Reading in the Times of Catherine II

Rodolphe Baudin

p. 151-178


Texte intégral

Introduction

1The last third of the eighteenth century, which corresponds roughly to the reign of Catherine II (1762-1796), saw significant developments in Russia’s reading practices and changes to the Russian readership itself. This phenomenon arose within a larger context: the development of elite secondary education in Russia in the 1750s and 1760s,1 which gave birth to a whole generation of readers, quantitatively much larger than Russia had ever known, and hungry for new forms of engagement with literature.

2This growing readership included graduates from the Academy of Science gymnasium, as well as the Cadet and Naval cadet Corps, which, according to figures provided by Gary Marker, may have produced up to 4000 graduates between 1755 and 1775. It also consisted of graduates from garrison and hospital schools, as well as the recently founded University of Moscow (1755), which was attended by 300 students during the same period. To these students must be added the pupils of the University gymnasia, which varied from 200 to 500 students.2 Considering a period larger than the one at the center of this chapter, V. N. Sevast’ianov has established that up to 371,000 people in Russia received a secondary education between 1730 and 1800.3

3As Marker puts it, this growing number of graduates from secondary education institutions formed “a critical mass of several thousand educated people,” which fostered “a social context for the Russian Enlightenment.”4 This intellectual elite came to cherish the moral and cultural progress brought about by the Enlightenment, and Enlightenment-era texts formed the core of the literature chosen for the curricula in these secondary schools.5 This Enlightenment ethos of progress was central to the writer Andrei Bolotov, for instance, who wrote in his 1767 essay “On the usefulness of reading books” (“O pol’ze, proiskhodiashchei ot chteniia knig”):

Didn’t [the European states] start flourishing from that very moment, when the sciences emerged from their prior oblivion and when a sufficient quantity of books started being printed? […] Don’t we see something similar in regard to our own Fatherland? And haven’t our people become more knowledgeable and wiser since the sciences have reached us and book printing started?6

4The intellectual needs of this new elite rapidly led to a significant expansion of institutional publishing.7 According to A. Samarin, more than 7000 non-religious books were published in Russia from 1762 to 1800.8 This figure seems particularly impressive when compared to the more limited overall production of 928 titles for the period 1725-1755.9 This growing production led to the creation of eight new publishing houses between 1752 and 1774, including the publishing house of the University of Moscow. Although the printing of books remained under state monopoly, the institutional publishing houses accepted orders from private individuals, mainly translations of European books proposed by the literati, which significantly contributed to their production volumes.10 In 1783 however, the State abandoned its monopoly, which resulted in the creation of over 30 private presses in Moscow and Saint Petersburg during the last quarter of the century, some of which turned out to be successful commercial enterprises, attracting dynamic merchants to the book market.11

5In order to sell their production, both institutional and private presses made efforts to improve commercialization. Indeed, commercialization had been a major issue for Russian presses from the time of Peter the Great, when book production was high but sales were poor. Commercializing meant both advertising and distributing. In order to improve advertising, both institutional and private presses started publishing catalogues meant to attract the attention of the reading public. By the end of the century, over 200 catalogues of books for sale had been published and circulated.12 Additionally, in the mid-1760s, publishers started advertising their books in newspapers. Moscow University Press advertised their books in the Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), while the Presses of the Infantry and Naval Corps used Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (St. Petersburg News).13 Improvements to distribution required developing a network of outlets where books could be purchased. Therefore, in the second part of the century, Russian presses started opening bookstores. Marker has established that the total number of outlets in the two capitals grew from 6 to over 50 between the early 1750s and the mid-1790s.14

6These improvements in advertising and commercialization reflect a virtuous circle, as they were both the results and the cause of the ongoing growth of readership. This growth, in turn, led to a significant reduction of book prices, which also helped secure new audiences, or helped traditional audiences increase the volume of their purchases. Whereas in the first part of the century, only very wealthy people had access to books,15 in Catherine II’s times, the gentry started not only buying individual books but, as the writer Nikolai Karamzin wrote in 1802, building up “small libraries” (bibliotechki): “I know noblemen, whose annual income does not exceed 500 rubles, but who assemble, to use their own terms, small libraries.”16

7This general growth of the reading public led to the rise of print runs. True, Yuri Lotman has stressed that print runs were often more the expression of prestige policies than the consequence of rational commercial thinking.17 Similarly, books with high print runs may have remained undistributed and/or unsold. However, even if it seems hazardous to consider, as Karamzin did, that the raise of the Moskovskie vedomosti print run from 600 to 6000 copies between 1780 and 1800 was the unequivocal sign of a ten-time growth of the reading public,18 it certainly testified to a growing demand from a growing audience.

8Reading, then, was growing in popularity in the last third of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, one should keep in mind that the overall quantity of literate people remained limited. B. V. Sapunov has established that only 4% of the population of the Russian Empire may have been literate in 1783.19 This figure is modest, especially when compared to the situation in Britain or France during the same period.20 Besides, being literate did not necessarily mean being a reader, a specific cultural and intellectual practice that was turning into a social role at the time.21 As the poet Mikhail Kheraskov put it in 1760, “there is a significant difference between knowing how to read and being a reader” (“velikaia raznost’ chitat’ i byt’ chitatelem”).22 Those who only “knew how to read,” to use Kheraskov’s terms, were the merchants, the nonnoble urban population of the townspeople (meshchane) and even some peasants, who did form emerging segments among the reading public.

9Most of the readers comprising this “nonnoble intellectual elite” (raznochinnaia intelligentsiia) read in order to answer basic professional or technical needs.23 Some, however, also read for pleasure. If so, they favored woodcuts called lubki, a genre of popular imagery including short literary texts, or Grub Street novels called “lubok romances” (lubochnye romany), a genre halfway between popular imagery and the European romance.24 Some with more sophisticated tastes seem to have valued satirical literature as well. In the foreword to the 4th edition of his Zhivopisets (Painter), the journalist, mason, enlightener and publisher Nikolai Novikov, trying to explain the success of his journal, wrote: “Having a very modest opinion of my own talent, I’d rather believe that this work happened to fit the taste of our meshchane (townspeople), for only those books which please them go through 3rd, 4th and 5th editions.”25 However, these readers scarcely belonged to the category of Kheraskov’s “true readers,” that is, readers able to exercise discernment on the books they read. Those readers belonged to the nobility,26 which read for pleasure, intellectual improvement, and in order to fit the symbolic demands generated by their growing self-reflective cultural status.

10This cultural status developed on the foundation of a new social context for this part of the population. Catherine II’s reign, often considered as the “golden age of the Russian nobility,” was a reign of growing social, if not political, autonomy for the nobility. This autonomy resulted largely from Peter III’s manifesto of February 1762, which freed nobles from mandatory service, and from Catherine II’s 1785 Charter to the nobility, which confirmed its privileges. If the first did not result in any mass exodus from service (which remained attractive for status, as well as moral and financial reasons27), and if the second could not hide that, politically, the nobility remained very vulnerable to pressure from tsarist authority,28 both reflected a general feeling that the nobility had gained sufficient symbolic capital to experience a certain degree of autonomy.

11This new autonomy launched a general public discussion on free time and leisure, which, as noted by Anna Anan’eva and Alexandra Veselova, became a central topic in many journals from the last third of the eighteenth century. These journals reflected a general anxiety that the nobility’s new free time could be misused, and thus attempted to promote proper forms of leisure. Among them was reading, naturally, but not just any old book. As Anan’eva and Veselova noted, the author of an article on the subject, published in the journal Prazdnoe vremia, v pol’zu upotreblennoe (Leisure time, used usefully) in 1759, i.e. just before the beginning of Catherine’s reign, wrote: “Finally, the best enjoyment possible for occupying free hours is without any doubt reading good and useful books.”29 This was an important nuance. Indeed, it is striking to note that the beginning of Catherine II’s reign coincided with the appearance of Russian literature’s first original novel. Only a few months passed between her coup in June 1762 and the publication of Fedor Emin’s first novel Fortune inconstant, or The Adventures of Miramond (Nepostoiannaia fortuna, ili pokhozhdenie Miramonda) in 1763. After Emin issued his first novel, another writer, Mikhail Chulkov followed suit, turning the 1760s into the first boom of novel writing in Russia.30 This movement had been preceded by three decades of translated novels from European languages and, as a consequence, a decade of novel bashing by the Russian exponents of classicism, who, very much as it had been the case in seventeenth-century France, accused the genre of corrupting morals and lacking any aesthetic rules.

12Another reason why classicist poets like Mikhail Lomonosov, Aleksandr Sumarokov, and even Mikhail Kheraskov expressed concerns regarding the novel, however, was the new genre’s impact on the pragmatics of literary appropriation. As their main arguments show, exponents of classicism feared that the novel’s lack of prestige would inspire less inhibited forms of literary appropriation, including forms of personal appropriation, such as, for instance, readers selecting their favorite passages. As Kheraskov put it in the previous quoted article “On reading books”: “People read novels to learn how to love more skillfully and often underline with a red pencil the tenderest passages.”31 This seemed all the more possible given that the very structure of novels, with their division into chapters, helped break up the text, which created a threat to the proper decoding of its semantic and ideological integrity.32

13The loss of control over reception was also conditioned by the type of literary consumption that this new genre encouraged. If not always read that way in practice, novels were primarily meant to be read alone. This new type of consumption seemed like a threat to the forms of social control that both the Court and the literati had developed in their respective attempts to transmit proper texts to the public. It was directly opposed to the public delivery of the ideological messaging that could be imparted to an audience by a performance at the theatre, or the reading of a panegyric speech in a court environment.

14Therefore, the history of reading under Catherine the Great’s reign, if focused on the most dynamic and evolving part of the readership, i.e. the nobility, is very much a history of the tension between the dynamics of a growing number of readers and the liberalization of both literary forms and forms of literary consumption on the one hand, and the attempts made by Court and the literati to support and simultaneously control this general progress on the other, according to a social and cultural agenda largely motivated by concerns to both promote and monitor social and cultural autonomy.

15The present study will focus on this inner tension of the reading experience in the last third of the eighteenth century, addressing what types of books were offered to the reading public, who the readers were, what new forms of literary consumption they were engaging in, and what new emotional rewards they were receiving while reading.

I. A growing and diversifying book market

16The overall growth of publishing in Catherine II’s time reflects the diversity of the published books. The various presses active in Russia were issuing all sorts of texts, in order to accommodate very distinct needs. This situation is well reflected in Denis Fonvizin’s 1769 play The Brigadier (Brigadir). In the introductory scene, the play’s major characters discuss what the brigadier’s son, Ivanushka, should read:

The Counselor: And I can also say about you, my dear son in law, that you have a bright future ahead. You just need to concentrate on business, read more.
The Son: What business? What should I read?
The Brigadier: Read? The military article and code; it wouldn’t do a young man wrong either to read the Instruction for cadastral survey.
The Counselor: First of all, you should read the Legal code and the decrees. He who, being a judge, knows how to interpret them, my dear son in law, will never be poor.
The Brigadier’s wife: It wouldn’t be bad either to take a look at my account books. This way no swindler will ever deceive you. You won’t be giving five kopecks anymore where you only need to give four or so.
The Counselor’s wife: May God preserve you from filling your head with anything else than charming novels. Forget, my dear, about all the sciences. You wouldn’t believe how instructive these books are. If I hadn’t read them myself, I could have stayed an imbecile forever.
The Son: Madame, you’re telling the truth. Oh! Vous avez raison. I never read anything else but novels myself, which made me the man I am.33

17What this dialogue shows is that the growth of the reading public had led to its diversification, and that each segment of the public required certain kinds of books, including books which now seem archaic but nevertheless had a real audience. As Marker noticed, the sale levels remained very high for calendars and almanacs until the end of the century.34 So did the production and sale levels of textbooks (which could rely on a captive audience of students) and law texts.35 Answering questions about his commercial activity as the director of Moscow University Press during the inquiry following his arrest in 1792, Novikov declared that he had published a legal dictionary (iuridicheskii slovar’) “three or four times, with a print run of 3000 copies.”36 But Fonvizin’s dialogue also shows a generational gap between an aging public that read technical or practical literature and a young and/or gendered one hungry for leisure literature. This generational gap is well reflected in the history of the Batiushkov family library on the estate of Danilovskoe. As N. M. Morozova has noticed, this collection, gathered by Batiushkov’s grandfather and father, underwent a shift in orientation in the 1790s, going from a majority of books on history and housekeeping or textbooks to a majority of leisure literature ones.37 This shift is also apparent in the publishing that Novikov oversaw in the 1780s. As Marker noted, leisure literature grew rapidly to become a major part of Novikov’s production: out of the 973 titles published between 1779 and 1792, 290 belong to this category.38

18This greater share of leisure literature within the Russian book market in the second part of the eighteenth century proceeded from a boom of translations, largely sponsored by Novikov or by the “Society Striving for the Translation of Foreign Books,” an initiative supported and financed by Catherine II herself.39 It was also spurred by the development of native Russian literature, written by an increasing number of writers who turned to an increasingly diverse number of genres borrowed from European (mainly French) contemporary literature. Indeed, leisure literature was a deeply heterogeneous category, encompassing very different genres, from prose fiction to poetry and drama.

19What then, among the leisure literature available, most appealed to the Russian audience? According to Marker, plays sold poorly, especially Russian ones, including the works of the “Russian Racine” Sumarokov, with the notable exception of Fonvizin’s 1782 comedy The Minor (Nedorosl’).40 Poetry seems to have done better, especially poetry with a moral function. Aesop’s Fables, for instance, continued, as earlier, to sell well, undergoing six editions throughout the century41 and also existed as part of the lubok literature mentioned earlier.42 Russian poets, however, don’t seem to have enjoyed such a degree of popularity. True, according to Natal’ia Kochetkova, they are well represented in handwritten collections, which are a trustworthy source of information on what people actually read. The collections she refers to, all dated from Catherine II’s time, present verses by Lomonosov, Sumarokov, and Kheraskov, the three classicist poets mentioned above, as well as spiritual verses.43 However, it may be argued that handwritten collections tend to reflect what literature Russian nobles valued, notably for its moral and educational worth, more than what they actually enjoyed. And what they enjoyed most, just as the foppish Brigadier’s son from Fonvizin’s play did, seems to have been light fiction, from tales to novels, which sold much better than Sumarokov’s play, as a 1772 article from Novikov’s Zhivopisets reveals: “Who in France would believe it, if they were told that fairy tales sold better than the works of Racine? Well, such is the case in our country. A Thousand and One Nights sold much better than the works of Mr. Sumarokov.”44

20The overwhelming triumph of light fiction in general, and of the new genre of the novel in particular—a phenomenon anticipated and feared back in the late 1750s and early 1760s by the main poets of Russian classicism—did happen. In his 1802 essay titled “On book selling and the love for reading in Russia” (“O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi k chteniu v Rossii”), Karamzin wrote: “The curious might wish to know what kind of books sell better in our country? I did ask several booksellers and all, without even thinking, answered: ‘novels’!”45 This popularity of the novel is also reflected in the figures gathered by Marker. Basing himself on Vladimir Sipovskii’s estimates, the scholar has established that, between 1763 and 1775 (i.e. is only a third of the period considered in this essay) 123 translated novels were published in Russia. This phenomenon grew even stronger in the 1780s, which witnessed a genuine flood of translated novels into the Russian book market.46

21Here again, however, the novel as a genre was a large and diverse category. As a consequence, translated novels included all kinds of books. It included Grub Street literature (lubok literature), whose appeal for the reader seems to have been very strong.47 But it also included far more ambitious books, like Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus or Marmontel’s Belisaire, two “philosophical novels” which propagated the ideology of moral progress and political virtue central to the value system of the Enlightenment. The former went through four editions between 1767 and 1797, and the latter seven between 1768 and 1796. Somewhere in between popular romances and sophisticated philosophical novels were Lesage’s novels, including Gil Blas, a modern version of the picaresque novel very popular in France, that went through seven editions between 1754 and 1800.48

22Naturally, Russian writers tried to capitalize on the new genre’s success, as did Emin, whose four novels, published between 1763 and 1766, imitated all the dominant subcategories of novels available in the European literary repertoire. His already mentioned 1763 Fortune inconstant was a romance, filled with exotic adventures; his Adventures of Themistocles (Prikliucheniia Femistokla), also published in 1763, was a philosophical novel, largely reminiscent of Fénelon’s Telemachus. Finally, Emin authored the first Russian epistolary novel with his 1766 rewriting of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse under the title The Letters of Ernest and Doravra (Pis’ma Ernesta i Doravry). Far from trying to repeat Emin’s attempts at imitating some of the high forms of European novels, Matvei Komarov produced Russian Grub Street literature, including his Adventures of the English Lord George (Povest’ o prikliuchenii aglinskago milorda Georga i o brandeburgskoi markgrafine Friderike Luize), a lowbrow rewriting of a seventeenth-century popular romance, which went through six editions between 1782 and the end of the century,49 or his Life of Vanka Kain (Obstoiatel’naia i vernaia istoriia rossiiskago moshennika, slavnago vora, razboinika i byvshago moskovskago syshchika Van’ki Kaina), a fictionalized biography of a famous Russian swindler.

23To our contemporary sensibilities, these works, which ended up forming a corpus of several hundred titles over the period studied in this chapter,50 differ both in genre and quality. Some may be called romances, others novels. Similarly, some look quite archaic, like Fortune inconstant and its European models, whereas others rely on more innovative models, like the Fénelon-inspired Adventures of Themistocles, or the Rousseau-based Letters of Ernest and Doravra. However, to their first Russian readers, all these works and their European models, available in original versions and/or in translation, were indeed novels, as testified by Bolotov’s 1791 essay Considerations and objective judgments on novels, both Russian and translated from foreign languages (Mysli i bespristrastnye suzhdeniia o romanakh, kak original’nykh rossiiskikh, tak i perevedennykh s inostrannykh iazykov Andreia Bolotova), which contains reviews of works as diverse as Emin’s Fortune inconstant and Rousseau’s Emile and Sophie, or the Solitaries.

24If equivalent vis-à-vis their affiliation to a specific genre, these novels did seem different to their first Russian readers when it came to their moral value. Novels could be as dangerous as they could be useful. And since the attempt of the classical poets to ban the entire genre had failed, they had to be distinguished. This was Bolotov’s concern when writing the essay mentioned above. As the writer put it: “Novels published recently in our Russian language are so numerous and they differ so much in terms of quality and virtue that there is almost undoubtedly a need, when buying them and reading them, to make a reasonable choice, and not just buy and read anything that falls into your hands.”51

25Fiction itself aspired to help readers sort out good books from bad ones, especially when dealing with novels. In 1788, Nikolay Emin, Fedor’s son and a novelist like his late father, printed a sentimental novel titled Rosa. In the novel, Count D. asks the young hero Milon what novels he would recommend to young ladies. In response, Milon suggests Fielding’s novels, Rousseau’s Emile, Marmontel’s Moral Tales, and the novels of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Sophie von Laroche, and Christoph Martin Wieland. As Kochetkova noted, this list, established by one fictional character for another, was also meant to provide guidance to actual readers in their reading choices.52 Similarly, Fonvizin’s The Minor staged an example of appropriate reading in scene 1 of act 4:

Starodum. Oh! you’re already here, my dear friend!
Sofia. I was waiting for you, my uncle. I was reading a book.
Starodum. Which one?
Sofia. A French one. By Fénelon. On girls’ education.
Starodum. Fénelon? The author of Telemachus? Good. I don’t know the book you are reading, but read it, read it!53

26What this scene stages is a form of mentoring of a young female reader by an older male one. This prescriptive scenario seemed especially necessary for female readers, whose “vivid imagination” was supposed to be particularly endangered by the seductions of the novel.

27These fictional attempts to regulate reading at a time when the practice was significantly growing testified to the literati’s moral concern. But their concerns were also cultural. As they considered it their civic duty to shape the educated public in Russia, they had to help readers develop a proper understanding of Western cultural history. This seemed especially important in a time when the ever-growing quantity of translations appearing on the Russian market reduced the historical diachrony of European culture to the synchrony of the Russian readers’ reception. In other words, Russian readers were discovering Milton and Goethe at the same time, which was cause for confusion.54 In order to fight that confusion, literati started publishing anthologies and/or dictionaries. Karamzin’s Pantheon of Foreign Literature (Panteon inostrannoi slovesnosti, 1798) and Pantheon of Russian authors (Panteon rossiiskikh avtorov, 1802) are good illustrations of such attempts to regulate reader reception by offering cultural frameworks for their readers. As in all dictionaries, they also built cultural hierarchies by sorting out what deserved to be included in a narrative of cultural progress. By doing so, they were trying to turn quantity reading into quality reading.

28Finally, the publication of such dictionaries served a patriotic agenda: even before Karamzin’s attempt at creating a Russian “pantheon,” Novikov had issued a Tentative Historical Dictionary of Russian writers (Opyt istoricheskogo slovaria o rossiiskikh pisateliakh, 1772), with the obvious goal of establishing the cultural legitimacy of Russian letters and promoting Russian culture as a whole.55 If reading was a good thing, then reading Russian—and thus pushing back against contemporary gallomania—was an even better one.

29Mentoring readers in order to form their taste was a way to save them the trouble of putting themselves through the personal evolution from quantity reading to quality reading. This evolution was staged by Karamzin in his loosely autobiographical Sternian novel A Knight of our time (Rytsar’ nashego vremeni, 1802-1803), in which the narrator pokes at the pleasure that his fictional alter ego acquired from reading Emin’s novels as a child.56 That evolution was also staged in “On book selling and the love for reading in Russia”, where Karamzin wrote:

Everyone needs something in accordance with their own taste: some need Jean-Jacques, others ‘Nikanor’. As physical taste informs us of the harmony between food and our needs, likewise moral taste reveals to man the true analogy between a subject and his soul; but this soul can be gradually elevated—and he, who starts with ‘The Infortunate Nikanor’ often ends up reading ‘Grandison’.57

30Saving readers the trouble of having to develop their taste by themselves—a task itself hazardous since they could develop misconceptions regarding morals—was the aim of children’s literature, a new trend offered to the readers of Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma (Children’s Readings for the Heart and Mind), a periodical published by Novikov between 1785 and 1789. A result of the “discovery of childhood” that characterized the Enlightenment and, as Darnton has noted, a typical product of booming literary markets during that period,58 children’s literature was of great importance, since it was widely believed that books read by children had a profound and lasting moral impact on them and largely determined what future individuals they would become.59 This moral agenda led to the publication, on the pages of these first books meant for children, of numerous texts belonging to the genre of moralistic literature. Among foreign authors published in the journal, often in young Karamzin’s translations, were Salomon Gessner or Stéphanie de Genlis. Hence, Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma offered children direct access to proper literature, saving them the trouble of going through the evolution leading from reading fairy tales and novels to reading moralistic literature, as does Cleon, the imaginary reader from Bolotov’s text “On the usefulness of reading books.”60

31Like many projects supported by Novikov, Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma was a journal, a relatively new type of medium for Russian readers that likewise witnessed a spectacular development in Catherine II’s time. If the first literary journals, such as Sumarokov’s Trudoliubivaia pchela (Industrious Bee, 1759) or the already mentioned Prazdnoe vremia, v pol’zu upotreblennoe (1759) had appeared at the end of Elisabeth Petrovna’s reign (1741-1761), the last third of the century saw a significant diversification of this medium, starting from the late 1760s. The call to emulate its model initiated by Vsiakaia vsiachina (All Sorts of Things), a magazine privately edited by Catherine herself, generated a boom of so-called satirical journals at the turn of the 1760s and 1770s, which included many journals published by Novikov. The appearance of these journals set a new trend, which immediately replaced the trend of the novel: most of the active Russian writers started publishing journals, including Emin and Chulkov, who had been the leading proponents of novel writing earlier in the decade. This swift and radical reorientation of writers’ interests shows how trends were becoming a part of both the writing and reading experiences. After this first boom, journals grew increasingly specialized. Throughout the 1770s, they began dropping their satirical tone and instead came to focus on specific topics, such as music, drama, fashion, or (to mention more serious topics) the sciences, agriculture, the economy, etc. As Anan’eva and Veselova put it, the literati intended for this diversification of content to address as many reading needs as possible and thereby fight idleness.61

32Unfortunately, it seems that commercial issues once more jeopardized the moral and social goals that the literati placed before themselves. Journals sold rather poorly, with the notable exception of Novikov’s Truten’ (Drone, [1769-1770]) and Utrennii svet (Morning lights [1777-1780]).62 Nonetheless, to the few readers they actually did reach, these journals offered new forms of engagement with reading. Periodical reading was indeed different from novel reading, for it structured the reader’s temporal experience differently. In other words, the development of periodicals led to new varieties of emotional response vis-à-vis reading, such as enjoying waiting for the journal’s next issue, either because it promised new materials or because it promised to offer the next installment of material that the reader had already enjoyed.63 In his memoirs, Bolotov remembered his excitement at waiting for Karamzin’s next installment of the Moskovskii zhurnal (Moscow Journal) while in the countryside in the summer of 1791: “We both especially enjoyed back then the Moscow Journal, published by Karamzin, so we always expected it with great impatience and were delighted when it was finally brought to us.”64

33Certain specific journals actually gained value from their very periodical nature. This was true of fashion journals, such as Novikov’s Modnoe ezhe-mesiachnoe izdanie, ili biblioteka dlia damskago tualeta (Fashionable Monthly, or the Library for the ladies’ dressing room), published in 1779, and especially of Magazin angliskikh, frantsuzskikh i nemetskikh novykh mod (The Magazine of English, French and German new Fashions), published in 1791.65 Besides fostering a peculiar temporality of textual consumption,66 fashion journals also targeted a specific, female audience. As such, they testify of the rise of new demographic sub-segments in Russian noble readership in the late eighteenth century.

2. Reading publics and their evolution

34Female readers, no less than children, constituted new segments in Russian noble readership. As Xénia Borderioux noted, social demands faced by Russian noblemen in the second part of the eighteenth century changed, and they were now expected to show growing cultural awareness. As a consequence, women were invited to read,67 just as Sophia—a fictional role model for Russian women—does in The Minor. Another role model, at least for women at court and in the capital’s aristocratic circles, was Catherine II herself, a notoriously well-read woman whose self-fashioning relied directly on her reputation as an avid reader, as her Memoirs would later testify.68 Besides the journals specifically published for them, women, according to Borderioux, read novels, but also comedies, poetry, songs, tales, and hocus-pocus.69 This narrative of frivolity, however, needs to be rendered with more nuance. As Samarin has established in his study of journal subscribers in late eighteenth-century Russia, women mostly read educational literature, then books dedicated to housekeeping and home economics, and only then novels.70 Furthermore, the novels that they read were often of a moralizing nature, as testified by the list of books sent to Ekaterina Chirikova to the countryside in 1797, where the names Mme de Genlis, Mme de Staël, Florian, and Marmontel dominate.71 An additional feature of female readers from the nobility is that they read predominantly in French.72 Among the thirty-eight books sent to Ekaterina Chirikova, only two were in Russian. This phenomenon of bilingual reading, if not specific to eighteenth-century Russia alone or to the female segment of the Russian readership, was significant.73 It explains the quantitative importance of French books in aristocratic private libraries and in the court library.74 It also explains the presence—starting from the middle of the century—of sellers of foreign books (notably French and German ones) in the two capitals.75

35If women and children from the nobility did emerge as new segments in the Russian readership, then adult male readers nevertheless continued to dominate it as a whole. This major segment, however, likewise evolved. The noble readership went through a process of inner democratization. Once the privilege of higher levels of the nobility, books became available to lower levels as well. These new levels included service noblemen, landowners with limited means, and students from the gymnasia,76 all of whom acquired access to books thanks to new forms of dissemination. After the failed attempts to open a public library in Saint Petersburg and a private library accessible to the public sponsored by Count Alexander Stroganov,77 paying libraries and reading cabinets started opening in both capitals in the 1770s. Initially serving foreign, mostly German and French communities,78 these cabinets sometimes offered Russian books as well. In the 1790s, Russian reading libraries started appearing too. Matvei Ovchinnikov, Fedor Tumanskii, Vasilii Sopikov, and Karl Wilhelm Miller opened reading cabinets from which readers could borrow Russian books for a cost varying between 10 to 16 rubles a year.79 The public targeted by these cabinets is clear enough. In the presentation of his catalogue of books, published in 1791, Sopikov explained that his cabinet was open to those, who: “while having free time and the noble and respectable desire to read, cannot, due to various reasons and circumstances, buy them in sufficient quantities.”80

36In addition to being a social phenomenon, this democratization of books and reading was also a geographical one. In Catherine’s times, books finally made their way to the Russian provinces, creating a new reading public: provincial readers. As seen previously, getting access to books outside of Saint Petersburg and Moscow had been problematic for decades. In a letter published in Novikov’s satirical journal Zhivopisets in 1772, the editor, in his response to a correspondent from Iaroslavl’, stressed this specific issue: “Conversely, nobles and merchants living in remote provinces are deprived of the possibility of buying books and using them for their benefit.”81 This situation, however, started evolving, notably thanks to the efforts of Novikov, who opened outlets in the provinces in order to improve sales. In the 1780s, he opened from 10 to 20 outlets outside of the capitals.82 But he was not alone and, by the end of the century, specialists estimate that books could be purchased in some 40 outlets outside of the two main cities.83 Moreover, items could also be sent by mail—one of the services offered by Novikov84—thereby dramatically increasing access to books. Based on data from various lists of subscribers, Samarin has identified some 339 different locations from which people ordered books. If most places in his list are located in central Russia, they include places as diverse as Tambov, Pskov, Tver’, Kazan’, Arkhangel’sk, Kaluga, and Voronezh.85

37If books from the capitals were a powerful tool of ideological modernization86, it seems that the average taste of provincial readers mostly remained conservative. As Marker notes, most books on sale in provincial outlets were religious books or textbooks.87 In his memoirs, Fedor Glinka remembers what kind of literature people most often read in the province where he lived in the 1780s and 1790s: “In my early childhood, as far as my remembrances go, in our quiet little corner of the Simbirsk province, near the town of Dukhovnitsa, people didn’t read much and almost didn’t own any books, apart from spiritual ones.”88

38Leisure literature seems to have been scarce in the provinces. It occupies the fifth and last rank among the types of books to which provincial readers subscribed according to Samarin, after the abovementioned spiritual books, books on history, educational literature for children, and books on sciences and technology.89 The conservatism of their taste does not mean, however, that provincial readers were not interested in what was going on in the capitals and beyond. This seems to explain their interest in journals, for which they remained the largest share of subscribers.90

39Additionally, not all provincial readers were conservative. The growing amount of nobles retiring from service to their provincial estates in the 1780s91 led to the multiplication of libraries in country houses. Similarly, libraries appeared in provincial towns inhabited by local noble families. For instance, the library of the Iaroslavl’-based Likhachev family, studied by Tatiana Ledeneva, included books by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvétius, Mably, Novikov, Kniazhnin, and Fonvizin.92

40In addition to nobles, the Russian readership came to include growing numbers of townspeople and merchants, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. According to Samarin, merchants represent 7% of the subscribers he studied, and townspeople 3,5 %.93 These figures were growing, which triggered Kheraskov’s anxiety and need for cultural distinction. Besides the already mentioned lubok literature and the satirical journals published by Novikov, these segments of the reading public were mainly interested (if we believe Karamzin) in newspapers,94 which they read for their information value. Merchants also continued to support the demand for technical literature, as is apparent from the development of books intended specifically for them. As Anna Zhukovskaia has noted, the genre of letter-writing manuals, for instance, went through various changes over the course of the eighteenth century. One of the most striking is its evolution from a genre intended for nobles at the beginning of the century to a genre intended for merchants by the 1780s.95

41However, the majority of readers—and the most visible ones—remained nobles from the main urban centers, a situation which would evolve, as explained by Damiano Rebecchini in his chapter, only in the first third of the following century96. Noble readers were the ones who mostly consumed the new literature of Enlightenment values, which they themselves translated or produced. They were the ones reading Jean-Jacques, whereas the others, in the best-case scenario, would, according to Karamzin, stop with Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison.97 Nobles compose 70 % of all subscribers studied by Samarin.98 Of course, the reading public cannot be reduced to subscribers only, since they represent, as Darnton rightly noted for Western Europe, only the richest segment of readers.99 But in the Russian context, noble readers were the most dynamic one. Besides, as mentioned earlier in regards to the new types of readers accessing books through reading cabinets, noble readers were as diverse as the books they read. 8,4% of Samarin’s subscribers came from the titled nobility and the imperial family; 8,16% from nobles occupying ranks 1 through 4 in the Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great; 5% occupied rank 5; and 28,64 % occupied ranks from 6 through 8. In other words, 51 % of all readers belonged to the hereditary nobility, to whom must be added 19,26 % of nobles from ranks 9 through 14.100

42Diverse in rank, noble readers were also diverse in virtue. Initially meant as a virtuous way to occupy free time outside of service, reading turned into a dangerous occupation in the hands of a new segment of the readership: readers “à la mode.” As Borderioux noted, under Catherine’s reign, reading became a fashionable occupation partly because the Russian public associated it with a French cultural practice.101 Publishers started aiming at the fashionable public, notably by publishing ads on new releases in fashion(able) journals.102 Books themselves became fashionable objects when some publishers decided to turn them into decorative items. Borderioux pointed out Anna Urusova’s interest in Louis-Antoine Caraccioli’s 1760 Book of four colours, noting that Urusova read the “green volume,” printed with green ink, while her sister read the “pink volume,” printed with pink one.103 Though this kind of highly sophisticated printing practice seems to have been closely associated with Parisian culture, it did initiate comparable experiments in Russia. As Borderioux noted, the Russian writer and notorious fop Nikolai Struiskii indulged in publishing sophisticated books on the private press installed on his estate.104

43This new type of relationship with books was a slap in the face of the literati’s intellectual ethics. It was even worse than the type of familiar appropriation of texts, which they had criticized at the eve of Catherine’s reign, but which required some kind of intellectual effort. Unsurprisingly, they mocked those who valued the possession of books as object more than the content of those books. In his 1791 Pocket book for people moving to Moscow for the winter (Karmannaia knizhka dlia priezzhaiushchikh na zimu v Moskvu), Nikolai Strakhov ironically invited fops and coquettes to compile libraries by selecting books according to their title, not their content:

Choose books according to their title, not their content. In this, follow fashion and your own knowledge and taste. Avoid as much as possible buying the following useless and empty books: books about virtue [...]; about matters of the heart [...]; about proper behavior [...]; about decency [...]; about true friendship [...]; about proper ways to spend free time [...]; in general don’t buy books about things unrelated to fashion or to any topics known to high society, for everything that is not fashionable can be described by the word fadaises.105

44We can get an idea of the “fadaises” (“nonsense”) that Strakhov invited fashionable readers to neglect in favor of fashionable books from another satirical text, one published earlier in Novikov’s Drone. In this article, published in February 1770, a coquette describes a boring library, which, as can be seen from the following quote, contained all the legitimate books of the literati’s literary pantheon:

I inherited from an old man who passed away—my late father—a whole lot of books, but, to be frank, I never read any. I assure you that, after having tried one, I started stinking with old morals. I bet that you won’t guess what books they were: nothing but Feofans and Kantemirs, Telemachus, Rollins, Chronicles, and other such nonsense.106

45Without going to such extremes, the diversification of the book production under Catherine II’s reign generated two different kinds of reading: a reading of canonized literature on the one hand, and a reading of innovative literature on the other. This movement contributed to the creation of a new generational gap between readers in the 1790s, reminiscent of the gap staged in the 1760s by Fonvizin in his Brigadier.

46The new aesthetic trend of sentimentalism, which grew increasingly popular from the late 1780s (see zorin, “A reading revolution?” in the present volume), seems to have had a specific impact on young readers, as demonstrated by the success of Karamzin’s books among students. His 1792 pastoral short story Poor Liza (Bednaia Liza), as well as his 1794 gothic short story The Island of Bornholm (Ostrov Borngol’m), enjoyed wide success among students from the Cadet Corp.107 Hence, reading the new literature of sentimentalism helped foster a sense of belonging to a specific community based on age. As Borderioux noted, buying trendy books was a way to oppose older people,108 who had traditionally been responsible for choosing (i.e. selecting) books for younger readers. In her memoirs, Anna Labzina remembers how Kheraskov, who brought her up, wrote to her: “You can get books from my brother, who knows which ones to give you.”109 Choosing their own books, then, became an act of social autonomy for younger, sentimental readers. Choosing how to read them met the same challenge.

3. Reading modes and the quest for autonomy

47In his memoirs, the poet and senator Ivan Dmitriev remembers how his father used to read Lomonosov’s odes to the family circle:

I get no less pleasure from remembering one night at Easter Eve which my father decided to dedicate to family reading. This also took place in the country, after I graduated from my last boarding school. While we were waiting for dawn, my father, in order to fight sleep, took from his library the Selected Works of Lomonosov, the first Moscow edition, and began reading aloud the famous strophes from Job, then the Evening Considerations on God’s Greatness, […]. The reading ended with the Ode to the conquest of Khotin.110

48This particular engagement with literature is a textbook example of how classicism treats books as an instrument of social control. It reproduces at the reduced scale of the family circle the consumption of texts mandated by the reading of a speech at court. In this scenario, the father embodies authority and reads an authorized text to a passive audience, whose possibilities to engage actively with literature are limited.

49The innovative forms of engagement developed by Russian readers in Catherine II’s time were radically opposed to this type of text consumption. Leaving the coded spaces of the library or the family parlour, Russian readers, like their European counterparts studied by Darnton,111 started reading outdoors. In A Knight of our time, Karamzin depicts how his young hero used to read on the banks of the Volga nearby Karamzin’s own hometown of Simbirsk: “Sometimes, putting down his book, he would stare at the vast blue Volga, at the white sails of the boats and barks, at the flocks of seagulls, diving from the clouds into the scummy waves and flying back to the skies immediately afterwards.”112

50As Kochetkova has noted, reading helped Karamzin’s hero enjoy the scenery by creating emotional associations between the landscape and the text. With time, recollections about the text would trigger recollections about the specific place where it was read, and vice versa.113 This merging of text and landscape, of an intellectual practice with an emotional and physical experience, had a desacralizing function.

51This kind of desacralization could go very far, and the new, freer way of consuming literature sometimes reached extremes. In a letter written to Dmitriev on May 31st, 1823, Karamzin remembered how the two of them, during their shared youth, once read on the banks of the river at night: “Your last, private and pleasantly melancholic letter flew me back in my imagination to the banks of the Volga, the crown of Simbirsk, where we once, heroically fighting sleep, read Young at night while waiting for dawn.”114 As this excerpt shows, night reading enhances the transgression of reading outdoors, as it adds to the unusual location an unusual time frame, one less governed by social control and as such associated with freedom by the two young men.

52As people started reading them outdoors, books became a part of the new social ritual of taking walks. In an overdoor painting from the 1750s by B. V. Sukhodol’skii entitled “The Walk” (“Progulka”), people are not represented walking, but reading.115 Reading also appears as a recurrent motif in several of Karamzin’s early literary texts dedicated to walking in the countryside, such as The Walk (Progulka) and The Village (Derevnia).116 Walkers could follow neutral paths regardless of how their itineraries were often culturally coded, and took them to places associated with the memory of cult figures and/or cult literary characters. In Letters of a Russian Traveler (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 1791-1801), Karamzin’s fictional double visits Gessner’s grave in Zurich with “a volume of his writings in [his] pocket.” Similarly, while day-dreaming about Rousseau on St Peter’s Island, he suddenly meets another walker, who also came to the island to reminisce about the writer with “a book in his hand.”117

53As Jean Breuillard has noted, reading outdoors became possible when the format of books became smaller.118 This change was celebrated by Bolotov, who noted that the format of Karamzin’s 1794 Trifles (Moi bezdelki) made it easy to place in one’s pocket, and that as such it was the ideal book to be taken out on walks.119 This reduction of book formats happened throughout the whole of Europe in the eighteenth century, and it is probable that Russia adopted it under the influence of Germany. Breuillard has noted that most books published in eighteenth-century Russia were in the octavo format,120 a relatively cheap one according to Marker,121 and that Karamzin innovated when he started publishing smaller books: Bolotov’s favourite Trifles came out in the duodecimo format; as for Julia, it even came out in the sextodecimo format.122 True, writes Breuillard, the duodecimo format did exist before Karamzin started using it, but it was mainly used to publish utilitarian literature, from alphabet books to agriculture manuals, or to publish unworthy literature, such as novels. Legitimate literature, on the contrary, was always published in large formats. Law or scientific texts were published in-folio, and texts belonging to solemn literary genres like odes were published in quarto.123 In other words, concludes Breuillard, formats reproduced the symbolic hierarchy of literary genres established by classicism, and what Karamzin did was to publish legitimate literature in the format of an unworthy one. As he wrote to Dmitriev in October 1795, while preparing the collection Aonids, his Russian response to the French Almanach des Muses: “This way we could each year issue a small book of verses that our ladies would not be ashamed to carry in their pocket.”124 Whereas Dmitriev’s father had to get Lomonosov’s odes from his library, a legitimate place for a (grand format) legitimate book, younger readers fond of the new sentimental literature only needed to take their favourite (small format) books out of their pocket. This reduction of book dimensions also enhanced their emotional value. They became more precious as they became tinier, and their constant presence in their owners’ pocket gave them the moral value of a companion: they became the receptacle of their owners’ emotions,125 sometimes literally inscribed in the books by the penciled notations in the margins that Kheraskov had condemned some twenty years earlier. Some books obviously provided moral support in difficult times, such as during military campaigns. Bolotov took his copy of Fénelon’s Telemachus to the battlefields of Prussia during the Seven Year war, and in 1788, Dmitriev took his copy of Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse when leaving for the front of the Swedish-Russian war.126

54Carrying them around in their pockets, readers turned books into a new tool of sociability. As Kochetkova notes, books became identifiers for people who shared similar reference points and values. In Nikolai Emin’s novel Rosa, the heroes become acquainted with one another thanks to Young’s Nights. Hearing that the heroine longs to have a copy of the book, the hero hands it over to her from behind the bush from where he overheard her conversation.127 Instrumental in creating emotional communities, books became an important part of these communities’ symbolic economy. They were exchanged, as with Karamzin’s books among the Saint Petersburg cadets. This, of course, had a special value outside the capitals, where books were scarce. In the episode from his memoirs quoted earlier in this study, Glinka remembers such an experience of shared reading:

Suddenly there appeared at my home a copy of My trifles. Someone had sent us this book from Moscow; how can one describe the impression it produced? Everybody rushed to take the book and immersed themselves in its reading. They read it again and again, and finally came to know it by heart. Our copy went around the entire neighborhood and came back to us torn apart. I suppose this was the fate of all Karamzin’s literary experiments.128

55Besides sharing books, readers started sharing opinions about their reading experiences. Mihail Murav’ev’s letters, for instance, are famous for reflecting his opinions on the books he read, which he considered legitimate to share with his correspondents.129 But sharing one’s fondness for specific books took more direct forms as well, like reading aloud in groups, which, according to Kochetkova, became popular under the influence of Goethe. It was used as a sort of metalanguage, in order to express feelings that society forbade one from voicing.130 Another example of language developed for a specific community on the basis of shared reading was the cryptic language used by the Russian masons in their correspondence.

56The emotional communities fostered by shared reading experiences and the use of shared unique languages also developed paraliterary cultural rituals. As Andrei Zorin notes in the present volume, the readers of Karamzin’s Poor Liza became emotionally invested in the area surrounding the pond nearby Moscow where the writer had placed the action of his short story. Wishing to immortalize their reading experience and to share it with members of their emotional community beyond their usual friendly circles, readers wrote graffiti on trees surrounding the pond, further transforming the location into a place for literary pilgrimage.131 This practice of community creation was clearly perceived as such by outsiders, who started covering the trees with salacious, counter-graffiti, spoiling the experience of Karamzin’s readers while protesting their unusual appropriation of public space.

57This kind of hostile reaction expressed the condemnation of a behaviour seen as irrational and threatening to the cohesion of educated society. Sentimental readers brought such reactions upon themselves by rejecting as alien those who did not share their reading-based emotional experiences. As Kochetkova rightly points out, reading was used by sentimental writers to create moral distinction. In many novels, characters were divided between the righteous ones, who read (appropriate) books, and the evil ones, who didn’t read (appropriate) books.132

58Of course, the moral rules and models of self-fashioning offered by sentimentalist fiction did not necessarily reflect Russian social reality. Meanwhile, they did reflect their authors’ ambitions to create new forms of social control for the educated nobility. In other words, freer forms of reading reflected attempts at replacing court-mandated models of engagement with literature with alternative models, ones governed by members of the reader’s emotional community. In a society where the majority of educated nobles still considered the state as their main partner, this was considered illegitimate.

59The irrational behaviour which people associated with sentimentalism was perceived as a form of intoxication by literature. A frequent criticism addressed to readers of sentimental stories was their inability to distinguish reality from fiction,133 which is precisely how people perceived the attempts of the readers of Poor Liza to turn a real place into a literary one, which presupposed the transformation of fiction into reality. This intoxication was the consequence of the deeper forms of emotional commitment which sentimentalism was developing for its readers. Of course, a similar criticism had been addressed to the novel on the eve of Catherine’s reign. But, by the beginning of the 1790s, the danger was not only back, it was stronger than ever. Indeed, besides new forms of emotional engagement, the new little books of Russian sentimentalism also provided greater reading pleasure. Karamzin’s reform of the Russian language, which cleansed literary Russian of its archaisms and resorted to French as a model for syntax, had made texts easier to read, notably for less experienced readers such as young people or women. Language, moreover, was not the only thing that Karamzin simplified. As Breuillard asserts, Karamzin not only reduced the format of books, he also simplified the textual structure of the page. Under the influence of Condillac, whose works he was well acquainted with,134 the young Russian writer realised that the cognitive possibilities of readers were limited, and tried to add clarity to his texts by rethinking their structure. He would develop only one idea per paragraph and summarize it in the first sentence of every paragraph, so as to offer to his readers the possibility of reading more easily.135 This innovative approach to structuring literary texts, which amounted to a small revolution in what Roger Chartier calls the “mise en livre,”136 proved productive. As Breuillard notes, it was adopted by some of Karamzin’s epigones, from Alexander Klushin in Unfortunate M-v. (Neschastnyi M-v, 1793), to Gavriil Kamenev in Sofia (1796), or Vladimir Izmailov in Beautiful Tatiana (Prekrasnaia Tat’iana, 1804).137

60Making reading easier also meant making it less time consuming. In his 1796 Abridged course on Russian style (Sokrashchennyi kurs rossiiskago sloga), Vassilii Podshivalov noted that no one cared about (slowly) reading long phrases anymore, and that the newest writers abridged the length of their sentences.138 This, noted Breuillard, recalled the type of reading “à la mode,” popular in France among petit-maîtres, who did not need lengthy books and preferred booklets providing the concise information necessary to fuel society conversations.139

61If not embodying the Leserevolution conceptualized by Engelsing and criticized by Darnton (as it did not lead to the disappearance of intensive reading, which only took on new forms),140 this radical change, no less than the change of formats, contributed to a desacralization of books and reading. It rejected the serious type of reading advocated from the times of classicism by the “serious elite”141 of the literati and mandated by the “theological, mystical, overly scholarly, pedantic and dry texts” that Karamzin declared unfit for his future Moskovskii zhurnal in 1790.142 This new agenda claimed that the sole value of books resided in their ability to provide pleasure for their readers,143 and partly explains Admiral Shishkov’s hostility towards Karamzin and sentimentalism at the beginning of the following century. An erudite, but not a writer seeking an audience, Shishkov condemned the type of reading that sacrificed information for the sake of pleasure and which destabilized the semantic integrity of the text, e.g. by introducing shifts from literal to figurative language. This new kind of reading conferred and relied on a growing level of autonomy from the reader, who from now on was supposed to be able to choose what to understand from the text and how to understand it. Like the coquettes, who, according to Borderioux, could reverse the meaning of a satirical text meant to mock them in order to use it as a normative statement on how to be fashionable,144 this new generation of readers was supposed to be autonomous enough to find in texts what was required by their personal intellectual and moral development. Far from fearing the corrupting influence of novels, as the literati had at the turn of the 1750s, Dmitriev claimed in his autobiography that their consumption did not harm him as a child: “Reading novels did not have a malicious influence on my morality. I even dare say that novels served me as an antidote against everything low and pernicious.”145 Similarly, Karamzin rejoiced at hearing that Russians were reading novels, as he considered any kind of reading to be acceptable.146 Of course, Karamzin referred mainly to mass readers, but his narrative concerning the development of taste—from Nikanor to Grandison—lay on the conviction that readers were wise enough not to become corrupted and could independently use literature as a tool of personal improvement.

62In other words, readers were considered to be increasingly socially autonomous, and reading to be an emancipatory practice. Readers were not to be treated as children anymore by the literati but rather as adults, according to the well-known Kantian metaphor of Enlightenment. In a letter by Catherine II, the empress expressed her ambition that her granddaughters would grow up to become adept readers, able to “choose books reasonably” (“blagorazumno vybirat’ knigi dlia chteniia147). The difference between this quote and Kheraskov’s monitoring of Anna Labzina’s choice of literature illustrates the new function carried out by reading in late eighteenth-century Russia. The problem, however, was that, in Karamzin’s plans, such independent reading was not intended for the imperial family only, but for the entire educated public; and that the subsequent step after readers were granted autonomy in reading was to be granted autonomy of thought. Indeed, the writer’s second attempt at creating a journal, his 1802 Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe), was not just a literary one, as the Moskovskii zhurnal of 1791-1792 had been, but a literary and political one.148 Karamzin’s ambitions laid the foundation for turning reading into a general conversation for the educated audience, one meant to parallel, if not replace, the traditional dialogue between the public and the state. This move was bold, and some warned both the public and the authorities about its possible dangers. In 1810, one of Karamzin’s enemies, Pavel Golenishchev-Kutuzov—who in 1799 had already warned his readers against the writer’s dangerously “seductive” (“prelestnyi”) style149—wrote a political denunciation on the writer, whose appeal to readers seemed dangerous. By doing so, he tried to restore the old form of dialogue between the public and the state, which he considered to be threatened by the new one between the writer and the public. Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s attempt failed, but it shows that he had sensed the new legitimacy granted to writers, which was to become a specific feature of the nineteenth century, and originated in the growing autonomy of readers and the liberalization of reading practices dating back to the times of Catherine.

Bibliographie

Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.

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Samarin A. Iu., Chitatel’ v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo MGUP, 2000).

Samarin A. Iu., “Lichnye biblioteki v Rossii epokhi Prosveshcheniia (obzor istoriografii kontsa XX veka), Imperskaia Rossiia / Classical Russia 1700-1825, 1 (2006), 153-176.

Sapunov B. V., “Iz istorii russkogo chitatelia perioda feodalizma,” in Istoriia russkogo chitatelia, vyp. 4 (Leningrad: LGIK, 1982), 28-30.

Shesterneva E. V., Kommercheskie publichnye biblioteki Rossii: stanovlenie i razvitie, analiz fondov i chitatel’skikh grupp (XVIII – nachalo XX vv.), dissertatsiia na soiskanie uch. stepeni kandidata ped. Nauk (Moscow: MGUKI, 2002).

Strakhov N. I., Karmannaia knizhka dlia priezzhaiushchikh na zimu v Moskvu (1791) (Moscow: Al’pina Pablisher, 2016).

Veselova A. Iu., “Iz naslediia A. T. Bolotova : stat’ia ‘O pol’ze, proiskhodiashchei ot chteniia knig’,” XVIII vek. Sbornik 21 (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1999), 358-367.

Zaitseva A. A., “‘Kabinety dlia chteniia’ v Sankt-Peterburge kontsa XVIII – nachala XIX veka,” Russkie biblioteki i chastnye knizhnye sobraniia XVI – XIX vekov. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Leningrad: BAN, 1979).

Notes de bas de page

1   G. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800 (Princeton, 1995), 69.

2   Ibid., 74-75.

3   A. Iu. Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (Moscow, 2000), 6.

4   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 76.

5   Ibid.

6   Quoted in A. Iu. Veselova, “Iz naslediia A. T. Bolotova: stat’ia ‘O pol’ze, proishodiashchei ot chteniia knig’,” XVIII vek, vol. 21 (St. Petersburg, 1999), 359-360. My translation.

7   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 69.

8   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 14.

9   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 59.

10   Ibid., 76, 78-79.

11   Ibid., 105.

12   Ibid., 163.

13   Ibid., 83-85.

14   Ibid., 164.

15   Ibid., 165.

16   N. M. Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi k chteniiu v Rossii,” in Idem, Izbrannye sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), vol. 2, 177. My translation.

17   Iu. M. Lotman, “Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury XVIII – nachala XIX veka,” in Iz istorii russkoi kul’tury. vol. 4 (XVIII – nachalo XIX veka) (Moscow, 2000), 107.

18   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 7.

19   B. V. Sapunov, “Iz istorii russkogo chitatelia perioda feodalizma,” in Istoriia russkogo chitatelia, 4 (Leningrad, 1982), 28-30.

20   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 183.

21   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 5.

22   M. M. Kheraskov, “O chtenii knig,” Poleznoe uveselenie, 1 (1760). Quoted in V. V. Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkogo romana i povesti (materialy po bibliografii, istorii i teorii russkago romana). Chast’ 1, XVIII vek (St. Petersburg, 1903), 234.

23   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 208.

24   T. Grits, V. Trenin, M. Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia. Knizhnaia lavka A. F. Smirdina (Moscow, 2001), 15, 18, 20.

25   N. I. Novikov, Zhivopisets, 10-11, quoted in V. B. Shklovskii, Chulkov i Levshin (Leningrad, 1933), 43. My translation.

26   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 208.

27   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 137.

28   J. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650-1825 (London and New York, 1998), 57.

29   A. Anan’eva, A. Veselova, “‘Chto-nibud’ ot bezdel’ia na dosuge’: publitsistika i vopros o svobodnom vremeni v dvorianskoi srede vtoroi poloviny XVIII – nachala XIX vv.,” Die Welt der Slaven, 63 (2018), Heft 1, 93.

30   R. Baudin, Formation et poétique du roman russe au XVIIIe siècle: le système romanesque des années 1760, Thèse de doctorat (Université Paris IV, 2002).

31   Kheraskov, “O chtenii knig,” 234.

32   R. Baudin, “Normativnaia kritika i romannoe chtenie v Rossii serediny XVIII veka,” in D. Rebecchini, R. Vassena (eds.), Reading in Russia. Practices of Reading and Literary Communication 1760-1930 (Milan, 2014), 39-58.

33   D. I. Fonvizin, Brigadir, in Idem, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, Leningrad, 1959), vol. 1, 48-49. My translation.

34   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 117.

35   Ibid., 193, 198-199.

36   Quoted in Shklovskii, Chulkov i Levshin, 41-42.

37   Quoted in A. Iu. Samarin, “Lichnye biblioteki v Rossii epokhi Prosveshcheniia (obzor istoriografii kontsa XX veka),” Imperskaia Rossiia / Classical Russia, 1700-1825, 1 (2006), 169.

38   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 132.

39   Iu. D. Levin, Istoriia russkoi perevodnoi khudozhestvennoi literatury, Drevniaia Rus’. XVIII vek (St. Petersburg, 1995), vol. 1, Proza, 153.

40   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 97, 205.

41Svodnyi katalog russkoi knigi grazhdanskoi pechati XVIII veka, 1725-1800 (Moscow, 1963-1967), vol. 3 (1966), 422-423.

42   Grits, Trenin, Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia, 13.

43   N. D. Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma. Chtenie v zhizni chuvstvitel’nogo geroia,” XVIII vek. Sbornik 14. Russkaia literatura XVIII – nachala XIX veka v obshchestvenno-kul’turnom kontekste (Leningrad, 1983), 140.

44   N. I. Novikov, Satiricheskie zhurnaly (Moscow, Leningrad, 1951), 299. My translation.

45   Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle,” 178. My translation.

46   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 101, 119.

47   Ibid., 119.

48Svodnyi katalog, vol. 2 (1964), 149-150.

49   Ibid., 435-436.

50   Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkogo romana, 5-140.

51   A. T. Bolotov, Mysli i bespristrastnye suzhdeniia o romanakh, kak original’nykh rossiiskikh, tak i perevedennykh s inostrannykh iazykov Andreia Bolotova, in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, vol. 9-10 (Moscow, 1933), 194. My translation.

52   Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 125.

53   Fonvizin, Nedorosl’, in Idem, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 149. My translation.

54   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 202.

55   Ibid., 98.

56   N. M. Karamzin, Rytsar’ nashego vremeni, in Idem, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 1, 764-765.

57   Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle,” 179. My translation.

58   R. Darnton, “First Steps toward a History of reading,” Australian Journal of French Studies, 2 (1986), 13.

59   On what eighteenth-century Russian writers actually read in their childhood, see L. Rossi, “Knigi i chtenie v avtobiograficheskikh povestvovaniiakh o detstve russkikh pisatelei XVIII-XIX vv.: opyt prochteniia,” in Rebecchini, Vassena, Reading in Russia, 59-77.

60   Veselova, “Iz naslediia A. T. Bolotova,” 360-362.

61   Anan’eva, Veselova, “‘Chto-nibud’ ot bezdel’ia na dosuge’,” 97.

62   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 96-97, 206.

63   R. Baudin, “Mode et modernité en Russie au XVIIIe siècle: le Magasin des modes nouvelles, premier journal russe consacré à la mode,” Modernités russes, 4 (2002), 57-68.

64   A. T. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov. 1738-1795 (St. Petersburg, 1873), vol. 4, 845-846. My translation.

65   X. Borderioux, Evropeiskaia moda v Rossii v epokhu Ekateriny II, Thèse de doctorat (RGGU - Université Paris III, 2012), 176.

66   Baudin, “Mode et modernité,” 68.

67   Borderioux, Evropeiskaia moda, 175.

68   A. Vacheva, Potomstvu Ekaterina II. Idei i narrativnye strategii v avtobiografii imperatritsy (Sofia, 2015), 110-111, 186.

69   Borderioux, Evropeiskaia moda, 185-186.

70   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 156.

71   Quoted in E. Grechanaia, C. Viollet, “Journaux féminins en langue française 1780-1850,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 50, 1 (janvier-mars 2009), 41-42.

72   On the gendered aspect of using French, see N. Dmitrieva, G. Argent, “The Coexistence of Russian and French in Russia in the First Third of the Nineteenth Century: Bilingualism with or without Diglossia,” in D. Offord, L. Ryazanova-Clarke, V. Rjéoutski, G. Argent (eds.), French and Russian in Imperial Russia (Edinburgh, 2015), vol. 1, Language Use among the Russian Elite, 228-242.

73   On the use of French in eighteenth-century Russia in general, see Offord, Ryazanova-Clarke, Rjéoutski, Argent, French and Russian, “Introduction,” 1-24.

74   Grits, Trenin, Nikitin, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia, 61.

75   See, for example, N. A. Kopanev, “Rasprostranenie frantsuzskoi knigi v Moskve v seredine XVIII v.,” in S. P. Lupov (ed.), Frantsuzskaia kniga v Rossii v XVIII veke. Ocherki istorii (Leningrad, 1986), 59-172.

76   E. V. Shesterneva, Kommercheskie publichnye biblioteki Rossii: stanovlenie i razvitie, analiz fondov i chitatel’skikh grupp (XVIII – nachalo XX vv.), dissertatsiia na soiskanie uch. stepeni kandidata ped. nauk (Moscow, 2002), 33.

77   A. A. Zaitseva, “‘Kabinety dlia chteniia’ v Sankt-Peterburge kontsa XVIII – nachala XIX veka,” Russkie biblioteki i chastnye knizhnye sobraniia XVI – XIX vekov. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Leningrad, 1979), 30.

78   Ibid., 31.

79   Ibid., 34-36.

80   Ibid., 38. My translation.

81   Novikov, Satiricheskie zhurnaly, 442. My translation.

82   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 178.

83   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 202.

84   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 178.

85   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 202-204.

86   Ibid., 207.

87   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 180.

88   Quoted in M. P. Pogodin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin po ego sochineniiam, pis’mam i otzyvam sovremennikov (Moscow, 1866), 216-217. My translation.

89   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 200.

90   Ibid.

91   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 136-137.

92   T. Ledeneva, quoted by Samarin, “Lichnye biblioteki,” 169.

93   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 135.

94   Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle,” 177.

95   A. Joukovskaïa, “La naissance de l’épistolographie normative en Russie. Histoire des premiers manuels russes d’art épistolaire,” Cahiers du monde russe, 40, 4 (1999), 672-673.

96   See Rebecchini, “Reading foreign novels,” in volume 2.

97   Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle,” 179.

98   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 134.

99   Darnton, “First Steps,” 11.

100   Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii, 134.

101   Borderioux, Evropeiskaia moda, 176.

102   Ibid., 181.

103   Ibid., 177.

104   Ibid.

105   N. I. Strakhov, Karmannaia knizhka dlia priezzhaiushchikh na zimu v Moskvu [1791] (Moscow, 2016), 61-62. “Fadaises” is in French in the original Russian text. My translation.

106   Novikov, Satiricheskie zhurnaly, 201. My translation.

107   Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 14, 18.

108   Borderioux, Evropeiskaia moda, 184.

109   A. E. Labzina, Vospominaniia Anny Evdokimovy Labzinoi (1758-1828) (St. Petersburg, 1903), 61. My translation.

110   I. I. Dmitriev, Vzgliad na moiu zhizn’ (Moscow, 1866), 17-18. My translation.

111   Darnton, “First Steps,” 13.

112   Karamzin, Rytsar’ nashego vremeni, 766. My translation.

113   Kochetkova “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 124.

114   N. M. Karamzin, Pis’ma N. M. Karamzina k I. I. Dmitrievu (St. Petersburg, 1866), 351. My translation.

115   Ia. V. Bruk, U istokov russkogo zhanra. XVIII vek (Moscow, 1990), 62-65.

116   Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 124.

117   N. M. Karamzin, Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Leningrad, 1987), 124, 182.

118   J. Breuillard, “Le petit format,” in Derrière l’Histoire, la langue. Études de littérature, de linguistique et d’Histoire (Paris, 2012), 239.

119   Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 123.

120   Breuillard, “Le petit format,” 244.

121   Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 116.

122   Breuillard, “Le petit format,” 250-251.

123   Ibid., 244-247.

124   Karamzin, Pis’ma k I. I. Dmitrievu, 61. My translation.

125   Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 124.

126   Ibid., 131.

127   Ibid., 124.

128   Quoted in M. P. Pogodin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin po ego sochineniiam, pis’mam i otzyvam sovremennikov (Moscow, 1866), 216-217. My translation.

129   Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 122.

130   Ibid., 128.

131   On this, see also Iu. M. Lotman, “Ob odnom chitatel’skom vospriiatii Bednoi Lizy N. M. Karamzina” (1966), in Idem, Karamzin (St. Petersburg, 1997), 616.

132   Kochetkova, “Geroi russkogo sentimentalizma,” 124.

133   Ibid., 135-136.

134   J. Breuillard, “Les sentimentalistes et la conquête de la page,” in I. Fougeron (ed.), Études russes II. La Russie et le russe à travers les textes (Lille, 1999), 49.

135   Ibid., 53-54.

136   Quoted in Darnton, “First steps,” 23.

137   Breuillard, “La conquête de la page,” 56.

138   Ibid., 57.

139   Ibid., 48.

140   Darnton, “First steps,” 12.

141   Iu. M. Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina (1987), in Idem, Karamzin (St. Petersburg, 1997), 219.

142   Breuillard, “La conquête de la page,” 58. My translation.

143   Ibid., 57.

144   Borderioux, Evropeiskaia moda, 198.

145   Dmitriev, Vzgliad na moiu zhizn’, 15. My translation.

146   Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle,” 179.

147   Borderioux, Evropeiskaia moda, 200.

148   Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina, 269.

149   N. D. Kochetkova, “Chitatel’skie otkliki na publikatsii Karamzina v Rossii XVIII veka,” in E. Waegemans, H. van Koningsbrugge, M. Levitt, M. Liustrov (eds.), A Century Mad and Wise, Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment (Groningen, 2015), 18.


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