1Over the last several decades, historical scholarship has investigated the manifold material, cultural, and political implications of reading in early modern Europe. A rediscovery of the material aspects of the print and book trade has led to new assessments of the role of reading in general cultural and political developments since the Renaissance and, in particular, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period which witnessed dynastic crises, civil wars and restorations across Europe and Russia. Given the crisis of traditional legitimacy, the production, dissemination and appropriation of written discourse emerged as pivotal modes of establishing and negotiating authority. To quote a recent study, this process unfolded as a relationship between the “author/authoriser/authority axis” and “the audience for and of these texts: the reader, or the ‘subjects’ (that is the matter, the person, those owing obedience) of the text.”¹

2Even beyond the specific field of historical studies of textuality, at least three major twentieth-century historians and theorists have explained the early modern “disciplinary revolution” and reformed statehood as phenomena grounded in and shaped by particular textual corpora. Norbert Elias has rediscovered conduct literature and courtly letters as a key to a “process of civilization” which began in the late Middle Ages and culminated in the “court society” of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century embodied by Louis XIV’s Versailles and Frederick II’s appreciation of Voltaire and the belles lettres.² Gerhard Oestreich has interpreted the literature of Neostoicism, initiated by Justus Lipsius, as a successful attempt by humanist learning to develop an ideology and a code of morals for the modern state emerging from the prolonged tumults.³ Michel Foucault has traced the gradual development of governmentality as a particular self-fulfilling vision of rule, its objects and aims taking shape in mercantilist theories of administration and, more broadly, political philosophies from Machiavelli to Rousseau.⁴

3After Marc Raeff’s work there can be little doubt that Russia’s transformation in the Petrine decades belonged to the general wave of crises and reforms which swept Europe in the long seventeenth century and led to the consolidation of modern, or “absolutist,” statehood.⁵ Quite importantly, all three mentioned textual corpora—conduct manuals, neostoicist and mercantilist writings—were present and well received in (post-)Petrine Russia, either as Western editions in the libraries of the elite, or as manuscript or printed translations often sanctioned by Peter and his successors.⁶ As Raeff concludes, “the ultimate breakup of the traditional patterns of social, religious, and political culture” under Peter was made possible and compensated for by the “printed word” which “proved one of the more significant tools in Peter’s kit” for the refashioning of elites: “The reorientation of behavior patterns initiated in the reign of Peter I, first for the monarch’s servitors (others will follow), had to be rooted and consolidated by dint of great effort: it required disciplining in the literal sense, threatening punishment and promising rewards, and systematic inculcation from an early age.”⁷

4A discussion of the monarchy’s top-down disciplining effort merges here with an analysis of the cultural mechanics of reading and subjectivity reactivated, though not outright invented, in the course of Petrine reform. What Raeff describes as a goal-oriented state policy can also be understood as a particular mode of reading which, while it reaches more and more readers, implies a never-ending, self-perpetuating cultural dynamic of self-reflection and self-improvement. This was recognized by literary and cultural historians aligned with the Soviet-era school of cultural semiotics. Writing at the same time as Raeff, they explored the symbolic dimensions of the Petrine transformation. A. M. Panchenko in his theoretically charged 1984 account of Russia’s seventeenth century illuminated the pivotal role of various modes of production and dissemination of discourse for cultural change.⁸ Iurii Lotman’s manifold work on eighteenth-century Russia, culminating in (but not limited to) his important yet neglected study Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury XVIII – nachala XIX v. (1994), offers a conceptual interpretation of the cultural implications and consequences of Petrine reforms centered on textuality and reading. The reforms’ cultural paradigm reflected, voiced and perpetuated a fundamental discrepancy between everyday practice and cultural norms introduced and supervised by the reforming government. This discrepancy, according to Lotman, was negotiated through various shifting uses of language and discourse: even while the distinction between the vernacular Russian and Church Slavonic as the language of religious learning was gradually suppressed, Russia’s cultural situation was more than ever dominated by an explicit split between “empirical reality” and regulatory “grammars,” theoretical (or outright utopian) normative models of statehood and subjectivity.⁹ While Elias’s, Oestreich’s, and Foucault’s authoritative accounts of the disciplinary revolution are open to criticism for placing too much trust in normative texts while ignoring the divergent historical realities, Lotman foregrounds this ever-present discordance between text and practice in his theoretical analysis.

5In this context, reading emerges as a central cultural procedure allowing for constant and complex negotiation between the sphere of norms (associated with religion and, more and more, phenomena imported from the west) and everyday practice, between authority and the self. Certainly understood by Russian rulers from Peter I to Catherine II as a ready technique of political indoctrination, reading—the encounter between texts and audiences—made possible and (re)shaped the very concepts of statehood, discipline, and subjectivity it was supposed to reiterate and broadcast. It can be thus recognized as culture’s self-constitutive procedure which “literature” (here a broad term for secular letters) can only cater to and perpetuate:

Literature requires a particular type of behavior from the reader, shapes its reader. In order to “become a reader,” to be worthy of literature they immerse themselves in, its addressee has to transform himself. Literature carries with it an ideal “image of the reader” which it imposes imperatively on the real reader […]. The text is addressed not to the real reader […] but to a particular constructed ideal of a reader […]. But this ideal actively influences reality, and within one generation the real reader accepts this norm as ideal rules for his own behavior. The reader is expected not to read books but to abide by them in their life. And the reader views this expectation as the medieval audience approached the strict moral norms preached to it: if my conduct in practical life is different from what books require, it is because of my own weakness and unworthiness. But I would like to abide by books in my life and this is the way of life I consider right and just. The closer my conduct is to what is said in books, the higher my moral self-esteem. This is why a depiction of corrupt morals can be taken for propagation of immorality. […] Once one becomes a “reader,” they project a system of bookish concepts, ideals and judgements onto their existence and selfhood.¹⁰

6Lotman’s far-reaching conclusions are confirmed by a programmatic
text published towards the end of the period covered here, in 1760, in the first pages of the journal Poleznoe uveselenie (Useful Entertainment). Usually associated with its editor, M. M. Kheraskov, this journal was in fact a semi-official publication of the recently founded Moscow University where Kheraskov served. The journal was initiated and sponsored by the university’s founding patron, Elizabeth’s favorite Ivan Shuvalov. Backed by the government’s political and cultural authority, Useful Entertainment quite appropriately opened with an essay “On the Reading of Books” (for its full text, see Appendix):

Reading books is of great utility to mankind […]. However, there is a great difference between reading and being a reader. An ignorant clerk avidly reads books written without thought; a merchant admires what they call rhymes produced by an ignoramus such as himself – but they are not readers. There are many inept writers, and the number of mindless readers is much greater – even though an author of a badly written book only brings dishonor to himself, while a foolish reader who reads it harms himself and others […], shares his folly with other ignoramuses. […] If I start reading in order to profit from the book I chose, I will begin with the following considerations: what is the book that I intend to read? How will I read it? Will I contemplate each issue, or just rush to finish the book? This is not fitting for books with worthy content. Many read novels to become better at the arts of love, and often underline the tenderest passages with a red pencil. But philosophy, lessons of morality, books on sciences and the arts and so forth are not novels, and one does not read them for erotic maxims. This is why I must immerse myself in the book’s content, analyze the author, the book and its value. […] Someone who reads a book for pleasure but without reasoning can find many harmful lessons even in the most useful of books.¹¹

7From the standpoint of straightforward indoctrination, it would seem counterintuitive for a state-run publication to insist on the ineptitude of the reading multitude or to voice regret that “these connoisseurs [ignoramuses] have been taught to read.” Indeed, the essay demonstrates a contempt both for the “empirical reality” of non-noble audience, and for the existing reading practices which it wishes to substitute for an exigent ideal of a never-ending self-improvement as a “technology of the self.” Instead of being easily educated by new wisdom, the readers must strive to make themselves worthy of their task, to “become a reader” before the book is even opened–a paradox which reveals the self-centered cultural value of reading beyond its pragmatic uses. The procedure is so crucial that it is the reader rather than the author who is entrusted with the power and responsibility to shape the public around them by promulgating the right lessons.

8The 1760 essay appeared during a transition from the first, Petrine, phase of new Russian letters and a reading culture dominated by earnest prescriptives and theoretical writing (roughly divisible into religious works in Church Slavonic and secular Western texts translated from Latin), to the second, “Catherinian” phase marked by the growing importance of belles lettres—fiction, drama, and poetry, mostly in Russian and French. The underlying cultural assumptions concerning reading and its effects on individual subjects and the body politic remained, however, largely the same, so that Catherine’s moral journalism of the 1760s could pursue the same goals as Feofan Prokopovich’s sermons.¹²

9Lotman derives the complex status of emerging Russian literature from the dialectics of secularization: while Petrine reforms subvert the absolute cultural domination of religious discourse in favor of secular statehood, this statehood along with the prescriptive “grammars” it imports—from conduct manuals to novels—claims for itself the authority enjoyed earlier by “church books”: “Literary speech was invested with the authority of the state, sacralized along with deified secular power.”¹³ In fact, by the last years of Peter’s reign, when the reading subject had become the primary focus of royal efforts to create a disciplinary society, Petrine publishing policy encompassed several areas of normative discourse and knowledge: Orthodox theology, Western political theory and conduct manuals, and the natural sciences. The 1760 essay offers a similar disciplinary variety in its outline of a curriculum worth reading: “philosophy, lessons of morality, books on the sciences and the arts and so forth.” All of these discourses were grounded
in humanist rhetoric, appreciated at the Russian court at least since
mid-seventeenth century, which considered the education of the subject for public life as a primary goal of reading and learning.¹⁴

10As a procedure which drives and reflects the fashioning of model subjects, reading is situated in the 1760 essay between three major elements of a nobleman’s social existence: class identity, formal education, and the practice of leisure. Forcefully distinguishing its ideal reader from the pod’iachii, chancellery clerk, the essay was tapping into a steady flow of government-sponsored discourse aiming to recruit the nobility for civil service which required education and reading. “The writers of the eighteenth century showed that the nobleman could be useful to the country only if educated. True nobility depended upon knowledge.”¹⁵ This was, of course, the vision behind Moscow University, the publisher of Useful Entertainment.

11Although the state eventually founded educational institutions, Petrine decrees and the contemporary cultural imagination made the upbringing of noblemen a responsibility of their fathers, and that process was integrated into the ethos of inherited distinction. The essay “On the Reading of Books” introduces education at the paternal home at once as a primary condition for and an impediment to true reading: “A father has bought many books according to the teacher’s list […], the child is beaten into reading them but not because he does not understand them […], he is given La Fontaine’s fables or Molière. These authors deserve much praise—but what will he understand without a guide?” The cultural utopia of noble identity is subverted by the very practices of its implementation: “These are the consequences of inept tutors, and that is what it means to be an inept reader!” The contrast between the cultural –textual– model and actual practice is directed (as in Fonvizin’s famous The Minor [Nedorosl’]), 1782) against the private, household existence not sufficiently regulated by government policy. Besides the deficient education of the youngest, this sphere encompassed the frivolous conduct of adults who “read novels to become better at the arts of love.” It is only here that we encounter female readers: “I have heard from a girl that she read Molière and found the best advice in him on how to deceive her mother.” This judgement echoes moral criticisms of the novel and drama, prominent in contemporary French letters and represented by J. J. Rousseau’s contemporaneous Lettre a M. D’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758) and Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Useful Entertainment captures their main nerve as it depicts the false mode of reading as a parody of the proper procedure: in both cases readers are competent enough to “draw worthy lessons” from books, that is, to recognize them as guides for real-life practice.¹⁶

12In fact, frivolous leisure and eroticized commerce of the sexes, decried here in the name of cultural and political authority, had once been officially introduced by Peter I as part of his reeducation of Russian society. The famous decree of 1718 instituted assemblies as spaces situated on the boundary of pleasure and state business, “a free meeting or gathering in someone’s house not only for amusement but also for business.”¹⁷ This formula clearly builds on the classic Horatian precept for poets which outlined practices of leisure and cultural consumption for Roman aristocracy and was revived by humanistically educated baroque elites: “He who joins the instructive with the agreeable, carries every vote, by pleasing and at the same time improving his reader.”¹⁸ Adopted for the title of Useful Entertainment and numerous other eighteenth-century publications, this maxim captures the tensions between reading and practice, the public and the private, leisure and service, authority and subject, which framed and drove various uses of reading in Petrine and post-Petrine Russia.

13In what follows, I will outline the evolution of normative approaches to reading from Peter’s reign until the death of his daughter Elizabeth in 1762 which inaugurated a new, Catherinian era. First, I will address Petrine disciplinary visions of reading as shaped by paradoxes of secularization. The dependence of the emerging secular letters on modes of authority associated with religious writing, as theorized by Lotman, was made explicit in Petrine reflections on the alignment of religious knowledge with political duty. Peter’s own notes along with translated and original works (most importantly, by Samuel Pufendorf and Feofan Prokopovich) published under his royal sponsorship outlined a vision of both secular and religious reading as a procedure which shaped the subjects’ selfhood according to the requirements of the reformed state and its reason. In the following section, I will investigate specific normative modes of secular reading which took hold in Russia during the Petrine and early post-Petrine years. Relying on the neostoic alignment of classical learning and political conformity explored by Oestreich, Peter and Petrine literati such as Antiokh Kantemir aimed to develop in Russia a ‘civic humanism’ as a mode of educating disciplined and zealous servitors. In the political crisis of 1730, this vision revealed its republican undertones and made reading and letters suspicious to Anna Ioannovna’s monarchy. Reacting to this, Vasilii Trediakovskii adopted the French model of absolutist literature, illuminated by Norbert Elias, which was couched in the idiom of love and associated the procedure of reading with ‘private’ existence and unconditional obedience to royal authority. In the next section, I will illuminate the interaction of those two models of reading—the ‘civic humanist’ and the ‘absolutist’ —in court literature which emerged under Elizabeth’s reign. Approaching the practice of reading as integral to education in civic ethics and arts of conduct figured in a growing number of translated conduct manuals, as well as in the court poetry and fiction produced and translated by the likes of Trediakovskii, Sergei Volchkov, and Mikhail Lomonosov. The Horatian formula of combining “the instructive with the agreeable” was repeatedly used to designate reading—and the literature which made it possible—as central to the public and private existence of a courtier and civil servant. In the final section, I will address two personalized accounts of reading experience from this era: the confessions of Mikhail Avramov, the Petrine reformer-turned-conservative, and Denis Fonvizin’s highly charged recollections of his father. In both cases, reading tastes and responses driven by state-sponsored publishing policies emerge as central elements of personal identity. Located in the spaces of privacy and individuality, the normative uses of reading nonetheless manage to inscribe the reading subject into symbolic and tangible structures of the political order.

1. Reason of State: Petrine publications and institutions

14In an undated note, Peter I wrote:

Those who do not know for themselves should very much be instructed. Judgement stands above all virtues, for all virtue is void without reason. […] It is true one should preserve innocence, in the words of St. Paul: “Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good.” But this innocence should be steeped in reason, not in foolishness, in the words of Christ: “be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” ¹⁹

15This note reveals the thinking behind Peter’s publishing policy as it emerged in the last years of his reign in translations such as Honorable Mirror of Youth (Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo, 1717) and Pufendorf’s On the Duty of Man and Citizen signed into print shortly before the tsar’s death in 1725. Peter aligns biblical wisdom with secular reason, associated at once with “new science” and Cameralist governmentality. This alignment was not unique to Russia: in fact, it followed from Francis Bacon’s highly influential amalgamation of learning and absolutist statehood expressed in the famous dictum “knowledge is power.”²⁰ Baconian visions famously underlay the culture of royal academies which Peter observed in Berlin, London, and Paris, and transferred to Russia when he established in 1725 the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.²¹ In his Advancement of Learning (owned by Peter’s learned general Bruce and published in Russian adaptation in 1760) Bacon quoted St. Paul, among others, to argue against the opinion that learning makes minds indisposed “for policy and government” and inclined “to leisure and privateness,” while in fact “it may be truly affirmed that no kind of men love business for itself but those that are learned.” In this theory of government, learning is recognized as a source of civic zeal:

For to say that a blind custom of obedience should be a surer obligation than duty taught and understood, it is to affirm that a blind man may tread surer by a guide than a seeing man can by a light. And it is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men gentle, generous, manageable, and pliant to government; whereas ignorance makes them churlish, thwart, and mutinous. ²²

16Petrine publications seem to rely on this political use of learning for the fashioning of subjects. In particular, Pufendorf’s work On the Duty of Man and Citizen begins its explication of civic duty with a discussion of the divinely given double faculty of reason (razum, in Russian) and will:

It has been given to man to become acquainted with the diverse multiplicity of objects that he meets in this world […]. But he has also the ability to envisage his future actions, to set himself to achieve them, to fashion them to a specific norm and purpose, and to deduce the consequences; and he can tell whether past actions conform to rule.²³

17Just as in Peter’s note (composed, we might surmise, in conjunction with the translation of Pufendorf), reason appears here as the faculty of discipline and (self-)government. This is why it should be a matter of state concern to provide education to subjects, along with publications inviting a particular mode of reading. According to Gavriil Buzhinskii’s dedication and preface to his translation of Pufendorf, after the by now deceased Peter had initiated massive reforms of the state apparatus, he needed to make sure his servitors would have enough understanding of the law driving the state and their own actions “to grasp in the speediest manner all truths and their duty.”²⁴ As Conal Condren concludes in his study of early modern concepts of office and obligation, “the presupposition of office took proper conduct to be by a persona as a function of office; conversely, improper conduct was office abuse.”²⁵

18The vision of reading as a mode of constructing the subjects’ interiority around the concept of duty had evident religious resonances. This was manifested in an important work personally devised and sponsored by Peter but largely overlooked by subsequent scholarship: Feofan Prokopovich’s Exegesis of Christ’s Sermon on the Beatitudes (Khristovy o blazhenstvakh propovedi tolkovanie, 1722). Composed on the tsar’s direct orders and explicating his political theology, this work must assume a central place among the publications of Peter’s final years.²⁶ In his preface, Feofan insisted on the need to establish the true meaning of divine doctrine:

Many misinterpreters do not reason well on these beatitudes and misunderstand their meaning. Seducing themselves and others with the empty name of promised salvation, as if beating on air, they walk blindly towards eternal damnation. For instance: an idle person, poor due to his idleness, flatters himself by remembering the words of Christ: blessed are the poor. A man persecuted for his crime claims the words of salvation: blessed are they which are persecuted. […] Conversely, many feel sorrow in their hearts because of their wealth, even if it was acquired lawfully, or their deserved honors […]. For this reason […] we offer here the meaning [silu i razum] of the Lord’s words for the instruction of those who claim salvation in vain and those who in vain despair of it.²⁷

19Hermeneutical uncertainty as to the meaning of Gospel, associated (for polemical purposes) with traditional liturgical orality and popular opinion, must be remedied by a single correct interpretation accessed through a disciplined reading of authoritative texts. This procedure is identified with the work of razum, reason, a concept which merges textual hermeneutics with the ethics of state service: the one correct reading of Christ’s sermon is required to inculcate the readers with true piety which is also the true principle of political compliance and zeal. ²⁸It is a major paradox of Petrine “secularization” that the production of the new civic subject was modeled on —or even amalgamated with—religious reform of the (Counter-)Reformation type.

20Petrine visions of education and the profound politico-theological effects of reading were manifested in some of the tsar’s spectacular measures, among them the trial and killing of his son, Tsarevich Aleksei. The 1718 manifesto proclaiming his exclusion from royal succession (soon followed by a death sentence) opened with a paragraph outlining the tsarevich’s reluctance to learn from teachers and books he was abundantly provided:

we have provided him with teachers of Russian as well as foreign languages and ordered to have him instructed in those in order for him to be educated not only in the fear of god but […] also to learn other languages, so that through reading histories and all civil and military sciences in these languages which are appropriate to a worthy ruler of a state he could become a worthy heir to our Russian throne. But we saw our abovementioned effort to educate our abovementioned son to go in vain, since he constantly violated his obedience to us and ignored everything wherein lies the duty of a virtuous heir. ²⁹

21The rejection of politically instructive reading offered by the sovereign father amounts to a renunciation of inherited identity and status, or so the manifesto suggests. In one of the preceding letters to the tsarevich, Peter proclaimed he would not leave the country to the “lazy slave from the Gospels [who] buried his talent in the earth (that is, threw away everything that God gave him).”³⁰ Reconstructing the political theology behind this letter, Ernest Zitser concludes that the tsar “did not want Aleksei’s formal obedience” but “demanded that his son undergo a political conversion.”³¹ By publishing his letters to Aleksei alongside the manifesto and other proceedings of his trial, Peter transformed them into royal instructions to the broad public of servitors, once again merging Gospel precepts with an insistence on reading in a coherent lesson of service ethics. In the framework of the reformed state, reading and learning came to be associated with personalized discipline of duty and service which from now on had to underlie one’s status in the hierarchies of power.

22These demands addressed to the empire’s nobility were institutionalized in the Academy of Sciences which opened in 1725 on the basis of a project personally approved by Peter before his death. Plans for the Academy, developed, among others, by Leibniz, were deeply rooted in the Baconian paradigm of politicized knowledge. Combining a research branch with a school for the nobility and the empire’s only secular press, the Academy embodied cultural policies of Peter’s last years and was conceived as a central institution of national (re)education. Michael Gordin has demonstrated that the introduction of “new science,” the Academy’s core task, was inseparable from Peter’s “educational projects and new manners reforms designed to transform Russia into a ‘Western’ state.”³² A Saxon representative in Petersburg remarked in 1743 that the Academy had been established “for the propagation of foreign manners” (“zur Fortpflanzung fremder Sitten”).³³

23As Raeff is right to note, “it was characteristic of the petrine didactic legacy that […] an educational and scholarly institution was entrusted with the selection and production of books.”³⁴ Addressing all of the Russian reading public as an audience of students, the Academy was expected to broadcast a very particular vision of knowledge and subjectivity. One of Leibniz’s projects, translated into Russian, provided a dense definition of learning which aligned the natural sciences, religious belief, and secular ethics:

That which the youth have to learn consists in the following, namely: in the knowledge of God and creation. In order to comprehend both we must make use of the divine light revealed to us in the Holy Scripture, from which proceeds […] Theology. […] This, however, consists not in useless squabble and disputations over empty ceremonies, because in this fashion God is not served, but in sincere love for God and your neighbor.³⁵

24Situated on the same crossroads of baroque secular and religious learning as Feofan Prokopovich, Leibniz (in a very “Petrine” fashion) divorces piety from religious ceremony and strife, and aligns it with academic knowledge “of the Creator and creation” and an interiorized ethics of public life. Speaking a language he shared with Leibniz and Pufendorf, Feofan in a 1718 sermon identified the Christian “love for thy neighbor” with service duty: “we have to observe everything that we see benefitting our neighbor but first of all that which is our obligation according to our rank, as work assigned to us by God.”³⁶

25In addition to the translated books that made up most of the its publications, the Academy published its own journals, Notes on the St. Petersburg Gazette (Primechaniia na vedomosti, 1728-1742) and, starting from 1755, Monthly Publications (Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia).³⁷ The Notes, well-read even after they stopped appearing, included popular essays on various topics, mostly scientific, but also made sure to instruct their readers in the right uses of knowledge for self-discipline. A lengthy overview of “philosophy” (a general term for all formal knowledge) published in 1738 insisted that the goal of all wisdom is to ensure that man follows his God-ordained obligation “to judge according to reason and act according to reason,” which means that every subject should “fulfill the duties of low […] rank with utmost loyalty and zeal in order not to resemble the inept slave by hiding the talent given to him”³⁸. An essay adopted from The Spectator in 1731 once again alluded to the parable of the talents to inscribe reading into an economy of personal existence:

There is another kind of Virtue that may find Employment for those Retired Hours in which we are altogether left to our selves, and destitute of Company and Conversation […]. Exercise of Virtue is not only an Amusement for the time it lasts, but that its Influence extends to those Parts of our Existence which lie beyond the Grave, and that our whole Eternity is to take its Colour from those Hours which we here employ in Virtue or in Vice, the Argument redoubles upon us, for putting in Practice this Method of passing away our Time. When a Man has but a little Stock to improve, and has opportunities of turning it all to good Account, what shall we think of him if he suffers nineteen Parts of it to lie dead […]? But because the Mind cannot be always in its Fervours, nor strained up to a Pitch of Virtue, it is necessary to find out proper Employments for it in its Relaxations. The next Method therefore that I would propose to till up our Time, should be useful and innocent Diversions. […] But of all the Diversions of Life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty Spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining Authors.³⁹

26Here, the concept and model practices of leisure—first of all, reading—are introduced to the Russian public as an officially sanctioned element of proper life conduct.⁴⁰ Divided into business and diversion, it is still driven by a totalizing imperative of virtue and duty. Just as in Peter’s letter to Aleksei, in The Spectator essay (which originally appeared only four years before it) and in the 1738 essay on philosophy, the parable of the talents emerges as a powerful trope for an internalized social discipline, situated on the border of the religious and the secular and projected into the individual psyche through the transformative experience of reading. In a 1734 testament, the model Petrine servitor and scholar Vasilii Tatishchev advised his son to read the Church fathers and Feofan’s Exegesis of Christ’s Sermon alongside Honorable Mirror of Youth to prepare for state service.⁴¹

2. 1705-1730: Political Humanism, Inglorious Revolution and sweet love

27An originary scene of Petrine reading has been recorded and publicized by Heinrich von Huyssen, the one-time tutor to Tsarevich Aleksei and a Leibniz correspondent. In 1705, he published in German a lengthy apologia of Peter I and his court, directed against recent less favorable accounts. Huyssen praised the tsar’s urge to educate his magnates and servitors even in leisure, and related an episode illustrating Peter’s curiosity. One day the tsar walked into a tent of a German who had Aristotle’s Politics and Juvenal’s Satires on his table. Looking at the book titles, Peter commented that diligence and honesty are the best policy for subjects (“fleißig und ehrlich seyn, ist bey Privat-Leuten die beste Politique”) while rulers need divine support, cunning and forcefulness. As for satires, Peter continued, they are forbidden in his lands under severe punishment. Yet, as the conversation developed, Peter learned that these satires were not libels but works devised to reform corrupt mores and customs (“übele Sitten und Gewohnheiten”) of the Roman aristocracy and populace with artful ridicule and moral lessons (“schöne Moralia und Sitten-Lehren”). As an example, the tsar was introduced to the last verses of Juvenal X, which he liked so much that he afterwards acquired a Dutch version of the text and would often elaborate on its message (“Verstand,” razum) to his retinue.⁴² Huyssen then quotes the relevant fragment from Juvenal in Latin accompanied by a translation into German verse.

Pray for a sound Mind in a sound Body; beg for a great Soul, not terrified by the fear of Death, that esteems the last Stage of a long Life among the Gifts of Nature, that is able to bear Misfortune, that knows not how to be angry, that desires nothing, and thinks the Troubles and cruel Labours of Hercules more agreeable than the Lasciviousness, the Luxury, the Softness of Sardanapalus. I shew you what is in your own Power to bestow upon yourself. Be assured, that the only Path to a Life of Peace is thro’ a Course of Virtue. O Fortune! did Men act right, thou wouldst have no Divinity about thee; but we make thee a Goddess, and place thee in the Skies.⁴³

28With Juvenal, Peter is shown to discover classical letters as an authority easily aligned with a royal top-down reform of the nation’s mores—and, with it, the legitimacy of secular, personalized reading patterns. Merging his own voice with Juvenal’s, Peter followed the neostoic appropriation of Roman imperial experience conveyed by Tacitus and other authors as a key to early modern political realities. Outlining an ideal image of a diligent and zealous subject, Juvenal situated him in a world dominated by a repressive royal rule and threats of popular mutiny. This was a world quite familiar to Peter and his courtiers: the prosecution of the rebel streltsy of 1698 was still underway in 1705. As in other parts of early modern Europe, the reading of classical authors and —by extension—their humanist interpreters and imitators emerged in Russia as a cultural technique allowing the reader to make sense of current political existence.⁴⁴ Both Gavriil Buzhinskii in his preface to Pufendorf’s outline of European history published in Russian in 1722 on Peter’s orders and Tatishchev in his massive History of Russia compiled between 1720s and late 1740s quoted Livy’s claim that “in history you will find sources of your own and the society’s good, you will see examples to follow and avoid.”⁴⁵

29One of the best-educated noblemen of the last Petrine generation, Antiokh Kantemir, made the alignment of classical satire with service discipline into a life-long literary project. In a satire on the virtues of nobility written by 1731 he praised the reading habits of a true statesman of the previous generation (alluding, quite possibly, to his own father):

Kakov zhe moi otets byl — kto togo ne znaet?
Pallas, Mars, sudilishche ob nem vozdykhaet:
V delakh voiny iskusen, ran polno vse telo;
Bitvy, osady, miry — vse to ego delo […]
V grazhdanskom pravlenii, ei, byl ne posleden —
Rishel’e i Mazarin pred nim v delakh beden.
V naukakh ves’ma glubok, nad knigami nochi
Prosizhival — tem gorbat byl i slab na ochi.
Biblioteka ego predivnaia byla,
Khot’ ne ochen’ velika — sovershenna slyla;
Knigi razny sobrany po luchshei primete.⁴⁶

30As in all of Europe, a thoughtfully collected library, erudition, and diligent reading are represented as attributes of an effective politician (like Richelieu) in an age when reason of state emerged as a field of theoretical knowledge.

31If for Peter the intellectual empowerment of subjects through education and reading was a way of fostering service zeal and awareness, the dialectical consequence of this process was the emergence of the free-thinking servitor, prepared for self-reliant political reflection and action. Such was the figure of Prince D. M. Golitsyn, the leader of the failed aristocratic revolution of 1730.⁴⁷ A member of Peter’s poteshnye guards, sent in 1697 to Venice to study, he became upon his return the governor of Kiev where he employed local scholars to produce a corpus of translations of Western political literature. While most of these translations were circulated in manuscript form, Peter was aware of them and considered having some of them printed. It is a noteworthy if neglected paradox that Peter himself displayed significant interest in history and the political discourses of European republics (a category which included limited monarchies): Venice, the Netherlands, England, and Sweden. Similarly, by 1730 his loyal servitor Golitsyn amassed a library which provided a textual foundation for aristocratic constitutional reform: for example, it included a manuscript of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government in Russian translation. Tatishchev, intimately involved in the defeat of the verkhovniki, later claimed in his History that the events of 1730 which—at least in his version—shook the foundations of Russian monarchy, originated in the circulation of subversive books, knigi nepotrebnye, and pernicious reading practices:

[…] the beginnings of societies, customs, governments and duties of rulers and subjects are properly speaking the subject matter of philosophy and its subdivisions: moral philosophy, natural law and politics, as has been sufficiently demonstrated by different philosophers in different languages. […] They have not been translated into our language except for Pufendorf’s doctrine of moral philosophy and politics mixed in his short book On the Duty of Man and Citizen. On the contrary, too many inappropriate books have been publicized: for example, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Treatise on Government, Boccalini and others circulate although they are more harmful than useful. For this reason, unreasonable people develop strange opinions irreconcilable with the wisdom and interest of the state, and some have attempted the illicit. This is why I found it fitting to briefly speak of this matter which is unnecessary for my history. ⁴⁸

32This is a vivid testimony of the effects and powers attributed to reading in contemporary political imagination. Tatishchev feels obliged to provide a theoretical argument in favor of Russia’s “eternal” autocracy to counter political hubris fostered by improper reading. The attempted coup is blamed on particular translated works. If the translations of Locke and Traiano Boccalini (a widely popular early seventeenth-century Italian pamphleteer with republican leanings, translated with Peter’s direct approval) fit neatly into a “republican” vision of rule, the counterintuitive appearance of Machiavelli and Hobbes on this list says much about political perceptions of reading as activity. The Prince offers no arguments for an aristocratic oligarchy envisioned by Golitsyn but does instruct its audience on the workings of popular discontent behind changes of power. It is not a republican ideology but the education of its reader in the arts of political action that makes this text subversive.

33The same is true of Hobbes‘s Leviathan. An outspoken apology of absolute sovereignty, it was still seen with suspicion by orthodox royalists during the English civil war when it appeared. In a tone quite similar to Tatishchev’s, two of these writers claimed that “Hobbes had written a ‘Rebells catechism’ and […] had published ‘false and evil Doctrines’ which were ‘pernicious to the Soveraign Power of Kings, and destructive to the affection and allegiance of Subjects.’”⁴⁹ What caused this rebuttal was not so much Hobbes’s overall assessment of monarchy as the theoretical arguments behind it. Rejecting any kind of dynastic divine right, Hobbes prefers monarchy over several possible types of “commonwealth,” all of them grounded in a free and collective decision of the people: “men agree amongst themselves, to submit to some Man, or Assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others.”⁵⁰ This theory seems to go beyond providing all subjects a right to resist repression; it also includes the possibility of aristocratic rule by a collective body or assembly, where elective monarchs “are not Soveraignes, but Ministers of the Soveraigne” lacking the power to appoint their own successors.⁵¹ (This was precisely the political model offered by Golitsyn’s Supreme Privy Council to Anna.) While Hobbes is explicitly skeptical of this option, what seems to trouble Tatishchev is the political knowledge—a pattern of political action, agency, and empowerment—that this account provides to power-thirsty actors. Later in the same chapter, Tatishchev evokes Leviathan as an emblem for the lawless rule of the Supreme Privy Council in its initial period dominated by Menshikov, and then compares Golitsyn and his allies of 1730 to “Roman Brutuses.”⁵² Denouncing the dangers of learned imitations of aristocratic republicanism, Tatishchev paradoxically replicated Hobbes’s own analysis of the origins of rebellion in Leviathan:

By reading of these Greek, and Latine Authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Soveraigns […]. And as to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans; from which, young men, and all others that are unprovided of the Antidote of solid Reason, receiving a strong, and delightfull impression, of the great exploits of warre, atchieved by the Conductors of their Armies, receive withall a pleasing Idea, of all they have done besides.⁵³

34Across early modern Europe, a natural response to this threat produced by books was the persecution of certain habits of political reading.⁵⁴ Indeed, during Golitsyn’s somewhat belated trial in 1737 special attention was paid to confiscating Machiavelli’s and Boccalini’s suspicious works from his library. Three years later, in 1740, Anna’s loyal courtier A. P. Volynskii was tried and beheaded over his interest in political writings (especially Lipsius), his comments on their relevance for the current reign, and a reformist project of his own.⁵⁵

35Since, however, suspending all reading in the realm was not an option even under Anna Ioannovna, what was required was an alternative, a conformist pattern of reading that would yield the desired political effects on individual subjects and the body politic. This pattern, associated with court society (dismantled during Peter’s early maturity but gradually reemerging by the 1730s), was introduced to the Russian public in 1730, only months after the defeat of the verkhovniki, in the Voyage to the Island of Love (Ezda v ostrov liubvi)—Vasilii Trediakovskii’s translation of the 1663 French erotic novel Le Voyage de l’Isle d’Amour by Paul Tallemant. In his groundbreaking discussion of this translation, Lotman suggests that it represented an attempt to transplant to Russia a particular code of polite behavior, civilité or galanterie, and was thus inscribed into the general Petrine trend to see texts as “instructions for conduct.” In this case, what was being prescribed and regulated was leisure, a private space of courtship and adultery, both separated from and juxtaposed with official hierarchies of rank and political existence.⁵⁶ Indeed, the rules for such a space were already given in Peter’s decree on assemblies, thereby including it within the broad scope of political education.

36Not only does this erotic novel end with the male protagonist’s return to the manly life of glory and reason, razum, but Trediakovskii emphasizes in his preface that the book is distinguished at once by delightfulness and wisdom, “thoughtful […] fiction […] as well as very delightful and pleasant verses, but first of all wise maxims of morality,” nravouchenie.⁵⁷ While
nravouchenie is a general term for the cultural discipline imposed on the Russian reader, its immediately political implications are made explicit in a series of Trediakovskii’s poems published together with his translation. Here, a language of gallant love was developed next to, and amalgamated with, the praise of Russian empire and Empress Anna. One of the poems explicitly styled love as a principle of political cohesion and peace:

Liubov’ pravit vsemi grazhdány,
Tu chtiat vezde i poseliany,
Ta vschinaet brani,
Nalagaet dani.
Ne bez liubvi mir, dogovory;
A prekrashchal kto b inoi ssory? ⁵⁸

37Other works of Trediakovskii’s in Anna’s praise leave little doubt that “conflicts” refer here to Golitsyn’s attempted revolution, while, according to another poem, “Anna krasneisha Aurory / Vsekh v liubov’ sebe serdtsa preklonila vechnu.”⁵⁹ Given this understanding of love as a trope for absolutist pacification, Trediakovskii’s translation (sponsored by the diplomat and aristocrat A. B. Kurakin) can be seen as a cultural gesture involving its audience in a civil compact different from, and opposed to, that of “republican” political literature. This was how Trediakovskii’s work was perceived by Johann Daniel Schumacher, the effective manager of the Academy of Sciences and thus one of the government officials responsible for cultural policy. Congratulating Trediakovskii on his success, Schumacher affirmed that it concerned the whole polity, or at least its reading elites:

I am delighted by the good success of your book among people of wit [gens d’esprit] not only out of love for you but also for our sake. It is well known that once poetry and music start to soften the mores of a nation, however barbaric it may be, rulers will find a way to benefit from it. ⁶⁰

38Schumacher directly links the introduction of fine arts both to stability of royal rule and to the Petrine project of disciplining the nation, as embodied by the Academy. In this, he singles out the gens d’esprit as a relevant milieu and a cultural type whose behavior and political sentiments can be fashioned and manipulated through reading and publishing. In the aftermath of 1730, the malleable courtier had to succeed and suppress the republican-minded statesman as the ideal type of reader and social actor—a task made easier by the fact that both modes of conduct were equally grounded in humanist learning and reading patterns.

3. 1737-1762: the courtier and his books

39Indeed, with its erotic escapism, Voyage to the Island of Love represented only one dimension—and a singular episode—of the politically charged consensus shaped and reflected by post-Petrine Russian letters. The broader outlines of that literary culture can be seen from two prominent political novels widely read in Russia between 1720s and 1750s: Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) and John Barclay’s Argenis (1621). Both novels probed the boundaries between dissent and conformity, political reflection and obedience. Situated on the crossroads of classical learning, political theory, and Catholic piety, Fénelon’s book portrayed the path of a prince (as well as that of the reader) towards a true understanding of monarchical order and the duties of subjects and rulers. Written for the education of the heir to the French throne but disapproved by Louis XIV, Télémaque was translated into Russian by Andrei Khrushchev, who was sent abroad by Peter I and executed along with Volynskii under Anna. His translation widely circulated and was published by the Academy on the personal orders of Empress Elizabeth in 1747. In 1751, it was followed by Argenida, Trediakovskii’s translation of Barclay’s Latin novel Argenis known to Feofan Prokopovich and already translated by Trediakosvkii once before in the 1720s.

40An epic portrayal of a political crisis (loosely modelled on the French Wars of Religion) and the reestablishment of authority, Argenis provided a comprehensive model of the absolutist political cosmos, endorsed by readers across seventeenth-century Europe. Condemning the political hubris of magnates who dared to challenge royal authority, Barclay saw political fiction such as his own as an important means of pacification. Within the novel, his alter ego, the court writer Nicopompus, designs “a stately fable, in manner of a history” for the politically active public:

They shall meet with themselves and find in the glass held before them, the show and merit of their own fame. It will perchance make them ashamed longer to play those parts upon the stage of this life, for which they must confess themselves justly taxed in a fable. […] Then will I take off the mask from the factious subjects, that the people may know them: what they are like to hope, what to fear: by what means they may be reclaimed to virtue, and by what means continuing obstinate, they may be cut off. ⁶¹

41In what is effectively Barclay’s commentary on his own work, the edifying effects of fiction are shown to be crucial for the absolutist political compact: they help refashion and reform individual subjects and their understanding of their political role, extending the imperative of obedience into their inner selves.

42Barclay’s novel portrays the transition from civil strife driven by competing powerful actors to a pacified polity dominated by an absolute monarch and his court. A similar transition was taking place in Russia between 1730 and 1750, between the Voyage and Argenida. Accordingly, a court literature and reading habits emerged and, in erasing the very possibility of political upheaval, embedded the reading subject in the hierarchies of royal service and favor. Their advent was marked by the publication of a series of conduct books. La Véritable politique des personnes de qualité, then attributed to Fénelon and known in English as The True Conduct of Persons of Quality, appeared in Trediakovskii’s translation as Istinnaia politika znatnykh i blagorodnykh osob in 1737 and 1745. In 1741, Sergei Volchkov published his version of Balthasar Gracian’s conduct manual known in French as L’homme de cour, followed by reeditions and many other similar works.⁶²

43The True Conduct of Persons of Quality included three chapters insisting on obedience to authority and prohibiting sedition or even criticism of government. Instead, it taught its audience to earn favor with patrons and profit from reading: “if there be any overplus time, they make use of it to read Books, which instruct and divert at the same moment.”⁶³ Reading became both a source and an attribute of courtly wisdom which regulates leisure just as it does business. It was defined in a distinctly humanist, Horatian language of delight and profit. Accordingly, belles lettres, and the newly emerging poetry in Russian in particular, became a privileged space of courtliness. Kantemir captured and attempted to canonize this trend in his verse adaptions of Horace’s Epistles. Written around 1740 and published after his death in 1744, they were devised to develop a cultural canon for Russia’s reemerging court society. In particular, Epistles I, 2 outlined the reading habits appropriate for a young aristocrat destined for the highest positions:

Znamenite Lollie, poka udivliaesh’
Ty Rim sladkorechiem, ia prochel v Preneste
Troianskoi spisatelia voiny, koi Khrispppa
I Kraptora uchit nas prostrannei i luchshe,
Chto chestno, chto gnusno nam, chto k pol’ze, chto vredno.
Dlia chego ia tak suzhu, kol’ dosug — poslushai. […]
Dobrodeteli, vprotiv, i mudrosti sily
Poleznyi predstavil nam obrazets v Ulisse […]
Esli ty trebovat’ ne budesh’
Pred zorei knigu s svechoi, i serdtse k naukam
I k chestnykh del znaniiu svoe ne prilozhish’,
Liubov’ il’ zavist’, otniav son, tebia izmuchit. […]
Teper’, poka molod, ty v chisto primi serdtse
Moi slova; teper’ ty vruchi sebia luchshim
Nastavnikam, i delam obykai poleznym.⁶⁴

While you, illustrious Lollius, are making declamations at Rome, I have once more read over at Praeneste, Homer the Writer of the Trojan War: Who sets forth more folly and in a better manner than either Crantor or Chrysippus, what is lovely, what deformed, what profitable, what pernicious. Hear, if Business don’t hinder you, my Reason for being of this Opinion. […] Again, he hath set before us a fine model of the power of virtue and wisdom, in the person of Ulysses […] And if you don’t call for your book and candle before day, and apply your mind to study and some laudable pursuit, you shall be tormented and kept awake with envy or with love. […] Now then while you are young, and your mind uncorrupted, drink in these maxims; now lend your ear to those of more experience than yourself.⁶⁵

44Both Horace’s text and Kantemir’s annotations firmly situate the act of reading and interpretation in the social space of the imperial court and government. Addressed to the young aristocrat Lollius, the epistle instructs him to read Homer’s classic works as lessons in political wisdom: against the backdrop of a major crisis, Homer gives vivid examples of the rulers’ cunning and folly, industry and idleness. While associated with the spaces of youth and leisure, education and reading still necessarily pertain to duties of service and Lollius’ standing as “a man as skillful in governing no less than in philosophy,” as Kantemir describes him.⁶⁶

45Just how much the Horatian reading pattern of delight and profit came to be appropriated by the Russian elites can be seen from a rare personal testimony. In 1747, Tatishchev thanked Schumacher for sending him the Academy’s recent publications with a direct paraphrase of the Horatian formula:

I was very much delighted by the newly printed books you sent me because when my disease does not allow me to write I take pleasure in reading such works which do not burden the mind but are agreeable due to their wise maxims.⁶⁷

46In his classic description of court society (explicitly based on Gracian, among others), Norbert Elias sees its reading and writing habits as an extension of specific techniques of human observation and self-observation “with a view to self-discipline in social life,” inscribed into the constant competition for prestige and influence.⁶⁸ At the Russian court, the future Catherine II was discovering in the mid-1740s the combined arts of self-observation, reading, and survival thanks to an experienced foreign diplomat who explained to her

that a philosopher of fifteen could not know herself, and that I was surrounded by so many rocks that I ran great danger of being wrecked, unless the temper of my mind was of a very superior stamp; that I ought, therefore, to fortify it by the study of the best works, such as the Lives of Plutarch, that of Cicero, and the Causes of the Greatness and Decay of the Roman Republic, by Montesquieu. I immediately ordered those books to be procured for me, and there was considerable difficulty in finding them in St. Petersburg at that period. I told the Count that I would trace my portrait for him, such as I supposed it, that he might see whether or not I really did understand myself.⁶⁹

47At court, according to Elias, the only valued “forms of literature and learning” were those linked “with the life of this society.” Professional, “pedantic” scholarly knowledge was discarded in favor of genres—like memoirs or novels—which were “nothing other than direct organs of social life.”⁷⁰ This is how proper reading is described in a book, The Perfect Education of Children (Sovershennoe vospitanie detei), referred to in Tatishchev’s letter; it was attributed to Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde and published in Volchkov’s translation in 1747. A reasonable nobleman

is not very interested in the many odd sciences of the world: knowing that the human mind is brought by them not only to confusion but even to degradation. He strives to learn that first and foremost which a good and honorable person is required to know […]. In each sphere or topic he does not read much but chooses the books of the best authors, reflects upon them and remembers well. Finding the best maxims in all of them he strives to put them to action for his own good and that of others. […] If he studies something or reads books, it is to perfect himself, not to appear wise and learned.⁷¹

48Just as this book appeared, a new generation of educated nobility was emerging in the capitals (first of all, from the Noble Cadet Corps) for whom sociability of this kind represented a natural space of advancement and self-fashioning. In the early 1750s, the cultural self-consciousness of this group erupted in a series of manuscript poems provoked by I. P. Elagin’s Satire on the Petit-maître (Satira na petimetra), a mildly critical portrayal of a fop. Among the responses defending the lifestyle of young aristocrats was an anonymous epistle to Beketov, a page who was for a short time Empress Elizabeth’s favorite. A central place in this defense belongs to reading habits:

Skazhi, Beketov, tot ne priamo l’ veselitsia,
Kto v userdi uchen, ne vovse v tom truditsia,
Kto chteniiu liubit knig, ne mozhet byt‘ bez nikh,
Sidit i s knigoiu i u druzei svoikh,
Veselosti i trud den’ priamo razdeliaet,
V trude ostrit svoi um i sam chiuvstvo uslazhdaet?
Mne kazhetsia, sto krat scheslivei on tovo,
Akrome kto nauk ne molvit nichevo.⁷²

49The space of cultivated leisure—both separated from and amalgamated with business, i e. state service—is depicted as a feature of social distinction, a mode of collective existence characteristic of the new generation of noble elites. Placed between satirical extremes of the pedantic scholar and the ignorant fop is the educated courtier who makes reading a crucial part of his public role at court and in government service. In 1749 Catherine was glad to note the rise of the new favorite, the twenty-two-year-old page Ivan Shuvalov, “for, while he was a page, I had marked him out as a person of promise, on account of his studiousness; he was always to be seen with a book in his hand.”⁷³ Shuvalov apparently followed the advice given in The True Conduct to read and learn because “an abundance of useful and entertaining knowledge […] procures all Persons of Merit to be their Advocates.”⁷⁴ Immediately after his rise Ivan Shuvalov emerged as the “Russian Maecenas,” a major patron of learning and letters, the founder (in 1755) of the Moscow University and thus a sponsor of the next generation of educated noblemen, which included Kheraskov, Gavriil Derzhavin and Denis Fonvizin.

4. Private voices: reading and secular piety

50Against this background of normative visions of reading as practice and cultural technique, we can make sense of the few first-hand accounts of reading experience known so far from early eighteenth-century Russia. Stemming from different decades and social contexts, most of them are nonetheless permeated with the normative imperative of approaching reading as a mode of instruction for political and cultural existence. The tensions between secular and religious knowledge, between service and leisure which shaped the prescriptive visions of reading, also informed actual reading practices—or at least written accounts of them. Behind these tensions we can discern an overarching structure of established authority, both secular and religious, as a common foundation for divergent yet interlinked and mutually dependent visions of reading and its effects on subjecthood.

51The most famous case where reading and book production emerged as a focal point of all the cultural and political tensions of the reformist era is the story of Mikhail Avramov, charged by Peter in 1712 with the establishment of the St. Petersburg press. For Avramov, a zealous servitor placed in the very center of the tsar’s cultural reforms, the tensions they unleashed became a matter of intense spiritual and intellectual experience that he recorded in his autobiography. There, he recounts how he came to share the emperor’s taste for “pagan books” by Virgil and Ovid, and volunteered to print and disseminate a publication containing images and stories of pagan deities. This publishing act had an intensely personal effect on Avramov:

With this style of life, my humble God-given mind was obscured through these Satan-driven actions. Because of this, I was favored by the lovers of this world and at that time, a fool, I was called by many a man of wit. This false human glory made me more and more proud, and I renounced my God-given humble way of life and from this point on started living a deadly pagan life, loose and shoreless, full of love for letters and voluptuousness. Having forgotten the fear of God, I immersed myself in all corporeal temptations, dissolute worldly pleasures, drinking, insatiate adultery and intense fornication, as well as other mad deeds and crimes. ⁷⁵

52With a self-conscious rhetorical skill, Avramov emphasizes the intimate link between reading and living, manifested in his case by the interplay between a love of letters, slovoliubie (an equivalent of philologia) and slastoliubie, voluptuousness. He depicts a specific public sensibility, encouraged by Petrine reforms and the monarch himself, which explicitly associated secular reading with a demonstrative hedonism and contempt for traditional moral strictures. Slightly later, other religiously-minded witnesses also complained about the “epicureanism” of the Russian court.⁷⁶ Most famously, Mikhail Shcherbatov in his later tract On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, dating from the end of 1780s, concluded that as a result of the Petrine reforms, “sciences, arts, and crafts began to flourish” in Russia, but at the same time “luxury and voluptuousness laid the foundation of their power.”⁷⁷

53Avramov, who goes on to describe his conversion to a strict religious morality and confessional zeal, easily appears as a representative of conservative opposition to Petrine reforms, a man rooted in the “old Rus’.”⁷⁸ However, as Lotman has demonstrated in his conceptually charged discussion of Avramov’s trajectory, this simplistic distinction does not hold: as much as Peter himself, Avramov believed in the idea of top-down moral reform of the realm, led by the monarchy and the church—even if his vision of reform came to diverge from the one accepted at court.⁷⁹ As the director of St. Petersburg press, Avramov was a central figure in the implementation of Peter’s cultural agenda. For all his religious fervor and explicit criticism of Peter’s religious policies, Avramov’s later denunciations of pagan literature and the practical hedonism associated with it did not imply a turn away from disciplinary reform or the royal authority at its center. Avramov collected materials for a future history of Peter, and praised his improvements of the “military and civil order [chin].”⁸⁰

54In fact, Avramov retained his allegiance to the reformist ethos, and over several decades submitted to Peter and his successors several projects of administrative reform. It is within this discursive mode that he makes explicit his critique of what we can call the Petrine religious settlement and offers his alternative, which Pekarskii defined in 1862 as “one of these theocratic governments the likes of which until recently unfortunately existed in the regions dependent on Rome but now, thanks to Garibaldi, only exist in Rome itself.”⁸¹ Indeed, pleading for the restoration of patriarchy and traditional piety, Avramov inscribed them into a vision of a future disciplinary state which would merge local parishes into a centralized system of control over the population, as well as its mental and practical habits.⁸² Radically diverging from Petrine policy on the issue of patriarchy, Avramov shared its understanding of the church as an institution of an all-embracing social discipline. His vision included a limited “traditional” curriculum of religious reading as a necessary tool for securing the subjects’ obedience.⁸³ Against this background, Avramov’s rejection of Ovid as a wrong kind of public and private reading can be seen as a necessary consequence of his own interpretation of Petrine reformist agenda. Avramov’s approach to reading, shaped by an Augistinian narrative of personal conversion, remained nonetheless embedded in a vision of reformist governance which aligned the spiritual and political discipline of the self. While at odds with Petrine cultural habits, Avramov’s vision of pious morality as a foundation for service zeal and disciplinary statehood remained very much relevant for later generations of Russian servitors.

55This can be seen from Denis Fonvizin’s account of the moral and reading habits of his father, Ivan, a zealous servitor and avid reader, in his own narrative of spiritual conversion, “Sincere Confessions of My Deeds and Thoughts,” composed around 1790:

My father was a man gifted with a vigorous, sound intellect. Given the idea of a proper upbringing current in has day, he was never given the opportunity to enlighten his mind with formal learning. He did read a great many Russian books, and particularly preferred the Ancient and Roman History, the Opinions of Cicero and other well-translated and morally instructive volumes. He was a virtuous man and a true Christian […] He detested the practice of bribery. When circumstances gave him the chance to make his fortune he never once accepted anything whatsoever. ⁸⁴

56Here, diligent reading of the few existing Russian books—exemplified by several identifiable editions published by the Academy of Sciences around 1750, at the time of the memoirist’s childhood—is firmly defined as a didactic practice. The value of Rollin’s Ancient History and Olivet’s excerpts from Cicero lies in their capacity to fashion the reader into a man of virtue, true Christian faith, and solid reason—three concepts which programmatically coincide in Fonvizin’s phrasing. Furthermore, the immediate significance of this self-discipline manifests itself in honest service to the state which places the law over material self-interest. Departing from this portrait of his father, Fonvizin proceeds to narrate his own descent into blasphemous epicureanism in reading and writing, soon followed by a return to faith once again identified with solid reasoning and dutiful service.

57Similar to Avramov and their common model, Augustine‘s Confessions, Fonvizin inscribes his personalized account of reading into a narrative of religious conversion, manifesting its role as a primary technique of selfhood and inner discipline. Both Avramov and Fonvizin deploy the authoritative confessional pattern to address the complex dialectic of secularization which at once subverts and reestablishes religious order in the name of the state. While Avramov’s critique of secularization could appear as politically heterodox in the Petrine and early post-Petrine decades, by the early 1760s—the timeframe of Fonvizin’s changes of heart—secular piety was firmly re-established as the dominant normative mode of selfhood within the conceptual framework of disciplinary statehood. The 1760 essay “On the Reading of Books,” backed by the institutional authority of the Moscow University and anticipating Fonvizin’s comic masterpiece, opposed true reading to any self-indulgence, whether rooted in family life or associated with the supposedly novel arts of adultery. By the Catherinian era a normative ethics of service lay at the heart of state-sponsored educational and publishing policies and aspired—with a degree of success we have yet to establish—to define personal experiences of reading for several generations of the Russian public.