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

Milan: Ledizioni, 2020. — 442 p. — (Di/Segni, 32). — ISBN 978-88-6705-594-4.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 first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The third volume of Reading Russia considers more recent (and rapid) changes to reading, and focuses on two profoundly transformative moments: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the digital revolution of 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 Brooks, Thomas Lahusen, Olga Malinovskaya, Denis Kozlov, Josephine Von Zitzewitz, Oleg Lekmanov, Catriona Kelly, Birgit Menzel, Henrike Schmidt, Birgitte Beck Pristed.List of Abbreviations
Part III. After the Bolshevik Revolution
The Readers’ Milieu, 1917–1920s
Evgeny Dobrenko, Abram Reitblat
The Press and the Public Adjust to a New Normal, 1918–1935
Jeffrey Brooks
Is There a Class in This Text? Reading in the Age of Stalin
Thomas Lahusen
Reading Russian Classics in Soviet Schools under Stalin: Analyzing Normative Material, 1922–1941
Olga Malinovskaya
Reading During the Thaw: Subscription to Literary Periodicals as Evidence for an Intellectual History of Soviet Society
Denis Kozlov
Reading Samizdat
Josephine von Zitzewitz
Case Study
The ‘Other’ Readers of the 1920’s: Three Portraits
Oleg Lekmanov
A “Shady aff air”? Reading the Russian Classics in Late Soviet Cinema
Catriona Kelly
Part IV. Towards the Digital Revolution
From Print to Pixel: Reading in the Perestroika, Post-soviet, and Present Eras, 1986–2017
Birgit Menzel
Virtual Shelves. Virtual Selves. Russian Digital Readingscapes as Re/Sources of Content and Identifi cation
Henrike Schmidt
Social Reading in Contemporary Russia
Birgitte Beck PristedNotes on ContributorsTrue PDF