Reading in Russia Readership of His Time

“Reader, where are you?”, wondered, in the mid-1880s, Mikhail Saltykov- Shchedrin, one of the Russian writers that paid the most attention to the READING IN RUSSIA readership of his time. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s call did not go unanswered. Over the past two centuries, various disciplines – from the social PRACTICES OF READING AND LITERARY COmmuNICATION sciences to psychology, literary criticism, semiotics, historiography 1760-1930 and bibliography – alternately tried to outline the specific features of the Russian reader and investigate his function in the history of Russian literary civilization. The essays collected in this volume follow in the tradition but, at the same time, present new challenges to the Edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena development of the discipline. The contributors, coming from various countries and different cultures (Russia, the US, Italy, France, Britain), discuss the subject of reading in Russia – from the age of Catherine II to the Soviet regime – from various perspectives: from aesthetics to reception, from the analysis of individual or collective practices, to the exploration of the social function of reading, to the spread and evolution of editorial formats. The contributions in this volume return a rich and articulated portrait of a culture made of great readers. • CONTRIBUTORS: Rodolphe Baudin (Université de Strasbourg); Edyta Bojanowska (Rutgers University); Jeffrey Brooks (Johns Hopkins University); Evgeny Dobrenko (University of Sheffield); Robin Feuer Miller (Brandeis University); Oleg Lekmanov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow); Anne Lounsbery (New York University); Damiano (eds.) Raffaella Vassena Damiano Rebecchini, Rebecchini (Università degli Studi di Milano); Abram Reitblat (RGBI • - NLO, Moscow); Laura Rossi (Università degli Studi di Milano); Jon Stone (Franklin & Marshall College); William Mills Todd III (Harvard University); Raffaella Vassena (Università degli Studi di Milano). Reading in Russia Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO READING IN RUSSIA Practices of Reading and Literary Communication, 1760-1930 Edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Facoltà di Studi Umanistici Università degli Studi di Milano © 2014 degli autori dei contributi e di Damiano Rebecchini e Raffaella Vassena per l’insieme del volume ISBN 978-88-6705-247-9 illustrazione di copertina: Aleksandr Rodchenko, Portret materi, 1924. nº 9 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 OTTOBRE 2014 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 Direttore Emilia Perassi Comitato scientifico Monica Barsi Francesca Orestano Marco Castellari Carlo Pagetti Danilo Manera Nicoletta Vallorani Andrea Meregalli Raffaella Vassena 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) Segretaria di redazione Laura Scarabelli Comitato di redazione Nicoletta Brazzelli Laura Scarabelli Simone Cattaneo Cinzia Scarpino Margherita Quaglia Sara Sullam CONTENTS “Reader, Where Are You?” An Introduction ............................................................... 11 D. REBECCHINI, R. VASSENA Нормативная критика и романное чтение в России середины XVIII века ......... 39 р. бодэн Книги и чтение в автобиографических повествованиях о детстве русских писателей XVIII–XIX вв.: опыт прочтения ............................... 59 л. росси Письменная литература в России в XIX веке, ее социокультурные функции и читатели ............................................................. 79 а. рейтблат Reading with Maps, Prints and Commonplace Books, or How the Poet V.A. Zhukovsky Taught Alexander II to Read Russia (1825-1838) ............................... 99 D. REBECCHINI How Not to Read: Belinsky on Literary Provincialism ................................................. 117 A. LOUNSBERY Writing the Russian Reader into the Text: Gogol, Turgenev, and Their Audiences ..... 129 E.M. BOJANOWSKA Dostoevsky’s Poor People: Reading as if for Life ......................................................... 143 R. FEUER MILLER Публичные литературные чтения эпохи Великих реформ как пример коммуникативной (не)удачи ...................................................................... 165 р. вассена V.N. Golitsyn Reads Anna Karenina: How One of Karenin’s Colleagues Responded to the Novel ............................................................................................... 189 W.M. TODD III The Young Chekhov: Reader and Writer of Popular Realism ...................................... 201 J. BROOKS Заметка к теме: Диалог с читателем в русских журналах 1900-х – 1910-х годов .................................................................................................. 219 о. лекманов Making the Symbolist Book / Fashioning the Symbolist Reader: the Case of Aleksandr Dobroliubov’s Collected Verses ............................................... 229 J. STONE Русская литература между читателем и писателем: от Соцреализма до Соцарта .................................................................................... 249 е. добренко abstracts in english ............................................................................................... 263 authors .......................................................................................................................... 269 index of names ......................................................................................................... 273 “READER, WHERE ARE YOU?” AN INTRODUCTION1 Damiano Rebecchini, Raffaella Vassena 1. “Reader, where are you?”, wondered, in the mid-1880s, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the Russian writers that paid the most attention to the readership of his time. His question arose from the dif- ficulty he experienced in grasping the key features of the contemporary reader, especially in the last decades of the 19th century. In that period, the Russian reading audience was characterised by great cultural fragmentation, with few new books, a defective distribution network, a small number of both public and private libraries spread over a huge territory, with a reduced readership and incomplete collections.2 None- theless, in spite of the difficult spread of reading in Russia – compared with the rest of Europe, the USA and Australia – the study of Russian readers began precisely in that period. And this debut is as little known as it was brilliant. The history of reading in Russia has very bright origins (1880s-1920s), a rather dark past (1930s-1960s), a lively recent history (starting from the 1970s) and, hopefully, a “shining future.”3 We will attempt, in this introduction, to highlight some steps that we deem relevant in the shaping of a discipline that may seem recent but has, in fact, ancient origins. As early as the 19th century, important authors like Nikolai Karamzin, Faddei Bulgarin, Ivan Goncharov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin left 1 Pages 11-27 were written by Damiano Rebecchini, pages 27-31 by Raffaella Vassena. 2 Rubakin 1895: 11-102. 3 On the 19th century origins of the history of reading in Russia, see Bank 1969 and Kogan 1969. A short and incomplete review of some studies on reading in Russia between the 18th and the 19th century is found in Stroev 1995: 181-196. For a more complete bibliography, see Reitblat 1992b. | 11 | | damiano rebecchini, raffaella vassena | us illuminating writings on the condition of readers in their age4. We believe that the founding of a proper scientific discipline, though, can be traced back to the late 19th century, and is especially linked to one specific name, Nikolai Rubakin’s, and one specific event, the “discovery” of the popular reader5. Ever since the 1880s, Rubakin had under- stood that, in order to study this new phenomenon – the rapid spread of reading among country people and factory workers after Alexander II’s reform of public education (1864) – the impressionist and amateur methods used by many keen writers and teachers, from Lev Tolstoy to Khristina Alchevskaia, were no longer viable. There was the need for a certain critical distance guaranteed by a scientific method; indeed, there was the need to employ the methods used in ethnology. The first steps in the new discipline were precisely informed by ethnology and anthropology, in the cultural discovery of the other, of the mysterious ‘popular reader’ (chitatel’ iz naroda). Yet Rubakin, differently from many of his contemporaries like Semen Rappoport and Aleksandr Pru- gavin, does not limit himself to studying the popular reader, but relies on a wide range of human and social sciences, from statistics to psychology, to investigate the evolution of reading in the entire Russian society of the second half of the 19th century.6 Between the late 1880s and the early 1890s, he thus wrote a masterful book for its

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