moscow, 1797). 42 In his Novyi i polnyi pis’movnik for merchants, Petr Bogdanovich published a number of letters of actual correspondence of some dignitaries, such as Lord Chesterfield to his son and the Marquise de Pompadour to her daughter. The compiler believed that ‘a clear and precise notion of the deeds and heart of man aids greatly the good language and fruitfulness of letters’ (291). See Bernstein, ‘Merchant “Correspondence” and Russian Letter-Writing Manuals.’ 43 See, for example, Pis’ma dlia ispravleniia serdtsa i razuma, translated from English and published by Ivan Glazunov (1794), or Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Pisma ot gospozhi Montier k Markize de *** ee docheri s otvetami na onye (1765). 44 It is interesting to compare the educational program suggested by the author and promoted by the translator, Novikov, who belonged to the merchant class, with a program designed by I.I. Betskoi, Catherine’s adviser on educational matters, for the educational curriculum at the

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Foundling Home in St Petersburg. Betskoi’s program was purely prag­ matic; it included reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, crafts, book­ keeping, and homemaking for girls, but excluded such subjects as foreign languages and etiquette, which were more suitable for the schools for   nobles. See David M. Griffiths, ‘Eighteenth-century Perception of Back­ wardness: Project for the Creation of a Third Estate in Catherine’s Russia,’ in Canadian–American Slavic Studies, 13 (Winter 1979): 452–72, 465. Yet for­ eign languages had been introduced into the curriculum at the Moscow Foundling Home, as I. Ia. Novikov’s biography and accounts of student examinations show (see following note). Opisanie torzhestva i ekzamena pitomtsev pri Imperatorskom Vospitatel’nom dome … (Moscow, 1774). A description of the celebratory event in which the students at the Vospitatel’nyi Dom were examined, this volume gives an account of the subjects in which the students were tested. A student, Stepan Semenov, gave an oration in Russian; he was followed by Aksin’ia Vasil’eva with a speech in German. ‘Classes were examined in written and oral performance in Russian, German, French, Latin, and Italian, and after that in drawing, painting, and enamel work on metal; in arithmetic, book­ keeping, history, and geography’ (2–3). Pis’ma ot ottsa k synu (Moscow, 1797), 36. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 49–50. De Prézel, O uspekhakh kommertsii, 75–6. The notion of merchant patriotism proposed in instructional literature is not much different from present-day calls to ‘buy American’ and to keep jobs in the country (‘prefer products of your country over those of foreign production,’ Pis’ma ot ottsa k synu, 85). Many articles in the form of letters published in the Russian satirical journals of the 1770s and 1780s criticize the predilection of Russian buyers for foreign goods. See, for example, Vedomosti v Sanktpeterburge iz Kronshtata, 2 June 1769. The contradiction between a desire to trade globally and a duty to buy domestic products persists to this day. Ponomarev, Pochtennyi kupets, iii. Ponomarev, Pochtennyi kupets, i. Kapiton Bocharnikov, Kratkoe opisanie Rossiiskogo torga, otpravliaemogo sukhim putem s Kitaem, Bukharieiu, Kalmykami, Kurliandieiu i Pol’sheiu (St Petersburg, 1782), 5. See, for example, Mueller, Opisanie o torgakh sibirskikh, 153; and Karl Berens, Kupets, ili vseobshchee rassuzhdenie o torgovle (St Petersburg, 1793), 9–10.

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Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce  53 56 Berens, Kupets, ili vseobshchee rassuzhdenie, 3. 57 Chulkov, Istoricheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi kommertsii, 1:16. 58 Ibid., 1:33.

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2 Dinner at Smirdin’s: Forces in Russian Print Culture in the Early Reign of Nicholas I george gutsche

Editor’s Note Still within our first thematic group – ‘Commercialization and social engagement’ – this next essay by George Gutsche provides a different perspective by approaching the topic less squarely from the realm of economic history. The sources Gutsche uses are more typical of cultural history (letters, memoirs, diaries, and contemporary sketches, as well as newspapers), and he also offers a different view on commercialization in this slightly later period. Besides alluding like Lina Bernstein to print culture developments within broader socio-economic processes (a growing demand for news stemming from international political events, financial success stemming from expanding capital), Gutsche uses a more specific focus on a single bookman, Aleksandr Smirdin, to highlight the extent to which merchants of the period contributed to social engagement in terms of the exposure to print materials they fostered. As before, the issues discussed also relate to mainstream Russian history (censorship, communications stratagems, and the like), and again should interest researchers outside the realm of print culture proper. In terms of theoretical models, the prominence of censorship issues in Gutsche’s essay raises the possibility of seeing restriction itself as an agent of change, given the socio-political effects of the circumvention and resistance it engenders. Gutsche also raises other theoretical questions including gender, a topic of increasing importance in mainstream Russian history of the period – as well as related print culture themes that recur in later essays (such as increasing varieties of readers). But a major contribution of the essay is to exemplify for Nicholaevan Russia the title of our volume, The Space of the Book. The physical space that Gutsche describes – a festive gathering in a reading library – crystallizes spatially the centrality of print culture for elite members of society, even while Smirdin

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and others helped foster its spread at lower cultural levels. Indeed, the emphasis on place in this and other print venues (book stores, coffeehouses, clubs, theatres) makes the period ripe for the application of new digital techniques with a geographic focus, especially GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Many methods exist for the digital representation of historical information,* but for geographic content, applications like ESRI’s ArcGIS (though complex) will allow the welcome superimposition on geographic data of multiple social variables, all for advanced analysis. For book studies, students should note the Print Culture GIS developed by Canadian scholars Bertram MacDonald and Fiona Black; integrating data layers on book production, bookstores, migration patterns, demographic information, and transportation routes, it is a wonderful model for further research of this kind.† Late on a Friday afternoon in St Petersburg, on 19 February 1832, everyone who was anyone in the Russian book trade – writers, translators, editors, artists, academics, and censors – sat down at tables set for eighty in an elegant book-lined room. The occasion was a dinner celebrating the opening of Aleksandr Smirdin’s bookstore and lending library in its fashionable new quarters in the building (now no. 22) next to the Lutheran church on Nevskii Prospekt. Providing the food was Diume’s (Dumé’s) well-known St Petersburg restaurant.1 Anticipating increased business, the bookseller Smirdin had two months earlier moved his wares from his shop on the Moika River near Sinii Bridge to more spacious quarters in a new building on one of Petersburg’s most prestigious streets. His large and impressive lending library soon followed, and occupied the upper floor. Now Smirdin wanted to mark the occasion with a special event. Known today for his pioneering work as a bibliographer and one of the most successful booksellers and publishers of the 1830s, Smirdin celebrated his move by inviting almost everyone in Petersburg involved with producing and publishing literature. Hosting such a dinner was obviously a marketing effort, one designed to promote goodwill as well as profit for his ventures. The publishing business had entered a new age of commercialization and social engagement, with significantly improved honoraria for authors and a growing demand from Russian reading audiences for literature and news. Many of the changes in the book scene resulted from phenomenal financial successes for the authors and publishers who had responded in recent years to the increased demand. Several years later, the Russian liter-

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56  George Gutsche

ary and social critic Vissarion Belinsky would term the decade of the 1830s the ‘Smirdin Period’ of Russian literature, paying tribute to the latter’s major role in promoting and producing literary and cultural publications and in bringing together authors and the public in mutually rewarding ways.2 The present study examines what happened that evening in early 1832 with the goal of deepening our understanding of how Russian print culture developed in the 1830s. Whatever we can discover about the forces at play in this period (all revealed that night in the interaction of the participants’ personalities, values, and interests) is likely to help us understand developments in subsequent decades as well. Booksellers, publishers, government officials, and writers had much to gain from cordial and collegial arrangements. Smirdin’s celebration presented opportunities for networking and conceiving new projects, and, beyond that, it created for the host a store of goodwill that he could call upon in the near future. Nonetheless, with such a wide range of diverse personalities and personal histories of antagonism as well as cooperation, participants could be expected to use the occasion not only for reconciling and forging new relationships but also for opening new wounds. Smirdin, always trusting, apparently hoped for the best. Unprepossessing in appearance and modest in demeanour, Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin (1795–1857) was clearly moving up the ladder of success. Born into a Moscow peasant family that rose to the meshchanstvo (artisanal townspeople), he served as an apprentice in a bookshop as a youth and then moved to St Petersburg to work as a bookshop clerk. He was rewarded for his diligence by the bookstore’s owner, Vasilii Plavil’shchikov, an important personage in Russian print culture of the first quarter of the century. Smirdin acquired the business upon the latter’s death, and it was this enterprise that he moved in late 1831, drawn by the larger and more prestigious quarters on Nevskii Prospekt and confident because of his recent publishing successes. Now a businessman (and with newly acquired merchant status), by the end of January 1832 he had a successful bookstore and commodious lending library in a prime location. 3 Smirdin played a significant role in promoting the professionalization of writing, a process that had gained momentum in the 1820s. He was extremely generous with his authors, giving them honoraria that allowed them to make a living by their work. The famous fabulist Ivan Krylov, born in 1769 and one of the oldest literary figures at the dinner, received royalties of almost one hundred thousand rubles for editions

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of his fables in the 1820s. Moreover, Smirdin had a standing agreement to pay him three hundred rubles a fable. This kind of financial arrangement set a striking contrast with the compensation of the previous age, when a poet as distinguished as Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816) could at most hope for recognition and honour. Even as late as the early 1820s, writers did not usually expect much financial compensation. Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin had received very little for his first major work, the narrative poem Ruslan i Liudmila (1820), even though it was a popular success – while his publisher Nikolai Gnedich enjoyed considerable financial success, and in fact profited from several of Pushkin’s early narrative poems. Pushkin to some degree made up for his early losses by striking extremely lucrative deals with Smirdin for printing later editions of the same works. Smirdin provided him with almost 122,000 rubles over a thirteen-year period; in the early 1830s, he gave Pushkin six hundred rubles a month as part of a four-year purchase plan for republication rights to all of Pushkin’s works already published through 1830.4 Smirdin was also generous with journalists and editors. He would pay the Polish-born scholar and prominent St Petersburg journalist Osip Senkovskii (S´kowski) fifteen thousand rubles a year to edit the very popular Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for reading), a periodical which in the next few years would achieve enormous success.5 Smirdin’s expenses were high, however: he rented his new store for twelve thousand rubles per year. Undoubtedly his recent business successes, which included ‘best-selling’ novels like Faddei Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin (1829), enabled Smirdin to lease such impressive quarters. Indeed, fellow journalist Bulgarin was one of Smirdin’s most financially rewarding authors and editors, a fascinating figure of the age who has been for the most part vilified by generations of scholars for his denunciations of fellow writers and service for Nicholas’ notorious Third Section (a secret government department headed by Aleksandr Benkendorf and notable in the 1830s for its surveillance and censorship activities).6 Whatever else can be said about Bulgarin, in the late 1820s and early 1830s he was a prominent figure in Russian letters – and one of the most notable of Russia’s literary exports. In Great Britain it was Bulgarin, not Pushkin, whom the reading public was more likely to recognize, largely because of the publication of a translation of his two-volume novel Ivan Vyzhigin.7 The novel was controversial with Russian literary people – particularly those close to Pushkin – because of its tendentiousness and mediocre quality, but its English translation was an

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extraordinary event since very little Russian literature had appeared in England up to that time. As noted, Smirdin published the first edition of Ivan Vyzhigin in 1829 and it sold out some twenty-five hundred copies in five days – a clear indication, incidentally, of Smirdin’s interest in promoting social engagement since Bulgarin’s novel attracted 410 subscribers in various social groups including aristocrats, military officers, civil servants, emerging professionals, and merchants.8 A year later (in February of 1830) the Emperor awarded Bulgarin a diamond ring in recognition of his new novel, Dimitrii Samozvanets (Dimitrii the pretender). His relationship with the authorities, and with the Third Section as an ‘informer,’ afforded him special privileges: only his periodical – the newspaper Severnaia pchela (Northern bee) – had permission from the government to print political news and thus had a virtual guarantee of a healthy subscription base. In part because of this Pushkin and Bulgarin – who at one time had enjoyed a cordial working relationship – in more recent years had waged an intense and acrimonious polemic in the periodical press.9 Both came to Smirdin’s dinner; inviting them to sit down together, apparently at the same table, was a bold move on Smirdin’s part. Pushkin, as another ‘best-selling’ author, merited Smirdin’s continued attention, although his popular successes were not in prose but in poetry, and principally works (narrative verse tales) of the previous decade. His novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin (1823–31), had been appearing serially, with chapters as separate books; the final chapter, published by Smirdin, had just come out at the beginning of 1832, and now plans were under way for the first complete edition.10 Whether Smirdin himself appreciated Pushkin’s work is an open question. Although lacking the cultural education shared by Pushkin and his peers, Smirdin must have developed some literary taste and skills over the years. After all, dealing in books for so long and devoting so much energy to supporting literary projects give evidence of more than a mercenary interest in literature; moreover, Smirdin must have known that popularity and quality were different and not always found in the same publications. In addition, he knew Pushkin was generally a source of good business, and that Pushkin’s status as an exiled writer who continued to be controversial, even after returning from exile, could not hurt sales. For both cultural and business reasons, Smirdin maintained a close professional relationship with Pushkin, a relationship Pushkin used – even took advantage of – at times to help himself and his friends (including Pogodin, Baratynskii, and Katenin) find a publishing outlet.11

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Smirdin’s publications had a good reputation: although unsophisticated and self-taught, Smirdin was concerned about quality and produced fine editions of Russian classics and works by contemporaries. And the elegance of his new quarters on Nevskii Prospekt and maintenance of a prestigious subscription library further demonstrated his stylistic sensibilities; he knew, or could find out, what was appropriate for his writers and customers. But Smirdin’s generosity towards his editors and his authors – perhaps even gullibility – and his all-embracing taste in literature would lead to problems in the late 1830s and 1840s, when his fortunes took a bad turn and he had to move his store again, this time to far less prestigious quarters. Struggling to stay solvent, he began to experiment with less expensive popular editions of classics, efforts that Belinsky thought constituted his greatest service to literature and education in Russia. But by the mid-1850s his ventures had failed and his store closed its doors. Many reasons have been offered to explain his bankruptcy; they include strong competition from other publishers for a relatively small reading public, overly generous honoraria, imprudent business decisions (such as guaranteeing loans taken by friends and associates), and victimization by occasionally unscrupulous if not fraudulent associates such as Bulgarin and Senkovskii.12 No one could have foreseen such an outcome twenty years earlier. At the time of his move to the building on Nevskii Prospekt, good fortune and financial success lay just ahead. The dinner could be seen as marking his first triumphs and preparing the way for bold new projects promising even greater success. A notice in Severnaia pchela, the newspaper co-edited by Bulgarin and Nikolai Grech, appeared within days of the dinner, on 26 February; here Grech described the event in glowing terms, identifying by name those who attended.13 His enthusiastic remarks were framed as an essay-letter to his friend Vasilii A. Ushakov, an author and critic who contributed to Severnaia pchela and other periodicals. (Such open letters represented a ‘genre’ by which periodicals could provide a more personalized view of news of the day.) Grech began by noting the construction taking place in St Petersburg and surveying the various new enterprises that provided ‘charming illumination on dark evenings’; but then he turned his attention to the newly finished right wing of St Peter’s Lutheran church, which now housed ‘the bookstore and library for reading of our honourable bookseller Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin.’ Smirdin had already moved the bookstore to the ground floor (the move was mentioned in an earlier notice in Severnaia pchela), and the

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library soon followed, occupying ‘a huge, bright, magnificent hall’ on the floor above. Grech saw the move as emblematic of Russian literature moving from ‘out of the basements into the palaces.’ He rightly noted the physically appealing aspects of Smirdin’s store and library. His reading library – both in the old quarters on Sinii Bridge and the new, more fashionable site next to the Lutheran church – provided an agreeable setting and just the right ambience for literary and business conversations. We know that Pushkin, for example, spent a great deal of time there in the last five years of his life.14 But the main purpose of Grech’s report was to describe the event of 19 February, a ‘unique and first in Russia celebration’ to which Smirdin ‘invited many Literary People and other lovers of enlightenment.’ Indeed, Grech viewed the dinner celebration as a major cultural event: bringing together so many key figures of Russian letters had an enormous positive value. With a dinner table ‘set in the great hall of the library, amidst the shelves filled with our own works and those of our predecessors,’ this diverse group of ‘representatives of the past century, present, and future,’ journalistic friends and enemies, ‘sat down to the table after five, in no particular order, those who write and those who read.’ Grech emphasized how goodwill and mutual respect reigned, how the witty conversation ‘sparkled like champagne in goblets.’ At one point during the dinner the ‘venerable veteran of Petersburg Poetry,’ Count Dmitrii Ivanovich Khvostov, appeared, offering verses ‘composed for the occasion.’ His poem for the ‘occasion’ was read twice so that all could hear, and the verses ‘were drowned in loud applause.’ Toward the end of the dinner the toasts began, with goblets foaming over: first all toasted to the health of the Sovereign Emperor ‘with unanimous, sincere ecstasy.’ Not just his health was addressed, however, but his actions to revive ‘our fatherland’s Literature with the Censor Code.’15 Commenting on this toast, Grech praised Russian littérateurs, more fortunate than their European brothers because of the enlightened leadership of Russia’s emperors and empresses, who were ‘the first connoisseurs and protectors of talents in the fatherland: our public followed the lead of its sovereigns.’ More toasts were offered, first to the health of the host and then to distinguished guests: Dmitriev, Krylov, Zhukovskii, Pushkin, Count Khvostov, and Prince Viazemskii. Even those absent were toasted: Gnedich, Shishkov, and Batiushkov. And then Krylov, grateful for the toast in his honour, proposed honouring former greats,

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now deceased: Kantemir, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Khemnitser, Derzhavin, Bogdanovich, Kapnist, Kniazhnin, Kostrov, Ablesimov, Ozerov, Neledinskii, Kriukovskii, Griboedov, and Karamzin. Krylov finished with a toast to Moscow ‘Literary People.’ All were in high spirits and ‘gaiety, candor, wit and an unconditional brotherhood animated the celebration.’ Toasting came to an end with glasses raised to the health of ‘all present-day Writers’ and ‘readers and customers’; this was followed by sad and grateful acknowledgment of the man who founded the bookstore and library, Smirdin’s mentor, Vasilii Alekseevich Plavil’shchikov. As a token of their appreciation, guests proposed an almanac, Novosel’e (Housewarming), to which each would contribute in Smirdin’s honour. Zhukovskii was the first to register his participation and the rest followed.16 Grech concluded his report with high praise for Smirdin, comparing him to Nikolai Novikov for his vital role in the book trade as an intermediary between writers and readers. From a public relations perspective, Grech’s report struck all the right notes: it was informative, paid its respects to authorities, promoted Russian literary figures, past and present, and presented Russian cultural and literary figures in a positive light. His report also promoted Smirdin’s interests. Nikolai Ivanovich Grech (1787–1867) had a long and successful career in journalism. He and Bulgarin had worked together for the last seven years, co-editing periodicals and writing respectfully about each other. Working with Bulgarin, however, tainted Grech’s reputation. Although there is no evidence that he denounced anyone or served as an agent of the government, he was very careful in his politics and policies; as Edwina Cruise notes, Grech was ‘a man whose convictions ultimately were shaped by his fearful respect for power and authority.’17 His positive account of the evening derived from these convictions. One of those who did not let the occasion soften his animosities, particularly his feelings about Bulgarin, left an account of the proceedings quite different from Grech’s. The Petersburg writer and translator Mikhail Lobanov (1787–1846) described the evening in frank, even cynical, terms, ending with a reference to the man he despised: ‘Bulgarin, with whom I had ceased even casual acquaintanceship since he sold his soul to the devil, several times manoeuvred himself near me and finally asked me about my health and my wife’s health and received a courteous but dry reply.’18 What had Bulgarin done to deserve such a characterization? Most were aware of his service to the notorious Third Section and few found

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him to be an agreeable personality. Moreover, his literary and periodical activities generated resentment. However, his image has been re-examined in recent years,19 and he has been given more credit for his skills, talent, and commercial success. The collaborative power of Bulgarin and Grech would increase when they joined forces with Senkovskii in 1833: the ‘triumvirate,’ as it was known then, virtually ruled the periodical scene through the rest of the decade and later because of their good connections and an impressive subscription base for their publications. In the mid-1830s Senkovskii’s very popular ‘thick’ journal, Biblioteka dlia chteniia, published by Smirdin (and with a format very similar to the Novosel’e volumes), acquired a huge readership. The popularity and influence of the triumvirate disturbed many, especially competing journalists with different values. As Sidney Monas notes, the tastes and practices of the triumvirate made them into a symbol for the corruption and arbitrary repressiveness of Nicholas’ reign.20 The dinner party in early 1832 set the stage for the formation of the triumvirate. Bulgarin and Grech were already powerful; Senkovskii would soon join them, playing a significant role as contributor and editor of a major periodical. Again, Lobanov, with his critical view of Bulgarin and Grech, provided a different, less sanguine perspective on what happened at Smirdin’s dinner. His account reveals some of the tensions between guests. Like Grech, he began with the setting: ‘In a spacious hall, the walls of which were lined with books (this was the reading hall), a table was set for eighty guests. At five o’clock everyone sat down to feast. The dinner was plentiful and, with respect to taste and refinement, rather good.’ But he gave a more frank assessment of the guests: ‘This was the first feast in Petersburg, and also in Russia, for almost all the writers; it was thus extremely curious. Joined together in one hall were the offended and their offenders, the duplicitous informers and spies.’ Lobanov, like Grech, noted the performance of the frequently ridiculed minor poet Dmitrii Khvostov, who read a poem in Smirdin’s honour; he added that the quality of the poem surprised everyone and that poor Khvostov, so unused to being taken seriously and to receiving praise for his work, left the party early in confusion. Lobanov also recounted the numerous toasts, beginning with Grech’s ‘To the health of His Majesty, the Emperor, author of the beautiful book Statutes of the Censorship!’ Cheers of approval were followed by more toasts, to those present and those who had died. But as the toasting descended to the third tier, to those whose talent was not universally

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recognized, problems arose: a proposed toast by the second-rate writer and journalist Aleksandr Voeikov to Sumarokov, Trediakovskii, and Shishkov drew a response of ‘Not necessary.’ And Grech, who did not like Voeikov, himself toasted Voeikov, which drew an even louder ‘Not necessary.’ Of course Grech himself had made no mention of this disguised disparagement in his newspaper account. Lobanov admitted that he was not surprised by anything that happened, in view of the personalities involved: ‘Smirdin didn’t invite guests to produce scenes like this; respectable literary people didn’t gather together to see these types; but wherever you find Bulgarin, Grech, and Voeikov, the first a lunatic Pole, the second a loud and weakwilled half-German, and the third a demon – such scenes are unavoidable. These people are the same in society as in their journals, i.e., wild and crazed buffoons.’ True, he added that the rest of evening (the party went on until ten thirty in the evening) went well and the atmosphere was even friendly, especially after Voeikov left. But his account of the evening reveals an undercurrent of bad feeling beneath the cordial and festive surface. Further evidence of that disquieting undercurrent can be found in a witticism by Pushkin recorded at the head table; it involved Bulgarin, Grech, and the censor V.N. Semenov. What happened was related by Grech, but not in his newspaper essay – he was not likely to publish this sort of account. Two different contemporaries recorded the incident: Nikolai Nikolaevich Terpigorev, Semenov’s nephew, who wrote as if he were present at the dinner although we have no evidence, other than his word, that he was there; and Vladimir Petrovich Burnashev, a writer and journalist. His account is written from Grech’s perspective: presumably the latter had told him about Pushkin’s remark, described below.21 Pushkin had showed himself to be in good spirits that evening, witty, talkative, lively, and energetic, perhaps even ‘manic,’ if Grech’s characterization (related by Burnashev) is apt. ‘Bulgarin and I,’ Grech is said to have remarked, ‘managed to sit so that the censor Vasilii Nikolaevich Semenov sat between us – he graduated from the Lyceum a year after Aleksandr Sergeevich. For some reason Pushkin at this time was in especially good form, chatting incessantly, making clever witticisms and laughing loudly, almost to the point of exhaustion. Suddenly he noticed that Semenov was sitting between us two journalists – who, to tell the truth, are always being criticized for something and have a reputation for being robbers – and he shouted out to Semenov from across

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the table: “You, brother Semenov, today you’re like Christ on Gol- gotha.” Everybody immediately understood these words.’ Grech laughed louder than anyone, according to Burnashev, and took Pushkin’s barb good-naturedly – perhaps realizing that he was being mocked for his association with the unsavoury Bulgarin, but apparently accustomed to it and not willing to take it seriously. Bulgarin, on the other hand, was enraged, ‘choked with fury,’ and barely able to restrain himself; he had immediately recognized the remark’s import.22 Indeed, although generally referred to as an example of Pushkin’s ready wit, what he said had a serious dimension that reveals much about journalism and publishing in the 1830s. For Pushkin’s witticism at Bulgarin’s expense derived from personal animosity, perhaps some envy for Bulgarin’s popular success, and concern for his own rights and honour as an author; moreover, it also reflected the complex relationship between representatives of the government (the censor Semenov) and the print culture community. At any rate, Pushkin must have struck a nerve. Even though Grech himself had sometimes referred to journalists as thieves, Bulgarin was very sensitive to the charge. Several years before, Pushkin and Bulgarin had engaged in a lengthy and at times intense and personal polemic in Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary gazette) and Syn otechestva (Son of the fatherland). One dimension of their exchange concerned literary theft and accusations of plagiarism. Bulgarin had levelled his charge against Pushkin in 1830 in a review of chapter 7 of Evgenii Onegin, which had just appeared as a separate volume. After registering his disappointment with the volume, he charged Pushkin with plagiarism: ‘Here the poet has taken abundant tribute from “Woe from Wit,” and we ask that one be not wroth, from another well-known book [i.e., Ivan Vyzhigin].’23 Pushkin’s friend Anton Del’vig, as editor of Literaturnaia gazeta, responded by demonstrating that the alleged plagiarized passages had been printed in Bulgarin’s own periodical, Severnaia pchela, before the latter wrote Ivan Vyzhigin; indeed, Del’vig implied that the plagiarism went the other way, from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov to Bulgarin’s Dimitrii Samozvanets.24 The connection with Del’vig raises another issue. Bulgarin a little more than one year before had denounced Del’vig’s Literaturnaia gazeta to the Third Section. Issue no. 61 printed a quatrain by a French poet, Casimir Delavigne, that referred to a monument to the sacrifices of the July Revolution in France in 1830. For printing these ‘incendiary four lines’ (alluding to revolution), Del’vig was punished in two ways: his rights to publish anything were withdrawn and he was reprimanded

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so severely that his frail health was affected. Demoralized by his experience and perhaps for other personal reasons, Del’vig fell ill and died in early 1831. Many blamed Benkendorf (as head of the Third Section) for his untimely demise; many also blamed Bulgarin for being the source of the denunciation.25 But what is most important in this context – a dinner party in February 1832 – is that Pushkin’s hostility toward Bulgarin had roots deeper than professional rivalry and irritation related to literary polemics. Bulgarin was morally repugnant to Pushkin for deeply personal and professional reasons. Because Smirdin’s dinner took place close to the anniversary of Del’vig’s death, we can perhaps better understand Pushkin’s manically high spirits and barbed reference at Bulgarin’s expense. His witticism contained barely concealed derision and hostility.26 Semenov, the ‘Christ’ figure in Pushkin’s remark, had indeed suffered in his role as censor.27 He approved for publication issue nos. 46–62 of Del’vig’s Literaturnaia gazeta, including issue no. 61 with its infamous four lines, and for this he was reprimanded. Apparently he endured his punishment better than Del’vig. Even with this blemish on his record, Semenov was allowed to continue on the censorship committee; at the end of 1831 he served as the censor for Del’vig’s almanac Severnye tsvety na 1832 (Northern flowers for 1832), which Pushkin edited and saw through to publication to benefit Del’vig’s widow. Semenov also approved the third part of Pushkin’s collected poetry in 1832, and several other collections that followed. He would later approve the first Novosel’e volumes. But his problems were not over: in 1833 he would be dismissed temporarily for allowing an issue of Moskovskii telegraf (Moscow telegraph) to make an inappropriate reference (the journal would be closed down by the government in 1834). The commotion over Delavigne’s lines, although a sensitive and vexing matter to Pushkin and Semenov, was not the only censorship controversy commanding attention in early 1832. The Moscow writer Ivan Kireevskii (1806–56) had received permission to publish a literary journal, Evropeets (The European), in December 1831. The poet Zhukovskii, a relative of Kireevskii – with close ties to the court – probably influenced the positive outcome, since Kireevskii secured permission to proceed (and it was not easy to get permission for a new periodical). Pushkin promised to contribute and apparently had high hopes for the journal’s success, judging by remarks in his correspondence. Only one issue was published, however. An article on Griboedov that included negative remarks, in passing, about foreigners in Russia an-

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gered Benkendorf, head of the Third Section, who took offence because his Russian language skills were weak. He ordered an investigation of Kireevskii, his habits, and his associates.28 As if this were not enough, two days after Benkendorf’s order Nicholas I also read the first issue, which Zhukovskii proudly (in retrospect, naively) had given him. Now it was the Emperor’s turn to take offence. Nicholas quite idiosyncratically read an essay entitled ‘The Nineteenth Century’ – one of the first attempts to present the meaning of Russian historical destiny in cultural terms. Kireevskii maintained that Russia needed to plunge into European culture and join the European Romantic movement if it had hopes of achieving its own cultural and historical destiny. Nicholas responded (in a letter written through Benkendorf on 7 February 1832 – less than two weeks before the dinner at Smirdin’s) accusing the writer of speaking about politics, not literature, and using an elaborate code system in which praise for enlightenment, mental activity, and moderation really meant calling for liberty, revolution, and a constitution. The censor was fined, the journal closed down, and Kireevskii was put under police surveillance. Zhukovskii immediately suspected that Bulgarin was involved. First he tried to intervene with Nicholas, saying that he would vouch for Kireevskii; this remark elicited the famous reply, ‘And who will vouch for you?’ Then Zhukovskii turned to Benkendorf for help, desperately appealing to commonsense semantics: ‘There is not a line, however simply it may be written, which could not be interpreted in the most ruinous manner, if, instead of words used by the author, you invent others, presuming bad intentions on the author’s part … There is no prayer which could not in this way be turned into sacrilege.’29 All was for naught. The incident vividly demonstrated the precarious position of the writer and publisher in Nicholas’s Russia. With the new revisions of the censorship code of 1828, so enthusiastically toasted at the dinner, with Literaturnaia gazeta and Evropeets controversies in the background (but hardly forgotten by those in the room), it was obvious that Russian print culture faced very difficult challenges in the 1830s, even with a growing readership. It was now an era of complaints and denunciations, with accusations of ‘audacity’ and ‘insolence’ freely tossed about by smug authorities and those who spoke for them. No one was immune from punishment, for denunciations have their own logic and can easily embroil the denouncer. Bulgarin and Grech, even with their favoured position with respect to the authorities, also had

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problems. Grech himself several years earlier had denounced a competitor to the censor and soon was threatened with being thrown into the guardhouse because his denunciation implicitly represented criticism of the censor for having allowed his competitor to compete.30 Nevertheless, although the publishing business posed risks for everyone, some, like Bulgarin, clearly made matters worse, adding to the already repressive atmosphere. Indeed, Pushkin’s witticism highlighted Bulgarin’s unsavoury behaviour. But thieves and police spies were not the only obstacles to the healthy development of print culture. The effusive toasts to the Emperor and the new censorship code surely rankled many of those present; the unpredictable and arbitrary administration of the code was more likely to inhibit and frustrate rather than stimulate and liberate. In fact, against a backdrop of recently forbidden periodicals brought down on the pretext of advocating revolution, Grech’s introductory toast to His Majesty as author of the censorship code was an action bearing significant emotional and ideological weight. Offering praise to a new code so integral to recent censorship problems – so disappointing because of the false expectations that it promoted – must have struck some as hypocritical. Such a toast implicated and focused attention on personal moralities and principles, on matters of honesty and integrity, adherence to one’s ideals in the face of state tyranny, and commitments to friendship. But it also brought to mind current reality: the new code threatened personal security and well-being. Indeed, as indicated above, it was not out of the question for editors to be jailed for short periods and deprived of their livelihood. As a result, participants at the dinner could be expected to be suspicious of their neighbours and ‘colleagues,’ for there could be no denying that the allied professions represented in the room were in a precarious position in the Russia of Nicholas I. Despite the tensions, animosities, and suspicions that emerged, sometimes directly, sometimes in anecdotes and asides, the dinner also revealed more positive forces: it was far from a failure.31 Guests at Smirdin’s dinner included representatives from every tier of the literary Pantheon – even artists who provided vignettes and portraits for publications. Khvostov’s fine performance appropriately marked the beginning of the celebration that honoured all those who served literature, whatever their talents. And toasting past and present literary figures represented a noble effort to sustain continuity between generations and to reinforce the notion that Russian letters indeed had a tradition worth praising. But more than that, the occasion of the dinner served to

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dispose those present to cooperation and generosity. And that generosity took the form of an offer to thank the host with a special gift – one he was uniquely poised to promote. To reciprocate for Smirdin’s kindness, the authors present agreed to contribute to Novosel’e, as Smirdin himself later explained in the book’s introduction: The simple occasion – moving my book store to Nevskii Prospekt (19 February 1832) – afforded me the good fortune to see almost all of the wellknown literary people in celebration of my new store. My writer guests, from a special and kind inclination towards me and at the proposal of Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovskii, volunteered to give me a house-warming gift, each offering his own work; some of these gifts I am publishing here now. The pieces sent me were sufficient to make up another book like this. But whether I, in memory of my house-warming, will produce a similar edition next year or will limit myself to the present one will depend on the verdict of our enlightened public.32

The first volume (1833) achieved great success, and was followed by a second volume in 1834 that required additional contributions. In 1845–6 a second edition as well as a third, supplementary volume appeared. Although the contributions in literature and criticism were diverse and uneven in quality, the overall value of the first volume (with excellent works by Pushkin and Gogol’) is unquestionable; moreover, Novosel’e provides a fine overview of Russian prose of the 1830s. Obviously Smirdin received a rewarding return on his investment in public relations.33 Novosel’e (1833–4) may have attracted its readers – who doubtless included not only the coterie of attendees at the dinner but also the diversifying communities of readers in the 1830s who had access to Smirdin’s store on St Petersburg’s main thoroughfare – not just because of the variety of writers assembled between the covers, but because of what was pictured on their covers and frontispieces.34 The frontispiece of the first volume, engraved by S.F. Galaktionov from Aleksandr Briullov’s drawing, focused on the head table of Smirdin’s dinner with Pushkin and others in the foreground (see fig. 2.1). Krylov was seated at the head of the table as the senior ranking literary light, with Smirdin standing behind him and Grech standing next to him proposing a toast; Khvostov, Zhukovskii, and Pushkin are seated on one side, with Semenov and Bulgarin on the other. Pictured here are some of the leading figures in Russia’s literary and print world, without regard for

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Figure 2.1 Frontispiece, Novosel’e, v. 1 (St Petersburg, 1833). Image courtesy of Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.

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camp or alliance, providing visual proof of Smirdin’s efforts to unite all factions. We know from the guest list (and names of those toasted) who else was present – stars of widely varying radiance (including the young Gogol’) – but we do not know how they were seated.35 If Briullov’s drawing is indicative of Smirdin’s efforts to unify, then we may surmise that cordiality was likely to be superficial. Indeed, deep differences in personality, status, and world view lay beneath the surface of politeness and civility. And wounds from very recent literary and personal battles could hardly have healed. The cover of the second volume pictured the bookstore interior (on the main floor), with Pushkin talking to Viazemskii in the foreground and Smirdin with Senkovskii in the back, in Smirdin’s office (see fig. 2.2). This picture (drawn by A.P. Sapozhnikov and engraved by Galaktionov) captured the near future of periodical publishing in Russia: the backroom conversation of Smirdin and Senkovskii symbolized their highly profitable collaboration, a joint effort that would soon produce the popular new thick journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia in 1834. Unfortunately, most of these positive outcomes were relatively short-lived. Biblioteka dlia chteniia’s popularity faded in the 1840s, and Smirdin’s business too went into decline. As mentioned earlier, he struggled in the 1840s, was forced to move his store to a more modest and less costly location, and went out of business in the 1850s; he died virtually destitute. Why he eventually failed and whether he could have done anything different to remain solvent are questions with no easy answers. Smirdin was not cautious in his investments and, by some accounts, even overly trusting with authors, editors, and business associates. Paying high honoraria, launching new projects, renting prestigious quarters, and promoting his business with expensive dinners give evidence of bold, though risky, entrepreneurism that depended on a steady and ever-increasing income that his publications could not in the end provide.36 Biblioteka dlia chteniia proved unable to sustain its high subscription base in the 1840s for a variety of reasons, not least as a result of worsening economic conditions for provincial landowners who had earlier supported it in great numbers, and also because increasing censorship created new patterns by forcing publishers to turn again to literary collections, threatening the supremacy of journals.37 When Smirdin held his dinner party, however, his future and the future of the book trade in Russia looked bright; his publications were selling well, and his service in professionalizing literature – providing

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Figure 2.2 Frontispiece, Novosel’e, v. 2 (St Petersburg, 1834). Image courtesy of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.

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generous honoraria, encouraging closer, mutually beneficial relationships between writers and publishers, and attending to production values and obligations to readers and authors in an exemplary way – inspired confidence that the publishing business could meet the needs and interests of both authors and new reading audiences, who at the time were said to include, for instance, provincial readers, and who, as recent research has shown, consisted not only of lower-ranked nobles but also of humble civil servants, emerging professionals, and merchants.38 Nevertheless, the dinner highlighted a considerable challenge: people of different talents, backgrounds, personalities, and commitments (moral and political) could not easily be united to further common goals. Providing this group with a sufficient incentive to contribute to the same volumes was a tremendous achievement. But despite Smirdin’s intentions, the professionals he invited and generously fed could never remain united once they left the dinner. Their values, motives, and perceptions of what readers needed and wanted differed radically; indeed, even though he contributed to Novosel’e and Biblioteka dlia chteniia, Pushkin would eventually start his own journal independent of Smirdin and despite the latter’s attempts to dissuade him. Although the hope of financial success motivated many at the dinner, other values were at play as well, values that constituted yet another dimension in the complex publishing scene of the 1830s and 1840s.39 Even so, by arranging the dinner – truly a seminal event in his rise to prominence in Russian letters – Smirdin brought together writers from many different tiers and different social classes, to forge a relationship that could successfully deal with Russia’s growing readership. Smirdin needed financial acumen and good judgment – and the next few years would bear testimony to both. The present study takes a snapshot of the forces at play in Russian print culture of the early 1830s: the different backgrounds of the participants, the tensions between them, and the challenges of publication in a closed society with a vigilant and arbitrary censorship. It is no easy matter to account for the changes that would come later in the 1840s and 1850s, as new alliances, new readers with different tastes, and new social forces begin to play a role. Nonetheless, a focus on Smirdin’s dinner and what it represented is an important approach to understanding the forces that gave shape to the development of nineteenth-century Russian print culture as publishers and writers strove to meet the needs and demands of new readers, maintain quality, make a reasonable in-

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come, compete successfully in an atmosphere of class tension and conflicting values, and negotiate safely their relationships with the state. The dinner showed an ambitious publisher’s approach to future success: nourishing his contributors and the people that made the printed word possible in Russia. Studying the event helps us appreciate Smirdin’s contribution to Russian letters and better understand the complex relations between state and culture in Nicholaevan Russia. NOTES  

* Daniel Cohen, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).   † Bertrum H. MacDonald and Fiona A. Black, ‘Using GIS for Spatial and Temporal Analyses in Print Culture Studies: Some Opportunities and Challenges,’ Social Science History 24, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 510.  

1 Discussions of Smirdin’s move to new quarters – a mark of the increasing commercialization in Russian society described in the previous essay in this volume by Lina Bernstein – can be found in several contemporary periodicals: ‘Novyi knizhnyi magazin G. Smirdina,’ Severnaia pchela, no. 286, 16 Dec. 1831; ‘Vnutrennie izvestiia,’ Russkii invalid, ili voennye vedomosti, no. 46, 22 Feb. 1832: 183; and N.I. Grech, ‘Pis’mo k V.A. Ushakovu,’ in ‘Korrespondentsiia,’ Severnaia pchela, no. 45, 26 Feb. 1832. M.E. Lobanov discusses the evening in his memoirs: ‘Literaturnyi obed u Smirdina s uchastiem Pushkina. Soobshchenie K. Shimkevicha,’ in Pushkin i ego sovre­menniki 31/32 (1927): 111–18. On the critical reaction of Moscow journalists, see T. Grits, V. Trenin, and M. Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia (knizhnaia lavka A F. Smirdina), ed. V.B. Shklovskii and B.M. Eikhenbaum (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 222–3.   2 Belinsky talks about the ‘Smirdin Period’ in his ‘Literaturnye mechtaniia’ (Literary daydreams) in V.G. Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1953), 1:98. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.) For accounts of Smirdin and the Russian publishing scene in the 1830s, see Miranda Beaven [Remnek], ‘Aleksandr Smirdin and Publishing in St. Petersburg, 1830–40,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers 27 (1985): 15–20 and ‘Russian Literary Almanacs in the 1820s and Their Legacy,’ Publishing History 17 (1985): 65–86; Grits, Trenin, and Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia; Lev S. Kishkin, Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin: K istorii smirdinskogo fonda Slavianskoi biblioteki (Prague: Noviná“, 1987) and a later revised

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3

 

4

 

5

 

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edition, Chestnyi, dobryi, prostodushnyi. . .: Trudy i dni Aleksandra Filippovicha Smirdina (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995); M.N. Kufaev, Istoriia russkoi knigi v XIX veke (1927; reprint Moscow: Pashkov dom, 2003), particularly the third chapter, 94–137; Nikolai Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Knizhnaia lavka A.F. Smirdina (Moscow: Vsesoiuznaia knizhnaia palata, 1957); Williams Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), particularly chapter 2; and André Meynieux, Pouchkine, homme de lettres, et la littérature professionelle en Russie (Paris: F. Paillart, 1966), particularly part 2, chapter 4. As Gary Marker notes (cited by Bernstein in her essay in this volume, note 2), merchants in growing numbers began to read books and then enter the book trade, so that most of the publishers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century comprised those with merchant and artisan background. The ‘education’ merchants received at the end of the 1700s (through publications designed expressly for them) affirmed their importance to the state, its economy, and its status within international commerce, strengthened their image ‘as the lifeblood of the world’ (Bernstein, 31), and cleared the way for later publishers and booksellers, such as Plavil’shchikov, who learned and then passed on the same positive values to Smirdin. On the importance of Plavil’shchikov, see Kishkin, Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin, 8–9. For a full discussion of the publication circumstances of Krylov’s and Pushkin’s works, including finances and printing issues, see Kishkin, Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin, 21–2, and Nikolai Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Rasskazy o prizhiznennykh izdaniiakh Pushkina (Moscow: Vsesoiuznaia knizhnaia palata, 1962). Sources mentioned in note 2 give a full discussion of Smirdin’s contribution to Russian print culture, with data on his financial arrangements with writers. There is a considerable literature on Biblioteka dlia chteniia; see especially the recent study by Melissa Frazier, Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers and the ‘Library for Reading’ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). For more on Russian censorship throughout this period, see the final essay in this volume by Marianna Tax Choldin. For a discussion of Bulgarin’s denunciations and links with the Third Section, see Mikhail Lemke, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tsenzury i zhurnalistiki XIX stoletiia (St Petersburg: Trud, 1904), 369–427; more recently, A.I. Reitblat has compiled data on Bulgarin: Vidok Figliarin: Pis’ma i agenturnye zapiski F.V. Bulgarina v III otdelenie (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998); also see his Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: Istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kul’ture Pushkinskoi epokhi (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 140.

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7 Ivan Vejeeghen, or Life in Russia (London, 1831). For the novel’s reception, see Gilman H. Alkire, ‘Gogol’ and Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin,’ Slavic Review 28, no. 2 (June 1969): 289–96. Todd (Fiction and Society, 89) argues that Bulgarin’s financial success was no greater than Pushkin’s. On Bulgarin’s success and his readers, see Grits, Trenin, and Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia, 227ff.; and Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel, 98–107.   8 On emerging reading communities, see Nurit Schleifman, ‘A Russian Daily Newspaper and Its New Readership: “Severnaia pchela,” 1825–1840,’ Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 28, no. 2 (1987): 127–144; and Miranda Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences, 1828–1848,’ PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999. How Pushkin and his friends reacted to these new communities and their tastes is considered by Paul Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 110–23.   9 For a discussion of Pushkin’s polemical skirmishes with Bulgarin, see J.T. Shaw, ‘The Problem of the Persona in Journalism: Puškin’s Feofilakt Kosiôkin,’ American Contributions to the Fifth International Congress of Slavists (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963), 301–26. 10 For information on the first editions of Evgenii Onegin as complete book, see Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Rasskazy, 309–20. 11 On Smirdin’s relationship with Pushkin, see Kishkin, Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin, 10–19. For a more critical evaluation of Smirdin’s aesthetic sensibilities, see Todd, Fiction and Society, 93–5. 12 See Kishkin, Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin, 47–55, and Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Knizhnaia lavka, 39–51, for reasons why Smirdin failed; also see Beaven [Remnek], ‘Aleksandr Smirdin,’ 28–30. Todd, Fiction and Society, 93–6, describes Smirdin’s triumphs in the 1830s, but points to signs of trouble (in particular, Gogol’ and Viazemskii’s criticism of Biblioteka dlia chteniia, and the opposition from other journalists that success engendered). He views Smirdin as a ‘consolidator’ rather than innovator (but see Kishkin, Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin, 45, for his innovations). 13 Grech, ‘Pis’mo k V. A. Ushakovu’ (from which quotations in the following five paragraphs are taken). The guests listed by Grech – with some inaccuracies in spelling, patronymics, and surnames (which I have preserved) – were as follows: E.V. Alad’in, A.M. Alekseev, V.N. Berkh, A.P. Briulov, F.V. Bulgarin, A.F. Voeikov, B.A. Vrasskii, Prince P.A. Viazemskii, P.I. Gaevskii, S.A. Galaktionov, G. Gogol’-Iasnovskii, Grech, A.I. Danilevskii, I.D. Ershov, V.A. Zhukovskii, K.A. Zelentsov, I.T. Kalashnikov, V.I. Karlgof, D.M. Kniazhevich, A.M. Kniazhevich, N.M. Kniazhevich, V.M. Kniazhevich, V.D. Komovskii, I.A. Krylov, A.M. Kornilov, M.E. Lobanov,

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14 15

16

17

K.P. Masal’skii, Andrei Af. Nikitin, Aleksandr Nikitich Nikitin, A.S. Norov, Prince V.F. Odoevskii, E.O. Ol’dekop, A.N. Ochkin, V.N. Panaev, P.A. Pletnev, A.S. Pushkin, N.F. Rozhestvenskii, Baron G.A. Rozenkamp, Baron E.O. Rozen, A.G. Rotchev, V.N. Semenov, O.M. Somov, A.I. Stoikovich, N.I. Ustrialov, N.I. Utkin, Count D.I. Khvostov, S.S. de Shaplet, D.I. Iazykov, M.A. Iakovlev, I.I. Iastrebtsov, B.M. Fedorov. (Grits, Trenin, and Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia, 217, provides an edited list.) Grech showed perhaps understandable unfamiliarity with Gogol’, whose Evenings on a Farm Near Dikan’ka appeared in 1831–2 and who should have been listed as N.V. Gogol’-Ianovskii (not ‘G. Gogol’-Iasnovskii’). Another periodical, Russkii invalid, listed some of those invited who could not attend and referred to ‘eighty’ invited guests, considerably more than Grech listed. Kishkin (Aleksandr Filippovich Smirdin, 85) speculates that the conflicting reports about total attendance may reflect confusion over the number of people invited (120), the number of table settings (80), and those who actually came to the dinner (51 in the above list). Pushkin and other literary people would gather informally at Smirdin’s; see Kishkin, Chestnyi, dobryi, prostodushnyi, 47–51. Grech’s high praise for the government clearly reflected his desire to please the Emperor and avoid censorship problems. Of course, not all present at the dinner shared his sentiments; for more on Grech and his sensibilities, see the following discussion. Although Osip Senkovskii apparently did not attend the party, shortly after the dinner he took over editing Novosel’e. Presumably, it was his performance in this capacity that subsequently led, at Smirdin’s invitation, to his editorship of Biblioteka dlia chteniia; see Louis Pedrotti, Jozef-Julian S©kowski; The Genesis of a Literary Alien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 135; also see Beaven [Remnek], ‘Aleksandr Smirdin,’ 22–3, and Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Knizhnaia lavka, 33–5. The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literatures, ed. George J. Gutsche (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1989), s.v. ‘Grech, Nikolai Ivanovich.’ Grech’s long career included editing (1812–39) one of the first ‘thick’ journals, Syn otechestva , and co-editing (with Bulgarin) Severnaia pchela from 1825 until 1860. As a literary periodical, Syn otechestva enjoyed prominence and longevity for its patriotic message, illustrations, and of course popularity, achieving a subscription base of eighteen hundred in its early years. Although sales declined significantly by the mid1820s, it nonetheless forged on, publishing all the best authors of the age and yearly reviews of literature, an innovation that would become popular with all the literary periodicals. Grech also wrote fiction, publishing two

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18 19

20

21

22

novels and textbooks on Russian language and literature. His Russian grammar had impressive staying power, with a usefulness extending into the 1860s. Memoir literature indicates that Grech was well aware of Bulgarin’s unsavoury qualities and reputation; see Vladimir Petrovich Burnashev, ‘Iz vospominanii peterburgskogo starozhila. [Part] 2. Chetvergi u Grecha,’ Zaria: Zhurnal ucheno-literaturnyi i politicheskii (April 1871): 20–6. For Grech’s connections with the Third Section, see Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel, 140. Lobanov, ‘Literaturnyi obed u Smirdina,’ 117–18. Citations from Lobanov in the text refer to these pages. For a more positive picture of Bulgarin that defends his service with the Third Section, see Frank Mocha, ‘Tadeusz Bulharyn (Faddej V. Bulgarin) 1789–1859: A Study in Literary Maneuver,’ Antemurale (1974): 60–209. Reitblat urges a careful re-evaluation of Bulgarin’s contributions in ‘Vidok Figliarin (Istoriia odnoi literaturnoi reputatsii),’ Voprosy literatury (March 1990): 73–114. The topic of Bulgarin’s reputation (the Bulgarin ‘myth’) is also addressed by Tat’iana Kuzovkina, ‘Rol’ knigi G. Keniga v razvenchanii bulgarinskogo mifa,’ Toronto Slavic Quarterly, no. 20 (Winter 2006), http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/15/kuzovkina15.shtml, and by M.B. Seleznev, in ‘Rol’ epigrammy v sozdanii ‘bulgarinskogo mifa’,’ Vestnik Cheliabinskogo universiteta, series 2, 15, no. 1 (2004): 48–55, who argues that criticism of Bulgarin has been too harsh. Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 120–1. Some years later P.V. Annenkov wrote in his memoirs: ‘Nowadays it is difficult even to understand the degree of indignation which the organs of this self-appointed tutelage over literature aroused in people who wanted to preserve for at least this part of social activity a certain shade of freedom and human dignity. In the prevailing absence of social and political interests, it became a matter of honor almost to struggle with the triumvirate. In certain circles … the moral qualities of people were judged according to whether they had a good or bad relationship with the triumvirate’ (cited in and translated by Monas, The Third Section, 121). Discussing these issues is beyond the scope of the present study. N.N. Terpigorev’s account is given in a short note, ‘Rasskazy o Pushkine,’ in Russkaia starina (1870): 580–1. The same anecdote is recounted from Grech’s perspective in Burnashev, ‘Iz vospominanii peterburgskogo starozhila. [Part] 2. Chetvergi u Grecha.’ For Semenov’s biography and activities, see K. Ia. Grot, ‘Vasilii Nikolaevich Semenov, literator i tsenzor: K literaturnoi istorii 1830–kh godov,’ in

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78  George Gutsche Pushkin i ego sovremenniki 37 (1928): 155–91. Semenov was often visited by his nephew, Terpigorev; it was at Semenov’s that Terpigorev met Smirdin, who invited him to the dinner. Terpigorev told the anecdote about Pushkin as if he were there, although his name was not on the list of guests attending, noting that Grech ‘applauded’ after the anecdote, and ‘we all laughed.’ Bulgarin, however, frowned and grew silent; afterwards he confronted Semenov, telling him he shouldn’t be there with them because he was a ‘literary executioner’ – referring of course to his censorship duties. Semenov was about to become offended but others dissuaded him; Grech explained that Bulgarin was merely venting his anger against Pushkin. Pushkin, when talking later with Grech, told him he was surprised at his relationship with Bulgarin. Grech responded that he related to him ‘like a stepfather to stepson’ (Terpigorev, ‘Rasskazy o Pushkine’). Burnashev’s account of the incident (‘Iz vospominanii peterburgskogo starozhila,’ 26; reprinted in Grits, Trenin, and Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia, 220–2) was very similar. Grot, Semenov’s biographer, though generally sceptical of Burnashev’s reliability, seems satisfied in this case; see Grot, ‘Vasilii Nikolaevich Semenov,’ 172, and G.I. Nazarova, ‘“Novosel’e” Aleksandra Briullova,’ Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, 1969: 79. 23 Severnaia pchela, no. 35, 22 March 1830 and no. 39, 1 April 1830; quoted in Shaw, ‘The Problem of the Persona,’ 305 (his translation). Also see N.K. Zamkov, ‘K tsenzurnoi istorii proizvedenii Pushkina,’ in Pushkin i ego sovremenniki 29/30 (1918): 49–63. For discussions of the new censorship code and its implementation, see Monas, The Third Section, 139–43; and Marianna Tax Choldin’s A Fence Around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 25–7. Of course, writers were not always so innocent either, using Aesopic language (see Choldin in this volume, note 5) and other means of communicating politically unacceptable messages, including privileging sets and subsets of readers with references invoking shared special meanings (see Peschio and Pil’shchikov in this volume). 24 Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 20, 6 April 1830; quoted in Shaw, ‘The Problem of the Persona,’ 306n13 (his translation). Del’vig continues: ‘We shall accuse Pushkin also of another, still more important theft – he borrowed a great deal from the novel Dimitrii the Pretender and with these plunderings successfully, with the artistry characteristic of him, adorned his historical tragedy Boris Godunov, although also, by a strange coincidence, it was written by him five years before the birth of Mr. Bulgarin’s historical novel.’ 25 Monas, The Third Section, 149–51, discusses the Delavigne problem; also see G. Galin, ‘K istorii zapreshcheniia “Literaturnoi gazety” A.A. Del’viga,’ in

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26

27

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29 30

31 32

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Iz istorii russkoi i zarubezhnoi literatury. Sbornik statei i issledovanii (Saransk: Mordovskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1964), 72–84. Another reason for the antagonism between Pushkin and Bulgarin no doubt involved the different audiences for whom they wrote. Pushkin’s readers were largely the almanac audience, small and aristocratic, as indicated by almanac subscription lists. For instance, Nevskii al’manakh na 1830 god (St Petersburg, 1830) had only seven merchant subscribers, whereas Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin of 1829, by contrast, had forty-four. For more on the use of subscription lists to provide quantitative data on the differentiation of Russian reading communities, see Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences.’ Almost three years younger than Pushkin, Semenov was a fellow Lyceum graduate (the class after Pushkin’s); Pushkin probably knew him there as well as later – we know they met at a breakfast at Bulgarin’s, when all were on more friendly terms, in January 1828; see L.A. Chereiskii, Pushkin i ego okruzhenie, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1988), 392. After time in the military, Semenov served with the Ministry of Public Education before joining the St Petersburg Censorship Committee, where he worked from July 1830 through April 1836. For biographical and other information on Semenov, see Chereiskii, Pushkin i ego okruzhenie, 392–3, and Grot, ‘Vasilii Nikolaevich Semenov.’ For a fuller discussion of Evropeets issues, see Monas, The Third Section, 153–6, and V.E. Vatsuro and M.I. Gillel’son, Skvoz’ ‘umstvennye plotiny’: Ocherki o knigakh i presse pushkinskoi pory, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Kniga, 1986), 114–39. As cited in Monas, The Third Section, 154 (his translation). Apparently, imprisonment of writers and censors for short periods of time (up to a few weeks) was relatively common; see Monas, The Third Section, 121, 157, and A.V. Nikitenko’s diary entry for 5 February 1830, in his Zapiski i dnevnik: V 3 tomakh (Moscow: Zakharov, 2005), [Vol.] 1: http:// belolibrary.imwerden.de/books/memoirs/nikitenko_dnevnik_1.htm. See Smirnov-Sokol’skii, Knizhnaia lavka, 31. These remarks are from the preface to the first volume of Novosel’e (St Petersburg, 1833), vi–vii. Novosel’e and the journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia posed terminological problems, like other such publications in the 1830s. Though similar in format to each other and differing in several respects from the almanac tradition, they bore some relationship to it. So the first, in particular, is usually considered an almanac, albeit transitional. See Beaven [Remnek], ‘Russian Literary Almanacs,’ 77–8. Novosel’e was another prime example of social engagement in that Smirdin

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80  George Gutsche worked to engage the entire literary elite in the production of substantive, elegant literature. Granted, in this case the titles were expensive because of the engravings, but other Smirdin titles – such as his editions of Krylov’s fables – were cheap at four rubles each, and in that way he engaged a larger public in the purchase of contemporary literature (see Meynieux, ‘Pouchkine,’ 485). 34 The volumes serve to exemplify the aesthetic qualities praised by Belinsky and others in Smirdin’s editions. The Novosel’e engravings provide a visual record of Smirdin’s store, its exterior next to the Lutheran church, and its interiors: the reading room where the banquet was held (showing the head table with Smirdin and his guests) and the bookstore (showing Smirdin and various littérateurs including Pushkin and Senkovskii). 35 An earlier sketch of the banquet by Briullov (that was not engraved) gives a different, broader perspective, showing the length of the tables, the furnishings in the room, some guests at the table, and Pushkin embracing Smirdin at the rear of the room. The earlier sketch is compared with the final version in Nazarova, ‘Novosel’e Aleksandra Briullova,’ 77–8; she gives an excellent analysis of the artistic qualities of Briullov’s work and also treats identification issues (matching guests with their artistic representation and the accuracy of the famous engraving). 36 For quantitative evidence from subscription lists that corroborates the fact that Smirdin stocked far larger quantities of publications than other bookmen, see ‘Appendix A3.1: Bookdealer Subscriptions by Number of Copies,’ in Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences,’ 403–5. 37 For a discussion of deteriorating social and economic conditions (and increasingly repressive censorship) in Russia in the late 1840s, see chapters 8–9 of W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (1978; reprint DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), 269–324; on censorship and the publishing of literary collections, see Beaven [Remnek], ‘Russian Literary Almanacs,’ 78. 38 The prominence of provincial readership was noted by Belinsky; see George J. Gutsche, ‘Puškin and Belinskij: “The Role of the Offended Provincial,”’ in New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose, ed. George J. Gutsche and Lauren G. Leighton (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1982), 41–59; and Beaven [Remnek], ‘Aleksandr Smirdin’ (see especially note 44). For more recent research on reading communities, see, for example, Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii, especially 14–29, and Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences.’ In particular, female readership of books and periodicals was growing; see Remnek, ‘“A Larger Portion of the Public”: Fiction, Journals & Female Readers in

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Print Culture in the Early Reign of Nicholas I  81 the Early Reign of Nicholas I,’ in An Improper Profession: Women, Gender & Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Barbara Norton and Jehanne Gheith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 26–52. Moreover, literary salons led by women continued to thrive; see Lina Bernstein, ‘Women on the Verge of a New Language: Russian Salon Hostesses in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Russia – Women – Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 209–24. Finally, women writers and translators became increasingly visible in periodicals and book publishing; see Catriona Kelly, ‘Part I’ of A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820–1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 93–107. But professionally oriented banquets such as Smirdin’s were decidedly limited to males. 39 In the first part of his book (Fiction and Society), Todd gives an illuminating and insightful discussion of factors that help explain the journalistic scene in the 1830s and 1840s. Many questions remain to be explored.

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3 The Proliferation of Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics in Pushkin and Baratynskii (1820s–1830s) joseph peschio and igor’ pil’shchikov

Editor’s Note This next essay breaks new ground in several respects. As the first in our second thematic group – ‘Plurality of reading communities and their social status’ – it moves from broader socio-economic concerns to a closer focus on readers, in this instance from a particularly cultured and imaginative segment of society in which poets like Pushkin and Baratynskii regularly congregated. The essay also exemplifies a different scholarly methodology – literary criticism – in which the sources used are the texts themselves, and the requirements for analysis involve an intimate knowledge of the patterns of poetic construction as well as of the more usual contextual information associated with scholarly commentary. Interestingly, the notion of communication stratagems apparent in the previous essay surfaces here more strongly, testifying to the varieties of inventiveness encountered among nineteenth-century Russian audiences. But in addition to intricate insights supporting a localized understanding of diversification among Russian reading publics (even within small communities), the essay is a rewarding base for the application of general theoretical concepts encountered in readership studies (among them the ‘interpretive communities’ of Stanley Fish and the ‘horizon of expectations’ of Hans Robert Jauss). Furthermore, the unusual source material used in this essay – the shalost’, or verse genre associated with literary impropriety – represents, despite its originality, very much the kind of data that digital humanists use for computer-assisted analysis. In fact, the authors presage such approaches in the terminology defining their topic when they speak of ‘encoding the structure of the readership into the form of the text.’ This is not surprising, since both serve as editors of the large Russian database of literary texts known as FEB (Fundamental’naia elektronnaia biblioteka: Russkaia literatura i

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Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics  83

fol’klor). Of course, the smaller corpus of shalost’ verse is easily manipulated by software like Wordle to create meaning-bearing word or tags clouds – or by more expansive text-analysis programs like the French-Canadian HyperPo, which helps scholars perform word-frequency, KWIC, and collocation functions. But a large corpus of texts like FEB, already encoded in Standard Generalized Markup Language, is ripe for use with multi-text data mining technologies like the Mellon-funded MONK (Metadata Offers New Knowledge) and SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research). MONK is associated with large corpora of English and American fiction; SEASR helps scholars uncover information across thousands of books. But SEASR also identifies small patterns in a single text, so one hopes that Russian print culture ranging from shalost’ verse to large collections will also join the cultural heritage materials being analysed using these systems. As George Gutsche suggests in the preceding essay, the early nineteenth century saw an increasing plurality of reading communities among diversifying social groups. This diversification was the result not only of socio-economic trends and related reader behaviour, but also of writerly practice. As several scholars of the period have noted, poets such as Aleksandr Pushkin and Evgenii Baratynskii (Boratynskii) often used obscure quotations and hints on proper names to fragment their audience. In its simplest form, this practice divides the readership into two categories: the circle of close friends who were able to decode the allusions, and the wider audience, who is given to understand that the poet is referring to a person or text, but is unequipped to catch all the nuances of the reference. In essence, this is a means of encoding the structure of the readership into the form of the text, creating and manipulating not just an ‘implied reader,’1 but a whole constellation of real audiences consisting of real people. In this essay, we survey a number of examples of how this practice works on the micro-philological level, focusing closely on Pushkin and Baratynskii’s veiled evocations of their mutual friend and fellow poet, Baron Anton Del’vig. In addition, we advance a working hypothesis for future analytical studies of the formal encoding of audience structure in Russian poetry of this period, addressing the question of why these poets sought to divide their audience, privileging certain segments of it over others. This communication strategy is not unique to Pushkin and Baratynskii, but it is characteristic of the ‘aristocratic’ literature of Pushkin’s

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84  Joseph Peschio and Igor’ Pil’shchikov

age in general, especially of the so-called Lyceum Circle. This was an informal alliance of three poets who had been classmates at the Lyceum from 1811 to 1817 – Del’vig, Vil’gelm Kiukhel’beker, and Pushkin. They were joined by Del’vig’s friend, Baratynskii, soon after their graduation.2 The poetry produced by the Circle, much of it friendly epistles between the members, was not only a result of these poets’ social affiliation, but was also key in creating and maintaining that affiliation. There are two social impulses in this poetry characteristic of what Sam Driver refers to as the period’s ‘aristocratic party’:3 the impulse to cement and maintain an independent, corporate social entity; and an exclusionary one, the impulse to erect walls around the ‘party’ in order to protect it from unwanted intrusions. Building multiple, separate audiences into poetry was an expression of both these impulses. The poets of the Lyceum Circle often wrote for four readerships at once: (1) the members of the circle (three readers); (2) the closest friends and associates of the members, including fellow members of slightly larger informal literary groups such as the Green Lamp and the Free Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature (fifteen to twenty readers); (3) the readership of the almanacs (fewer than one hundred readers); and (4) the broader readership of perhaps two or three hundred readers.4 As we describe below, Baratynskii and Pushkin encoded in some of their work a barrier between the first two audiences and the second two: thus, (1) and (2) vs (3) and (4). The first two readerships embody what Boris Eikhenbaum called ‘literary domesticity’ [‘literaturnaia domashnost’’]. A fairly rare word, ‘domashnost’’ is used by the Formalists in a sense peculiar to the early twentieth century.5 Only Ushakov’s dictionary defines this usage: ‘A familial, unofficial attitude toward something. Domesticity cannot be allowed in public work.’6 Domesticity is distinct and isolated from larger structures of social power. It is that private reserve – that exclusive and insular social space – in which one is much freer to do as he pleases and be who he wants. Literary domesticity is the projection of the private, personal relationships of domesticity (especially the author’s relationships with fellow writers) onto the pragmatics of the author’s interaction with the readership at large, a highly public kind of interaction. It thus simultaneously asserts domesticity as part of literature proper and brings the broader readership into this inner sanctum, providing readers a peek – though, as we shall see, often no more than a tempting and frustrating glimpse behind the curtains. Two aspects of literary domesticity are particularly important to our

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discussion here: the shalost’ and circle semantics. The ability to exert influence on social organization – the ability, to paraphrase J.L. Austin, ‘to do things with poetry’ – was, interestingly, first exercised in the Russian context in connection with the very ‘lightest’ genres, including the shalost’.7 The word ‘shalost’’ is usually translated as ‘prank,’ ‘caper,’ ‘mischief,’ or ‘naughtiness.’ In the early nineteenth century, an even broader range of behaviours was associated with the word, including deception, practical jokes, assault, mutiny, vandalism, rape, and kidnapping.8 It also denotes a literary phenomenon. We have described shalosti as a peculiar, but stable, verse genre practised by the poets of the Lyceum Circle, the Green Lamp, and Arzamas.9 Its main characteristic is behavioural rather than formal: whether a long poem or just a couple of lines, a shalost’ in one respect or another flaunts the prescriptions of literary propriety, adhering instead to the behavioural codes and semantics of domesticity.10 When published, as part of ‘literature proper,’ a shalost’ brings the intimate, local semantics of that domestic setting, an ‘inside joke,’ to the broader stage of literature. For some writers, the designation ‘shalost’’ also signifies the author’s attitude toward the text as something insignificant and trifling (this is true, for example, of Griboedov and Baratynskii, but not of Pushkin and Del’vig). In any case, such texts tend to rely heavily on what Tynianov refers to as ‘domestic, intimate, circle semantics.’11 In other words, they evoke and play on associations and allusions, literary and otherwise, that are particular to a small circle of acquaintances such as the Lyceum Circle. The literary sources that constitute the associative horizon of shalosti can acquire for certain addressees (and only for them) a special meaning, and sometimes they can be known only to them. A reader who does not belong to this small group of people risks taking a comic, playful text as being more or less ‘serious.’ And for those who understand the reference, the whole text takes on an entirely different meaning. In many respects, the same is true of any obscure literary allusion. The few erudite souls, for example, who appreciate all of Nabokov’s allusions feel themselves part of an elite club.12 Circle semantics in the early nineteenth century are different in that a concrete, social connection was necessary for one to perceive the purely domestic subtexts characteristic of shalosti. In other words, the readership is divided not by factors like education and erudition, but by social proximity to the author and his immediate milieu. It is not the clever who understand, but those who are privy to the private discourse of the author’s circle – in a word, his friends.

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An episode in the reception of Evgenii Onegin provides perhaps the clearest example of how all this works. In 1922 Modest Gofman published a collection of Del’vig’s previously unpublished poems. Among Del’vig’s juvenilia included in the volume was ‘Fani: Goratsianskaia oda’ (Fani: a Horatian ode).13 In the poem, Del’vig compares time spent with an experienced, older prostitute to that with a younger, less experienced prostitute, ultimately coming out in favour of the former. The ‘Fani’ of the title is a combination of literary convention (the ‘Fannis’ of Cleland, Klopstock, Diderot, and others) with the image of a real-life Fan(n)i, who was a popular St Petersburg entertainer and consort in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Del’vig reworked the poem at least twice – we have three redactions – in order to present it to the Green Lamp in 1819, where Pushkin critiqued it. It remained unpublished both because it fell outside the norms of decency and because Del’vig could have been prosecuted under the censorship laws of the day for naming Fani (the real-life prostitute) in a literary work.14 Its libertine character and unpublishability made it perfect material for the Green Lamp, which was an assiduously constructed domesticity. At all events, Gofman’s 1922 publication of ‘Fani’ cleared up a longstanding mystery of Pushkin scholarship. ‘Fani’ begins: Мне ль под оковами Гимена Всё видеть то же и одно? Мое блаженство – перемена, Я дев меняю, как вино. Темира, Дафна и Лилета Давно, как сон, забыты мной, И их для памяти поэта Хранит лишь стих удачный мой.15 [Shall I take up the shackles of Hymen / and always see one and the same thing? / Bliss for me is variety; / I change wenches like I change wine. // I have long ago forgotten, like a dream, / Temira, Daphne, and Lileta. / For the poet’s memory, they are / preserved only in a verse of mine that turned out well.]

As Gofman noticed,16 it is this poem that Pushkin quotes in four hitherto indecipherable lines from Evgenii Onegin:

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Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics  87 Словами вещего поэта Сказать и мне позволено: Темира, Дафна и Лилета – Как сон, забыты мной давно.17 [I, too, can say, in the words of the prophetic poet: I long ago forgot Temira, Daphne, and Lileta like a dream.]

With the line ‘In the words of the prophetic poet,’ Pushkin gives his readers to understand that the following lines are a quotation. How- ever, before Gofman published Del’vig’s ode (that is, just over a hundred years after it was written), the general audience could not have puzzled out who ‘the prophetic poet’ was:18 his name is omitted, and the quotation was unrecognizable to all but the handful of schoolboy chums and fellow members of the Green Lamp who had read ‘Fani’ or heard it recited – in all, no more than perhaps thirty people.19 In his seminal article ‘The Text and the Structure of Audience,’ Iurii Lotman commented on Pushkin’s allusion to Del’vig as follows: ‘In a printed text addressed to the readership at large, Pushkin deliberately omits something as if it were well known, or hints at facts known only to a very small circle of his friends.’20 Lotman continues: ‘Among the potential readers of Evgenii Onegin, there was a small group for whom this hint was clear: the circle of Pushkin’s Lyceum friends ... and, possibly, a tight circle of the acquaintances of the post-Lyceum period. Thus, Pushkin’s text split the audience in two groups: a small one, to whom the text was comprehensible and intimately known, and the majority of readers, who sensed the hint but were unable to decipher it.’21 In some sense, this is a challenge to the reader and an insult to a large portion of the readership. By quoting Del’vig in such a way, Pushkin secretes an indecent domestic text inside his sprawling masterwork. Moreover, he impudently dangles in front of his readers the virtual assertion: ‘I hereby quote a poem that practically none of you can have read.’ Speech act theory and pragmatics provide a good framework for puzzling out what is at stake here. J. Searle makes the case that ‘referring’ is a speech act governed by the same principles as other speech acts.22 And other speech act theorists have proposed a cooperative model of referring whereby the identification of a referent is a collaborative outcome of semantic negotiation.23 So referring is a distinct speech act – and a highly performative one – that projects the (implied)

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reader in the text. Pushkin here is refusing to play by the rules and flouting the conventions that govern the ‘conversation’ between a writer and his readers. In fact, Pushkin’s very ostentatious reference to an unknowable referent evinces a deliberate and demonstrative refusal to observe H.P. Grice’s so-called cooperative principle: Pushkin does not want most of his readers to understand the reference. Rather, he employs deliberate discursive dysfunction to select among his readership. Pushkin snubs most of his readers while privileging the few members of his immediate milieu who will be able to identify the referent. Most interestingly, the ‘felicity’ of the speech act (i.e., whether the reference leads the reader to the correct referent) is determined exclusively by social proximity to Pushkin: only those close to him or to the Green Lamp were able to understand the reference to Del’vig. As a result, those of his readers who were able to understand the reference felt themselves part of an exclusive club composed of the few individuals who knew to laugh at it. The effect is to build insulated domestic circles into the broader public of his readership. This same mechanism is at work in another reference to Del’vig in Evgenii Onegin. In the famous passage where Vladimir Lenskii composes his elegy (ch. 6, XX), we read:   ... его стихи, Полны любовной чепухи, Звучат и льются. Их читает Он вслух, в лирическом жару, Как Дельвиг пьяный на пиру.24 [... his verses, / full of romantic nonsense, / ring and flow. He recites them / in a lyrical fever, / like drunken Del’vig at a banquet.]

First of all, most people had never encountered Baron Del’vig at a banquet and could only guess how he used to recite poems. Secondly, and more importantly, this line could not appear in Pushkin’s day as we are accustomed to reading it today – Pushkin abbreviated the name, using only the first initial. All the editions published in Pushkin’s lifetime read: ‘Like drunken D. at a banquet.’25 The ‘decoding’ of proper names in early nineteenth-century poetry was in and of itself a logical sociopoetic phenomenon that, as Lotman puts it, invites the reader to ‘share in a game of hints and omissions.’26 In an important article on the textology of Evgenii Onegin, Maksim

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Shapir demonstrated that the poetics of proper names in Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin consists of four basic rules:27 1. The rural landlords bear charactonyms (such speaking surnames as Pustiakov, Petuskov, Buianov). 2. The Moscow gentry are called by first names and patronymics, rather than surnames:28 Всё белится Лукерья Львовна, Всё то же лжет Любовь Петровна, Иван Петрович так же глуп, Семен Петрович так же скуп ...29 [Luker’ia L’vovna still powders her face, / Liubov’ Petrovna still tells the same lies, / Ivan Petrovich is still just as stupid, / Semen Petrovich is still just as cheap …]

3. Members of St Petersburg high society are described periphrastically, but in such a way that Pushkin’s contemporaries could easily recognize them. 4. The full names of some other contemporaries are given, but only when they are described in terms of their public personae – as poets, statesmen, etc. Thus, ‘Bard of Feasts, and languid melancholy’ is Baratynskii, as Pushkin explains in note 22 to Evgenii Onegin.30 ‘Another bard, who eloquently / Painted for us the first snow’ is Prince Viazemskii, as Pushkin explains in note 27.31 But if the same personage appears in the novel as a private person, his name is always replaced by asterisks or the initial letter. Thus, when Tatyana Larina meets the same Prince Viazemskii, we are informed: ‘К ней как-то В. подсел’32 (not ‘К ней как-то Вяземский подсел,’ as the modern editions read).33 Sometimes, other poetic considerations superseded this poetics of proper names. For example, one might object that one famous passage does not seem to fit in with Shapir’s categories. It appears in twentieth- century editions of Evgenii Onegin as ‘Du comme il faut (Шишков, прости: Не знаю, как перевести)’34 [Du comme il faut (pardon me, Shishkov: / I do not know how to translate it)]. These lines were actually never published by Pushkin in this form. He at first used the initial Sh., but then replaced it with three asterisks: ‘(pardon me, ***: / I do

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not know how to translate it).’35 Consequently, the name was so hard to ‘decode’ that Pushkin’s Lyceum classmate, Vil’gelm Kiukhel’beker, was even convinced that the lines were addressed to him: ‘Pardon me, Vil’gelm: / I do not know how to translate it.’36 Shishkov was very public indeed about his disapproval of the gratuitous use of French, and, as such, his full surname could have been given. However, in order to rhyme ‘forgive’ [prostit’] with ‘translate’ [perevesti], Pushkin had to employ the informal ‘ty’ form of the imperative (hence Kiukhel’beker’s conviction that it must addressed to a friend). But he could not use the informal address in this context with Shishkov (who was Admiral of the Russian Fleet and President of the Russian Academy) as a matter of basic propriety – just as he could not openly mock Baron Del’vig’s drinking. As Shapir points out, by adding proper names to Pushkin’s texts, the editors violate both his norms of ethics and his poetics.37 The apotheosis of this poetics of enigma is Pushkin’s epigram ‘Sobranie nasekomykh’ (A collection of insects), where all the names are replaced by asterisks, the number of which corresponds to the number of syllables: Вот ** божия коровка, Вот **** злой паук, Вот и **российский жук, Вот ** черная мурашка, Вот ** мелкая букашка [and so on].38 [Here is ** the ladybug, / here is **** the mean spider, / and here is ** the Russian beetle, / here is ** the black gnat, / here is ** the little bug.]

There are three or four reconstructions of this epigram with inserted names, but even Pushkin’s contemporaries were not sure how to decode this poem. Pushkin was quite fond of the effect this text produced and republished it in the journal Literaturnaia gazeta (edited by Del’vig with Pushkin’s help) with the following note: ‘We place here this important poem, which has been corrected by the Author. It will in the near future come out as a separate book, with an introduction, commentary, and biographical notes, with the addition of all the criticisms to which it has given rise, and with rebuttals of these [criticisms]. This edition will be adorned with a lithochrome of the insects. 25 rubles with shipping.’39 Thus, the asterisks are ambiguous: the readers have to guess who is who and insert different names, and Pushkin wanted to

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create an edition of it that is something like a combination of a board game, a ‘Mad Libs’ book, and a curio, which its owners could continue to play with over time as an amusement.40 Baratynskii’s method of splitting his audience according to social proximity is a little different from Pushkin’s, but it hinges on the same moment of deliberate discursive dysfunction. His poem ‘Eliziiskie polia’ (The Elysian fields, ca 1821) is a thoroughly domestic shalost’ that welcomes ‘outsiders’ from readerships (3) and (4) described above into his circle of friends via a number of more or less accessible references, while privileging his intimates by secreting a couple of entirely unknowable referents in the text. Baratynskii’s technique differs from Pushkin’s in that he does not dangle unknowable allusions in front of his readers, thus insulting them, but keeps these references extremely oblique, thereby creating a number of possible readings of the poem. ‘Eliziiskie polia’ is, first and foremost, part of a poetic dialogue with Del’vig on the fate of poets in the afterlife. Del’vig was Baratynskii’s poetic mentor – it was he who, as Del’vig himself put it, ‘introduced the Bard of Feasts to the muse’41 – and many of their poems are written in ‘dialogue’ with one another. ‘Eliziiskie polia’ is a belated reply to Del’vig’s poem ‘Elizium poetov’ (The poets’ Elysium, 1814–19). Like ‘Fani,’ this poem remained unpublished until 1922, so ‘Eliziiskie polia’ has at its core a thoroughly domestic intertextual dialogue with a text that only a small circle of his friends knew. In Del’vig’s ‘Elizium poetov’ a recently deceased poet is refused admittance to Elysium because, rather than singing of virtue, he devoted himself to Bacchus and Venus, squandering the spiritual purity necessary to a real poet.42 In Del’vig’s view, Elysium is a stern place to which only the most morally irreproachable poets are admitted. In Baratynskii’s version, Elysium is, in contrast, a huge celebration. His lyrical subject is a dying poet who boasts, ‘I do not fear the change in address,’ because he will be greeted most hospitably by the residents and, once there, he will continue to delight in his favourite earthly pleasures – wine, women, and song: Где б ни жил я, мне все равно: Там тоже славить от безделья Я стану дружбу и вино. Не изменясь в подземном мире, И там на шаловливой лире Превозносить я буду вновь

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92  Joseph Peschio and Igor’ Pil’shchikov Покойной Дафне и Темире Неприхотливую любовь.43 [It is all the same to me where I live: / there, too, I will from idleness / sing the praises of friendship and wine. / Not changing in the underworld, / even there on a mischievous44 lyre / I will again exalt / to dead Daphne and Temira / modest love.]

He tells Del’vig not to worry: О Дельвиг! слезы мне не нужны; Верь, в закоцитной стороне Прием радушный будет мне: Со мною музы были дружны! [O Del’vig! I need not your tears; / Believe me: there, beyond the Cocytus, / I will be accorded a warm welcome: / I was a friend of the muses!]

Further, he looks forward to joining his like-minded colleagues of ages past: Прочту Катуллу и Парни Мои небрежные куплеты, И улыбнутся мне они. [I will read to Catullus and Parny / My slipshod couplets / And they will smile.]

He even promises to acquaint his still-living friends with his new, dead ones – in order to ensure that they will be welcomed to the afterlife with frothy cups when the time comes: Мы встретим вас у врат Айдеса Знакомой дружеской толпой; Наполним радостные чаши, Хвала свиданью возгремит, И огласят приветы наши Весь необъемлемый Аид! [We will meet you at the gates of Hades / As a familiar, friendly crowd; /

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Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics  93 We will fill the joyful cups, / The toast to our meeting will thunder / And our greetings will fill with sound / All of endless Hades!]

The set of intertextual references in ‘Eliziiskie polia’ is distinctly characteristic of the Lyceum Circle, and includes, like Evgenii Onegin, Del’vig’s ode ‘Fani’ – by virtue of the references to Daphne and Temira. Besides Del’vig, Baratynskii also inserts references to poets in the Circle’s unofficial ‘canon’: Évariste Parny – an exponent of the elegy par excellence; ‘the Russian Parny’ – Konstantin Batiushkov; Catullus – the paragon of frivolous poetry; and Horace, whose role, in the Lyceum Circle, was, again, played by Del’vig.45 These references were accessible to the more well-read among Baratynskii’s audience – to all four readerships described above. But some of his references were completely unknowable to anyone outside the fifteen to twenty readers in his close circle of friends. Baratynskii conceived ‘Eliziiskie polia’ as a decidedly domestic text, and expressly describes it as a shalost’ in a letter of April 1825 to Ivan Kozlov: ‘“The Elysian Fields” was written about four years ago: it is a French shalost’ and fit only for an almanac.’46 Later, in an epistle to the poet Nikolai Gnedich, Baratynskii explained that ‘shalosti’ are ‘verse bagatelles’ (bezdelki stikhotvornye), humorous, but different from serious poetry.47 The central generic conceit of the poem is the mixture of the elegy with the friendly epistle – the former being the favourite ‘serious’ lyric genre of the day, and the latter, the most important ‘light’ genre of the day. The poem opens in the melancholy style of the elegy: Бежит неверное здоровье, И каждый час готовлюсь я Свершить последнее условье, Закон последний бытия. [My fickle health is fleeing, / And every hour I prepare / To carry out the final rite, / The last law of existence.]

This elegiac mood is quickly deflated. Baratynskii effects the transition from the elegiac to the epistolary at the beginning of the second stanza by using the traditional motif of a valediction to friends: Простите, ветреные други, С кем беззаботно в жизни сей

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94  Joseph Peschio and Igor’ Pil’shchikov Делил я шумные досуги Разгульной юности моей! [Farewell, light-hearted friends, / With whom, in this life / I blithely shared the noisy leisure / Of my merry youth!]

This valediction immediately brings readers into a narrow set of domestic subtexts by focusing on an oblique self-quotation: the phrase ‘share the noisy leisure’ comes from Baratynskii’s expository poem ‘Piry’ (Feasts, 1821). Тот домик помните ль, друзья, Где наша верная семья, Оставя скуку за порогом, Соединялась в шумный круг И без чинов с румяным богом Делила радостный досуг?48 [Can you remember, friends, that house / Where our faithful family, / Having forgotten about boredom, / Gathered in a noisy circle / And, without ranks, / Shared our joyful leisure with Bacchus?]

It was for ‘Piry’ that Baratynskii became known as ‘the Bard of Feasts,’ as Pushkin calls him in Evgenii Onegin, and it is addressed to the Lyceum Circle, with whom Baratynskii became close in early 1819. By 1821, when he penned ‘Eliziiskie polia,’ ‘Piry’ had already come to represent for his readers Baratynskii’s relationship with the Lyceum Circle, and, by evoking it here, he sets a very palpable stage, bringing all his readers, so to speak, to the table. Of the Lyceum Circle poets, Del’vig was the most important for Baratynskii, and the remaining lines of ‘Eliziiskie polia’ play out within a specifically ‘Del’vigian’ context. Thus, the friends addressed in ‘Eliziiskie polia’ are not the characters of elegiac generic convention, but the concrete addressees of the Lyceum Circle’s epistles to one another:49 Del’vig, Pushkin, Kiukhel’beker, Baratynskii. Some of these epistles were well known and much loved and therefore served as the very concrete literary-domestic setting of these poets’ association. In this way, Baratynskii’s intimates serve as something like flesh-and-blood stand-ins for the stock characters of the genre, which immediately underscores the domestic character of the text. As a result, a melancholic elegy ‘addressed to all readers’ is

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transformed into a friendly epistle addressed to an intimate group and entails subtexts belonging to the sphere of the Circle’s poetic communication – all in such a way that the text becomes cryptogrammatic, something that must be deciphered according to an already existing code. One particularly cryptogrammatic moment in the text is, at first glance, quite puzzling: ‘Even there on a mischievous lyre / I will exalt anew / To dead Daphne and Temira / Modest love.’ The names Daphne and Temira are conventional classical names commonly found in Russian poetry from the late eighteenth century on. But what does the use of these conventional names mean here? Does it mean that the poet would once again celebrate Daphne and Temira or dedicate his poems to them as he had done in the past (thus, ‘anew’)? It does not, for the simple reason that Baratynskii had never used these names before. This is his only use of the name Temira; and this is his first usage of the name Daphne.50 Thus, this passage must be a paraphrase of ‘another’s speech’ (Bakhtin’s chuzhoe slovo) and a cue to readers that they should seek an intertextual referent here. Several clues point to Del’vig as the source of the paraphrase, which allows us to reconstruct the text as a veiled, but public, display of an intensely intimate dialogue between the two friends. Baratynskii names his intertextual sources in the poem by positioning the name of the author adjacent to a quotation or paraphrase from his works. For example, the French poet Évariste Parny’s name appears in ‘Eliziiskie polia’ in close proximity to the following lines: Когда из таинственной сени, От темных Орковых полей, Здесь навещать своих друзей Порою могут наши тени, Я навещу, о други, вас ... [When our ghosts will sometimes be able to emerge from this mysterious shelter, from the fields of Orcus to visit our friends here ‘on Earth,’ O friends, I will visit you.]

This is a quotation from Parny’s ‘Le Revenant’: Si du sein de la nuit profonde On peut revenir en ce monde, Je reviendrai, n’en doutez pas.51

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Baratynskii uses the same device to identify Del’vig as the source of the lines ‘Even there on a mischievous lyre,’ which are followed by the line ‘O, Del’vig! I need not your tears.’ Further, the constellation of conventional names found in ‘Eliziiskie polia’ also points to Del’vig as the source. ‘Temira’ and ‘Daphne’ are two of Del’vig’s favourite conventional names, and, unlike other poets of the period – and with what seems to be disregard for the very different provenances of these names – he uses them together. For example, in his ‘Uteshenie bednogo poeta’ (Consolation for the poor poet, 1819),52 we find the lines ‘Кто был Лидий, где Темира / С Дафною цвела?’53 [Who was Lydius, where Temira / Blossomed with Daphne?]. Baratynskii was greatly fond of ‘Uteshenie bednogo poeta’ and inscribed it in his family album.54 But, given the thematic context of the paraphrase, the more likely referent here is Del’vig’s ‘Fani.’ In ‘Fani,’ Del’vig writes, ‘Temira, Daphne and Lileta / Have long ago been forgotten by me.’ In reply, Baratynskii says in ‘Eliziiskie polia’ that, while Del’vig may have forgotten them already, he will celebrate them even after his death. Unlike his quotation from Parny, which could be recognized by any learned reader of the period, this reference to ‘Fani’ was – again – recognizable to a very small, very tight group of close friends. As it happens, Baratynskii was not the first in the Lyceum Circle to allude to ‘Fani’ in the context of a deliberation on death. In 1819, Pushkin concluded an epistle to a fellow member of the Green Lamp with the promise: Скажу тебе у двери гроба: «Ты помнишь Фанни, милый мой?» И тихо улыбнемся оба.55 [I will say to you at the door to the grave: / ‘Do you remember Fanni, my dear friend?’ / And we will both quietly smile.]

As such, Baratynskii’s evocation of Del’vig’s ‘Fani’ points not only to the poem itself, but also to its intertextual resonance among all of the Lyceum Circle poets and their close associates. Moreover, it is quite possible that it was precisely the 1827 republication of ‘Eliziiskie polia’ that reminded Pushkin of ‘Fani’ when he was composing the fourth chapter of Evgenii Onegin. It might well have been Baratynskii’s poem that prompted him to quote the lines from ‘Fani’ discussed above (‘I have long ago forgotten, like a dream /Temira, Daphne, and Lileta’) and 

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to allude to ‘Fani’ a few more times in the novel. In a word: the dialogue continued. We should pause for a moment on some finer points of textology. Written circa 1821, ‘Eliziiskie polia’ was first published in 1825; Baratynskii later included it in his 1827 collection and also in his 1835 collection (we quote the 1835 version throughout). In the 1827 publication of ‘Eliziiskie polia’ Baratynskii’s paraphrase of ‘Fani’ – an allusion, in Vasilii Zhukovskii’s terms, ‘für wenige’ (‘for the few’) – appears alongside other ‘Del’vigian’ cues that were not nearly so obscure. For example, he takes the extremely rare adjective ‘zakotsitnyi’ (‘lying beyond the Cocytus,’ as in, ‘Believe me: there, beyond the Cocytus / I will be accorded a warm welcome’) from Del’vig, who coined the word in the opening line of an epistle to the respected older poet Nikolai Gnedich that was published in 1823.56 In the 1825 version of ‘Eliziiskie polia,’ however, Baratynskii does not name Del’vig, but gives only his initial – just as Pushkin did in Evgenii Onegin. Likewise, the lines with the adjective ‘zakotsitnyi,’ which immediately prompted an association with Del’vig’s poetry, appeared only in the 1827 text of the poem. The 1825 text refers to Del’vig much more obliquely: the intertextual signals pointing to Del’vig in this redaction are quotations from Horace. These allude to the poets’ published epistles to one another, in which Baratynskii calls Del’vig Horace, and Del’vig took up the comparison with gusto in his response. This verse ‘correspondence’ was very much on the minds of the day’s littérateurs. For example, Boris Fedorov – a writer and journalist who was a slightly older contemporary of Pushkin’s – ridiculed it in his satirical poem ‘Soiuz poetov’ (The Union of poets, 1822), which was directed against the Lyceum Circle.57 In a sense, then, ‘Eliziiskie polia’ (in all three published versions) really is addressed to all readers, and it ‘opened up’ more with each successive redaction. Nonetheless, in all three versions, the audience is still split between the very few who understood everything, and the rest, who, at best, only understood part. Some layers of its meaning were still only ‘for the few,’ and those few are privileged by Baratynskii in that only they were fully able to appreciate the degree to which the poem is built on inside jokes. Again, the technique of Baratynskii’s shalost’ differs from Pushkin’s. Whereas Pushkin (rather rudely) makes certain that his readers know they are missing something, Baratynskii keeps his allusions sufficiently oblique that the unsuspecting reader might well never realize that he or she has been, in a sense, snubbed by the poet.

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It bears noting that the principle group excluded by these poetic practices consisted of female readers and writers. Pushkin, Baratynskii, and the other poets of their milieu did write poetry specifically intended for female readers, but in other genres (the madrigal and other types of album lyric). Genres such as the epistolary poetic impromptu (in Pushkin’s letters to Viazemskii and Vigel’, for example) were intended solely for male readers and, like the letters in which they are found, are marked as such by their abundance of obscene jokes and offensive words. The surface meaning of texts like Evgenii Onegin and ‘Eliziiskie polia’ was, of course, available to women readers inasmuch as they made up part of groups 3 and 4 described above. In her article ‘The Hierarchy of Narratees in Evgenii Onegin,’ Sona Hoisington sets up a productive framework for understanding this rather peculiar mode of author-reader interaction.58 Reinterpreting Hoisington’s conclusions in some respects, one may maintain that, in Pushkin’s novel in verse, the ‘implied reader,’ who is repeatedly addressed by the narrator, finds him- or herself, as it were, between two poles. The first pole is what Hoisington refers to as the ‘mock reader,’ whom Pushkin also addresses from time to time. For example: ‘Hm! Hm! Noble reader, / I trust all your kin is well?’59 The other pole is the poet’s real friends. For example, he refers to Baratynskii (naming him openly in a special note): Певец Пиров и грусти томной, Когда б еще ты был со мной, Я стал бы просьбою нескромной Тебя тревожить, милый мой.60 [Bard of Feasts, and languid melancholy, were you still with me, I would trouble you with an indiscreet request, my dear friend.]

Almost no reader wants to be identified with the ‘mock reader;’ and at the same time he or she is unable (and sometimes unwilling) to assume the position of Pushkin’s real friends/readers. Nevertheless, movement between these two poles plays an important role in the structure of Pushkin’s narrative: readers construct their identities within the text differently, taking into account different addresses to the reader, including those which are not really addressed to them. Baratynskii, on the other hand, finds it important to indicate the presence of his friends in the situation of poetic communication. Moreover, in his famous ‘Moi

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dar ubog ...’ (‘My gift is poor ...’) he compares his ideal reader to a friend: ’И как нашел я друга в поколенье, / Читателя найду в потомстве я.’61 [Just as I found a friend in my generation, / I will find a reader in the posterity.] It is not always so easy to find such a friend, though. For example, two works by Pushkin written in 1830, his poem ‘Domik v Kolomne’ (The little house in Kolomna) and even his collection of stories entitled Povesti Belkina (Tales of Belkin), were exceedingly poorly received because most readers could not understand them. Meanwhile, Pushkin’s friends seem to have understood these texts perfectly. Pushkin informed his associate and literary agent Petr Pletnev that Baratynskii ‘laughed himself into fits’ when he read Povesti Belkina.62 We are still trying to guess why Baratynskii laughed. Returning to Del’vig and the problem of poetic citation, the case of ‘Eliziiskie polia’ may be contrasted with another type of Del’vigian quotation in Baratynskii. In many respects, Del’vig was Baratynskii’s tutor in poetry, and sometimes Baratynskii followed Del’vig’s example when he appropriated traditional imagery. This is a kind of intertextual triangle involving three parties. For example, when Baratynskii employs poetic formulas associated with Gavriil Derzhavin, he sometimes takes these formulas not directly from Derzhavin, but from Del’vig’s appropriation of them. Thus, in essence, he refers to Del’vig’s reference to Derzhavin. Let us cite two examples of this. One such case was analysed by Vadim Vatsuro, who demonstrated that the last hemistich of Baratynskii’s ‘Podrazhanie Shen’e’ (Imitation of Chénier) – ‘venchánnyi osokói’ (literally, ‘crowned by sedge’) – comes from Derzhavin’s ode ‘Kliuch’ (The spring), where we find ‘uvénchan osokóiu.’ However, Baratynskii’s use of this formula was mediated by Del’vig, who, in his poem ‘Na smert’ Derzhavina’ (On Derzhavin’s death), wrote: ‘venchán osokóiu.’63 We have described another such example from Baratynskii’s elegy ‘Vodopad’ (The waterfall).64 This poem, inspired by Derzhavin’s ode of the same title, begins: ‘Шуми, шуми с крутой вершины, / Не умолкай, поток седой!’65 [Roar, roar from the steep peak, / Do not subside, the hoary stream!] All the elements of this description originate in Derzhavin’s ode, where they are scattered over its 444 lines. The poet who gathered them together, before Baratynskii, was Del’vig. In his Lyceum poem ‘K Fantazii’ (To fantasy) Del’vig’s fantasy leads him to the mountains: ‘Где в бездну с мрачного навеса / Cедой поток шумит.’66 [Where the hoary stream roars into the abyss from a gloomy ledge.] It was Del’vig who modified Derzhavin’s imagery and invented the combination ‘the

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hoary stream’ (sedoi potok) – and, as Aleksandr Pen’kovskii has noted, it was Del’vig who first attempted this unusual use of the acoustic verb shumet’ in locative and directional meaning: ‘to roar from something’ (shumet’ s chego-libo).67 Thus, Baratynskii’s appropriation of these formulas is part of an intimate poetic dialogue with Del’vig.68 Other parallels may be found in Pushkin, who often used formulas from Derzhavin that had already been slightly modified by Zhukovskii and Batiushkov.69 A key distinction must be drawn between this sort of obscure reference and the instances of deliberate discursive dysfunction described above: here, the fact of quotation belongs to the sphere of textual genesis, while in those discussed earlier, quotations fulfil a poetic function. This distinction gets to the core issue of theoretical poetics at play here. To use Mikhail Gasparov’s distinction between ‘literary intertext’ and ‘language intertext,’70 we can say that, in Baratynskii’s ‘Vodopad,’ Del’vigian quotations form part of the poetic language (‘language intertext’), while in ‘Eliziiskie polia’ they form part of the poetic text (‘literary intertext’).71 Circle poetics thus present literary historians with an interpretive pitfall. Misinterpreting the facts of the poetic text as the facts of the poetic language can and does result in serious misreadings of key texts in the canon. In closing, we should lay out our hypothetical explanation for the impulse displayed by Baratynskii and Pushkin to fragment the readership. The significance of literary domesticity can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century, when the poetry of Nikolai Karamzin, Ivan Dmitriev, and other ‘senior Karamzinians’ positioned itself as a domestic, unofficial counterpoint to the official poetry of Mikhail Lomonosov, Vasilii Petrov, and even Derzhavin. Hence its connection to literary domesticity and with the oral forms of circle communication.72 As the next generation of Karamzinians (Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, Viazemskii, Pushkin, et al.) came on the scene, they naturally ‘in- herited’ this tradition, along with Karamzinian poetics, the genre system, etc. And by the 1820s and 1830s, it becomes something of a touchstone: this is ‘our literature for us.’ But in this new period, the period of literary journals and literary trade, a new generation comes to the fore with entirely new and different values,73 and the poets and readers of Pushkin’s immediate milieu begin to feel themselves ‘the stars of a scattered pleiade’ (as Baratynskii describes Prince Viazemskii in the dedication of his book Sumerki [Twilight’]). As a result, domestic semantics become increasingly important for these poets, and part of their discourse of embattlement against the

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new values of the increasingly commercial literary scene.74 Fragmenting the audience is one way of maintaining literary domesticity, even in the pages of such a highly public text as Evgenii Onegin. The effect on the formation of the readerships in the 1820s and 1830s is fairly clear: this device creates an elite (or, rather, several different elites) within the overall readership. As with any elite, this one is, again, defined by both exclusionary and inclusionary dynamics. That is, in order to remain an elite, it must be exclusive; at the same time, though, it must also attract those readers who are not members of the elite, but who would desperately like to be one of those ‘friends’ who have full access to the aesthetic principles and significations on which such elite texts are based. As Bourdieu describes in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, literature here reflects the same socio-economic forces that fuel the development of such lynchpins of consumer culture as fashion: the masses are always chasing after the elite, which must invent and embrace new forms in order to remain an elite.75 Thus, the practice of fragmenting one’s audience contributed – perhaps paradoxically – in no small way not only to the increasing plurality of reading communities in the 1830s, but also to the first steps in the commodification of literature. NOTES This essay builds in part on findings described in Igor’ Pil’shchikov, ‘The Structure of Audience and Circle Poetics in Pushkin and Baratynsky,’ Amsterdam International Journal for Cultural Narratology 3 (Autumn 2006): available at (http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a06_pilshchikov.html).   1 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). See also his The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: University of Maryland Press, 1978).   2 On the Lyceum Circle, see Boris V. Tomashevskii, Pushkin, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1956), 22–7.   3 Sam N. Driver, Puškin: Literature and Social Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 11.   4 As many scholars have noted, Pushkin and Baratynskii assiduously asserted themselves as writers for and of this elite set of readerships comprising no more than three hundred people. They were distinctly uninterested in

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  5

  6

  7

  8   9

the reader who was neither rich enough to afford to buy their exorbitantly priced books, nor well-connected enough to obtain a manuscript copy from a member of this small elite. Unfortunately, we lack a convincing ‘census’ of the total Russian poetry readership of the 1810s and 1820s, partly due to the fact that manuscript copies remained by far the most common and important means of disseminating poetry well into the 1820s. [Editor’s note: This readership of three hundred is of course the ‘relatively minuscule’ reading public mentioned by William Mills Todd in Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 2. But other contemporary readerships were much larger, and even Pushkin’s works circulated well beyond the social space for which he wrote: consider the memoir of Iuliia Polilova – the youngest daughter of St Petersburg merchant E.T. Polilov – who recorded in her diary on 25 June 1831 that she had read chapter 7 of Evgenii Onegin, a story that captivated her imagination and reduced her to tears; see G.T. Polilov-Severtsev, ‘Divan: dnevnik kupecheskoi devushki,’ in his Nashi dedi-kuptsy: Bytovye kartiny nachala XIX stoletiia (St Petersburg: Devrien, 1907), 106–7.] Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Literaturnaia domashnost’,’ in his Moi vremennik (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1929), 82–6. The Petersburg Formalists were members of a group of literary critics, OPOIaZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Iazyka), founded during the First World War that rejected the politicization of literary criticism. Other members included Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Tynianov. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine, 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), and Ronald Hingley, Russian Writers and Soviet Society, 1917–1978 (New York: Random House, 1979), 90–1. Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka, s.v. ‘domashnost’.’ Unless otherwise stated, all translations are our own. In translating verse, we preserve line breaks when possible. See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Lacking a single English equivalent, we are compelled to use the Russian throughout. Igor’ A. Pil’shchikov, ‘On Baratynsky’s “French trifle”: The Elysian Fields and Its Context,’ Essays in Poetics 19, no. 2 (1994): 62–93; revised Russian version: ‘O “frantsuzskoi shalosti” Baratynskogo (“Eliziiskie polia”: literaturnyi i biograficheskii kontekst),’ in Russkaia antropologicheskaia shkola. Trudy. 2, ed. I.A. Protopopova (Moscow: RGGU, 2004), 61–88, and in Tartuskie tetradi, ed. R.G. Leibov (Moscow: OGI, 2005), 55–81; Joseph

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10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

Peschio, ‘Prankishness in Golden Age Russian Literature and Culture’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2004); Pil’shchikov, ‘Nomina si nescis ... (Struktura auditorii i “domashniaia semantika” u Pushkina i Baratynskogo),’ in ‘Na mezhe mezh Golosom i Ekhom’: Sbornik statei v chest’ Tat’iany Vladimirovny Tsiv’ian, ed. L.O. Zaionts (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2007), 70–81. The members of Arzamas defined their literary production as shalosti. One of the documents from Prince Petr Viazemskii’s personal archive (published by Viazemskii himself in the 1860s) bears the title ‘Literaturnye arzamasskie shalosti’ (‘Arzamas literary trifles’). An epigraph from Count Dmitrii Bludov’s speech at the celebration of Viazemskii’s anniversary is prefixed to this publication: ‘Shall we recollect, not without a smile, our, as it were, literary shalosti, in particular because they often had much vivacity and wit.’ See ‘Vyderzhki iz starykh bumag Ostaf’evskogo Arkhiva,’ Russkii arkhiv 3 (1866): 473. Iurii Tynianov, ‘Vopros o literaturnoi evoliutsii,’ Na literaturnom postu 10 (1927): 47; Idem, ‘O literaturnoi evoliutsii,’ in his Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929), 43. Cf. Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 109. On the textology of ‘Fani’ and its social and historical context, see Peschio, ‘Prankishness in Golden Age Russian Literature,’ 159–77. For more on censorship in this period, see the preceding essay by George Gutsche and the final essay in this volume by Marianna Tax Choldin, author of the seminal book A Fence Around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas Under the Tsars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985). Anton Del’vig, Neizdannye stikhotvoreniia, ed. M.L. Gofman (St Petersburg: Pushkinskii Dom pri Akademii nauk, 1922), 50. Ibid., 124. Aleksandr Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1937–59), 6: 647. Hereafter: PSS, volume:page. Iurii M. Lotman, Roman A.S. Pushkina ‘Evgenii Onegin.’ Kommentarii: Posobie dlia uchitelia (Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1980), 9–11. Cf. Boris Modzalevskii, ‘K istorii “Zelenoi Lampy”,’ in Dekabristy i ikh vremia: Trudy Moskovskoi i Leningradskoi sektsii po izucheniiu dekabristov i ikh vremeni (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politkatorzhan, [1927 or 1928]), 1:15–6, 32–4; Peschio, ‘Prankishness in Golden Age Russian Literature,’ 159–76, cf. 52–7. Iurii M. Lotman, ‘Tekst i struktura auditorii,’ Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 422 (1977): 59. Ibid., 60.

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104  Joseph Peschio and Igor’ Pil’shchikov 22 John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), chapter 4. See also J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 23 H. Clark and D. Wilkes-Gibbs, ‘Referring as a Collaborative Process, ‘ Cognition 22 (1986): 1–39. 24 Pushkin, PSS, 6:125. 25 Ibid., 651. 26 Yuri M. Lotman, ‘The Text as Process of Movement: Author to Audience, Author to Text,’ in his Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. A. Shukman. (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1990), 66. 27 Maksim I. Shapir, ‘”Evgenii Onegin”: Problema autentichnogo teksta,’ Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 61, no. 3 (2002): 6–9. 28 Cf. Viacheslav A. Koshelev, ‘”Ee sestra zvalas” Tat’iana ...,’ in his ‘Onegina’ vozdushnaia gromada ... (St Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentstvo ‘Akademicheskii proekt’, 1999), 83. 29 Pushkin, PSS, 6:158. 30 Ibid., 193. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 652. 33 See, e.g., ibid., 160. 34 See, e.g., ibid., 171. 35 See ibid., 623, 652. 36 Iurii Tynianov, ‘Pushkin i Kiukhel’beker,’ Literaturnoe nasledstvo 16/18. (Moscow: Zhurnal’no-gazetnoe ob’edinenie, 1934), 372; A.S. Pushkin, Evgenij Onegin: A Novel in Verse, Russian text edited with introduction and commentary by Dmitry 2iževsky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 287. 37 Cf. Shapir, ‘“Evgenii Onegin”,’ 6, 8. 38 Aleksandr S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), 3:135; cf. idem, PSS, 3.2:800. 39 PSS, 9:131. 40 Cf. Boris V. Tomashevskii, ‘Primechaniia,’ in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, 3: 450. 41 Anton Del’vig, Sochineniia, ed. V.E.Vatsuro (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 49. 42 Del’vig, Neizdannye stikhotvoreniia, 45–7. 43 Henceforth quoted from Evgenii Baratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii v 2 tomakh (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1936), 1:31–2. 44 ‘Shalovlivoi’ in the original has the same root as shalost’.

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Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics  105 45 See Pil’shchikov, ‘On Baratynsky’s “French trifle.”’ 46 Evgenii Baratynskii, Stikhotvoreniia. Poemy. Proza. Pis’ma, ed. O. Muratova and K. Pigarev (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1951), 481. On almanacs as socio-cultural form, see N.P. Kashin, ‘Al’manakhi dvadtsatykh-sorokovykh godov,’ in Russkaia Kniga, ed. V. Ia. Adariukov and A.A. Sidorov, vol. 2, Deviatnadtsatyi vek (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925), 100–38; Larisa I. Petina, ‘Russkii al’manakh nachala XIX v. kak tip teksta,’ in Sbornik studencheskikh nauchnykh rabot: Kratkie soobshcheniia. Literaturovedenie. Lingvistika, ed. V.I. Bezzubov, E.I. Gur’eva, and Kh.Ia. Pak (Tartu: Tartuskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1973), 20–3; Miranda Beaven [Remnek], ‘Russian Literary Almanacs in the 1820s and Their Legacy,’ Publishing History 17 (1985): 65–86; Abram I. Reitblat, ‘Literaturnyi al’manakh 1820–1830–kh godov kak sotsiokul’turnaia forma,’ in Novye bezdelki: Sbornik statei k 60–letiiu V.E. Vatsuro (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1995/1996), 167–81. 47 Baratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii v 2 tomakh, 1:93. 48 Ibid., 2:166. Baratynskii’s ‘Piry’ is part of another ‘dialogue’ with Del’vig, whose poem ‘Moia khizhina’ (My hut, 1818) presents a similar epicurean vision of a domestic setting in much the same terms. 49 See Iurii Tynianov, ‘Pushkin,’ in his Arkhaisty i novatory, 239, 241. 50 It appeared later in his poems ‘Opravdanie’ (An excuse), published in 1825, and the revised 1827 version of ‘Chtob ocharovyvat’ serdtsa ...’ (To captivate people’s hearts ...). 51 Le chevalier de Parny, Poésies érotiques (L’Isle de Bourbon: n.p., 1788), 22. This quotation would have been all the more obvious to Baratynskii’s readers, as the opening line of ‘The Elysian Fields’ – ‘My fickle health is fleeing’ – is a translation of the opening line of ‘Le Revenant’: ‘Ma santé fuit: cette infidèle …’ Cf. Frantsuzskaia elegiia XVIII–XIX vekov v perevodakh poetov pushkinskoi pory, ed. V.E. Vatsuro and V.A. Mil’china (Moscow: Raduga, 1989), 612. 52 Also known as ‘Larets’ (The casket). 53 Anton Del’vig, ‘Uteshenie bednogo poeta,’ Sorevnovatel’ prosveshcheniia i blagotvoreniia 8, book 11 (1819), 98. The poem is signed ‘–D–.’ 54 E.A. Boratynskii: Materialy k ego biografii. Iz Tatevskogo arkhiva Rachinskikh, ed. Iu. N. Verkhovskii (Petrograd: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1916), 11–12. 55 Pushkin, PSS, 2.1:87–8. 56 Mikhail P. Alekseev, ‘Nezamechennyi fol’klornyi motiv v chernovom nabroske Pushkina,’ Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy, vol. 9 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), 51.

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106  Joseph Peschio and Igor’ Pil’shchikov 57 V.E. Vatsuro, ‘Primechaniia,’ in Poety 1820–1830–kh godov, ed. L.Ia. Ginzburg and V.E. Vatsuro (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1972), 717–18. 58 Sona S. Hoisington, ‘The Hierarchy of Narratees in Evgenii Onegin,’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 10, no. 2 (1976): 242–9. 59 Pushkin, PSS, 6: 81. 60 Ibid., 64. 61 Baratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii v 2 tomakh, 1:163. 62 Pushkin, PSS, 14: 133. 63 V.E. Vatsuro, ‘Iz zapisok filologa: 1. Perevod do originala,’ Russkaia rech’ 4 (1988): 27–9. Another mediator was Aleksandr Voeikov with his translation of Delille’s Les Jardins. See Alina Bodrova, ‘K literaturnoi istorii odnogo obraza: ‘venchannyi osokoi’: E.A. Baratynskii, ‘“Naiada” (“Est’ grot: Naiada tam v poldnevnue chasy ...”).’ Russkaia filologiia: Sbornik nauchnykh rabot molodykh filologov, vol. 17 (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2006), 25–9. 64 Igor’ A. Pil’shchikov, ‘Notes on the Semantics of Otzyv in Baratynsky,’ Irish Slavonic Studies 15 (1994/1996): 79; idem, ‘Otzyv u Baratynskogo: Slovo i znachenie,’ in Iazyk. Kul’tura. Gumanitarnoe znanie: Nauchnoe nasledie G.O. Vinokura i sovremennost’, ed. S.I. Gindin and N.N. Rozanova (Moscow: Nauchnyi mir, 1999), 285–6. 65 Baratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii v 2 tomakh, 1:7. 66 Del’vig, Sochineniia, 112. 67 A.B. Pen’kovskii, ‘Iz nabliudenii nad poeticheskim iazykom pushkinskoi epokhi: 1. ’Shumi, shumi s krutoi vershiny, / Ne umolkai potok sedo!..’ (E.A. Baratynskii. Vodopad, 1820),’ in Khudozhestvennyi tekst kak dinamicheskaia sistema: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 80–letiiu V.P. Grigor’eva, ed. N.A. Fateeva (Moscow: Upravlenie tekhnologiiami; Azbukovnik, 2007), 70. 68 The appropriation of formulas noted here and above from ‘within’ a given community in some sense foreshadows the larger appropriations ‘between’ communities with differing social status that are described by Kevin Kain and Jeffrey Brooks in later essays in this volume. 69 Viktor V. Vinogradov, Stil’ Pushkina (Moscow: OGIZ – Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1941), 123–4. 70 Mikhail L. Gasparov, ‘Literaturnyi intertekst i iazykovoi intertekst,’ Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 61, no. 4 (2002): 3–9. 71 Cf. Zara G. Mints, ‘Funktsiia reministsentsii v poetike A. Bloka,’ Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 308 (1973): 387. 72 Iurii M. Lotman, ‘K funktsii ustnoi rechi v kul’turnom bytu pushkinskoi

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Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics  107 epokhi,’ Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 481 (1979): 107–20. 73 On new reading communities, especially in the late 1820s and 1830s, see M.A. Antifeeva, ‘Zhurnal A. Smirdina “Biblioteka dlia chteniia”,’ in Knizhnoe delo Peterburga-Petrograda-Leningrada: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Leningrad: Leningradskii gos. Institut kul’tury, 1981), 37–47; V.G. Berezina, ‘Zhurnal N. A. Polevogo “Moskovskii telegraf” (1825–1834) i chitatel’,’ Vestnik Leningradskogo universiteta, seriia 2: Istoriia, iazyk, literatura no. 1 (January 1981): 38–44; A.V. Blium, ‘Massovoe chtenie v russkoi provintsii kontsa XVIII-pervoi chetverti XIX vv,’ Istoriia russkogo chitatelia 1 (1973): 37–57; A. Dolinin, Istoriia odetaia v roman. Val’ter Skott i ego chitateli (Moscow: Kniga, 1988); A.I. Reitblat, ‘F.V. Bulgarin i ego chitateli,’ in Chtenie v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Moscow: Gos. b-teka im. V. I. Lenina, 1992), 55–66; Nurit Schleifman, ‘A Russian Daily Newspaper and Its New Readership: “Severnaia pchela,” 1825–1840,’ Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 28, no. 2 (1987): 127–44; and Miranda Remnek, ‘The Expan-sion of Russian Reading Audiences, 1828–1848’ (PhD diss, University of California, Berkeley, 1999). 74 On increasing commercialization, see especially the preceding essay by Gutsche; also T. Grits, V. Trenin, and M. Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia (knizhnaia lavka A F. Smirdina), ed. V.B. Shklovskii and B.M. Eikhenbaum (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), and André Meynieux, Pouchkine, homme de lettres, et la littérature professionelle en Russie (Paris: F. Paillart, 1966). 75 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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4 The Archaeology of ‘Backwardness’ in Russia: Assessing the Adequacy of Libraries for Rural Audiences in Late Imperial Russia ben eklof

Editor’s Note In stark contrast to the close literary criticism of the preceding essay – but still exemplifying our second theme, ‘Plurality of reading communities and their social status’ – this next essay moves into the realm of social and quantitative history, requiring a completely different methodology. The main source materials come from publications of the zemstvo, the system of local self-government founded under Alexander II in 1864 as part of the first round of far-reaching reforms – they also affected education, the judiciary, and the church – that followed the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. Here the data are primarily numeric, illustrating, for example, the rate of book distribution under the St Petersburg Literacy Committee from 1861 to 1895, and the proportion of schools with zemstvo-sponsored libraries. Thus, although the two essays approach the same concept (a differentiation of reading communities), the perspective is very different, moving from the overlapping audiences of Pushkinian poetics to the students and workers of the mid- to late nineteenth century, and crystallizing the strongly interdisciplinary nature of print culture studies. There is, however, a unifying factor: the need that Russian intellectuals felt to ‘imagine’ and cater to the social constraints of the audiences with which they interacted. In both cases, intellectuals recognized and sometimes exaggerated the differences among the groups, not always with results that made for inclusive sharing of cultural patrimony. Print culture researchers interested in pressing further the issues raised here will find additional resources available for manipulation and analysis. Ben Eklof uses a wonderful array: school census reports from the Ministry of Education; provincial yearbooks from the pre-revolutionary zemstvos in provinces like Iaroslavl, Moscow, Poltava, and Viatka; and related data groups.

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  109

Interpreting these statistics involves expert descriptive analysis, as here. On occasion, researchers may also test tools like SAS and also SPSS (which works well with the GIS software mentioned earlier); these are presented, for example, in workshops provided by the Michigan-based ICPSR (InterUniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, which already holds coded data sets relating to Russia). Both approaches may help reinvigorate the quantitative approaches of the 1970s, especially now that they can be enhanced by powerful GIS techniques with the potential for increasing mastery of the vast expanses of the Russian Empire – whether the data concern literacy, size and location of school libraries, distribution totals and routes of the upper-class literacy societies, or other variables characterizing the spread of print culture in prerevolutionary Russia. In the second half of the nineteenth century in Russia, books were justly regarded as a bridge between the school and the outside world. In the first decade following the Great Reforms in the 1860s, which put education reform on the national agenda, S.I. Miropol’skii and others argued that building village schools would be fruitless unless libraries were also founded. Later, in a much-publicized letter of 22 July 1894 addressed to all district assemblies of the local self-governing zemstvo, the St Petersburg Literary Committee argued that ‘the establishment of village libraries is as “capital” an issue today as was the establishment of public schools to the zemstvos of the 1860s.’1 The 1911 Zemstvo Congress appointed a special (Third) section to study measures to promote extramural education, and its report to the assembly, adopted by an overwhelming majority, declared that schools were incapable of carrying out their mission without what we today would call a strong ‘outreach’ program: ‘knowledge acquired in school, but not supplemented and reinforced later in life, is soon forgotten, so outlays on schooling are unproductive unless accompanied by measures beyond the school.’2 The congress supported proposals first given publicity by the All-Russian Library Congress (1–7 June 1911)3 for the establishment of a nation-wide library network, similar to the school network now in the process of formation, with a central library in each district town, smaller (raion) libraries at regular intervals in the countryside, and even smaller units in each school ‘radial.’4 By this time, the network principle was at the core of the national drive to achieve full accessibility of schools and books to the population by the early 1920s. The literacy campaign rivalled the program of military reform adopted by the Duma and the

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Stolypin land reforms as benchmarks for assuring Russia’s modernization and continued status as a Great Power. The library campaign was an essential part of the ‘culturalist’ mission to transform Russian society at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, it had strong ‘instrumentalist’ objectives, as well as a paternalistic tone: specially trained librarians were to ‘systematically direct the moral development’ of the people through ‘carefully selected texts.’ Despite the real and protracted conflict between state and society over the path Russia was to take, and ‘official regulations’ as well as ‘administrative caprice’ that posed real obstacles to the production and dissemination of the printed word, ‘the “intelligentsia culturalism” that pervades the writings of the leaders of the public library movement is not unrelated to the Ministry of Education’s policy of guardianship of close surveillance of the lower classes.’5 As a whole, educators differed from much of the rest of the professional intelligentsia in that their commitment to social transformation remained intact despite the shock and fear generated by the extraordinary violence of the 1905 Revolution, even as their perceptions of the narod (common people) became more nuanced. When one reads the biographies of these activist educators, one is struck by their dedication, intelligence, and self-sacrificing commitment. But below I argue that the very professionalism of these activist educators tainted their ability to provide a balanced assessment of conditions prevailing in European Russia; that real progress achieved was often understated and ‘backwardness’ inordinately highlighted in contrast to an ‘imaginary’ West;6 that a focus upon the ‘specialized expertise’ of professional librarians in selecting appropriate readings led to radically distorted counts of books available in the countryside; and that the fabled narrative of conflict and distance between people, authority, and society understates the diversity of sources contributing to the spread of books and libraries. This essay constitutes an interrogation of the notion of backwardness through quantitative measures, namely, descriptive statistics.7 How widespread were school libraries, how adequate were their holdings to meet the needs of the countryside, and what role did they play in village culture? School libraries were in fact only one source of books in the villages. Besides school libraries there were the so-called public (narodnye) libraries, housed sometimes in separate facilities, and sometimes, as school-public libraries, in the schools, but on shelves separate from the school-pupil (uchenicheskie) and school-

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  111

teacher (uchitel’skie) libraries – each with its own catalogue of permissible holdings and limitations on who could read the books. Whatever meaning these distinctions had at the local level, they did affect the way information was collected on these libraries; zemstvo statisticians often distinguished between school libraries, public libraries at schools, public reading halls in the villages (narodnye chital’ni), and libraries in the towns (publichnye biblioteki). The first two were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, the second two, of the Ministry of the Interior, and each of the four had separate regulations governing its collection. However, formal libraries, whatever the type, were only one source of books; peasants had their own collections, obtained through book hawkers, at bazaars, at railroad stations, in the cities, as well as from the church and the zemstvo.8 Any attempt to measure the adequacy of school libraries should thus take into account the overall availability of books in the countryside, as well as estimate how many and what kinds the peasants were reading. Here the notion of adequacy is more limited: I have used contemporary expert estimates of how much it would cost to stock, replenish, and add to basic school libraries as a yardstick by which to measure the state of the library network before 1914. Just as the size, shape, or cost of a school building will not tell us much about the quality of instruction, so the dimensions of school libraries will not tell us what was being read or what kind of impact libraries had. However, quantitative measurements are a necessary first step in the social history of education, and applying such yardsticks can yield surprising conclusions, quite at odds with the temper of the day. Specifically, we will find that preconceptions of backwardness shaped the interpretation of these figures and resulted in distorted notions of adequacy. Libraries Come to the Russian Countryside: The Early Days In 1864 there were only 280 libraries of all types in Russia, of which ninety-two were public, and as few as fifteen located in rural settlements, including monasteries. Public discussion of peasant education, leading up to and subsequent to the Elementary School Statute of 1864, also generated concern for the establishment of rural libraries. As with schooling, the most frequently mentioned potential sponsors of such libraries were the church, the village commune, and the zemstvo. The St Petersburg Literacy Committee also showed a brief flurry of interest in libraries, issuing in 1862 a Handbook for Rural Libraries, in which

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the author solemnly advised libraries to ‘guard against mice, rats, dust and worms,’ but did not address the basic problems of how and where to purchase books or find sponsors. The 1862 publication, which suggested that rural libraries be established at schools, made no distinction between school and public libraries in general, a habit which prevailed for the next thirty years, and even after the 1890 Library Law established a sharp distinction in jurisdiction and nature of holdings allowed in the two types of libraries, very few people paid heed.9 There is scattered evidence of the establishment of church-sponsored libraries as well as village and volost (Russian volost’, canton) libraries organized by peasants, but before 1890 it was the schools that usually became the repository for the meagre collections assembled at local initiative. For the most part, zemstvo library efforts were initially limited to subsidies to subscription libraries in urban centres, intended ‘largely for the needs of zemstvo staff and the educated urban elite,’ and to the establishment of zemstvo-run staff libraries located at the offices of the district executive board. By 1903, 65 per cent of district zemstvos had such libraries, which were targeted at teachers among others.10 However, in the 1870s a handful of district zemstvos also began to allocate funds for school libraries; in the 1880s the number of districts involved increased, and the Moscow, Ekaterinoslav, Tver, and especially Kazan provincial zemstvos began to offer seed money or matching grants for libraries. Kazan’s contribution of 3,000 rubles for 150 libraries lasted only two years, but other provinces began annual allocations. All in all, the sums allocated were modest, and limited to a few areas of the country; though in a few provinces such as Viatka and Moscow school libraries soon became a permanent feature of the village, it is impossible to determine just how widespread zemstvo-sponsored libraries were, or how extensive their holdings.11 In Moscow province in 1882, out of 429 zemstvo schools only 129 had ‘libraries’ (thirty books or more, in addition to textbooks). Of these, only 32 held more than 100 books. If we include church schools the figures were no more heartening: of 544 schools 66 per cent had no books for reading, and only 60 had over 100 books. Most libraries were insured by the zemstvo at 5 to 50 rubles, indicating that they were collections of ‘cheap editions, aimed primarily to reach children.’12 Evidence collected by A.S. Prugavin suggests that the vast majority of school libraries were small in size. For example, in Buzulusk district (Samara), where the zemstvo contributed one-sixth of its budget to public education, 56 school libraries on which information was available had an average of

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  113 Table 4.1 Book Distribution: St Petersburg Literacy Committee, 1861–1895 Decade

Total*

Annual

1861–1869 1870–1879 1880–1889 1890–1895

210,042 483,225 279,660 287,119

23,338** 48,322 27,966 47,853

  * In 1861, only 800 books were delivered; in 1862, 1,800, after which the number increased to 14,000 in 1863, 24,000 in 1866, and 56,000 in 1870. A peak of 96,000 was reached in 1873, after which the numbers plummeted to 49,200 the following year, and then dropped steadily to a low of 9,000 in 1880. ** In 1868 no books were sent out.

31 books (ranging from 4 to 87). In Tver province in 1883, ‘The majority of schools are very poor in readings to take home. In some districts only a few schools have anything but textbooks, and these have just a few religious books like the Psalter and Horologium, lives of the saints, inexpensive historical, popular science and geography brochures.’ According to a school in Samara province, ‘The school library is in such unsatisfactory condition that there is no use in trying to circulate literature, the books are all worn-out and in shreds, so that it is impossible to read them.’ Other reports suggest that the pupils rapidly exhausted the holdings, and in many places the available holdings were appropriate only for children – adults had to fend for themselves.13 Another sponsor of school-public libraries was the St Petersburg Literacy Committee. While leaving the initiative for organizing and maintaining libraries to local sponsors, the committee began in 1861 to purchase and distribute books to the countryside; indeed, according to the committee’s historian, the distribution of purchased book ‘packages’ through the mail at local request was virtually the sole activity of the committee in the years from 1866 to 1880. Between 1861 and 1895 the committee distributed some 1,272,951 books to the countryside (see table 4.1).14 The noted historian and member of the Moscow Literacy Committee

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A.A. Kizevetter recalled that these organizations ‘distributed books – belles lettres and popular scientific – among the broad circles of inadequately prepared readers … the work of the Committee was of truly gigantic proportions. It reached throughout all of Russia. Village school libraries, and reading rooms in all the localities in the empire were, in one way or another, connected with this Committee which was for them a plentiful source of books and other educational ideas.’15 Though this statement contains more than a grain of truth, it whitewashes the early history of the Moscow, and perhaps St Petersburg, committees and glosses over their true mission. By no means all of the volumes went to school libraries or served a narrowly pedagogical purpose. Between 1863 and 1870, depending on the year, some 13 to 65 per cent of deliveries from St Petersburg went to the Polish and Western provinces in an explicit attempt to promote Russification of the borderlands; library holdings were restricted to Russian-language texts. The historian of the St Petersburg Committee comments that throughout the 1860s and well into the 1870s, committee activities bore the imprint of what reformers called ‘odious officialdom,’ and its annual reports bear out that those responsible for book deliveries believed that the mission was to propagate the Russian language and Orthodoxy in the borderlands. Until the mid-1870s most packages were sent to local priests and bureaucrats in the Western provinces.16 But in the 1870s the St Petersburg Committee also began to meet the requests of teachers for textbooks, teachers’ aides, and readers in schools of the heartland. In the 1880s the composition of the section of the committee entrusted with deliveries changed, to include primarily former teachers, publishers, and specialists in popular literature. More important, the requests coming to the Committee also began to change: Reading the documents of the committee for the 1860s and 1870s, and then for the 1880s, one is struck by the change that took place. In the former period the committee received letters on fading paper in atrocious handwriting, awkward language, punctuated with mistakes, from governors, bishops, marshals of the nobility, peace mediators, pomeshchiki, clergy, and other notables, as well as from Russifiers in the borderlands. It is rare to find correspondence from the volost offices, teachers, or heads of state peasant villages. In the 1870s it changes; letters from peasants, volost offices and teachers arrive with increasing frequently (the author notes that the tone changes and the handwriting and spelling improve); in the 1880s letters arrive from the zemstvo executive boards, teachers, peasants, li-

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  115 brary administrators … while letters from the upper layers of the secular and religious hierarchy completely vanish.17

According to the annual report for 1886, by now the committee gave first priority to school libraries; still, judging by data from 1890, this effort remained modest. In that year, book packages were sent to 66 church parish, 48 Ministry of Education, 71 literacy, 4 Sunday, 7 missionary, and 63 peasant-run schools – a grand total of 259 schools. Thus, before the 1890s elite efforts to build libraries and spread books were scattered, sporadic, and small scale, hardly meriting the praise bestowed by Kizevetter. As a result, the historian N.V. Chekhov concluded, while school libraries served as an embryo for all publicaccess libraries in the countryside (which appeared only later), they too ‘emerged late, and spread very slowly,’ remaining insignificant in number in the 1870s and even 1880s. My own study of Viatka province, a pioneer in distributing books to the people, supports this generalization.18 However, as was the case with school expansion and registration, many libraries sponsored and maintained by peasants most likely escaped the notice of the record keepers. Zemstvo historian and activist B.B. Veselovskii notes that the zemstvos by and large left the organization of libraries to the local community. Another keen observer of the commerce in books, Prugavin, observed that with increasing frequency the zemstvo assemblies received petitions from peasants to help build libraries at the schools.19 Turning Point: The 1890s The last decade of the nineteenth century was a period of excitement, activity, and planning in library as in school affairs in general.20 The activity began at the St Petersburg Literacy Committee with the publication and distribution in 1894 of a model statute for libraries designed to reduce the red tape surrounding opening procedures and to provide organizational guidelines. The brochure was so popular that the first print run of 3,000 was exhausted in two months and the second of 5,000 nearly as quickly, forcing a third run of 16,500 a year later. In 1893 the committee had launched a fund-raising campaign (by sending out 60,000 letters) that within two years produced over 34,000 rubles for the establishment of rural libraries. In 1894 the committee sent out letters to all district zemstvos, urging them to join in the effort, and the

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following year sent a similar letter to provincial zemstvos, calling them to overcome their fear of ‘centralization’ and to pitch in. In return, it offered a book package worth 250 rubles (ultimately 486 titles and 572 volumes) to each zemstvo that would provide facilities, a librarian, and a commitment to maintain and add to the collection in the future. More than two-thirds of all district zemstvos responded positively in the fall of 1894, but by no means all agreed to provide money. In addition, of the 34 provincial zemstvos, all but 10 resolved to take part, primarily through matching grants, but also by offers of help in organizing and, later, book selection – which soon provoked the wrath of many districts. All in all, a total of 110 libraries were established before the St Petersburg Literacy Committee was effectively disbanded in 1896.21 In an attempt to recruit local energies in the library effort, the committee in 1895 also sent out to 12,000 volost offices copies of a report calling for joint zemstvo and peasant efforts, to which it received, according to its historian, ‘several hundred’ positive replies containing specific commitments of money (averaging about 30 rubles). The largest number of affirmative responses came from the northeast and the south. In the majority of volosts the peasants also petitioned to open libraries, but offered no money, pleading poverty and overtaxation. From ‘a few’ there was either no response, a negative reply, or references to harassment by local land captains or other officials.22 The following year, after receiving a bequest of 60,000 rubles from an anonymous donor, the Moscow Literacy Committee chose a similar path by allocating 20,000 rubles to free public libraries and sending letters to some 16,000 volosts. Some 500 volosts sent petitions in favour of such libraries, over 300 of them offering to contribute money to the effort – mainly by establishing a special tax. The largest number of petitions came from the zemstvo provinces, especially those where the zemstvo effort in education had been most prominent, but there were exceptions to this pattern. As with the Petersburg initiative, many volosts also declined, citing lack of funds. In other volosts there was apparently some generational tension over the issue, with the young in favour, the elders against. In still others, the legal requirement that all such libraries hold only Russian-language books met with open hostility and derision.23 As a result of these efforts the Moscow Literacy Committee established, between 1890 and 1896, when its activities were curbed as well, a total of 572 libraries, at a cost of 10,634 rubles. In addition the Kharkov Literacy Society, which turned to library efforts later, but which main-

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  117 Table 4.2 Outlays on Extramural Education (in rubles)24

Districts

Provinces

1893   35,000    7,000 1901 386,000 361,000 1902 614,442 314,147 796,262 312,630 1903 1914 (43 zemstvos) Combined total: 2,500,000

tained its independence until the post-1905 zemstvo repression began, opened another 427 libraries between 1894 and 1907. So, these three literacy committees (there were others, as in Tambov) should be credited with the establishment of 1,109 rural libraries after 1890.25 Perhaps the best way to measure the upsurge in commitment to the spread of books is through budget allocations. The growth in zemstvo commitment after 1890 to the organization of libraries is evident (see table 4.2). There is no question that most zemstvos made an active effort after 1890 to promote libraries for the peasants, both in and out of school; but at no point were the zemstvos the exclusive source of initiative. Local studies showed that in areas such as Iaroslavl,26 it was local teachers who were most active as organizers; there is scattered evidence that the local gentry as well as priests were sometimes the sponsors and organizers. After 1901, when the Ministry of Finance published regulations allowing the Temperance Society to build libraries and give public readings on more liberal terms than allowed the zemstvo, Temperance Society libraries grew rapidly in the countryside, and numbered some 3,911 (though in some areas the Temperance Society acted as a front for zemstvo activities). Another major contribution came from the estate of the book publisher F.F. Pavlenko, whose estate in 1902 bequested a substantial sum to establish 2,000 libraries, largely in the zemstvo provinces.27 This look at the variety of private and semi-private sponsors involved in the effort might suggest that all initiative proceeded from the top down, not from the peasantry itself. In some cases this was certainly true, but even after the onset of large-scale elite activity, the peasant contribution continued. As evidence of this we have not only the volost-level petitions to the literacy committees, and scattered public

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references to peasant efforts, but also a remarkable piece of evidence from a Poltava zemstvo study published in 1903: If we look at the circumstances under which public libraries appeared in the province, it must be said that the majority were initially opened without the material, and sometimes without the moral, support of the zemstvo, exclusively through petitions from and funds provided by the district and village communities. Some (district) zemstvos … refused zemstvo subsidies to those village societies which had decided to open libraries, and even declined (when requested) to petition the governor for permission to open up such libraries. That the popular call for libraries far outstripped zemstvo efforts to respond is evident from the fact that of 215 libraries granted permission to open their doors between 1895 and 1900, only 31 were organized with joint peasant-zemstvo funds, and of the petitions sent in, 52 were drawn up independently by peasants, at either village or district assemblies … Of those schools opened with peasant funds and through peasant petitions, 19 remained without zemstvo subsidies as late as 1902.28

Further, buried in an obscure zemstvo statistical study of rural libraries at the turn of the twentieth century is more evidence of the peasant contribution. The Kazan zemstvo kept records of the year of founding of all school libraries, and these records show a different pattern than that offered by Veselovskii, who used zemstvo records to study the year in which the zemstvo began to contribute to libraries.29 By this measurement, the majority of libraries in all provinces were first opened after 1890. But in Kazan, which made no distinction among sponsors, many opened their doors between 1882 and 1887. These were, by all accounts, years of zemstvo inactivity, at least a decade before the literacy campaign was launched (see table 4.3). Thus, many of the zemstvo libraries were already in existence when first ‘opened’ (that is, subsidized) by the zemstvos, largely in the 1890s. As for the church schools, Kazan (with a large Muslim Tatar population, and considerable missionary presence) was clearly not a representative province. In most areas of the country church schools first arose after 1884, but in Kazan fully one-quarter of church schools had libraries in operation before that date. It is difficult to reconstruct precisely how many public libraries were in operation in Russia in the 1890s; most writers were concerned either

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  119 Table 4.3 Kazan: How Long Has the School Library Been in Operation?30 (1903) 

Zemstvo

Church

  1–5 years   49   18%   67 35.4%   6–10 years   33   12%   43 22.8% 11–15 years   16    6%   17   8.9% 16–20 years   55   21%   15   7.9% 21–25 years   34   13%   47 24.9% 26+   79   30%   –   – 266 100 189 99.9

with school (whether uchenicheskie [school-pupil] or narodnye [schoolpublic]) or with non-school public libraries to the exclusion of the other, while at the local level there was little understanding or concern about the distinction between the two, and many libraries were either counted twice or entirely ignored in the occasional tallies taken by outsiders. As D.D. Protopopov noted, ‘The educated public had little understanding of the fine points of the question … there was virtually universal ignorance of the regulations (promulgated by the Ministry of the Interior in 1890) … few knew that public libraries were divided into two basic categories, those located at school and those independently situated; or of the existence of two distinct catalogues of permitted books – one for school-public libraries (extremely restrictive) and the other (somewhat less confining) for non-school public libraries.’31 According to the most reliable sources, the number of public, nonschool libraries in the zemstvo provinces of the Russian Empire in 1890 did not exceed 38–50. By 1894 this had increased to 94, by 1898 to over 3,000, and by 1904 to at least 4,000.32 However, since these figures did not include church, Temperance Society, peasant, or indeed any libraries outside central Russia they certainly understate the total number, and can serve only as a measure of increased zemstvo participation. Nor, of course, do the numbers include the 3,000 ‘5 ruble’ libraries established in the villages by the Viatka zemstvo in the late 1890s.33 Another writer noted from information presented at the Kursk educational fair (1904) that ‘by now in some provinces almost all schools have libraries; yet in others there is still a long way to go.’34 Again, the problem with such estimates is that the distinction between libraries

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120  Ben Eklof Table 4.4 Moscow: School Libraries (Zemstvo)35

1882

1889

1895

Schools 129 277 522 Percentage having   libraries   30%   56%   91%

for pupils, which also allowed parents and outsiders to read books, and school-public libraries aimed at the outside public, was more fiction than reality, and was inconsistently recorded in the records. It is possible to look more closely at specific zemstvo provinces where record-keeping was meticulous. In Iaroslavl in 1896 there were public libraries in only 10 per cent of the areas serviced by schools; of the 73 in operation, 32 were reading halls (that is, located off the school territory and supervised by the Ministry of the Interior), 11 were district run, only 2 were housed in a zemstvo school, and 11 were located at church schools. Another 18 libraries were soon to be opened – of this number 6 were to be run from the volost offices. It is evident here that it was the peasantry and the church who were still the most active, though the zemstvo statisticians complained that many church libraries were dominated by anti-schismatic literature and served no useful pedagogical function. When asked why so little had been done to promote nonformal education, only a small number of teachers complained that the local authorities had interfered – and then mainly with efforts to organize public readings rather than with library expansion.36 A few provinces collected precise information on the proportion of schools with school-pupil libraries. In Moscow, where the zemstvo was one of the first to be concerned with libraries, progress was rapid from 1882 (see table 4.4). In Vladimir at the turn of the century, 327 of 482 zemstvo schools (68%) and 200 of 396 church schools (50.5%) had school-pupil libraries.37 In Viatka, 84 per cent of zemstvo and 68 per cent of church schools had school libraries;38 in Kazan (in 1905), between 22 per cent and 36 per cent of all schools in three districts had no libraries, while in the other seven districts 89 per cent or more did.39 In Poltava in 1901 there were 381 public libraries (195 located in schools), 532 school-pupil school collections – and an unrecorded number of church and district libraries. Thus there was at least one library for every school, though they were

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  121 Table 4.5* School Libraries, 189040

Kazan

Vladimir

Volumes

Zemstvo

Zemstvo

Church

Church

Under 50   6.5% 15.9% 20% 53.5% 12.2 29.1 27 23 to 100 to 150 19.2 28.3 21 13.5 to 200 14.5 14.7 14   3 to 300 22.6   8.4   –   – to 500 21.5   3.2 18   7 over 500   2.7   0.4   –   – * Note that here and in tables 6 and 7, the original presentation of the data in the sources produce slight imprecisions of no import when percentages are calculated. For this reason, summary numbers are not provided. This does not detract from the argument, which is to show that contemporary counts were often imprecise, or distorted and interpreted to give false conclusions.

not always located together. When pupil and public libraries were both housed in the same school, as noted, the books were fastidiously placed on separate shelves in the same room.41 This was one province where legal distinctions were actually observed. How large were the holdings of school libraries? In Kazan the average was 249 volumes and 219 titles for zemstvo schools, 166 volumes and 121 titles for church schools. But there was considerable diversity, as was the case in Vladimir (see table 4.5). In general, Kazan schools were better stocked with books. In both Kazan and Vladimir the zemstvo school holdings were ampler than church holdings, but only in Kazan did a substantial proportion of school libraries (47 per cent) have over 200 books at the disposal of the local community. In contrast, numerous schools in Vladimir had no library at all for out-of-school reading. In Vladimir, the average value of a book held in zemstvo libraries was only 23 kopecks, and in churchschool libraries, only 17, signifying that the school library in both types of schools consisted primarily of inexpensive brochures. In Viatka zemstvo schools the average collection numbered 259 books (ranging from 20 to 1,629); in church schools, 124 books. In Moscow, each zemstvo school library held 146 books in 1893, and 178 in 1902. In Poltava, the

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122  Ben Eklof Table 4.6 Library Book Holdings42 Viatka (670 zemstvo and 460 church-school libraries) Zemstvo Church 22% 50.6% Historical   8.8   9.8 Geography and travel   5.4   3.9 Science and agriculture 11.7   6.0 Fiction 30.6 11.9 Other 18.4 12.6 Unknown   2.9   5.2 Kazan (412 zemstvo, 237 church-school libraries) Zemstvo Church 16.5% 45.8% Historical 12.6 13.1 Popular science 11.1   6.1 Agriculture   7.9   3.8 Fiction (belles-lettres) 37.3 15.9 Children (skazki)   6.1   1.6 Other   8.5 13.7

average size of school-public libraries was 258 volumes (at a value of 31 kopecks each).43 The school-public and school-pupil libraries, when not the same collection, in fact served the same people, as suggested by the fact that in Poltava 62 per cent of all patronizers of school-public libraries were under 17 years of age, while in Kazan adults frequented these libraries in 50 per cent of schools, and in Viatka 66 per cent of school-pupil libraries ‘also’ served adults.44 But studies of 2,700 non-school public libraries in 14 provinces around 1900 showed that these were more substantial enterprises than the school libraries, averaging 400 to 500 books each and worth 200 to 250 rubles. Not only were the total collections worth more (compare 30 rubles in Vladimir schools and 80 in Poltava), but at 50 kopecks each the volumes were more substantial.45 Who selected the books? For zemstvo schools in Viatka province selections were made by the zemstvo (48% of schools), the local school inspector (22%), the teacher (18%), school board (2%), and ‘other’ (8%). Finally, we can compare the content of church and zemstvo school libraries (table 4.6) as well as non-school public libraries (4.7).

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  123 Table 4.7 Public Reading Halls (Non-school)

Chernigov

Kharkov

Poltava

Religious-moral   9.5% 16% 17% Fiction (slovesnost’) 48 42 43 History and biography 12 14 12 Geography and travel   8   8   7 Popular science   8.5   9   5 Medicine and hygiene   –   –   2 Agriculture   6   9   6 Law and civics   1   2   1 Newspapers and periodicals   1   ?   5* Variety   6   ?   2 * The data from Poltava included 34 libraries with 29,385 volumes; the data from the other provinces are included in the Poltava study with no description of sources. The proportion of periodicals and newspapers is a proportion of single issues; as a proportion of titles, newspapers and periodicals amounted to 2 per cent of the total.

The church libraries offered a much more limited sample, with less popular science, economics, and law, and far more edificational and religious as well as popular history. The non-school public libraries offered basically the same fare, concentrating slightly more on fiction and less on edificational literature. In all types of libraries, of every 10 to 11 books on the shelf, there would be one each on history, geography, and travel, popular science and travel (except in church-school libraries, where only 1 in 20 books was on geography, and 1 in 20 on popular science). The Last Decade of the Empire A decade later, though everyone agreed that there had been a substantial increase in the numbers of public libraries in the countryside, estimates of precise numbers varied widely. The most authoritative count, taken for the 1911 Zemstvo Congress, placed the number of public libraries at 12,127 for 150 districts in 33 provinces, which, at almost 81 per district, would yield 29,007 for the zemstvo provinces alone. Yet Veselovskii counted only 10,000 public libraries in the zemstvo provinces, and the Narodnaia entsiklopediia (People’s encyclopedia) placed the number in the entire Empire at 20,000. To further confuse matters, an

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official survey taken in 1914 placed the number of popular, non-school libraries at 13,876, of which 11,301 were located in the countryside.46 Part of the disparity is caused by the by now familiar confusion of school and non-school libraries; of the 12,000 libraries counted by the Zemstvo Congress, 61 per cent were ‘mixed,’ serving both school and public, so it is possible that only the 4,736 non-school libraries appeared in the other surveys, which would make a figure of 13,000–20,000 plausible for the Empire. Indeed, a detailed study of 40 of 58 districts in five provinces turned up 1,406 libraries, which, at 498 libraries for each province, would suggest that there were slightly over 20,000 libraries in European Russia alone. Each rural library counted by the census held about 500 books, which meant that in rural areas such non-school libraries could offer about three books per hundred population. This figure did not include books available from all village public libraries. The official School Census of 18 January 1911 counted the number of public libraries in schools in the entire empire.47 It did not include other (ie., non-school) village libraries, but distinguished between schoolpupil, and reading hall libraries (that is, public libraries in schools), and surveyed all provinces and all types of schools (except non-Orthodox confessional). The results indicate that there were clearly more than 13,000 school-public libraries in rural Russia. According to the Census there were 423 urban and 12,662 rural – a total of 13,085 – school public libraries in Russia, one in roughly every seven rural schools (14%). The average village collection in all school-public libraries contained 397 books and at 44 kopecks per title was worth 173 rubles. One source noted that there were 4,467,000 volumes in all rural libraries in 1914,48 but the total number of books available through these libraries alone was 3,999,734, at a net value of 1.7 million rubles. Ministry of Education schools had made a larger commitment than had the schools of the Synod; the church parish schools were less likely to have public libraries attached, and when they did they were smaller. Yet the cost of each book was virtually the same, suggesting that the content was comparable (see table 4.8). Undoubtedly, if there were 13,000 school-public libraries in Russia, there were by 1911 another several thousand public libraries housed in separate facilities – which again suggests that the total number of 20,000 indicated by several sources is an understatement. The census also tells us that school-housed public libraries, at least those under the Ministry of Education, had substantially increased their holdings since the previous decade. According to the 1911 census, 73 per cent of all

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  125 Table 4.8 School-Public Libraries,* Rural and Urban, 1911

Min. of Ed.      Church



Parish schools

Literacy schools

Schools w/ libs 10,075 % of total 18 % Total value 1,594,912 Unit book cost (kopecks) 41 Number of books 3,645,323 Average # books 422 Average value (rubles) 185

1,987 6 % 212,127 47 442,437 295 140

47 1 % 2,292 47 5,415 235 100

Empire

13,085 13 % 1,866,910 44 4,212,109 405 180

* Since information was available on only 60,775 of 72,122 schools with libraries, the total number of volumes and the net value of the collections are understated. Assuming that the libraries not reporting had, on average, the same holdings as those reporting, the number of volumes would be 15,156,120 and the net value 5.6 million rubles.

schools also had teachers’ libraries. In general, teachers’ libraries were very humble collections, numbering only 47 books on average, and hardly merit our attention. However, it should be recalled that many zemstvos had substantial lending libraries, specifically for teachers and other professionals, housed at the offices of the district executive board. The school-pupil libraries, judging by the 1911 census, added up to almost 13 million volumes, of which 10.4 million were in the countryside, and were valued at 4.7 million rubles (3.6 million in the villages). The average size of the rural school-pupil library was 194 volumes, at an estimated value of 66 rubles (at 37 kopecks per title) (see table 4.9). This lengthy excursion into numbers has undoubtedly tried the reader’s patience. Yet from it, we can deduce that three out of every four rural schools in the Empire, and four in five zemstvo schools, in 1911 had school-pupil libraries, and another one in seven had school-housed public libraries. Despite overlap and double counting of some libraries, we can conjecture that in close to nine out of ten schools there were libraries for out-of-school reading for the Empire as a whole, both in the heartland and on the periphery. In the European core, the distribution of book collections was much denser. Moreover, as noted earlier, all age groups used these libraries (a study of five provinces put the distribution of users as one-third children, one-third adolescent, and one-third adult); since we know that adults used the pupils’ libraries,

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126  Ben Eklof Table 4.9* School-Pupil Libraries for Take-Home Reading

Min. of Ed      Church

.

Parish schools

Empire

Literacy schools

Schools w/ libs 40,392 28,121 1,536 72,171 (63,958 rural) % of all schools Min. of Ed. 68% 83% 35% 71.6% (zemstvo = 86%) (74.5% rural) Total no. of books 8,277,773** 3,822,014 78,571 15.2 million Total value (rubles) 2,993,511 1,447,865 24,658   5,607,764 Average book cost   (kopecks)   36   37 31   36 Books per library 238 170 66 210 (194 rural) Value of library   86   63 21   77   (rubles)   (64 rural)   * Konstantin Abramov offhandedly notes that in addition to the 13,000 non-school libraries existing in the countryside, there were another 28,300 church-sponsored libraries. He casually adds that these libraries didn’t ‘count,’ since they were stocked with religious and edificatory literature, which was useless! If these church libraries were distinct from the school-pupil libraries, of which there were 29,000 in 1911, we must add them to the estimate of 20,000. ** For 12,662 public libraries (narodnye biblioteki) with 397 or so books per collection there would be 5,026,814 – this estimate based on the same procedure used to determine the total volumes available for school-pupil libraries.

and that children and adolescents used the adult public library, it is reasonable to argue that there were far more public book collections, however humble, in the countryside before 1914 than conventionally estimated. Our most optimistic count would place the number at over 80,000 (63.9 thousand school-pupil, and 20,000 school and non-school public) and perhaps 110,000 (28,300 church libraries). The number of books available to the populace, then, would be no fewer than 20.1 million, far more than most commonly encountered estimates. Repressive new rules announced by the Ministry of Education on 12 May 1912 threw educators into disarray and temporarily halted progress. Article No. 5 of these rules reintroduced restrictions upon school-housed library holdings and reinstated the official list of approved books. This forced many activists to conclude that, as in the 1890s, village libraries should be located outside the school, where they

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would be subject only to the 1906 law on censorship (all books except those specifically censored could be held in such libraries). This meant channelling money, which otherwise could have gone into book purchases, into new buildings and salaries for librarians (to replace unremunerated teachers in this position). While a number of provincial zemstvos, including Perm, Ufa, Penza, Nizhegorod, and Viatka, petitioned the government to roll back the 1912 regulations, others began closing school-housed libraries as a first step towards relocation. This meant transferring supervision over the collection from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of the Interior, and receiving permission once again to open a library; but in Perm and Viatka, where the zemstvos moved quickly to close down school libraries, they ran into snags, for local officials dragged their heels, or even refused to grant permission to open these new libraries. In Ufa more than 660 libraries were closed, in Viatka, 300, and in Penza, 136. In some provinces, between 40 and 60 per cent of all books were forcibly removed from school-public libraries. In Viatka, the new regulations, coming soon after the notorious purge of zemstvo leadership and of prominent hired professionals in 1906–7, had a profound impact; as late as 1914 the literacy campaign was still in disarray. Nevertheless, in most other areas, despite some initial confusion, and much resentment, the 1912 rules seem to have only momentarily halted progress.49 Systematization: Envisioning a Library Network and Defining Adequacy The most notable change after 1912 was the widespread planning to promote a library network modelled upon the school network plans and intended to carpet the entire countryside. While a few zemstvo assemblies (especially in Viatka) had publicized the network principle at the turn of the century, and Iaroslavl and Kharkov had begun to act between 1906 and 1908, it was only after the 1911 zemstvo and library congresses that it gained widespread support, and isolated districts began to act. At the library congress, it was agreed that networked libraries should be open to all and free of charge; and that the selection of books should be made by trained professionals from special bibliographies. At the provincial level, Moscow, Perm, Kharkov, and Olonets had all moved beyond the planning stage by 1914.50 The overriding goal was now universal access to libraries: ‘We are confident that the time is not far away when everywhere in our country it will be possible to talk

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about providing the entire literate population with adequate reading material, about universal access, so to speak, to library books.’51 War, revolution, and civil war negated whatever progress was achieved, but the conception and guidelines drawn up in the prerevolutionary era informed Soviet practice once recovery began after 1921. More important, discussion of a systematically designed network marked the inception of a new stage of standardization and formalization in the area of village libraries. This process had begun with schools in the mid-1890s; it was only just now spreading to libraries. Book collections were to be made uniform, experts (preferably at the provincial level) would select the books, professionals would run the libraries, and the collections would be housed in appropriate buildings designed by specialists. And not only peasants, but also the bureaucracy would be kept at arm’s length in choosing books to stock libraries.52 This meant that the standards by which existing rural libraries were judged were changing according to the dictates of ‘school science.’53 It was no longer enough to have a library of books assembled by chance and stored in the local school, distributed by the teacher. Instead, a province had to have an integrated network of libraries run by professionals and with collections scientifically selected. Any library that failed to meet these criteria was no longer worthy of note. So, how adequate were these school and non-school public libraries? Abramov argues that over 90 per cent of rural public libraries in Russia in 1914 were inadequate but does not define his criteria. In a report to the 1911 Library Congress, B.B. Veselovskii argued that rural Russia needed a total of 70,000 libraries (distinct from school-pupil collections) with a book collection worth 27 million rubles, annual increments of 38 million rubles, and small collections within two miles (three versts) of every peasant hut. Thus, Russia needed three times more rural libraries than existed at the time, and more than five times the value of gross book holdings (5 to 27 million rubles).54 Veselovskii’s assessment of needs was widely cited after the 1911 Library Congress, but even his fellow educationists and librarians found his numbers overstated. For example, while teachers, often unremunerated, ordinarily maintained libraries, he wanted to provide a separate librarian for each library. Yet it was noted that many librarians would serve no more than 20 to 30 readers, with an average per capita book circulation of 15 times a year, that is, 300 books, or less than one book a day, hardly a full-time job. Numbers aside, the demand for full-time professionals and special buildings was for the most part a

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statement that without specialization, standardization, and supervision from above, as well as large-scale capital investments in facilities, there could be no talk of ‘adequacy’ of library facilities in the countryside. Undoubtedly, there was significant room for improvement; the Narodnaia entsiklopediia estimated that there was no more than one public library for every 7,000 rural residents. As for usage, the average number of readers in many zemstvo public libraries was only 140; in other studies it was 200 or at most 400. Moreover, the total number of books, though much higher than Soviet estimates, was certainly low for a rural population of over 100 million. Even for the school-age population, which numbered over 12 million, or its enrolled fraction – some 6.8 million – a total of 15–20 million volumes for outside reading was not an abundance.55 On the other hand, the 200 titles that each school-pupil library now offered was a start, and once readers had exhausted these books they could travel to the public library in a nearby village. What constituted an adequate library, if measured by number and value of holdings? The ‘libraries’ purchased and distributed by the St Petersburg Literacy Committee in the 1890s included 486 titles and 572 volumes, at a retail cost of 370 rubles (256 rubles wholesale). This included the cost of permanent bindings, which lengthened the life of such libraries. The figure of 300 rubles was also Veselovskii’s estimate of adequacy, while in 1914 the school expert V. Tikhonovich placed a price tag of 300–500 rubles on public libraries that would be ‘adequate in size and variety’ for large settlements in the countryside. According to him, smaller villages needed holdings costing only 95–115 rubles with annual additions of 10–20 per cent. These, too, were the target figures set by provincial zemstvos that launched library expansion programs. As for school-pupil libraries, another expert, C. Seropolko, pointed to the example of the Volchansk district zemstvo, where school-pupil libraries were ‘more or less satisfactory’ and holdings were worth approximately 275 rubles each, but a ‘core’ collection could be purchased for as little as 50 rubles. Other, no less well-known educators, put the minimum cost as low as 20 rubles per school unit (50 pupils).56 Using the estimate of 300–500 rubles for major village public libraries, it is possible to deduce from the information collected in 1900 on 1,400 libraries that the average collection was two-fifths to two-thirds adequate, and that in many provinces (e.g., Poltava) the majority of non-school village public libraries met these criteria. In the following decade significant improvements took place: an unnamed study of 4,200 zemstvo public libraries after 1912 showed that the average

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library held 1,000 books. According to Veselovskii, the net value of all rural public library holdings in Russia equalled 5 million rubles, which meant that the average collection was worth 250 rubles (if the estimate of 20,000 libraries is correct), still one-fifth to one-half short of ‘adequacy.’ These estimates do not take into account, however, the libraries serving smaller settlements, where an ‘adequate’ holding would have cost only 100 rubles. Thanks to the 1911 School Census, one may speak with more confidence about conditions in school-pupil libraries. If 50 rubles (150 volumes) established a ‘core’ and 250–275 rubles (750 volumes) a good collection, school libraries were near the bottom of the scale, with an average of 194 volumes worth only 66 rubles. The variety of school holdings can be partially gauged by the average size of school libraries in each province. In 76 per cent of the provinces of European Russia, the size of school library holdings was between 150 and 250 volumes.57 In value of holdings, 12 per cent had collections under the minimum needed for a core collection, 60 per cent fell between 51 and 75 rubles, 18 per cent between 75 and 100, 8 per cent between 100 and 200, and 2 per cent (one province) over 200 rubles. The point here is not to establish a precise notion of adequacy for village libraries, but to suggest that while the countryside could easily have absorbed more books, libraries with more or less adequate core collections were spreading. The public library system was only a few steps along the journey from dearth to abundance; indeed, it was generally behind the rural school itself, but just how far it had gone depended on how one defined the distance to be travelled. To argue, as many (including Lenin) did, that the village remained mired in ‘benightedness’ as late as 1914 is unfair, even when we apply the standards used by the zemstvo activists to measure progress. Irreproachable Books The most important question concerning libraries was not how much was enough, but how good was the selection offered the population? What did it matter that school libraries of 200 books each and public libraries of 500 books each were now available if these libraries contained nothing but substandard literature? But who is to say what is appropriate for the village reader? The government believed that it knew, for it only allowed in school libraries a small percentage of the

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books published every year, including only 15 per cent of textbooks. In many cases, by the time a work received approval of the Ministry of Education, six to ten years after publication, it was no longer in print. Moreover, the 1889, 1896, and 1899 Katalogi listing books considered appropriate for libraries were themselves soon bibliographic rarities – not only was it difficult to receive permission to stock good books, it was even more difficult to find out what was approved and what was not.58 As a result of this inept censorship, and the lengthy delays, the tendency was often to proceed as if the Katalog was not only hard to find, but also not binding. In the words of N.V. Chekhov, ‘In most cases inspectors completely ignored the catalogues, or looked the other way, and libraries did not make their selections according to them.’59 On the other hand, there were reports after 1906, when the official Katalog was no longer in force, that local officials sometimes arbitrarily forced librarians to remove from the shelves all books not officially approved. Whatever the effects of official censorship, many at the local level were unhappy with the quality of books available. Before the 1890s there simply were not enough good books published in cheap editions to compete with the pernicious products of the Nikol’skii Market in Moscow. But after 1900 it was the failure of good books, now abundantly published, to reach libraries and the rapid depletion of holdings that concerned educators.60 The 1911 Zemstvo Congress received isolated reports of libraries with as few as 25 books (though nominally listing far more), of libraries where no additions had been made since the original purchase of a small collection, and of libraries where depletion through theft and physical destruction had left only a handful of old textbooks. One report noted, ‘we have no real library at school, just a handful of books about daily life.’ Another lamented, ‘[the library] is in deplorable condition; there is almost nothing left to read, and what books there are available are dilapidated.’ And the St Petersburg zemstvo complained in 1911 that ‘libraries, with rare exceptions, are very unsatisfactory, particularly from an organizational point of view.’61 Others pointed out that two to three years after a library opened, evidence of use declined as the selection of readings was so limited and was quickly exhausted. In the 1890s in Moscow, 30 per cent of all teachers reported that peasants did not use the libraries at all even when nearby, simply because there was nothing to read. This was supported by the fact that in those schools with the largest book holdings, the proportion of teachers who reported that peasants did not use libraries was much lower.62 In Viatka a survey showed that in 56 per cent of

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the villages where five-ruble libraries (each with 100 books) had been established, the local peasants had read the collection within two years and circulation figures dropped precipitously. The Viatka survey also noted that many peasants did not understand the basic principle of a library, and felt no need to return books. In Moscow as late as 1906–7, many correspondents reported that the libraries in their areas were fictional entities, as appropriations for book purchases were too small to make up for depletion through theft and loss. Yet by 1914 the situation had changed for the better. The annual school report to the zemstvo assembly shows that of 416 schools on which information was collected, 35 per cent had received additions that year, at an average of 171 books for each library, and with average increments as high as 225 books in Volokolamsk, 236 in Moscow, and 312 in Podol’sk districts.63 But again, the issue was not one solely of numbers. The most trenchant criticism came from Nizhegorod province, a ‘middling province’ in terms of zemstvo school efforts, where roughly three out of four schools had libraries. One study presented to the 1911 Zemstvo Congress by a dedicated educator named N.A. Malinovskii, surveying of Nizhegorod schools, showed that more than half of all libraries there had over two hundred books, but that 20.5 per cent of all library books in one district, and 23 per cent in another (the only two providing complete lists of holdings) were ‘rated unsatisfactory by the critics and by all published listings of recommended books.’ In these two districts only 10.4 per cent and 8.9 per cent respectively of all books were ‘irreproachable.’ Moreover, the author found that fiction dominated most libraries, and bad fiction at that! He compiled a list of the ‘best titles’ from the catalogues of 197 of the largest libraries of the province, and then calculated that each library had an average of only 35 of these titles on hand – the remaining works were inferior.64 Malinovskii reserved his harshest words for the ‘backwardness’ of the collection. As in the 1890s, when several studies complained of the length of time before a book could be approved for school and public libraries, so now for children’s books as a whole (and for textbooks in particular) there was a widespread feeling that children’s literature was advancing so rapidly that books published a decade previously were hopelessly outdated. In Nizhegorod school libraries were being left in the wake of scientific advance: ‘while the field of children’s literature is growing and improving, it has entirely passed by the village school.’ To be sure, the author also complained that many of the classic works were also unavailable, but his major complaint was that the library was

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behind the times. In sum: ‘The situation is terrible. A child in the first or second grade wants something to read. After school, hungry, he stands in front of the book shelves another hour or two; sometimes, literally in tears he asks the teacher to give him just once a good story, and he gets … nothing but the junk which fills our school libraries … all the categories of our school libraries are either empty or filled with inappropriate books … the qualitative side of school library affairs in Russia needs a fundamental transformation, from A to Z.’ But even where, as in Moscow, a number of district zemstvos began to take care to restock libraries and select carefully the books available for circulation, this did not always increase book circulation. In 1911 the Zvenigorod district zemstvo reported a survey revealing widespread indifference and apathy towards public libraries. The report stated that ‘public libraries are being built and filled with the best publications, but the people only infrequently make use of them; they never take out books nor do they read them on the premises.’ Only 4 per cent of zemstvo correspondents in Zvenigorod, a stone’s throw from Moscow, stated that the population was enthusiastic about libraries. Among the reasons most often cited for this apathy were the lack of free time, the widespread practice of otkhozhie (seasonal labour outmigration), and nekul’turnost’, a word signifying illiteracy, ignorance, and cultural backwardness. But the most common reason given was the dissatisfaction with library holdings – indicating perhaps that zemstvo efforts to introduce more books of a popular scientific nature were running into the stone wall of peasant resistance.65 Conclusion Russian educators were convinced they had discovered a scientific method of teaching reading to peasants, the whole word method. Today, most specialists have jettisoned that method (clearly unsuitable for a phonetic language like Russian). In 1900 Russian educators commonly argued that children’s literature more than 6–10 years old was hopelessly out of date. Few today would argue that the history of children’s literature has been one of unilinear advance, one decade of progress succeeding the last. This does not mean that value judgments are, or were, out of place. But progressive educators were confident that their assertions were founded upon neutral criteria derived from the new discipline of school science. In fact, their criteria were not scientific, but didactic, and no less so than the criteria used by the Orthodox Church

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and the state. It makes no difference whose vision of childhood was more acceptable. Progressive educators and officialdom had different and somewhat contradictory models of child development but shared an instrumental and paternalistic view of books and libraries; they differed only over the nature of the goal. Both believed that books should be an instrument for learning rather than entertainment: utilitarianism prevailed over imagination. The state promoted love of homeland, tsar, religious devotion, skills development, diligence, and punctuality as well as obedience in the workplace. Progressives promoted autonomy, initiative, self-reliance, and curiosity, as well as punctuality, persistence, and thrift. In practice, their goals often overlapped. Neither group paid more than lip service to peasant preferences. In short, zemstvo experts, when complaining about the shortcomings of school-public libraries in Russia after 1906, were often complaining about government control of the selection of books available, and about peasant preferences for literature that entertained rather than educated, rather than an actual dearth of the printed word. Notions of adequacy, progress, and quality (and, conversely, of failure or shortcomings) were deeply coloured by often implicit standards set by school experts, but by no means necessarily shared by the peasant community. In a word, by 1911 in all zemstvo provinces, more than 80 per cent of schools had libraries. Though some collections were so depleted as to be insignificant, a comparison of books and libraries from province to province shows that by the standards set by school specialists themselves, a large number of sometimes fully adequate libraries were in operation by 1911. Educators were now complaining that they had little opportunity to stock the libraries with books they felt best met the public’s needs, rather than their demands. This is why it has been useful to consider numbers with such relentless doggedness; once it is possible to demonstrate that a modest selection of 200 or so inexpensive books was on hand to launch a pupil on a career as a reader, it is possible to assess with greater clarity the complaints of educators and to achieve better balance and perspective. Deeply imbued with belief in the power of the book to dispel suffering and irrationality, they overlooked the strong element of intellectual paternalism present in their own approach. Because peasants were not rising above their natural instincts or their superstitions and traditional habits, this had to be because the proper books were not reaching them and educational allocations were inadequate. Libraries may have been inadequate – there

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probably were not enough books to go around – but now we at least know that they were present. In this remote corner of Russian social history, we must be wary of the criteria used by experts to measure the degree of progress achieved. It is one thing to say that libraries did not exist, another to say they were not functioning properly. When Russian experts on the eve of the First World War claimed that libraries ‘for all practical purposes’ did not exist in the countryside, they were saying that despite the rapid spread of libraries and other book collections, the books included were not appropriate pedagogical tools for remodelling the peasant child according to their preferences, and to keep the former pupil from regressing to the old village ways. There is more than a slight difference between the two statements. NOTES   1 S.I. Miropol’skii, Inspektsiia narodnykh skhol i ee zadachi (St Petersburg, 1877), 149–55. All translations from Russian are mine unless otherwise noted.   2 V.I. Charnoluskii, ‘Voprosy narodnogo obrazovaniia na pervom obshchezemskom s’ezde,’ Russkaia shkola 22, no. 12 (1911): 100–1.   3 For the Library Congress, see ‘Pedagogicheskaia khronika,’ Russkaia shkola 22, no. 7–8 (1911): 103–15; and V.I. Charnoluskii, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii s’ezd po bibliotechnomu delu,’ Vestnik vospitaniia 20, no. 6 (1911): [65]–106; also A.D. Kirzhnits’, ‘Vserossiiskii s’ezd po bibliotechnomu delu,’ Vestnik obshchestva prosveshcheniia Evreev, no. 8 (1911).   4 According to the 1908 Duma School Bill (never promulgated because of the ongoing struggle between the Synod and Ministry of Education over who should control the schools, but implemented as guidelines regulating state subsidies for school construction, which were massive in these years), schools were to be established so that no village was more than three versts away. On this, see Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 115–19; Narodnaia entsiklopediia nauchnykh i prikladnykh znanii (Moscow: Sytin, 1912), s.v. ‘Narodnoe obrazovanie.’ On the transfer of the ‘radial’ concept to school libraries, see V. Tikhonovich, ‘Set’ uchrezhdenii vneshkol’nogo obrazovaniia,’ in Narodnoe obrazovanie v zemstvakh: Osnovy organizatsii i praktiki dela; Sbornik statei, ed. E.A. Zviagintsev et al. (Moscow: Zadruga, 1914), 320–59. For an extensive bibliography of books and articles on the ‘library question’ in Russia, especially after 1905,

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  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

10

11 12 13

14 15

see E. Medynskii and I. Lapshov, Sistematicheskii ukazatel’ knig i stat’ei po vneshkol’nomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Nauka, 1916), esp. 24–35 and 141–69. See the excellent article by Mary Stuart, ‘“The Ennobling Illusion”: The Public Library Movement in Late Imperial Russia,’ Slavonic and East European Review 76, no. 3 (July 1998): 401–40. Political ‘imaginaries’ are stock components of postmodernism, and the ‘imaginary West’ of subaltern and postcolonial studies. In the case of Russia, a useful introduction is in Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). A similar approach was used in my earlier article, ‘Kindertempel or Shack? The School Building in Late Imperial Russia (A Case Study of Backwardness),’ Russian Review 47, no. 2 (1988): 117–43. The authoritative work in English on this subject is Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). V.I. Charnoluskii, Zemstvo i narodnoe obrazovanie. 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Znanie, 1910), 162–4; D.D. Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, sostoiavshego pri Imperatorskom vol’nom ekonomicheskom obshchestve: 1861–1895 gg. (St Petersburg: Skoropechatnia A.N. Tsepova, 1898), 157, 163–4. Charnoluskii, Zemstvo, 166–7. The term volost’ (roughly translated above as ‘canton’) designated an exclusively peasant unit of administration, whereas the more commonly encountered uezd (district) was a territorial unit encompassing all of the population. A uezd might have 200,000 people or more, whereas a volost’ typically would have at most a handful of villages and perhaps 1,000–2,000 people. Given the difficulty of finding a good English equivalent for volost’, the anglicized Russian is used throughout this essay without italics (as is common practice with the term zemstvo). Ibid., 169; B.B. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let (St Petersburg: Izd-vo O.N. Popovoi, 1909–11), 1:540–1. V.I. Orlov, Narodnoe obrazovanie v Moskovskoi gubernii. Vol. 9 of Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Moskovskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1884), 140–2. A.S. Prugavin, Zaprosy naroda i obiazannosti intelligentsii v oblasti prosveshcheniia i obrazovaniia, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1895), 108–9. See also Sbornik materialov i statisticheskikh svedenii po narodnomu obrazovaniiu v Tambovskoi gubernii (Tambov, 1899), 159. Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, 135. A.A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh vekov, 228–9, cited in Boris Raymond, Krupskaia and Soviet Russian Librarianship, 1917–1939 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979), 21.

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  137 16 Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, 138–9. The author refers in particular to the St Petersburg Committee’s annual report of 1867 for evidence of collusion with officialdom’s Russifying mission. 17 Ibid., 151. 18 N.V. Chekhov, Narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii s 60–kh godov XIX veka (Moscow: Pol’za, 1912), 131. This volume has a useful overview of the history of popular libraries in this era. 19 Prugavin, Zaprosy naroda i obiazannosti intelligentsii, 110. 20 On this period, see Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 97–119. 21 Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, 169–71, 174–8, 194– 202; A.A. Zviagintsev, Polveka zemskoi deiatel’nosti po narodomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Zadruga, 1915), 73. The dramatic closing of the St Petersburg Committee is part of the stock national narrative of the Liberation Movement, and the rising tensions between state and society as the reign of Nicholas II began. Technically, the society was ‘reorganized,’ under government supervision, and it regained a measure of vitality in future years; see N. Venkulev, ‘15–letie deiatel’nosti S.-Peterburgskogo Obshchestva Gramotnosti, 1896–1911,’ in ‘Pedagogicheskaia khronika,’ Russkaia shkola, no. 5–6 (1911): 108–21. A rich bibliography of works on literacy societies in Imperial Russia can be found in Medynskii and Lapshov, Sistematicheskii ukazatel’, 85, 197–202. 22 Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, 194–5. 23 P. Shestakov, ‘Stolichnye komiteti gramotnosti,’ Russkaia mysl’ 17, no. 5 (1896): 113–14. 24 This information compiled from Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 1:554; Zviagintsev, Polveka, 62; Charnoluskii, Zemstvo, 181–2. 25 Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar Brokgauza-Efrona, s.v. ‘Biblioteki’; see V. Charnoluskii, ‘Obshchestvennye biblioteki’ (signed subentry under the larger title ‘Biblioteki’); Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 1:547–55; M.M. Poluboiarnov, ‘Bibliotechnoe delo SSSR v tsifrakh,’ Biblioteki SSSR 36 (1967): 129–66. For a province-by-province tabulation of school libraries in place in 1910, see Pervyi obshchezemskii s’ezd po narodnomu obrazovaniiu 1911 goda: svodka Svedenii (Moscow, 1911), sec. 1: 70–1. 26 Kratkii obzor zemskogo shkol’nogo dela v Rossii (Iaroslavl: Iaroslavskoe gubernskoe zemstvo, 1906), 128. This is a report on the Iaroslavl Northern Region Exhibit of 1903. See also Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, s.v. ’Biblioteki.’ 27 Charnoluskii, Zemstvo, 182. 28 Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Poltavskogo gubernskogo zemstva za 1903 (Poltava, 1903), 71–2.

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138  Ben Eklof 29 Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 1:551. 30 Narodnoe obrazovanie v Kazanskoi gubernii. Vol. 1: Voprosy vneshkol’nogo obrazovaniia (Kazan, 1905), 99, 107. 31 Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, 163. 32 Raymond, Krupskaia, 21; Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 1:550–1; Chekhov, Narodnoe obrazovanie, 134; Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, 163; Charnoluskii, Zemstvo, 171. 33 ‘Sel’skie obshchestvennye biblioteki,’ in Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Viatskoi gubernii za 1899 (Viatka, 1901), 115–39. For a history of the Viatka zemstvo, which along with Moscow was a leader in popular education, see Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 4: 644–70; on Viatka schools, see A.A. Krasev, Nachal’nye narodnye uchilishcha Viatskoi gubernii 1786–1898 (Viatka, 1900). A recent work on local libraries is by N. Valeeva, Bibliotechno-prosvetitel’naia deiatel’nost’, Kazanskogo i Viatskogo zemstv, 1865–1917 (Moscow: Al’ians, 2005). 34 Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstvo, 1:540. 35 Orlov, Narodnoe obrazovanie, 141; V.V. Petrov, Voprosy narodnogo obrazovaniia v Moskovskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1897), 1:106. 36 Nachal’noe obrazovanie v Iaroslavskoi gubernii po svedeniiam za 1896–1897 uchebnyi god (Moscow, 1902), 1:469–81. 37 Sbornik statisticheskikh i spravochnykh svedenii po narodnomu obrazovaniiu v Vladimirskoi gubernii (Vladimir, 1902), 3:186. 38 Issledovanie polozheniia nachal’nogo obrazovaniia v Viatskoi gubernii (Viatka, 1900–1902), 2:161, 185. 39 Narodnoe obrazovanie v Kazanskoi gubernii: gubernii, 1:96. 40 Sbornik statisticheskikh i spravochnykh svedenii po narodnomu obrazovaniiu v Vladimirskoi gubernii, 3:186; Narodnoe obrazovanie v Kazanskoi gubernii, 1:91– 5, 107–9. 41 Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Poltavskogo gubernskogo zemstva za 1903, 67–71. 42 The data for Viatka and Kazan in table 4.6 are taken from Issledovanie polozheniia nachal’nogo obrazovaniia v Viatskoi gubernii, 2:171, 185, and Narodnoe obrazovanie v Kazanskoi gubernii, 1:97, 110. The data for Chernigov, Kharkov, and Poltava in table 4.7 are taken from Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Poltavskogo gubernskogo zemstva za 1903, 87–8. 43 Issledovanie polozheniia nachal’nogo obrazovaniia v Viatskoi gubernii, 179–81. 44 Ibid., 81; Narodnoe obrazovanie v Kazanskoi gubernii, 1:117; Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Poltavskogo gubernskogo zemstva za 1903, 80. 45 Charnoluskii, Zemstvo, 172. 46 M.M. Poluboiarinov, ‘Bibliotechnoe delo SSSR v tsifrakh,’ Biblioteki SSSR

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47

48 49

50

51 52

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36 (1967): 129–65, 130–1, 135, 152; ‘Pedagogicheskaia khronika,’ 107, 114; Pervyi obshchezemskii s’ezd po narodnomu obrazovaniiu 1911 goda: Svodka svedenii, 6; Prakticheskaia shkol’naia entsiklopediia, ed. N.V. Tulupov and P.M. Shestakov (Moscow, 1912), s.v. ‘Narodnye biblioteki v Rossii’; Narodnaia entsiklopediia nauchnykh i prikladnykh znanii, 10:213. Ministerstvo Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia. Odnodnevnaia perepis’ narodnykh shkol Rossiiskoi Imperii: Proizvedennaia 18 ianvaria 1911 g. (Petrograd, 1916), 16:17. Konstantin Abramov, Istoriia bibliotechnogo dela v SSSR, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Kniga, 1970), 134. The most comprehensive study of legislation on the Russian library is E.V. Zviagintsev, Pravovoe polozhenie narodnykh bibliotek za 50 let (Moscow: Izd. Knizhnogo sklada dlia samoobrazovaniia biblioteki i shkoly E.D. Trautskoi, 1916); see pp. 44–5 for the impact of the 1912 regulations. Also, Stuart, ‘The Ennobling Illusion,’ 415. There is an abundance of as yet untapped material available in provincial zemstvo yearbooks to assess the state of school and popular libraries following the 1912 regulations. These zemstvos and others had adopted more realistic goals of putting a library within 10–12 versts of every settlement; see Prakticheskaia shkol’naia entsiklopediia, s.v. ‘Narodnye biblioteki v Rossii.’ Zemstvo studies at the time suggested that 5 versts was the maximum distance a peasant would travel solely to obtain a book. Zviagintsev, Polveka, 76. Whereas at one time educational specialists had sharply criticized the tsarist government for failing to contribute to the cause of non-formal education, now the prevailing argument was that the government should maintain hands off and that revenues should be raised locally; in the resolutions of the zemstvo and library congresses of 1911 ‘local self- administration’ was part of the triad, also including ‘universal’ and ‘nofee’ access. The goal was to avoid the ‘sad experience’ of the post-1908 period in school expansion, when massive central government allocations for school construction came with stringent regulations on school organization. Turn-of-the-century school science produced a wealth of specialized literature, providing a rich trove of source material on everything from legislation to notions of early childhood, curriculum plans, school building templates, and recommended and annotated indices and reading lists. In addition to Tulupov and Shestakov, Prakticheskaia shkol’naia entsiklopediia, cited above, two prominent examples are: A. Anastasiev, Narodnaia shkola: Rukovodstvo

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54

55

56

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dlia uchitelei i uchitel’nits, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd. A.A. Stupina, 1910); A.I. Lebedev, Shkol’noe delo, 2 vols. (Moscow: Sytin, 1908). According to Veselovskii, there should be one major and 20 affiliate libraries for every 20,000 to 25,000 population; each major collection would cost 300 rubles, which would allow a ‘more or less satisfactory variety of selections.’ Of the 38 million rubles needed annually, only 7 million would go to book purchases; the remainder was earmarked for building maintenance and full-time professional librarian salaries. See Prakticheskaia shkol’naia entsiklopediia, s.v. ‘Narodnye biblioteki v Rossii’; ‘Pedagogiche­ skaia khronika,’ 106–8. Narodnaia entsiklopediia nauctinykh i prikladnykh znanii, 10:213; Charnoluskii, Zemstvo, 172; Abramov, Istoriia bibliotechnogo dela, 182; Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Poltavskogo gubernskogo zemstva za 1903, 92. Protopopov, Istoriia St. Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti, 191. The 1911 Zemstvo Congress study placed the value of Volchansk libraries at 275 rubles each, and collection size at 750 volumes; see Pervyi obshchezemskii s”ezd po narodnomu obrazovaniiu 1911 goda: Svodka svedenii, 1:2. The twenty-ruble figure is from ‘Pedagogicheskaia khronika,’ 109. Tikhonovich’s figures are in Zviagintsev, Narodnoe obrazovanie v zemstvakh, 336–50. The school komplekt of fifty pupils was the basic unit of calculation used for state funding according to the 1908 School Bill. Though it never became law, the terms of the bill guided actual funding mandates. Three of the seven provinces with average holdings under 150 books were in the Baltic provinces (where the overall average was only 139 books). In the Polish provinces, schools had, on the average, only 119 books on hand. Obviously, the requirement that all library books be in the Russian language had a deleterious effect in these areas (and elsewhere, as studies of Kazan and Ukraine showed). Yet, inexplicably, the largest school libraries were in the Caucasus (296 volumes), Turkestan (333), and even Siberia   (249 volumes), none of which are included in this table. This also applied to censored books; a petition was addressed by the 1911 Library Congress to exempt public librarians from prosecution if they could demonstrate they were not aware specific books were prohibited, once the 1906 law allowed all books not censored to be held in such collections. Chekhov, Narodnoe obrazovanie, 131. Around 1900, estimates of books approved as a percentage of those published ranged from 3 to 15 per cent, including 2–3 per cent of popular history, 5–6 per cent of fiction, 14 per cent of geography, and 15 per cent of textbooks.

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Assessing Libraries for Rural Audiences  141 60 The Viatka ‘5 ruble’ libraries of 100 volumes each, established in 3,000 villages, with each book selected and purchased wholesale, at total cost of under 5 rubles per library, were not intended to serve as permanent collections. In order to make up for loss and attrition through the widespread peasant practice of ‘permanent borrowing’ and rapid physical destruction of such cheap editions, new ‘libraries’ had to be purchased every year. Moreover, the village soon exhausted the available choice of ‘volumes’ in such collections (56% of villagers responsible for supervising the ‘5 ruble’ libraries reported this was the case). See ‘Sel’skie obshchestvennye biblioteki,’ in Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Viatskoi gubernii za 1899 god (Viatka, 1901), 159. This entire article (pp. 115–239) is rich with data on holdings, circulation, reader preferences, and the clash between village culture and ordinary library practices. 61 Pervyi obshchezemskii s’ezd po narodnomu obrazovaniiu 1911 goda: Svodka svedenii, 1:72, 5:16. 62 Petrov, Voprosy narodnogo obrazovaniia, 1:114. 63 Vladimir Akimov, ‘Zemskaia deiatel’nost’ po narodnomu obrazovaniiu v Moskovskoi gubernii,’ Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, Chast’ 8, sec. 3 (April 1907): 174–91, and Chast’ 9, sec. 3, (May 1907): 1–43; ‘Statisticheskii obzor narodnogo obrazovaniia,’ in Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Moskovskoi gubernii za 1914 (Moscow, 1914), tables 16 and 17, 278, 279. 64 N.A. Malinovskii, ‘Korennye nuzhdy sovremennoi nachal’noi narodnoi shkoly,’ Doklady Pervogo obshchezemskogo s’ezda po narodnomu obrazovaniiu 1911 goda, 2: 752–5. 65 E.N. Znamenskaia, ‘O postanovke dela v narodnykh bibliotekakh,’ Doklady Pervogo obshchezemskogo s”ezda po narodnomu obrazovaniiu 1911 goda, 2: [1]–2.

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5 The Reading Culture of Russian Workers in the Early Twentieth Century (Evidence from Public Library Records) leonid borodkin and evgeny chugunov (Translated from Russian by Gregory Walker)

Editor’s Note Our second group on ‘Plurality of reading communities and their social status’ is completed here by a third essay, dealing with the early twentieth century. Similar in methodology to Eklof’s social history, but describing a discrete group (Russian workers) and with added focus on the agency of women, this piece by leading Russian scholars also uses quantitative sources: library catalogues, zemstvo publications, and archival materials from the Iaroslavl, Moscow, and Vladimir regions. The result helps elucidate yet more aspects of the diversification of Russian reading communities – although an ostensible division of opinion arises vis-à-vis Eklof’s essay. The two studies differ on the extent to which libraries satisfied the needs of users, with Borodkin and Chugunov espousing a more negative view. But the difference is, in part, one of audience (the previous essay studied peasants, not workers). In any case, as more scholars mine these types of resources for the study of print culture, acquaintance with digital technologies will grow in importance as an aide to complex projects. Among the possibilities are data management systems like the Firefox-based Zotero, developed at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and now even more attractive given its collaboration with the aforementioned SEASR (to allow the addition of an powerful analysis component, once the data – textual or numeric – has been retrieved and organized). That is, Zotero goes beyond citation management, and allows the application of digital tools to data stored in a Zotero database. Another approach already discussed (the use of visualization techniques like GIS, and also Many Eyes) would again be relevant here in analysing the geographic distribution of worker libraries. As noted earlier, humanities scholars are increasing drawn to spatial analysis, as shown at the February 2009 New

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Directions in Digital Humanities Scholarship Symposium held at the University of Illinois and sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources, when several speakers spoke of the need for tools that deal with geographic visualization. This foregrounding of spatial concerns is somewhat new for history, previously characterized by narrative approaches – although GIS approaches have in fact been tested for some time by Russian scholars such as Borodkin’s colleague at Moscow State University, Nina Piotukh.* Nonetheless, the incidence of Slavic GIS applications is rather slim, and topics like these on worker libraries offer inviting possibilities for the application of methods that seem destined to advance in measurable ways the cause of Russian print culture research. The industrial revolution began in Russia in the 1880s, and its progress was remarkably rapid. By the years immediately preceding the First World War, Russia had achieved the highest industrial growth rate in the world, and the number of industrial workers had increased dramatically. However, the composition of the working class was not homogeneous. The majority were first-generation workers, retaining strong links with their home villages – although others came from a line of skilled workers, and these workers were literate. The first full Russian population census in 1897 recorded a literacy rate of about 23 per cent. However, this proportion was much higher among industrial workers and ranged from 30 to 70 per cent, depending on the branch of industry, the region of the country, the proportion of women workers, and other factors. The reading culture of workers developed year by year to become a part of their everyday life. An important role in developing this culture was played by the zemstvos, Russian local self-governing institutions that had been established as part of the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Zemstvos initiated the setting up of public libraries, elementary schools, and other institutions. The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth saw the most activity in this respect. What is important in the context of this essay is that the local intelligentsia associated with the zemstvos undertook various kinds of sociological research projects and surveys in order to study the reading culture and social composition of public library users in several Russian provinces (gubernii). The results were published in the first years of the twentieth century. This essay offers some observations and findings based mainly on

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144  Leonid Borodkin and Evgeny Chugunov

the zemstvo publications of Vladimir province to the east of Moscow, which was one of the most heavily developed textile regions in Russia. It should be noted that the manufacture of textiles ranked foremost among Russian industries, both in terms of the number of workers and in value of output. Furthermore, the zemstvo statisticians and intelligentsia used public library records in carrying out their surveys. Those surveys included data on the entire readership, but we concentrate here on the reading culture of the working class. We have also used archival sources that relate to working-class culture in Moscow province (see fig. 5.1). Before moving on to consider the situation of workers’ reading in the central industrial region of Russia, we will address the nature of the attitude of Russian entrepreneurs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries towards developing workers’ literacy, and introducing them to the habit of reading. Entrepreneurs and Workers’ Literacy I.M. Koz’minykh-Lanin, well known as a factory inspector and the author of a book on the working class, remarked in 1912 when dealing with the pattern of literacy among workers in the Moscow province that ‘the enormous importance of educating workers at the present time is readily and openly acknowledged by the foremost representatives of industry.’ He associated this with the material support that they provided to the Moscow Society of Peoples’ Universities, such as the organization of lectures for the workers at various industrial establishments, and the maintenance of the People’s Middle School for workers in the Khamovniki district.1 Koz’minykh-Lanin had access to a large number of questionnaire-style letters, the writers of which – representatives of major industrial concerns – stated categorically that ‘education must raise the qualitative and quantitative productivity of workers’ labour, lessen drunkenness amongst them, reduce the number of accidents they suffer, lessen the damage caused to machines, tools and engines, reduce the deplorable level of theft of factory property, and improve to a significant extent the relationship between the factory owners and the workers.’2 Here are typical excerpts from these letters:3 1. From a letter by the representative of a major textile dyeing and printing factory in Moscow (30 March 1910): The factory values even a decently literate workman – let alone an accom-

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Figure 5.1 Certificate of graduation of Solomin Aleksandr Ivanov, son of a peasant, Chernyshevskii one-class church school in the village of Korgashin, Moscow province, 1 November 1913.

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146  Leonid Borodkin and Evgeny Chugunov plished one – so much that he receives not only a higher rate of pay, but also various privileges and the opportunity for promotion to more senior and better paid positions. It is hard even to enumerate all the advantages which accrue from educating a workman … It is difficult to resolve those often trivial misunderstandings that arise simply because a man does not understand the ordinary speech of a cultivated person and cannot grasp the basic rules of factory legislation … There is one further reason that prompts factory owners to set up evening schools, and that is the bright beam of light cast through the darkness of factory life by the worker’s demand for knowledge, by his understanding of the usefulness of knowledge, which in his eyes constitutes an instrument for bettering his existence. Taking all of the above into account, the question arises: how can we satisfy the pressing need for a better-educated worker? There are no municipal evening schools, and the private ones are very expensive and hence out of the reach of workers. We have had to set up our own special school for the workers, which will, we hope, produce the required results. 2. From a letter by the representative of a major cotton-printing factory in Moscow (29 March 1910): In spending substantial amounts annually on the education of its workers, the factory management cannot but remark, with a sense of moral satisfaction, that this expenditure is not wasted, but is associated to a significant extent with the factory’s success in production, as well as with many other aspects of factory life. It should be recognized that literacy influences the productivity of labour first and foremost in terms of the quality and quantity of the product. We must also remark that the factory schools have enabled many ordinary workers to progress to apprenticeships. They have had a positive effect on the number of cases of workers damaging machines and other equipment, thus lessening expenditure on repairs. This is due in considerable measure to many misunderstandings between workers and management being resolved peacefully. The schools have a noticeable influence on workers’ attitudes, with fewer instances of drunkenness, coarse behaviour, and rowdy scenes – all of which, of course, has led to improved relations between workers and management …   Without exhausting the list of improvements in factory life mentioned above, which stem from the raising of workers’ intellectual levels, the fac-

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The Reading Culture of Russian Workers  147 tory management is convinced that only by this means – through the intellectual development of the working masses – can we expect a rapid improvement in all aspects of the factory’s life. To raise the level of workers’ education, the company at the present time maintains a school for workers’ children, and evening classes for adult workers; from time to time it arranges popular lectures in the reading room on matters of hygiene; and it lends books from the company library free of charge. Since 1909, lectures by the Society of People’s Universities have been given in the same reading room for the factory’s workers.

A tone that is more reserved, in comparison with the industrialists’ questionnaire-letters, can be found in the view of the Soviet historian of the working class A.G. Rashin, who observed ‘in some cases, though comparatively few, a purely utilitarian and positive attitude to workers’ literacy on the part of certain factory owners, who showed an interest in setting up schools for younger workers or evening classes for the adults.’4 Both these viewpoints, it can be assumed, have a certain amount of truth in them. The approach of the majority of entrepreneurs towards the education of workers’ children was undoubtedly associated primarily with the purpose of training a literate workforce, appropriate to their company’s requirements, from the children of their own workers. A sizeable proportion of workers gained their literacy in schools that were attached to factories and financed by their owners. It is evident that, taken as a whole, the systematic work of the factory schools, with all their shortcomings, produced significant local results in the training of literate workers. In some places this was observable as early as the 1880s. The first Russian inspector of factories, I.I. Ianzhul, noted in his commentary on the education of workers’ children at the Ramenskoe textile mill (one of the largest in Moscow province): ‘Although the majority of those who attended did not complete the course, nevertheless a large number of workers did achieve literacy thanks to this beneficial work in elementary education on the part of the owners of the Ramenskoe mill – something which we encounter all too rarely.’5 As far as the workers were concerned, on the one hand, they saw in the factory schools a way of raising their own level of education, being motivated by the prospect of obtaining better-paid work; on the other hand, they valued the opportunity to build a better future for their children.

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Factory Libraries Libraries began to appear in Russian factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some started life as libraries attached to factory schools and then, as the number of books began to increase and the interest among workers grew, these collections were turned into separate establishments. An example of this kind of library is to be found in the Prokhorov Trekhgornaia textile mill, one of the largest in the city of Moscow. It was often the case that separate libraries were established: some for white-collar employees and others for workers. At another large textile factory in Moscow province – the Konshin mill – there were also only a few readers in the 1880s: 100–150 people in a year out of a workforce of 5,000. However, a book taken out from the library would not be read by those people alone; there would also be group readings for the majority of the workers who could not learn to read themselves, but were thirsty for knowledge.6 Over time the library at the Konshin concern expanded significantly, and in 1907 books were being loaned to workers on two separate days each week: on each lending day, 60 to 150 workers visited the library. In that year there were about 800 workers among the readers using the library, of whom about 4 per cent were women. The number of books in 1907 amounted to 2,000, and the number of loans to about 8,500. In 1909 an actual reading room was set up at the same factory. Also interesting in this connection is the example of another large textile concern: the Iaroslavl Bol’shaia Mill (IaBM) in Iaroslavl province to the north of Moscow. A free library and reading room were opened here for workers in 1895, following repeated appeals from the workers to the factory board. We should note that a library for white-collar employees was already in existence. The two libraries were accommodated in a specially furnished two-storey stone building. The factory library for the workers was one of the first of its kind in the province. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were only two free public libraries with reading rooms in Iaroslavl: the Nekrasov library, and another at the IaBM factory. In 1906, with the support of the IaBM company, a further free library and reading room for workers was established in the factory district. It had previously belonged to the Society for Assisting the Education of the People and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in Iaroslavl province. The stocks of the factory libraries continued to grow at a significant rate: in 1911 IaBM acquired over 1,500 books and 100 periodicals on various subjects for the library and reading room. The

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books belonging to factory libraries were generally arranged in sections by subject. In the Catalogue of Books in the Employees’ Library at the Factory of the Iaroslavl Bol’shaia Mill Company, published in 1894, we find ten such sections: Theology; Law and Political Science; Education; History; Travel, Geography, and Ethnography; Natural Sciences, Agriculture, and Medicine; Criticism, Bibliography, and Journalism; Literature (Russian and translated); Theatre; and Journals and Newspapers.7 The book stock of the workers’ library was arranged in much the same way. The archival records of these firms show that the holdings of the factory libraries were not particularly rich, but even so the degree of attention given to book selection is clearly in evidence. For instance, the stock of the Konshin factory library included Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and a complete collection of the works of S.M. Solov’ev, as well as Nekrasov’s poetry, Uspenskii’s stories, and even Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. More sizeable were the library’s holdings of the Russian classics; practically all the well-known authors were represented, from Fonvizin to Chekhov, while it was only books in this category that were held in multiple copies: one of the lists of book purchases for the factory library records forty volumes of Pushkin, twenty-five of Lermontov, and twenty of Gogol’. The number of ‘popular’ pamphlets was also fairly large, over half of them being devoted to the evils of drink, while others offered spiritual and moral guidance, and explained to their readers how to run a rural household, how to keep bees, all about cooperation, and similar subjects. Adventure stories, historical novels, and books on geography and the natural sciences were also held by the dozens, as well as books on the history of science. Even academic works such as General Physiology, Psychology, Physics and The Mechanics of Heavenly Bodies can be found, although they constitute isolated cases. Of interest is a list of twentyodd volumes of legal publications bought for the library, including the latest edition of the Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (Collection of laws of the Russian Empire), as well as the text of the 1903 law on workers’ accident insurance. The Konshin library also subscribed to a number of journals, such as, for example, Sel’skii vestnik (Rural bulletin) and Vokrug sveta (Around the world). The same trends can also be seen in a report on the activity of the Norskaia textile mill in Iaroslavl province, published in 1900. The report records that books from the ‘section on Russian literature’ were in highest demand among the workers, followed by titles in the ‘religiousmoral and historical’ category.8 The following interesting observation

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also appears in the report: ‘The largest percentage of readers falls into the 12- to 20-year-old age group, because children and adolescents spend less time in the factory and hence have more free time for reading. Workers aged 35 to 50 read books least, because ‘this age group contains the smallest percentage of literates.’9 However, we should by no means judge the interests of workers solely on the basis of their book borrowing practices; the stocks of individual libraries should also be taken into account. The following remark from the reports of the Konshin libraries is of particular interest in this regard: ‘Generally speaking, the composition of the libraries’ stock does not satisfy the needs of readers well, because the greater proportion of books consists of short pamphlets, while the principal demand is for the Russian classics, historical novels, and travel accounts.’10 Judging from the fact that this critical remark occurs with identical wording in the reports produced by the factory management in 1906, 1907, and 1908, there seem to have been no qualitative changes in the character of the books added to the library during those years. It is also interesting to note that the concessions demanded by the workers who were striking at the Konshin factory during the strike of 1905 included this particular point: consent that ‘the library should be augmented with books requested by the workers which have been authorized for circulation by public libraries.’ We see from this stipulation that the workers too were interested in building the library’s collection. It goes without saying that political literature that had been prohibited by the government could not find its way into any factory library; indeed, the reading of such pamphlets and books by any of the workers carried the risk of instant dismissal.11 The composition of library holdings in the firms studied for this essay is generally typical of workers’ libraries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, materials from a study of workers’ reading interests that was carried out by the zemstvo of Vladimir province and was based on card files from twenty public libraries in that province from 1903 also show that the reading interests of workers lay predominantly with religious works and classical Russian literature, as well as with historical and adventure novels.12 The Reading Priorities of Russian Workers: Evidence from Public Library Records As we have already noted, the turn of the twentieth century saw the beginning of a qualitatively new stage in the involvement of workers with

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culture. A leading role in this process was assumed by the zemstvos. Through the enthusiastic efforts of members of the local intelligentsia who were serving in zemstvo institutions in various locations, analyses were undertaken practically everywhere of the effect of various cultural factors (books and periodicals above all) on the workers’ style of life. As suggested by materials from the study carried out by the zemstvo of Vladimir province at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘common reader’ (narodnyi chitatel’) was encountering a chronic shortage of accessible books, newspapers, and journals. Despite active measures by the zemstvo to set up free public libraries, reading rooms, and similar establishments, and the efforts in the same direction made by industrialists, the number of such cultural institutions in Vladimir province was far lower than the number of other establishments where the populace spent its leisure time. In 1898, for instance, there were 157 libraries but 1,585 drinking premises. By 1909 the number of libraries had reached 252. The ‘book corners’ and small collections, which were to be found in local administration offices, factories, and tea houses, supplemented the libraries and reading rooms in offering the populace access to books, but their holdings were small, and with the rapid increase in workers’ numbers they were clearly not satisfying readers’ needs.† The local intelligentsia promoted the development of reading opportunities for workers in a variety of ways. For example, in 1895 A.K. Klepikov, a factory inspector in the Kineshma district of Ivanovo province (northeast of Moscow), organized a free public reading room in Kineshma; and his wife Iuliia Porfir’evna, with the help of drama lovers from the local intelligentsia, arranged a number of theatrical productions, the proceeds from which were used to develop the reading room.13 Across the whole country, the temperance societies founded by the intelligentsia in the early twentieth century had rooms in their tea houses for those wishing to read books, newspapers, and journals, and funded them accordingly. This kind of activity on the part of the intelligentsia was particularly important in view of the fact that, in general, workers could not afford the sums needed for access to cultural goods from their own scant resources. According to the calculations of researchers, at the beginning of the twentieth century these sums would have amounted to between two and four rubles a year (1 to 1.5 per cent of a worker family’s budget).14 In the period from 1903 to 1914, the network of libraries accessible to workers grew steadily, and its composition became more diverse. The following types of libraries stood out in terms of the highest volume and quality of publications requested by readers: (1) public libraries at

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the People’s Houses (narodnye doma); (2) reading rooms and libraries organized by boards of charity trustees; (3) public libraries attached to specialist schools and high schools; (4) factory libraries; and (5) trade union libraries. A particular feature of public libraries was that they not only loaned publications to ‘common readers,’ but also instructed them in their use. As time went on, the formation of readers’ interests became the subject of acrimonious socio-political controversy. In the cities of Iaroslavl and nearby Kostroma, this was centred on the Pushkin Libraries, where the principal managers and subscribers belonged to the Social Democratic Party. Political dogmatism heavily influenced the character of the publications to be found in the small domestic collections of the workers who were drawn into illegal activity by party functionaries. Since the content of such collections is known to us now chiefly from the reports of police searches, it is worth noting that the state authorities regarded the presence of books and periodicals in a worker’s home (whether their content was religious, socio-political, or any other) as a threat to the prevailing order in Russia. For example, one of the reports from the zemstvo board of Kostroma province further to the northeast has this to say in 1905: ‘The concern of government organs … is not to disseminate education … but to safeguard their own political interests.’15 The following is one of the most glaring examples. Gendarmes in Iaroslavl, while carrying out a precautionary operation to prevent May Day demonstrations by workers in 1910, confiscated the following from the home of E.V. Ermolin, a metal worker at the Bol’shaia Iaroslavskaia textile mill: Aleksandr Tsitron’s book 72 dnia pervogo russkogo parlamenta (72 days of the first Russian Parliament); a number of issues from the journals Golos zhizni (Voice of life), Dukh vremeni (Spirit of the time), and Iaroslavskaia kolotushka (The Iaroslavl rattle); Narodnyi kalendar’ (People’s calendar); and the Izbiratel’nyi biulleten’ iaroslavskoi gruppy partii narodnoi svobody (Electoral bulletin of the Iaroslavl group of the People’s Freedom Party). The following were confiscated from the personal collection of I.S. Petrov, a worker at the same firm: the pamphlet Po stopam Khrista (In the footsteps of Christ); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Khizhina diadi Toma (Uncle Tom’s Cabin); four issues of the journal Prikhodskaia zhizn’ (Parish life); the newspaper Kopeika (Kopeck); and the pamphlet Skazanie o iavlenii Isaiskoi ikony Bozh’ei materi (The story of the apparition of the Isaiah ikon of the mother of God).16 It is quite evident from all of this that the cultural and educational activity of many libraries and reading rooms from which workers obtained books and

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periodicals (especially the collections located in urban areas) were – just like the activity of social organizations for workers’ education – under the constant surveillance of the provincial gendarmerie offices. A particularly important element in the successful inculcation of cultural values among workers was the dissemination of books with a strong religious content and those with a broad intellectual appeal. This process was due in large part to the titanic work of the well-known Moscow publisher I.D. Sytin, who was among the first in Russia to develop the concept of books for ‘readers among the people.’ Sytin was critical of ‘the theory of a separate literature for the people,’ the supporters of which believed that the people were not mature enough to read serious works and that they needed to have books specially written for them in the same way as, for example, books were written for children. Supporters of this theory believed, furthermore, that such works should be authored by an ‘elder brother,’ that is, by the intelligentsia. The theory was shared and vigorously applied by Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Mikhailovskii, whose views were for a long time treated as laws for Russian literature; and an entire generation of writers devoted massive efforts to creating a ‘people’s and peasants’ literature.’ Sytin, by contrast, considered that ‘we should not create a separate literature for the people, nor do we need one: the people find first-class writers of all nations accessible. What the people do need is for the books of classic writers – Pushkin, Gogol’, Turgenev, etc. – to be accessible in price.’17 This was the kind of literature that Sytin published for the workers and peasants. Experience proved him to be right. His publications, sold at the lowest possible prices (often at a loss), were eagerly and quickly bought up by ‘the reader from the people.’ In publishing works for the people, Sytin carefully studied the interests and demands of his readers and then went on in many respects to shape them. Beginning with calendars (as reference works with a universal appeal), and also popular prints or lubki (as the publications most readily understandable by even the least literate readers), Sytin went on to publish the principal Russian and foreign classics. In 1906 he brought out the multi-volume study Chto chitat’ narodu? (What should the people read?), a critical guide to books for popular reading. This was followed in 1910–12 by the Narodnaia entsiklopediia (People’s encyclopedia). He also published as many as 180 primary school textbook titles; the vast series Biblioteka samoobrazovaniia (Library of self-education), comprising books on history, philosophy, economics, and the natural sciences; and much more. The following quotation shows how V.P. Vakhterov, the eminent Rus-

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sian teacher and champion of public education, described the importance of Sytin’s work: ‘His books are cheap and easy to carry, so that they can easily make their way into places where there are neither lectures … nor universities. Sytin has been able to make the book accessible to the indigent worker and the poor peasant.’18 Sytin organized an elaborate book distribution network for the people. He himself had this to say about the social purpose of his cultural and educational activity: ‘I wish to point to the uncommon talents of the Russian workers and to the exceptional abundance of self-taught people among us. Oh, if only we could give real schooling to these workers! How much time they waste in discovering discoveries already made.’19 While acknowledging Sytin’s talents, as well as those of many other entrepreneurs who invested their capital in the cause of popular education, we should note that this activity and its outcomes were no more than what the industrial workers were demanding. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the demand in the Upper Volga region for educational and other publications rose steeply, which made it an area with a heightened attraction for enterprising investors. In 1901–3 in the Rodniki industrial district of Kostroma province, religious publications and belles-lettres accounted for the bulk of the book trade with total sales of 939 rubles, while educational publications, at 469 rubles, made up less than a third of the total purchase value of printed matter (1,408 rubles). However, by 1912 educational publications (1,145 rubles) were accounting for over 40 per cent of the value of all publications purchased (2,818 rubles). Expressed in terms of values, the amount of educational publications sold over this period increased two and a half times (from 469 to 1,145 rubles), while the total sales value of other books increased by slightly under 1.6 times (from 939 to 1,673 rubles).20 Factory owners, too, played a part in the broad socio-educational drive for the establishment of library facilities for workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is interesting to note in this connection that three of the seven libraries in Ivanovo-Voznesensk – another city in the Kostroma region not far from Kineshma – were located in factories. In 1899 the Iaroslavl newspaper Severnyi krai (Northern region) informed its readers that the first free library and reading room had been opened in the province’s main city. The need for it turned out to be so great that, on the very first day of operation, the issuing of books continued on into the late evening, while the number of books charged

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out to waiting readers amounted to several hundred. Factory workers, too, were among the library’s first readers. It was remarked by the public in Iaroslavl that the library’s bookstock of eleven hundred volumes was manifestly inadequate to satisfy the needs of the ‘common reader.’ Over the following nine years the library continued to attract a readership of around a thousand persons.21 An important element of our study is to describe the nature of the workers’ reading environment, as being one of the indicators of their cultural level. Statistical studies carried out by the Vladimir provincial zemstvo in 1909 enable us to offer such a description based on 102 public libraries. The data reveal that worker readers were somewhat more active than peasant readers if we consider an indicator such as the average number of books read in a given year by readers from each group. A peasant reader was reading an average of 8.5 books a year, while a worker reader was reading an average of 9.1. Of some relevance in characterizing the cultural level of industrial workers in Vladimir province is the analysis of readers by gender, and here the results are especially interesting. In all social categories of readers, men predominated, both in terms of the total number of readers and in terms of the number of books read: peasants – 5,426 men and 1,409 women (reading respectively 47,081 and 11,048 books); workers – 1,629 men and 425 women (14,675 and 4,077 books); artisans – 1,421 men and 405 women (13,233 and 6,750 books); students – 911 men and 382 women (9,834 and 3,971 books); and doctors, teachers, medical assistants, and others – 587 men and 262 women (7,023 and 3,647 books). However, in all categories except that of peasants, the average number of books read per person was higher for women than for men, and this is striking. The indicators give the following overall picture: while peasant men read an average of 8.7 books a year and peasant women 7.8, the corresponding figures for workers were 9 for men and 9.6 for women. In the case of artisans the figures were 9.3 for men and 16.7 for women; of students, 9.7 for men and 10.4 for women; and of the intelligentsia, 12 for men and 13.9 for women. From the results of this study, it appears that its organizers were justified in reaching the conclusion that ‘women are more diligent readers, and read on average one book more per year than men do.’22 The data we have collected also allow us to describe the composition by age and sex of the readership of 118 free public libraries in Vladimir province, with reference to the year 1909.23 The largest group of readers (8,659 out of 15,205, or 56.9 per cent) consisted of young people aged

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from 11 to 20. Bearing in mind that the average age on leaving school was 11.5 years (see fig. 5.2), we can conclude that the high level of interest in reading that typifies Russia’s youth at this time was, in its way, a subsequent (post school) stage of gaining knowledge and acquiring culture. On the other hand, interest in reading weakened substantially after young people reached their twenties, to the point where readers aged over 50 accounted for only 1.5 per cent of the total number of public library patrons in Vladimir province. At the same time readers aged 11–20 read 91,331 books (or 61.5 per cent) out of a total number of 148,367 library volumes issued to patrons; those aged under 11 read 12,589 books or 8.5 per cent, while those over 20 read 44,447 books or 30 per cent. In addition, several points should be noted with regard to the practices of women readers. Their number fell steadily after the age of 15: females aged 11–15 totalled 1,452; but those aged 16–20 totalled only 796; aged 21–25 – 319; aged 26–30 – 176; aged 31–35 – 139; aged 36–40 – 80; aged 41–50 – 55; aged over 50 – 26. This fact is explained, in our view, by two factors. The first is that women readers (and those from the worker and peasant classes most of all) began their involvement in education much later than men. The second is that women were far more constrained than men by their domestic circumstances. Having married, as a rule, between the ages of 16 and 20, a woman had to think first of family concerns, and only after that could she turn her attention to reading.‡ On the other hand, however, women readers of all age groups except those from 10 to 15 years of age read more books per person than men did. In the 16–20 age group, men read on average 10.5 books a year, while women read 10.9. The corresponding figures for the 21–25 age group were 8.8 books for men and 9.8 for women; for ages 26–30, 7.1 for men and 10.9 for women; for ages 31–35, 8.0 for men and 11.5 for women; for ages 36–40, 8.8 for men and 13.7 for women; for ages 41–50, 8.2 for men and 10.2 for women; and for those aged over 50, 13.6 for men and 18.4 for women. Taking all age groups together, men read on average 9.6 books a year and women 10.3.24 The zemstvo statisticians also formed the interesting opinion that women readers ‘from the factories’ requested a greater number of publications from libraries than did women from the intelligentsia.25 Also noteworthy in this connection is an observation made by staff of the Vladimir provincial zemstvo in 1909 about urban readers, the substance of which was that factory readers formed the predominant group among all urban dwellers requesting books, amounting to over

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Figure 5.2  Certificate of graduation of Iraida Poliakova, daughter of a peasant, at 11 years of age, Redrikovo-Gorskaia elementary public school, Aleksandrov­ skii uezd, Vladimir province, 1913.

50 per cent.26 People from the factories and workshops, in the towns as much as in the countryside – when they were given access to free public and other libraries – sought in books the answers to the most urgent questions in their lives. But, as the zemstvo staff went on to observe, ‘someone’s diligent hand has mercilessly deleted these very publications from the list of books.’27 That is to say that there existed a definite

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disparity between the actual reading needs of workers, and what the free public libraries were able to offer them. We also have at our disposal information characterizing the reading interests of workers in terms of subject matter, likewise collected by staff of the Vladimir provincial zemstvo.28 In each library, books were classified into one of eleven sections: 1. Religion and Morals; 2. Literature; 3. History and Biography; 4. Geography; 5. Natural Sciences; 6. Agriculture; 7. Medicine, Hygiene, and Sanitation; 8. Trades; 9. Legal and Social; 10. Periodicals; and 11. Others. Following this classification of the bookstock, we analysed the distribution of readers according to their interests and their occupations in 1909.29 One fact that particularly stands out is that the section most read by all categories of readers using rural free public libraries was that of ‘Literature.’ Second in popularity among workers was the section ‘History and Biography.’ Out of a total of 17,769 books read by workers, 7,340 fell into the category of literature and 3,183 were historical and biographical works. Taken together, these categories accounted for about 60 per cent of the total number of volumes read (from data on 45 libraries). This distribution of workers’ reading interests was determined not only by their greater or lesser preference for the publications in any particular section, but also by the fact that readers using public libraries found themselves in a situation where they were obliged to read not what they needed and found interesting, but what was in fact available in any given library. That is to say, it was not the bookstock that was adapted to suit the tastes of readers and their various requirements: on the contrary, it was reader demand that had to adapt to the bookstock in hand, which was itself the outcome of the authorities’ specific policies regarding popular education. If we compare the 1909 data from Vladimir province with data for 1903, we can trace a definite dynamic in the formation and development of the reading needs of Russian workers. The data for 1903 can be said to indicate that readers from the ranks of workers perused on average one book a year on a religious or moral subject, and an artisan on average 1.6 – while the worker would read an average of 7.4 literary works, the artisan 6, and a reader from the intelligentsia, 4.30 Factory workers were also the most active readers of the periodical press. Among the newspapers with which workers were familiar, police organs noted the following: Russkie vedomosti (Russian gazette), Kur’er (The courier), Novosti dnia (News of the day), Birzhevye vedomosti (Stock exchange gazette), Svet (The world), Chital’nia narodnoi shkoly (Elementary school reading

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room), Sever (The north), Razvlechenie (Entertainment), Narodnoe zdravie (People’s health), Iunyi chitatel’ (Young reader), and others. Police officials found the journals most heavily read by workers to include Zhurnal dlia vsekh (Journal for everyone), Novoe vremia (New times), Russkoe slovo (Russian word), Niva (Cornfield), Trudy imperatorskogo vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva (Proceedings of the Imperial Free Economic Society), Russkii palomnik (Russian pilgrim), Voskresnyi den’ (Sunday), and others.31 The range of favourite periodicals might have been a good deal broader, had it not been for the virulence of nineteenth-century Russian censorship and the actions of the Ministry of Public Education in banning the majority of newspapers and journals from free public libraries.§ The ‘common reader’ did not want to see mere practical advice on housekeeping, family relationships, and children’s education in the periodicals he or she read; such readers also wanted them to reflect the most important social and political events and processes taking place in their country and around the world – events such as international military conflicts (including the Russo-Japanese War), and so on. Based on the sources referred to above, we have carried out an analysis of the dynamics of workers’ reading interests over the period from 1903 to 1909. This reveals that while the demand for religious and moral works decreased by half (from 2,035 to 1,029 books), in the same period the demand by workers for historical and biographical works more than tripled (from 947 to 3,183). Artisans were reading almost ten times as many literary works (up from 949 to 9,107 books), whereas the interest of factory workers in literature declined markedly (from 15,083 to 7,340 books). This decline is associated with the growth of workers’ interest in books on geography, the natural sciences, law, and trades and manufacturing (the respective increases were from 748 to 2,261; from 428 to 725; from 38 to 286; and from 24 to 501). At the same time the demand for periodical publications fell, both among workers (from 1,430 to 367) and also among artisans (from 1,519 to 499). Indeed, taken as a whole, workers in 1909 were reading 3–4 fewer books per year than they were in 1903. While in 1903 the average number of books read annually by a worker was 13.6, by 1909 it had declined to 9.1. The explanation for this may be connected with the notion that workers were able to find more time for books in conditions of economic crisis and industrial stagnation (1903), while in a period of economic growth (1909) there was much less time for reading pursuits. A corresponding decline in this indicator also occurred in the case of artisans, from 13.2 to 10.9.

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An important element in the descriptive scheme applied to workers as readers is the question of what they read: which authors, which works, etc. Here we are obliged to depend on the circle of individuals who ran the public and other libraries, and who worked in the reading rooms of the tea houses, the People’s Houses, and the temperance societies. It was they who shaped the reading interests and tastes of library users. In the view of the zemstvo administrators, and also of the industrialists, the people most reliable and best fitted for this work were teachers in the elementary schools.32 In the towns, as many as half the librarians were teachers, and in rural areas as many as 87 per cent. A significant number of librarians in the towns were priests and deacons (up to 25 per cent) or local headmen and clerks (up to 10 per cent). Even in rural libraries the latter accounted for up to 6.5 per cent of librarians. Since in the majority of cases the worker himself (if he was a novice reader) found difficulty in deciding what he would like to read, librarians had to recommend suitable material, taking into account his intellectual, cultural, and educational development. Meanwhile, materials available to us from twenty public libraries in Vladimir province for the years 1903–1905 (see table 5.1) show that the books most heavily read among workers were the works of Russian writers (both ‘first rank’ and ‘second rank’), followed by works of Western literature, and after that by religious and moral publications. Looking at this in greater detail, table 5.1 shows the following ranking of books requested: 1. Lives of saints (618 loan requests during the period concerned); 2. Works by Mikhail Zagoskin (575); 3. Vsevolod Solov’ev (485); 4. Jules Verne (453); 5. Nikolai Gogol’ (446); 6. Vas. I. Danchenko (378); 7. the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (377); 8. Alek- sandr Pushkin (246); 9. Aleksey K. Tolstoy (219); 10. Pavel Mel’nikov (Pecherskii) (200); 11. T. Mayne Reid (197). Among other books popular with workers we should mention Lev Tolstoy, Dmitrii Grigorovich, Aleksei Pisemskii, Grigorii Danilevskii, Pavel Zasodimskii, Daniil Mordovtsev, and Ivan Turgenev.33 It is thus evident that the reading interests of workers lay predominantly with the literary classics, historical adventure writing, and religious literature. Of course, such a conclusion requires some qualification, being affected by the presence in any given library of books in which workers were interested. Libraries frequently did not hold the quantity of books necessary to satisfy readers – hence, in our view, the apparently low demand for works by Ivan Aksakov, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Aleksei Kol’tsov, Alexandre Dumas, Walter Scott, and others.

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The Reading Culture of Russian Workers  161 Table 5.1.  List of Books Requested by Workers in 20 Free Public Libraries in Vladimir Province, 1903–1905 [Extract]. Books requested

Number of book requests

Lives of saints

618

Works of: M.N. Zagoskin Vs. Solov’ev Jules Verne N.V. Gogol’ Vas. I. Danchenko Brothers Grimm and H.C. Andersen A.S. Pushkin A.K. Tolstoy P.I. Mel’nikov (Pecherskii) T. Mayne Reid A.F. Pisemskii I.S. Turgenev G.P. Danilevskii D.V. Grigorovich P.V. Zasodimskii L.N. Tolstoy D.P. Mordovtsev N. Pozdniakov I.A. Goncharov Count E.A. Salias [historical novelist] I.S. Leskov Fenimore Cooper M.Iu. Lermontov Alexandre Dumas D.N. Mamin-Sibiriak A.P. Chekhov I.S. Nikitin V.A. Zhukovskii Harriet Beecher Stowe A. Brehm [traveller and zoologist] Walter Scott A.V. Kol’tsov I.S. Aksakov

575 485 453 446 378 377 246 219 200 197 173 158 155 122 120 120 120 89 75 72 69 66 53 44 39 36 28 25 19 15 11 10 5

Source: Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva no. 7 (1905): 32–5.

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This is how F.N. Samoilov described his path towards a knowledge of life through reading the books of older workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk: ‘Swept along in my mind on the trail of fictional heroes, I pondered on their situations, sought ways for them to escape, and in doing so moved on imperceptibly to think about the hopelessness of my own life … Books taught me to think. To begin with I read authors like Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, and Cooper, and was carried away by adventures and travels. Later I moved on to the classics: to Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol.’ I also read all kinds of novels in the supplements to Niva, Rodina and other journals. Now and then popular scientific books appeared in our free library.’34 It is interesting to witness here the succession of changes in interest in the reading tastes of a typical worker: from adventure stories to the national classics, and then to popular scientific literature. In summarizing, it should be noted that the process of modernization in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century included the education of the people, primarily workers and peasants. Indeed, it was a time that saw the formation of a new reading culture. We have in mind here, first and foremost, the emergence of local public libraries and the building up of their collections. Various social and political movements and forces saw books as one of the most important means of shaping mass consciousness. Judged by today’s standards, the most valuable work was that conducted by the zemstvos, the democratically orientated intelligentsia, the most forward-looking industrialists, and progressive publishers such as Ivan Sytin. During the short period embracing the last two or three decades before the First World War, the reading of books became an increasingly widespread social practice, especially among the ranks of Russian workers. Notes * Nina Piotukh, ‘The Application of GIS Techniques to Russian Historical Research,’ History and Computing 8, no. 3 (1996): 169–83. Abbreviations GAIaO – Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Iaroslavskoi oblasti GAVO – Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Vladimirskoi oblasti TsIAM – Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv g. Moskvy

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The Reading Culture of Russian Workers  163   1 I.M. Koz’minykh-Lanin, Gramotnost’ i zarabotki fabrichno-zavodskikh rabochikh Moskovskoi gubernii (Moscow: T-vo ‘Pechatnia S.P. Iakovleva,’ 1912), 16–17.   2 Ibid., 17.   3 Ibid., 17–19.   4 A.G. Rashin, Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii: Istoriko-ekonomicheskie ocherki (Moscow: Izd-vo sotsial’no-ekon. lit-ry, 1958), 606.   5 I.I. Ianzhul, Fabrichnyi byt Moskovskoi gubernii: otchet za 1882–1883 g. (St Petersburg, 1884), 30.   6 For details on the Prokhorov Trekhgornaia mill, see Prokhorovy: Materialy k istorii Prokhorovskoi Trekhgornoi manufaktury i torgovo-promyshlennoi deiatel’nosti sem’i Prokorovykh, 1799–1915 gg. (Moscow: ‘Terra’: Izd. dom Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 1996), 259. For details on the Konshin mill and its group readings, see TsIAM, f. 673, op. 8, d. 20, l. 3. We are grateful to Dr Timur Valetov for this last reference, and more generally for his assistance in the preparation of this section on factory libraries.   7 Katalog knig biblioteki dlia sluzhashchikh na fabrike Tovarishchestva Iaroslavskoi Bol’shoi manufaktury (Iaroslavl, 1894).   8 Norskaia manufaktura v ee proshlom i nastoiashchem (Moscow, 1900), 13.   9 Ibid., 14. 10 TsIAM, f. 673, op. 1, d. 415, ll. 13, 65, 96v. 11 For example, in the TsIAM file f. 673, op. 1, d. 24 (ll. 121–2) there are particulars about the dismissal of a watchman in 1905 because he was reading ‘a pamphlet and a leaflet with anti-government content.’ 12 Ia.O. Kuznetsov, ‘Narodnye besplatnye biblioteki i biblioteki-chital’ni vo Vladimirskoi gubernii za 1903 god,’ Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva, no. 7 (1905). For more on the importance of this source and an indepth treatment of the subject, see E.A. Chugunov, Polozhenie i kul’turnyi uroven’ promyshlennykh rabochikh Verkhnego Povolzh’ia (konets XIX v. – 1913 g.) (Kostroma: Izd-vo KGU im. N.A. Nekrasova, 2001). †Editor’s note: This notion of the inadequacy of libraries for the ‘common reader,’ again, may appear to be at variance with the thrust of the preceding chapter in this volume, which suggests that, in the main, reports of library inadequacy were exaggerated. But although the groups overlapped, Eklof’s main focus is on peasants rather than workers. 13 GAVO, f. 14, op. 4, d. 1875, ll. 4, 20; f. 542, op. 1, d. 13, l. 2. 14 M.S. Volin and Iu.I. Kir’ianov, Rabochii klass Rossii ot zarozhdeniia do nachala XX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo ‘Nauka’, 1983), 247. 15 Doklady Kostromskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia gubernskoi zemskoi upravy, no. 12 (1905): 29.

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164  Leonid Borodkin and Evgeny Chugunov 16 GAIaO, f. 912, op. 1, d. 230, ll. 17–18. 17 I.D. Sytin, Stranitsy perezhitogo [cover title: Zhizn’ dlia knigi], 2nd ed. (Moscow: Kniga, 1985), 95. 18 Polveka dlia knigi (Moscow: Tipografiia T-va I. D. Sytina, 1916), 260–1. 19 Ibid., 233. 20 Kul’turno-prosvetitel’skaia deiatel’nost’ v Rodnikovskom fabrichnom raione (Moscow: s.n., 1913), 26. 21 GAIaO, f. 912, op. 1, d. 269, l. 39. 22 Polozhenie narodnogo obrazovaniia vo Vladimirskoi gubernii po issledovaniiu 1910 g. Vyp. 4. Vneshkol’noe obrazovanie (Vladimir-na-Kliaz’me: s.n., 1911), 11. 23 Ibid., p. 12; Prilozhenie 1, Table 19. ‡Editor’s note: Women may also have been constrained in terms of their access to reading material. For a brief discussion of this issue in regard to the early nineteenth century, see Miranda Remnek, ‘“A Larger Portion of the Public”: Fiction, Journals and Female Readers in the Early Reign of Nicholas I,’ in An Improper Profession: Women, Gender & Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Barbara Norton and Jehanne Gheith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 36–7. 24 Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva, no. 27 (1905): 43. 25 Ibid., 40. 26 Polozhenie narodnogo obrazovaniia vo Vladimirskoi gubernii …, 20. 27 Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva, no. 27 (1905): 40. 28 Ia.O. Kuznetsov, ‘Narodnye besplatnye biblioteki i biblioteki-chital’ni vo Vladimirskoi gubernii za 1903 god’, Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva, no. 7 (1905). 29 Polozhenie narodnogo obrazovaniia vo Vladimirskoi gubernii …, p. 14; Prilo­ zhenie 1, Table 20. 30 Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva, no. 27 (1905): 41–2, 71; and GAVO, f. 14, op. 4, d. 1859, l. 22. 31 GAVO, f. 14, op. 4, d. 1859, l. 22. §Editor’s note: For more on censorship patterns in the late nineteenth century, see especially Marianna Tax Choldin, A Fence around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Czars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), and also Choldin’s essay at the end of this volume. 32 Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva, no. 7 (1905): 29; Prilozhenie 1, Table 23. 33 Vestnik Vladimirskogo gubernskogo zemstva, no. 7 (1905): 32–5; Prilozhenie 1, Table 24. 34 F.N. Samoilov, Po sledam minuvshego (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1940), 31–2.

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6 Reading between the (Confessional) Lines: The Intersection of Old Believer Manuscript Books and Images with Print Cultures of Late Imperial Russia kevin m. kain

Editor’s Note Moving to our third thematic group (‘Community intersections and appropriations’), the next essay, on a subfield of religious iconography (hybrid texts containing verbal and visual elements), begins a different disciplinary focus by blending religious studies with art history – or, more precisely, with the social history of art. Known in its new incarnation as the ‘cultural history of images,’ this approach to art history is related to an important trend in Slavic studies proper, a new attention to visual culture.* Kain’s essay therefore contributes to our understanding of both print culture issues and broader cultural history, interweaving theoretical notions like appropriation (discussed by French thinkers Bourdieu and de Certeau) and the newly ‘extensive’ reading of patriarchal literature (in line with Engelsing’s concept) with methodological issues like the degree of horizontal intersection between proximate social groups – and also ongoing debates such as the agency of women, details of which Kain uses to support conclusions regarding appropriation from mainstream historical fiction in later dissenting Old Believer compositions. Kain has created digital versions of the published pictorial images introduced in this chapter, as well as many others, for ‘Visual Images of Patriarch Nikon: An Electronic Digital Gallery,’ hosted by Moscow State University’s Electronic Resources Library (http//www.hist.msu.ru/ER/NIKON/index_e.html). Given that religious content is so intrinsic a part of the history of print – as well as manuscript – culture in Russia, one hopes to see more analysis of these and similar sources by means of image markup software. Opportunities exist in the use of programs like Image Markup Tool (http://www.tapor.uvic. ca/~mholmes/image_markup/index.php) – a resource produced by TAPoR@ UVic, the Text Analysis Portal for Research at the University of Victoria.

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TAPoR is a collaboration of research units at six Canadian universities, to build a centralized gateway to representative electronic texts and text analysis tools. The goal at the University of Victoria in creating the Image Markup Tool was ‘to produce a tool which creates conformant TEI P5 XML files, but which has a simple enough interface that it can be used by people with little or no experience in editing XML code.’ The learning curve is thus less daunting, such that IMT is widely using for encoding manuscript imagery while applicable of course to other source material – and tools like these represent an important option for the consistent linking of visual images with increasing numbers of digitized scholarly texts. The second half of the nineteenth century in Russia was a period of unprecedented expansion of literacy, a period that Jeffrey Brooks has called the time ‘when Russia learned to read.’1 Literacy programs aimed at enlightening and indoctrinating peasants and children were proliferating, and commercial publications were rapidly expanding. While most studies concentrate on the mainstream patterns of book printing and consumption, one important segment that is often described as an archetypical ‘book culture’ and whose members are widely recognized as one of the most literate in imperial Russian society is still understudied. 2 This group is the Russian Old Believers.3 Dispelling traditional views that present Old Believer culture as operating in isolation, contemporary scholarship has already brought to our attention that outside stimuli were crucial in shaping Old Believer identity. Roy Robson concludes that ‘the history of Old Belief has been a constant struggle between outside forces (such as church, state, and secular society) and the old ritual itself.’4 Robert O. Crummey concurs that ‘some of the complexity and variety of Old Believer high cultures [book cultures] are the result of their ongoing interaction with intellectual and cultural currents in society as a whole.’5 Therefore, argues Crummey, ‘the image that Old Believer high culture was hermetically sealed off from the outside world … can no longer be maintained.’6 This begs the question: how exactly did Old Believers respond to the new challenges and opportunities that emerged with the expansion and diversification of Russian print and reading cultures in the second half of the nineteenth century? This essay begins to answer this question by examining late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century hand-written and hand-illustrated Old Believer books sharing the title Istoriia o patriarkhe Nikone

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(History about Patriarch Nikon) and their place in larger Russian print and reading cultures.7 Like the following chapter by Jeffrey Brooks, it challenges the notion that Russian ‘high’ or ‘elite’ book cultures operated in isolation from other segments of society by viewing them from a perceptive that includes analysis of broader cross sections of printed texts, both verbal and visual, and by revealing instances of commingling and convergence among them. Part of a comprehensive study of Patriarch Nikon’s image, this chapter looks beyond the dichotomies traditionally used to characterize Russian religious cultures, and adopts a comparative approach that considers both dissenting and non-dissenting book cultures and highlights cases of contact, transfer, and competition.8 My investigations cut across confessional lines and include literary and iconographical analyses of the written and pictorial materials found in Old Believer sources and those circulating in late imperial Russian society. More specifically, I compare the Istoriia’s verbal and visual texts with each other, with classic Old Believer texts, and against their equivalents found in Russian print culture.9 The illustrated versions of the Istoriia considered here are well suited for comparative study. First, as part of a tradition of writing about Patriarch Nikon that extends back to the late seventeenth century, they illustrate continuity and change within Old Believer literary culture. Second, they are truly hybrid texts that feature as many as thirty-seven visual images in a single volume. This combination of verbal and pictorial texts presents the opportunity to compare the books against a broad spectrum of Russian print culture, including its often neglected visual features. Yet the books’ treatment of a single topic, namely, Patriarch Nikon, allows for a focused analysis of manageable scope and makes it possible to pinpoint exact instances of cross-cultural/confessional contact and exchange. This degree of specificity allows us to not only determine the impact of the verbal and visual features of mainstream print culture on Old Believer books, but also appreciate the originality of the dissenting responses, both written and painted. My findings demonstrate that nineteenth-century Old Believer authors and artists updated and transformed traditional religious polemics by creating new hybrid texts that systematically integrated modern historical scholarship, biographies, historical and popular fiction, and published artistic images.10 This willingness, or perhaps perceived need, to appropriate ever greater cross sections of the dominant print culture represents complex attempts to compete with it. These negotiations and contestations of published materials mark significant, but

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completely neglected, responses to the Russian press and larger discourses on Russian identity. In the broader theoretical sense, my investigations of the hybrid Old Believer responses to the verbal and visual texts in Russian print culture illustrate the potential of combining features of reception theory and variants thereof, as applied in literary studies, with their counterparts in the social history of art. While the former are regularly employed by scholars of reading culture, the latter have been less readily embraced despite the important place held by the visual in modern book and print cultures. The new approaches to the social history of art known as the ‘cultural history of images’ have led scholars ‘to move away from the history of art as a record of the creation of aesthetic masterpieces’ to include the study of visual images previously excluded from the aesthetic-centred canon – to interpret more broadly the content and meaning of art and to analyse its effect(s) on viewers.11 This means that all types of visual images (including pictures in print media) are recognized as potentially noteworthy sources of historical and cultural information in their own right. Focusing on the ‘work’ performed by an image in the ‘life of a culture,’ the cultural history of images emphasizes the meanings and significance of art at both the point of production and reception. It follows that visual images are seen as reflecting the circumstances of their creation and engendering political, social, and cultural meanings. In short, pictorial texts are conceived as both embodying and shaping discourse. Since, according to the cultural history of images, art does not possess intrinsic value, what a culture (or individual) brings to a work is just as important as what viewers find in it. Therefore, a visual image’s effectiveness depends on the familiarity of a culture or audience with the image content in a given context. Especially noteworthy for those considering the import of images presented together with verbal texts are the seminal studies of Reformation propaganda, in which the impact(s) of hybrid texts are assessed by investigating the relationship(s) between visual image, verbal text, and viewer or reader.12 In sum, the approaches to studying responses to visual images, prescribed and actual, advocated by the cultural history of images, both parallel and complement the ‘reception theory’ and investigations of ‘reader responses’ and ‘model readers’ followed in literary studies. These approaches likewise call for the same levels and types of analysis for both visual and verbal texts. Recognizing the compatibility of these modes of research will expand our knowledge of ‘reading’ the diversity of hybrid texts that

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increasingly characterized modern publishing in the late nineteenth century and will make it possible to discern not only the negotiation and contestation of visual texts in writing and pictures, but also the role of visual images as responses to verbal texts.13 The adoption of inclusive, comparative approaches that address the pictorial-verbal complexes in their entirety will ultimately provide more nuanced interpretations of modern reading culture than those limited to either verbal or visual texts. Patriarch Nikon’s Image in Russian Literature Few, if any, figures command as much attention in Old Believer literature as Patriarch Nikon (1605–81). As the seventeenth-century reformer who imposed the textual, liturgical, and ritualistic changes that ultimately divided the Russian Church, Nikon evoked strong and lasting feelings of resentment, even hate, among those who rejected the so-called ‘Nikonian reforms.’14 Indeed, writings about Nikon are among the most enduring and dynamic aspects of Old Believer book culture. Unlike the well-known vitae of early Old Believer figures, such as Archpriest Avvakum and also Kornelii of Vyg, which became part of the dissenting literary canon and were faithfully recopied, the writings on Nikon continued to evolve over time.15 The genesis of several core stories about the patriarch may be traced from their first documented appearance in the 1670s to the early twentieth century.16 Although seminal aspects of early Old Believer tales persisted, new details were added, while other features, deemed no longer relevant, were abandoned. Cross-confessional interaction was crucial to this evolutionary process. Since the early eighteenth century, new Old Believer tales about the patriarch served as reactions to the pro-Nikon literature. By the 1730s, they were formulated in direct response to the highly favourable representations of the hierarch originating in Ioann Shusherin’s widely copied Povest’ o rozhdenii i vospitanii i o zhitii sviateishego Nikona patriarkha moskovskogo i vsei Rossii (Account of the birth, life, and upbringing of his holiness Nikon, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia), dating from the 1680s.17 Adopting the biographical framework of the Povest’, and even closely mimicking its title, dissenting writers snuggly fit the earlier tales into the narrative of Nikon’s life and penned new ones that transformed what Shusherin presented as Nikon’s most noteworthy accomplishments into acts of treachery, heresy, and sacrilege.18 This ef-

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fective method of countering the pro-Nikon discourse offered useful paradigms for the later generations of Old Believer writers, who were compelled to address the explosion of new representations of the patriarch in nineteenth-century print culture. While a variety of political, religious, and social factors served to elevate Nikon’s significance in nineteenth-century Russia, the patriarch’s ultimate societal relevance depended upon the expansion and diversification of Russian print and reading cultures.19 Hundreds of publications about Nikon appeared over the course of the nineteenth century. Written by clerical and secular authors, both well known and obscure, and published by state ministries, the official church, and private enterprises, these works came to know few limits in terms of genre or audience. In the second half of the century the patriarch became not only the subject of a diverse body of religious literature and scholarly histories, but the topic of popular biographies, fiction, and a wide variety of periodical publications. Reflecting new educational and propagandistic initiatives, the publications about the patriarch traversed all social and educational divides and expanded dramatically to include works produced explicitly for ‘simple people’ and school children.20 In sum, the proliferation of Nikonian literature figured in a substantial cross section of Russian print and reading cultures. The Old Believer books about the patriarch cannot be fully comprehended without taking this rich body of publications into account. The ascendancy of ‘scientific history’ and archival research in the mid-nineteenth century introduced new primary sources and paved the way for new, often critical, interpretations of the patriarch’s life and deeds.21 As the study and publication of documents pertinent to Nikon’s fall from power and clerical trial (December 1666) became a new focus of attention, the classic sources, especially Shusherin’s Povest’, came under increased scrutiny. At the same time early Old Believer writings about patriarch Nikon became recognized as valid sources of historical information in their own right. 22 Indeed, several of Russia’s most respected historians, including S.M. Solov’ev and Metropolitan Makarii (Bulgakov), penned unfavourable assessments of the patriarch which to their critics appeared to confirm the ‘schismatic lies’ about Nikon.23 This revisionism not only sparked intense historiographical controversies among scholars, but spawned a concerted effort among church and state ideologues to rehabilitate Nikon by propagating his image across all levels of Russian society.24 The resulting flurry of pro-Nikon publications, which included biog-

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raphies,25 descriptions of the patriarch’s New Jerusalem Monastery,26 and articles in periodicals, is representative of a whole body of official and semi-official literature intended to uphold the traditional interpretations of Orthodoxy and autocracy as the defining features of Russian nationality.27 Based largely on Shusherin’s Povest’, the pro-Nikonian literature stressed the organic nature of the relationship between the institutional church, autocracy, and society by emphasizing the patriarch’s close connections with the Romanov dynasty and the Russian people. Propounding a friendly, loving relationship between patriarch and the royal family and his ‘service to the state,’ the narratives of Nikon’s life characteristically glossed over the patriarch’s disputes with Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich as well as the salacious details of his trial and removal from the patriarchal throne. The considerable literature on the New Jerusalem Monastery reinforced and extended these notions by not only depicting the patriarch and royal family as working together in unison, but by building the Romanovs’ image as protectors and patrons of the Russian Church and indeed all of Orthodoxy. This discourse extended well beyond the church-state relationship. The patriarch’s malleable biography was also reshaped to reflect modern ideals of progress and imagined ethnic identity.28 The literature emphasized Nikon’s humble roots and deemed him a true representative of the Russian folk (narod).29 Born a peasant, the Nikon of nineteenth-century literary discourse never forgot his origins and became a champion of the common people. Naturally, the Russian folk always loved Nikon and considered him a hero and a saint.30 Constructing the patriarch’s image as an educated peasant and a lover of learning, the pedagogical literature intended for teachers and books distributed to schools all upheld Nikon’s example in order to highlight the advantages of peasant literacy.31 The pro-Nikon literature regularly cast the patriarch as an exponent of enlightenment who ‘was ahead of his time,’ as in the following example: Patriarch Nikon was one of those men whom the Lord raises up from time to time for the special needs of their ecclesiastical and civil society ... Gifted above all their contemporaries with a clear and comprehensive intellect … with firm and powerful will, they see the defects of their own age, rise up fearlessly against them by word and deed, clear away prejudices, overthrow superstitions, extirpate vices, defeat injustice, dispel darkness and ignorance, throw down the antiquated foundations of popular or social

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This practice of attributing distinctly modern qualities to Nikon not only distinguished him from his contemporaries, but placed him in direct opposition to the stereotypes used by Orthodox polemists to denigrate the nineteenth-century Old Believers.33 In some cases, the clerical and governmental publications, including missionary literature, and schoolbooks, moved directly from praising Nikon’s enlightenment to attacking the dissenters’ ‘ignorance’ and dismissing their ‘schismatic lies’ about the patriarch, including the early Old Believer tales about Nikon.34 While the ideologues of the church and state played a central role in constructing Nikon’s image in nineteenth-century print culture, they did not monopolize it. Biographies of the patriarch also appeared as part of popular commercial series, such as Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Lives of outstanding people), Russkaia deshevaia biblioteka (The inexpensive Russian library), and Vseobshchaia biblioteka (Universal library).35 Although free of the most intense indoctrination, these books nonetheless offered the same basic account of the patriarch’s biography found in the official and semi-official literature. However, the same may not be said about the much more innovative new fictional stories about the hierarch published in the 1880s. In the second half of the nineteenth century Nikon became the central character of historical fiction. Two works in particular, Daniil Mordov­ tsev’s Velikii raskol (The great schism) (1881) and M.A. Filippov’s Patriarkh Nikon (1885) solidified the patriarch’s cultural standing. Unfettered by the constraints of scientific history, religious dogma, or the conventions of biography, these novels introduced highly imaginative and unorthodox perspectives on the patriarch by means of psychological portraits, as well as intimate dialogues between him and other individuals. The most radical departure was the extensive role of other characters in Nikon’s life. The formulation of the patriarch’s personal relationships with women, namely, Nikon’s wife (a.k.a. ‘mother Natal’ia’) and Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s sister, Tsarevna Tat’iana Mikhailovna, added the most crucial new dimensions. Moving these figures from the fringes of Nikon’s biography to the centre not only introduced new plot lines but, more importantly, offered novel, often sensational, explanations of wellknown and controversial historical events. 36 The explosion of pro-Nikon literature, both specialized and popular,

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is important for understanding the larger trends in mainstream Russian print culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even more important for this essay is the appreciation of how this culture affected Old Believer literature. In the next section, I document the borrowing and creative interpretation of the Nikonian literature by unintended audiences, namely, the Old Believers of the Filippovtsy concord who penned the masterful late nineteenth-century Istoriia o patriarkhe Nikona.37 Comparative Analysis of the Istoriia’s Written Texts Careful reading of the Istoriia reveals striking anomalies that cannot be explained by the study of Old Believer book culture alone. Although the narrative continued to build upon classic tales and to respond to Shusherin’s Povest’, significant portions of it have no precedent in the earlier dissenting literature. On the one hand, the text exhibits various anachronisms not relevant to Nikon’s day, or even the eighteenth century, but that were prevalent in nineteenth-century fiction. On the other hand, Istoriia contains accurate historical ‘facts’ about seventeenth-century events published in nineteenth- century scholarship, but not recorded in the earlier Old Believer books. Deeper analysis reveals the newfound emphasis on women to be an innovation common to both published historical fiction about the patriarch and the Old Believer Istoriia. Women are virtually absent from the earlier Old Believer tales about Nikon. On the rare occasions that females did appear, they were used to introduce charges of misogyny, including alleged physical mistreatment, against the patriarch.38 The opposite is true of the late nineteenth-century Istoriia wherein two female characters, borrowed directly from the historical fiction, namely, Nikon’s wife Praskov’ia, a.k.a. ‘the false nun Natal’ia,’ and Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s sister, Tat’iana Mikhailovna, share the spotlight with the patriarch, doubling as his love interests and partners in treachery. The Old Believer authors subverted what Filippov portrayed as a purely spiritual relationship between the patriarch and his former wife, an ascetic holy woman in the novel, by adding scandalous sexual innuendoes.39 The reprehensible nature of the couple’s behaviour is magnified by the claims that despite their monastic vows they continued their conjugal relationship and even used the cover of monasticism to carry on their illicit love affair in holy places.40 Especially noteworthy are the cases in which the dissenting authors transformed Filippov’s work by

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interjecting animal metaphors used in the earliest Old Believer tales. For example, when describing a particularly deceitful meeting between the patriarch and the ‘false nun’ in a convent, the Istoriia explains that ‘the abbotess left the preying wolf [Nikon] with the sly female wolf [Natal’ia], husband with wife, as if engaged in religious council.’41 Building on formulae common in popular fiction, the Istoriia also expanded Filippov’s brief mention that Tat’iana Mikhailovna privately pined for Nikon, and portrayed instead an ongoing adulterous affair.42 The narrative explains that shortly after they met, Nikon and Tat’iana were ‘captivated by each other, [and] an obscene love developed.’43 Nikon frequently entered the women’s section of the Kremlin palace. Not content, the patriarch constructed a house for the tsarevna at the Alekseevskii convent ‘with a secret entrance that gave direct access to the outside world.’44 Next, ‘Nikon began to visit her both openly in daytime, and secretly at night.’45 Tat’iana, who consciously betrays Nikon’s wife, reciprocates by actively pursuing Nikon in a series of clandestine trysts. The affair reaches a fever pitch when the tsarevna disguises herself as a nun, makes a midnight rendezvous with the patriarch at the New Jerusalem Monastery, and convinces him to run away with her to Kiev.46 The women’s significance in the Istoriia extends well beyond romantic interludes. Just as in the historical fiction, Natal’ia and Tat’iana are presented as playing pivotal roles in central events, including Nikon’s promotion to the patriarchal throne,47 his reform of church books and customs,48 and his foundation of the New Jerusalem Monastery,49 as well as the patriarch’s alleged plan to relocate to Kiev.50 However, the dissenting writers transformed what Filippov presented as Nikon’s divinely inspired acts of piety, wisdom, and charity into examples of conspiracy, deceit, and treachery driven by the vaulting ambition of Nikon’s ‘demanding wife.’ The extent of the women’s negative involvement is repeatedly summed up in statements such as ‘so blinded by female slight and treachery he [Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich] decided to elevate Nikon to the status of patriarch,’ ‘now it is necessary to recall the female cunning and intrigues which Nikon used to get to the patriarchal throne,’ and ‘this is how Nikon received the power from the tsar to corrupt the holy religious books and all the holy ancient customs.’51 While peppering the narrative with fanciful tales of illicit love and betrayal clearly drawn from Filippov’s fiction, the emphasis on women adds contradictory details to the traditional Old Believer image of the patriarch. Nikon’s furtive liaisons with females raise fresh opportunities

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to accuse him of deception, lust, adultery, and the desecration of holy spaces, but they also minimize larger, more significant charges against him. The patriarch’s deep preoccupation with the women shows him to be indecisive and dependent, even helpless, not menacing, controlling, and powerful. As a result, the women, not the patriarch, receive the ultimate blame for what the earlier Old Believer accounts presented as one of Nikon’s worst transgressions, i.e., the abuse of the patriarchal throne and the implementation of the ‘Nikonian reforms.’52 By relieving the patriarch from culpability in such grievous offences, the late imperial Old Believer books often presented him as a less formidable character than he appeared in the traditional tales – albeit far from innocent. The Istoriia’s authors also updated the earlier Old Believer stories about Nikon’s New Jerusalem Monastery by replacing the no longer relevant charge that its foundation signalled the coming of the Antichrist with an imaginative synthesis of materials found in Russian print culture.53 The heart of this exposé, which features an anachronistic display of modern political concepts, was directly plagiarized from Filippov’s novel. Indeed, the historical fiction and the Old Believer story use exactly the same words to relate how the patriarch allegedly explained the monastery’s significance to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich: The Holy Spirit inspired me to create the Resurrection Cathedral, a true replica of the Jerusalem church, on this place so that the pious and the faithful will have a safe place to pray and so that the Holy Eastern Church and blessed patriarchs will have asylum should the Turks persecute them… I pray to God that he will unite the Eastern Church in New Jerusalem in the future. Without this, the unification of all Slavic peoples … cannot be realized. You and I together, great tsar, laid the cornerstone of this unification … Kiev and Galicia are now part of your tsardom. However, other Orthodox peoples, Bulgarians, Serbs, Slovenians, Moravians, Herzegovines, Bosnians, and Montenegrins, still moan under the yoke of Turks and Germans. All of them will come under your hand, great lord and tsar, and under my patriarchal rule and blessing.54

Yet it soon becomes evident that the dissenting authors only included Filippov’s claim that Nikon was a pan-Slavist visionary dedicated to increasing tsarist power in order to set up a straw man. While the novelist continued to explain that the tsar ‘understood the political significance’ of the New Jerusalem concept, and that Nikon advanced royal authority

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even further by ‘opening a window to Europe,’ the Old Believer story moved in a drastically different direction.55 Employing S.M. Solov’ev’s seminal and controversial claim that the patriarch instigated a ‘struggle between the secular and spiritual authority,’ the dissenting authors transformed Nikon into the Romanovs’ arch-enemy.56 This contention is articulated most clearly when the Old Believer writers have an enraged Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich proclaim: ‘Maybe he [Nikon] will soon damn my house and his damned New Jerusalem will be named a new Rome where Nikon will be a new pope. It is necessary … to demonstrate his evil intentions in order to destroy them.’57 Otherwise, ‘he will take both state and clerical power in his iron hands. After that, it will be impossible to save the Romanov dynasty.’58 This complex fusion of fiction and historical scholarship and the modern political discourses contained therein marks important refutations of both Nikon’s image as the tsar’s friend and the late imperial discourses on ‘the union of the throne and the altar’ of which the patriarch’s image was a part. The Old Believer authors also appropriated the bandit (razboinik) of late nineteenth-century popular literary fame to challenge the representation of Nikon in official and semi-official literature as a pillar of moral order and champion of the Russian folk. Throughout the early sections of the narrative the Istoriia’s Nikon displays archetypal traits of banditry, including thievery, unchecked passions, encounters with a shaman and a sorcerer, and dealing with the devil.59 However, the patriarch’s depiction as a razboinik reaches new heights as he becomes increasingly desperate, takes up arms, and joins the company of other well-known brigand types, including Cossacks, in order to escape the tsar’s authority. 60 In the course of the action Nikon morphs into a dangerous outlaw much like the main character of N.I. Pastukhov’s muchimitated Razboinik Churkin (The bandit Churkin; 1883).61 Employing the bandit motif, the dissenting writers transformed Filippov’s explanation that Nikon decided to journey to Kiev to enlighten the Ukrainian people and unite them with the Russian realm into a series of action-packed adventures.62 In the first case, Nikon embarked on a plan, originally hatched by his wife and Tat’iana Mikhailovna, according to which he would secretly escape the New Jerusalem Monastery in the company of Cossacks. The narrative explains that in the middle of the night, ‘Nikon took off his clothes, tied his hair in a knot, put on a large Cossack hat and dress, and became unrecognizable. He truly looked like a leader of the Cossacks.’ A spy later reported that after waking up at night he ‘saw how the patriarch himself exited like

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a bandit [my emphasis] in Cossack clothes with a sword and a pistol at his belt.’ In the thrilling chase that ensues, a local boyar accompanied by a regiment of strel’tsy pursues Nikon, besieges the house where he is hiding, captures him by force, and returns him to New Jerusalem under increased security.63 Faced with the distinct possibility of imprisonment, Nikon and two accomplices, ‘Olshevskii the Pole and Dalmatov the German,’ ‘dressed themselves in peasant clothes and secretly departed from the monastery … [Nikon] hid swords and pistols under his dress.’ Another chase, headed by a different boyar, ensues. When the nobleman eventually catches up with the fugitives, the patriarch makes a desperate break for the woods while his accomplices, armed with swords, attack the pursuers. But it is a case of too little, too late. Realizing that the game is up, the defeated patriarch restrains his aggressive foreign co-conspirators and wails: ‘woe to me. There is no peace for me … I want to leave and you prevent me. I want to go to Kiev. I left you everything. I carry my sinful body and even that I cannot have.’ Despite his pleas, Nikon is arrested and detained in the New Jerusalem Monastery under strong guard until his trial. Thus, just like the anti-hero of the bandit literature, the patriarch is ultimately denied his freedom and forced to face the consequences of his rebellious actions.64 Engrained in the extremely entertaining stories of Nikon’s banditry are powerful commentaries on the patriarch’s identity and his relationship to other Russians. Like the bandit Churkin, Nikon is ‘no defender of the common folk.’65 On the contrary, he constantly deceives and preys upon unsuspecting Russians in order to fulfil his own selfish desires. He even abandons the Russian people for the company of wellknown foreign threats to domestic order. Most importantly, however, Nikon betrays the folk when he cloaks himself, his accomplices, and his weapons in ‘peasant clothes.’ Thus, the Istoriia’s depiction of Nikon as a bandit marks the modernization of the classic Old Believer representations of the patriarch as a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’66 In sum, the Old Believers’ efforts to update Nikon’s image by constructing a composite Other, based on popular fictional stereotypes, appear as a part of the larger process that Jeffrey Brooks conveys in his chapter as a nationwide revolution in thinking and imagining new possibilities that invoked the problem of the individual and the imagined Other, freedom of choice, responsibility, morality and God’s purpose. The Old Believer authors proved equally adept at integrating modern scholarship into the Istoriia. Large sections of the story reflect its

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authors’ knowledge of the leading historical literature and display important hallmarks of modern historiography. Indeed, the very decision to entitle the Old Believer anthology a ‘history’ indicates a conscious attempt to lend a higher degree of credibility to the tales in a period characterized by the professionalization of historical scholarship and the emergence of enlightened public opinion. The efforts to connect traditional Old Believer allegations with the findings of recent scholarship on the patriarch are especially noteworthy in this regard. In one striking example, the dissenting writers attempted to buttress the classic charge that Nikon secretly desecrated Christ’s cross by including an eyewitness account of the patriarch’s public destruction of icons published by Metropolitan Makarii (Bulgakov) in 1883.67 Indeed, some versions of the dissenting story even sought to heighten the authenticity of the report by explaining that ‘so says Metropolitan Makarii’s History.’68 However, analysis reveals that the Old Believer authors replaced Makarii’s clarification that Nikon destroyed the images because they were painted ‘according to Frankish examples’ with the claim that ‘some icons were ancient images of the two-finger blessing and praying. They also depicted the eight-ended Cross of Christ.’69 This change is important because while the original shows Nikon protecting traditional Russian icon canons against foreign innovations, a trait held dear by both Nikon and the Old Believers, the new version presents the patriarch as enemy of not only ‘ancient icons,’ but the central symbols of the pre-Nikonian Russian faith they depicted. The updated account of Nikon’s trial represents the most obvious attempt to emulate modern historical studies and their reliance on archival sources. Reflecting the trial’s central place in the heated historical debates about the patriarch, the dissenters devoted more space to it than any other single issue.70 Following closely the practices of ‘scientific history,’ the authors also quoted extensively from the trial transcripts and other official documents with little or no interruption. 71 Thus, the Istoriia faithfully reproduced significant sections of the court records, including the final act of Nikon’s condemnation.72 The result is a detailed and accurate account of the proceeding against Nikon that is often indistinguishable from the work of leading nineteenth-century historians, including Metropolitan Makarii, S.M. Solov’ev, and N.I. Gibbenet.73 In sum, the Old Believer account of Nikon’s trial parallels the dominant historical scholarship, both pro- and anti-Nikon, in terms of content and method. However, this reliance on the official archival sources came at a price. The Istoriia marks a sharp break with the earlier dissenting tales,

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which used the trial not only to disgrace Nikon, but also to discredit the authority of the church council that condemned him.74 This distinction is significant since it was the council, not Nikon, who later confirmed the ‘Nikonian reforms’ and deemed the pre-Nikonian/Old Believer practices heretical. Comparative Analysis of the Istoriia’s Visual Texts Comparative analysis of the Istoriia’s visual and verbal texts reveals that the pictorial images often contained information about Nikon not found in the written narrative, or in the earlier Old Believer works. More specifically, the dissenting authors rarely provided physical descriptions of Nikon, yet the patriarch is depicted in the artwork in a variety of ways. How then did the Old Believer artists come to conceive Nikon visually? The answer to this question lies in the investigation of the pictures of the patriarch disseminated by Russian print culture. Print culture played the central role in shaping visual conceptions of Patriarch Nikon in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the diversity of literary works about Nikon appearing in the press was matched by the publication of different artistic representations of the patriarch. These included original works and reproductions of icons, parsunae (early portraiture), portraits, history paintings, engravings, and drawings.75 The pictures appeared not only in commemoratives, art catalogues, and pictorial histories, but also in biographies, religious literature, fiction, and the periodical press, as well as on posters and postcards. While all of these sources are important in their own right and may well have influenced Old Believers’ visual conceptions of Nikon, the ‘portraits’ published in biographies and the pictures depicting historical events featured in illustrated journals like Niva (Cornfield) deserve special attention. Most of the biographies about Nikon published in the nineteenth century, including the least expensive, featured an engraved ‘portrait’ of the patriarch [see fig. 6.1].76 While there is some variation among them, all of the pictures are similar in that they depict Nikon in ‘full patriarchal dignity’ and wearing a ‘Nikonian’-style patriarchal mitre.77 Clearly, like the verbal narratives of Nikon’s life, the pictures shared a common source. In fact, the majority of these images were based on a seventeenth-century painting of Nikon recognized as the artistic equivalent of Ioann Shusherin’s Povest’ o rozhdenii i vospitanii.78 Known today as the parsuna (portrait) Patriarch Nikon with Clergy, this painting was

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Figure 6.1  Patriarch Nikon. Source: Unknown engraver, ‘Patriarkh Nikon’ in Patriarkh Nikon (Moscow, 1879).

promoted by church and state apologists as the single most important artistic representation of Nikon’s physical and symbolic likenesses, and character.79 Indeed, the practice of including a copy of this picture together with Nikon’s biography was rooted in the conception that it served as a primary source on a par with written documents and that it

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‘reflect[ed] Nikon’s spirit.’80 The custom of appending the phrase ‘with portrait’ to the title of the biographies highlights the significance that authors attached to these images.81 Presented on the cover, title page, or first page of a publication about Nikon, the portraits provided the initial source of information about him and established a visual point of reference to which the ideas in the verbal narrative that followed could be attached (see fig. 6.2). Thus, a specific pictorial image became representative of Nikon’s entire life story. The associations between the visual and verbal texts became deeply engrained in print culture as the same picture was repeatedly published together with the biographies for nearly a century. While this process established a standard, officially recognized image of Nikon over time, the art published in the late nineteenth-century periodical press had a more immediate impact across wide segments of Russian society. The illustrated journal Niva, the most powerful force for the dissemination of pictorial art in late-imperial Russia, held a pre-eminent place in shaping new visual images of the patriarch. With record-breaking subscription rates peaking at over 235,000 issues per week, the self-proclaimed ‘first illustrated journal in Russia for family reading’ reached an intended audience of teachers, parish clergy, the middle class, and gentry, as well as a secondary readership after used copies fell into the hands of less sophisticated consumers.82 Among its other cultural products, Niva delivered reproductions of several important artistic images depicting Patriarch Nikon to the greatest single audience ever. In 1881 the journal brought copies of several works, including academician V.G. Shvarts’s Patriarch Nikon at the New Jerusalem Monastery (1865; see fig. 6.3), the most famous historical realist painting of the patriarch, to over 55,000 subscribers.83 The full-page reproductions of A.E. Zemtsov’s Patriarch Nikon on Trial (see fig. 6.4) and N.D. Dmitriev-Orenburgskii’s Death of Patriarch Nikon (published in 1892) reached more than 115,000 families.84 Still other images followed in the early twentieth century, when subscription rates were among their highest ever.85 Yet the effect of these pictures cannot be judged by the sheer number of copies distributed alone. Following its central program of fostering enlightenment by exposing its subscribers to the best Russian art, Niva offered prescribed responses to the images that explained how they were intended to be received by viewers.86 But the commentaries did not always discuss the artwork per se. Instead, they took the pictures as a point of departure for larger

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Figure 6.2  Patriarch Nikon. Source: M. Gedan, ‘Patriarkh Nikon,’ in A.A. Bykov, Patriarkh Nikon. Biograficheskii ocherk (St Petersburg, 1891).

discussions on the patriarch. Moreover, the written statements often mirrored the polemics promoted in the official and semi-official literature about Nikon, regardless of whether or not the visual images actually supported such discourse. For example, Shvartz’s image, which pictures the patriarch dressed in a distinctive broad-brimmed hat and

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Figure 6.3 Patriarch Nikon at the New Jerusalem Monastery. Source: V.G. Shvarts, ‘Patriarkh Nikon v Novo-Ierusalimskom monastyre’ (engraver Puts) Niva no. 8 (21 February 1881): 185.

engaged in conversation with a monk in front of a church, served as the launch pad for a highly praiseworthy discussion of Nikon’s intense involvement in the construction of the New Jerusalem Monastery, its place in Russian history, and its significance in the 1880s.87 The verbal texts accompanying Zemtsov’s picture, which depicts Tsar Aleksei

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Figure 6.4  Patriarch Nikon on Trial. Source: A.E. Zemtsov, ‘Sud nad patriarkhom Nikonom’ (engraver Shubler), Niva no. 5 (8 May 1892): 109.

Mikhailovich reading charges against Nikon before the council of clerics and boyars, conversely stressed the close friendship between Nikon and the tsar and even explained that the autocrat was moved to tears during the proceedings.88 In other words, the verbal texts invested the pictures with meanings that threatened to undo the Old Believer conceptions of the patriarch. Like the proliferation of new literature about Nikon, the publication of artistic images depicting him presented new challenges and opportunities that the Old Believers did not ignore. The dissenting artists responded to the published visual representations of Nikon just as the Old Believer authors responded to the verbal texts – by creating synthetic new constructions containing distinct elements of both mainstream print and Old Believer book cultures. In the artists’ case, this meant transforming the products of the modern mass media into oneof-a-kind works of art executed in the style of traditional Old Believer book illustrations. The standard and officially recognized portraits published in biographies of Nikon became a source of inspiration and important point of

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Figure 6.5 Nikon Beats Holy Bishop Pavel for His Accusations. Source: Russian State Library (RGB OR f. 17 no. 140, 38). Reproduced with permission.

contention for the Old Believers who illustrated books about the patriarch’s life.89 In fact, responses to the portraits are the most numerous and the most complex of the artistic images found in the Istoriia. The dissenting artists directly contested the classic visual representation of Nikon by placing it in highly unfavourable visual contexts. More precisely, they depicted Nikon, in his official capacity, dressed in patriarchal mitre and other vestments, abusing other clerics and symbols of the ‘ancient faith.’90 Abuses attributed to Nikon were indeed grave, including the violent acts of mercilessly beating a dissenting hierarch (see fig. 6.5),91 burning ‘holy books,’92 and smashing ‘holy icons’ (see

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Figure 6.6 Nikon Enraged over the Holy Icons. Source: Russian State Library (RGB OR f. 17 no. 140, 52). Reproduced with permission.

fig. 6.6).93 The visual impact of Nikon’s deeds is magnified by the depiction of the patriarch’s relationship to the others who witness them. The images show the patriarch separated, by piles of burning books and smashed icons, from the Russian tsar and/or people who stand in united opposition to him. Therefore, by inserting the standardized artistic representations of the patriarch into these new contexts, the pictures not only provided unmistakable visual proof of the classic Old Believer charges of heresy against the patriarch, but also challenged

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the image of him as builder, enlightener, lover of reading, close friend and champion of the people, usually ascribed to the Nikon-related art in print culture. Iconographical analyses of other artistic images in the Istoriia prove that the pictures of Nikon published in Niva not only reached Old Believer audiences, but supplied them with concrete ideas about how to depict the patriarch in specific situations for which the verbal narrative provided no clarification.94 For example, the dissenting artists appropriated the historically accurate representation of Nikon wearing a distinctive broad-brimmed hat and ‘everyday dress’ (details not found in the Istoriia or any other known written document) from Shvarts’s famous Patriarch Nikon at the New Jerusalem Monastery and included it in pictures demonstrating the patriarch’s alleged clandestine activities in the monastic context.95 Indeed, Shvarts’s Nikon appears in pictures illustrating the patriarch’s secret midnight rendezvous with Tat’iana Mikhailovna at the New Jerusalem Monastery as well as in images visualizing the charge that he cavorted with the devil at the Ferapontov Monastery. 96 These recontextualizations could not have been more complete. While Shvarts’s famous painting depicts the patriarch in the centre of the monastery in broad daylight and in the company of another monk, perhaps conducting monastery affairs or offering moral guidance, the Old Believers’ Nikon is shown in completely secluded monastery areas, holding hands with his partner in adultery (disguised as a nun), and embracing a large winged ‘snake’ coiled around a ‘Nikonian cross’ with open arms. In sum, these pictures suggest a conscious effort on the part of the Old Believer artists to ascribe a sense of historical accuracy to their work. The examination of other visual texts tends to support this supposition. Deeper investigations of the Old Believers’ pictures of Nikon’s trial prove that they too were inspired by art published in Niva. In fact, the composition and content, including the depictions of Nikon standing before the court, the tsar addressing the assembly from behind a table placed in front of his throne, and the church hierarchs and the boyars sitting at the back of scene, all closely imitate A.E. Zemtsov’s Patriarch Nikon on Trial.97 However, although the Old Believer artwork has much in common with the published picture, it is not a passive imitation. The artists actually created a more historically accurate portrayal of Nikon by paying close attention to the material cultural symbols of his patriarchal status. The Old Believer image portrays the patriarch wearing a black klobuk (a Nikonian innovation) on his head, whereas

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the published image incorrectly pictured Nikon in a (traditionally Russian) white one. The dissenting artists also placed a patriarchal staff in Nikon’s hand, while Zemtsov mistakenly equipped Nikon with a simple walking stick. While these details may have gone unnoticed by the majority of Niva’s audiences, they were of the utmost importance for the Old Believer artists, whose ultimate goal was to illustrate the differences between the Nikonian and ‘ancient’ faiths, denigrating the former and elevating the latter. Conclusion This essay offered specific examples of how and why Old Believers responded to the expansion and diversification of Russian print and reading cultures in the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the traditional view, which considers Old Believer book culture to be a closed system, my comparative readings of the Istoriia’s written and artistic texts proved them to be complex constructions shaped by a movement of ideas that flowed across confessional lines. My analysis determined that the dissenting authors and artists revolutionized traditional religious polemics by creating fresh new hybrid texts that systematically synthesized modern historical scholarship, biographies, fiction, and published artistic images. The Istoriia was indeed designed to present an updated version of the traditional Old Believer tales about Nikon that countered the proliferation of new representations of the patriarch circulating in late imperial society. While the positive representations of Nikon disseminated in Russian print culture generally affected the Old Believers, it appears that the advent of official and semi-official publications designed to promote a modernized version of the patriarch’s image ultimately triggered the dissenting responses. Yet it was not just the latent and more virulent anti-Old Believer messages sometimes preached in the Nikonian literature that evoked replies. Careful reading of the texts suggests that those who created the Istoriia took particular issue with the practices of using Nikon to promote the idea of a close church-state alliance and of upholding the patriarch as a true representative of the Russian folk. The Old Believer reactions to both of these practices mark important contestations of Nikonian publications propagandizing the concept of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality,’ especially those tailored for simple people and children. The Old Believers located solutions to the challenges posed by the

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official and semi-official pro-Nikon literature in other areas of print culture. Indeed, the dissenters proved equally effective in adapting historical scholarship, fiction, and published works of art to their cause. Given the title of the Old Believer work (Istoriia), it was not surprising to find that the dissenting authors employed the highly critical treatments of the patriarch espoused in modern Russian historiography to argue that he represented a threat to the Russian autocracy. The adoption of the extremely well-known theme of banditry from popular literature also appears as a logical choice to contest Nikon’s image as the epitome of Russianness and champion of the common folk. While by far the smallest genre of works considering the patriarch, historical fiction provided arguably the most important influence in stimulating new ideas about Nikon. In addition to serving a point of contention in itself, manipulations of Filippov’s narrative introduced opportunities to integrate both historical scholarship and the bandit theme into Nikon’s life story. In other words, Filippov’s Patriarkh Nikon played the same role in the Old Believer formulations of Nikon’s image in the late nineteenth century that Shusherin’s Povest’ did in the early eighteenth century. The impact of print culture and the originality of the dissenting responses are most evident in the cases where Old Believers fused different literary and artistic genres in order to create new products for which there were absolutely no precedents in Old Believer book culture. This process is epitomized by the synthesis of the elements drawn from Filippov’s fiction and the reproduction of Shvarts’s historical realist painting found in Niva that is displayed in the Old Believer picture of Nikon’s secret meeting with Tat’iana Mikhailovna at the New Jerusalem Monastery. Equally striking is the fusion of materials gleaned from Metropolitan Makarii’s History and the engraved portraits of the patriarch featured in the pictures of Nikon smashing icons. These truly hybrid texts testify to the complexity and inclusive nature of the Old Believer books. Late nineteenth-century print and reading culture clearly ‘sparked the imagination’ of the Old Believer writers and artists who created illustrated versions of the Istoriia.98 Taking the written and pictorial texts that appeared in the press as points of departure, they created original new works that transformed both the published materials and traditional dissenting book culture. Although continuing to develop distinctive Old Believer positions on identity, the verbal and visual texts exposed readers to new themes, types, and genres prevalent in broader nineteenth-century Russian print culture. As a result, the Istoriia’s audi-

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ences were concurrently inculcated in traditional Old Believer religious culture and drawn into larger modern Russian reading cultures. Notes This project benefited immensely from the generous ongoing support of Georg Michels, I.V. Pozdeeva, N. Iu. Bubnov, Miranda Remnek, and Katia Levintova. Research for large portions of my work was conducted while holding a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship, 2001–2.   * Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).   1 Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Brooks’s title is in line with the opinion that reading prior to 1861 was the province of a ‘minuscule’ group; see William Mills Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Puskhin: Ideology, Institutions and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 2. However, some regard this as an oversimplification; see Miranda Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences, 1828–1848’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999).   2 See, for example, Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 72; Robert O. Crummey, ‘Old Belief as Popular Religion: New Approaches,’ Slavic Review 52 (1993): 707, 710; and Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 26–7.   3 Old Believers (Starovery), or Old Ritualists (Staroobriadtsy), are those who rejected the changes in church texts, liturgical practices, and rituals formulated and imposed upon the Russian Orthodox Church during the patriarchate of Nikon (1652–66) in favour of pre-Nikonian Orthodoxy. Initially championed by a handful of educated religious zealots, the Old Belief spread through Russian society in the later seventeenth century and eventually developed into complex movements, differentiated into several not necessarily cooperative concords (soglasiia). Regarded as schismatics (raskol’niki) by their opponents in the state and official church, who condemned many of the pre-Nikonian practices as heresies, Old Believers were subjected to varying degrees of persecution until 1905, when they were granted full religious and civil toleration. Strict censorship measures forbidding Old Believers from publishing were an enduring component of the state’s repressions. The combination of these prohibitions and efforts to preserve pre-Nikonian church books led Old Believers to develop a

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  4   5   6   7

deep respect for books and promoted the practice of creating handwritten and hand-illustrated books among Old Believer faithful into the twentieth century. For classic contemporary histories of the Russian Old Believers, see George Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in SeventeenthCentury Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State 1694–1855 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); and Robson, Old Believers. See Robson, Old Believers, especially 7–10. The quoted passage appears on p. 10. Crummey, ‘Old Belief,’ 709. Ibid. The copies of the books I studied include Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka, Otdel rukopisei (hereafter RGB OR), f. 17, no. 140; Biblioteka Akademii nauk (hereafter BAN) 45.4.9; BAN 45.5.9; and BAN Sobranie Kalikina 49. The books’ written and visual texts have different origins. The author of the written narrative is unknown. The visual images and the books themselves were produced in the workshop of A.S. Kalikin, a peasant artist belonging to the Filippovsky concord of Old Believers from the Vologda region. See N. Iu. Bubnov, ‘Litsevye rukopisi staroobriadcheskoi knigopisnoi masterskoi vologodskikh krest’ian Kalikinykh,’ in Staroobriadchestvo: Istoriia i sovremennost’, mestnye traditsii, russkie i zarubezhnye sviazi (Ulan-Ude: Izdatel’stvo BNTs SO RAN, 2001), 314–20, and A.A. Amosov, ‘Knigopisnaia masterskaia tarnogskikh krest’ian Kalikinykh,’ in Traditsionnaia dukhovnaia i material’naia kul’tura russkikh staroobriadcheskikh poselenii v stranakh Evropy, Azii i Ameriki (Novosibirsk: ‘Nauka,’ 1992), 131–7. Bubnov has recently updated his descriptions of the books and published one of the written texts. See N. Iu. Bubnov, ‘Staroobriadcheskoe Antizhitie patriarkha Nikona’ and ‘Istoriia ob iskorenitele drevnego blagochestiia patriarkhe Nikone otstupnike ot sviatoi very,’ in N. Iu. Bubnov, Pamiatniki staroobriadcheskoi pis’mennosti: Sochineniia Gerontiia Solovetskogo; Istoriia o patriarkhe Nikone (St Petersburg: ‘Russkaia simfoniia’: Biblioteka Akademii nauk, 2006), 324–47 and 348–435, respectively. For a different written text, see A. Titov, ‘Staroobriadcheskoe skazanie o patriarkhe Nikone,’ Russkii arkhiv 41 Kn. 1 (1911): 321–68. In his ‘Staroobriadcheskoe Antizhitie patriarkha Nikona,’ Bubnov speculated that nineteenth-century publications may have served as sources for the Istoriia but did not offer a comparative analysis drawing on Russian print culture. I am greatly indebted to Nikolai Iur’evich Bubnov for sharing his knowledge of the Old Believer books about Nikon with me during my research at BAN in 2001–2 as well as for his continuing willingness to communicate his more recent findings.

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192  Kevin M. Kain   8 This project began as my ‘Patriarch Nikon’s Image in Russian History and Culture’ (PhD diss., Western Michigan University, 2004). In moving beyond the realm of binary oppositions I am following the course advocated in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds., Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), and Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice Under the Tsars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). My efforts to understand the relationships between the hybrid texts produced by religious dissenters and mainstream society were originally inspired by the rich literature on the European Reformations, especially R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives. Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Thomas Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998).   9 My analysis of the written texts spotlights the book known as RGB OR   f. 17, no. 140 because I found this version to be the most inclusive. However, my research of visual texts includes the artistic images featured in all of the books. 10 Thus, I refute the claims of V.N. Peretz, the recognized nineteenth-century authority on the Old Believer literature about the patriarch, who concluded in 1900 that no new tales appeared after the late eighteenth century, ‘because later writers lost interest in the person of Nikon. Without the inspiration of the events contemporary to Nikon, they only rhetorically retold already known tales.’ See V.N. Peretz, Slukhi i tolki o patriarkhe Nikone v literaturnoi obrabotke pisatelei XVII–XVIII vv. (St Petersburg, 1900), 160. 11 This program is clearly articulated in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, ‘Introduction,’ in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Bryson, Holly, and Moxey (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). The quoted passage is on p. xvi. See also the essays in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds., Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). For an insightful recent overview of the new approaches, see Peter Burke, ‘The Cultural History of Images,’ in Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 178–89. For path-breaking mono­ graphic treatments of the effects of visual images on society, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

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Old Believer Manuscript Books and Images  193 12 I have in mind Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, and Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives. 13 My way of thinking was originally inspired by the classic ‘Introduction’ to Lynn Hunt and Aletta Biersack, eds., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1–22. Therein, Hunt explains that historians have begun to deal with the same questions posed by the new breed of art historians and literary critics: ‘What does a picture or novel do and how does it do it? What is the relationship between the picture or novel and the world it purports to represent?’ She further establishes ‘representation as a problem which historians can no longer avoid,’ and representations are significant because ‘rather than simply reflecting social reality, [they] could actively be an instrument of (or constitute) power.’ Finally, Hunt concludes that ‘historians of culture really do not have to choose (or really cannot choose) … between meaning and working, between interpretation and deconstruction … neither must they choose between interpretive strategies based on uncovering meaning on one hand and deconstructive strategies based on the text’s mode of production on the other.’ 14 On the Nikonian reforms, see Paul Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual and Reform (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991). 15 The early stories about Nikon that were a part of larger narratives, for example the ‘Life of Kornelii of Vyg,’ continued to be recopied (and unchanged) into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Good examples of this process are the following hand-written books: Verkh. nos. 803, 1663, 1988 [1] and 1992 (Otdel redkikh knig i rukopisei, Nauchnaia biblioteka Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, Verkhokamskoe knizhnoe sobranie) 16 The earliest documented tale, ‘O volke i khishchnike i bogootmetnike Nikone ...’ (1680s) was written by deacon Fedor Ivanov. The text of this piece is published in L.V. Titova, ‘Skazanie o patriarkhe Nikone – publitsisticheskii traktat pustozerskikh uznikov,’ in Istoriia russkoi dukhuvoi kultury v rukopisnom nasledii XVI-XX vv., ed. E. K. Romodanovskaia (Novosibirsk: ‘Nauka,’ 1998), 232–7 (hereafter cited as ‘O volke i khishchnike i bogootmetnike Nikone’). The next generation of tales appeared in Zhitie Korniliia Vygovskogo. See D.N. Breshchinskii, ‘Zhitie Korniliia Vygovskogo kak literaturnyi pamiatnik i ego literaturnye sviazi na Vyge,’ in Trudy Otdela Drevnerusskoi Literatury 33 (Leningrad: ‘Nauka,’ 1979), especially 127–41; and N. Iu. Bubnov, ‘Skazaniia i povesti o patriarkhe Nikone,’ in Trudy Otdela Drevnerusskoi Literatury 41 (Leningrad: ‘Nauka,’ 1988), 142–5. I traced the persistence of the early Old Believer stories in ‘A Comparative, Semiological and Iconographical Analysis of the Tales about Patriarch Nikon Inspired by the

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17

18

19

20

21

22

23

“Life of Kornilii”,’ in Mir staroobriadchestva, ed. I.V. Pozdeeva, vol. 6, Traditsionnaia kul’tura permskoi zemli (Iaroslavl: Izdatel’stvo Remder, 2005), 141–68. See Ioann (Ivan) Shusherin, From Peasant to Patriarch: Account of the Birth, Life, and Upbringing of His Holiness Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Written by His Cleric Ioann Shusherin, trans and ed. Kevin M. Kain and Katia Levintova (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Here I refer to the anonymous Old Believer response to Shusherin’s work, the similarly titled Povest’ o zhitii i rozhdenii i vospitanii i o konchine Nikona, byvshego patriarkha … Different versions of this work are published in A.K. Borozdin, Protopop Avvakum: Ocherk iz istorii umstvennoi zhizni russkogo obshchestva v XVII veke (St Petersburg, 1900), 145–67 and 177–90. I detailed the Old Believer responses to Shusherin’s work in ‘Patriarch Nikon’s Image,’ 291–316. I discussed the other factors, which range from the imposition of official policies on nationality to new conceptions of the purpose and meanings of art, in my ‘Patriarch Nikon’s Image,’ 64–76, 119–32, and 152–74. See, for example, Arkhimandrit Leonid, Kratkoe istoricheskoe skazanie o nachale i ustroenii Voskresenskogo, Novyi Ierusalim imenuemogo monastyria (Moscow, 1872); Postoiannaia komissiia po ustroistvu narodnykh chtenii pri Ministerstve Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, Novyi Ierusalim (St Petersburg, 1887); N.A. Sergeevskii, Sviateishii vserossiiskii patriarkh Nikon (Moscow, 1894); G. Georgievskii, Nikon sviateishii patriarkh vserossiiskii i osnovannyi im Novyi Ierusalim (St Petersburg: Izd-vo P. O. Ialonskogo, 1902); and A.F. Petrushevskii, Patriarkh Nikon i nachalo raskola (Moscow: Dumnov, 1915). On the larger contexts, see Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 50–69 and 155–76; and Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 36–42. Especially noteworthy are the new editions of Ioann Shusherin’s biography of Nikon, including Izvestie o rozhdenii i vospitanii i o zhitii sviateishego Nikona patriarkha moskovskogo i vsei Rossii, napisannoe klirikom ego Ioannom Shusherinym (Moscow, 1871) and Kratkoe izvestie o rozhdenii i vospitanii i o zhitii sviateishogo Nikona patriarkha moskovskogo i vsei Rossii (Moscow, 1872). See S.M. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 1613–1657 (St Petersburg, 1860; repr., Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2001), 11:265–8; and Makarii (Bulgakov), Istoriia russkoi tserkvi (St Petersburg, 1883; repr., Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Spaso-Preobrazhenskogo Valaamskogo monastyria, 1996), 12:291–308. Critiques of Solov’ev’s and Makarii’s work and/or comparisions of their

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24

25

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27 28

scholarship with ‘schismatic’ writings about Nikon are found in N.I. Subbotin, Delo patriarkha Nikona (Moscow, 1862), 1–8 and 169–177; N.A. Gibbenet, Istoricheskoe issledovanie dela patriarkha Nikona, Pt. 1 (St Petersburg, 1882), i–iv; P. Nikolaevskii, Zhizn’ patriarkha Nikona v ssylke i zakluchenii (St Petersburg, 1866), esp. 141; S. Mikhailovskii, Zhizn’ sviateishego Nikona patriarkha vserossiiskogo (Moscow, 1878), 5–12; N. Zaozerskii, ‘Nikon i raskol’niki,’ Pravoslavnoe obozrenie 6–7 (1882): 540–66; D. Sklobovskii, ‘Patriarkh Nikon po novym istoricheskim ukazaniiam,’ Pravoslavnoe obozrenie 7 (1883): 424–35, 683–6, 692, and ‘Dva slova o dvukh novykh knizhkakh,’ Bratskoe slovo vol. 1 Otd. 1 (1888): 278–86. On historiographical debates concerning Nikon, see V.S. Ikonnikov, Novye materialy i trudy o patriarkhe Nikone (Kiev, 1888). For a discussion on the efforts to rehabilitate Nikon, see Kain, ‘Patriarch Nikon’s Image,’ 164–74. In addition to the works cited above, these include Patriarkh Nikon. S portretom pervosviatitelia (St Petersburg, 1869); Patriarkh Nikon (Moscow, 1879); F. Nikolaevskii, Puteshestvie Novgorodskogo mitropolita Nikona v Solovetskii monastyr’ za moshchami sviatitelia Filippa (St Petersburg, 1885); S.A. Belokurov, Dela sviateishego Nikona patriarkha, pache zhe reshchi chudesa vrachebnaia (Moscow, 1888); I.I. Brilliantov, Patriarkh Nikon v zatochenii na Beleozere (St Petersburg, 1891); Sviateishii patriarkh vserossiiskii Nikon (Moscow: Tipografiia T-va I. D. Sytina , 1904). More than thirty books and booklets (many in multiple editions) and at least as many articles about the monastery appeared during the nineteenth century. Books published in the second half of the century include Opisanie sobornogo khrama Voskreseniia Khristova, postroennogo po Ierusalimskomu obraztsu sv. patriarkhom Nikonom v Voskresenskom, Novyi Ierusalim imenuemom, monastyre (Moscow, 1870); Arkhimandrit Leonid, Istoricheskoe opisanie stavropigial’nogo Voskresenskogo, Novyi Ierusalim imenuemogo, monastyria (Moscow, 1876); N.S. Golitsyn, Novyi Ierusalim (St Petersburg, 1879); Istoricheskoe opisanie stavropigial’nogo Voskresenskogo, Novyi Ierusalim imenuemogo, monastyria (Moscow, 1886); and the aforecited Postoiannaia komissiia po ustroistvu narodnykh chtenii, Novyi Ierusalim. I base this on my reading of Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 310. For examples of Nikon’s representation as an enlightener, see P. Lashkarev, ‘Patriarkh Nikon. Vosshestvie Nikona na patriarshestvo moskovskoe,’ in Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii Bk. 2 (1860): 30–168; M. Tolstoi, ‘Rasskazy po istorii russkoi tserkvi,’ Dushepoleznoe chtenie 15 (April 1874): 420–1; Mikhailovskii, Zhizn’ sviateishego Nikona, 7–10; ‘V. K-v.,’ ‘Vzgliad Nikona na znachenie patriarshei vlasti,’ Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 12 (1880): 233–67; and V. Kolosov, ‘Popytki kanonizatsii patriarkha Nikona,’ Istoricheskii vestnik 1 (August 1880): 793–6.

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196  Kevin M. Kain 29 See, for example, Mikhailovskii, Zhizn’ sviateishego Nikona, 5–6. 30 See, for example, Nikolaevskii, Zhizn’ patriarkha Nikona, 1 and 14; and Belokurov, Dela sviateishego Nikona, 112–13. 31 V. Vodovozov, ‘Chtenie dlia naroda: Patriarkh Nikon i Krizhanich,’ Narodnaia shkola 12 (1 December 1878): 1–12; Zaozerskii, ‘Nikon i raskol’niki,’ 566; and N. Sergeev, Kratkoe zhizneopisanie sviateishego patriarkha Nikona (Viatka: tipografiia Kuklina, 1888), 1–2, 9. Nikon’s image as a model reader has deeper roots that first emerged in Arkhimandrit Apollos, Kratkoe nachertanie zhizni i deianii Nikona, patriarkha moskovskogo i vsei Rusi, s portretom ego (Moscow, 1836), 1. 32 Mikhailovskii, Zhizn’ sviateishego Nikona, 5–6. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 33 See, for example, P.S. Smirnov, Vnutrennie voprosy v raskole v XVII veka (St Petersburg, 1898), i–v. 34 See, for example, Nikolaevskii, Zhizn’ patriarkha Nikona, 140–1; Sergeev, Kratkoe zhizneopisanie sviateishego patriarkha Nikona, 14–18; Belokurov, Dela sviateishego Nikona,112–13; Sviateishii patriarkh vserossiiskii Nikon, 151–9; Petrushevskii, Patriarkh Nikon, 26–9; Arsenii (ieromonk), ‘Pis’mo k novoobrativshimsia iz raznykh sekt russkogo raskola k pravoslavnoi tserkvi iz Novogo Ierusalima (Rossiiskogo),’ Dushepoleznoe chtenie 25 (September 1884): 53–7. 35 A.S. Suvorin, Russkie zamechatel’nye liudi: Patriarkh Nikon (St Petersburg, 1874); A.S. Suvorin, Patriarkh Nikon. Rasskaz (St Petersburg, 1893); A.A. Bykov, Patriarkh Nikon. Biograficheskii ocherk (St Petersburg, 1891); and S.F. Chiretskii, Patriarkh Nikon, ego zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’. Biograficheskii ocherk (St Petersburg, 1908). 36 Daniil Mordovtsev, Velikii raskol: istoricheskii roman (St Petersburg, 1881); M.A. Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon (St Petersburg, 1885; repr., Moscow: ‘Tsentr 100,’ 1992). 37 On the Filippovtsy (priestless) concord of Old Believers, see Robson, Old Believers, 36–7. There is no connection between the Filippovtsy concord and M.A. Filippov, author of the historical novel Patriarkh Nikon. 38 See the Old Believer Povest’ o zhitii i rozhdenii, 161, 167. 39 Filippov delineates Natal’ia’s character and her relationship with Nikon in Patriarkh Nikon, 1: 161–6. The sexual themes apparent in Nikonian stories by Filippovtsy Old Believers represent a different kind of eroticism from that contained in the shalost’ tradition of early nineteenth-century elite writers described by Peschio and Pil’shchikov earlier in this volume. While erotic references in the poetry of Pushkin and his circle were more purely playful, and were largely designed to bifurcate reading audiences

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

into close associates (who understood the references) and those further away, Old Believer eroticism served a more serious purpose: it sought to subvert in dramatic ways the new pro-Nikonian literature that emerged in the last half of the nineteenth century. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 10ob, 17, and 34–6. Ibid., 34–6. The quote is found on 35–35ob. The seed of the original idea of this encounter is found in Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 1:163–4. Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:172. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 55ob. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 56. This idea too is a manipulation of the historical novel. See Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:171. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 56; Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 1:171. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 91ob-93ob; Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:111–14. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 26–31; Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 1:162–3. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 32–37; Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 1:194. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 57ob-59ob; Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 1:229–30; 2:111– 14. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 86–95. Ibid., 29, 55, 36. See, for example, Povest’ o zhitii i rozhdenii, 151–2, 158. For a classic Old Believer statement on the connection between the monastery and the Antichrist, see ‘O volke i khishchnike i bogootmetnike Nikone,’ 233–4. RGB OR f. 17 no. 140, 62–4; and Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:4–5. Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:6–12. Filippov actually included Solov’ev’s line of contention in the ‘Introduction’ to his novel in order to discount it (Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 1:4–5). See also Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii, 10:679–80. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 70. Ibid. Ibid., 140b-15, 34–36, 171, 3–3ob, 7–7ob. See Brooks’s chapter ‘Bandits: Ideas of Freedom and Order,’ in When Russia Learned to Read, 166–213, esp. 171–2, 174, and 182–3. See ‘The Terrible Bandit Churkin,’ in Entertaining Tsarist Russia, ed. James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 221–30; and Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 180–3. See Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:111–12 and 114–21. RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 96 ob-97ob. In Filippov’s novel, Nikon leaves peacefully and the tsar sends an emissary after the patriarch requesting him to return. See Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:120.

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198  Kevin M. Kain 64 RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 100ob–104ob. Filippov, Patriarkh Nikon, 2:114–21. 65 The quote referring to Churkin is from Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 182. 66 The representation of Nikon as a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ is the most common, and arguably the most important image of the patriarch in the classic Old Believer tales. Indeed, it serves as the central theme of ‘O volke i khishchnike i bogootmetnike Nikone.’ See, for example, 232, 234, and 236. See also Povest’ o zhitii i rozhdenii, 148, 151. 67 RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 50ob–52. See Makarii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 93–4. 68 BAN 45.4.9, 36; BAN Sobranie Kalikina 49, 87. 69 Makarii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 93; RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 51. 70 RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 117–33. 71 Makarii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 345–70; Gibbenet, Istoricheskoe issledovanie, 2:319–73, 1042–99; and Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii, 344–9; Filippov, who cited all the above authors, follows the same course. See his Patriarkh Nikon, 2:475–99. 72 This emphasis on Nikon’s trial clearly reflects the broader preoccupation among Russian writers and artists with the Russian judicial system in the post-reform era discussed by Brooks in this volume (p. 215). 73 See, for example, the concurrence between RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 131– 132ob; Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii, 347–8; Makarii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 365; and Gibbenet, Istoricheskoe issledovanie, 2:1093. 74 See Povest’ o zhitii i rozhdenii, 165–6. 75 See Kevin M. Kain, ‘Izobrazhenie patriarkha Nikona v iskusstve XVII–XIX vekov,’ in Nikonovskie chteniia, ed. G.M. Zelenskaia (Moscow: Severnyi palomnik, 2002), 82–7; and ‘Obraz Patriarkha Nikona v rossiiskoi kul’ture: Khudozhestvennye istochniki i elektronnye tekhnologii,’ in Krug idei. Trudy VIII konferentsii Assotsiatsii ‘Istoriia i komp ’iuter’ ed. L.I. Borodkin and V.N. Vladimirov (Moscow-Barnaul: Izdatel’stvo Altaiskogo universiteta, 2003), 61–114. Many of these images may be viewed in my ‘Visual Images of Patriarch Nikon,’ Moscow State University Electronic Resources Library (http//www.hist.msu.ru/ER/NIKON/index_e.html). 76 See, for example, unknown engraver, ‘Patriarkh Nikon’ in Patriarkh Nikon (Moscow, 1879), 3; ‘Patriarkh Moskovskii i vsei Rossii,’ in Arkhimandrit Apollos, Nachertanie zhitiia i deianii Nikona, patriarkha Moskovskogo i vsei Rusi, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1845), reverse flyleaf; ‘Patriarkh Nikon,’ in Patriarkh Nikon s portretom pervosviatitelia (St Petersburg, 1869), flyleaf; F. Milovidov, ‘Patriarkh Moskovskii i vsei Rossii,’ in Arkhimandrit Apollos, Nachertanie zhitiia i deianii Nikona, patriarkha Moskovskogo i vsei Rossii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1859), flyleaf; M. Gedan, ‘Patriarkh Nikon,’ in Bykov, Patriarkh Nikon, title

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77

78 79

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81

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page; A. Belyi, ‘Patriarkh Nikon,’ in A.S. Suvorin, Patriarkh Nikon. Rasskaz, flyleaf; and ‘Patriarkh Moskovskii i vsei Rossii,’ in Georgievskii, Nikon sviateishii, flyleaf. In most cases, Nikon is depicted holding a bishop’s staff in his left hand. His right hand is sometimes presented either resting on a book of scripture or raised to give a Nikonian style blessing. See D.A. Rovinskii, Podrobnyi slovar’ gravirovannykh portretov (St Petersburg, 1887), 2:1382. See, for example, F.G. Solntsev, Drevnosti rossiiskogo gosudarstva, vol. 1, Sv. ikony, kresty, utvar’ khramovaia i oblachenie sana dukhovnogo (Moscow, 1849), 140–4; A.N. Murav’ev, Puteshestvie po sviatym mestam russkim (St Petersburg, 1836); and Arkhimandrit Leonid, Kratkoe istoricheskoe skazanie, 31–3. The quotation is from Arkhimandrit Apollos, Nachertanie zhitiia i deianii Nikona, patriarkha Moskovskogo i vsei Rusi (1845), IV-VI. The idea that the parsuna of Nikon provided an important source of information about the patriarch’s character was likewise expressed by Arkhimandrit Leonid, Istoricheskoe opisanie, 22. See, for example, Arkhimandrit Apollos, Kratkoe nachertanie zhizni i deianii Nikona, title page; Patriarkh Nikon s portretom pervosviatitelia, title page; Bykov, Patriarkh Nikon, title page; Chiretskii, Patriarkh Nikon, cover. On Niva, see I. Eizen, ‘“Niva” 1870–1899,’ Sistematicheskii ukazatel’ literaturnogo i khudozhestvennogo soderzhaniia zhurnala ‘Niva’ za XXX let (s 1870–1899 g.), osnovannogo i izdavaemogo A. F. Marksom, comp. A.D. Toropov(St Petersburg: A.F. Marks, 1902), 1–35; and Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 111–14. The quotation is from Eizen, ‘“Niva”,’ 1. V.G. Shvarts, ‘Patriarkh Nikon v Novo-Ierusalimskom monastyre’ (engraver Puts), Niva no. 8 (21 February 1881): 185. The other main image, ‘Patriarkh Nikon so svoim klirom’ (engraver Pannemaker), appeared on p. 184. On the circulation statistics, see Eizen, ‘“Niva”,’ 1. A.E. Zemtsov, ‘Sud nad patriarkhom Nikonom’ (engraver Shubler), Niva no. 5 (8 May 1892): 109; N.D. Dmitriev-Orenburgskii, ‘Konchina patriarkha Nikona’ (engraver Piastushkevich), Niva no. 40 (3 October 1892): 872. On the circulation statistics, see Eizen, ‘“Niva”,’ 1. See I. B-v [I.I. Brilliantov], ‘Mesto zatocheniia patriarkha Nikona,’ Niva no. 23 (6 July 1898): 450–6; and S.D. Miloradovich, ‘Sud nad patriarkhom Nikonom,’ Niva no. 12 (19 March 1911): 224. On the circulation statistics, see Eizen, ‘“Niva”,’ 1. Eizen, ‘“Niva”,’ 1–2; N. Boev, ‘Patriarkh Nikon,’ Niva no. 8 (21 February 1881): 183–7; P. Polevoi, ‘Sud nad patriarkhom Nikonom,’ Niva no. 5 (8 May 1892): 112–14; ‘P. P.’ [P. Polevoi], ‘K risunkam. Konchina patriarkha

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200  Kevin M. Kain Nikona,’ Niva no. 40 (3 October 1892): 883–4. 87 Boev, ‘Patriarkh Nikon,’ 186. 88 Polevoi, ‘Sud nad patriarkhom Nikonom,’ 112. 89 I also found a portrait of the patriarch pasted into a handwritten Old Believer book on the leaf facing an anti-Nikon tale (BAN 25.7.7, 42 ob). 90 Still other images depicted Nikon meeting with an accused heretic (BAN 45.4.9, 11; and BAN Sobranie Kalikina 49, 55). 91 RGB OR f. 17, no. 140, 38. 92 Ibid., 50. 93 Ibid., 52. 94 The Old Believer practice of copying artwork published in Niva into their books is not limited to the case of Nikon. BAN Sobranie Kargopol 68, 6ob features a copy of the painting Presledovanie russkogo plat’ia pri Petre Velikom published in Niva no. 45 (7 November 1892). The Old Believer responses to the pictures published in Niva demonstrate what Jeffrey Brooks describes as the illustrated journals’ role in the creation of a ‘new popular visual language’ (When Russia Learned to Read, 162–3). 95 Analysis shows that Shvarts based his work on existing cultural artefacts, including the hat belonging to Nikon. Artistic renderings of the same type of artefacts painted by academician F.G. Solntsev were published earlier in the first of 6 volumes of plates accompanying Drevnosti Rossiiskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1849) as illustrations no. 95 ‘Domashnee plat’e patriarkha Nikona’ and no. 103 ‘Klobuk, trost’, chetki, brusok, shliapa, sapog i tufli patriarkha Nikona.’ 96 BAN 45.5.9, 92 shows Nikon with Tat’iana Mikhailovna at New Jerusalem. BAN 45.4.9, 24 and BAN sobranie Kalikina 49, 73 depict the patriarch with the devil at the Ferapontov Monastery. 97 BAN 45.4.9, 19ob-20; BAN 45.5.9, 117ob-118; and BAN sobranie Kalikina 49, 67ob-68; Zemtsov, ‘Sud nad Patriarkhom Nikonom,’ 109. 98 I borrow this phrase from Miranda Remnek’s introduction to this volume.

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7 The Moral Self in Russia’s Literary and Visual Cultures: The Late Imperial Era and Beyond1 jeffrey brooks

Editor’s Note This second essay on ‘Community intersections and appropriations’ stays within the framework of art history, but adds to its focus on religious themes important manifestations of secular art and literature, creating a mix of disciplinary concerns. The author has long been concerned with popular culture, but here he views a wider social realm by taking the traditional anthropological – and print culture – opposition between elite and popular, and using it in new ways. He suggests that lower-class communities may not have been as little preoccupied with moral and ethical choices as one might think, and in terms of their artistic output, may represent a classic example of community intersection and appropriation. He notes that the celebrated masterpieces of late nineteenth-century Russian literature and art were created at a time when block prints (lubki) were ever more ubiquitous, and increasingly redolent of major tensions in the Russian social imagination, elite as well as popular. Other theoretical issues arise, such as gender concerns; and, in terms of digital approaches, those already suggested are implied again – especially the spatial imperatives so evident in this volume. Referring to the ‘onrush of geographic and social mobility,’ Brooks notes that ‘late imperial Russia was in motion in almost all respects’ – perhaps validating the desirability of constructing a print culture GIS with a focus on lubki and their distribution through the Empire. The problems of sorting such a mass of disparate images seem daunting, so it may be useful to point here to one example of image commenting software in use by digital humanists. Developed at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (King’s College, London), the Pliny project (http://pliny.cch.kcl .ac.uk) ‘looks broadly at the provision of tools to support scholarship. One of its

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products … [allows] its user to integrate … initial notes into ... an evolving personal interpretation – perhaps one of the key goals of scholarly research.’ In an example using the elaborate frontispiece of New Science, the 1725 treatise of the Italian philosopher Vico, various annotations are attached – some closed (the annotator has decided that no further comment is needed), and others with extended text as a guide to their contents (the user has chosen to show this as well). The researcher can also use grouping facilities to create a sophisticated conceptual structure for analysing, in this case, visual materials. One group in the example relates to spatial analysis – already described as an important new direction for print culture studies. Russian culture is famously tormented by moral imperatives, ethical choices, and life-shaping dilemmas; by a stereotypical anguish of the quotidian that Woody Allen so aptly parodies in Love and Death (1975). Great Russian writers from Gogol’ onward felt impelled to instruct their readers in how to live, and to illuminate the hard choices of the human condition in a blaze of light and passion. Observers of Russian culture starting with the pre-revolutionary critics attributed the moral and ethical preoccupations of Russian literature to the nobles’ guilt about serfdom, and their anger at their own lack of rights under the autocracy. Emotions constantly at a high simmer in the intellectual world of educated Russians boiled over, in this view, in masterpieces of literature and art. Again according to this reasoning, educated Russians created a world-class culture reflective chiefly of their own anguish.2 The country’s Europeanized bookish elites are generally seen to have been isolated from the rest of Russian society. This critical perspective carries a paternalistic dismissal of the lower classes as non-participants in the national culture, simple folk about whom their betters could moralize, but who were not themselves concerned with ethical choices. Yet what if this is not the case? What if the lower classes and others outside the intellectual elite were similarly preoccupied, although perhaps not so tormented by different alternatives? What if both were rooted in common experiences and traditions? What if the consumer culture that ordinary people sought out was also charged with momentous spiritual encounters? In that case the wellsprings of emphasis on moral issues of good and evil and ethical choice in Russian culture would lie deeper in the Russian experience, in layers including folklore and traditional religious belief. Then the achievements of the greatest writers and artists would have much in common with the experience of Russians of other

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classes, and the grand bookish culture of Imperial Russia would have composed but one segment of a wider web of print. One way to examine the question is to look at Russian culture from the bottom up. I have written elsewhere about the commingling of Russian high and low literature in myths of rebellion.3 In this essay I extend that query to compare the moral and ethical presence in Russian elite secular culture with that represented in the ubiquitous prints known as lubki (sing. lubok) and other forms of popular culture. Indeed, while Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote their celebrated works of literature and Ilya Repin and the Peredvizhniki (the Wanderers) created a modern Russian art, a cohort of semi-educated illustrators invented the modern version of the traditional lubok. Lubki were popular engravings sold throughout Russia at markets and by itinerant hawkers together with combs, kerchiefs, baubles, and cheap books. The prints circulated in millions of copies and decorated the walls of peasant dwellings and urban tenements. From the 1860s through the 1880s, the creators of the lubok addressed the imaginative demands of ordinary people with almost as much familiarity and authority as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did those of the educated reading public. The lubok of the second half of the nineteenth century was an early consumer product tailored to the changing tastes of a mixed public of lower- and lower-middle-class purchasers. It was printed from a single impression of a lithographic plate and then often hand-coloured with vegetable dyes or sold unembellished.4 As the century closed, more sophisticated chromolithographic prints created by stamping the same plate with different coloured inks became widely available. Illustrations and photographs from magazines circulated widely at this time as well. According to contemporary observers, peasants divided the cheap popular booklets that often accompanied the prints into religious and secular categories, which they termed ‘serious’ and ‘humorous.’5 The prints can also be divided into authority figures and scenes of daily life. Jesus, Mary, saints, tsars, military officers, generals, and other figures that command great respect frequently appear by themselves in popular illustrations, and fall into the first category of authority figures. The secular prints representing such subjects also owe something to the Byzantine and Russian tradition of the holy icon. Tsars, heroic military officers, and other powerful figures, including mythologized and folkloric heroes, often stand alone or enlarged amidst smaller figures such as common soldiers or grateful peasants as in prints of the

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Emancipation. These figures of secular authority appear unquestioned and powerful.6 The enlargement of the hero is particularly apparent in lubki from the post-Emancipation era representing tsars, military figures, and occasionally even huge peasant warriors.7 There were many heroic lubki of this type, and they serve as a reminder of the exceptional quality of such characters in contrast to those around them. The tradition of the enlargement of the hero was an old one in the lubok.8 The great heroes (bogatyria) of the traditional prints associated with the chivalric tales that circulated in Russia in the eighteenth century, featuring the heroes Bova Korolevich, Frantsyl Ventsian, and Milord Georg, as well as figures of folklore such as Ilya Muromets, appear larger than life. The inclination to enlarge the hero carried over to prints representing military figures, as, for example, in the lubok published by the magnate I.D. Sytin in Moscow in 1889 of General Adjutant Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich Gorchakov (see fig. 7.1), where Gorchakov appears several times the size of the soldiers milling around him. Gorchakov, a hero of the Crimean War, should not be confused with his famous brother, Prince A.M. Gorchakov (appointed foreign minister in 1856 and chancellor in 1867). To the Western eye, this picture appears to violate rules of perspective commonly observed since the Renaissance. In the tradition of the religious icon, however, nothing could be more usual. The gaze of the viewer is directed toward the hero, and the other figures seem to be largely decorative. As in the pictures of the great champions of old, the hero is shown facing the viewer. In the visual language of icons, saints were always shown facing the viewer with two eyes visible, whereas devils and those identified with them were often shown in profile, with a single eye showing. The artists of the lubok frequently followed this convention. The popular prints resembled icons and church frescoes in other ways as well, which is not surprising since they originated in German biblical illustrations.9 They lacked depth of field and exhibited flatness of the image, suggested a narrative with different time frames, and featured common figures and forms, including the hellish monsters fought by storied heroes such as Bova the King’s Son and Eruslan Lazarevich. The powerful influence of the icon in the second half of the nineteenth century is unsurprising. Icons were familiar to people of all classes and ages. They were displayed prominently in the ‘red’ or ‘beautiful’ corner of almost every dwelling, from the peasant’s hut to the noble’s palace. Churches were filled with icons, with the apotheosis in the iconosta-

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Figure 7.1 General Adjutant Prince Gorchakov. Moscow. I.D. Sytin. 1889. Source: Private Collection.

sis, the wall of icons dividing the sanctuary from the nave. Moreover, during the late nineteenth century printed icons on paper and chromolithographs on tin proliferated, with the result that fresh images of saints, Jesus, and Mary were ubiquitous in even in the most remote villages.10 These late icons are more descriptive and ‘realistic’ in style than the earlier icons, and they were often covered with ornamental casings so only the hands and face were visible. The believer staring at an icon experienced a spiritual encounter, not with the image in the picture, but with the divine saints and Holy Family themselves. In some instances, peasants acted as if famous wonderworking icons were living persons, welcoming them into their villages as honoured guests.11 In fact, one priest complained that peasants sometimes treated icons as if they were ‘gods.’12 Thus within the Platonic world of Russian spirituality, icons represent a path to something

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greater than the self. P.A. Florenskii and others developed the notion of the reversed perspective (obratnaia perspektiva) of the Orthodox icon.13 As John Binns has observed, ‘the lines of perspective are strangely reversed so as to give the effect of drawing the viewer into the icon. The figure itself looks out at the viewer, addressing him and inviting him to look and see face to face.’14 Michel Quenot suggests that the viewing of icons and frescos involves a contemplation of ‘Invisibilia,’15 a gateway to the spiritual grandeur the figures exemplify. ‘The action taking place in an icon before our eyes is outside the laws of human logic, outside the laws of earthly existence,’ write Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky.16 Viewers imbued in this tradition saw a secular picture of a hero as more than a military mug on a matte; it was instead an invitation to contemplate the hero and the meaning of his heroism, as well as his image. There was little ambiguity here or space for ethical choice. The representations of secular authority reflect the tradition of the icon blended with the powerful ideology of the autocracy, according to which the monarch and the political order were divinely sanctioned and the interests of church and state intertwined.17 The face-to-face visual language of icons also carried over to secular prints representing scenes from daily life, and drew the viewer into an active engagement on the moral or ethical issues posed. A revolution in reading and in the production and distribution of cheap printed materials ensured a plentitude of new images available to ordinary people.18 The lubok, part scene and part text, was an aspect of this process. The semi-educated lubok artists created new prints about life and personal choices, including images of good and bad housekeeping, the benefits of literacy, evils of drink, tenderness and pain of love, sorrow of soldiers’ farewells, enticement of Gypsy fortune tellers, and tragedy of abandoned babies, as well as death. These images involved ethics. They often show face-to-face interactions between a primary subject and another person or persons, usually very different or in different circumstances. For example, in the print The Return Home of a Chap from Iaroslavl (see fig. 7.2), published by A.V. Morozov in Moscow in 1878, a father has refused to renew his son’s passport, thus recalling a prodigal home. The son had worked perhaps as a servant in the capitals for several years without sending any money home. In the text, the father asks what happened to the son’s earnings and the son in reply pats his ample belly. The son stares at the viewer as if to ask whether he need reply at all to his irate father.

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Figure 7.2  The Return Home of a Chap from Iaroslavl. Moscow. A.V. Morozov, 1887. Source: Private Collection.

The jovial family members appear to invite the viewer to join in the laughter. The woman over the stove directs attention to the father and son. In the corner, on the son’s left, the rooster and pig imitate the family quarrel, mocking its ridiculousness. The rooster’s stripes resemble those of the strutting rooster-like father, and the pig resembles the gluttonous prodigal. Although the artist mocks both figures, the print expresses the conflict between satisfying one’s own desires and thinking of one’s family, between immediate gratification and its postponement, and also between the will of the son and the authority of the father. In fact, the print brings to the fore some of the chief ethical issues raised by the consumer revolution then beginning to unfold in Russia. In The Soldier’s Farewell (see fig. 7.3), published by I.D. Sytin in 1889, a soldier tells his wife he will return with a medal on his chest or die with glory. The enlargement of the soldier and his wife suggests the

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Figure 7.3 The Soldier’s Farewell. Moscow. I.D. Sytin. 1889. Source: Private Collection.

importance the artist gives to their interaction. The horse with its huge eye on the viewer bends his neck toward the soldier and the wife, as if soliciting our gaze. Everyone in the picture appears in profile except the soldier, further highlighting his importance. Although speaking to his wife, he faces outward as if to invite the intended viewer into the conversation. The invocation of the viewer in such prints is evident in the text of a lubok from 1887 entitled simply Song (see fig. 7.4) published by A. Abramov, an enterprising hack operator nicknamed ‘cheat’ (zhulik).19 Two dancing male Gypsies face the viewer while two women framed by architectural elements appear in the background. The artist draws the attentive eye into a face-to-face encounter with the singer and the scene, raising issues of freedom and rebellion that a less engaged observer might ignore. Specifically, the singer belittles the social order, demands respect, and echoes popular songs of bandits and Cossacks with his promise to flee to the southern borderlands. The text begins:

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Figure 7.4  Song. Moscow. A. Abramov. 1887. Source: Private Collection. I am a fine Gypsy fellow I am neither lord, nor peasant nor merchant Hey, stand back, watch out Hats off, bow lower I have on the porch a beautiful wife On the stove is a devil of a mother-in-law.

In other words, the singer warns off the viewer while establishing a bond, emphasizing his independence and free will. The song concludes: On this horse I will sit And [ride] further into the steppe Hey, stand back, watch out Hats off, bow lower!

As in some popular religious prints, the words direct the viewer, in

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this case from wife, to mother-in-law, and finally to the horse, as each is mentioned.20 The colour in the original image (not reproduced in fig. 7.4) links the two women with the man holding the stringed instrument, presumably the singer. He is tinted red, as is the roof to his left; whereas the shutters framing his wife and the stove on which his mother-in-law rests are blue. The dog, perhaps a surrogate for the viewer, takes in the scene with the sweep of his body and points with his nose to the horse, the solution to the singer’s family problems. The horse, eye on the viewer, stretches toward the second dancer, the probable addressee and perhaps another surrogate for the viewer. Alternatively, a male viewer could well identify with the singer as the decisive protagonist of the scene. On the wall of a peasant’s cottage, this print, with its play of colour, form, and text, could have sustained interest in its themes of family and freedom, honour and male pride over repeated viewings. The choices portrayed in such prints have to do with determining a life course in the face of difficult and sometimes novel circumstances. In the wake of the Emancipation this encompassed decisions to fall in love, marry, move beyond one’s station, satisfy a craving for a consumer product, break with routine, or escape completely from the accepted pattern of daily life. Almost without exception, the prints illuminate the force of human agency. In thinking about these interactions and their icon-like presentation, the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman about self and identity is evocative. Goffman describes faces as pieces in a ritual game the self plays with others.21 He suggests that face-to-face interactions often reveal differences in codes of conduct expressed through deference and demeanour, and are critical to the workings of society. If we look closely at lubki that feature ordinary interactions, codes of conduct are certainly at play. The chap from Iaroslavl has one understanding of his obligations to his family, and his father has another. The dancing Gypsy counterpoises a free life to the strict rules of the social order. Even the heroic soldier and the enlarged image of Prince Gorchakov suggest how heroism and grandeur contrast with ordinary behaviour. Equally telling are such moralistic pictures as The Tavern (Sytin, 1889), The Son Cursed by his Parents (chromolithograph, Solov’ev, 1883), The Stages of Human Life (Vasil’ev, 1887), Zealous Housekeeping (Sytin, 1889), Knowledge Is Light – Ignorance Is Darkness (Morozov, 1880s), and The Strong and Brave Soldier Anika (Golyshev, 1868), who is shown facing and then experiencing his

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own death.22 In each instance, the subject represents a code of correct behaviour contrasted with something very different. To read these interactions as clashes of codes of conduct is suggestive, but it does not take us very far in explaining the moral or ethical turn in Russian culture. We can additionally reflect on the meaning of Otherness in the tradition in European thought that sees the relationship between the self and the Other as a moral problem. The French critics Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari attribute the overpowering idea of ‘the other person’ to Leibniz’s notion of the Other as representing alternative worlds in his Monadologie (1714).23 Most suggestive in this regard are the writings of the French-Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–95), particularly his masterpiece Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961).24 For Lévinas, the Other signifies everything beyond the self; that is, an infinity of possibility from death to the deity. He associates the Other with desire, freedom, prohibition, compulsion, and finally with an ethical sense of responsibility or at least recognition of another person. The Other in Lévinas’s work represents pluralism, openness to imagining something outside the self. He stresses that this begins with the phenomenon of seeing the face of another person, of someone unique and different. Lévinas’s notion of otherness offers a stimulating way to conceptualize the moral challenges and ethical issues Russians faced in the post-Emancipation era. The onrush of geographic and social mobility, economic growth, urbanization, and other social and cultural changes associated with modernity multiplied contacts between people of different classes, religions, ethnicities, geographic origins, nationalities – and worldly fortunes. The decline of the patriarchal household as lower-class women found work outside the home and middle- and upper-class women sought independent identities required similar adjustments.25 So did the expanding empire and new travel opportunities, as soldiers and migrants confronted people of different nationalities, and the well-heeled visited Europe and other foreign places in record numbers. Late imperial Russia was in motion in almost all respects, from the new draft law of 1874 that inducted a large number of peasants into the army and then returned them to their villages four to six years later as reservists, to the increasingly commercialized agriculture that drew in migrant workers. Under such conditions, ordinary citizens of differing backgrounds as well as the educated elites were ever more likely to encounter unfamiliar people who lived different lives according to dif-

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ferent standards and expectations, or familiar ones in unfamiliar situations. In this milieu of mobility, society retained legally defined but increasingly pressured markers of status, hierarchy, and authority. Writers and artists bridged the long-familiar divides of social cast, nationality, and gender in their works. The explosion of print media, the expansion of the reading public, and the growth of the art market provided the opportunity and challenge to do so.26 The lubok artists and publishers responded to new consumers in an industry alive with activity and enterprise. The cultural elite experienced something equivalent. In high art there was a shift from the familiar and predictable public of the Academy to unfamiliar and often non-noble purchasers in provincial towns with money to spend. In literature, there was a similar change. Some Russian writers in the mid-nineteenth century still wrote for a small public of like-minded readers whom they could very well identify as ‘the reader friend’;27 and Russian writers in the earlier era had often had the experience of reading to relatively small groups comprised of fellow writers and critics. But the gradual emergence of the larger public that began in the 1830s and boomed from the 1860s changed this. Instead of being able to imagine the circulation of a text at least in part as a face-to-face encounter with readers much like themselves, writers now had to imagine something altogether different. Face to face with the public increasingly meant imagining a crowd of readers unlikely to share the author’s education, sophistication, or even perhaps social standing. This expansion of the consumption of culture gradually extended into the culturally ambitious middle classes who bought the elite’s books, subscribed to their journals, purchased their pictures, and attended their plays and concerts.28 Whereas in England and France writers earned considerable sums from publishing in the eighteenth century, Russian writers only began to do so in the 1830s, and would not earn much of note until well after the mid-nineteenth century. The rapidity of the change must have been remarkable to the writers who experienced it. So too for the Peredvizhniki, who were known for their break with the Academy of Art in 1870–1. Their reliance on the travelling exhibition, a medium of display consistent with the increased accessibility of their subject matter, earned them increasing audiences. Their stated aim in their statutes was ‘to broaden the circle of art-lovers.’29 Their exhibits were the only independent art shows in Russia until the 1890s, and they won support from many different segments of society, particularly upwardly mobile industrialists and entrepreneurs.30

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Another indication of increasingly diverse cultural markets was the rise of the illustrated magazines. There were five illustrated weeklies designed for ‘family reading’ in 1860, 18 in 1880, 29 in 1890, and 41 in 1900.31 The star of these so-called thin magazines was Niva (Cornfield, 1870–1917) with a circulation of 120,000 in 1890 and 200,000 a decade later.32 At the bargain price of six rubles a year, Niva was read by nobles, merchants, the middle classes of the cities and countryside, and even by rural schoolteachers, parish priests, tradesmen, and the odd prosperous peasant.33 In 1899 Leo Tolstoy serialized in Niva his novel Resurrection, with a simplified plot and simplified language likely to be accessible to a large and diverse reading public.34 Niva also offered readers a literary supplement beginning in 1891 that featured popular editions of the works of writers such as Tolstoy. A more expensive rival, Rodina (Motherland), reached a circulation of 120,000 in the late 1880s and early 1890s.35 Also noteworthy were weekly urban humour magazines such as Budil’nik (Alarm clock, 1865–1918), a Russian equivalent to the English Punch, where the young Anton Chekhov published. In 1893 the critic D.S. Merezhkovsky suggested that the readers of the ‘petty press’ from ‘the most democratic, even non-intelligentsia milieu’ numbered two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand.36 This is probably an underestimate, however, since the number of family readers of Niva alone would have surpassed these figures. The illustrated magazines provided a continuing display of the mixed population, with social groups and nationalities rubbing shoulders with each other. Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia (Universal image) showed scattered through its pages in the early 1870s a crowd before a Gypsy chorus singing at a fair, a village assembly (shkod) outside the local county seat, a review of the St Petersburg fire brigade, the night-time illumination of a new monument to Catherine II, and a promenade on the Nevskii Prospect with several Cossacks in full costume marching among other citizens.37 Twenty years later Niva featured for readers’ entertainment captivating pictures of parishioners of all classes streaming from a church after an Easter service, a motley crowd awaiting the first train from the newly constructed Siberian Railroad at the city of Kurgan, and a crush of plump Muscovites eating pancakes on the winter holiday of Maslenitsa, the weeklong festival before Lent.38 New and emerging patterns in gender relations were also well represented, particularly in the humour magazines. The cover picture in Budil’nik (Alarm clock) on 30 June 1876 (A Break in Enjoyment) shows a

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well-dressed voyeur with a cigar spying on peasant women in a river while his outraged wife readies to strike him with her umbrella.39 A decade earlier, in 1865, the magazine lampooned the working woman and the pompous man in a cartoon in which a woman asks, ‘Tell me Paul; should a woman work?’ The man’s answer is, ‘Of course, if you want to be a cook or a washerwoman.’40 Budil’nik also displayed pictures of powerful and dangerous women. In 1873, for example, the year in which Tolstoy began to serialize Anna Karenina in Mikhail Katkov’s Russkii vestnik (Russian messenger), Budil’nik featured a predatory woman weaving a gigantic web in which helpless men are caught along with coaches, horses, houses, and a bag of money. 41 The caption reads ‘A two-handed spider.’ The large reading public pioneered by the illustrated magazines attracted popular commentators on a range of moral and ethical issues, including authors of inexpensive books of religious instruction. The church hierarchy had urged parish clergy to carry out special talks (besedy) with peasant parishioners as early as in the 1850s and 1860s and the number of sermons increased markedly in subsequent decades.42 By the end of the century the priest and later radical Duma deputy G.S. Petrov published cheap booklets promoting individual moral responsibility with titles such as Children and Grownups, War and Peace, and The Gospels as the Basis of Life.43 For 15 to 25 kopecks, lay readers might find moral instruction and encouragement, whereas priests could draw inspiration in conveying a similar message to their parishioners. ‘The sins of children are most of all our own sins,’ Petrov writes in one of his booklets, urging parents to attend to their children’s upbringing.44 In another he describes the powerful positive influence of religious texts on soldiers who were in danger of succumbing to drink.45 In a third he warns of the seductiveness of material goods and shops that ‘arouse the appetite’ of the poor person who arrives in a city.46 He could well have been speaking of the wayward son pictured in the lubok titled The Return Home of a Chap from Iaroslavl. Such concerns about how to live in a changing world also no doubt inspired the millions of ordinary people who abandoned the official church for the Old Belief and the various Protestant-like groups that flourished in late imperial Russia.47 As Kevin M. Kain shows in his essay in this volume, Old Believers engaged fully with the often morally charged print culture of late imperial Russia, challenging what they did not like and appropriating what they found useful.

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The newly empowered common people pictured in the illustrated magazines and addressed by popular preachers composed a richly imagined civil society as well as a new consuming public for cultural goods. So taken with these developments were Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that they each introduced the new juries created by the 1864 judicial reform into their novels. The penultimate scene in The Brothers Karamazov involves the trial of the innocent Dmitry in one of the new courts. Dostoevsky describes the varied public and the jury of officials, merchants, tradesmen, and peasants. He shows not only the jury but also a large audience, including many women. The final chapter in which the jury finds Dmitry guilty is titled ‘Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves.’48 Although Dmitry is innocent legally, he is morally culpable in Dostoevsky’s world, and perhaps for that reason the jury finds him guilty. Dostoevsky reiterates the fact that society and perhaps God are passing judgment when, in the final lines of the novel, he has the boys gather around the saintly Alyosha, and as disciples of what amounts to a new church of civil society cry out: ‘Hurrah for Karamazov!’ Tolstoy in his last major novel, Resurrection (1899), goes beyond Dostoevsky; he does not simply describe the jury, but puts his protagonist on it. Nekhliudov, sitting on the jury, recognizes the accused as the young woman he seduced years ago, now a prostitute charged with murder. Nekhliudov must judge the victim whose life he ruined. He instead judges himself and resolves, in a truly Tolstoyan fashion, to reform: ‘Nekhliudov sat in his high-backed chair, the second from the end in the front row. Without removing his pince-nez he stared at Maslova, while a complex, painful process took place in his soul.’49 The fact that Maslova has not recognized him is all the more important, since it makes the moral decision his alone, reorienting his life in recognition literally of the face of another.50 Such scenes are a reminder that one of the most tormenting issues for the greatest of Russian writers was the gulf they imagined separating them from the common people.51 That they conceptualized this in terms of civil society is hardly surprising given the character of the era and the expansion of the consuming public. The angst-ridden works of the Russian literary tradition operate in an intense moral and ethical sphere filled with face-to-face encounters involving a range of situations. Pushkin gives us the duel between Onegin and Lenskii but also other equally charged one-on-one confrontations in the ‘Queen of Spades,’ The History of Pugachev, and Mozart and Salieri. Each reaches a crescendo when the protagonist faces a person

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linked to him by death or desire. The repeated recapitulation of Pushkin’s own fatal duel with d’Anthès belongs to this type of encounter.52 Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time opposes Pechorin to Grinsky, as well as Pechorin to his demon lover. Gogol’ in ‘The Overcoat’ confronts his poor clerk with his bureaucratic nemesis twice – once when he tries to recover his stolen overcoat, and then again when as a ghost he snatches the bureaucrat’s own coat. Tolstoy plots War and Peace and Anna Karenina with such moments but uses this device even more memorably in other works.53 In The Death of Ivan Ilych, the dying Ivan looks to his servant in one of the greatest of Tolstoyan encounters; in Resurrection, the nobleman Nekhliudov confronts the moral choices of his own life in the face of a girl he once seduced. Dostoevsky filled his works with such instances, from Poor Folk to Netochka Nezvanova, and culminating in the most renowned of all such interchanges in The Brothers Karamazov, when the Grand Inquisitor faces Christ himself. In a 1906 illustration of the scene, the Grand Inquisitor opens the door to the cell in which he has imprisoned Christ, glares at him, and speaks the famous line: ‘Leave, don’t hinder us!’ In fact, illustrators of Dostoevsky’s fiction portrayed one face-to-face confrontation after another.54 Similarly, Russian art of the second half of the nineteenth century features many instances of frontal confrontations between protagonists personifying moral dilemmas. Prominent among them are Nikolai Ge’s famous paintings ‘Quod est veritas?’ Christ and Pilate (1890) and Peter I Interrogating Tsarevich Alexey Petrovich at Peterhof (1871), as well as Mikhail Nesterov’s The Vision of the Boy Bartholomew (1889–90). These imagined face-to-face moments are not about doubles or doppelgangers; the Other in each instance is a unique, distinct person joined to the protagonist through a relationship featuring moral issues and choices. The morally charged gaze is perhaps also in play in Ilya Repin’s famous Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, 16 November 1581 (1885) in which the bloodthirsty tsar stares into space after killing his son as if seeking the eye of God.55 The religiously inclined contemporary viewer might likewise follow the upward gaze of the youth who looks into a beam of sunlight in Repin’s famous picture Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870–3). The gulf between the subject and the Other in the culture of the educated classes is mirrored in the popular prints. The chap from Iaroslavl, the soldier explaining heroism to his wife, and the Gypsy singing of freedom are participants in conversations across a gulf. In both educated and peasant culture these encounters represent ethical issues, sometimes moral dilemmas involving good and evil, and ultimately

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the reflection of ambivalence in the face of the imperative to choose between alternatives. These are moments in which the human condition is illuminated. We may not be accustomed to granting an ethical aspect to the choices in the lubok between adultery or fidelity, debauchery or sobriety, chastity or promiscuity, altruism or self-fulfilment, duty to country or family, submission to mortality or defiance of death, but these were the popular manifestations of the contemporaneous portrayal of the same or related issues by Russian thinkers and writers who captivated an international audience. The greatest writers and artists shared with the semi-educated creators of the popular prints a reflexive impulse to invite the reader and viewer to enter into works of art as both observer and morally obligated participant. Responsibility for one’s own actions in a context of respect for the Other preoccupied both the great and the lesser. The force of the moral presence in late imperial Russian culture is not diminished by recognition of its generality in the hierarchy of classes. Nor is its significance undercut by the existence of similar scenes in popular prints elsewhere in Europe. The power of these Russian images derives in part from their very European ordinariness on the one hand and their novelty within the oldregime society of tsarist Russia on the other. Pioneering late imperial Russian advertisers gave these momentous confrontations a humorous twist. A commercial artist latched onto Vasnetsov’s famous painting At the Crossroads, which he completed in 1882, replacing the skull with a bottle of beer.56 Adept marketers showed Repin’s quizzical youth, who seemingly dreams of a better world in Barge Haulers on the Volga, longing instead for a smoke.57 Repin’s Cossacks in The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV (1880–91) became in the hands of an adman in the early 1900s exponents of the pleasure of smoking ‘Ottoman’ tobacco.58 Although these can be seen as a simple appropriation by the advertising industry of well-known cultural landmarks, the appropriation included the entire territory of the conflict between personal pleasure and societal responsibility. Am I entitled to a smoke or a beer, or should I sacrifice pleasure to meet the needs of others?59 The opportunity to choose even in an embryonic consumer economy signalled a shift from age-old communal controls to self-control and a more individualized, modern identity.60 The need for self-control was everywhere apparent in the emergent culture of consumption. In an 1897 advertisement for perfumes and soaps, a devilishly swanky man in red tights and a cape points a black wand at a selection of products.61 One for Singer sewing machines

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shows a young woman in a luxurious traditional dress looking up from her work and smiling.62 In a poster for Zaria cigarettes from the same era a peasant, a workman, an aristocratic lady, and several businessmen besiege a fresh-faced vendor.63 The graphic artists of the advertising industry did not ponder deep philosophical issues, but by initiating a conversation about personal choices and drawing the viewer or reader into it, they shared in the process of enlarging individual consciousness and responsibility within their cultural context. Nothing better expresses the enlargement of the self at the expense of the old order than representation of Tolstoy in the new popular commercial medium of film. The successful director Yakov Protozanov in his banned film The Departure of a Great Elder (1912) shows Tolstoy rising from his deathbed to stand in the sky face to face with Christ or God; that is, appearing on an almost equal plane in Lévinas’s terms with the ultimate Other. The absence of any official earthly figure to challenge or mediate Tolstoy’s moral authority is striking. In popular culture, the expansion of civil society, the shrinking of the authority of the state, and the increased autonomy of the individual citizen in economic and legal terms cleared the way for the most characteristic of modern heroes, the detective; the autonomous actor par excellence for civil society.64 The detective is a stand-in for the public; he is its best representative, an exemplar of individual agency. The Russian craze for detective stories after the Revolution of 1905 marked the culmination of the process that gained momentum with the rise of the late nineteenth-century lubok and brought the ethical dimension in Russian culture to the fore. The detective stories captivated a more diverse and urban public than the late nineteenth-century lubki, but these purchasers also found a display of personal choices and ethical issues. The prerevolutionary private detective is an ‘in your face’ hero and a figure of civil society. Like the heroes of the lubok, he is an independent actor with whom we may engage or at least accept as a good citizen. The detective and the criminal are in effect twins and their powers clash, although the hero is finally superior. The implicit invitation to side with the detective gives these crude adventures the ambiance of the representations of figures of secular authority in the lubok. Dispensing justice, struggling against the forces of evil, the detective upholds the moral legitimacy of the social order; so also in their way do the military figures represented in the lubok prints. The difference is that one wears the uniform of the old order and the other does not.

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The early twentieth-century detective supplants officialdom in his pursuit of justice much as Tolstoy’s hero Nekhliudov supplants the state in Resurrection. They are both self-assertive rule breakers, although Nekhliudov’s moral self is well defined and the Russian detectives are virtual stick figures. Nevertheless, the detective exemplifies the selfassertive hero who ultimately vanquishes a figure that threatens not only the individual, but also the collective. Sherlock Holmes is the ‘super-detective’ (sverkhsyshchik) in P. Nikitin’s rendition of his adventures in Russia in 1900.65 Characteristically, Holmes tells Watson in Nikitin’s series, ‘Most of all others turn to us for help.’66 Later in the same tale, when they are recognized at a crime scene, Watson notes, ‘The investigators and the bailiff rushed up to us as if we were their bosses.’67 The history of the pre-revolutionary Russian detective story is truncated by the Revolution of 1917, but Pinkerton clearly ruled the lubok world of late imperial Russia. One story, entitled Nat Pinkerton – King of the Detectives: The Steel Point, has a puzzle, a superhero, a sidekick, and a society and police at bay. The cover shows the hero bound and facing certain death in the form of a cobra, much as in Vasnetsov’s picture and the lubok of The Brave Soldier Anika. The story begins ‘All the New York police were on alert and the enormous city was seized by panic.’ 68 The ‘invisible one’ has killed eight without leaving a mark. ‘“Truly, Bob,” said Nat Pinkerton [to his assistant, in Russian], sitting in his apartment over his morning coffee, “this is the trickiest riddle I have ever encountered.”’69 The Russian Pinkerton lacks Holmes’s eccentricities – he is chiefly an actor rather than a thinker – but he also solves problems and protects society better than do the police. The police turn to him for help, as in his dialogue with an inspector: ‘“What are we to do, Mister Pinkerton?”’ Nat soon arrests the villain. The October Revolution brought a break in the cultural ascendance of the morally conscious and empowered individual. Neither Tolstoy’s peasant shirt nor Pinkerton’s gumshoes could retain their power to confront and question the uniformed authority of the Soviet state. Nor was there room for the old lubok’s ambiguity about life’s choices. The new revolutionary state filled the place of the Other and over the course of the 1920s enclosed the infinity of its former boundaries, letting all know that moral quandaries and angst over ethical issues were now part of the pre-revolutionary old order – no need to trouble with those any longer. The imagined moral self shrank because the possibility of imagining other worlds and recognizing them as legitimate also shrank. Al-

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though the celebration of the hero, and particularly the uniformed hero, grew in Soviet culture, the heroes themselves paradoxically diminished because they no longer fought the significant moral battles – they just did what the new political orthodoxy expected of them.70 Moreover, they could never attain the enlarged size of a lubok hero simply because the party-state, which commandeered that role for itself, could never fully relinquish power to an independent individual. After the revolution face-to-face interactions were gradually reconfigured under the suspicious eye of the Bolshevik regime. One elaborate project to engage mass readers on Bolshevik terms was that of Marietta Shaginian. From late 1924 through 1926 she published three novels, parodying in turn the detective story, science fiction, and the travel adventure. The Mess-Mend series as it was called, after the secret password of its working-class heroes, appeared first in thirty-two page segments, like the Pinkertons, in quantities of thirty thousand copies, then as separate books. In 1926 it became a popular film, directed by Fedor Otsep and written by Otsep and Boris Barnet.71 All three novels feature foreign supporters of the Soviet Union operating abroad. In Yankees in Petrograd evil fascists (imperialists in later editions) try to blow up Soviet leaders with the help of an engineer’s son, who mistakenly blames them for murdering his father. The chief of the state publishing house N.L. Mershcheriakov in an introduction praised Shaginian’s ideological rigour and ‘healthy revolutionary fantasy,’ stressing how she handled the issue of agency: ‘The novel’s main hero is the collective of the proletariat.’72 He wrote: ‘All other heroes struggle for or against the proletarian revolution, not for personal wishes and strivings, and they can complete heroic feats only because the proletariat is behind them.’ The confrontation between self and other becomes a confrontation between the state, hidden here under the rubric of the proletariat, and its enemies, with the hero or the individual self as an odd man out.73 In Yankees Shaginian introduces the secret Mess-Mend organization of workers, including Mick Thingmaster, Lory Lane, a young metalworker, and Sorry, a technologist who spies on villains. The drama also concerns Arthur Rockefeller (Morlender in later editions), the engineer’s son, and Vivian Orton, who also seeks revenge in a mistaken belief that Arthur’s father had killed her mother. There are disguises and substitutions. Fascists kill Vasilov, an American communist travelling to Russia, and send Arthur in his stead. Mick and Sorry substitute Viv-

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ian for Vasilov’s wife, who was to travel separately to the Soviet Union but is also murdered. Fascists try to kill Vivian, who spies on them in disguise. The heroes proliferate, but are powerless. Love blossoms. Arthur, claiming to be Vasilov, meets Vivian, claiming to be Mrs Vasilov, but the fascists guess her ruse and kidnap her. Arthur discovers them questioning Vivian, but is overpowered. Unlike Pinkerton, who can freeze a villain with his gaze, Arthur proves a wimp. Mick and his dog Beauty track the head villain Cice to a conference of psychiatrists in Petrograd, where he poses as an American doctor. He is unmasked by Lepsius, Arthur’s family physician, who has discovered Cice’s crimes in America. Lepsius diagnoses in Cice ‘a fatal deformity’ that occurs in émigrés whose hatred causes them to turn into four-legged beasts. Cice attacks the doctor, is seized by militiamen, but transforms himself into a monster and escapes. Mick, Sorry, and Beauty draw back in terror. As Cice flees, Mick exclaims, ‘No court in the world can punish him more than he has already been punished!’74 Later editors disallowed this ending. In the revised 1954 edition, an anonymous Red Army soldier kills Cice, confirming Mershcheriakov’s observation that the proletariat is the novel’s main hero. To conclude a detective story in this manner is to have Pinkerton or Holmes beg a policeman to arrest the criminal. To conclude an adventure story in this way demystifies the hero and heroine. In the 1926 film Cice grabs onto an elevator cable and is killed without human intervention. If Arthur is a constrained hero, so are Mick and Sorry, who have no romances, no private lives, and no motives but class war. As Mershcheriakov put it, the heroes ‘have no personal wishes and strivings.’75 The state has replaced the self, and the face of the Other has become that of the enemy for whom there is no question of mercy or scope for moral ambiguity. The late imperial detective Pinkerton saves New York with his superb powers. Shaginian’s Soviet protagonists, on the contrary, acquire little power, though they occasionally accomplish splendid deeds. This casting was necessary in a cultural system that left citizens beholden to authority. Since all thanks were due to the party, state, and leaders, heroes and heroines could not become society’s benefactors, even in the world of the novel.76 The continued popularity of the Pinkertons in tattered pre-revolutionary editions well into the 1930s is a testament to lasting allure of the detective as an independent hero who outdid the state and did not have to bow down before it.77 So in effect is the

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continued effort to create a Soviet equivalent to the detective story in the novels about crime in the 1930s and 1940s, as Stephen Lovell rightly affirms in his essay in this volume. Lévinas in Totality and Infinity argues that war destroys the identity of the Other and imprisons the self within its totality. He writes, ‘Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.’78 The face to face encounter between the state and its enemies does not lead to recognition of the Other, but to denial and obliteration. In Lévinas’s argument, military war and class war are alike in their destruction of moral ambiguity and encapsulation of the self within its own boundaries. War was a favourite subject of Soviet authors, and the militarization of society and culture shifted moral issues from the personal to the social, from the individual to the collective, from self to self-sacrifice. In other cultures, war has also been represented, probably falsely but nonetheless effectively, as a font of deep personal experience and selfrealization, as Ernest Hemingway and James Jones show in their classic American novels about the First and Second World Wars. The Soviet treatment of war, in contrast, features statements such as ‘your life is no longer your own, but belongs to the Party and the whole people,’ from A. Fadeev’s The Young Guard (1946). Young men and women hardly kiss, despite their shared struggle.79 The emotional effacement of heroes, which is the ultimate denial of self, occurs to a ludicrous extent in early Cold-War propaganda fiction. Andrei, a border guard and the hero of A.O. Avdeenko’s By the Tisza, is on heightened alert. His dying mother writes begging him to come to her bedside. When he confesses his grief to his superior, the officer tells him that if his mother knew of the alert, ‘she would apologize for troubling you!’ She would say, he added, ‘Forgive me, again, forgive me. Grip your gun firmly.’80 Then he asks, ‘Do you agree or not agree with your mother?’ In effect, the officer elides the ethical problem: there is no choice; there is no legitimate Other in the eyes of the state. Nor does the self in the person of Andrei have any personal needs or desires that might override the officer’s demands. The effacement of the tormenting dilemmas of the moral self is also found in one of the most canonical early Soviet works, Arkadii Gaidar’s semi-autobiographical novel that is appropriately titled School (1930).81

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The hero-narrator in the course of his civil war adventures meets a person of the same age dressed in a gymnasium school jacket. They go along together, and Gaidar hopes to link up with the Red Army, but the Other proves to be a treacherous supporter of the Whites. When the young villain lunges at the apparently sleeping narrator, the narrator shoots him. The shooting does not raise a moral quandary, but rather affirms the hero’s identity. Later, Gaidar succeeds in joining the Red Army and is inducted into the Party. When the required Party document is signed, his officer-mentor exclaims: ‘I am now not only commander but also [your] godfather.’82 After this putative adoption, the state personified by the officer has effectively pre-empted all competing loyalties. Schooled in war, with Party card in hand, the hero can now distinguish clearly between us and them. The innovation in post-revolutionary culture and the profound discontinuity with its predecessor was the severing of the moral bond between the self and the Other. The rupture affected not only the high culture of recognized great writers and artists, but also the full range of works known and appreciated by ordinary people. After 1917 the latter suddenly confronted each other in new roles, both as enforcers of the rules of the regime and as its victims, but without the cultural instruments used in the past to address complex moral issues. Bolsheviks gradually created an official public culture in which the state merged with the self, and the true Other was defined as outside the realm of responsibility, resident of a region inhabited only by spies, traitors, and enemies of the people who had no moral claim to consideration. The deeply textured moral space of pre-revolutionary culture, even when manifest in silly cigarette adverts and detective stories, became instead a flat surface, aesthetically appealing in its best manifestations, but morally shallow. The anguished questioning of the Grand Inquisitor gave way to rote repetition of slogans such as ‘Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for a Happy Childhood,’ which remained with varying sophistication up until the fall of communism. Choices about how to live morphed into questions of obedience and correct behaviour in the performance of official duties, rites, and rituals. Appreciation of the degree to which moral and ethical choices were embedded in the cultural landscape of ordinary Russians prior to the revolution highlights how deeply the revolutionary discontinuity cut into the cultural psyche. How Russians will reconstruct their moral and ethical discourse in the present era and how it will be reflected in today’s and tomorrow’s culture are yet to be seen.

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224  Jeffrey Brooks Notes   1 I thank Karen Brooks, Gulru Cakmak, Georgiy Chernyavsiy, Christina Lodder, Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Anne Eakin Moss, Georgi Parpulov, and Miranda Remnek for helpful comments. I thank the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center and Miranda Remnek for hosting the conference at which an earlier version of this essay was presented, and I thank the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library for access to the library’s collection of lubki. The essay was also discussed in the Seminar of the Johns Hopkins History Department. I thank my colleagues for their suggestions.   2 See, for example, Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 22. Like many clichés this has an element of truth. It has also been challenged. See N.M. Zorkaia’s classic study of literature and film, Na rubezhe stoletii: U istokov massovogo iskusstva v Rossii, 1900–1910 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976).   3 Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985; repr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003); citations below are to the 2003 edition. See also Brooks, ‘How a Soldier Saved Peter I: A Kudzu Vine of Russia’s Popular Fiction,’ Russian History/Histoire Russe 34 (2007): 1–19; ‘How Tolstoevskii Pleased Readers and Rewrote a Russian Myth,’ Slavic Review 64 (Fall 2005): 538–59; ‘Il romanzo popolare in Russia: Dalle storie di briganti al realismo socialista,’ in Il romanzo, vol. 2, Le fome, ed. Franco Moretti (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 447–69.   4 On the varied styles of coloration, see A.G. Sakovich, ‘Moskovskaia narodnaia graviura vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (K probleme krizisa zhanra),’ in Narodnaia kartinka XVII–XIX vekov: Materialy i issledovaniia, ed. M.A. Alek­seeva and E.A. Mishina (St Petersburg: Izd-vo ‘Dmitrii Bulanin’, 1996), 154–9.   5 On this distinction among books, see A.S. Prugavin, Zaprosy naroda i obiazannosti intelligentsii v oblasti prosveshcheniia i vospitaniia, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1895), 389, and Kh. D. Alchevskaia, Chto chitat’ narodu (St Petersburg, 1884), 1: 48, 347, 459.   6 N.A. Kozhin and I.S. Abramov make this point in Narodnyi lubok vtoroi poloviny XIX veka i sovremennyi (Leningrad: Izd. Muzeia obshchestva pooshchreniia khudozhestva, 1929), 17.   7 On lubki of military heroes and tsars and a lubok of Skobelev in this style, see Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 93.

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The Moral Self in Literary and Visual Cultures  225   8 Kozhin and Abramov, Narodnyi lubok, 17.   9 B.M. Sokolov, Khudozhestvennyi iazyk russkogo lubka (Moscow: Russkii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1999), 38–51; for nineteenth- century icons, see Wendy R. Salmond, Tradition in Transition: Russian Icons in the Age of the Romanovs (Washington, DC: Hillwood Museum and Gardens, 2004), 35, 47, 54. 10 Salmond, Tradition in Transition, 21–2. 11 Chris J. Chulos describes the welcoming of an icon of St Nicholas the Wonderworker as ‘an anthropomorphized guest of honor’ in Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861–1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 50. 12 G. Petrov, K svetu! Sbornik statei, 4th ed. (Moscow: Sytin, 1904), 23. 13 P.A. Florenskii, U vodorazdelov mysli, vol. 2, part III, ‘Obratnaia perspektiva’ (Moscow: Izd. ‘Pravda’, 1900), http://www.vehi.net/florensky/ vodorazd/P_3.html. 14 John Binns, An Introduction to the Christian Orthodox Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 103; see also Vera Shevzov, ‘Scripting the Gaze: Liturgy, Homilies, and the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in Late Imperial Russia,’ in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 61–2. 15 Michel Quenot, L’icône: fenêtre sur l’absolu (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 58. 16 Léonide Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, ed. Urs Graf-Verlag, trans. G.E.H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky (Boston: Boston Book and Art Shop, 1956), 41. 17 On ideology, see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol.1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5–6, 27–8. 18 I describe this revolution in When Russia Learned to Read. 19 Prugavin, Zaprosy naroda, 288. 20 This was characteristic of some popular renditions of the Last Judgment that circulated in the middle of the nineteenth century. 21 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967), see particularly the essays ‘On Face-Work,’ 5–46 and ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,’ 47–96. 22 These prints are in the Slavic and East European Collections of the New York Public Library. 23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 17.

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226  Jeffrey Brooks 24 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 25 See Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 68–127 and Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7–33. 26 On the expansion of the Russian reading public in the late imperial period, see, for example, A.I. Reitblat, ‘Chitatel’skaia auditoria,’ in Kniga v Rossii, 1881–1895, ed. I.I. Frolova (St Petersburg: Rossiiskaia national’naia biblioteka, 1997), 305–17, and Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: Ocherki po istorii chteniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Izd. MPI, 1991), reprinted as Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: I drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009); see also E.A. Dinershtein, ‘Fabrikant’ chitatelei A. F. Marks (Moscow: Kniga, 1986), 25–54. On the earlier period, see Miranda Remnek: ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences, 1828–1848’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999) and ‘“A Larger Portion of the Public”: Fiction, Journals & Female Readers in the Early Reign of Nicholas I,’ in An Improper Profession: Women, Gender and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Barbara Norton and Jehanne Gheith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 26–52; see also Susan Smith-Peter, ‘The Russian Provincial Newspaper and Its Public, 1788–1864,’ The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1908 (October 2008).  27 M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin bewailed the scarcity of the ‘reader friend’ in an essay published in 1887. See M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 16, bk. 2, Melochi zhizni 1886-1887 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1974), 154. 28 Again, this process has been noted as early as the 1830s. See Anne Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); see also Reitblat, ‘Chitatel’skaia auditoria’ and Ot Bovy, and Remnek, ‘The Expansion of Russian Reading Audiences’ and ‘“A Larger Portion of the Public.”’ For the later period, see Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), and Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 29 Quoted in David Jackson, The Wanderers and Critical Realism in NineteenthCentury Russian Painting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 28.

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The Moral Self in Literary and Visual Cultures  227 30 Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), 43. 31 Reitblat, Ot Bovy, 97. 32 Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 113. 33 Prugavin, Zaprosy naroda, 209–18. See also Reitblat, Ot Bovy, 98–9. 34 See the comments of P.N. Krasnov, a critic for Nedelia (Week), quoted in P.I. Biriukov, L.N. Tolstoi. Biografiia (Berlin: Izd. I. P. Ladyzhnikova, 1921), 3:570. The review appeared in Knizhki ‘Nedeli’, the supplement of Nedelia, no. 1 (1900): 200–13. 35 Reitblat, Ot Bovy, 100, 105. 36 D.S. Merezhkovsky, O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury (St Petersburg: Tipo-Litografiia B. M. Vol’fa, 1893), 20. 37 Vsemirnaia illustratsiia, no. 109 (23 January 1871), 77; no. 140 (4 September 1871), 153; no. 250 (13 October1874), 248; no. 258 (15 December 1873), cover; no. 274 (30 March 1874), 220. 38 Niva, no. 16 (16 April 1894), 364; no. 25 (18 June 1894), cover. 39 Budil’nik, no. 25 (30 June 1876), cover. 40 Budil’nik, no. 6 (9 February 1865), 42 41 Budil’nik , no. 25 (19 June 1873), 72. 42 See Gregory L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 126, 130, 392n202), and also Susan Smith-Peter, ‘Books behind the Altar: Religion, Village Libraries, and the Moscow Agricultural Society,’ Russian History 31, no. 3 (fall 2004): 217. 43 G. S. Petrov, Voina i mir (St Petersburg: tip. P.F. Voshchinskoi, 1904); Deti i vzroslye (St Petersburg: tip. P. F. Voshchinskoi, 1904); Evangelie, kak osnova zhizni, 3rd ed. (St Petersburg: tip P.F. Voshchinskoi, 1899). The publisher claims on the cover of G.S. Petrov, Brat’ia pisateli, 8th ed. (St Petersburg: tip. Voshchinskoi, 1904) that thirty-six thousand copies of this booklet have appeared. Petrov emerged as a left-wing priest deputy after the Revolution of 1905. 44 G.S. Petrov, Deti i vzroslye, 24. 45 G.S. Petrov, Bozh’i rabotniki, 5th ed. (Moscow: Sytin, 1904), 6–8. 46 G.S. Petrov, Zerna dobra: Sbornik statei, 5th ed. (Moscow: Sytin, 1904), 72– 3. 47 For example, see Sergei Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millenialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), 263–318. 48 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Pen-

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228  Jeffrey Brooks

49 50 51

52

53

54

55

56 57 58 59

60 61

62 63 64

guin, 2003), 748, and Polnoe sobranii sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 15:179. Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 56–7. Ibid., 99. From different vantage points Susan McReynolds in Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Anti Semitism (Evan­ ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008) and Nancy Ruttenburg in Dostoevsky’s Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) stress Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with the common people. On duels, see Irina Reyfman, Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) and Aleksandr Katsura, Duel’ v istorii Rossii (Moscow: Raduga, 2006). For Tolstoy’s use of such confrontations, see Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845–1887 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 91–4, 295–324. N.G. Goncharova, F.M. Dostoevskii v zerkalakh grafiki i kritiki (1848–1998) (Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2005), 291. The illustration is by Ia. Turlygin. See also 288–9, 326–27, 348, 428, 470, and 477. Yelena Nesterova, The Itinerants: The Masters of Russian Realism: Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Bournemouth, UK: Parkstone Publish­ ers; St Petersburg: Aurora Art Publishers, 1996). See also Olga’s Gallery, http://www.abcgallery.com/alfaindR.html. Elena Chernevich, Russian Graphic Design, 1880–1917 (New York: Abbe­ ville, 1990), 95. Ibid., 99. A.E. Snopkov, Reklama v plakate: Russkii torgovo-promyshlennyi plakat za 100 let (Moscow: Kontakt-Kul’tura, 2007), 27. On the moral implications of mass consumption and advertising, see Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late NineteenthCentury France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 4–7. On this and the paradoxes of consumerism, see Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 72–4. Torgovaia reklama i upakovka v Rossii XIX-XX vv. : Iz fondov Gosudarstvennogo Istoricheskogo Muzeia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Muzei, 1993), 54. Chernevich, Russian Graphic Design, 97. Torgovaia reklama, 32. On pre-revolutionary Russian detectives, see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 141–6, 207–13, and A.I. Reitblat, ‘Detektivnaia literatura i russkii

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65 66 67 68 69 70

71

72 73

74 75 76

chitatel’ (vtoraia polovina XIX-nachalo XX vv.),’ in Knizhnoe delo v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX-nachale XX veka: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (St Petersburg: Russkaia National’naia Biblioteka, 1994), 7:126–40; on Soviet detectives, see Stephen Lovell’s essay in this volume and Anthony Olcott, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). On Holmes as an individualistic defender of liberal values, see Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 18–19, and Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 166–9. P. Nikitin, Sverkh-syshchik. Iz poslednikh prikliuchenii Sherloka Kholmsa v Rossii (Moscow: Poplavskii, 1900). P. Nikitin, ‘Strashnyi dushitel’,’ reprinted in Staryi russkii detektiv: roman, rasskazy, ed. O. Krasnolistov (Zhitomir: ‘Olesia’, 1991), 1:236. Ibid., 241. Nat Pinkerton, korol’ syshchikov. Stal’noe zhalo (St Petersburg: Razvlechenie, 1915?), 1. Ibid., 3. On the Stalinist hero without sympathy for the enemy, see Gregory Carlton, ‘Na pokhoronakh zhivykh: Teoriia “Zhivogo Cheloveka” i formirovanie geroia v rannem sotsrealizme,’ in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Hans Günther and Evgenii Dobrenko (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), 339–51. The original version of Mess Mend appears in vols. 3–4 of Marietta Shaginian, Sobranie sochinenii, 1905–1933 (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo ‘Khudozhestvennaia lit-ra,’ 1935). The first volume of Mess Mend was later republished in new versions, one of which appears in English as Mess-Mend, Yankees in Petrograd, trans. Samuel D. Cioran (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1991). See also Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 128–34. Shaginian, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:108. I discuss the proletariat as an referent of the state in ‘Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s,’ in New Directions in Soviet History: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, July 1990, ed. Stephen White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 27–40. Ibid, 367. Shaginian, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:108. I discuss this moral economy of obligation in Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 83–105.

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230  Jeffrey Brooks 77 See, for example, E. Taratuna, ‘Pochemu chitaiut Pinkertona,’ Izvestiia, no. 188 (4 August 1935). 78 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 21. 79 A. Fadeev, The Young Guard (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), 485. 80 A. Avdeenko, Nad Tissoi (Iz pogranichnoi khroniki) (Moscow: Voennoe Izdatel’stvo Ministerstva Oborony Soiuza SSR, 1955), 62. 81 Arkadii Gaidar, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1964), 1:93–335. On the ‘relentless’ official promotion of Gaidar and his works, see Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 460. 82 Gaidar, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:328.

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8 Books and Their Readers in Twentieth-Century Russia stephen lovell

Editor’s Note Our fourth thematic group deals more squarely with issues of ‘reader response’ and its link with publishing. Both essays focus on the Soviet era, with this first contribution taking the broad approach of the cultural historian, and providing a rich overview of recent developments in twentieth-century Russian print culture studies. For the most part, the essay itself resists extensive use of the theoretical models sometimes encountered in print culture studies (the agency of change of Eisenstein, the move to extensive reading of Engelsing, the readerresponse theory of scholars like Fish and Jauss, elite versus popular culture, gender issues, and the like), and instead uses new Russian scholarship and recently published archival documents to provide a dense tissue of practical data and sources on what and how people were reading throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. It comments especially on major publication categories – sometimes using case studies like the detective novel – and also observes major trends, for example, a recent dramatic shift from ‘worthwhile fiction and political commentary’ to ‘“light” fiction and instructional literature on childrearing, accountancy, and so on.’ It notes, too, the rather spectacular current growth in Russian publishing, which Lovell calls ‘conclusive proof of the improving moral health of the Russian nation.’ It ends by suggesting a variety of avenues for further research, including the changing contexts of reading in the USSR, and articulates why the study of print culture in the Soviet period is as interesting as the cultures of earlier periods of Russian history, placing print culture studies in the centre of cultural scholarship. The reader of this essay may seek to build on the tapestry of practical data presented here, both in the ways suggested, and perhaps within the framework of a relevant model from print culture or reader-response theory. For instance,

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232  Stephen Lovell

a recent article (12 March 2009) on the BBC ‘newsforums’ web site (http:// newsforums.bbc.co.uk) raised the issue of the effect of the Internet on critical thinking, suggesting that ‘younger people are failing to learn the skills of deep reading, and instead are too ready just to skip to another web page.’ This is reminiscent of the transformation from intensive to extensive reading posited by Engelsing as occurring around 1750, and begs further analysis of the question (a likely concern for many) of whether the coming of the Internet has been an equally significant divide. There are no doubt other such applications in the Soviet and post-Soviet context. For much of the twentieth century, Russians reckoned to have a special relationship with the printed word. The Soviet people, in the well-worn phrase, constituted the ‘most active reading nation in the world’ (samyi chitaiushchii narod v mire). This patriotic cultural myth, intensively propagated by the regime from the mid-1930s onwards, did not always square with empirical observation of Russians’ preferred recreations. It also seemed to rely on research methods that were far from rigorous. The main supporting evidence was the number of people spotted reading books on the metro.1 Instead of trying to determine, on the basis of usually imperfect evidence, and in the absence of a firm basis for cross-cultural comparison, whether Russians read ‘a lot,’ ‘a little,’ or somewhere in between, it is more rewarding to investigate what and how they read. Until recently, research on this question relied on study of the key institutions of Soviet print culture (above all, publishing and the book trade) as well as of the huge body of commentary and research on the Soviet reader that appeared between the 1920s and the perestroika era.2 Now, however, we can benefit from a lengthening of chronological perspective (otherwise known as hindsight) and from the various fruits of the archival revolution in Soviet studies. This chapter, then, will be a survey of recent developments in the study of twentieth-century Russian print culture, and will also attempt to articulate questions that seem promising for future research in the field. There is perhaps no better place to start than the present. To write on this topic is to be confronted by the speed of change. In the last twenty years we have moved from the glasnost era, when the Soviet people finally did become the most politically engaged nation of readers in the world, to the era of economic reforms, when all the talk was of cultural crisis and the death of the book, and now to the present day,

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when it has become clear that Russians have not stopped reading – just that they no longer read what some would say they should.3 Instead of ‘worthwhile’ fiction and political commentary, they now read ‘light’ fiction and instructional literature on child-rearing, accountancy, and so on. Reports of cultural meltdown that were heard in the first half of the 1990s now seem to have been seriously exaggerated. In many ways, the myth of the samyi chitaiushchii narod v mire fits Russia better in the multimedia age of the early twenty-first century than it did in the 1970s. True, the output of Russian publishing dipped alarmingly at the time of the Soviet collapse and for some time afterwards. The economic value of the book plummeted, as did that of learning of all kinds; the only historical parallel for the intelligentsia’s flight from higher education in the early 1990s is the Chinese Cultural Revolution.4 But the situation has now stabilized, education has recovered its value, and we can speak of a book boom occurring in the early twenty-first century. Even if we take our figures from the All-Russian Book Chamber (which are always understatements, as they rely on the copies that publishers choose to deposit), the situation appears to be anything but gloomy. After descending to a post-Soviet low of under thirty thousand titles per year in 1992 and 1993, publishers reached an all-time high of fifty-six thousand titles in 2000. As Kristine and John Bushnell observed in a report to the 2001 Summer Slavic Librarians’ Workshop held at the University of Illinois, the book business was comfortably outperforming the vodka industry by the end of the millennium (which, one would have thought, is fairly conclusive proof of the improving moral and physical health of the Russian nation).5 At the start of the present millennium, the growth trend in Russian publishing continued, and it may fairly be called spectacular. In 2005, again according to Book Chamber figures, more than ninety-five thousand titles were published in the Russian Federation.6 The Bushnells are surely right to say, in their 2001 report, that figures regarding print run are an even more extreme understatement than those for number of titles. Publishers, of course, have a hard fiscal reason to understate the level of their own economic activity: low declared turnover means low tax liability. But, according to the available figures, it seems that the average print run of books has fallen significantly: from more than thirty thousand in the mid-1980s to well under ten thousand in the early 2000s. This should, I think, be taken as evidence not of decline, but of a desirable increase in the responsiveness and level of differentiation of the book market.

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234  Stephen Lovell

Just as in Soviet times, the single largest thematic category (in terms of number of titles) is ‘political and socio-economic’ literature (though this now comprises textbooks on management and public relations rather than Marxist-Leninist political economy); second place is taken by fiction; third place by books on education and culture. This last category quite expectedly tops the lists for overall print run, as it includes textbooks.7 Russian publishers are using more or less the same marketing strategies as anyone else. They work hard to establish particular authors as ‘brand names.’ They have attractive, easy-to-use, and informative web sites. After a few taps of the keyboard, you can easily discover, for example, when Paulo Coelho will be signing books at a venue near you on his tour through Siberia.8 If Russian book marketing has any specific qualities of its own, they seem to lie in the preference for presenting books in series with instantly recognizable insignia. This practice surely has its roots in the ways in which knowledge was systematized for the reading public in the innumerable series publications of the Soviet era. Many of these were launched in the 1970s, when Soviet publishers took a step sideways from the educative role they had been meant to perform since the 1920s and instead tried to turn their mass audience into book connoisseurs.9 The impression of a book boom is confirmed when you walk into a bookshop – and not only in Moscow and St Petersburg. My own recent experiences outside the two capitals include Vladimir and Nizhnii Novgorod in April and May 2006. Admittedly, these cities are far from the back of beyond, but even so the attractive displays and light, airy premises of many bookshops are a wonderful change from what foreign visitors will recall even of the late 1990s, let alone the Soviet era. The self-service format is not quite universal, but it is more common than the traditional arrangement whereby the shop assistant presides behind the counter over books that are accessible only to the gaze of the consumer. Nor is it the case that the book business is dominated by the tawdry novelties of the present day. Places like Vladimir and Nizhnii also have a flourishing second-hand book business. It is not just the layout of bookshops that is striking, but also their contents. Whereas in the first half of the 1990s readers had to rely on translations if they wanted to read romantic fiction or hard-boiled detective novels, they now have ‘native’ versions of these and other genres in abundance. One of the most significant developments in post-Soviet book publishing is surely that women have now been recognized as a

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Books and Their Readers in Twentieth-Century Russia  235

distinct, and highly profitable, category of consumer. There is a long debate in literary studies as to whether Harlequin romances are mere opiates that lull women into accepting the patriarchal order or, by contrast, agreeable fantasies that give them space to dream and time, however minimal, to themselves.10 These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but in the Russian context it is appropriate to stress the latter: after decades of ‘double burden’ for women in domestic life and demotion of romance by Soviet cultural policy, the mere fact that women’s interests were recognized as existing at all is worthy of note and, one might add, of restrained celebration. In recent years the range of fictional offerings has become notably more diverse and more sophisticated. ‘Ironic’ versions of the detective novel and the romance have proliferated, as have hybrid fictions (which may be two parts crime-solving to one part domestic drama, or one part fantasy to two parts political commentary). Another development that can be observed recently is what one might call the everyday novel of self-revelation: a kind of autobiographical roman-à-clef penned by a journalist or celebrity. All in all, there is much evidence on the Russian book market of the ‘genre bending’ currently so fashionable on the Anglo-American book scene.11 The genres of biography, autobiography, and memoir have also flourished. Not for nothing is the series put out by Molodaia gvardiia, ‘Lives of Remarkable People,’ one of the most strikingly successful publishing carry-overs from the Soviet era. But the range of potential subjects for biography is incomparably greater than in Soviet times: film stars, singers, and sportsmen are now more likely to be featured than writers or revolutionaries. If we move to the area of publishing that lies closest to the interests of area studies specialists – Russian history and politics – we likewise find no shortage of titles. Yet here there are obvious imbalances and blank spots. History of the ‘fatherland’ is now dominated by books on the Second World War in much the same way that sections on German history in British bookshops are colonized by the Nazis. As for contemporary or near-contemporary history, there is a bewildering amount of depressingly polarized commentary on the Soviet collapse and its aftermath: sensationalist and demagogic accounts of the shenanigans of the 1990s alternate with peremptory and self-justificatory explanations of why there was no alternative to ‘liberal’ reforms. All this, of course, is quite in line with other areas of cultural expression and with public opinion surveys that show the war to be

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236  Stephen Lovell

overwhelmingly the most important point of historical reference for modern-day Russians (even those who are much too young to have experienced the war personally). The October Revolution, by contrast, is almost an irrelevance.12 The statist patriotism of the Putin regime plays well with the electorate and also sells well on the book market. So, as well as all the invigorating signs on the contemporary Russian publishing scene, there is also a certain amount to dispirit a liberal Western academic. But we need to put this in its proper context. First, it is by no means clear that we would find less to depress us if we looked closely at the entire publishing output of our own countries. Second, there are now signs of diversity and commercial vigour in Russia that were manifestly lacking in the Soviet era. This is not to say that all is well. But if we are to deliver a meaningful assessment of the cultural health of the contemporary Russian publishing industry, we need to look to other indicators. As well as celebrating the fact that Russia has become an immeasurably more open society since the late 1980s (even if, in many respects – as Marianna Tax Choldin documents in chapter 10 of this volume – attitudes to media freedom have taken a further illiberal turn under Putin), we need to remember that the avalanche of information triggered by the digital age presents its own problems. Substantial freedom to publish is not necessarily incompatible with illiberalism. Russia is now a society where people can say or write much of what they like as long as they do not do so on TV or in meetings in the centre of Moscow. In other words, the quality and impact of information has suffered as its quantity has grown exponentially. The problem is exacerbated by the deep scepticism – not to say cynicism – with which many Russians approach all information they receive about politics. In this context, people are differentiated not by their access to information but by their ability and opportunity to draw on several different sources of information, and to sort that information quickly and effectively. Paradoxically, the inequalities become greater as mass access to information increases. We do not have to look too far to find these inequalities. The most fundamental lies between the metropolis and everyone else. In 1990 there were fewer publishers in the USSR (280) than there had been in the Russian Empire in 1911 (300). The whole of Russia outside Moscow and Leningrad could boast only forty publishing houses.13 This imbalance has largely been preserved in the post-Soviet era. In 2005 Moscow accounted for about 60 per cent of titles and 85 per cent of copies printed. St Petersburg had more than 10 per cent of titles.14 It is clear

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that certain kinds of minority interest have suffered – even if the minorities in question are rather substantial. Translations from languages of the Russian Federation have tailed off steeply. By 2000 the proportion of translated literature in overall output had matched its highest levels in the Soviet period – but the languages from which the books were translated were very different.15 Even so, the book trade in many regions outside Moscow and Petersburg is showing growth in absolute (if not relative) terms. The Book Chamber now claims to be improving links with regional libraries and publishing organizations. And certain regions (Novosibirsk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Rostov on Don) have become powerhouses of the book trade. The largest book chain in the country is Top-kniga in Novosibirsk, which apparently stocks forty thousand titles. But even in the more prosperous regions – such as Rostov, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Cheliabinsk, and Tatarstan – the literature available does little to reflect the interests of the particular region: 85–90 per cent of stock comes from the capitals. In less prosperous parts of the periphery, the dominance of Moscow appears to be even more complete.16 Historical Questions For all the instability of print culture in the post-Soviet era, it seems clear enough that it has disproved the idea that the written word would be vanquished by the audio-visual media as soon as the gates were opened to mass culture. We now know a great deal about the ways in which post-Soviet publishers have tried to appeal to consumers and about the choices those consumers make.17 But the empirical saturation of the early twenty-first century – at least to this observer – only makes the twentieth century more mysterious and fascinating. The researcher quickly realizes that we do not have anything like the amount and the quality of information for the Soviet period that we have in the audience research and best-seller lists of the present day. The remainder of this chapter will explore the extent to which these gaps in our knowledge can be plugged. It will pose three obvious questions. First, what was actually published in the Soviet period? Second, what was actually read, and how was it received? Third, and most brutal, why should we concern ourselves with this subject? Why should a historian of print culture and reading in other places and other eras pay attention to the history of print in the Soviet Union? More particularly, why should a historian of Russian print culture be interested in the So-

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viet period, given that Soviet print culture seems so much less rich than that described in the fine works on the pre-revolutionary era published by Jeffrey Brooks, Louise McReynolds, and Abram Reitblat?18 Finally, why should a historian of the Soviet Union pay attention to the history of print culture? 1.  Publishing Output We still have very little idea of what works and genres were important in twentieth-century Russia – if we measure importance not in terms of the fame of an author, or the canonicity of a work in histories of Soviet culture, but rather in terms of what was published and read. The pioneering lead of Vera Dunham in analysing the middlebrow fiction of the late Stalin era has not really been followed for other periods.19 In some cases, entire genres and modes of reading are still lurking in the shadows. Let me take as a case study the detective novel (detektiv), because some good recent scholarship has been devoted to tracing this genre through the twentieth century.20 It is generally believed that the detektiv disappeared as a genre at the end of the 1920s and made only a tentative reappearance in the post-Stalin era. But if we cast our net more widely to capture not only self-identifying works of detective fiction but also socialist realist adventure literature, we find numerous works of fiction from the 1930s and 1940s that deal with crime and the pursuit of criminals (even if these are criminals in the eye of socialist law); especially prominent were the novels of Nikolai Shpanov and Lev Ovalov. In the mid-1950s, this type of spy novel (shpionskii detektiv) was joined once again by a police variant (militseiskii detektiv) and by translations of selected Western exemplars. In the second half of the 1960s, journals were able to meet some of the pent-up demand for crime fiction: the most important publication venue was the journal Chelovek i zakon. At about this time we find the first Soviet detektivy written according to Western rules of the genre (labyrinthine investigation, red herrings, and so on). The 1970s brought the golden age of the Soviet militseiskii detektiv as well as the arrival of hard-boiled Western fiction. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were duly welcomed as providing demonstrations of the rottenness of the bourgeois world. Abundant indirect evidence for the rise of officially disfavoured types of literature can be found in newly published documents from the ideological commissions of the Central Committee that were set up

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in the late 1950s. In January 1958, for example, the Central Committee’s Department of Culture noted that the number of works by foreign authors had almost tripled relative to 1950, and that the average print run of such books had risen five times. While some of this material performed the necessary function of introducing Chinese, Indian, and Arab literature, as well as some European classics, to the Soviet reading public, much of it was light entertainment fiction that should have had no place in Soviet publishing schedules. Mayne Reid’s Headless Horseman, for example, had appeared in ten separate editions in 1955–7 in Moscow, Kiev, Alma-Ata, Baku, Frunze, Tashkent, Novosibirsk, and Chita. Not only that, classic works with sexual content, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, had been published in unjustifiably large print runs. The internal reviewers in publishing houses, the report deduced, were clearly losing their vigilance.21 Although there are numerous blank spots in our knowledge of fiction, belles-lettres (khudozhestvennaia literatura) are still better served than non-fiction (for the simple reason that most scholars with an interest in matters of print culture come from a background in literary studies). A striking exception is Catriona Kelly’s major study of advice literature, which has many clever and interesting things to say about Soviet etiquette books, especially in their two boom eras of the 1920s and the 1960s.22 Yet there are other non-fiction genres that deserve exploration. One is books on academic subjects for the general public (nauchnopopuliarnaia literatura), a genre that attracted many high-quality authors and that, to judge by what we know of the Soviet fascination with such subjects as geography and exploration, fulfilled an important need among readers.23 Another interesting topic would be reference works, which have had an exceptionally chequered and revealing history (as a recent article by Brian Kassof on the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia has begun to show).24 And finally, a full historical study of biographies in the Soviet period would be a rewarding enterprise.25 2.  Reception Even if we arrive at a more encompassing description of Soviet print culture, such a description would not necessarily reveal its social function. How can we begin to establish what effects books had in Soviet society once they had been published? Let me start with a story from the archives. In the spring of 1947, the Moscow Party organization became concerned about the contents of

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second-hand bookshops. As the city’s publishing boss reported in April of that year, inspectors had been too ready to remove from second-hand shops books that were purportedly ‘pornographic,’ even if they had been approved by the censorship. Erotopégnie, a rare edition of what was presumably a titillating neoclassical reworking of a love story from Greek mythology, was deemed to be ‘pornographic’ only in its illustrations but overall merely ‘erotic.’ Yet, if the authorities were prepared to be relatively relaxed on matters sexual, the same liberalism did not extend, for example, to a complete set of the journal Sovetskoe foto, which included pictures of enemies of the people, or indeed to the authors who had become Soviet bywords for pre-revolutionary trash (in the first instance, Lidiia Charskaia and Anastasiia Verbitskaia). Shop assistants in the second-hand trade were reprimanded for acquiring their books in the first place.26 This story reminds us that, although thorough purging of public library collections took place from the 1920s onwards (and, thanks to the work of Arlen Blium, we know just how thorough they were), and although they succeeded in limiting the intellectual horizons of generations of Soviet people, they did not succeed in controlling how books circulated in Soviet society, let alone how people treated the books that came their way.27 Times of impoverishment and instability such as during the Civil War, the postwar era, and perestroika usually had the effect of flushing out valuable parts of domestic book collections on to the book market, as families tried to convert their cultural capital into cash, food, or firewood.28 Even at more stable times, the moment that a book first left a Soviet shop in the possession of its new owner did not mark the end of its biography.29 Of course, many books in the Soviet Union never found their addressee: their final destination was the pulping station. The interdependent phenomena of overproduction and ‘book famine’ are now well known. According to official statistics, a total of more than seventy billion books and brochures were published in the USSR between 1918 and 1988. But, even if we make generous estimates, private book holdings, library collections, and likely war losses amounted to less than half that figure by the late 1980s. In other words, more than thirty-five billion books had gone missing.30 By the later Soviet period, the mass libraries, which had enjoyed a boom period from the mid-1930s until they reached their maximum extent in 1955, were no longer even beginning to meet the population’s needs. More than 60 per cent of library books were not checked out even once.31 And the state’s efforts to mi-

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cromanage the reading process through the practice of directed reading (rukovodstvo chteniem) were becoming ever less successful. Yet it is unwise to assume that Soviet readers were merely marking time waiting for Raymond Chandler and Barbara Cartland to come along and disedify them. They were reading and responding to a great deal that was made available to them by Soviet publishing. But how can we begin to gauge their response to what they read? As many historians of reading have noted, evidence is thin on the ground; and, even where it does exist, it is problematic. Unless the historian strikes lucky and happens to study a peculiarly well-documented reading culture (as does Jonathan Rose in his study of the reading habits of the British working classes), he or she is stuck with a patchwork of unreliable anecdotes.32 Or perhaps not. Before we become too downhearted, it needs to be said that the Soviet Union had a peculiarly well-documented reading culture. The figure of the Soviet reader was a positive obsession of public discourse for the full duration of the Soviet period. But the problem lies rather in the quality of documentation, which often resembles ideological hogwash. Much of it is hogwash, of course, but better-quality information does exist. To some extent, it is provided by the available surveys of reader behaviour and reader tastes that were resumed after a thirty-year hiatus in the 1960s. Even published sources from the 1930s to the 1950s are not devoid of interest, if read in the right way.33 And, since the opening of the archives, researchers have also been able to draw on readers’ letters to journals and publishing houses. Although only a fraction of the millions of letters sent in have been preserved, there are still more than enough on which to base a study of the topic. Let me mention two interesting recent pieces of research in this vein. In an article on child readers in the postwar era, Catriona Kelly draws on letters to the children’s publishing house in Leningrad to draw some conclusions about the character of children’s reading and the ways in which it changed, or did not change, over time. What she finds is that the letter-writers represent a relatively narrow social milieu: these are the high-achieving sons and daughters of self-confident members of the fast-growing intelligentsia of the 1950s and 1960s. Her oral history suggests that, whatever the patriotic myth of the ‘best-read nation’ might trumpet, there were still plenty of working-class Leningrad families who either did not own books at all or (more likely) had so few that they were treated as cult items. (This squares with research by the Lenin Library’s research group for the sociology of reading that showed huge

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variation along class lines in the size of domestic libraries in the 1970s.)34 But even with these sociological limitations, the children’s letters are highly instructive. For one thing, they give a strong sense of the kind of fiction that was actually read and enjoyed by children who did read in this period. They also confirm that the post-Stalin period showed a turn to a more child-centred reading culture, where elements of adventure gained in popularity at the expense of what Kelly calls ‘rags-to-righteousness’ narratives (even if these young readers retained a taste for tales of heroism). Kelly also notes that these letters, and to a large extent the reading process itself, were about self-affirmation, as the children both measured the heroes against themselves and demonstrated their own capacity for the blend of analysis and emotional involvement that was the approved mode of reading. While their consumption of literature did not turn these children into undersize dissidents (in fact quite the opposite), it certainly had the effect of strengthening their sense of self and, in the long term, depoliticizing the activity of reading.35 A contrasting, but also very illuminating, case study is provided by a recent analysis by Denis Kozlov of readers’ letters to Novyi mir. This literary journal is remarkable for the extent to which it preserved its postbag: its archive contains around twelve thousand readers’ letters received between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. Kozlov finds that the audience of Novyi mir comprised above all the ‘mass intelligentsia’ of schoolteachers and engineers from all over the USSR – it was by no means restricted to metropolitan intellectuals. He also notes the tendency of letter-writers to engage in ‘guild readings’ of imaginative literature: to respond above all to the way in which their own profession was depicted in fiction. But there was also a clear increase in the sophistication of responses from the early 1950s to the late 1960s. In the age of de-Stalinization, readers continued to use the language of the terror – scapegoating, social hygiene – even as they deplored the terror itself. By the late 1960s they were offering more open-ended reflections on the historical process. What was rarely in doubt, however, was the emotional identification that readers sought with literature: they craved books that would help them work through what they had experienced in the Stalin era (whether they had received punishment, or inflicted it, or both).36 What do these case studies tell us about the activity of reading in Soviet Russia? They tell us that Soviet readers, as if we needed convincing, were not at all passive recipients of culture, but instead were actively making sense of what they read. They also suggest interesting

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ways of sociologizing and historicizing the reading process – ways in which the sense-making capacities of Soviet people varied according to social milieu, and changed over time. There is scope for more such localized studies, which would give us a much richer understanding of the ‘virtual communities’ created by books and journals in the Soviet Union. Yet, if we want to go further with history and sociology, we need also to go beyond the interesting but necessarily partial conclusions provided by case studies, and look more broadly at the changing contexts of reading. One such context is the conditions in which Soviet people were able to partake of print culture. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s the library was the main venue for mass reading.37 After that, Soviet people started in much greater numbers to move to separate apartments and build their own book collections. Decent quality bookshelving – especially from Czechoslovakia – was among the items most in demand in the shortage culture of developed socialism (as trade and industry reports from the 1960s and 1970s indicate).38 We could also do more to trace in detail what happened before this gradual domestication of reading in the post-Stalin era. Perhaps we cultural historians, in our efforts to take the high politics out of culture (to show, for example, that socialist realism was not straightforwardly imposed from above) have been too inclined to take at face value the regime’s propaganda on the emergence of a new Soviet reader in the 1930s. I for one am a little suspicious of the ease with which a shift from orality to literacy can be slotted into what might be called, following Vladimir Papernyi, a ‘two cultures’ theory of Soviet history in the 1920s and 1930s: a shift from the fluid, decentred, non-hierarchical Culture One of the 1920s to the static, monumental Culture Two of the 1930s.39 In the realm of print culture, so the theory goes, the process was clinched by the publication of Stalin’s Short Course on the history of the Communist Party in 1938: from this moment onwards Marxist-Leninist scripture became the essential point of reference for people in all walks of life. But even if we accept that the book was becoming the most prestigious medium of Soviet culture in the 1930s, it is far from clear that silent solitary reading was the only, or even the primary, means of appreciating the written word. This is partly because the mass reading public whose emergence was heralded at the end of the 1920s in all the relevant Soviet publications was poor, appallingly housed, and still weakly literate. None of these circumstances were conducive to the concentrated and self-improving reading practices that Soviet people

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were constantly exhorted to pursue. It is clear from David Brandenberger’s work that the Short Course went over the heads of most of its intended audience; and, to the extent that it did reach the mass reader, it did so not on the page but in the retelling by poorly educated propagandists.40 Reading aloud remained a part of Russian life even after the campaign against illiteracy had ended in victory. In the 1930s, many writers made significant sums from public readings.41 And from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, it would seem, many people heard their literature on the radio as well as reading it on the page. The major cult work to emerge from the war, Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s Vasilii Terkin, owed its huge popularity to the readings by Dmitrii Nikolaevich Orlov (whose other credits included extraordinarily widely known readings of Nekrasov’s ‘Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho?’; Tolstoy’s War and Peace; and Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don).42 Orlov’s career reminds us of one crucial distinctive feature of the twentieth century for the history of reading: the fact that books had company and competition from the audio-visual media. This is not to espouse a zero-sum theory of media history – to assert that the continued salience of orality required the downgrading of the written word. I do think, however, that we should consider more carefully how cultures of reading in the Soviet Union changed over time. In particular, we need to take account of the conclusion stated or implied by several recent pieces of scholarship: that Soviet cultural construction was largely a failure not only in the 1920s but in the 1930s also, and that what made the difference was the huge mobilization of cultural energies brought on by the Second World War.43 3.  Why the History of Soviet Print Culture Is Still Interesting Many book historians find their richest pickings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and call off their research at some point in the nineteenth. In Russia, however, there are excellent reasons to keep going into the twentieth. Above all, there is the fact that, from a number of perspectives, this was a society at the same stage of literacy as France or England in the seventeenth century – although it was undergoing social and economic transformations that were supposed to bring it level with the leading powers of the twentieth century. What this meant was that the book became the flagship medium of industrial modernity in a way that it was not in other places. Of course, one could readily object that the role books could play in Soviet society was limited to the point

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of meaninglessness by the political mission they were never allowed to shirk. How can social historians find anything to interest them in a time and place where book production was totally in thrall to politics? Even in a violent and unfailingly ideological one-party dictatorship, however, the message is shaped by the medium in which it is articulated. One important reason for this is that print culture is about economics as well as politics. Even though the Bolsheviks were viscerally opposed to commerce, they still faced the issue of how best to use the colossal resources that the publishing system required. And, once publishing plans had been drawn up and books printed, there was the problem of how to ensure their appropriate distribution. Here the managers and ideologues of Soviet publishing could not afford to be entirely oblivious to questions of demand and profit. They engaged periodically in discussions of book design and sales techniques where politics and economics were welded together.44 We now know, thanks to a detailed study by Brian Kassof, the manner in which this discussion took place in the formative era of the centralized Soviet publishing system, but it seems clear enough, even from the published sources and the archival fragments that have come to light, that something similar was taking place in the post-Stalin era, when the need to combine limited market mechanisms with vigilance against cultural contamination was an enduring preoccupation of policy-makers.45 Numerous Party resolutions in the late 1950s spoke of publishers chasing after profit, but how exactly did they gain the leverage to start doing this? In short, the inside story of post-Stalin publishing would seem to be well worth writing, and the sources are now available, notably in the Agitprop files of the postwar Party archive, RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History). In 1957, after all, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee reported that ‘the craze for republishing “profitable” books often leads to a complete bacchanalia.’46 Whatever solution was found to distribution problems, the Soviet publishing system was bound to send tens of millions of cultural artefacts into circulation; and, as reading switched from libraries to homes, their trajectories resembled less targeted distribution than Brownian motion, as books were passed from hand to hand, or from home to pulping station or second-hand book market. We find here a central paradox of Soviet cultural construction: the most culturally prestigious medium of this state socialist society became less collectivist and more individualizing in its modes of consumption as time went on. The other

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reason that message in the Soviet Union was never independent of medium is that the Platonic truths of Marxism-Leninism were hard to put in satisfactory cultural form. The process of actualizing ideology in print involved hundreds of institutions and tens of thousands of workers in various branches of the party-state. This brings us up against the hoary question of whether Soviet culture was ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up,’ ‘imposed’ or ‘negotiated.’ Some would say that the word ‘negotiation’ gives rather too benign a sense of a conversation between equal parties. But it is nonetheless true that the powers that be rarely gave a clear sense of what they wanted to impose. In the last few years, as more has been discovered about the workings of Soviet cultural policy, its directives have come to seem less unambiguous. The Soviet Union was an ideology-based society not in the sense that it operated with reference to a single unchanging set of truths, but rather in the sense that social, cultural, and political actors were always required to justify themselves in terms of a universal belief system. However, these terms were murky and shifting. The beleaguered artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats charged with manufacturing socialist culture had to work with instructions that were often opaque or self-contradictory. One of the best recent illustrations of this point is Andrew Jenks’s book on the Palekh community of artists.47 For print culture, an analogous study is provided by Kassof, who sheds much light on the poorly educated and miserably remunerated intellectual proletariat of the publishing houses.48 If we take a broader view, however, the twentieth century might in fact be regarded as the golden age of the editor: a time when books became collective products as never before. This was all the more so in the Soviet Union, where thousands of manuscripts were sent in by poorly educated authors, and where even members of the Writers’ Union were far from guaranteed to have a flawless command of the literary language. One of the axioms of the Soviet literary establishment in the 1930s was that any manuscript, whatever its manifest imperfections, could be ‘saved’ by editorial intervention (as long as the author was a union member, of course).49 A history of Soviet editorial practices (based partly on archival research, partly on oral history) would be well worth undertaking. In other words, studying high institutional politics and Party declarations is insufficient on its own. It pays also to look at the making of Soviet culture on the ground with the help of newly available archives, which, though they have not brought any staggering new insights, do

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provide a rewarding sense of complexity. Until recently, one of the key topics for British undergraduates being introduced to Soviet culture was socialist realism, which involved studying the pronouncements of Gorky, Zhdanov, and others at the first Writers’ Congress in 1934. It now becomes clear, however, how little their prescriptive definitions meant to people at the time, let alone in retrospect. The congress is seen in a different light when we discover from secret police reports that many delegates were numbed by the tedium of the proceedings, and valued the congress primarily as an opportunity to stock up on consumer goods.50 The genesis of socialist realism loses its aura of historical inevitability when it emerges how most writers in the 1930s were scrambling desperately to make ends meet and having dealings with publishing houses that might arbitrarily change their plans and refuse to pay up for the copy they had received.51 These are perhaps trivial examples, and they represent only a small fraction of the ways in which culture (in the broad sense of shared meanings) came to take material form and elicit responses in Soviet Russia. But I hope that they will lend some support to the concluding contention of this chapter – that although the history of twentieth-century Russian culture has mainly been written as the history of political institutions, of authors, of works, and of artistic philosophies, there is much to be gained from instead taking books – in all their social, political, economic, and cultural ramifications – as our primary object of enquiry. Notes   1 See, for example, Michael Binyon, Life in Russia (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), 169.   2 Such is the approach of my own The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture and Society in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 2000). On publishing, see Gregory Walker, Soviet Book Publishing Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). On research into reading in the 1920s, the key publication is Jeffrey Brooks, ‘Studies of the Reader in the 1920s,’ Russian History 9 (1982): 187–202. For examples of research after the revival of sociology in the 1960s, see, for example, O.S. Chubar’ian, ed., Kniga i chtenie v zhizni nebol’shikh gorodov (Moscow: Kniga, 1973); N.N. Solov’eva, ed., Kniga i chtenie v zhizni sovetskogo sela (Moscow: Kniga, 1978); and the more recent V.D. Stel’makh et al., eds., Biblioteka

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  3

  4

  5

  6   7   8

  9 10

11

i chtenie: Problemy i issledovaniia (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Rossiiskoi natsional’noi biblioteki, 1995). This is but a small sample of the work done, much of it by a research group based in the Russian State Library (Lenin Library) in Moscow whose leading figures include B.V. Dubin, L.D. Gudkov, A.I. Reitblat, and V.D. Stel’makh. A review of developments since perestroika can be found in Birgit Menzel, ‘Writing, Reading and Selling Literature in Russia, 1986–2004,’ in Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective, ed. Stephen Lovell and Birgit Menzel (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2005), 39–56. Theodore P. Gerber, ‘Educational Stratification in Contemporary Russia: Stability and Change in the Face of Economic and Institutional Crisis,’ Sociology of Education 73 (2000): 224. Kristine and John Bushnell, ‘Russian Publishing, 2000–2001: Threats to Freedom of Information, but a Record Year for Books. A Report to the 2001 Summer Slavic Librarians’ Workshop,’ Slavic and East European Information Resources 2, no. 3/4 (2001): 111–25. Statistics on titles are also taken from this article. Valerii Sirozhenko, ‘2005 god: Sbyvshiesia i nesbyvshiesia prognozy,’ Knizhnoe obozrenie pro, no. 224 (2006): 1–4. See Sirozhenko, ‘2005 god.’ Coelho’s enthusiastic reception in Siberia even drew comment from the Western press. See Tom Parfitt, ‘Author on Slow Train to Adulation across Siberia,’ Guardian, 23 May 2006. On the role of the series in Soviet publishing, see Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution, 61–2. A locus classicus that gives full weight to the latter of these interpretations is Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). For more on romance in a Soviet and post-Soviet context, see Oksana Bocharova, ‘Formula zhenskogo schast’ia,’ Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 22 (1996): 292–302; Ol’ga Vainshtein, ‘Rozovyi roman kak mashina zhelanii,’ Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 22 (1996): 303–30; and Mariia Cherniak, ‘Russian Romantic Fiction,’ in Lovell and Menzel, Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia, 151–72. A striking recent phenomenon is the prolific Sergei Minaev, whose bestselling 2006 novel Dukhless has been accompanied by a high-profile blog (http://www.sergeyminaev.ru). Dukhless is an expression of fashionable nihilism, replete with drink, drugs, and sex, that claims to speak for ‘the lost generation born between 1970 and 1976 whose start in life was so bright and whose life has been wasted so foolishly.’ See Sergei Minaev

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12

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19 20

21 22 23

(b. 1976), Dukhless: Povest’ o nenastoiashchem cheloveke (Moscow: AST, 2007), front matter. See, for example, M.K. Gorshkov and N.M. Davydova, ‘Istoricheskoe samosoznanie rossiian,’ Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia 1/73 (2005): 17–24. B.V. Lenskii, Knigoizdatel’skaia sistema sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 52, 54. Sirozhenko, ‘2005 god.’ G.I. Matriukhin, ‘Izdanie perevodnoi literatury v Rossii v poslednee desiatiletie XX v.,’ Kniga: Issledovaniia i materialy 81 (2003): 42–60. See, for example, V.Ts. Khudaverdian, ‘Regional’nyi knizhnyi rynok Rossii,’ Kniga: Issledovaniia i materialy 80 (2002): 203–13. This article is especially valuable as it draws on interviews with people involved in the book trade (ekspertnyi opros) in thirty ‘subjects of the Federation.’ Published statistics on the regional book market, by contrast, are highly unsatisfactory. The newspaper Knizhnoe obozrenie has been the single best source of such information. For one thorough article that draws on this publication, see Jeremy Dwyer, ‘The Knizhnoe obozrenie Bestseller Lists, Russian Reading Habits, and the Development of Russian Literary Culture, 1994–1998,’ Russian Review 66 (2007): 295–315. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); A.I. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: Ocherki po istorii chteniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo MPI, 1991) – reprinted with various new works under the title Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: I drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009) – and Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: Istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kul’ture Pushkinskoi epokhi (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001). Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Note especially Jeremy Andrew Dwyer’s PhD dissertation, ‘From MessMend to the Mafiia: A History of the Russian Detektiv,’ Monash University, 2005, from which the material in this paragraph is drawn. E.S. Afanas’eva et al., eds., Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPSS 1958–1964: Dokumenty (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), 34. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the Stalinist origins of the fascination, see John McCannon, Red Arctic:

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24 25

26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33

34

35

36

37 38

Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Brian Kassof, ‘A Book of Socialism: Stalinist Culture and the First Edition of the Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia,’ Kritika 6 (2005): 55–95. Irina Paperno has launched an interesting study of memoirs of the Soviet experience: see her ‘Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,’ Kritika 3 (2002): 577–610. A.S. Kiselev et al., eds., Moskva poslevoennaia, 1945–1947: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 2000), 650. On censorship, see inter alia A.V. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu total’nogo terrora, 1929–1953 (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000). As I recall from student days in Yaroslavl in 1991–92, some of my classmates were able to pick up vast quantities of second-hand polnye sobraniia sochinenii (and ship them home) for very small quantities of British pounds. Numerous tales of the unofficial book trade and of book-sharing practices among the 1970s intelligentsia can be found in Mariia Dubnova and Arkadii Dubnov, Tanki v Prage, Dzhokonda v Moskve: Azart i styd semidesiatykh (Moscow: Vremia, 2007). Homo legens: Pamiati Sergeia Nikolaevicha Plotnikova (1929–1995) (Moscow: Dom intellektual’noi knigi, 1999), 31. Homo legens, 40. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). As is richly demonstrated by Evgenii Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). See the later summary in B. Dubin, ‘Kniga i dom (K sotsiologii knigosobiratel’stva),’ in Chto my chitaem? Kakie my? ed. N. Efimova (St Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, 1993). Catriona Kelly, ‘‘Thank You for the Wonderful Book’: Soviet Child Readers and the Management of Children’s Reading, 1950–75,’ Kritika 6 (2005): 717–53. Denis Kozlov, ‘The Readers of Novyi mir, 1945–1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical Consciousness’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2005). A point made, for example, in Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader. I am grateful to Natalya Chernyshova for this observation, which is presented in her PhD dissertation ‘Shopping with Brezhnev: Urban Consumer Culture in the Soviet Union, 1964–1985’ (King’s College London, 2007).

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Books and Their Readers in Twentieth-Century Russia  251 39 Vladimir Papernyi, Kul’tura ‘dva’ (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985). 40 David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity: 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 73–5. 41 V.A. Antipina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskikh pisatelei: 1930–1950–e gody (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2005), 99–103. 42 Orlov received many appreciative letters from listeners for all of these roles. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2216, op. 1, dd. 243–5. 43 For much new material on this, see T.M. Goriaeva et al., eds., Muzy v shineliakh: Sovetskaia intelligentsiia v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Dokumenty, teksty, vospominaniia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006). 44 For more on the issue of book design and its impact on the Soviet reader, see the following essay in this volume by Anne Fisher, which includes discussion of ‘evaluative’ or ‘material’ peritexts such as format, binding, and illustrations. 45 Brian Evan Kassof, ‘The Knowledge Front: Politics, Ideology, and Economics in the Soviet Book Publishing Industry, 1925–1935’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000). 46 Afanas’eva et al., Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPSS, 39. 47 Andrew Jenks, Russia in a Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005). 48 Kassof, ‘The Knowledge Front.’ 49 Antipina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 61–2. 50 Antipina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 42–7. 51 On the material predicament of many writers in the 1930s, see Antipina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 129–40.

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9 Adapting Paratextual Theory to the Soviet Context: Publishing Practices and the Readers of Il’f and Petrov’s Ostap Bender Novels anne o. fisher

Editor’s Note The second essay in our ‘reader response’ group also deals with the Soviet era, but the approach is different. Using a narrower focus (the reception of the oeuvre of just two writers, Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, who wrote as a team), the approach is literary and the perspective unusual – the editional segments at issue are not so much the texts themselves as their accompanying materials, or peritexts. Drawing in part on the elite-popular distinction of anthropological theory, Fisher uses a new addition to the arsenal of literary theorists, or peritextual theory, suggesting that different editions of a book ‘can serve as evidence of documented reader response.’ Applying it in a ground-breaking manner to the Russian context, and based on a study of 150 editions of the novels of Il’f and Petrov, she adapts the method of diachronic editional comparison ‘to the most programmatically influential peritext of all, the foreword’ – concluding that even intellectual readers were susceptible to peritextual influence. This diachronic panorama of responses to Il’f-Petrov and their significance in the history of Soviet print culture is innovative enough to suggest the probable benefit of taking similar approaches to the study of other corpora. It might also be useful to recall again the retrieval and analysis possibilities associated with the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines. The analysis of editional components such as that featured here would be a strong candidate for structured text encoding, whether offered by the TEI itself, or by other systems directed at scholarly editions (such as TeksTale, a text classification/profiling system from the National Center for Supercomputing at the University of Illinois, or the German TextGrid, a ‘community resource for the collaborative editing, annotation and analysis of specialist texts’). These systems need not be complex to use, and may involve no more than the regularized employment of commonly

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used XML editing software like oXygen, albeit with significant start-up advice from experienced practitioners. Such experts are, however, available in the increasing numbers of scholar labs or humanities computing centres now located on college campuses. The systems they apply are mainly in use for projects that analyse literary texts, rather than peritextual manifestations, but they are worth considering for print culture needs as well. Indeed, approaches are now possible that invoke in highly innovative ways the potential of digitally enhanced analysis. This is an exciting time to enter the field of print culture studies, and one hopes that younger scholars will take advantage of the opportunities!* The book always aims at installing an order, whether it is the order in which it is deciphered, the order in which it is to be understood, or the order intended by the authority who commanded or permitted the work. This multi-faceted order is not all-powerful, however, when it comes to annulling the reader’s liberty. – Roger Chartier, The Order of Books1

The space of the book is not a neutral one. But neither is it always and necessarily a competitive arena in which the reader and the book vie for primacy, as Roger Chartier seems to indicate here. Perhaps a better metaphor would be a stage, on which the meaning of the text is performed for a more or less receptive audience by an entire ensemble consisting of author, editor, designer, illustrator, copy editor, bindery and typography workers, and, in the Soviet case, various representatives of the ‘commanding’ authority (the Soviet Writers’ Union) or the ‘permitting’ authority (Glavlit, the literary censorship organ).2 Each individual edition of a book, even each individual copy of a book, performs its text differently for the audience, the reader, who may be reading for any number of reasons, in any environment from a quiet study to a crowded tram car, and who may exhibit various levels of sophistication in interpretation. The sheer variety of factors affecting the reading process culminates in the impossibility of a Manichaean model in which either the text or the reader wins out. Yet the Bolsheviks’ post-1917 agenda was more or less predicated on exactly this model: first centralize control over the means of publication, then liquidate illiteracy, and enlightenment will result.3 The presupposition of a predictable result betrays the instrumentalism of this approach to reading. In fact, in 1923 Nadezhda Krupskaya famously

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compared literacy to a spoon, which is ‘handy for eating soup, but if there’s no soup, then probably there’s no need getting a spoon either.’4 This image of reading as a mechanical transfer of information from the book to the mind effectively disengages the imaginative, aesthetic activity that according to Hans Robert Jauss is one of reading’s major functions. The more one insists on the book’s ‘all-powerful’ order, the closer one is to reducing the book to cabbage soup: something that is either eaten or not, assimilated or not, by the consumer. This is the bind that early Soviet literature found itself in, caught between the desire to preserve the aesthetic qualities of art and the demand that it reliably deliver an unmistakable message to readers. Evgenii Dobrenko and Stephen Lovell have both shown that this bind was resolved by creating literature based on the aesthetic taste of a purported ‘socially valuable reader’ or ‘mass reader.’5 Of course, this amalgamated, idealized category does not exist, which is why the best recent studies of reading in Russia have focused either on how the category of ‘mass’ reader is deployed and contested (Dobrenko and Lovell), or on what Lovell in chapter 8 calls ‘localized studies’ – descriptions of the ways individual readers actually interpreted and used what they read (Jochen Hellbeck, Thomas Lahusen).6 The latter approach offers more information on the practices, strategies, and habits of real readers, helping answer the second of Lovell’s three questions about Soviet reading (‘What was actually read, and how was it received?’). Still, the history of Soviet reading needs many more such localized studies if it is to offer a representative picture of which readers at which times succumbed to Chartier’s ‘order of the book,’ or if it is to create a useful taxonomy of Lovell’s ‘“virtual communities” created by books and journals in the Soviet Union.’ The main obstacle hindering these localized studies is the lack of documented reading evidence, which is difficult to find and often surfaces by sheer chance in the course of other research. This is a problem for all students of reading history and reader reception, regardless of time period or geography The prevalent Russian model for obtaining information on reader response, established in the 1920s, was the reader questionnaire administered and recorded by officials such as librarians or reading-circle leaders; the results of such questionnaires are unquestionably valuable, but for obvious reasons must be regarded as limited in the picture of reading they provide. As far as unsolicited documentation of reader response goes, there have been some suggestions: D.F. McKenzie’s famous exhortation to look in the printed text itself; Hans

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Robert Jauss’s idea of looking at readers who emulate fictional heroes; the treasure troves Jonathan Rose found in autobiographies; Roger Chartier’s examination of fictional portrayals of readers and reading; and Robert Darnton’s sifting through readers’ diaries and letters to editors.7 Inspired partly by Western theorists such as McKenzie and Chartier, and partly by the Russophone textological tradition emphasizing scholarly attention to the accumulation of textual variants over time due to varying levels of censorship, the present essay suggests the peritext (or editional apparatus) as another, usually overlooked source of information about what real readers thought about a text. Most readers are by now familiar with the concept of a paratext, which is more or less any text secondary to what I will call its main text, the text on which it comments or about which it gives supplemental information. Gérard Genette, the most important theorist of the paratext, describes it as a textual space surrounding, but not part of, its main text. It is a ‘fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author […]: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies).’8 The idea of the paratext as exerter of influence on the reader is central to Genette’s definition. Genette also separates all paratexts into two categories, peritexts and epitexts, based on where they appear: if an individual paratext is included somewhere in a book edition along with the main text, it is a peritext, while if it appears outside a book, such as in a newspaper or letter, then it is an epitext. Thus, the only distinction between the two categories is that a peritext was chosen to be included in a book edition along with its main text. (So, comments on paratexts will apply equally to epitexts and peritexts, while comments on peritexts apply only to the latter.) While all paratexts are characterized by the first idea, the element of presumed influence on the reader, only the peritext embodies the second idea, the element of choice (the quality of having been chosen to be reproduced in a book along with its main text). The peritext’s definitive element of choice is key to my strategy of mobilizing peritexts as reading evidence: each individual peritext, whether it be foreword, illustration, or commentary, is a reflection of its author’s interpretation of the main text. What’s important to remember about the Soviet context, however, is that each peritext has been approved by one or more

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censors, representatives of Chartier’s ‘authority who commanded or permitted the work.’ Thus, while I agree with Genette’s statement that the peritext is always intended to be a site ‘of influence on the public,’ I disagree that the peritext’s interpretation is generally ‘authorial or more or less legitimated by the author.’ In addition, I see the space of the peritext as a less harmonious one than Genette does, since various peritexts can still compete or contrast both with each other and with their main text (we will see this in the discussion of reader responses to forewords, below). This leads us to consider the paradoxical nature of the peritext as a whole. It is both static and documentary, since it is a manifestation of its main text’s meaning as imagined by the book’s producers, and dynamic and persuasive, in that it attempts, as Chartier put it, to ‘install’ this meaning for readers. I will not focus here on what the peritext can tell us about writing, i.e., the ways authors use the intertextuality of peritexts such as dedications, epigraphs, and titles to engage readers, since this has been explored by Genette, Chartier, the Russian Formalists, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, and many others. Rather, I am interested in what the peritext can tell us about reading. There are two ways to think about this, based on the two natures of the peritext as documentary and persuasive text. If, as McKenzie famously pointed out, a printed text is itself an interpretation of the text it reproduces, then a printed peritext is also, surely, an interpretation of the main text it accompanies. It is a fixed, documented interpretation of an individual reader. This documentary aspect of the peritext has received little scholarly attention, not least because most scholars who engage the peritext have assumed with Genette that any peritext reflects an ‘authorial commentary’ (i.e., it is approved by the author of the main text), while I suggest that it is more accurate to emphasize the realized or potential interpretive independence of each peritext’s author. Meanwhile, the second aspect of the peritext, its persuasiveness, is understood by Genette as the extent to which a peritext can guide the reader toward the ‘intended’ or ‘authorial’ meaning of the text, an extent limited, in an ideal world, only by the imagination of the author and the sophistication of the reader. But what about the peritext’s efficacy in the real world, the peritext’s effect on real (historical, actual) readers? In short, the persuasive nature of the peritext confronts us with one problem (where can we find reading evidence documenting what readers thought of the peritext?) while its documentary nature helps solve

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another problem (the peritext is reading evidence documenting what readers thought of the main text). Both problems have been consigned to the margins of scholarship, although a growing interest in the theory and practice of reading has already led scholars to start collecting reading evidence, as mentioned above.9 The present essay is an experiment that will hopefully show the value of investigating both the persuasive and the documentary aspects of the peritext. The peritext in question will be the allographic foreword (a foreword written by someone other than the author of the main text), while the main text will be Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov’s set of two novels about the con man Ostap Bender (Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev [The Twelve Chairs], 1928) and Zolotoi telenok [The Golden Calf], 1931). Due to these novels’ characteristic combination of mass popularity and satirical ambiguity, they have prompted the creation of an especially rich peritextual corpus. I.  Forewords as Persuasive Peritexts, Part One:   Forewords and the Publishing History of Il’f and Petrov’s Novels Genette devotes not a little space to the allographic foreword in Western literature, amply illustrating the patronage function of these peritexts. Still, he does not address the extent to which this function became hypertrophied in the Soviet context. Forewords came to be regarded as window dressing, much ado about nothing: their role was simply to prove (to the censor more than the reader, as Genette points out in his own discussion) the political correctness of the main text and its author(s). However, I would argue that these ‘obvious’ or ‘boring’ peritexts contain much information for the researcher. In the case of Il’f and Petrov’s Bender novels, the allographic foreword plays a fascinating role, both in terms of the behind-the-scenes struggles to get the novels rehabilitated after they were banned, and in terms of the foreword’s effect on readers. The publishing history of the Bender novels is well known: both were first serialized in the illustrated monthly magazine 30 dnei (30 days), but while Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev was released in book form the very same year it was serialized, it required the influence of ‘the father of Soviet Realism,’ Maksim Gorky, to overcome the objections of Aleksandr Fadeev, who, speaking on behalf of Glavlit, refused to release Zolotoi telenok as a book.10 Zolotoi telenok is much harsher than Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev in its satirical critique, and includes not only vignettes appropriate to the contemporary theme of building socialism, but memorable quips

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from Bender, who is bored by building socialism, and who comforts a monarchist troubled by annoying Soviet dreams by promising to remove Soviet power, the source of the dreams. Still, both novels were immediately published abroad (in fact, the American translation of Zolotoi telenok appeared even before the first Russian book edition) as proof of the young Soviet nation’s healthy sense of self-criticism. It is significant to note that the first serialization of Zolotoi telenok in 1931 included an edifying article on the book by none other than the young Soviet nation’s indefatigable Commissar of People’s Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and that this article was later included (with some changes) as the foreword to the American and German translations of the book; strangely, however, the article was never included in any Russian edition of the book. Its absence is especially odd since the critical reception of Zolotoi telenok was fairly harsh, and Lunacharsky’s explanatory, sanctioning foreword was arguably as necessary at home as it was to foreign readers. Still, by the time the Il’f-Petrov partnership was ended in 1937 by Il’f’s death from illness, the Bender novels had been published or excerpted thirteen times by Soviet publishers, not once with an allographic foreword. The happy fate of the novels soon changed. In contrast to the erroneous impression still held by many commentators that Il’f and Petrov never suffered censorship or other reprisal, the Bender novels were attacked in 1948, resulting in a seven-year ban. The secret memos prompting the ban11 make clear the role that peritexts played in these events. Il’f and Petrov might never have suffered attack, had the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel’ (The Soviet writer) not decided to include the Bender novels in a jubilee series meant to celebrate thirty years of Soviet literature, ‘The Library of Selected Works of Soviet Literature, 1917–1947.’ The combination of, first, the need to celebrate the impending jubilee year of 1947 and, second, the insecurity of the literary situation in the second half of 1946, following Zhdanov’s attack on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko in Zvezda (The star), was a foreboding one for the publishing house. Still, even after the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union, Sovetskii pisatel’s parent organization, warned the publisher in December of 1946 to rethink the inclusion of Il’f and Petrov’s books in the series, and regardless of the fact that later not only the Secretariat, but the Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda, the Party’s literary watchdog, both recommended against their inclusion, the Bender novels still appeared in the series.12

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The Agitprop Department was quick to use this opportunity to embarrass the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union, which, on 15 November 1948, agreed to sign a special resolution that began, ‘The Secretariat of the Soviet Writers’ Union considers the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel’s release of Il’f and Petrov’s books Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev and Zolotoi telenok a crude political mistake.’13 The resolution admits the publishing house’s and the Secretariat’s mistakes, proposes increasing the number of persons who would have to approve each individual book published by Sovetskii pisatel’ from one to five, and suggests reprimands for the responsible editors.14 Fadeev, Secretary of the Writers’ Union, sent the resolution to Stalin and Deputy Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov on 17 November 1948. This stern self-criticism wasn’t enough for the Agitprop Department, which had already mounted a serious attack on Sovetskii pisatel’ at a special meeting of workers of the central press it had convened six months before, in May of 1948. On 14 December it sent Malenkov its own proposal for a resolution by the Secretariat of the Central Committee attacking Sovetskii pisatel’ and the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union for releasing not only Il’f and Petrov’s books, but also books by or about Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Tynianov. The Agitprop Department was clearly out for blood, recommending not only that Fadeev be reprimanded, but that the director of Sovetskii pisatel’, G. Yartsev, be fired. The proposed resolution was accompanied by a long denunciatory letter, of which more than half is devoted to describing in detail the anti-Soviet nature of Il’f and Petrov’s ‘libelous pasquinade.’15 A new tactic the Agitprop Department introduces in its letter, however, is the mobilization of the peritext as part of its attack by referring to a supposed ‘standard’ of peritextual guidance of the reader that Sovetskii pisatel’ did not meet. Not only did Sovetskii pisatel’ reprint the Bender novels against the Department’s recommendation, but in addition ‘the book was released without a foreword, without any critical remarks about the novels’ contents. Moreover, in the biographical notes printed in the back of the book, the novels Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev and Zolotoi telenok are hailed without qualification as the favourite works of Soviet readers.’16 Literaturnaia gazeta’s subsequent February 1949 editorial, the public result of all this behind-the-scenes letter writing, includes the main points of both resolutions and many of the accusations found in the Agitprop Department’s letter, including the ‘standard’ of peritextual guidance of the reader. Sovetskii pisatel’ ‘didn’t manage to produce even

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the most barely adequate notes or forewords to the published works and made no attempt whatsoever to explain the merits or defects of various authors’ works to the reader’; moreover, the short author biographies included in the back matter are at fault for simply listing, rather than evaluating, the authors’ other works. The editorial also remarks archly, ‘it’s strange that an activity like the composition of biographical notes for the foremost Soviet writers hasn’t become an object of special attention for the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union.’ In its conclusion, the editorial reminds the publisher to make proper use of ‘the most important levers that help publishers promote a certain politics in the organization of the literary process’ – in other words, peritexts.17 This is the point where Soviet publishing policy officially splits from Genette’s definition of the peritext; it does remain ‘a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public,’ but these privileged pragmatics serve ‘a certain politics,’ and are no longer ‘authorial or more or less legitimated by the author.’ This unsigned 1949 editorial, a clear signal of policy, represents the Agitprop Department’s victory over the Writers’ Union, upon whom it imposed yet another level of self-policing. As for Il’f and Petrov, they fell victim to the ripple effect of Zhdanov’s 1946 decree, or, more specifically, to the incautiousness of editors who didn’t appreciate the new tendency’s strength. The co-authors’ names stopped appearing in print (unless to be castigated, especially Il’f, as part of the ‘anti-cosmopolitanism campaign’), their works were removed from libraries and card catalogues, and readers who still had old editions of Il’f and Petrov’s works at home kept silent on that score. Still, Il’f and Petrov were too popular, too powerful a potential propaganda tool, to remain banned for long. On 13 November 1954, right before the moment when the Second Congress of the Writers’ Union in December 1954 would signal cautious change, the Secretariat resolved to have its own publishing organ, Sovetskii pisatel’, look into publishing the Bender novels ‘in the near future.’ The resolution also specified that the edition have a foreword by Konstantin Simonov, one of post-war Soviet literature’s most important literary mediators, which indicates that Simonov was probably the one who had raised the issue with the Secretariat to begin with.18 In August of 1955, perhaps wishing to distance itself from the novels that had caused it so much trouble not even ten years earlier, the Secretariat transferred the job to Goslitizdat (the State Literary Publishing House), but kept the condition that the edition include an ‘objective’ foreword from Simonov.19 An omnibus

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edition of both novels, with a foreword by Simonov, was released in May of 1956 and served as an implicit, but unmistakable, signal of Il’f and Petrov’s full rehabilitation. Simonov’s foreword is predictable in analysis, content, and rhetoric: ‘the strength of Il’f and Petrov’s satirical gift was devoted to the battle against the remnants of the past’; ‘with their sharp satirical pen [they made] short work of the remnants of the old way of life [byt]’; and so on.20 In a sense, of course, the content is superfluous, since the foreword is a prime example of peritextual ‘window-dressing’: the real message of Simonov’s foreword was simply the fact of Simonov’s patronage, which confirmed the reversal of the 1949 ban on Il’f and Petrov and their works. Within two years of the release of the 1956 edition, seven similar omnibus editions, all of which also contained Simonov’s foreword, were released by regional or republic publishing houses. Not six months later, the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union issued a resolution establishing a committee for the preservation of Il’f and Petrov’s literary heritage and authorizing a collected edition.21 Even given the quick and erratic changes of the Thaw, the speed with which the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union moved from rehabilitation to canonization (of which a collected works is the traditional sign) is surprising. Odesskii and Fel’dman, in their work on the textual and reception history of the two Bender novels, have explained that the move to canonize Il’f and Petrov was a deliberately calculated way of harnessing the writers’ popularity to the state’s post-Stalinist project of self-legitimization. They point out, ‘the population needed to be convinced that the mass repressions were the result of Stalin’s “cult of personality” … Il’f and Petrov’s novels and the books of many other writers became … proof of the rightness of the path to which the country, according to the assurances of ideologues, was already returning.’22 The project of relegitimizing Il’f and Petrov was thus one of mutual appropriation: on the one hand, the ‘ideologues’ appropriated what had, by the mid1950s, become an underground cult classic to perform their repudiation of Stalin’s policies, while on the other hand, literary figures more concerned with the fate of Il’f and Petrov’s literary heritage took advantage of the literary establishment’s desire to seem more liberal to bring their works back into print. Given the 1961 edition’s canonizing mission, as well as its participation in the regime’s project of legitimization, the issue of patronage for the edition was fraught: a literary figure with too little political authority would detract from the edition’s ability to legitimize the re-

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gime, while a patron too closely associated with literary politics and bureaucracy might discredit the project in the eyes of wary readers. These questions came to the fore in the process of choosing the author of the edition foreword. The edition file at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) confirms that on 22 September 1960, when the editorial board of the State Publishing House of Belles Lettres (GIKhL) met to approve the Il’f and Petrov edition (now in five volumes) for 1961, Konstantin Simonov was listed as the author of the foreword.23 But two months later, on 17 November, documents show that the responsibility had been passed to David Zaslavskii, a writer and critic who actively supported the Party line in literature (and who had already written the foreword to a 1957 collection of Il’f and Petrov’s short works). Valentin Kataev, Il’f and Petrov’s first patron, who was on the edition’s editorial committee along with Simonov and the ‘official’ writer G. Dement’ev, objected strongly to this turn of events. It didn’t help that Kataev had an old grudge against Zaslavskii, who had praised the heavily propagandistic 1936 film Tsirk (Circus). The screenplay was co-written by Il’f, Petrov, and Kataev, but the director Grigorii Aleksandrov had so disfigured it that the three co-authors chose to remove their names from the film credits. This old grudge was rekindled in the process of editing the Collected Works, because Zaslavskii not only wanted to include the original version of Tsirk – the libretto for a musical revue called Pod kupolom tsirka (Under the big top), also written by Il’f, Petrov, and Kataev – instead of the screenplay, but he also openly expressed doubts as to Kataev’s co-authorship. (The volume includes the libretto, not the screenplay, but does cite Kataev as co-author.) In retaliation, Kataev insisted that Zaslavskii wasn’t fit to write the edition foreword. Kataev eventually had to settle for stating his disapproval in written form for the edition file: ‘My personal opinion: giving the works of Il’f-Petrov a foreword by Zaslavskii is the same as giving the works of Pushkin a foreword by Bulgarin. It’s a sacrilege! Il’f and Petrov couldn’t stand Zaslavskii (either as a person or as a writer). 18 April 1961. V.P. Kataev.’24 Apparently the situation continued to be problematic, and Simonov had to take steps. He addressed the subject in an open letter of explanation to the GIKhL editorial board and the edition’s editorial committee (including, of course, Kataev himself): The whole story with the foreword started when V.P. Kataev conveyed his

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Il’f and Petrov’s Ostap Bender Novels  263 willingness to GIKhL, and to me personally, to do a short writerly introduction of 5–6 pages for the collected works. I personally thought that this would be best and related this opinion to both Kataev and GIKhL. About a month went by and VPK [Kataev], essentially without justification, categorically refused to write the foreword. As a way out of the situation, GIKhL asked me to write the foreword, and I agreed to do it if a better solution couldn’t be found. Then, at a meeting of the editorial committee, VPK announced that only one writer had the moral right to write the foreword to the collected works of writers like Il’f and Petrov: Sholokhov. But unfortunately he didn’t back up his excellent suggestion with action, he didn’t take it upon himself to arrange for Sholokhov to actually write that foreword. As a result, with Kataev’s approval, it was decided that any critic who would commit to getting it done in the extremely short time remaining would be the one to write it. Eventually D.I. Zaslavskii agreed to write it, which he did, helping the editors out of a rough spot and giving us a way to avoid holding up the publication of the collected works. I consider the foreword Zaslavskii wrote acceptable and I don’t think it’s possible to remove Zaslavskii’s foreword and hold up the publication of the collected works, which the publishing house promised to finish by the end of 1961, all because of the caprice of even such a respected person as VPK.25

This letter does not factually contradict the timing of events in the project file, but it still leaves room for doubt. As noted, the edition file shows that Simonov was listed as the foreword writer on 22 September, but by 17 November the task was assigned to Zaslavskii; based on the timeline described by Simonov, these two months would be the time the entire edition waited on Kataev to convince Sholokhov to provide the foreword. It seems unlikely that the publishing house would have exhibited such patience. Also, Simonov is probably exaggerating the ‘extremely short time remaining’ when Zaslavskii ostensibly stepped in to ‘help the editors out of a rough spot,’ since, according to the colophon, the manuscript for the volume containing Zaslavskii’s foreword was not submitted to the typographers until 18 February 1961, three months after Zaslavskii was listed in the edition file as the foreword’s author. Overall, the sense that Simonov had to alter the details to smooth the ruffled feathers of both Kataev and Zaslavskii is strong. Simonov may or may not have shared Kataev’s views; in any case, his letter (and his repeated thanks to Zaslavskii in his in-house review of Zaslavskii’s foreword) hints that he was primarily interested in applying the necessary amount of social grease to keep the edition on

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track. In this he was successful. GIKhL released the edition on time, with Zaslavskii’s foreword, in a print run of 300,000, a figure more typical of the collected editions of nineteenth-century Russian classics (for example, in the same year of 1961 GIKhL also records releasing a Chekhov edition in a print run of 625,000, Tolstoy in 500,000 copies, and Pushkin in 298,000, while Soviet classics such as Leonid Leonov or Aleksander Fadeev were assigned far smaller print runs of 75,000 and 90,000).26 The publishing industry immediately congratulated itself for the achievement, awarding the edition a second-degree diploma at the 1961 competition for ‘The Best Book of the Year.’27 The competition catalogue reveals that the Il’f and Petrov edition was the only collected works or multi-volume format to be named one of the year’s top fifty books, and that only one other book that year had a print run of 300,000: a collection of Swedish folktales called Vodiat pcheli khorovod (The bees have a hoedown), which sold for the lowest price listed, 19 kopecks. The only other award-winning books to have print runs over 100,000 were four children’s books and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. To judge by these measures, the publishing industry was deeply invested in confirming Il’f and Petrov’s newly canonical status as classics of Soviet satire. II.  Forewords as Persuasive Peritexts, Part Two:   Who Can Remain Outside the Peritext’s Influence? This new status, and the effort exerted in promoting it, resulted in several long-lasting trends. One was that a whole generation of writers, including the ‘young prose’ of the 1960s, took the Bender novels’ characteristic modes of ironic discourse, detached authorial commentary, and manipulation of cliché as models.28 The second trend was a spike in publishing activity, followed quickly by a wave of adaptations for film, television, theatre, puppet theatre, radio, and other media. In the third trend, starting in the late 1960s, some intellectuals began accusing Il’f and Petrov of willingly collaborating with Stalin’s repressions. This phenomenon has been definitively researched by Iakov Lur’e, who wrote his book V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov (In the land of unfrightened idiots)29 largely to clarify the motivation, target, and significance of these accusations. Rather than revisit Lur’e’s work, I want to focus attention on one of the pieces of evidence most widely cited by Il’f and Petrov’s detractors: Vasisualii Lokhankin from Zolotoi telenok. Lokhankin, who is allegedly Il’f and Petrov’s contribution to Stalin’s

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anti-intellectual campaign, loved to admire impressive books (that is, admire them for their peritexts) rather than read them. He basks in a collection of luxury bindings, impressive serial volumes, and gold-stamped spines that help him ‘become purer’ and ‘grow spiritually somehow’; then, having taken the full recommended daily allowance of culture, he sits down to ogle, among other things, the ads for bust enlargement in a thirty-year-old back issue of Rodina (Homeland).30 Lokhankin is a philistine, coward, and parasite, someone who does not work because ‘work would have kept him from thinking about the meaning of the Russian intelligentsia, a social group to which he considered himself to belong.’31 Il’f and Petrov ostensibly created Lokhankin, a brilliant caricature of the pseudo-intellectual, and a reader all too susceptible to the message of ‘impressive’ peritexts, as part of their dutiful collaboration with Stalin’s anti-intellectual campaign. The interpretation of Il’f and Petrov as having ‘succumbed’ to the regime’s demands gained such prominence that by the 1970s some people actually felt guilty about enjoying Il’f and Petrov and tried to explain themselves in print.32 Iakov Lur’e reads this as proof that the literary bosses’ post-1956 attempts to co-opt the coauthors for their side worked: ‘No matter how forced [these official] statements are, no matter how much they contradict Il’f and Petrov’s real texts, they still had an effect on the reader. It is precisely this belief in the establishment (ofitsioznyi) character of the writers’ work that made it easier for their short-lived admirers of the 1960s to cast off their former idols.’33 In other words, Lur’e is arguing that the entire canonization campaign, including the official statements found in Zaslavskii’s foreword, did affect how readers read Il’f and Petrov’s works. Moreover, he is indicating that the post-1956 campaign to reclaim Il’f and Petrov as loyal Soviet writers, spearheaded by Simonov largely as a means of facilitating their rehabilitation and republication, was taken at face value by elite readers who were themselves intimately familiar with the compromises and political machinations necessary to the functioning (or dysfunction) of Soviet literature. The example of Il’f and Petrov indicates that the space of the peritext is indeed one of influence on the reader, that it is, in fact, impossible to read their works without having the peritextual interpretation ‘hang over your reading, compelling you to take a position, positive or negative, in relation to it.’34 Iakov Lur’e also notes this influence of the peritext, providing a quote from Zaslavskii’s foreword (‘their satire … contributes to the communist upbringing of the workers’) and commenting: ‘It’s easy to understand how similar

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compliments (especially from the mouth of such a well-known scoundrel as D. Zaslavskii …) could only reinforce the opinion’ of Il’f and Petrov’s accusers.35 Lur’e suggests that the bitter accusations against Il’f and Petrov came out of the conviction that gained ground in intellectual circles that the co-authors were zakaznye pisateli (writers who wrote whatever the ‘social command’ ordered), sell-outs who exchanged artistic freedom for a life of high privilege. This conviction was strengthened by the rhetoric of the post-1961 official canonization campaign, much of which took place in the peritexts of the authors’ books. Thus, the peritext is the field on which three features of reader response meet: authorial reputation (a very influential, if amorphous, paratext), peritextual explication, and individual readers. The case of Il’f and Petrov is a prime example of how the potential for conflict between these elements grew over time, subject to the increasing pressure on publishers to promote, as the 1949 Literaturnaia gazeta editorial put it, ‘a certain politics in the organization of the Soviet literary process.’ The fact that so many readers were ready to take the peritextual packaging of Il’f and Petrov so seriously also indicates the continuing influence of what Sheila Fitzpatrick has called the Manichean discourse of identity in the early Soviet period.36 Fitzpatrick argues that the only two officially recognized identities vis-à-vis power at this time were the binary opposites of ‘ally’ and ‘enemy,’ and that this binary mentality was internalized by many intellectuals, who also recognized only two identities vis-à-vis power, ‘collaborator’ and ‘resister.’ Each of these, apparently, had a known moral valence and produced known results: collaboration was easy, but evil, and earned the collaborator success, while resistance was difficult, but good, and earned the resister misery, even death. Even though Il’f and Petrov did receive warnings from editors (one that was allegedly passed down from Stalin himself in response to their 1932 feuilleton ‘KLOOP’), neither writer was ever arrested, much less sentenced to death, for what they wrote, nor were their works repressed during their lifetimes; ergo, they must have been collaborators.37 But this binary model is, I think, overly reductive. In fact, an increasing number of scholars from Lovell, Hellbeck, and Lahusen to Alexei Yurchak and Catriona Kelly have proven the value of non-binary models of everyday behaviour in the Soviet period.38 Furthermore, letters written by average Soviet citizens to political leaders in the 1930s reveal that people could have a wide range of responses to government-sponsored violence and suppression, a range

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that a binary system simply cannot accommodate.39 Rather than engaging the emotional debate about whether Il’f and Petrov were stalinskie sokoly (Stalin’s falcons) or proto-dissidents, neither of which is accurate, I hope to focus attention on process, to examine the nature and efficacy of the ‘levers’ that ‘guided’ readers’ perceptions of the coauthors and their work. A better understanding of the efficacy of the peritext on the reader in the Soviet context, and how this might differ from reader responses to peritexts in other cultural contexts, is a goal justifying attention to even the most bombastic, eminently ignorable Soviet forewords. III.  Forewords as Persuasive Peritexts, Part Three:   The Reader and the Foreword Representative of the backlash against highly theoretical approaches to reader response is Jonathan Rose’s 1992 article calling for scholars to ignore the assumed responses of ‘ideal,’ ‘authorial,’ ‘intended,’ or other unreal readers, focusing instead on documented reading response.40 In dealing with the peritext, too, there is always the danger of relying too much on assumed responses. For example, as much as one might agree with Iakov Lur’e’s well-reasoned conclusions about the (unintended) efficacy of David Zaslavskii’s foreword to Il’f and Petrov’s 1961 Collected Works, they are still based on inductive reasoning, not documented reader response. But we are fortunate to have one such response, from Eduard Grafov, a writer of the generation that came of age in the late 1950s fetishizing the Bender novels (for example, he claims to have spent his ninth- and tenth-grade years in school speaking only in phrases from them). When he read the foreword to the 1961 edition, Grafov was appalled at Zaslavskii’s misrepresentation of the facts: I read D. Zaslavskii’s foreword to the wonderful five-volume edition (1961) carefully. He was one of those Kremlin arbiters of taste in the realm of the satirical. I’ll pass on a charming quote so that you can appreciate the sliminess of this regime mouthpiece: ‘Well-meaning critics in their time pointed out a few weak parts of the novels.’ That is, they were so ‘wellmeaning’ that for long years the novels were hidden under lock and key.   And do you know why the people, as it turns out, loved Il’f and Petrov, why they were just what the people wanted? Here’s why: ‘Quite often the people bore their suffering with laughter, with smiles, with jokes.’ That is, they just laughed themselves silly for the entire decade of the 1930s from

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268  Anne O. Fisher start to finish. They especially ‘suffered with laughter and smiles’ in the Kolyma camps. Well, isn’t he a jerk?!41

Here is one reader who, although also an intellectual, represents the opposite end of the spectrum from Il’f and Petrov’s elite detractors. Grafov would have agreed with Kataev that Zaslavskii’s foreword was a ‘sacrilege,’ but he is easily able to dissociate Zaslavskii’s rhetoric from the authors whose work he loves. It’s worth bringing up the example of readers from other Socialist countries who were able to separate the beloved text from the despised peritext … literally. The following is a wonderful vignette from the autobiographical fiction of Czech writer Jan Zábrana describing the reader ‘S.’ Here we see the pragmatic reaction by ‘S’ to the Communist government’s attempts to appropriate one of his favourite writers, the classic Czech writer Alois Jirásek, by publishing Jirásek in a mass edition: I saw that S. had a volume of Jirásek’s writings in his satchel – in those days they were being published in large numbers thanks to some campaign. In every book was printed: ‘Alois Jirásek, the nation’s heritage’ and under that ‘A collection of writings published on the initiative of Klement Gottwald, President of the Republic – edited by Zdenek Nejedly.’ I looked at S. and said: ‘Did you borrow that somewhere?’ – ‘No, I bought it.’ – ‘You bought it from them?’ S. turned to me: ‘You don’t understand me, pal, you’ve got it all wrong ... I like Jirásek. He was one of the Czech nation’s great writers and a National Democrat ... It’s not his fault that those bastards are parading him around ... And by the way,’ he took off the paper dust jacket, ‘these books are beautifully bound, bound in cloth, the paper is nice and they’re cheap, subsidized ... Why shouldn’t I buy them if I like Jirásek? ... And look,’ he turned to the front of the book, ‘this page with all their crap on it – I always take a razor and cut that out, perfectly, clean work, I take my time with it so it doesn’t cut up the spine ... Then I cut out the page in back, too ... So then I have a beautifully bound Jirásek on beautiful paper at home in my bookcase, and those Communist bastards paid half of it for me.‘42

The popular, established writer Valentin Kataev, so offended by the thought that Zaslavskii would write the foreword to the Collected Works of his close friend (Il’f) and brother (Petrov), might have been gratified to know that sophisticated readers would eventually come up with such an easy response to an odiously official edition patron.

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It would not be at all surprising to encounter such a sharp reaction to Zaslavskii’s foreword, regardless of the omnipresent Soviet rhetoric regarding the cultured treatment of books. So far, none have surfaced. Il’f and Petrov would doubtless have enjoyed hearing about it if an example had turned up, since they were both keenly interested in readers, especially the poor or inexperienced reader. The co-authors were particularly alert to the abuse of the peritextual function, as well as to its inversion, the philistine reader’s slavish fetishization of peritexts (we remember Lokhankin’s quasi-religious veneration of his luxuriously bound books). In the 1932 feuilleton ‘V zolotom pereplete’ (‘In a golden cover’), the co-authors mock both the crude marketing tactics of ostentatious bindings and the absurd narrative tactics of forewords that insist on an ideological justification for reading a book which the foreword itself admits is ideologically inert and artistically barren. The co-authors are not referring here to that favourite foreword writer’s ploy of pre-empting criticism from readers by criticizing the book oneself, a ploy that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg has called the ‘lightning-rod’ function of forewords.43 Rather, they object to the stupidity and transparency of a foreword that consists of a laundry list of caveats and warnings, finished off by a weak attempt to give the book an ideologically substantiated (ideologicheski vyderzhannyi) appeal of which Marx himself would approve:





The reader, having admired to his satisfaction the dust jacket printed in color, the golden binding and the title ‘Documents of Theatrical Society and Public Life: The Memoirs of Infantry Captain and Amateur Actor A. M. Snop-Nenemetskii,’44 opens the book and immediately comes up against a large foreword.   Here he finds out that: a) Snop-Nenemetskii was never remarkable for the depth of his talent; b) he was continually distracted by superficialities; c) he wrote memoirs that are careless, foolish, and exceedingly dubious in terms of their truth value; d) his memoirs weren’t written by Snop-Nenemetskii himself, but by a hack journalist, the obscurantist and swindler Tantalov; e) the very existence of Snop-Nenemetskii should be regarded with suspicion (perhaps such a Snop-Nenemetskii never even existed at all); f) the book is nevertheless of great interest, since it clearly and vividly sketches out the mores of the pre-revolutionary theatrical petty

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270  Anne O. Fisher bourgeois, which vacillated between large-scale feudalism and the individual accumulation of goods.45

Clearly, there is neither a political nor an aesthetic reason to read this book at all. Il’f and Petrov conclude with a sarcastic comment on the institutionalization of these forewords and their effect on the reader: Gradually a special caste of foreword writers has formed, which hasn’t yet been registered as a professional union, but which has already developed two standard templates.   According to the first template, the work is reviled, preferably with foaming at the mouth, and in a postscript the little book is recommended for the attention of Soviet readers.   According to the second template the author of theatrical or some other kind of memoirs is crudely made up as a Marxist and, with an ideological foundation having been thus built under some Elizabethan grandma, her works are also recommended for the attention of readers ...   So the consumer of artistic merchandise gives the book a suspicious look. Snop-Nenemetskii has been unmasked and so can’t stimulate any interest, while it’s difficult to believe in the Elizabethan grandma who is briskly rushing over to stand under the flag of Marxism.   The consumer puts the book on his shelf with a sigh. Let it stay. If nothing else, at least the cover is gold.46

Although both templates warmly recommend the main text ‘for the attention of readers,’ the first template is too contradictory, the second too artificial, to be believed. Il’f and Petrov were mocking the transparent attempts of foreword writers, and by extension, of publishers, to recast a book as something it was not, almost twenty years before their own books would provoke official pronouncements on the necessity of ‘notes or forewords [and an attempt to] explain the merits or defects of various authors’ works to the reader.’ The difference in time period is painfully clear: in 1932 Il’f and Petrov make fun of forewords that try to put an ideological spin on an obviously unsuitable candidate, while in 1949, as we have seen, the ideological spin becomes more or less imperative, whether the candidate is suitable or not. ‘V zolotom pereplete’ is also a comment on the reader’s supposed susceptibility to peritextual influence. Although Il’f and Petrov gently rib the reader for succumbing, Lokhankin-like, to the blandishments of a gold binding, they approve of his acumen in negotiating textual peri-

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texts. The reader is sophisticated enough to see that these are not just badly written peritexts, they are templates. This means that they have predictable relationships to their main text: they each take a poor text and falsify its virtues. Thus, even though the peritext itself is false, containing many untruthful claims and euphemisms, it reliably conveys the truth about its main text to sophisticated readers who know how to decipher the code or template. It is just this kind of sophisticated reading that, as Dobrenko has shown in The Making of the State Reader, was being institutionally phased out by 1932,47 rendering the co-authors’ portrayal both optimistic and anachronistic. It is tempting to wonder what Il’f and Petrov would have made of the sophisticated readers who had such divergent readings of the foreword to their own 1961 edition, a foreword in which David Zaslavskii, a confirmed member of the ‘special caste of foreword writers,’ portrayed Il’f and Petrov as standing ‘under the flag of Marxism.’ IV.  Future Directions of Study: The Peritext as Documentary Evidence The example of the foreword in Il’f and Petrov’s writing shows that a peritext and its text can be at odds with each other, compromising any concept of the book as a unified space. Similarly, as other authors in this volume have pointed out, it would be inaccurate to describe as ‘unified’ the cultural context in which any given Soviet reader, or community of readers, made meaning from print culture. Given this fragmentation both of interpreter and interpreted, we can rephrase Stephen Lovell’s tongue-in-cheek question from chapter 8: rather than asking what could possibly be interesting about ‘a time and place where book production was totally in thrall to politics,’ we could investigate how the book’s thralldom to politics was enacted as effectively as it was, given the complex, often contradictory nature of the book object itself, its producers, and its socio-political context. As satire, Il’f and Petrov’s Bender novels might be more conducive to complexity and contradiction than other texts. Still, as Catriona Kelly has observed, ‘real-life readers took very different “routes” through propaganda texts.’48 The reader with the razor blade is only a more extreme manifestation of the desire to blaze one’s own trail through any text, even one with a seemingly unambiguous message. It seems superfluous to argue the importance of understanding how a reader makes meaning from a text. But it is worth repeating that all paratexts – including peritexts – have much

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to offer the scholar interested in this question. Since the Soviet paratext is still relatively underused, there are still many organizational tasks to be done. The first is to modify Genette’s definition of the paratext as representing exclusively authorial intent: ‘something is not a paratext unless the author [of the main text] or one of his associates accepts responsibility for it, although the degree of responsibility may vary.’49 The Soviet peritext, as I have already argued in this essay, had a less direct relationship to the main text’s author. Genette is quite aware of issues limiting authors’ control over the paratextual presentation of their work, such as market demand, unscrupulous publishers, or misrepresentation in posthumous editions, issues which plagued the Soviet as well as the Western author. Nevertheless, Genette’s definition of the peritext’s relationship to the main text simply does not allow for the realia of the Soviet ‘literary environment’ (literaturnyi byt, a concept described by Boris Eikhenbaum in his 1929 article of the same name),50 in which an author’s control was limited by system-wide mechanisms such as state censorship, ‘social command’ (the injunction to write on certain themes purportedly desired by Soviet readers), or the fact that a single organization, the Soviet Writers’ Union, regulated access to publishing. The first task, then, will be to reassign the agency of all paratexts (and thus all peritexts) back to their respective individual authors, not to the author of the main text. The second task awaiting the scholar of the Soviet paratext is to rework Genette’s typology, taking advantage of the absence of the unifying principle of authorial intent to create a system that pays equal attention to all paratexts. This is imperative in the case of the peritext, since Genette neglects significant peritexts such as binding (which he relegates to a mere ‘peritextual manifestation’) and illustrations (which he sidesteps since they require additional expertise with visual materials).51 I propose to typologize the peritext according to textuality. Thus, all peritexts will divide into either atextual or textual. The atextual category will consist of material peritexts (paper quality, choice of printing technology, choice of binding material and style, inclusion of luxury items such as bookmark ribbons or tipped-in illustrations, number of These atextual peritexts can be quite effective, as we see with Lokhankin and similar ‘readers.’ The textual category will also be divided into two categories: narrative peritexts (introductions, forewords, afterwords, commentaries, footnotes) and non-narrative peritexts (colophon, publication data, errata slips). As in Genette’s original taxonomy, textual

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peritexts may be either authorial (written by the author of the main text) or allographic (written by someone else). This reshuffling of categories focuses attention on a variety of peritextual elements capable of providing information about what the book’s various reader-producers thought it meant. It also seems more appropriate to the reality of the heavily bureaucratized and closely surveilled Soviet literary environment. Overall, rearranging Genette’s typology to be less author-centric and less text-centric will help us see the book object as what it is: a multivalent space in which meaning is negotiated by a wide variety of producers and consumers, rather than a homogeneous space whose disparate elements are all more or less unified by authorial intent. Separating out the peritext in this way frees us to examine other peritexts as documentary evidence. One particularly informative example of this is the illustrations found in successive editions of the Bender novels, which provide a diachronic reading history of what successive illustrators thought these novels meant. Genette is not alone in choosing not to analyse illustrations: art historian Aleksandr Kamenskii has noted, ‘[Yuri Tynianov in his article ‘Illustration’] also did not pay attention to the evolution of the literary image in the reception of readers with the flow of time; but illustration notes and in its own way embodies this evolution.’52 Two examples from the illustrational history of Zolotoi telenok will serve to illustrate the changing norms of reader reception. Zolotoi telenok was illustrated most famously by Konstantin Rotov in 1931, Kukryniksy in 1971, Evgeny Shukaev in 1983, and Leonid Tishkov in 1989. Kukryniksy, a collective group of three artists, portray the conflict between Bender and Koreiko straightforwardly, capturing an actual moment in the text when the two arch-enemies come face to face. Kukryniksy make sure to represent the physical details of Koreiko’s room and dress just as Il’f and Petrov describe them, emphasizing the realia of everyday life in the late NEP era (see fig. 9.1). The Kukryniksy illustrations, as well as the luxury coffee-table book edition in which they appear, serve to subtly position Zolotoi telenok as a cultural treasure, a nostalgic, affectionate documentation of the early years of Soviet power. In contrast, Leonid Tishkov’s figurative illustration of the conflict between Bender and Koreiko (see fig. 9.2) clearly reflects the relaxed interpretive parameters of the late perestroika era. Tishkov’s illustration, like Kukryniksy’s, emphasizes the realia of everyday life of the late NEP period when the events in Zolotoi telenok take place, but Tishkov’s

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Figure 9.1  Bender and Koreiko by Kukryniksy, 1971. Source: Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, ill. Kukryniksy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971).

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Figure 9.2 Bender and Koreiko by Leonid Tishkov, 1989. Source: Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, intro. Z. Papernii, comment. E. Sakharovaia, ill. L. Tishkov (Moscow: Kniga, 1989).

portrayal is threatening and symbolic rather than charmingly literal. Tishkov’s depiction of Bender literally clipping Koreiko into his own file of blackmail materials also emphasizes the inordinate power that bureaucracy and official paper-shuffling could exert on private citizens, a common theme of fiction from the period; Tishkov’s rendering reminds us that this power is no less insidious for being wielded by Bender, a sympathetic character. Throughout his illustrational series, Tishkov’s emphasis on violation and the grotesque highlights the negative aspects of the Soviet system, reading the novel as critique of this system’s cruelty rather than as affectionate celebration of its quirks. V.  Conclusion As already indicated, D.F. McKenzie’s simple but radical point that

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book editions are themselves readings of the text(s) they reproduce is fundamental to my own strategy of peritextual comparison.53 How­ ever, McKenzie’s insight also leads us to a more global reconsideration of the opposition between reading and writing. Usually, this opposition contrasts writing, which, in Roger Chartier’s formulation, is ‘conservative, fixed, [and] durable,’ to reading, which is ‘always of the order of the ephemeral.’ Seen in this light, reading is a process that ‘rarely leaves traces, that is scattered in an infinity of singular acts, and that easily shakes off all constraints.’54 While the ‘constraint’ of the peritext might be harder to shake off than Chartier hopes, it is true that this idea of reading’s ephemeral nature has been reflected in the scarcity of reading evidence and the resultant difficulty of constructing localized studies of actual readers. Fortunately, McKenzie’s now-famous insistence that ‘forms effect meaning’ means that we do have a rich source of ‘traces’ of reading.55 In fact, each published book edition of a text is a reading of that text, and by means of diachronic editional comparison we can trace the changing meanings of this text over time: ‘each reading is peculiar to its occasion, each can be at least partially recovered from the text, and the differences in readings constitute an informative history.’56 On top of opening up a valuable source of reading evidence, though, McKenzie has also overturned the reading-writing opposition: it is writing that may be reproduced poorly or wrongly (especially given the vagaries of Sovietera censorship), writing that is ultimately ephemeral, and reading that is tangible and remains accessible. The interpretations manifested in successive book editions of the Ostap Bender novels confirm that they provide an exceptional example of what Chartier calls the ‘dialectic between imposition and appropriation, between constraints transgressed and freedoms bridled’ that so characterizes Soviet-era reading.57 Notes   * See, for example, Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, eds., A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).   1 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), viii. My thanks to the participants of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Fisher Forum 2006 for their comments on a conference paper on this subject, to Peter

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  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8   9

10 11 12 13

Pozefsky for reading an early draft of this paper, and to Miranda Remnek for her meticulous and insightful editing. This discussion concerns the ‘intrinsic’ space of the book – which will normally also exist in an ‘extrinsic’ world of mappable spaces (libraries, coffee shops, and the like) that are equally varied but less closely tied to the physical entity. For a brief overview of this policy, see the introductory chapter in S.I. Timina, Put’ knigi. Problemy tekstologii sovetskoi literatury. Spetskurs (Leningrad: Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut, 1975). Quoted in Evgenii Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 188. The first phrase is from Dobrenko, Making of the State Reader, 42; the second is from Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 36. Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Writing the Self in the Time of Terror: Aleksander Afinogenov’s Diary of 1937,’ in Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 69–93, and Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). These suggestions are found, respectively, in: D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xxviii, 8; Jonathan Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no.1 (January-March 1992), 49; Chartier, Order of Books, 22; and Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading,’ in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), 157. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. The most exciting recent project in this regard is the U.K. Open University’s magnificent online resource, the Reading Experience Database (RED) 1450–1945: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/. Viktor Ardov, ‘Chudodei,’ in Sbornik vospominanii ob I. Il’fe i E. Petrove, ed. G. Munblit, A. Raskin (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), 209. ‘Kniga paskviliantskaia i klevetnisheskaia,’ in Evgenii Petrov, Moi drug Il’f, ed. A.I. Il’f (Moscow: Tekst, 2001), 308–19. Ibid. Ibid.

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278  Anne O. Fisher 14 The ‘Il’f and Petrov affair’ gives at least one example of a strategy for surviving changing literary and political policies: A. Tarasenkov, the editor of Sovetskii pisatel’s Soviet Russian Literature Section, was reprimanded for approving his section’s books ‘without even reading them first.’ But since he was the author of the first major review of Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev in 1929, this is clearly just a reason he fabricated for his investigators in order to avoid admitting the worse sin – that he had judged the Bender novels still fit for print in 1948. 15 Ibid., 312–19. 16 Ibid., 314. 17 ‘Ser’eznye oshibki izdatel’stva “Sovetskii pisatel,”’ Literaturnaia gazeta, 9 February 1949, 12. 18 RGALI f. 613, op. 10, d. 1393, ll. 50, 22. 19 Ibid. 20 Konstantin Simonov, ‘Predislovie,’ in Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev. Zolotoi telenok (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1959), 3–4. 21 ‘Postanovlenie sekretariata Soiuza sovetskikh pisatelei SSSR. Protokol 35, no. 10, 28/XI/56 g.’ in RGALI 613.10.1393.51. 22 Mikhail Odesskii and David Fel’dman, ‘Legenda o velikom kombinatore (v trekh chastiakh, s prologom i epilogom).’ Zolotoi telenok. Pervyi polnyi variant romana. Podgotovka teksta i vstupitel’naia stat’ia M. Odesskogo i D. Feld’mana (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 61. 23 RGALI f. 613, op. 10, d. 1394, l. 135. 24 Ibid., l. 48. 25 Ibid., ll. 36–7. 26 RGALI f. 613, op. 10, d. 7517, ll. 1–3. 27 Luchshie knigi 1961 goda (Moscow: Kniga, 1961), 80–1. 28 The poor imitators of the inimitable Il’fopetrovian style are discussed in M. Chudakova and A. Chudakov, ‘Sovremennaia povest’ i iumor,’ in Novyi mir, no. 7 (1967): 222–32, while Ann Komaromi has demonstrated that better-known writers such as Vasilii Aksenov and Venedikt Erofeev employed Il’f and Petrov’s example with more skill (Ann Komaromi, ‘The Children of Lieutenant Bender: Velikii kombinator and the Art of Late Soviet Quotation,’ paper delivered at the 2003 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies). 29 Iakov S. Lur’e (writing under the pseudonym Avel’ A. Kurdiumov), V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov: kniga ob Il’fe i Petrove (Paris: La Presse Libre, 1983). The title is actually a quote taken from Il’f’s notebooks. A new edition of this work was published in St Petersburg in 2005. Citations in this essay are to the 1983 edition.

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Il’f and Petrov’s Ostap Bender Novels  279 30 Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961), 2:143. 31 Ibid. 32 Lur’e, V kraiu, 16–17. 33 Ibid., 274. 34 Genette, Paratexts, 224. 35 Lur’e, V kraiu, 26. 36 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in TwentiethCentury Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 103. 37 Lidiia Ianovskaia discusses this story, and her difficulties publishing it, in ‘Nash drug Il’f’ in Zapiski o Mikhaile Bulgakove (Holon, Israel: Izdatel’stvo Moriia, 1997), 41–73. 38 Stephen Lovell puts it very nicely when he reasons that we need ‘to shift our attention from the question “why” to the question “how?”’ (Russian Reading Revolution, 40). This question is examined in the previously cited works by Hellbeck and Lahusen, as well as in Aleksei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Catriona Kelly, ‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers: The Stengazeta (Wall Newspaper), Kul’turnost’ and the Language of Politics in the Early Soviet Period,’ Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 4 (June 2002): 573–602. 39 Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 40 Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader,’ 49. 41 Eduard Grafov, ‘Satira – eto priut toski. Nevidal’ dlia Eduarda Grafova,’ Vecherniaia Moskva, 15 October 1997, 8. 42 My thanks to Jonathan Bolton for sharing this example with me from his own translation of Zábrana’s Celý život in an email of 9 April 2004. 43 Quoted in Genette, Paratexts, 208. 44 Snop-Nenemetsky is a nonsense concoction that literally translates as ‘Sheaf-Not-German.’ 45 Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, ‘V zolotom pereplete,’ in their Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961), 3:90–1. 46 Ibid. 47 For comments regarding this timing, see Dobrenko, Making of the State Reader (163, 177–8, 198, 213); Lovell sees the changes in attitudes toward reading more as a ‘homogenization’ of all elements of the book distribution circuit, but comes to the same conclusions as to timing (see Lovell, Russian Reading Revolution, 36–7, 42).

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280  Anne O. Fisher 48 Kelly, ‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers,’ 575. 49 Genette, Paratexts, 9. See also pp. 16, 347, 408–10. 50 See Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Literaturnyi byt,’ in Moi vremennik (Leningrad: Izd-vo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1929), 49–58. Editor’s note: ‘Literaturnyi byt’ is often translated as ‘the literary everyday,’ or ‘literary environment.’ Note that while discussing a smaller print culture space in chapter 3 of this volume, Peschio and Pil’shchikov refer to a subsequent article in Moi vremennik (82-6) entitled ‘Literaturnaia domashnost,’ which they define elsewhere as ‘unofficial literaturnyi byt.’ 51 Genette, Paratexts, 7, 411. 52 A. Kamenskii, ‘Samopoznanie zhanra,’ in Sovetskaia grafika, vol. 6 (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1981), 79, cited in Iurii Molok, ‘“Tri vozrasta” odnoi stat’i Tynianova,’ Tynianovskie chteniia, vol. 2 (Riga: Zinatne, 1986), 57–8. 53 McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 7–76. 54 Chartier, Order of Books, 1–2. Chartier here makes reference to Michel de Certeau’s formulation of the reading-writing opposition in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: Unversity of California Press, 1984). 55 McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 13. 56 Ibid., 19. 57 Chartier, Order of Books, viii.

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10 Closing and Opening and Closing: Reflections on the Russian Media marianna tax choldin

Editor’s Note The fifth and last theme in our volume involves censorship and its impact on the media – a topic of lasting interest to print culture historians, especially of the Russian ‘space of the book.’ This final chapter* takes as its basis an overview of issues raised in the Russian press since the year 2000 as reflected in Media Matters online – which until June 2008 was issued twice monthly by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), an independent international broadcast organization that provides news, information, and analysis to countries where non-state media are often limited or banned. RFE/RL has long served as a convenient introduction to the Russian press, of value both to experienced scholars and advanced students who have not yet accumulated extended Russian-language skills. Of similar value is the CDPSP (Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press), as well as Foreign Broadcast Information Service bulletins, since 2005 part of the newly formed Open Source Center with reports available through World News Connection – which identifies translated and English-language news articles for a specific country or region.   In terms of digital applications, news resources present challenges. First, newsprint titles involve unusual digitization difficulties given their large format, fragility, layout, and small fonts. They also represent a challenge when it comes to contextual information. A minimalist approach is to digitize mainstream content while omitting advertisements and the like. But this diminishes the value of the digitized version, as noted by a young researcher at Illinois who sought to determine the frequency and context of references to ‘consumerism’ in the Soviet press (the online version of the CDPSP eschews contextual information). Such an approach is rejected by newspaper archives and national libraries, which seek conversion programs for their output that properly reflect

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context. A second problem involves the unstructured nature of news content. Unlike the structured qualities of literary works, news articles require different markup in order to provide efficient coding and analysis of categories. Appropriate software exists in the form of qualitative (not quantitative) data analysis tools like QSR International’s NVivo – although these programs are more often applied by social scientists than humanists, who nonetheless make use of historical newspapers in digital format, and need tools with which to analyse content. With more world newspapers available over the Internet, and the development of the new Slavic & East European corpus of NewsBank’s World Newspaper Archive (announced in January 2009), it is to be hoped that more scholars of print and news culture will acquaint themselves with the possibilities.† My research over the last thirty years has focused on censorship in the imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet worlds, so it is in that context that I share with you now some thoughts about the present-day Russian media. Citizens of imperial Russia lived with a system of openly acknowledged, bureaucratic censorship that I call ‘sovereign censorship.’1 A large staff of censors, headquartered in the imperial capital of St Petersburg with branch offices throughout the empire and many specialized divisions, reviewed all material, printed or in manuscript, whether produced domestically or abroad. I really do mean all material, including not only books, magazines, newspapers, musical scores, and such, but also posters, business cards, candy wrappers, play scripts, works of art in various media, technical manuals, scientific and educational materials, personal mail – every kind of item on which words or symbols appeared. The censorship aimed to protect citizens, especially ‘the masses,’ from dangerous ideas. My research has dealt mainly with ideas coming in from outside the empire, but whether imported or generated internally, the concerns appear to be the same. I group these ideas into four main categories: against royalty, against the prevailing social order, Russians portrayed as non-European barbarians, and immoral and blasphemous ideas. The authorities attempted to maintain a closed system, keeping citizens of Russia safe both from imported and locally generated ideas. But the borders of the empire were open and fairly porous, and although it was difficult to do so, people still managed both to bring in foreign publications deemed dangerous, and to circum-

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vent the censorship and publish material frowned upon by the authorities domestically. Speaking or writing of imported ideas, I often quote Baron Korf, a high censorship official who said that ‘to try to protect a society from the influx of harmful ideas from outside by means of censorship is like trying to protect one’s garden from birds by closing the gates.’2 The same can be said of ideas produced at home.3 Only days after the Bolshevik Revolution censorship was imposed again, but with a major difference: now the system was unacknowledged officially, but in fact it pervaded the entire society. Again, all expression was covered by the system, now including new media as they appeared: telephone, radio, television. The aim was still to keep dangerous ideas from all citizens. Themes were roughly parallel to imperial themes: one was not allowed to express negative ideas about Communist Party leaders or rule by the Party, to criticize Soviet citizens as nonEuropean barbarians, to produce works considered by the state to be immoral (a rather Victorian morality prevailed) or blasphemous in a sort of spiritual, quasi-religious sense (the Soviet state, while professing atheism, had its own icons and rituals). This new type of censorship, resembling its imperial antecedent superficially but differing from it in crucial ways, I call ‘omnicensorship,’ to convey the breadth and depth of its coverage.4 It was a much more seriously closed system, and the borders were definitely closed now. It is certainly true that despite these restrictions, extremely severe at times, people did manage to communicate in all kinds of ways, using Aesopic language and other codes of various kinds,5 and that forbidden material did penetrate from foreign places. But people paid a high price if caught, and communication of ideas was definitely more limited than it had been in tsarist times.6 Now let us look at the end of the Soviet Union. The years from about 1986 through 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, are often referred to as the glasnost and perestroika period, during which the old system was still in place but enormous changes were taking place under the surface and, gradually, in plain view as well. Looking back, we can see the inexorable advance of change, a mighty volcano really, about to erupt. Those of us who spent time in the country during the early eighties felt the increasing openness almost physically, like an insistent rumbling; it was directed from the top at first, to be sure, but soon became delicious chaos, each day bringing amazing openings that we saw on the stage, on television, in the print media, in libraries and archives, in conversations with friends and with strangers on the street.

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The eruption came, finally, over three days in August 1991, by which time it was too late for the government to control any media, certainly not the latest additions, fax and email. (My husband and I followed the attempted coup from Leningrad, thanks to the BBC World Service and a joint-venture rock radio station that interrupted its musical program with frequent news bulletins, and to all kinds of daring posters and equally fascinating wall-newspapers.) The first half of the 1990s was quite an open period. Newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, along with all kinds of social, cultural, and educational institutions (certainly including libraries and archives), were struggling to remake themselves, to operate under totally new economic conditions, and to serve different audiences. Dramatic incidents abounded, one of my favourites, in October 1992, being the first religious rock concert in the Kremlin (italics and bold underscore my amazement, at the time and even now, that these words should occur in a single phrase). By the second half of the decade we were beginning to hear more and more about Boris Berezovskii, Vladimir Gusinskii, and a few other socalled ‘oligarchs’ and their ‘media empires,’ and that theme continues to the present. Vladimir Putin was elected president in March 2000, and his era has been characterized by, among other things, a highly publicized struggle between the government and the media oligarchs.7 To supplement my own observations in Russia and what I have learned from conversations with Russian friends, I decided to conduct a modest survey, using the wonderful resource of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty’s Media Matters (henceforth referred to as MM), which appears online every week or two.8 I pored over hundreds of entries from January 2000 to mid-June 2006. In this chapter I shall share the results with you, by means of a quick tour of headlines, grouped under four rubrics. I.  ‘We have definitely moved backward’ We begin with a group of items dealing with the relationship between government and media, which I have pulled together in a category I call ‘We have definitely moved backward,’ a quote from a May 2004 statement by Igor Yakovenko, general secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, and included in the 18 June issue of MM.9 The 13 April 2001 issue of MM reports that ‘Unknown people bought up all the copies of Nezavisimaya gazeta meant to be sold on 13 March … The edito-

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rial board believes this was due to an article critical of the Smolensk Oblast administration.’ In the same issue are reports of two Smolensk TV shows taken off the air, two issues of Kazan papers destroyed, and an Omsk paper censored. These and similar incidents all around the country were being reported regularly by the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, an organization founded in February 2000 by the Union of Journalists of Russia.10 A headline in the 3 August 2001 issue of MM has this headline: ‘FSB Calls for Full Takeover of Mass Media’; two months later, in the 8 October issue, we read that a special structure to protect state secrets has been created. The name of this new structure, the Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets, brings to mind, of course, the ‘Glavlit’ of Soviet times, the function of which was the same, and an imperial Russian structure with the same nickname and function.11 Surely there are no coincidences here! The 1 February 2002 issue of MM reports that a liberal State Duma deputy, Viktor Pokhmelkin, predicts that the days of independent media in Russia are numbered – though he suggests that ‘Russian authorities will not provoke a direct clash, but will instead make attempts to achieve a political reorientation of the independent media.’ Ten days later, in the 11 February issue, we read that the media minister denies censorship. Speaking to the Duma, the minister claimed that only 10 per cent of print, broadcast, and Internet publications are owned by the state, but the report concludes with the observation that the minister ‘failed to mention that the 10 per cent includes all national television channels and most of the national newspapers.’ President Putin weighed in, quoted in the 12 April issue of MM: ‘If freedom of the press is understood as the freedom of a handful of socalled oligarchs to buy journalists, to dictate their will in the interests of their groups, and to protect the way of Russia’s oligarchic development that was thrust on the country over the past decade, then yes, it is in danger.’ The 7 June issue has this headline: ‘KGB General to Oversee State-run RTR TV Network.’ In the 9 August issue a long feature in the newspaper Izvestiia is noted, dealing with the death of political satire on TV, and the 17 January 2003 issue includes a piece on self-censorship, seen as increasingly widespread. Another perennial theme, concern about the image of Russia and Russians, appears in the 8 March 2002 issue of MM: President Putin called on the country’s cultural elites to ‘utilize the [country’s] cultural potential for forming an image of Russia and establishing [Russia’s]

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new role and place in the civilized world,’ producing children’s television programming, especially cartoons, that will ‘reinforce national values.’ In the 7 April 2003 issue, in an item headlined ‘Russia Responds Sharply to U.S. Accusations of Poor Press-Freedom Record,’ the Media Ministry lashed out at the United States: ‘The statements of American officials claiming that there are limitations of the rights and freedom of [Russian] citizens to access information have a particular piquantness against the background of the ongoing military operation of American forces in Iraq.’ And the 9 June issue reports that anti-American books are among Russia’s best-sellers. There were reports in August 2003 that the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion, esteemed at home and abroad for its independence despite its status as a state enterprise, would have a new management board. This raised fears that the organization could no longer be counted on to produce accurate and responsible information.12 In the fall of 2003 journalists and Duma deputies challenged the controversial new media law in Russia’s Constitutional Court, but headlines during the following spring indicate a theme of docile media paving the way for Putin’s victory.13 In the same issue of 12 March 2004, Catherine Fitzpatrick, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty regular commentator, contrasts slick current TV news with its rough and seamy Yeltsin-era predecessor, noting that ‘The professionalism of Vesti [a nightly news program] and the legitimate news stories that it does cover well distract attention from the stories it never covers, as well as from its unwavering and uncritical gaze on President Vladimir Putin … Precisely because Vesti has the look and feel of a Western-style and modern news program, any bias it reflects or omissions it makes are harder to detect.’ This reminds me of the Soviet technique of what I call ‘censorship by translation,’ in which the Soviet view was inserted into translations by careful additions and omissions; short of comparing the translation with the original, there was no way to know what had been added, changed, or left out.14 The 9 April 2004 issue of Media Matters leads with an item by Robert Coalson entitled ‘The Battle Over Broadcasting Licenses’; Coalson observes that the Justice Ministry is now responsible for registering print media, and notes that this ministry has been accused of political bias. (Again I am reminded of the past, this time the imperial past, when the censorship office was moved in connection with censorship reforms being carried out in the period 1863–5 from the relatively benign Ministry of Education to the sharper-edged Ministry of the Interior.) Coalson

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also has the lead item in the issue of 10 January 2005 entitled ‘Now That the Media Are Under Control, Let’s Use Them’; he concludes that ‘It seems evident that in 2005, the Kremlin intends to use the tools that it honed in 2003 and 2004, including especially the state media. By the end of the year … we could be talking about an ideological sector in Russia, rather than a media sector.’ In the 29 December issue, Victor Yassman looks back in an article entitled ‘The Transformation of Television,’ remarking that ‘The year 2005 was a mixed bag for television in Russia – a year in which quantity came at the expense of quality, and the number of entertainment offerings ballooned as the Kremlin tightened control over information programming.’ Paul Goble continues this theme one month later15 with an item called ‘Putin’s Frightening “Press Guidance.”’ In February 2006 religious cartoons surfaced as an issue, as they had done worldwide; authorities in Volgograd closed a local newspaper over a cartoon depicting Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and the Prophet Muhammad.16 The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) held its annual meeting in Moscow at the beginning of June, despite the protests of many members. In his opening speech, President Putin said ‘I was very pleased to hear that, despite attempts to talk you out of this and to frighten you, the press showed responsibility and did not allow itself to be frightened but came to Moscow.’ A very different view was expressed by Oleg Panfilov, director of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, who chose to boycott the congress. Panfilov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: ‘The fact that I didn’t go to this congress is a form of protest, because I consider that congresses devoted to the development of a free and independent press in the world should not be held in a country where there are very serious problems with freedom of expression … WAN could hold a congress on Russia’s problems, for example, then this would be very important, then President Putin would not come and read his speech about how everything’s fine in Russia.’17 I conclude this section with a few – mostly negative – items on the state of the print and electronic media. In 2001 Russians were observed to be reading less and depending more on TV.18 ‘One Russian in Three Does Not Read Books’ is the headline of an item reporting the results of a survey of contemporary reading and viewing practices.19 True, upbeat notes were sounded in November 2001 – ‘Russians Can Now Send Musical Telegrams’20 – and in an April 2002 item describing a new online biographical directory of Russian politicians and government workers, a development suggesting increased openness.21

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But despite these positive signs, postal censorship, that old Russian and Soviet tradition, had already reared its head in March 2002: ‘NGOs in Perm Believe Letters From Abroad Are “Prescreened.”’22 And gloom definitely descended again in 2003, with two July headlines: ‘FSB Eavesdropping on Mobile Phones’23 and ‘Writers Warn Against Creeping Conservatism in the Schools,’ reporting that a group of eminent writers warned that ‘a tradition of great Russian writers who opposed tyranny and totalitarianism is being consigned to oblivion and eliminated from the curriculum of Russian schools.’24 Indeed, the writers noted, ‘Over the last couple of years, anti-totalitarian works by writers such as Boris Pasternak, Andrei Platonov, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandel’shtam … have been removed from required-reading lists, while Soviet literary icons such as Mikhail Sholokhov continue to be taught.’ The letter was signed by writers Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil’ Iskander, Andrei Voznesenskii, and Rimma Kazakova, among others. Finally, comments in 2003 on a new Russian encyclopedia to replace the Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet encyclopedia) have a sceptical tone: ‘Publication of [the encyclopedia] is fully financed by the state, and is not expected to be commercially profitable. Rather, it seems intended to encapsulate a new vision of Russia following what the Kremlin clearly wishes to portray as a successful post-Soviet political and economic transition.’25 In July 2004 we read that ‘Russian publishers and activists say police have swooped down on alternative bookstores and suppliers … in Moscow and other Russian cities recently, confiscating books on drugs, the war in Chechnya, and other controversial themes.’26 II.  ‘In this context, you can’t really be a journalist’27 Let us now turn our attention to the state of journalists and journalism in Russia. In October 2001, we read that the Interior Ministry is trying to take over the House of Journalists in central Moscow,28 and in the next few months numerous items deal with the case of Grigorii Pas’ko, charged with treason and revealing state secrets to the Japanese media.29 In May 2002 we learn that the FSB (one of the successor organizations to the Soviet KGB) has found spies among Western journalists, and in the fall of 2002 a psychiatrist suggests that TV journalists are responsible for depressing the citizenry with their negative stories.30 In 2004 two prominent figures in the world of Russian journalism give damning interviews to RFE/RL colleague Catherine Fitzpatrick.

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Masha Gessen contends that journalism is ‘a different profession now … There are those who are servicing the propaganda machine, which is straightforward enough. And those who are engaged in a polemic with the propaganda machine, which is very difficult and very honorable, but also isn’t journalism.’31 Oleg Panfilov, mentioned earlier, director of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, observes that ‘What’s dangerous is that Putin is re-establishing an authoritarian regime with a docile press that will not challenge him.’32 An outside observer, freelance journalist Julian Evans, returns us to the theme of dangerous Western journalists, in an interesting piece that reminds me of the ‘Russians as non-European barbarians’ concerns of earlier eras. Evans writes that It’s no secret that Moscow has an image problem. When Russian President Vladimir Putin makes headlines, it’s usually for jailing a businessman or cracking down on dissent. A 2003 poll [in the United States] commissioned by Putin’s government revealed the depth of the problem. The survey asked Americans to name the top 10 things they associated with Russia. The top four were communism, the KGB, snow, and the mafia. The sole positive association – Russian art and culture – came in dead last. A poll conducted in August on foreigners’ awareness of Russian brands did even worse. The only ‘brands’ foreigners could think of were Kalashnikov rifles and Molotov cocktails.33

Evans continues, ‘The Kremlin is convinced the culprits responsible for this distorted view of their country are people like me – foreign correspondents based in Moscow.’ III.  ‘This would be laughable if it weren’t so sad’34 As I pointed out earlier, immorality and blasphemy have always been of concern to censors – in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and, indeed, in most other countries. Some Media Matters headlines from 2001–4 illustrate responses by both the government and nongovernmental pressure groups to perceived threats in these areas. In March 2001 we read that Russian and U.S. police have closed down a child pornography organization operating on a Russian web site.35 In July of that year we learn that ‘members of the recently established Guild of Religious Journalists are being subjected to increasingly frequent attacks by nationalist and extremist groups that oppose the

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guild’s commitment to accurate and balanced coverage of religious questions.’36 We read in February 2002 that the pro-Kremlin political youth movement Moving Together completed ‘book swaps’ in several Russian cities, gathering up ‘intellectually marginal’ works by modern authors and replacing them with Russian classics by Bunin, Chekhov, and others. The swap is said to have netted nearly seven thousand books, including close to one hundred by Karl Marx.37 Religious issues surfaced again in March 2002, when the Orthodox Christian Citizens organization called on ‘all decent people’ to boycott the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets for criticizing a church group.38 Also in 2002 – as in some other countries, including my own – the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came in for stern criticism; an unidentified group in Kaliningrad called for a boycott, charging that ‘the film promotes occultism and magic and the author of the Harry Potter book series, J.K. Rowling, is a Satanist.’39 And a year later, a controversial textbook (Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture) made the headlines when a Moscow district court upheld a decision not to bring charges of ‘inciting ethnic strife’ against the book’s editor and publisher. According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘The textbook, which is recommended for use in Russian public schools by a joint panel of experts from the Education Ministry and the Russian Orthodox Church, argues that Jesus died because Jews were seeking “earthly well-being and power over other peoples” rather than spiritual values.’40 In spring 2004, in a case that attracted considerable media attention, the Sakharov Museum in Moscow was targeted by government prosecutors because of an art exhibition with religious themes, seen as ‘inciting religious and ethnic hatred.’41 Earlier, in May 2003, a headline read ‘Centrist Deputy Calls for Criminalizing Blasphemy.’42 And throughout the summer and fall of 2002 battles had raged over writer Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Goluboe salo (Blue lard) on the grounds that it was pornographic. The attacks had the usual effect, as reported by the radio station Ekho Moskvy on 19 July: ‘Interest in Sorokin is enormous now … In recent days, we have been selling more than 120 copies … a day, while before we were lucky to sell 16.’43 Another Moscow bookstore owner noted that ‘This assault … is pure politics, especially when you consider the raw sex that is carried on Russian TV and the pornography that is available in the kiosks. We are a general literary bookstore and do not specialize in pornography unless Henry Miller and James Joyce fit that category.’44 At the

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close of the year, an Interior Ministry official linked pornography and terrorism, claiming that ‘the profits generated by pornographic web sites worldwide play a significant role in the financing of extremist and terrorist organizations.’45 IV.  ‘The 90th Region of Russia’46 The last theme I want to review is the impact on the contemporary Russian scene of the Internet, described in 2001 as ‘the 90th region’ by a Kremlin media advisor. In other words, it constitutes such an important presence in Russian life that it has an almost physical presence (we in the United States would call it ‘the 51st state’). Media Matters is peppered with items dealing with this topic; the following examples are typical. In March 2001 the Duma proposed placing restrictions over foreign web sites as well as domestic ones, using Chinese or North Korean models.47 (This is a nice contrast to the Soviet era, when the Soviet Union’s censorship served as a model for China and North Korea!) In July the results of a survey taken by the Internet Monitor and reported in Kommersant-Daily suggested that Internet users in Russia were more educated, richer, and more mobile than their European counterparts; in fact, 69 per cent of Russian Internet users had a higher education, as opposed to only 48 per cent in Europe.48 But in August a senior financial analyst associated with a subsidiary of the Economist Intelligence Unit noted that ‘Russia lacks a coherent government policy and national strategy to promote the Internet, and thus lags behind neighboring countries in its use of the Internet.’49 However, in late September a government-sponsored portal opened for consultation, ‘devoted to resources on Russian civil society.’50 In January 2002, MM reports Internet statistics gathered by Kommersant Daily, a leading business newspaper, to the effect that almost 3 per cent of the total population of Russia has used the Internet at least once – and gives detailed information on Internet use in Siberia.51 In February we read about ‘patriotic hacking’ in Tomsk (students hacking into a Chechen web site are cleared of wrongdoing on the grounds that they are protecting the motherland from terrorists); and we learn that the Federal Security Service (FSB) plans to ‘increase its surveillance over Internet usage.’52 On a different note entirely, a June 2002 item notes that in a town in Chuvashia ‘adolescents are paying for time on computers with me-

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dicinal herbs that they gather in the surrounding countryside,’ an upto-date example of creative bartering.53 A year later, in May 2003, the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations noted that ‘The readership of the largest Russian Internet outlets is now comparable to that of the largest print publications and to the audience of radio stations … Thus, ownership struggles for major Russian web sites are likely to intensify.’54 In July 2004 a detailed interview on Russian Internet usage was given by Ivan Zasurskii, an administrator of Rambler (http://www.rambler. ru) – one of the major Russian search engines. Although, according to Zasurskii, only about fifteen million Russians (roughly 10 per cent of the population) regularly accessed the Internet at that time, it might in fact have been reaching as much as one-third of Russia’s population, especially those people living in urban areas – because other communication channels, such as radio, pick up information from the Internet and transmit it through their own programming.55 Given this expanded reach, questions about possible increased attention to the Internet on the part of authorities were bound to come up. MM writer Julie A. Corwin wrote three interesting reports on this topic – in July 2004, February 2005, and May 200556 – and it seems clear that the authorities were indeed contemplating attempts to control the Internet, although no one knew quite how to do it. V.  Conclusion Given the data to be gathered from this kind of review of a major Russian media digest, and from other impressions, should it be said that we are in an ‘opening’ or a ‘closing’ phase of Russian history? Journalistic observers – foreigners and Russians alike – always have a tendency to present us with gloom and doom. But even taking this into account, it does seem clear that we are in a period of closing: Putin, like imperial and Soviet leaders before him, is certainly attempting to control the media; glasnost is definitely over. Now, as in imperial and Soviet times, criticism of the government and its leaders is not welcome, and can lead to dire consequences. In the realm of organization and management the trend is toward verticality. The change can be seen perhaps most dramatically in television, but radio is not immune either; vertical lines are beginning to be evident, with ‘reliable’ people placed at the top of the hierarchies. A trend toward government control of publishing houses is evident now

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too; there are rumours that those who publish anything negative about the president could be in trouble.57 Another link with the past is the current concern about immorality and blasphemy. It would be interesting to know how many of the pressure groups protesting ‘immoral’ and ‘blasphemous’ books are really grass-roots organizations, and how many are really linked to the state, as the youth movement ‘Moving Together’ appears to be. This is where observers often end their comments on Russia today: things are bad and getting worse. As I too have noted, Russia appears to be closing. But I cannot leave it there. Are we not also in a period of opening? The borders remain open (remember that they were, for all practical purposes, sealed under the Soviets), always good news in Russia, and traffic in and out of the country is brisk. Scholars continue to dig into the past, and to write and speak freely about their findings. This is certainly true in the area of research on censorship itself, where new articles and volumes appear steadily, and where there is now a tradition of conferences and exhibitions.58 Some archives that were open in the heady early post-Soviet days have closed again, but many remain open and are filled with Russian and foreign scholars. The Internet appears still to be free, despite rumblings. (World experience shows that it is terribly difficult to control the Internet, although many governments are trying.) Furthermore, it occurs to me that some of the phenomena I observe now in Russia are certainly characteristic of other countries; consider, for example, problems of the independence and safety of journalists or, in my own country as well, issues regarding the monitoring of the Internet, or tapping phones. I am especially impressed by the phenomenon of internal monitoring that has developed in Russia; a good example is the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations. External monitoring has been around for a long time – as represented by groups such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and international human rights groups – but initiatives such as those named on the list in the appendix are a healthy post-Soviet phenomenon that we should applaud vigorously. My title, ‘Closing and Opening and Closing,’ suggests a dynamic and complex situation, and that is exactly what I see. If pushed against the wall and told that I must answer the question, ‘Is Russia closing or opening now?’ I would have to answer ‘Yes’! History is a continuum along which closing and opening go on all the time. There are simultaneous dismal and hopeful signs.59 I urge us all to support efforts

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by Russian friends and colleagues to keep things more open than  closed, just as we ourselves need to work toward the same end here at home. Notes   * Chapter 10 departs in length and style from the earlier essays in this volume, and serves in some sense as an epilogue. As noted, all were first presented at the Ralph and Ruth Fisher Forum entitled ‘Book Arts, Culture and Media in Russia, East Europe and Eurasia’ held at the University of Illinois in June 2006, but this essay served as the keynote lecture, and here preserves much of its lecture style.   † For pointers to newspaper research and content analysis see Roger D. Wimmer and Joseph R. Dominick, eds., Mass Media Research: An Introduction, 9th ed. (Boston, MA: Cengage-Wadsworth, 2011).   1 I’ve discussed ‘sovereign censorship’ in numerous articles and talks, but introduced the concept in the conclusion to my full-length study of imperial Russian censorship, A Fence around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 200. Here I describe the control exercised directly by the autocrat over the reading and writing of his or her subjects.   2 Choldin, Fence Around the Empire, 203. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.    3 There is a rich literature on censorship in Russia, by both Western and Russian scholars. Russians were not allowed to publish on this topic until recently. Russian publications on imperial censorship published in the last few years include Tsenzura v Rossii: Istoriia i sovremennost’: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, vyp. 1 and 2 (St Petersburg: Izd. Rossiiskoi natsional’noi biblioteki, 2001, 2005); N.G. Patrusheva, ed., Tsenzura v Rossii v kontse XIX-nachale XX veka: Sbornik vospominanii (St Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, 2003); and N.A. Grinchenko and N.G. Patrusheva, comps, Komitet Tsenzury inostrannoi v Peterburge, 1828–1917: Dokumenty i materialy (St Petersburg: Izd. Rossiiskoi natsional’noi biblioteki, 2006).   4 I first discussed the term ‘omnicensorship’ in a lecture (unpublished) at the Library of Congress in May 1990 to characterize the Soviet type of censorship. Basically, ‘sovereign’ censorship is the traditional variety, enforced by the state through a bureaucracy designed for that purpose. ‘Omnicensorship’ was something entirely new, devised by the Soviets, who claimed that there was no such thing as censorship in the Soviet state but who at

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  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

the same time implemented a system that permeated the society thoroughly and affected everyone. ‘Aesopic language’ is a term used widely when describing Russian and Soviet censorship, but not only Soviet. Derek Jones, ed., The Encyclopedia of Censorship (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001), 1:16 defines it as follows: ‘Modern writers have used Aesop’s name to describe an effective means of avoiding censorship: telling a story which appears to have nothing to do with present political concerns and leaving it to the readers (viewers, theatre-goers) to make connections that are apparently hidden from the censor.’ For more on ‘characteristic modes of ironic discourse, detached authorial commentary, and manipulation of cliché,’ see the preceding essay by Anne O. Fisher. For background reading I recommend two Western works: Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1973), and Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg, eds., The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR (London, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Among more recent Russian publications, see two works by Arlen Blium, Evreiskii vopros pod sovetskoi tsenzuroi, 1917–1991 (St Petersburg: Peterburgskii evreiskii universitet, 1996) and Zapreshchennye knigi russkikh pisatelei i literaturovedov 1917–1991 (St Petersburg: Sankt Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet kul’tury i iskusstvo, 2003). Berezovskii has been described as a self-exiled Russian media tycoon who served briefly as the former CIS executive secretary but was dismissed by Yeltsin. Gusinskii is the former owner of Russia’s NTV television network and head of the powerful Media-MOST company. For more information, a fine introduction is David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2002). For those readers not familiar with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, here is how the organization describes itself: ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, international communications service to Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Southwestern Asia, funded by the U.S. Congress through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In countries stretching from Belarus to Bosnia and from the Arctic Sea to the Persian Gulf, listeners rely on RFE/RL’s daily news, analysis and current affairs programming to provide a coherent, objective account of events in their region and the world.’ For more information, consult RFE/RL’s web site: http://www.rferl.org/. Editor’s note: As noted, Media Matters has ceased. Archival copies issued before 27 June 2008 are linked from http://www.rferl.org/subscribe.aspx. Yakovenko’s statement is part of an overview of media in Russia, and is well worth reading.

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296  Marianna Tax Choldin 10 This and other media-monitoring sites are listed in a document appended to this lecture, prepared for me by Svetlana Stulova of the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow and since updated. 11 The FSB is the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Federal’naia sluzhba bezopastnosti); Glavlit was the main Directorate for Literary and Publishing Affairs (Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Izdatel’stv), the state agency responsible for the censorship of printed materials in the Soviet Union. 12 MM, 18 August 2003. 13 MM, 12 March 2004, article by Robert Coalson. 14 On censorship by translation, see Maurice Friedberg, A Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954–64 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1977); and two of my own articles: ‘The New Censorship: Censorship by Translation in the Soviet Union,’ Journal of Library History 21, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 334–49, and ‘Censorship Via Translation: Soviet Censorship of Western Political Writing,’ in Choldin and Friedberg, eds., The Red Pencil, 29–51. 15 MM, 31 January 2006. 16 MM, 9 February, 2006. 17 MM, 8 June 2006. 18 MM, 21 May 2001; MM, 17 August 2001. 19 MM, 10 September 2001. 20 MM, 16 November 2001. 21 MM, 19 April 2002. 22 MM, 22 March 2002. 23 MM, 11 July 2003. 24 MM, 25 July 2003. 25 MM, 11 September 2003. The entry provides additional details on this publishing event: ‘The Great Russian Encyclopedia is the first official revamped version of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE). With 30 volumes and 80,000 entries, the Great Russian Encyclopedia – or BRE – will be the largest Russian encyclopedia available ... The BRE owes its existence to President Putin, who last October issued a decree ordering the publication of a Great Russian encyclopedia of national significance.’ 26 MM, 16 July 2004. 27 This quote from Masha Gessen, a Russian émigré journalist who contributes to publications in Russia and other countries, serves as the title of an interview with her conducted by RFE/RL staff member Catherine Fitzpatrick; see MM, 13 February 2004. 28 MM, 26 October 2001.

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Reflections on the Russian Media  297 29 MM, 26 October 2001, 4 January 2002, 18 February 2002. A search of Media Matters in April 2007 yielded 269 references to the Pas’ko case between 2001 and 2006. 30 MM, 17 May 2002; MM, 27 September 2002. 31 MM, 13 February 2004. 32 MM, 2 August 2004. Clearly there were, and are, journalists quite ready to challenge Putin, perhaps the best known among them being Anna Politkov­skaia, who paid for her challenge with her life.  33 Julian Evans, ‘Spinning Russia,’ Foreign Policy (online, posted 1 December 2005). 34 A statement made by Lev Ponomarev, head of the For Human Rights group, quoted in an RFE/RL article by Jeremy Bransten (see note 41). The saying is of course well-known, but it takes on new meaning in this context. 35 MM, 30 March 2001. 36 MM, 3 August 2001. 37 MM, 25 February 2002. The MM article contains further detail from Moving Together Press Secretary Denis Zaitsev: ‘The movement offered the reading public in various cities the opportunity to turn in books by modern popular authors such as Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, which the activists deem intellectually marginal.’ 38 MM, 29 March 2002. 39 MM, 5 April 2002. 40 MM, 7 April 2003. The MM article provides further detail: ‘The textbook authors have indicated that a second edition will take into account the views of human rights activists. Other religious leaders – most notably Muslims – have also voiced opposition to the introduction of the study of Orthodox Christianity into the curriculum … The Russian Orthodox Church is the only non-state organization that has prepared its own textbook for use in public schools.’ 41 See the report by Jeremy Bransten, ‘Russia: Modern-Art Trial to Test Freedom of Expression,’ MM, 17 June 2004. According to Bransten, the exhibition featured works of art ‘intended to provoke discussion about the role of religion in modern society.’ 42 MM, 30 May 2003. 43 Quote from Moscow’s Dom Knigi bookstore deputy director, quoted in MM, 26 July 2002. 44 MM, 11 October 2002. 45 MM, 13 December 2002. 46 Quote from Gleb Pavlovskii, Kremlin media advisor; see MM, 22 October

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47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

2001. In Pavlovskii’s words: ‘one must get used to the fact that the Russian Federation now has a 90th region – the Internet, and that Russian leaders at all levels must be present in this region, which will gradually become the largest region in the country in terms of political influence.’ [Editor’s note: Here it is important to note the emerging importance of blogs in Russia. Currently the most popular is Livejournal.ru – others include Diary.ru and Blogs.mail.ru – and all play an increasingly visible role on the Russian political scene, as indeed they do in the United States. Although the extent of their influence is a subject of debate, Michael Cheney (senior fellow at the University of Illinois’ Institute of Government and Public Affairs) believes that ‘select blogs have the potential to shape national races’; see Paolo Cisneros, ‘Blogs’ role growing in coverage of ’08 election,’ Daily Illini (25 March 2008). In Russia the same may occur since the Internet is gaining in popularity as a tool for opposition, especially among young people (most blog users fall in the 16–35 age group).] MM, 9 March 2001. MM, 27 July 2001. MM, 10 August 2001. The analyst, Svetlana Issaeva of Pyramid Research, affirmed that, before 1998, the Russian government largely ignored the Internet. MM, 10 October 12001. MM, 18 January 2002. MM, 11 February 2002. MM, 14 June 2002. MM, 2 May 2003. Julie A. Corwin, ‘Draining the “Cesspool”: Internet Legislation in Russia’ (MM, 16 July 2004). Corwin, ‘Draining the “Cesspool”’; ‘From Censorship to Content Filtering’ (MM, 9 February 2005); ‘Is the FSB Hoping to Rein In the Internet?’ (MM, 13 May 2005). See two reports by Kristine and John Bushnell, ‘Publishing Thrives While the Government Tightens Control Over the Media: A Report to Slavic Librarians, June 2005’ and ‘Russian Publishing in 2003 and Early 2004: Publishers Thrive While the Noose Tightens Around the Media: A Report to Slavic Librarians, July 2004,’ Slavic and East European Information Resources 7, no. 1 (2006): 83–108. RFE/RL devoted a series of special reports to ‘Russian Media Empires,’ and now maintains RFE/RL Watchdog (http:// www.rferl.org/archive/Watchdog/latest/646/646.html), a blog that pays ‘particular attention’ to the countries of Russia and Eurasia. It has ‘a singular mission – to monitor the latest developments concerning human

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Reflections on the Russian Media  299 rights, civil society, and press freedom.’ As for radio, a troubling article by Andrew E. Kramer appeared in the New York Times of 22 April 2007: ‘50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio.’ Kramer reports on a new directive that all radio newscasts must contain at least 50 per cent good news. ‘In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin.’ 58 This includes a series of historical exhibitions on censorship in Russia and the Soviet Union that I organized together with my Russian colleague Ekaterina Genieva in various cities around Russia, beginning in 1993 and continuing through the 1990s (always accompanied by scholarly conferences). Others who have organized such events include Vladimir Firsov and Mikhail Konashev in St Petersburg, and Tatiana Goriaeva in Moscow. In recent years a group of scholars, both senior and young, at the Russian National Library and other institutions in St Petersburg have been publishing excellent histories, bibliographies, and reference works on imperial Russian censorship, based on library and archival holdings. These include Natal’ia Patrusheva, Arlen Blium, Mikhail Konashev, and Vladimir Firsov. 59 It must be noted that some items on the dismal side continue to emerge. Consider the closure of the Educated Media Foundation in April 2007 (see appendix) and also two articles in the New York Times of 19 May 2007: ‘Eviction Notice Is Latest Russian Move Against Journalists,’ by C.J. Chivers; and ‘Russia Detains Opposition Leaders Until They Miss a Protest,’ by Steven Lee Myers. But all three stories are based on interviews with concerned individuals, who are still able to speak their minds openly, and I remain hopeful that this situation will prevail.

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Appendix: The Internet on the State of Mass Media in Russia

Compiled by Svetlana Stulova, Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow; revised by Miranda Remnek; and translated by Kirill S. Tolpygo, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina NOTE: Plans exist to update this list on a new web site, Print Culture in Russia from the Empire to the Present (http://www.library.illinois.edu/spx/ rusprintcult/).

All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion (Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniia obshchestvennogo mneniia) (VTsIOM) – Russia’s leading public opinion research organization. The center’s main activity is to conduct sociological research of a political, social, and electoral nature. Its web site contains a special theme section devoted to mass media, with subsections dealing with public trust of mass media, censorship, the Internet, mass media, and politics, etc. http://wciom.ru Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations (Tsentr ekstremal’noi zhurnalistiki) – founded 1 February 2000 as the human rights organization of the Russian Union of Journalists. The center’s projects include publication of weekly and monthly analytical bulletins on the state of mass media in the countries of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) and investigations into violations of journalists’ rights. http://www.cjes.ru Educated Media Foundation (EMF), formerly Internews Russia (Intern’ius Rossiia) – EMF was forced to suspend its work following an

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302  Svetlana Stulova

18 April 2007 raid on its Moscow headquarters and the filing of criminal charges against its director, Manana Aslamazyan. In May 2008 the Russian Constitutional Court ruled the charges unconstitutional, but it has been observed that the EMF ‘will not be allowed to re-open any time soon’ (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediarepublic/category/ people/). EMF had based its activities on the belief that a free, stable, and just civil society cannot exist without independent and powerful mass media. Among the goals of the program were the strengthening of mutual understanding and tolerance among people and the support of independent mass media. Internews carried out diverse humanitarian projects in the sphere of electronic mass media – educational programs, consulting, production, and dissemination of TV programs, and the development and dissemination of state-of-the-art television technologies. Internews was a member of Internews International, an international association whose membership includes organizations with offices in 35 countries. No current Russian web site; see the international http://www  .internews.org Glasnost Defense Foundation (Fond zashchity glasnosti) – the objective of the foundation is to promote the preservation and development of the rights of Russian print and electronic media, and through them, to promote the democratization of the information environment, science, politics, and education in modern Russia. Numerous programs of the GDF are aimed at making the activities of Russian print and electronic mass media and their agents more secure and uncorrupted in the interest of the Russian Federation and its citizens. http://www.gdf.ru Institute for Information Freedom Development (Institut razvitiia svobody informatsii) – a non-profit, non-governmental organization that conducts research on the theoretical and practical aspects ensuring the rights of citizens and organizations to access information. Thus, its activities are aimed at investigating, identifying, and solving problems of access to socially significant information in Russia. Since 2004, the institute has been employing a dual approach of monitoring governmental agency web sites for content, and litigating on behalf of citizens against government agencies to ensure access to information guaranteed under the law. http://svobodainfo.org

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Institute of Press Development (Institut razvitiia pressy) – Russian independent non-profit organization that contributes to the growth of professional opportunities, publishing standards, and viability of the Russian regional press. Established in November of 2000 on the basis of the previously existing National Press Institute (1996–2000) and Russian-American Information Press Center (1993–6). http://www.pdi.ru Journalist (Zhurnalist) – online version of the magazine Journalist, a virtual corporate and socio-political opinion resource. http://www.journalist-virt.ru Media Guide – an independent information portal for mass media market professionals: managers, and owners of advertisers, employees of advertising and marketing departments, representatives of advertising agencies, as well as employees of commercial services, PR departments, and advertising and marketing departments of publishing houses. http://www.mediaguide.ru MediaAtlas – an encyclopedia of the Russian press. This resource provides visitor statistics for web sites of periodicals publishers, and information about publishing houses (products, company details, advertising prices, and audience data). http://www.mediaatlas.ru Medialogia (Medialogiia) – an online system of analysis of open sources of information: newspapers, magazines, television, radio, information agencies, and Internet resources. http://www.medialogia.ru Media-Manager of Russia (Media-Menedzher Rossii) – the official web site of one of the more important projects in the field of Russian media business: The National Prize ‘Russia’s Media Manager.’ The goal of the prize is the popularization of the field and its role in the development of society and the state. Since 2001 the prize has been awarded to top managers in the mass media, advertising, and PR industries for professionalism and an innovative approach to management that contributed to the achievement of the most significant results in the area of media business. http://www.media-manager.ru

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Mediascope (Mediaskop) – the portal for scientific research of mass media and methods of journalism education of the Faculty of Journalism, Moscow State University. http://www.mediascope.ru Open Media News – news of the media community, overview of the media market, events, analysis, interviews, and opinions. http://www.omn.ru Russian Press Union (Rossiiskii soiuz pressy) – The lengthy statutes of this voluntary, self-administered, and non-commercial organization, known in full as the All-Russian Social Organization for the Support of High-Quality Means of Mass Information (Obshcherossiiskaia obshchestvennaia organizatsiia podderzhki kachestvennykh sredstv massovoi informatsii), speak to an emphasis on openness and legality, and its web site includes listings of numerous current press organs and associated personnel. However, it has not been updated since 2008. http://www.allpress.ru SMI.ru (Sredstvo massovoi informatsii v internete) – a daily online publication. The main goals of SMI.ru are operational analysis and systematization of publications of the Internet mass media devoted to socio-political matters (electronic publications and online versions of traditional media,) as well as commentary on these publications. SMI.ru has a stable and devoted audience; thousands visit the site daily. The audience of this resource consists primarily of individuals working in politics and mass media. The publications of SMI.ru are often quoted in print, on television, and on the radio. http://www.smi.ru

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Contributors

Lina Bernstein, Professor of Russian, is Chair of the Department of German and Russian and The Comparative Literary Studies program at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. She has published works on Nikolai Gogol’, the Moscow salon hostess Avdotia Petrovna Elagina, Russian letter-writing manuals, and merchant portraiture and book culture of the eighteenth century. Leonid Borodkin is Chair of the Department for Historical Information Science and head of the Center for Economic History at Moscow State University. He defended his doctoral degree in history in 1993. He has published extensively on the socio-economic history of Russia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and has participated in research projects on the living standards of Russian workers and labour relations in the Russian textile industry. He is also a specialist in historical digital resource creation. Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (1985), Thank You, Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (2000), and many essays on Russian culture and politics. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Marianna Tax Choldin is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and founding director of its

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306  Contributors

Mortenson Center for International Library Programs. She served as President of AAASS in 1995, and in 2000 received Russia’s Pushkin Gold Medal for cultural contributions. She has written many works on Russian censorship and book culture, including A Fence Around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars (1985). Evgeny Chugunov graduated in 1999 from Kostroma State University (KSU) and wrote his PhD dissertation on the living standards and culture of industrial workers of the Upper Volga region from the end of the nineteenth century to 1913. He has published on entrepreneurial history and workers’ culture in pre-revolutionary Russia and has served as Director of the State Historical Museum-Reserve ‘Ipatievskii Monastery.’ He continues his association with KSU, where he has served as associate professor of history, and he is now also Deputy-Chief of the Kostroma Department for Culture and Tourism. Ben Eklof is Professor of History at Indiana University. Among his works are Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (1986) and Soviet Briefing: Gorbachev and the Reform Period (1989). He has also co-edited Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855– 1881 (1994) and collaborated with Boris Mironov on supervising and producing the translation of Mironov’s Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917 (2000). Anne O. Fisher received her PhD from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on the publishing and reading history of Il’f and Petrov’s Ostap Bender novels. Her current research interest is in depictions of reading in early Soviet literature. Her new translation of Il’f and Petrov’s classic novel The Little Golden Calf was published in 2009 by Russian Life Books. Her next project, supported by an NEH ACTR Collaborative Research Grant, is a critical biography of Il’ia Il’f and annotated translation of his notebooks. George Gutsche is Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona (since 1991) and has taught at UIChicago, University of Tennessee, and Northern Illinois University. His primary scholarly area is nineteenth-century Russian literature (especially Aleksandr Pushkin) and his publications include Moral Apostasy in Russian Literature (1986), articles, edited volumes, and translations. He currently teaches courses on Russian and Balkan topics.

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Contributors  307

Kevin M. Kain is Lecturer in Humanistic Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He received his PhD in History from Western Michigan University (2004). Kain is co-editor of a critical edition of Ioann Shusherin’s seventeenth–century biography of Patriarch Nikon (1605–81) and is the author of several publications analysing visual representations of Nikon and Russian Old Believer literature about the patriarch. Stephen Lovell is Reader in Modern European History at King’s College London. His publications include The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (2000), the prize-winning Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000 (2003), and Destination in Doubt: Russia since 1989 (2006). Joseph Peschio is Assistant Professor of Russian and Coordinator of the Slavic Languages Program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He earned a PhD in Russian Literature from the University of Michigan (2004) and has published works in Russian and English on the sociology of literature and ‘unprintable’ Russian poetry of the early nineteenth century, and many scholarly and literary translations. He is English-language editor of The Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Folklore (feb-web.ru). Igor’ Pil’shchikov is a Leading Researcher at the Institute of World Culture, Moscow State University (MGU), with a kandidat degree from MGU (1998), and a doctoral degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Linguistics (2007). He has authored over 150 refereed works and two monographs, edited several scholarly editions, and cofounded The Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Folklore (feb-web.ru) and the journal Philologica: A Bilingual Journal of Russian and Theoretical Philology. Miranda Remnek is former Head, Slavic & East European Collections and Professor of Library Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and recipient of the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) CLIR Distinguished  Librarian Award, 2010. Her PhD research (UC Berkeley) examined reading communities in Nicholaevan Russia. She has written extensively on Russian book culture, including essays in collections from Duke and Cambridge University Press, and edited Books in Russia & the Soviet Union (1991) and Access to East European and Eurasian Culture (2007).

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STUDIES IN BOOK and PRINT CULTURE General Editor: Leslie Howsam Hazel Bell, Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction Heather Murray, Come, bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of NineteenthCentury Ontario Joseph A. Dane, The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method Christopher J. Knight, Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization William A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge, eds, The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, eds, The Future of the Page Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia, eds, Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Paper-contestations’ and Textual Communities in England, 1640– 1675 Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York Jonathan Earl Carlyon, Andrés González de Barcia and the Creation of the Colonial Spanish American Library Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture Deborah McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience David Finkelstein, ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s

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Elizabeth Driver, Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825–1949 Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Ms. Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book-Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 Lisa Surwillo, The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain Dean Irvine, Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 Janet Friskney, New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952–1978 Janice Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator Martyn Lyons, Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France Robert A. Davidson, Jazz Age Barcelona Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman, Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing Miranda Remnek, ed., The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination

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