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Reading Russia a History of Reading in Modern Russia

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Reading Russia a History of Reading in Modern Russia Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts (eds.) . and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. READING RUSSIA These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning “love story” Vassena that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit A HISTORY OF READING of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from Raffaella IN MODERN RUSSIA the eighteenth century to the present day. and vol. 3 The third volume of Reading Russia considers more recent (and rapid) changes to reading, and focuses on two profoundly transformative Rebecchini moments: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the digital revolution of Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena (eds.) the 1990s. This volume investigates how the political transformations of the early twentieth century and the technological ones from the turn of the twenty-first impacted the tastes, habits, and reading practices of the Russian public. It closely observes how Russian readers adapted to and/or resisted their eras’ paradigm-shifting crises in communication and interpretation. Contributors to volume 3: Evgeny Dobrenko, Abram Reitblat, Jeffrey Damiano Brooks, Thomas Lahusen, Olga Malinovskaya, Denis Kozlov, Josephine Von Zitzewitz, Oleg Lekmanov, Catriona Kelly, Birgit Menzel, Henrike Schmidt, Birgitte Beck Pristed. IN MODERN RUSSIA Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Università degli Studi di Milano READING RUSSIA. OF READING A HISTORY READING RUSSIA. A HISTORY OF READING IN MODERN RUSSIA Volume 3 Edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Facoltà di Studi Umanistici Università degli Studi di Milano © 2020 degli autori dei contributi e dei curatori per l’intero volume ISBN 978-88-6705-594-4 illustrazione di copertina: M. M. Cheremnykh, Poster calling for subscribers to popular periodicals, 1923 nº32 Collana sottoposta a double blind peer review ISSN: 2282-2097 Grafica: Raúl Díaz Rosales Composizione: Ledizioni Disegno del logo: Paola Turino STAMPATO A MILANO NEL MESE DI APRILE 2020 www.ledizioni.it www.ledipublishing.com [email protected] Via Alamanni 11 – 20141 Milano Tutti i diritti d’autore e connessi sulla presente opera appartengono all’autore. L’opera per volontà dell’autore e dell’editore è rilasciata nei termini della licenza Creative Commons 3.0, il cui testo integrale è disponibile alla pagina web http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/it/legalcode Condirettori Monica Barsi e Danilo Manera Comitato scientifico Nicoletta Brazzelli Andrea Meregalli Marco Castellari Laura Scarabelli Simone Cattaneo Sara Sullam Raffaella Vassena Nicoletta Vallorani Giovanni Iamartino Comitato scientifico internazionale Albert Meier Sabine Lardon (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel) (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) Luis Beltrán Almería Aleksandr Ospovat - Александр Осповат (Universidad de Zaragoza) (Высшая Школа Экономики – Москва) Patrick J. Parrinder (Emeritus, University of Reading, UK) Comitato di redazione Elisa Alberani Marco Canani Angela Andreani Valentina Crestani Nataliya Stoyanova Table of contents List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................. 11 part iii. after the bolshevik revolution The Readers’ Milieu, 1917-1920s ............................................................................... 15 evgeny dobrenko, abram reitblat The Press and the Public Adjust to a New Normal, 1918-1935 ..................................43 jeffrey brooks Is There a Class in This Text? Reading in the Age of Stalin.....................................83 thomas lahusen Reading Russian Classics in Soviet Schools under Stalin: Analyzing Normative Material, 1922-1941 .................................................................................................107 olga malinovskaya Reading During the Thaw: Subscription to Literary Periodicals as Evidence for an Intellectual History of Soviet Society ........................................................... 159 denis kozlov Reading Samizdat .................................................................................................. 217 josephine von zitzewitz case study: The ‘Other’ Readers of the 1920’s: Three Portraits .......................273 oleg lekmanov case study: A “Shady affair”? Reading the Russian Classics in Late Soviet Cinema ...........................................................................................295 catriona kelly part iv. towards the digital revolution From Print to Pixel: Reading in the Perestroika, Post-soviet, and Present Eras, 1986-2017 ........................................................................................................... 323 birgit menzel Virtual Shelves. Virtual Selves. Russian Digital Readingscapes as Re/Sources of Content and Identification ..................................................................................365 henrike schmidt Social Reading in Contemporary Russia ............................................................... 407 birgitte beck pristed Notes on Contributors ............................................................................................. 433 List of Abbreviations In the notes the following will be used: d. (dd.) delo (dela) f. fond GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii GASO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sverdlovskoi oblasti GATO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tverskoi oblasti IK Iskusstvo kino l.(ll.) list (listy) LG Literaturnaia Gazeta op. opis’ ORF GLM Otdel Rukopisnykh Fondov Gosudarstvennogo Literaturnogo Muzeia RGAE Rossiiskii Gosudartsvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki RGALI Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva RGASPI Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii SD stsenarnoe delo TsGALI-SPb. Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva, Saint Petersburg TsGAIPD-SPb. Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Istoriko-Politicheskikh Dokumentov, Saint Petersburg Part iii after the bolshevik revolution THE READERS’ MILIEU, 1917-1920s Evgeny Dobrenko, Abram Reitblat 1 The readership of the first post-revolutionary years largely consisted of those who belonged to the Russian reading public at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By this time, literacy and, accordingly, reading had be- come strong features of the urban lifestyle, but had only begun to take root in the countryside, where oral transmission of cultural traditions and work experience prevailed. Such an attitude to the book and reading was well entrenched and changed slowly. However, the post-revolutionary era was characterized by radical sociocul- tural shifts. Revolutions, World War I and the Civil War not only galvanized the masses, but also politicized them. The “social creativity of the masses” (Lenin) was the result of a crisis and the subsequent rapid destruction of all previous social institutions. This process led to radical shifts in collective (class, national) and individual identity, reinforcing the Party’s need to un- derstand political and social changes, adapt to the new conditions, and have a number of social groups participate in building a new society. The Communists who came to power retained to a large degree the in- telligentsia approach to culture. They aimed to familiarize the population with ‘culture,’ and therefore saw as their immediate tasks eliminating illit- eracy and fostering among the population (primarily the working strata) the need for the printed word, a book, and a steady reading habit. But gradually, reading’s capacity to influence the population ideologically became increas- ingly important, enhancing political campaigns and otherwise mobilizing the population. Works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin as well as |15| | evgeny dobrenko, abram reitblat | propagandistic brochures were published in large runs. In 1920, the total run of propagandistic editions published by the Moscow branch of the State Publishing House was ten times higher than that of artistic ones. At the same time, the library funds and warehouses of book-selling organizations were cleared of “ideologically alien and outdated” literature.1 There is no exact data on changes in the readership in Soviet Russia. However, one could safely assert that the total number of readers in the first post-revolutionary years (in comparison with the pre-revolutionary period) barely changed. On the one hand, readers made up a significant part of those 9–11 million by which Russian population declined between 1917–1921.2 On the other hand, during this period, approximately 4–5 million workers and peasants became regular readers thanks to the eradication of illiteracy. Only the social structure of the readership had undergone significant changes. The proportion of those who before the revolution could be called an “edu- cated audience” declined considerably: a large part of them emigrated, oth- ers were repressed, some died on the fronts of the Civil War, and others died of starvation and cold because they received insufficient rations. At the same time, the proportion of those who used to be called “popular readers” (narodnye chitateli) significantly increased. This was primarily due to the large-scale campaign to eradicate illiteracy. In 1918, the Russian Federation Constitution stated: “In order to ensure that workers have effective access to knowledge, the Russian
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