Reading in Russia

Practices of Reading and Literary Communication, 1760-1930

Damiano Rebecchini, Raffaella Vassena

• Publisher: Ledizioni
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9788867053575
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

"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. Saltykov-Shchedrin's call did not go unanswered. Over the past two centuries, various disciplines – from the social sciences to psychology, literary criticism, semiotics, historiography 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 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Bibliographic informations
• First pages
• Table of contents
• “Reader, Where Are You?” An Introduction
• Ноpмативная критика и романное чтение в России середины XVIII века
• Книги и чтение в автобиографических повествованиях о детстве русских писателей XVIII–XIX вв.: опыт прочтения
• Письменная литература в России в XIX веке, ее социокультурные функции и читатели
• Reading with Maps, Prints and Commonplace Books, or How the Poet V. A. Zhukovsky Taught Alexander II to Read Russia (1825-1838)
• How not to read: Belinsky on Literary Provincialism
• Writing the Russian Reader into the Text: Gogol, Turgenev, and their Audiences
• Dostoevsky’s Poor People: Reading as if for Life
• Публичные литературные чтения эпохи великих реформ как пример коммуникативной (не)удачи
• V.N. Golitsyn Reads Anna Karenina: How One of Karenin’s Colleagues Responded to the Novel
• The Young Chekhov: Reader and Writer of Popular Realism
• Заметка к теме: Диалог с читателем в русских журналах 1900-х – 1910-х годов
• Making the Symbolist Book / Fashioning the Symbolist Reader: the Case of Aleksandr Dobroliubov’s Collected Verses
• Русская литература между читателем и писателем: от соцреализма до соцарта
• Index of names