Reading Russia a History of Reading in Modern Russia

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. (eds.) 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. 1 The first volume of Reading Russia describes the slow evolution of reading between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the reign of Peter the Great, the changes Rebecchini Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena (eds.) initially concerned a limited number of readers from court circles, the ecclesiastical world, the higher aristocracy and the Academy of Sciences, that considered reading as a potent way of regulating the conduct of the people. It was only under the modernisation progamme inaugurated by Catherine the Great that transformations began to gain pace: the birth of private publishers and the widening currency of translations soon led to the formation of an initial limited public of readers from the nobility, characterised by an increasing responsiveness to European models and Damiano by its gradual emancipation from the cultural practices typical of the ecclesiastical world and of the court. Contributors to volume 1: Daniel Waugh, Gary Marker, Kirill Ospovat, Rodolphe Baudin, Ekaterina Kislova, Andrei Zorin, Bella Grigoryan, Simon Franklin. 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 1 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 978-88-5526-192-0 illustrazione di copertina: Volumes of «Pot pourri» from the Voltaire Library at St Petersburg (Rare Books Department, National Library of Russia). Photo courtesy of the National Library of Russia, © Nikolay Nikolaev, photo 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 DICEMBRE 2020 www.ledizioni.it www.ledipublishing.com [email protected] Via Boselli 10 – 20136 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 Angela Andreani Valentina Crestani Laila Paracchini Paola Mancosu Table of contents List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................. 11 Introduction.............................................................................................................. 13 damiano rebecchini, raffaella vassena part i. the long eighteenth century How Might We Write a History of Reading in Pre-Eighteenth-Century Russia? .....45 daniel c. waugh The Eighteenth Century: From Reading Communities to the Reading Public ......... 77 gary marker Reforming Subjects: Poetics And Politics of Reading in Early Eighteenth-Century Russia ......................................................................................................................117 kirill ospovat Reading in the Times of Catherine II ......................................................................151 rodolphe baudin What, How, and Why the Orthodox Clergy Read in Eighteenth-Century Russia ...179 ekaterina kislova A Reading Revolution? The Concept of the Reader in the Russian Literature of Sensibility ...........................................................................................................219 andrei zorin The Depiction of Readers and Publics in Russian Periodicals, 1769-1839 .............. 235 bella grigoryan case study: Reading the Streets: Encounters with the Public Graphosphere, C. 1700-1950 ...........................................................................................................259 simon franklin Notes on contributors ..............................................................................................293 List of Abbreviations In the notes the following will be used: d. (dd.) delo (dela) f. fond l. (ll.) list (listy) op. opis’ TsGA Moskvy, Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv goroda Moskvy, Moscow. OR RGB Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennoi Biblioteki, Moscow. OR RNB Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi Natsional’noi Biblioteki, St. Petersburg. RGADA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennii arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow. RGIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg. RO IRLI Rukopisnyi otdel Instituta russkoi literatury i iskusstva, St. Petersburg. SPbF ARAN, Sankt-Peterburgskii filial Arkhiva Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, St. Petersburg. INTRODUCTION1 DAMIANO REBECCHINI, RAFFAELLA VASSENA 1. These volumes originate in two gatherings convened at Milan State University in 2013 and 2017 which brought together an international group of scholars of the history of literature, publishing history, and social history, with a view to exploring the phenomenon of reading in Russia from a broad and multidisciplinary perspective. The first occasion was a conference en- titled ‘Reading Russia. Places and Manners of Reading, 1760-1930’, which was followed by the publication, in 2014, of Reading in Russia. Practices of Reading and Literary Communication (Milan, Ledizioni).2 The second was instead a workshop with the more ambitious title ‘Towards a History of Reading in Russia’, from which the project represented by these volumes emerged. Our aim was to put together a first history of reading in Russia intended not only for experts in Russian Studies, but also for scholars in- terested in the history of reading and book history in Europe. After sharing drafts of numerous chapters with colleagues, the majority of the authors met together for three days at Gargnano, on Lake Garda, to discuss issues needing resolution in the various chapters, and the overall structure of the project. In light of the above, a first important clarification is called for: these three volumes are not constructed on a common theoretical basis or with a 1 Pages 13-16 and 31-42 were written by Damiano Rebecchini, pages 17-30 by Raffaella Vassena. The editors wish to thank the reviewers who agreed to appraise anonymously the contributions to these three volumes. Especial thanks to Joachim Klein, Irina Paperno, William Mills Todd III, and Yuri Tsivian for their valuable advice. We also thank Daniel Brooks for his revision of the English texts. 2 D. Rebecchini, R. Vassena (eds.), Reading in Russia. Practices of Reading and Literary Communication, 1760-1930 (Milano, 2014) Open access: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/disegni/article/view/8292/7913 |13| | damiano rebecchini, raffaella vassena | shared methodological procedure. Each author has brought to the table his or her own historical and methodological expertise, which has been thus enabled to dialogue with those of the others, while maintaining the writers’ own individual scholarly identities. If the divergence of procedures among the contributors might seem at first sight to be a weakness, we believe it is rather one of the strongpoints of this work: a phenomenon as fluid and elusive, as hard to pin down, as reading acquires a degree of substance and clarity as the authors of these volumes investigate its dynamics, each from a different critical perspective, deploying the methodologies of their own disciplines and their own interpretive approaches. Given the methodological diversity among us, our starting point was an extremely broad definition of reading. By ‘reading’ we mean above all that process of ‘visual encounter with a written text’ in which some level of in- terpretation is present. Such a wide conception of reading has allowed our authors a considerable latitude in choosing their sources and defining their material for analysis. The following chapters contain analyses of the reading of written texts from very diverse media: from inscriptions on trium- phal arches to shop signs, manuscripts, typed samizdat productions, film scripts, as well as, naturally, books, newspapers and journals, which will undoubtedly occupy the lion’s share of this story of Russian reading. The result is an attempt to throw some light on the processes of familiarisation and appropriation of the written word on the part of Russian readers which derive from the specific

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