Rebecchini D., Vassena R. (eds.) Reading Russia. A History of reading in modern Russia. Volume II

Milan: Ledizioni, 2020. — 568 p. — (Di/Segni, No. 32). — ISBN 978-88-5526-193-7.Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning “love story” that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the fi rst attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day.
The second volume of Reading Russia considers the evolution of reading during the long nineteenth century (1800–1917), particularly in relation to the emergence of new narrative and current aff airs publications: novels, on the one hand, and daily newspapers, weekly magazines and thick journals, on the other. The volume examines how economic and social transformations, technological progress and the development of the publishing industry taking place in Russia gradually led to a signifi cant expansion of the reading public. At the same time, in part due to the infl uence of new literature reading policies in schools, there was a greater cultural standardisation of Russian society, which was partially opposed by new forms of poetic reading.
Contributors to volume 2: Daria Khitrova, Damiano Rebecchini, Abram Reitblat, Jonathan Stone, Roman Timenchik, Alexey Vdovin, Roman Leibov, Susan Smith-Peter, Katherine Bowers, Tat’iana Golovina, Marcus C. Levitt, Raff aella Vassena.List of Abbreviations
Part II. The long Nineteenth Century
Reading and Readers of Poetry in the Golden Age, 1800–1830
Daria Khitrova
Reading Foreign Novels, 1800–1848
Damiano Rebecchini
The Success of the Russian Novel, 1830s–1840s
Damiano Rebecchini
The Reading Audience of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Abram Reitblat
O!?!?!: Reading and Readers in the Silver Age, 1890s–1900s
Jonathan Stone
Early Twentieth-Century Schools of Reading Russian Poetry
Roman Timenchik
What and How Russian Students Read in School, 1840–1917
Roman Leibov, Alexey Vdovin
The Book and the Peasant in the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: from Illiteracy to the Religious Book to the Secular Book
Abram Reitblat
Case Study
The Struggle to Create a Regional Public in the Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Empire: the Case of Kazanskie izvestiia
Susan Smith-Peter
The Gothic Novel Reader Comes to Russia
Katherine Bowers
Belles-Lettres and the Literary Interests of Middling Landowners. A Case Study from the Archive of the Dorozhaevo Homestead
Tatiana Golovina
The Making of a National Poet: Publishing Pushkin, 1855–1887
Marcus C. Levitt
Dostoevskii and His Readers, 1866–1910
Raffaella Vassena
Reading the News on Tolstoi in 1908
Raffaella VassenaNotes on ContributorsTrue PDF