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Reading Russia, vol. 2

 | 
Damiano Rebecchini
, 
Raffaella Vassena

Part II. The Long Nineteenth Century

The Reading Audience of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Abram Reitblat

Texte intégral

1In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small part of Russia’s population was able to read, and for every reader there were at least twenty non-readers. In fact, readers represented only a very narrow section of the population. The social process that most factored into the growth of reading was the population’s gradual transition from a traditional, rural way of life to a modern, urban one. Historical experience shows that in Russia (as in other countries), books and reading were attributes of town-dwellers’ lives. The dominant social structures in the feudal village—which observed traditional patterns of behaviour and fixed courses of action in various life situations—were closely related to oral communication. Only in a city that offered many conflicting patterns of behaviour was there a need for the printed word as a universal intermediary.

  • 1   See: “Sostoianie gramotnosti mezhdu kupechestvom i zhiteliami podatnogo sostoianiia v Saratovskoi (...)

2The processes of modernization initiated by the reforms of Peter I found expression not only in the growth of cities, but also in the breakdown of the isolation of the villages and the slow penetration of urban culture into them. However, in the first half of the nineteenth century these processes were very slow, and social structures and social relations did not change significantly. The estate-based nature of society also left its imprint on the spread of distribution of reading. Although Peter I’s reforms somewhat eased social dynamics by weakening inter-estate partitions, they also significantly increased the culture gap between the nobility and other estates. Drawn into these processes of transformation, the nobility intensively absorbed Western culture—including one of its foremost elements, the book. By the first half of the nineteenth century, reading was already an indispensable component of the noble way of life (with the exception of the lowest stratum of the nobility). In the estates that joined the modernisation process significantly later (merchants, urban commoners [meshchane], and domestic serfs), one could often find active readers. However, if their absolute number was quite high (it is characteristic that ‘lowbrow’ literature was regularly reprinted in large editions), they represented only a small portion of these strata. Here, the level of literacy was generally low, and the act of reading itself was often met with disapproval; it was treated as an activity appropriate for only representatives of other estates.1

  • 2   For more information, see Reitblat, “The Book and the Peasant in the Nineteenth and the Beginning (...)

3Peasant farmers, who made up the vast majority of the population, were not affected to the reforms, and were mostly unable to read (if you do not take into account the Old Believers). Not only the habit of reading, but also its technical requisite—literacy—remained limited in this environment.2

  • 3   See details: J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861—1917 ( (...)

4The reforms of 1860-1870s (the emancipation of the serfs, the introduction of public trials, universal military service, and local government [zemstvos]) paved the way for Russia’s capitalist development and, as a result, created the need for more and more people capable of reading. This consequence arose from two primary factors. One might be called utilitarian: as they moved from patriarchal domestic and economic ties to a commodity-driven economy and formal legal relations, significant portions of the population needed to know laws and existing rules, to constantly become acquainted with new state decrees, to be aware of trade and economic information. Additionally, in the spheres of politics, economy and culture, more and more literate, educated people were required for the management of the country. If in a village—where the economy was conducted in the old manner and the work was performed manually—a significant part of the population could do without reading, then in the city, the main spheres of life during this period were increasingly inextricably linked with it. Moreover, close contact with representatives of privileged estates in the city often led others to adopt their patterns of behaviour, including habits of reading.3

5However, ideological factors also played an equally important role in the spread of reading: the breakdown of previously existing social relations led to the destruction of the old view of the world, and people sought to construct a new worldview adequate to their newfound way of life. This fact also stimulated the transition to the printed word. Although the majority of the population during the second half of the nineteenth century did not read either books or periodicals, printed publications were highly significant for the reading minority. The book was considered to be a guide to life, capable of helping in spiritual and moral self-improvement.

6Another substantial social factor in the spread of reading—one especially relevant to the reforms of the 1860s—was the contemporary political struggle, and particularly elite social groups’ efforts to involve the wider population in reading.

7In regards to the historical destiny of the printed word in Russia it is generally characteristic that, unlike in Western countries (Germany, England, France, etc), where both book printing, periodicals, and libraries arose in a “natural” way, satisfying the needs of the population, here, to a large extent, it was introduced from above—by the government (it is no accident that for a long time there was only state printing), the church, and later by other social institutions and groups. This process especially intensified in the post-reform period.

  • 4   A. G. Rashin, “Gramotnost’ i narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii v XIX v. i nachale XX v.,” Istorichesk (...)

8On the eve of the 1860s reforms, the existing proportion of the Russian reading public was not large. There is no exact information on these numbers, but there are data that allow for approximations. According to the calculations of A. G. Rashin, who summarised the results of a number of regional surveys, the literacy rate among rural residents in the second half of the 1860s stood at about 5%, and among townspeople in the first half of the 1870s—more than one third.4 Since the rural population accounted for nine-tenths of the country’s total population, it can be assumed that in the late 1860s and early 1870s, approximately 8% of the country (that is, about 10 million people) was literate.

  • 5   See: Materialy dlia statistiki Kostromskoi gubernii (Kostroma, 1870), Vyp. 1; N. Bogolepov, “Stat (...)
  • 6   See: “O sredstvakh chteniia v Moskve i o moskovskoi lubochnoi literature,” Knizhnyi vestnik, 3/6 (...)
  • 7Mneniia raznykh lits o preobrazovanii tsenzury (St. Petersburg, 1862), 21.

9However, in practice, a significantly smaller part of the population turned specifically to books and periodicals. In the village, as evidenced by numerous memoir sources, the tradition of reading books was almost absent,5 and it was weak among those in the merchant and urban commoner estates.6 The overwhelming majority of those in possession of literacy used it in everyday life, but such individuals were not habitual readers of books or periodicals. In general, according to our estimates, the readership of the country did not exceed 1 million people by the beginning of the 1860s. It is important to emphasise that these circumstances were not homogeneous, and remained inflected by the rigid estate structure of the time: different estates varied significantly in their way of life and relation to print culture. Such differences were also largely maintained by the estate-driven nature of education. Institutions of higher education (universities) and secondary education (gymnasiums) were closely connected and separated from those of primary, elementary education. As a result, in the circle of their knowledge and interests, the overall reading audience was divided into quite different layers. Writing in 1862, the censor F. F. Veselago characterised the reading public in the following way: “Our reading public can be rather definitively divided into three main groups. The first is made up of people who are modern, seriously educated, who in their educational development stand on par with the developments of their European peers and have knowledge of foreign languages. In the second, there are people who possess a more or less complete academic education, and who, from their own reading of others’ words, remain aware of modern ideas in but a fragmentary way. The third group is motivated to read merely in order to pass the time in a pleasant and useful manner; this includes the less developed layer of the so-called noble estate, nearly all of the merchant estate, and all the literate common people.”7 Although Veselago is perhaps biased and slightly unfair in assessing the reading needs of merchants, peasants, and workers, his instinctive stratification of the Russian reading public is more or less correct. Indeed, in this period and later, until the end of the nineteenth century, the reading audience consisted of three such classes—and distinctions between groups within these reading classes likewise became more pronounced.

  • 8   V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1971), 70.

10According to the estimates of V. R. Leykina-Svirskaia, there were about 20,000 people in Russia with a higher education by the beginning of the 1860s. We should also take into account university students (just over 5,000 in 1861);8 women, who often received a good home education; some graduates of gymnasiums, who supplemented their knowledge with independent reading; and so on. Overall, the first group defined by Veselago (“seriously educated”) included, according to our estimates, no more than 30-40,000 people.

  • 9   Sh. I. Ganelin, Ocherki po istorii srednei shkoly v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Leningrad; M (...)

11It is much more difficult to determine the size of the other groups. According to our calculations, about 100,000 people had a secondary education in these years (or at least had been enrolled in the lower levels of secondary school). In addition, data from 1865 indicates that around 26,800 people studied in gymnasiums and grammar schools at that time.9 If we also take into account those who received a home education, and self-taught people who read a great deal, then the second group designated by Veselago could number around 200-250,000 people.

12Our estimates regarding the size of the third group have an even more vague and provisional character. Data on the number of primary school graduates are not available, and information on literacy rates provides little in this regard, since only a small part of those who were literate in the merchant, urban commoner, and, especially peasant estates read systematically. Relying only on indirect data and, above all, information about publications that were distributed exclusively among such readers, we might assume that their number reached 500-600,000.

  • 10   Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii, 70.
  • 11   Ibid, 51—52.
  • 12Universitety i srednie uchebnye zavedeniia 50-ti gubernii Evropeiskoi Rossii i 10-ti Privisliansk (...)
  • 13   Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii, 51, 55, 56.

13By the end of the period under discussion, the number of educated members of the public had grown substantially. According to calculations by V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, by the end of the nineteenth century, about 85,000 people had been educated in higher educational institutions that served the civilian population.10 In addition, according to the census, in 1897 there were more than one million students in secondary school (graduated and those not yet graduated), not counting those enrolled in post-secondary institutions (around 200,000).11 The number of college students—which represented the main reading group—had grown exponentially. In 1880, 8,200 students were studying at universities and 181,700 boys and girls were enrolled in secondary schools.12 By the end of the century, the number of college students had increased to 15,200 (in all types of higher education institutions), and secondary school students—to 220,000.13

  • 14   A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1813--1913): Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow, 1956), 8 (...)

14However, the increase in readership in the lower stratum was much more significant, which was due to a number of factors. First of all, it should be noted that the population of cities rapidly increased in European Russia between the years 1863-1897. It almost doubled (from 6.1 million to 12.1 million),14 while the rural population increased only by a factor of 1.5. Even more important for the fate of the book was the strengthening of contact between the peasants and the city.

15The opening of peasant-focused schools likewise stimulated that demographic’s interest in reading; they helped to increase peasants’ literacy rates substantially, and moreover, changed their attitudes to literacy and reading as well.

  • 15   A. V. Muratov, Knizhnoe delo v Rossii v XIX i XX vekakh (Moscow; Leningrad, 1931), 203.
  • 16Voenno-statisticheskii sbornik, 4 (1871), 898.
  • 17   Muratov, Knizhnoe delo v Rossii, 153.

16In the late nineteenth century the structure of the reading public can be visualized as a pyramid in which the top layer is occupied by “educated readers,” the base by popular readers, and the layers between them—by the “average” readers. The growth in readership is indirectly evidenced by a concurrent increase in the number and circulation of periodicals, as will be discussed in more detail below. In the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, the total circulation of books published in Russian grew threefold (from 18.5 million copies in 1887 to 56.3 million copies in 1901).15 A network for the book trade formed throughout the country between the 1860 and1890s; one could find bookshops not only in the principal provincial cities, but also in county towns. If in 1868 there were 568 bookselling establishments in Russia,16 then in 1883, there were 1,377, and in 1893—1,725.17

17Information on the number of members of public libraries can guide our assessment of the rate at which the reading public grew—particularly its middle strata. Indeed, it should be borne in mind that a significant portion of materially wealthy readers (the upper and middle ranks of the nobility and officials) turned primarily to journals and newspapers obtained through subscriptions, as well as home libraries, for their personal reading. These groups—which were not generally burdened by worries about money—acquired every book they were interested in, and subscribed to whichever periodicals they deemed necessary. Moreover, we should also keep in mind that some lower-class readers were cut off from the use of libraries; they lacked the money to pay for library services and faced other restrictions on their ability to acquire books. Some of these restrictions were of a governmental nature, such as the 1884 withdrawal of a large number of books and journals of an oppositional character from the public collections, mandate that “people’s libraries” include certain books only in a special catalogue. Other restrictions—such as the exclusion of lowbrow and lubok literature from public libraries—were prompted by decisions of influential educators.

18The most common and popular type of libraries, which played a huge role in providing the nineteenth-century urban population with books, were circulating libraries (biblioteki dlia chteniia). These were institutions with a permanent book collection that, in exchange for a fee (contributed in advance either for the year, six months, three months, a month, or even a day) and a deposit for the cost of the book, made their holdings available for public consumption. They differed from state, municipal, and “people’s libraries” in that their aims were not primarily education and enlightenment, the dissemination of knowledge, or the advancement of culture, and so on, but instead merely meeting the needs of readers.

19The rapid growth in the number of circulating libraries and the corresponding growth of their audience began in the 1860s. From that time they became a permanent component of the urban way of life, and were vital to the life of not only the province capitals, but also many county towns.

  • 18   A. Ovsiannikov, “Iz vospominanii starogo pedagoga,” Russkaia starina, 5 (1899), 423.
  • 19   P. D. Boborykin, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1965), vol. 1, 47.

20It appears that the urban readers were satisfied with the collections made available to them. After all, the library owner was interested in attracting as many readers as possible, and tried to purchase publications that interested the subscribers. Moreover, these libraries shifted their acquisition profile in accordance with the changing tastes and interests of the audience. Therefore, until the mid 1850s, these circulating libraries (especially far from the capitals) primarily acquired fiction designed for easy reading. In the mid-1850s in Kazan’, the I. A. Sakharov library was immensely popular: “... most of the landowners were subscribed to it. The books were mostly translated and, of course, in the foreground stood the then-leading figures of French literature: Eugène Sue, Balzac, Alexander Dumas, Georges Sand, and so on.”18 P. D. Boborykin recalled that in Nizhny Novgorod in the early 1850s, he and other senior gymnasium students devoured novels of domestic and foreign authors “... In large quantities, borrowing them for [...] tiny amounts of pocket money from a paid library of S.P. Meledin.”19

  • 20   P. A. Kropotkin, Dnevnik (Moscow; Petrograd, 1923), 46.

21In the early 1860s, when the politicisation of public consciousness sharply increased, natural-scientific and socio-political books became popular and even fashionable. In 1862, P. A. Kropotkin wrote of a circulating library in Irkutsk: “...most of the people read only journals, and others—fiction and a few historical books; moreover, now [...] they are beginning to demand some serious books, likewise mainly related to the popularly described branches of the natural sciences.”20 Accordingly, in the circulating libraries, the proportion of such publications increased substantially.

  • 21   Catalogues of a significant part of circulating libraries in 1850-1870s are taken into account in (...)

22It should be noted that in a specific Russian political and cultural context, circulating libraries—despite being a commercial enterprise—often functioned not as commercial, but as educational and even revolutionary institutions. Such circumstances were connected to the difficulty of opening other types of libraries, and the opportunity to include in collections those publications that were prohibited from circulation in state-created libraries, as well as with the unprestigious “indecency” of trading-associated activities and, inversely, the high prestige associated with educational activities. In the 1860s there were a number of libraries that pursued revolutionary and propagandistic aims, disseminating oppositional and even illegal literature (these included the N. A. Serno-Solov’evich Library in Petersburg, the A. A. Krasovskii Library in Viatka, the A. I. Ikonnikov Library in Perm, the M. P. Shestunov Library in Irkutsk, and so on.) Libraries oriented purely around educational matters were more widely disseminated in those years, and included: the V. K. Makalinskaia Library, the P. P. Semennikov Library, the L. G. Rubakin Library in Petersburg, the I. A. Shidlovskii Library in Kazan’, and so on. In addition to those mentioned, the well-known Moscow libraries which had extensive book collections enjoyed wide popularity. These included the N. N. Ulitin Library, the A. F. Cherenin Library, the A. F. Ushakov Library, the M. A. Viv’en Library; the L. D. Kashkin Library in Tver, the P. N. Anosov Library in Voronezh, the M. A. Fronstein Library in Rostov-on-Don, the E. P. Raspopov Library in Odessa, the V. M. Istomin Library in Warsaw, the P. I. Makushin Library in Tomsk, and others.21

  • 22   See: M. Zakharov, Ukazatel’ Moskvy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1851), vol. 1, 199; [A. F. Cherenin], Sborni (...)
  • 23   Calculations are made by: Spisok zavedeniiam knizhnoi torgovli, bibliotekam dlia chteniia i muzyk (...)

23Some idea of the rate at which the number of circulating libraries grew is provided by records in Moscow. (It is worth noting that data exists only for libraries with collections of Russian-language books.) In 1851 there were two, in 1866—nine, in 1880—thirty-two, and in 1900—forty.22 In 1882, the total number of circulating libraries in the country amounted to about 350.23

24Information about the composition of these circulating libraries’ collections helps us to characterise their overall activity. We analysed the printed catalogues of circulating libraries over one of the periods of their existence. The sample includes all the circulating libraries’ catalogues printed between 1879-1881 that are held in the collection of the Russian State Library (numbering thirty-one in total). The analysis showed that a collection usually consisted of 2-3,000 book titles, and fiction accounted for 60-70% of the holdings. However, in some metropolitan libraries, the size of the collection sharply exceeded average levels, and in some provincial libraries the collection was much smaller. A significant place in the collections was occupied by journals. As a rule, no fewer than 10 journals, primarily thick, universal monthly journals (Otechestvennye zapiski [Fatherland Notes], Delo [Work], Vestnik Evropy [Messenger of Europe], Russkii vestnik [The Russian Herald], Russkaia mysl’ [Russian Thought], and so on) were subscribed to.

25The catalogues suggest the integrity and thoughtfulness at work in the selection of books, and indicate a fairly comprehensive program of acquisitions in selected areas. There appear to be frequent concurrences in composition across the many collections, a circumstance which undoubtedly reflects their administrators’ consideration of reader tastes and an orientation towards popular works. A number of books (and not only classics) were present in all or almost all the libraries. According to the catalogues from the abovementioned years, circulating libraries saw these contemporary writers in the greatest demand: Lev Tolstoi, Turgenev, Boborykin, Dostoevskii, Krestovskii, Scheller-Mikhailov, Meshcherskii, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leikin, Grigorovich and Leskov. Foreign literature was also held in these collections. In all libraries there were books by such foreign prose writers as Auerbach, Balzac, Berthet, Belot, Beecher Stowe, Born, Bret Harte, Bulwer-Lytton, Boisgobey, Verne, Gaboriau, Gerstäcker, Dickens, Daudet, Dumas, George Sand, Cobb (J. Lermina), Collins, A. Leo, E. Marlitt, X. de Montépin, Paul de Kock, Ponson du Terrail, Sue, Trollope, Féval, Erckmann-Chatrian, Spielhagen and Aimard. Moreover, there were quite often 15-20 different works by one particular writer in a single library.

26It should be noted that these libraries also held quite a high proportion of literature in their collections related to natural science, philosophy, and history. The works of widely distributed authors at the time, such as Buckle, N. I. Kostomarov, J. Mill, Mordovtsev, Proudhon, Smiles, S. M. Solov’ev, Taine, Shashkov, F. Schlosser (of the humanities), Brehm, Huxley, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Darwin, Moleschott, Tyndall, Faraday, and Flammarion (of the natural sciences) were available in almost every library. Even the first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was held in almost two-thirds of the libraries.

  • 24   N. A[gafonov], “Vospominanie ob I. A. Shidlovskom i ego biblioteke” in Zavolzhskaia vifliofika (K (...)

27The core of the circulating libraries’ public was comprised of officials, students of various levels, employees of private enterprises and shops, officers, and persons of “freelance professions.” For example, after the opening of the I.A. Shidlovskii library in Kazan’, it was stated that “students, officials, clergy, officers, and clerks rushed, you might say, to the library [...] and the books flew off the shelves like hot cakes.”24

  • 25   See: Knizhnyi vestnik, 22 (1860), 256; I. S. Nikitin, Sobranie sochinenii, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1975) (...)
  • 26  A. A. Rusov, Opisanie Chernigovskoi gubernii, 2 vols. (Chernigov, 1899), vol. 2, 142.
  • 27   So estimated the proportion between subscribers and users of the circulating library N. A. Rubaki (...)

28Statistics on the total magnitude of the circulating library audience are not available; however, based on calculations, one can get an idea of its approximate size. In the 1860s, during a period of sharp growth in the readership, in a good city library, there were usually 150-300 subscribers.25 Given the fact that, by the 1880s, the number of readers in the cities had increased, and a significant number of new libraries had been opened in small towns and even villages, we might presume that the average number of subscribers of a more provincial town library was approximately 100. (In the capitals this number reached around 300, yet in the smaller town it could be significantly lower; for example, in the towns of the Chernigov province even at the end of the nineteenth century, there were 20-30 subscribers).26 According to our calculations, a library with subscribers numbering fewer than 50 brought practically no income to the owner: if they spent money on journal subscriptions and purchase of new books, it became unprofitable. If we accept these assumptions based on available data, then in 1882 (when, as indicated, 350 circulating libraries for reading were in existence) there were likely around 35,000 subscribers and more than 100,000 people making use of their collections.27

  • 28   Calculated by: A. Cherenin, “Biblioteka A. F. Cherenina v 1860 godu,” Knizhnyy vestnik, 6 (1861), (...)
  • 29   N. A. Rubakin, “Chastnye biblioteki i vneklassnoe chtenie uchashchikhsia,” Zhenskoe obrazovanie, (...)

29In the 1860s, readers borrowed mostly fiction and journals (which were frequently borrowed precisely for the fiction that they contained) from circulating libraries. So, in 1860, in one of the largest Moscow libraries, fiction amounted to 43.5% of books, and journals amounted to 43.2%, and books related to all other types comprised only 13.3%.28 This situation remain unchanged even by the end of the nineteenth century. The famous library sciences researcher N. A. Rubakin noted that “the largest percentage of issued books are accounted for by translated novels—they occupy the first place in the collection. In second place, in terms of the quantity of requests, are Russian novels, summarily followed by: journals and periodicals, textbooks and manuals, essays on history, books on natural science and geography, and finally books on the social sciences.”29

  • 30   Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 41.
  • 31   Calculated by: Polnyi alfavitnyi ukazatel’ vsekh knizhnykh magazinov, bibliotek dlia chteniia i m (...)
  • 32   Calculated by: Goroda Rossii v 1910 godu (St. Petersburg, 1914).
  • 33   See: A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1811-1913) (Moscow, 1956), 88.
  • 34   See: E. N. Medynskii, Vneshkol’noe obrazovanie, ego znachenie, organizatsiia i tekhnika (Moscow, (...)
  • 35   M. D. Afanas’ev, Problemy rasprostranennosti chteniia v sel’skoi srede: Dissertatsiia na soiskani (...)

30The number of public libraries (of all types) grew rapidly. In 1856, according to a report by the Minister of Public Education, there were 49 libraries open for use by the Russian population30. Since the number of subscribers was then small (no more than 200-300 per library), we can assume that throughout the whole country their number did not exceed 10-15,000. In 1882, according to incomplete official records (without Moscow, Petersburg, and a number of provinces), there were 517 public and private libraries in the country. Given that Moscow and Petersburg combined contained more than 60 libraries, the total number of libraries would have approached six hundred nationally.31 In 1910, approximately 1.5 million readers were recorded in the city’s libraries in Russia (according to incomplete data, the total number of readers at that time would be 2.6 million).32 Since the urban population of Russia was 23.3 million in 1913,33 the coverage of library services was thus slightly more than 11%. Rural libraries in 1909-1911 were used by 2.9% of the total rural population,34 that is, by about 3 million people. Thus, in Russia in the early 1910s, the scope or coverage of library services (taking into account libraries of all types) was 3-4%. This figure gives the lower threshold of the readership’s size, since only more or less regular readers were recorded in the library. The reading audience as a whole was, naturally, larger. Its total number by the end of the nineteenth century can be estimated at 8-9 million people (that is, 6-7% of the population). M. D. Afanas’ev came to a similar conclusion: in his opinion, readers of books in Russia at the end of the nineteenth/ beginning of the twentienth century accounted for 4-6% of the population.35

  • 36   See: M. Iu. Matveev, Rossiiskie biblioteki vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX veka (St. Petersbu (...)

31In Russia there were about 200,000 libraries of different types in the pre-revolutionary years, and the overwhelming majority of them were educational.36

32The growth in readership was mainly due to those cultural strata that had been theretofore poorly acquainted with the printed word. Let us turn to the accounts of N. A. Rubakin, who noted that:

  • 37   Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 17-18.

the literary currents in all of reading Russia are rolling [...] wave after wave. Almost a hundred years have passed since the wave of pseudo-classicism swept over the foremost readers, seventy years ago Karamzin’s wave of Sentimentalism swept over us, then Zhukovskii’s Romanticism, and so on and so forth, but somewhere in the bowels of the provinces, these waves are rolling to this day, moving around in circles, washing over more and more people and giving way to the next wave. It’s no wonder that wherever the wave of the eighteenth century is still rolling, works that represent the end of the nineteenth century do not receive attention or meet endorsement.37

33This observation reflects the inescapable stratification of Russian culture and literature—and, accordingly, the Russian readership.

34Such a phenomenon is not surprising. As a consequence of the heterogeneous economic forces that structured society (and consequently structured culture as well), the Russian populace straddled broad socio-cultural spectrums: practitioners of traditional agriculture existed alongside workers in the modern manufacturing industry; illiterate peasants existed alongside highly educated scientists, writers, and engineers. Therefore, a certain reading group might be in the midst of a cultural “stage” that the most “advanced” sections of the population had long ago passed through (in, say, the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries).

35It is generally accepted that there was a singular literature in Russia in which there existed qualitatively different levels—first-class writers, second and third-class writers, graphomaniac writers, and so on. Accordingly, readers are divided into: highly cultured connoisseurs, “average,” “undeveloped,” etc. We would suggest a somewhat alternative vision of Russian literature, or, more precisely, an image of several simultaneously existing literatures. In Russia of the last third of the nineteenth century, we can provisionally distinguish the following types of literature: the literature of thick journals, the literature of thin journals, the literature of newspapers, lubok literature, “literature for the people,” and children’s books. Each of them had their own poetics, their own authors, and ways of bringing the texts to the public—that is, their readers.

  • 38   N. V. Shelgunov, “Vospominaniia,” in N. V. Shelgunov, L. P. Shelgunova, M. L. Mikhailov, 2 vols. (...)
  • 39   V. A. Krylov, Prozaicheskie sochineniia, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1908), vol. 1, xiv.

36Reading sharply intensified with the reforms of the 1860s (or more precisely, during the very period of their preparation). According to N. V. Shelgunov, “in the sixties an unexpectedly absolutely new, unprecedented reader with public feelings, public thoughts and interests, who wanted to think about public affairs, who wanted to learn and to know, was created by some miracle.”38 In many ways, attitudes towards reading changed in those years. If in earlier times, many readers used books and journals to escape from surrounding reality and find solace in entertainment, now they turned to books in order to better choose their path in life and seek for instruction for everyday living. The place of the printed word in Russian society of the late 1850s to early 1860s is vividly illustrated by the curious fact that “the guard officers who looked after […] the ballerina brought her the works of Belinskii, who at that time was a must-read—or, at the very least, one had to give the appearance of having read him.”39

37Among the “educated” public, the most active readers were those most affected by the social transformations taking place throughout the country, those who experienced the transformations most acutely because of their unequal place in the social hierarchy—but who, as a rule, were not involved in specific practical activities. They regularly read thick journals, newspapers, and were up to speed with new literary developments and the critical responses to them.

38Thick journals occupied pride of place for the educated readers of late nineteenth-century Russian society. Journals’ preeminence over the book format proved decisive from the middle of the 1830s on, following the great success of the journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia (The Library for Reading). By the mid 1840s, the thick journal’s key position in the sphere of literature had become obvious.

  • 40   “Ot redaktsii,” Russkaia mysl’, 1 (1885), annex after page 170.

39From that time until about the beginning of the 1890s, most literary and journalistic works (at least by domestic authors) were initially printed in journals and only later (and even then not always) published in separate editions. Contemporaries noted that “Russian fiction is concentrated in journals, in which everything that is more or less deserving of attention is placed. Separate publications represent either works that have already been published in the journals, or rejected by all the periodical publications.”40

40The “journalisation” of Russian literature can be explained by the following reasons. With rising education levels across the population and the lower estates’ adoptions of cultural patterns from the nobility, reading became a way of life among broader strata—primarily provincial landowners and officials. However, such individuals were scattered across their estates and numerous provincial cities and county towns. Given that readers were spread across vast expanses of the country, traditional channels of book distribution (the book trade and libraries) turned out to be ineffective. The delivery of printed publications to remote places through the post proved to be a much better solution, as this was a precisely functioning institution not private, but public in nature. Thus, one task that the journal solved was the communication between writers and readers.

41In addition, journals united their readers. At first, it was simply a community of “cultural,” “educated,” “enlightened” people, but from the beginning of the 1860s, journals began to consolidate this or that group (radicals, liberals, conservatives, and so on) within the framework of a literary community. In conditions of underdeveloped political life, a journal could contribute to the formation of public opinion on topical issues. It almost always defended this or that set of ideas, opinions, and theories. A journal’s orientation was primarily governed by its socio-political program; its literary and aesthetic views were of secondary importance. Regular reading of a certain journal meant that usually a reader found a social or cultural group with which they identified.

42To understand the success of the journal as an institution, one should also take into account the fact that books in Russia were relatively expensive. As a rule, a reader did not want to risk money acquiring a book that was unknown to them. It was much more convenient to choose a journal based on the reader’s previous experience, and to turn exclusively to that journal in the future, entrusting the editorial board to select worthy works for reading.

43The journal singled out the most important texts for its readers from all the richness and diversity of modern culture, brought them into the system and offered them to the reader. By collecting works of various authors and linking them in a certain way, the editorial team created a new macro-text, one determined by the previously identified aims and structure of the journal.

  • 41   About thick journals in the second half of the XIX century see also: D. A. Martinsen (Ed.), Liter (...)

44Since the early 1860s, a characteristic feature of journals’ existence was the constant polemic between them. Although quite often aesthetic or everyday issues were a pretext for disputes, more often than that there was hidden struggle, one not so much literary as ideological.41

45Journal publications were addressed to readers of a relatively high educational level, to those who were, in basic terms, familiar with domestic and foreign history, geography, the political system, and so on. They were also aimed at those who placed high importance upon the printed word—who consulted it in their search for self-determination and were nevertheless possibly limited in their access to books. At the same time, the reader’s preference for the journal over the book perhaps meant that they considered themself not competent enough to choose from the stream of numerous, separately published works suitable for them and which might correspond to their deeper requests. This reader did not (or could not) read a large number of varied books and was often satisfied with compilations, paraphrasings, reviews, and so on. The journal reader was generally loath to trust one particular individual (who thought an author personally responsible for their book), and it was important for this type of reader that a journal publication was ratified by an entire group.

  • 42   O. M-skii [Mil’chevskii], “Nasha zhurnalistika i publika,” Knizhnyi vestnik, 3 (1864), 254.

46The observations of O. V. Milchevskii in the mid 1860s showed that the main readers of journals were: “higher officialdom, a wealthier, non-serving nobility, young teachers and students; many more journals are read by official’s wives, more, at least, than husbands,” and at that very rich people, libraries, or higher and secondary schools subscribed to them.42

  • 43   See also: V. V. Karpova, “Chtenie tolstykh zhurnalov v Rossii v kontse XIX veka,” Tsarskosel’skie (...)

47Several thousand people were subscribed to each journal. In order for the journal to stay in business, it was necessary to have at least 2-3,000 subscribers, and successful journals garnered in different periods from 6-15,000 subscribers: in 1860, Sovremennik (The Contemporary) had 6,600 subscribers; in 1880, Otechestvennye zapiski had 8,100; and in 1887 Russkaia mysl’ had 10,000). According to our calculations (conducted according to data contained in research on the history of the press, memoirs, correspondence, journal archives, and so on), overall, the aggregate circulation of all journals numbered at 30,000 in 1860, 40,000 in 1880 and 90,000 in 1900. Given that the a journal was usually read not only by the subscriber themself, but also by their family members, as well as friends and acquaintances, and that several hundred copies of the journal’s circulation went to libraries where they saw intensive use, it should be clear that the readership of journals was approximately 10 times larger than their circulation indicated. As previously stated, most readers of journals lived outside the capitals. For example, in 1859, the provinces accounted for two-thirds of the subscriptions for The Contemporary.43

48We can distinguish three main readership groups of the “educated” public: scholars and writers, students, and landowners. All of them had a relatively large amount of free time and wide access to printed publications.

49For writers, journalists and scholars, reading had always been an important aspect of their professional work, but now they had a need to be familiar with a much wider range of sources—to participate in the political and ideological struggle of their time. However these were people with a worldview that had already been formed, capable of a critical attitude to published articles and works of art.

  • 44   Rich material about the reading of the raznochinnyi (raznochinets—an educated person of non-arist (...)

50The most avid readers in the second half of the nineteenth century were young people (students of universities, gymnasiums, and seminaries), which was determined by their intensive search for their place in life (See Leibov, Vdovin, “What and How Russian Pupils Read in School,” in the present volume).44 They preferred mostly radical journals, and the articles of N. A. Dobroliubov, N. G. Chernyshevskii and D. I. Pisarev tended to interest them most of all.

51Such readers’ memoirs of this time vividly portray the journal as a source of revelation, the only true leader on the path of life:

  • 45   S. L. Chudnovskii, Iz davnikh let (Moskow, 1934), 8.

The idol and god of the gymnasium students in the mid-60s of the last century was D. I. Pisarev. We were beside ourselves when we read his articles. His thoughts were perceived with reverence, like the gospel, as something indisputable, like a sacred covenant. I remember with what eager impatience we expected the release of the then extremely popular journal Russkoe slovo (Russian Word) and with what greed we devoured the new issue if an article by Pisarev appeared in it (and his articles appeared in almost every issue).
(from the Kherson Gymnasium mid-1860s)45

  • 46   I. I. Arkhangel’skii, “Vospominaniia studenta,” Trudy Vladimirskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii, 5 (...)

I had the opportunity to get my hands on the journal Sovremennik. The copies of this—the best journal of that time—were lent to me for a short period, so I had to sit through the night reading. Articles from The Contemporary from the late 50s and early 60s made extremely strong impressions on young people who thirsted for knowledge.
(from the Vladimir Seminary in the first half of the 1860s)46

52Even the students from the capitals, who had extensive libraries available to them and listened to the lectures of the best professors and were in circles of like-minded people, read the journals just as enthusiastically. V. P. Ostrogorskii, who studied at the University of Petersburg in the first half of the 1860s, recalled:

  • 47   V. Ostrogorskii, Iz istorii moego uchitel’stva (St. Petersburg, 1914), 99.

The journals of the time were of great importance to me and my comrades. Especially those of them that combined almost all the best literary forces. Presenting both the richest material for reading critical and sociopolitical ideas, not to mention works by the most talented fiction writers (Turgenev, Nekrasov, M. I. Mikhailov, Pleshcheev, and others), they encouraged a fervent attitude towards public issues, presented ruthless satirical scourging of all that was contrary to the idea of progress, and tried to cast a shadow over the good reforms of the new reign. [...] At that time, critical and academic articles (by Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov) quite often appeared in journals, and were in great demand.47

  • 48   About readers of Otechestvennye zapiski see: R. J. Ware, “A Russian journal and its public: Otech (...)

53With the decline of social activism in the 1870s and 1880s, most readers’ developed a calmer attitude towards journals, but radical young people continued to read with rapt attention the journals that were close to their viewpoints—Trud and, especially, Otechestvennye zapiski.48

  • 49   On reading the publications of A. I. Herzen in Russia see: B. S. Ginzburg, “Rasprostranenie izdan (...)

54A significant place in the reading lists of students in the 1860s was occupied by émigré literature—primarily the publications of Aleksander Herzen.49 At Petersburg University, according to the recollections of one of the students,

  • 50   A. Egorov, Stranitsy iz prozhitogo, 2 vols. (Odessa, 1913), vol. 1, 91.

...we read with avid attention, having gathered in a circle at someone’s place to read the work published by Herzen in London—in Kolokol [The Bell] and Poliarnaia zvezda [The Polar Star], discussing and commenting on our understanding of any article in these journals, admiring both the remarkable stylistics and language of their author-emigrant and their content, always inspired by the ardent desire for freedom and progressive reforms for Russia.50

  • 51   N. Popov. “Epokha uvlechenii,” Nabliudatel’, 1 (1895), 357.
  • 52   V. P. Meshcherskii, Moi vospominaniia, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1897), vol. 1, 21.
  • 53   See: M. Iu. Ashenbrenner, Voennaia organizatsiia Narodnoi voli (Moscow, 1924), 5-6.

55At Moscow University, “in classrooms Kolokol, Poliarnaia zvezda, The Future of the Christian Religion by Feuerbach, Force and Matter by Bűchner and other works were openly read.”51 In military schools, classes were “divided into Herzenists and anti-Herzenists”52 in the Petersburg Cadet Corps; during classes, students read Kolokol and Poliarnaia zvezda as well as the books of émigré authors I. G. Golovin and P. V. Dolgorukov with their teacher.53

  • 54   N. K. Bukh, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1928), 52.

56Later, illegal and forbidden political literature began to occupy an important place in the reading choices of youth. For example, during the period of the rise of the Narodnik political movement (1873), “studies at universities were abandoned, [the students] tried to absorb as much knowledge as possible in the spring, when they expected to excite the people for propaganda purposes. They read Anarchy (Anarkhiia) by Bakunin, the journal Vpered (Forward), the writings of Chernyshevskii, Khudekov, Flerovskii, Lavrov, and others.”54

57Young students also actively read and discussed philosophical and sociological literature (Feuerbach, Strauss, Stirner, Carlyle, Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner, Comte, Spencer) and socio-political literature (Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution, Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Buckle). A significant place in reading belonged to natural science publications (Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley and so on), but these authors interested readers not by virtue of purely scientific content, but rather by virtue of their worldview: they became guides for a materialistic, as opposed to a religious, world outlook. In the book, readers sought arguments in favor of the already formed “realistic” worldview, the main features of which were materialism and atheism in philosophy, radicalism in politics, and “rational egoism” in ethics. A few books considered authoritative were perceived as a source of scientifically proven truth.

  • 55   N. Kotliarevskii, Kanun osvobozhdeniia (Petrograd, 1916), 455, 459.

Young people entered the temple of science with a preconceived attitude and expected that they would receive into their hands a new catechism, the basic dogmas of which had been already predetermined. They needed only to be formalized and backed up with citations […] Crowds of young and sometimes mature people, for whom the world’s scientists were oracles of wisdom, could merely read these ‘sacred’ books on a superficial level, or not even read them, but be content with their retelling; they could also draw very arbitrary conclusions from reading; could say something on behalf of the oracle that which never occurred to him; could, at long last, throw out all other ideas save those of the chosen book, not wanting to know anything that might contradict this book [...].55

58Many youth read contemporary fiction too. This was, to a certain extent, a consequence of radical changes, in the early 1860s, to how literature was taught. As a result of such changes,

  • 56   A. Skaftymov, “Prepodavanie literatury v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole: (Sorokovye i shestidesiatye go (...)

...the choice of works for school study expanded, contemporary questions could enter the school, along with real problems pertaining to current struggles; literature could be a means of critical analysis of the oppressive social order of the past and present; students’ activity and their consciousness of their educational process expanded [...] Demands for meaningfulness in educational materials, for their relevance to life, were estalished.56

59However, a utilitarian approach to fiction (largely influenced by D. I. Pisarev) often led the youth to pass over the works of I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevskii, L. N. Tolstoii—complex, ambiguous, and written at a high artistic level—in favor of didactic and one-dimensional novels created in a “progressive” spirit, such as the novels by N. F. Bazhin and A. K. Sheller-Mikhailov.

60Another leading group of readers for the 1860-1870 period came from the major and middling local nobility. This group was represented, as a rule, by the older generation. Readers from this social sphere placed a high premium on reading fiction. And in fact, their preferences were to a great extent met by the leading Russian prose writers of the 1850s-1860s. The group’s reading habits are quite easy to imagine: first of all, they read journals such as Sovremennik, Russkii vestnik, Otechestvennye zapiski, and Biblioteka dlia chteniia, which published works of fiction, journalism and literary criticism, all of which were to become well-known and subsequently afforded the status of literary classics.

61Among government officials, readers with developed literary interests were few. A. S. Suvorin, who was well acquainted with various major officials, described this stratum as follows:

  • 57   A. S. Suvorin, Dnevnik (Moscow; Petrograd, 1923), 336.

Russian people of higher education do not read anything; having entered the service, after a certain amount of time, a Russian person turns out to be ignorant, for he considers himself to be educated, and others consider him so, but he has vague notions, for his former education is never updated and developed by reading; if the topic turns to scientific subjects he will begin to speak nonsense, for he worships the old gods; if he reads at all, he offers praise at random, admires and criticizes without sense, and with the air of a connoisseur all the while; this is especially so if he has managed to get into the service of the major ranks. Teachers are not an exception to this. There is no time for them to read.57

62During the post-reform period, the ranks of another reading group—the provincial intelligentsia—was growing sharply. Many of these individuals were zemstvo employees—teachers, doctors, statisticians and so on. For them, the book was an extremely significant means of overcoming cultural isolation and the opportunity to feel a sense of community with other representatives of this intelligenstia.

  • 58   S. Mikhno [V. Farmakovskii], “Pis’mo iz Viatki,” Russkii dnevnik, 99 (1859).

63In the context of the rapid growth and diversification in readership during the post-reform period, we can identify a considerable “intermediate” layer of the readership, consisting of “semi-educated” readers who had already outgrown the lubok book but lacked sufficient preparation for understanding publications found in the thick journals (and the books of that level of literature). The education received by its representatives can be called—rather conditionally—partial and restricted to the secondary school context (county school, lower theological school, seminary, several classes at a gymnasium, and so on). In terms of their social status, these were, as a rule, petty officials, less wealthy landlords, village priests, merchants, and urban commoners. According to an observer of that time, “reading, (which our businessman previously considered an idle act; the merchant and urban commoner—an inappropriate way to spend one’s time; and the clergy—an unworthy occupation) is, little by little, beginning to acquire attractiveness.”58

  • 59   A. S. Voronkevich, “Russkie illiustrirovannye ezhenedel’niki v XIX veke,” Vestnik Moskovskogo uni (...)

64If in the beginning of the nineteenth century these social groups had not taken to reading, then by the middle of the century regular reading became the norm for them. In a historical moment of rapid social changes, representatives of this readership strove to comprehend their place within the framework of the social whole. After receiving a formal education, they were accustomed to looking for answers to emerging questions in a book, but due to their brief training, they had not yet fully assimilated a “scientific” picture of the world, and their outlook was fragmentary, retaining many elements and traditional, commonplace ideas. Hence, on the one hand, a desire to obtain a variety of information, and on the other, a craving not for the systematic ordering of this knowledge, but rather for the sensationalism, interest, and attractiveness offered by the information itself. The needs of such readers were best answered by the illustrated weekly. A thick journal was too complex for readers of the intermediate layer, and the problems discussed in these journals were not compelling. Although the first illustrated weekly appeared in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a rapid increase in their number can be observed only in the last third (in 1860, 5 publications; in 1880, 18; in 1890, 29; in 1900, 41).59 The most widespread type of illustrated journal during this period was the universal weekly “for family reading,” combining text and illustrations (portraits, landscapes, reproductions of paintings, and so on).

65The first such journal, Vsemirnaia illustratsiia (World Illustration), was published from 1869 on, and in 1877 there were already seven such publications (Vsemirnaia illustratsiia, Zhivopisnoe obozrenie [Picture Review], Illustrirovannaia nedelia [The Illustrated Week], Krugozor [Outlook], Niva [Field], Pchela [The Bee], Severnaia zvezda [The Northern Star], all published in Petersburg). As a result, the total audience of illustrated journals at the end of the 1870s was approximately 100,000 subscribers, and in the beginning of twentienth century—about 500,000. It was the illustrated journals that played an important role for this reader group in inculcating the skills of reading culture, familiarising them with fiction and modern scientific knowledge, and acquainting them with the fine arts.

  • 60   “Lubochnye ili narodnye kartinki,” Knizhnyi vestnik, 6/7 (1891), 266.
  • 61   Department of manuscripts of the Russian state library (Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvenno (...)
  • 62   Ibid., d. 18, l. 23 ob., 25.

66In the 1890s it was noted that “...cheap illustrated periodical publications are dispersed among the relatively poor population, and they are content to read them instead of the lubok publications”.60 Attentive observers turned their attention to the fact that for many “...the main reason for subscription [to illustrated journals] is to imitate others, the desire to become [...] on par with the educated”61 (Tobolsk Province, 1889). “Merchants and their family do not read journals, but take out subscriptions for the sake of bonus materials [free oleographic pictures attached to the journal], and to seem more fashionable, so as not to lag behind others”; this is particularly the case for children and wives. However, they did not truly read either: “...all reading ends with looking at the pictures and reading what’s under the pictures. Sometimes the master of the house will also look at the pictures, and if they are interesting to him, he takes an edition, flips through it, and orders it to be taken care of and protected”62 (Riazan Province, 1891). Nevertheless, the need for regular reading of journals gradually developed even among these subscribers.

  • 63   Institute of Russian literature (Institut russkoi literatury – IRLI), f. 583, d. 56, 58.
  • 64   OR RGB, f. 358, k. 5, d. 21, l. 95.
  • 65   Ibid., d. 15, l. 9 ob.
  • 66   L. Lichkov, “Kak i chto chitaet narod v vostochnoi Sibiri,” Russkaia mysl’, 2 (1896), 36.
  • 67   Calculated by: I. Voronov, Materialy po narodnomu obrazovaniiu v voronezhskoi gubernii (Voronezh, (...)

67The reading audience considered here was likewise differentiated—both “vertically,” according to the cultural horizon and income level, and “horizontally,” by belonging to a particular region, profession, and so on. Accordingly, each illustrated journal sought to focus on its “own” reader, which found expression in the contents and price of the journal. Out of the weekly journals of the 1880s, Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia had an annual subscription (with postage) of 12 rubles, and Zhivopisnoe obozrenie cost 8 rubles; both were designed for more well-off and cultivated readers (middle officials, rich merchants), while Niva (at a cost of 6 rubles) was for the petty bourgeoisie and the provincial intelligentsia. The 1883-1885 archive of the cheapest (4 rubles) illustrated journal Rodina (Homeland) shows that its subscribers consisted of small provincial officials, priests, military men in low ranks, as well as teachers and peasants.63 In the late 1880s, the daughter of a merchant from the Siberian city of Surgut admired the “lovely” novels in Rodina.64 A peasant from the Riazan province wrote in the early 1890s: “I have been receiving the journal-newspaper Rodina for four years already, and I find that this is the most ‘peasant-oriented’ journal both in price and content and in the abundance of material it contains.”65 According to one of the peasants, they preferred the journal Rodina to all others because it “...presents stories that are more suitable to life and more understandable.”66 However, on the whole, only an insignificant part of the peasants read this type of illustrated journals. In the Voronezh province, for example, only 0.1% of the peasant population identified themselves as readers of Rodina and Niva.67

  • 68   OR RGB, f. 358, k. 5, d. 18, l. 23 ob.
  • 69   Ibid., d. 13, l. 38 ob., 39.
  • 70   See: Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po nachal’nomu obrazovaniiu v Orlovskoi gubernii za 1900-1 (...)

68However, despite this fact, there was no rigid estate affiliation of journals. An observer noted (in 1891) that in the big trading village of the Riazan province, Niva was the most widely distributed: “...gentlemen [i.e. nobles and officials; A. R.], merchants and priests, and wealthier urban commoners receive it.”68 A peasant from the Viatka province (early 1890s) reported: “...the clergy have subscriptions for the journal Niva (I believe joint ones), and newest edition of Niva is passed from the priest to the deacon, and then to the sextons [...] moreover, mostly female relatives of clergy read this journal, because in Niva there is an appendix, ‘Paris Fashions,’ which serves as a guide for all the ladies of the rural intelligentsia.”69 Niva was much more “solid” and “cultural” than Rodina, and also penetrated into the working and peasant spheres, albeit on a smaller scale.70

69In such a competitive market for readers, each illustrated weekly either soon ceased to be published, or found its audience within those readers’ preexisting preference for a type of publication that most responded to their spiritual needs. As a result, the weeklies formed a system that encompassed the “average” readership as a whole. Editors and publishers of illustrated journals (often these functions were combined in one person) understood the specifics of their publication’s audience. This was facilitated by subscription receipts, which indicated the social status of subscribers, as well as numerous letters to the editorial office in which readers evaluated the journal’s content and expressed wishes for its future.

70Unlike thick journals containing only printed text, illustrated journals combined text with image. Clear and easy accessibility was ensured by the fact that the image was given equal footing with the printed text. Images (icons, lubok prints, and so on) were by that time widely distributed among the common folk, but the printed word was a relatively recent innovation in their media consumption. That is why a hybrid form such as an illustrated journal, based on a combination of image and text, was needed. Illustrations, which had greater visibility and familiarity, made it easier for people who had only recently developed the habit of reading to understand the text.

  • 71   Dinershtein, “Fabrikant” chitatelei, 50.
  • 72   IRLI, f. 583, d. 58, l. 169.

71The clarity and cheapness of the illustrated journal were complemented by its universality. In the opinion of E. A. Dinershtein, the success of Niva was “...related to its skillful combination of different and diverse materials, which in aggregate could serve the whole of a family’s reading. Therefore, all […] content categories were equivalent and formed in terms of holistic perception.”71 Here one could find an image and description of the phenomena of modern domestic and foreign policy, science, culture and art; “remarkable places” and historical events; famous people; paintings and sculptures; distant countries and their people; and more. The most important component of the journal was its literary works—novels, stories, essays, and poems. We will quote a typical letter from a subscriber to the editor: “There are many who desire there to be more fictional works in Rodina, even translated ones—because in the provinces [...] they are very much eager for novels.”72

72Even as such publications favored more and more modern material, they nevertheless retained meaning and integrity by maintaining a focus on historical topics. History, especially embodied in an aesthetic and therefore integral and meaningful form (novels, images of architectural monuments), served as a reference point and a measure in assessing a fragmented and contradictory modernity. This fact explains why the historical novel was consistently an indispensable component of the annual subscription of any illustrated journal: publishers sought to secure the constant cooperation of one or another popular historical novelist, such as V. S. Solov’ev, E. A. Salias, P. N. Polevoi, M. N. Volkonskii, and others in this category. The key place of the historical novel in the illustrated journal clearly demonstrates the difference in the interests of its readers and those of the thick journals, which were dominated by “social problem” novels with modern themes.

73The materials of a journal were “linked”—both within the a single edition and within the annual set, since the editions were designed to be collected and stored long after their appearance. At the end of the year, for an additional fee, editors often offered subscribers the opportunity to receive a bound annual (or semi-annual) set. Collected journals turned into thick folios, which, due to the universality of the content, became something like an original chronicle, book for reading, and encyclopedia all at once.

74The role of universal illustrated journals in the culture of that time was neither singular nor simple. On the one hand, in the context of intensive social and cultural development, when both the conditions of everyday life and popular views were changing with extraordinary rapidity, the illustrated journal, with its appeal to the family, the historical past, and religious moral norms, served the purposes of cultural stabilisation, mitigating and reconciling (in the consciousness of readers) the contradictions present in modern culture. However, at the same time the illustrated journal also helped the reader to find a new support system: the world of science and culture. Thanks to certain components of its content (popular science materials, sometimes articles, stories and novels of social-critical orientation), and, more importantly, its form (printed text, albeit in combination with the image), which contributed to the growth of the analytic capabilities and rationality of readers’ consciousness, the illustrated journal was itself a conductor of modernity in culture. By turning viewers into readers and random readers to regular readers, the printed journal contributed to the emergence of a mass readership in Russia, and, thereby, accelerated of the processes of social and cultural development.

75A characteristic phenomenon of the type of publishing described here was the publication of books in the form of a free supplement to the journal (from the 1880s on). Soon, in a number of publications, such add-ons began appearing on a monthly basis and become an effective means of distributing books (as well as journals themselves) in mass print runs. For example, in 1887, after A. A. Caspari became the publisher of Rodina and began supplementing it with A Collection of Novels, Novellas and Stories (Sobranie romanov, povestei i rasskazov) and other additional materials on a monthly basis, the circulation of the journal began to grow rapidly and reached a total of 120,000 copies.

76In fact, the cost of the book was included in the subscription fee, even though psychologically the subscriber considered the book to be free, a simple bonus to the paid periodical. Thus, the subscriber received a cheap book that corresponded to their requests. The journal, having sharply increased its circulation thanks to its additional subscribers, while simultaneously electing to not spend money on advertising, storage, and retail space, could reduce the overall production cost and, as a consequence, the book’s price of sale. As a result, the subscriber of the journal Rodina received could receive, in addition to the journals themselves and other numerous supplements, twelve books for 4 roubles—an expense similar to what they would find in traditional retail, where books were typically not less than half a rouble apiece. Given that the circulation of a fiction book was then usually 1,200 or 2,400 copies, and the circulation of Rodina (and, therefore, the books published and distributed in accompaniment to it) reached 120,000, one can imagine how much wider the readership was of “free supplements” in comparison with the usual publications.

77Moreover, the content of the supplement could differ quite significantly, since the editors of the journals were guided by the needs of the subscribers. For example, taking into account the low cultural demands of its readers, the editorial board of Rodina sought to capitalize on popular genres by including books written by third-rate authors successful with mass audiences. The annual set usually included historical writers (A.V. Arsen’ev, P. N. Polevoi, A. A. Sokolov), “crime” writers (K. V. Nazar’eva, A. I. Krasnitskii, I. N. Ponomarev), and writers of romantic-melodramatic novels (E. O. Dubrovina, E. I. Zarina, F. V. Dombrovskii). In the case of Niva, among whose readers could be counted many provincial members of the intelligentsia, annual supplements included classics both foreign and domestic (Lermontov, Gogol’, Turgenev, Dostoevskii, Goncharov, Fet and others), as well as well-known contemporary writers (Chekhov, Bunin, Korolenko, Boborykin, Leonid Andreev, and others). As evidenced by numerous recollections, these sets of works, published as supplements to Niva, formed the basis of many provincial home libraries. In the late nineteenth-early twentienth century, at least 5 million such copies were distributed annually as supplements to illustrated journals; that is, they represented at that time one of the main channels for distributing books.

  • 73   See Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii za 400 let (Moscow, 1973), 80.
  • 74   Quoted from Voskresnoe chtenie, 10 (1861/62), 270-271.

78Those readers of the “average” cultural level differed quite sharply in their life interests. For example, in 1860, the number of priests had reached an impressive figure—113,800 people.73 Contemporaries testified that among members of this group interest in reading meaningfully increased during the early 1860s: “...at the present time our parochial clergy, including those in rural areas, have strongly indicated that they want to read, and to read various other types of spiritual content [i.e. things apart from liturgical texts – A.R.]; indeed, they are not isolating themselves from those books that we call secular [...] our priests, especially in recent years, have themselves come to represent a significant number of those who buy and write spiritual books and journals.”74 Such individuals read special “spiritual” journals (Palomnik [Pilgrim], Rukovodstvo dlia sel’skikh pastyrei [Guide for Rural Shepherds], Kormchii [Helmsman]), as well as secular illustrated journals (Niva, Rodina), plus cheap newspapers (Svet [Light], Syn otechestva [Son of the Fatherland]).

79Similarly, the number of readers among low-ranking officers, poor landowners, and petty officials grew. They often held subscriptions for the newspapers Svet and Syn otechestva, the illustrated magazines Niva, Rodina, Zhivopisnoe obozrenie, Voskresen’e (Sunday), Illiustrirovannyi mir (Illustrated World), and so on, many of which usually had supplements in the form of novels written by modern “mass” or popular authors.

  • 75   See Pamiatnaia knizhka Ufimskoi gubernii 1889 goda (Ufa, 1889), 76-78.

80In the 1880s, a sharp increase in levels of “average” readership was recognised as literature’s “invasion of the street.” Indeed, circulations of illustrated journals and newspapers, which read primarily by this subsection of the readership, grew rapidly— sometimes by hundreds of thousands. For example, in 1887, 485 residents of the Ufa province subscribed to Niva and 406 to the newspaper Svet. In third place (258) was the newspaper Sel’skii vestnik (The Rural Herald); in this case, a free copies were sent to the parish boards. Next came Zhivopisnoe obozrenie (182), then Voskresen’e (132), Syn otechestva (118), and so on. Thick journals were subscribed to in a much smaller number: Russkaia mysl’—35 copies, Vestnik Evropy—31 copies, Severnyi vestnik (The Northern Herald)—23 copies, Nabliudatel’ (The Observer)—13 copies. The total number of copies of illustrated journals received in the province was more than six times greater than the number of thick monthly journals.75

81The largest, most rapidly increasing reader group in the last third of the nineteenth century was composed of the lower estates. We have already spoken about the sharp gap between the primary and secondary schools in pre-revolutionary Russia. But since the primary school developed at a faster rate than the secondary one in the post-reform period, a large number of literate but uneducated readers were created as a result. Both in their life experience and in the nature of their knowledge (they possessed insignificant information on history and geography, but had the ability to read, write, and count) they were not ready to accept the literature of the “educated” readership. In the cities, the main material for reading available to this group was the city newspaper. Newspapers sharply expanded their audience in general in the second half of the nineteenth century. Having appeared in Russia in the eighteenth century, the newspaper only habitual reading for officials and provincial landowners in the first half of the nineteenth century. But then newspapers were, as a rule, official or semi-official, and their total audience did not exceed 30-40,000 readers—even by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the post-reform period, the rapid development of the newspaper business began, which was reflected in the growing number of publications and their corresponding growth in total circulation. According to our approximate calculations (only literary and general “unprofiled” newspapers were taken into account, and they had to be published at least once a week), this process proceeded at the following rates:

Year

1840

1860

1880

1900

Number of newspapers

51

67

123

204

Total circulation, (in thousands of copies)

25

65

300

900

  • 76   See: B. I. Esin, Russkaia dorevoliutsionnaia gazeta (Moscow, 1971), 74.

82In 1913, there were 856 total Russian newspapers, and their combined circulation reached 2.7 million.76

  • 77   M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols. (Moscow, 1972), vol. 13, 628.

83In the late 1870s, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: “The physiognomy of our literature has changed significantly over the past fifteen years. […] The importance of large (monthly) journals has fallen, and in their place, as leaders of public opinion, daily newspapers have appeared.”77

84At that time, newspapers did not simply grow sharply in number. They were also increasingly differentiated from one another in various categories: ideology, place of publication (i.e. metropolitan or provincial), and audience (this or that social stratum)—all of which reflected the corresponding process of sociocultural differentiation at work in Russian society itself.

85A specific type of literature was quickly developed for readers from the lower strata (it had existed before, only in much smaller quantities), and that literature gradually became further differentiated, catering to different “sub-layers” of this reading group.

86In the 1860-1870s merchants and petty officials joined in the regular reading of newspapers, and in the 1880s, newspapers also became the property of the urban lower classes (clerks, servants, some workers). If the newspaper represented merely one of the reading options for other groups of the urban population (along with the journal and the book), then for urban lower classes, the newspaper often represented the only type of reading in which they engaged.

87In the late 1850s/early 1860s, so-called “street leaflets” emerged, catering to the low-level urban reader, and in the first post-reform years the so-called “small press” publications began to appear: Peterburgskii listok (The Petersburg Leaflet) in 1864, Peterburgskaia gazeta (The Petersburg Gazette) in 1867, and Sovremennye izvestiia (Modern News) in Moscow in 1867. The 1880s saw additional periodicals of this type come into being; for example, Moskovskii listok (The Moscow Leaflet) began publication in 1881, and Moscow’s Novosti dnia (News of the Day) began publication in 1883. By this time, the level of literacy among urban lower-class citizens—which consisted in a large part of peasants who had migrated from villages, and whose childhood and adolescence had fallen in post-reform time—had increased significantly.

  • 78   S. S. Okreits, “Literaturnye vstrechi i znakomstva,” Istoricheskii vestnik, 6 (1916), 630.
  • 79   B. A. Shchetinin, “Khoziain Moskvy,” Istoricheskii vestnik, 5/6 (1917), 455.
  • 80   M. Gor’kii, Detstvo. V liudiakh. Moi universitety (Moscow, 1975), 285.
  • 81   S. Reshetov, K novoi zhizni (Moscow; Leningrad, 1926), 8.

88“Small press” print was much cheaper than traditional publication: in 1880 an annual subscription to a grassroots newspaper cost 8-9 roubles, while a newspaper for the educated public cost twice as much, typically between 15 and 17 rubles. “Small press” publications more closely corresponded to the needs of grassroots readers not only in terms of price, but also their nature of the presentation content, given that such readers either did not read at all previously, had been content with rumors and urban folklore, or at most consumed lubok literature. The readership of the “small press” consisted of those substrata of the urban population which occupied the lowest rungs of the social ladder: small merchants and officials, clerks, servants, artisans, and literate workers. S. S. Okreits, who worked for Peterburgskii listok, noted that “ninety-nine percent of the readers of Listok are visitors to pubs and third-rate taverns, shop assistants, craftsmen and small traders.”78 Another memoirist recalled that the newspaper Moskovskii listok “immediately won the sympathy of lackeys, chambermaids, coachmen, laundresses, cooks, shopkeepers, small craftsmen, middle-class merchants, and so on.”79 Newspaper materials were often read aloud for illiterate or semi-literate listeners. In his story In People (V liudiakh), Maksim Gor’kii gives a description of the reading of the newspaper Moskovskii listok for audience members who “listen attentively, with some kind of reverent greed, exclaiming ‘aah’ at intervals, and who are amazed at the villainy of the characters...”.80 Often, such readings were held in taverns. According to the recollections of one worker, there “there were not many who could read. These readings of the newspaper were only held occasionally, but still it was very satisfying.” Readers were divided into two camps: some demanded to see in the newspaper whether a fire had occurred, whether a horse might have been taken away from a peasant at a market, or whether there was an outbreak of disease. Others were eager to read the feuilleton (referring to a novel printed in parts with sequels).81

89This type of low-level paper provided a functional equivalent to rumours and folklore, acclimated its audience to the practice of regular reading, and pulled it into the sphere of the printed word’s influence. At the same time, like a thick or thin journal, it modeled its readers’ image of the world. Many of them had recently come to the city from the village or were childhood natives of the village. Torn from the traditional way of life and ushered into the life of a large city, they experienced considerable stresses while altering their worldview to this new reality. The urban way of life called into question the patterns of behaviour they had once learned in the village. It demanded not blind submission to tradition, but independent decision-making based on the diversity of social and cultural opportunities available. The printed word had the task of introducing to and reinforcing in these readers’ consciousness new values and norms, but also behavioural regulations as such. Thus, the motivation for enrichment inherent in the urban way of life was tempered by knowledge of possible violations of the legal and moral order; hence the interest in the criminal chronicle and sensational novel, which demonstrated the consequences of the “wrong,” “illegal” way to success.

90The world of readers’ interests was determined by what they saw and heard during their own lives; their chosen reading focused on vital issues familiar to them from work and life. This world was limited in space (foreign news in the “small press” was represented minimally or not at all, while specific city-wide news dominated, as suggested by the periodicals’ named [Peterburgskii listok, Peterburgskaia gazeta, Moskovskii listok]) and limited in time, giving priority to a particular conceptualization of modernity—one understood as a momentary flash in the pan. This was not contradicted by the fact that an important component of the grassroots newspapers—especially those in Moscow—was the historical novel, since the published works of this genre were actually projections of current issues. These texts discussed current problems (the search for historical roots and a national identity, autocracy as the basis of the Russian state, and so on), and the motives for the characters’ actions and the nature of their consciousness were equated with modern ones. Furthermore, the protracted publication time of the serialized novel, as well as the place they were printed—the daily newspaper—“inserted” history into the present, making it seem as if the events described within the novel were happening here and now.

91All the material in the “small press” was presented in such a way as to pique the readers’ curiosity and make the content accessible; the reader would begin to read, and continue without stopping, and understand the text. In a number of respects, the “small press” occupied an intermediate place between oral literature and the press in the proper sense of the word. These “low” newspapers were subscribed to and kept in taverns, that is, places where people gathered, had conversations, and exchanged rumours. As stated, often “small press” papers were read out loud there (or in other places where the “folk” gathered). The newspaper itself “spread” scandalous information, often capturing rumours that were already in circulation. The orientation of newspaper fiction to speech genres (for example, “scenes” with dialogue) and the aesthetics of historical folklore (novels and stories about noble robbers) are also noteworthy phenomena here.

92By “issuing” readers an integrated image of the world, the newspaper “equalised” various genres; in a sense, it erased the line between literary and non-literary genres. On the one hand, facts and incidents connected to scandals, crime news, performances (primarily theatrical), comedic occurrences—all of which were drawn from contemporary events—were described via a narrativized sketch that “fictionalized” such content. On the other hand, the fiction in the newspaper was certainly of a documentary nature, since such genres as “from everyday life” and sensational novels written on the basis of real events prevailed. Moreover, there were historical novels about events that had really happened, and sketches created as if they were “copied from nature.” Quite often they were a processed record of what the writer had heard. And finally, such a key genre as the feuilleton, where the events of the day were discussed in an easy and jocular manner (often with the inclusion of poems) straddled the border between fiction and non-fiction.

93A key component of the grassroots newspaper was the novel, most often adventurous and sensational in nature. In the beginning (from 1870 in Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta, plus later in the Moscow Novosti dnia), translations of French novels were published from issue to issue (X. de Montépin, F. du Boisgobey, A. Bouvier, A. Belot, etc.), created in the framework of the tradition begun by The Mysteries of Paris by E. Sue. Already in the 1880s, domestic samples of this genre (novels by F. K. Ivanov, I. N. Ponomarev, A. A. Sokolov, A. I. Sokolova, G. A. Khrushchev-Sokolnikov, A. N. Tsekhanovich, A. V. Ewald and so on) began to appear; in the 1890s, they almost ousted the foreign ones from the newspaper pages. Most often these were “criminal novels” or “novels from modern life,” which usually meant exposés of the “ulcers” and “vices” of a large city. The “criminal novel” was in many respects similar in its problems and generic structure to the detective story; however, it focused more on the causes and consequences of the crime, and not on the course of its disclosure. In Moscow newspapers, and especially in Moskovskii listok, which did not include any translations at all, a large number of novels “from everyday life” (with melodramatic structure) and historical novels were also printed.

94The novels were located at the bottom of the newspaper page, in the feuilleton section, so they were often called feuilletons themselves. In these typical memoirs of a worker, who in 1900 was a pupil in an icon-painting studio, it is recalled that:

  • 82   S. Leningradskii, Ot zemli na zavod i s zavoda na zemliu (Moscow, Leningrad, 1927), 10.

...the owner had a special predilection for Moskovskii listok for the sake of the feuilletons printed in it, such as Storm in Still Waters [Buria v stoiachikh vodakh] [A. Pazukhin] or The Robber Karmeliuk [Razboinik Karmeliuk] [M.P. Staritskii]. The owner was also interested in the war in China. I read him the newspapers every day...82

95An important place in the literary section of the newspaper was occupied by “scenes from nature” and humorous stories. As a rule, both genres concerned a ridiculous anecdote regarding the life of merchants or urban commoners. The story was conducted in a fairly soft, kind-hearted manner, ridiculing the stock characters of this environment that were fixed in the mass consciousness. At the same time, the author (and the reader) viewed the situation as if from above, having risen above it—that is, free of the described characters’ shortcomings. Hundreds of such works were written by each of the humourists of the “small press”: N. A. Leikin, I. I. Miasnitskii, A. M. Pazukhin, D. D. Togolskii, etc. Poems, mostly humorous (by L. I. Palmin, L. G. Grave, A. F. Ivanov, S. F. Ryskin, S. Ia. Ukolov) were also constantly printed on the pages of newspapers. In general, the brunt of the literary section of the newspaper had a joking tone—it was dominated by a mockery of almost everything that came to the attention of the authors.

96It is also worth looking at newspaper reportage devoted to such topics as murder and robbery, litigation, fires and natural disasters, fairs, and any other events related to everyday life. To name one example, N. I. Pastukhov, the creator of Moskovskii listok, became famous for his “fire” reports, and later kept a special reporter on hand for the description of fires in the newspaper. Famous reporters were V. A. Giliarovskii, who worked for Moskovskii listok for many years, and N. N. Zhivotov.

97The remaining space in the newspaper was taken up by additional information about city life, government reports, correspondence from other cities, theatre reviews, letters to the editorial office and announcements. With these kinds of contributions accounted for, our outline of the newspaper genre’s content is more or less complete.

98According to the observations of A. P. Chudakov, who analysed in detail the nature of this type of literature and the work of its main representatives,

  • 83   A. P. Chudakov, Mir Chekhova (Moscow, 1986), 55. On the genres of small press, see ibid., 69-94.

... If in the 1860s, the first decade of the existence of mass Russian journals, the boundary between ‘small’ and ‘big press’ was unclear, and many authors cooperated with both types of publications, then gradually the difference became more pronounced. The ‘small’ press got its own ‘story’ and novellas based on high society, its sketches acquired specialized genre features, which had not previously been catered for in the journals Sovremennik, Russkoe slovo, Biblioteka dlia chteniia—the publications in which they had begun; the newspapers had created the canons of a special newspaper novel.83

99One more important part of the reading public, and the lubok literature that satisfied its intellectual demands, is discussed in our article on peasant reading in this volume.

  • 84   See: S. Reiser, “Vol’naia russkaia poeziia vtoroi poloviny XIX veka” in Vol’naia russkaia poeziia (...)

100It should be noted that along with the government-controlled channels of text distribution described above, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there were parallel publications of handwritten literature,84 editions of foreign “free” press and domestic illegal publications that complemented them in genre and thematic respects.

101Due to the nature of handwritten literature—a significant part of which was not approved by the state (for political and moral reasons), it is rather difficult to estimate the extent of its distribution.

  • 85   “Zapiska o pis’mennoi literature,” Golosa iz Rossii (London, 1856), 38, 40, 42.
  • 86   P. D. Boborykin, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1965), vol. 1, 182.

102A sharp impetus to the spread of manuscripts containing oppositional literature was the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War. According to the testimony of the anonymous author of the article “A Note on Handwritten Literature” (“Zapiska o pis’mennoi literature,” 1856), “handwritten literature has appeared in society; it has eluded the censorship and is unknown to the government. Articles of all types of content are passed from hand to hand, are copied (also by hand) in considerable numbers, are transported from the capitals to the provinces and from the provinces to the capitals [...] almost all the educated class in Russia participate in the dissemination of handwritten articles [...] [the manuscript] is transmitted to others, and they talk about it almost in public, without any fear.”85 An example of these observations can be found in the reminiscences of P. D. Boborykin, who wrote that when, at the end of the 1850s, he learned about the student unrest in the University of Kazan’, he sent a comrade a message on this subject, a message which contained a description of a number of professors. “This message,” he wrote, “...had a sensational success, was dispersed in a multitude of pages, and I met Kazan’ locals twenty, thirty years later who almost remembered it by heart.”86

103Memoirs of state and public figures, which contained information about what was the hidden from the eyes of the public sides of political life and about the personalities of monarchs, were widely copied and distributed (for example, those by I. V. Lopukhin, Catherine II and Countess E. R. Dashkova).

  • 87   See: N. Sapov [S. I. Panov], “ ‘Barkov dovolen budet mnoi!’: O massovoi barkoviane XIX veka” in N (...)

104Pornographic and erotic works should also be mentioned here. Collections of works by I. Barkov and his imitators were widely distributed and read.87 Apparently, the scale of their distribution, especially in an exclusively male environment (i.e. in educational institutions or the army), was very large. Here, for example, are the memoirs from a student of the 5th St. Petersburg grammar schools in 1881:

  • 88   V. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, To, chto proshlo (Moscow, 2009), vol. 1, 168.

Due to the extremely diverse composition of the students in the 2nd grade, pornography made its first appearance. Among the students were the so-called “book-lovers,” whose satchels were full of textbooks and notebooks, and half obscene literary works and pornographic cards, which such students apparently had due to domestic neglect. These items were all free of charge and very willingly provided during lessons to those interested.88

  • 89   See: Svodnyi katalog russkoi nelegal’noi i zapreshchennoi pechati XIX veka: knigi i periodicheski (...)

105True, with the creation of the Russian foreign press, the situation changed, and many texts (primarily those of a political nature) that were previously distributed in handwritten copies now began to circulate in print. In 1853 in London there was A. I. Herzen’s Free Russian book printing house (in addition to individual publications, the yearbooks The Polar Star [1855-1862], the collections Voices from Russia [Golosa iz Rossii] [1856-1860], and the newspaper The Bell [1857-1867]). Later, books and periodicals began to appear in Germany and France. According to the Union Catalogue of the Russian Illegal and Prohibited Press of the nineteenth Century, more than 60 periodicals were published abroad in the second half of the nineteenth century.89 Books printed abroad were also brought to Russia by persons traveling overseas.

106In Russia, the agitational and propagandistic publications of The People’s Will (Narodnaia volia) movement and later the Marxists, came out illegally, but such tendentious works by Tolstoi as What is My Faith?, Confession, and others were also published.

107Along with the abovementioned reader groups at the end of the nineteenth century, there were two additional reader groups, at that time not numerous, that became widespread in the early twentienth century.

  • 90   V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55 vols. (Moscow, 1967), vol. 3, 498.
  • 91   See: R. E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: the Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth C (...)
  • 92   P. P. Aleksandrov, Za Narvskoi zastavoi: Vospominaniia starogo rabochego (Leningrad, 1963), 18.
  • 93   M. Zhabko, Iz dalekogo proshlogo: Vospominaniia starogo rabochego (Moscow; Leningrad, 1930), 29.
  • 94   Rasschitano po: P. M. Shestakov, Rabochie na manufakture t-va “Emil’ Tsindel’” v Moskve (Moscow, (...)
  • 95   See: V. Dadonov, “Russkii Manchester,” Russkoe bogatstvo, 12 (1900), 50-52.

108One of them was the gradually developing working-class readership. Its development was connected both with the growth of the number of workers (which, in the large-scale industrial sector of European Russia, expanded from 706,000 in 1865 to 1,432,000 in 1890),90 and with their professionalisation, which caused their gradual separation from village life and their assimilation into urban culture. In the late nineteenth early twentienth centuries, hereditary workers accounted for a small part of the total number, while natives of the village or seasonal workers predominated.91 This seasonal work helped unify the reading habits of the workers and the reading habits of the peasants. Unfortunately, there is very little empirical data on the reading habits of workers, since their reading has not been studied in detail. Some evidence demonstrates that here too, reading was not widespread: according to a worker’s memoirs about life in Petersburg at the beginning of the twentienth century, “books, newspapers, and journals rarely appeared in working families at that time”92; another memoirist similarly testified that the workers “did not subscribe to newspapers, did not read books, and one could rarely find a printed word in the house”.93 However, under favorable conditions, i.e. with free time and a free library, workers quickly joined in reading activities. A statistical survey by P. M. Shestakov, conducted in the late nineteenth century at the Moscow cotton printing factory (whose owners pursued a “philanthropic” policy, opening a school, a library, a theatre for workers, etc.), showed that 42% of the working men there were readers.94 In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, the centre of the textile industry in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentienth century, where there were five library reading rooms “for the people,” including two located in factories, 83% of workers under the age of 25 were readers, and in general, 10% of literate workers read books.95

  • 96   About these differences, see: J. Brooks, “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era” in W (...)

109The observations of S. An-skii and several other researchers showed that in some aspects, workers’ attitudes towards reading—and consequently their readerly tastes—differed from those of peasants.96 The way of life of the workers was different, their level of education was higher; in addition, they lived in a city where the network for obtaining books and information about books was much broader. N. A. Rubakin characterised these differences as follows:

  • 97   Rubakin. Etiudy o russkoi chitayushchei publike, 193.

The tension in factory life is more evenly distributed throughout the year than in the village one: the former requires more mobility, it is less conservative; it is incomparably more saturated with the spirit of urban “civilisation,” with all its sides—both dark and light. At the factory, the time of the year has a much less pronounced effect on the reading of books: in the village, one does not read during the summer working period; the factory workers read in summer, after the end of work, and after the “clock out whistle” often pick up a book. During work, a peasant man is not up to reading; yet a factory worker can often be seen with a book at his workplace.97

  • 98   For example, in the library for the workers at the Ramenskoe factory in 1901, fiction was preferr (...)
  • 99   See: S. An-skii [Sh. A. Rappoport], Narod i kniga (Moscow, 1913).

110Reader-workers seemed to have much less interest in religious literature,98 reacted unenthusiastically to fairytales and chivalric narratives, such as those extremely popular in the peasant milieu (e.g. Milord Georg by M. Komarov), and were much more interested—in comparison with the peasants—in reading novels devoid of fantasy elements like adventure and criminal plots.99 They also did not read thin pamphlets, like rural residents did, but turned to larger volumes, and often even to very thick books.

  • 100   See the memoirs of workers: A. Frolov, Probuzhdenie: Vospominaniia riadovogo rabochego, 2 vols. ( (...)
  • 101   See: S. Reshetov, K novoi zhizni, 7-10

111There were three categories of worker-readers. One was made up of afficionados of urban lower-class literature: adventure, criminal, historical, and melodramatic novels, with which they had become acquainted on the pages of the “lowbrow” city press—the newspapers Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta, or Moskovskii listok and Novosti dnia, as well as monthly additions to the illustrated magazine Rodina and the newspaper Svet.100 It was expensive to buy books, and periodicals were much cheaper; moreover, the newspaper could be read free of charge in taverns.101

  • 102   Ia. Mikhailov, Iz zhizni rabochego (Leningrad, 1925), 6.
  • 103   D. I. Grazkin, Za temnoi noch’iu den’ vstaval, 16.

112And if the village reader had a fairly homogeneous selection of popular or educational books published specifically for him, then in a city where the repertoire of published books was much wider, the range of books available to read was quite random. One of the St. Petersburg workers recalled that “...everything printed that came to hand I read. Often it happened that you read some little book, you could not understand anything in it, but there was nobody to ask. Later I began to buy books at the Aleksandrovskii market, but there was a lot of junk there.”102 Another worker “...read everything that came to hand: old calendars, song books, dream books, the lives of saints...”103

  • 104   Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 192.

113The group of worker-readers oriented towards intelligent reading was substantially smaller. Nevertheless, N. A. Rubakin wrote in 1895 that “a type of fully intelligent man among the factory workers, especially in recent years, has now been determined quite clearly”.104 The observer of that time estimated that the percentage of such persons in the working environment was 1-3%, and wrote that,

  • 105   F. P. Pavlov, Za desiat’ let praktiki: (Otryvki vospominanii, vpechatlenii i nablyudenii iz fabri (...)

...for all the elementary nature of their school preparation, once they became addicted to reading, they sometimes achieved surprising results. Unsatisfied with fiction, they devour books of historical, economic, and philosophical content. Many of them are well known, and not only by name: Darwin, Tyndall, Byron, Mill, Gladstone, Bismarck, and dozens of other great European names, not to mention all the major Russian writers and figures. Believing in science and understanding what a great service knowledge can serve, they literally crave enlightenment...105

114Similar readers used factory libraries or city reading rooms “for the people,” and less often ordinary city libraries. They also bought books and exchanged them.

  • 106   See: O. D. Sokolov, Na zare rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1978), 74-142.

115Some of the representatives of this group—specifically, those with political interests—primarily read political and economic works, and in the search of the latter they often used underground party libraries. A certain place in their reading was also occupied by underground propaganda literature (The Speech of Peter Alekseev [Rech’ Petra Alekseeva], Cunning Mechanics [Khitraia mekhanika] by V. E. Varzar, King Hunger [Tsar’-Golod] by A. N. Bakh, Spiders and Flies by V. Liebknecht). In the 1860-1870s, instances of such publications being read were relatively rare,106 but by the end of the century, with the development of the labor movement, a considerable number of workers had read them. An observer wrote that such workers

  • 107   P. Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskoi rabochii (St. Petersburg, 1906), 6.

...often came across more or less serious books. [...] They often happened to meet Lange’s Working Question, Lippert’s History of Culture, The Eight-Hour Day by Webb and Cox, and even Marx’s Das Kapital [...] not everyone is able to understand everything they read, but all the same, they read with great desire [...]. Along with this, the reading of illegal literature flourished.107

116And in the realm of fictional literature, representatives of this reading group chose works that motivated people to fight against injustice and social protest: the novels The Gadfly by E. L. Voinich, Spartacus by R. Giovagnoli, What is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?) by N. G. Chernyshevskii, One Man in the Field is Not a Warrior by F. Spielhagen, Germinal and Labour by E. Zola, The Struggle for Rights by K.-E. Franzos, Emma by I. B. Schweitzer and so on.

117It should also be noted that in the mid 1890s, a new group of readers appeared, one purely elite in its nature that focused on Decadence and Symbolism (see Stone, “O!?!?!: Reading and Readers in the Silver Age, 1890s-1900s” in the present volume). The attitude toward literature of its representatives was depoliticised and aestheticised; they expected the book not to teach, but to provide enjoyment; not to address social problems, but to analyse the feelings and experiences of the individual. In this environment, writers such as D. Merezhkovskii, K. Balmont, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub and N. Minskii rose to fame.

  • 108   A. V. Muratov, Knizhnoe delo v Rossii v XIX i XX vekakh, 201, 203.

118With the growth of the Russian readership and its concurrent stratification, readers’ preferences became more diverse. As a result, the book industry’s repertoire of titles rapidly increased: in total (including texts in foreign languages) the titles annually published in Russia were 1,239 in 1855, 2,085 in 1860, 7,366 in 1887 and 11,548 in 1895.108

119Even this brief review that we have conducted demonstrates the presence a large number of distinct reader audiences in Russia of the second half of the nineteenth century. These audiences differed significantly from each other in terms of attitude to the book, level of knowledge, and range of interests; they ranged from fans of lubok books to elitist, sophisticated connoisseurs of literature with a taste for the Decadent movement.

  • 109   Rubakin. Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 85.

120In conclusion, we wish to emphasise that the provided data on the presence of a large number of distinct reader audiences in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century by no means indicate that reading had become a pervasive phenomenon by the end of the period under consideration. According to estimates by N. A. Rubakin, even among representatives of privileged classes, no more than one-fifth of the population held membership to libraries in the first half of the 1890s.109

  • 110   Ibid., 84.

121Thus, while reading indeed passed from the category of a rare practice to a not infrequent phenomenon, it would be a stretch of the imagination to claim that it came to represent an urgent need for the majority of the population. By the mid 1890s Rubakin also stated that “there are few such people who feel the need for constant communication with a book [...]. A regular reader who presents a general need for the book in the Russian Empire is an isolated phenomenon, but not a mass one.”110

122However, the cultural mechanisms of the spread of reading, and the corresponding organisational forms (the school system, grass-roots newspapers, illustrated journals, cheap “books for the people,” and “people’s libraries”) were clearly present. Later (partially at the beginning of the twentieth century, then finally in the years of Soviet power [see Dobrenko-Reitblat, “The Readers’ Milieu in 1917-1920s” in vol. 3]), reading expanded on the foundation created in the second half of the nineteenth century, transforming Russia from a country of the unread into a country of almost universal reading.

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Notes

1   See: “Sostoianie gramotnosti mezhdu kupechestvom i zhiteliami podatnogo sostoianiia v Saratovskoi gub.,” Zhurnal Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 14 (1846), 525-528, and memoirs: I. K. Zaitsev, “Vospominaniia starogo uchitelia,” Russkaia starina, 6 (1887), 665; L. Checherskii [L. M. Korkhov], “Iz shkol’nykh vospominanii krest’ianina,” Neva, 7 (1911), 597-598.

2   For more information, see Reitblat, “The Book and the Peasant in the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in the present volume.

3   See details: J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861—1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 3-34.

4   A. G. Rashin, “Gramotnost’ i narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii v XIX v. i nachale XX v.,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 37 (1951), 32, 38.

5   See: Materialy dlia statistiki Kostromskoi gubernii (Kostroma, 1870), Vyp. 1; N. Bogolepov, “Statisticheskie svedeniia o gramotnosti krest’ianskogo naseleniia Moskovskoi gubernii po podvornoi perepisi 1869 i 1883 gg.,” Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Moskovskoi gubernii za 1895 g. (Moscow, 1896), Prilozheniia, 1; M. E. Nikolaev, “Moi vospominaniia,” Vospominaniia russkikh krest’ian XVIII – pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 2006), 665; P. Sumarokov, “Khoziaistvennyi etnograficheskii ocherk Kashirskogo uezda,” Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, 8 (1860), otd. 6, 63; V. M. Neskol’ko slov o sel’skikh chital’niakh (Moscow, 1866), 3; S. A. An-skii [Sh. Z. Rappoport], Ocherki narodnoi literatury (St. Petersburg, 1894), 33.

6   See: “O sredstvakh chteniia v Moskve i o moskovskoi lubochnoi literature,” Knizhnyi vestnik, 3/6 (1860), 36; M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Nasha obshchestvennaia zhizn’,” Sobranie sochinenii, (Moscow, 1968), vol. 6, 282; S. F. Librovich, “Za kulisami knizhnogo dela v Rossii,” Rossiiskaia bibliografiia, 25 (1879), 103; T. Nikitin, “Povest’ o moem samouchnom zaniiatii naukoi gramote,” Morskoi sbornik, 5 (1862), 5-6; I. M. Krasnoperov, Zapiski raznochintsa (Moscow; Leningrad, 1929), 11; V. M. Maksimov, “Avtobiograficheskie zapiski,” Golos minuvshego, 4 (1913), 148.

7Mneniia raznykh lits o preobrazovanii tsenzury (St. Petersburg, 1862), 21.

8   V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1971), 70.

9   Sh. I. Ganelin, Ocherki po istorii srednei shkoly v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Leningrad; Moscow, 1950), 84.

10   Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii, 70.

11   Ibid, 51—52.

12Universitety i srednie uchebnye zavedeniia 50-ti gubernii Evropeiskoi Rossii i 10-ti Privislianskikh, po perepisi 20-go marta 1880 g. (St. Petersburg, 1883), 3, 19, 225.

13   Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii, 51, 55, 56.

14   A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1813--1913): Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow, 1956), 87.

15   A. V. Muratov, Knizhnoe delo v Rossii v XIX i XX vekakh (Moscow; Leningrad, 1931), 203.

16Voenno-statisticheskii sbornik, 4 (1871), 898.

17   Muratov, Knizhnoe delo v Rossii, 153.

18   A. Ovsiannikov, “Iz vospominanii starogo pedagoga,” Russkaia starina, 5 (1899), 423.

19   P. D. Boborykin, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1965), vol. 1, 47.

20   P. A. Kropotkin, Dnevnik (Moscow; Petrograd, 1923), 46.

21   Catalogues of a significant part of circulating libraries in 1850-1870s are taken into account in bibliographic indexes: Knigotorgovye katalogi 50-70 gg. XIX veka (Moscow, 1978); Knigotorgovye katalogi 60-70 gg. XIX veka (Moscow, 1980).

22   See: M. Zakharov, Ukazatel’ Moskvy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1851), vol. 1, 199; [A. F. Cherenin], Sbornik svedenii po knizhno-literaturnomu delu za 1866 god (Moscow, 1867), 121-123; Adres-kalendar’ raznykh uchrezhdenii g. Moskvy na 1880 god (Moscow, 1880), 1006-1008; Vsia Moskva (Moscow, 1900), 955-956.

23   Calculations are made by: Spisok zavedeniiam knizhnoi torgovli, bibliotekam dlia chteniia i muzykal’nym magazinam, nakhodiashchimsia v guberniiakh (St. Petersburg, 1882); Pamiatnaia knizhka [Peterburga] na 1882 god (Sankt- Peterburg, 1881), 77.

24   N. A[gafonov], “Vospominanie ob I. A. Shidlovskom i ego biblioteke” in Zavolzhskaia vifliofika (Kazan’, 1887. Vypusk 1), 30.

25   See: Knizhnyi vestnik, 22 (1860), 256; I. S. Nikitin, Sobranie sochinenii, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1975), vol. 2, 388; Ia. Khotiakov, “A. A. Krasovskii i ego biblioteka dlia chteniia,” Bibliotekar’, 5 (1955), 38 et al.

26  A. A. Rusov, Opisanie Chernigovskoi gubernii, 2 vols. (Chernigov, 1899), vol. 2, 142.

27   So estimated the proportion between subscribers and users of the circulating library N. A. Rubakin. See: N. A. Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike (St. Petersburg, 1895), 87.

28   Calculated by: A. Cherenin, “Biblioteka A. F. Cherenina v 1860 godu,” Knizhnyy vestnik, 6 (1861), 99.

29   N. A. Rubakin, “Chastnye biblioteki i vneklassnoe chtenie uchashchikhsia,” Zhenskoe obrazovanie, 6/7 (1889), 405.

30   Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 41.

31   Calculated by: Polnyi alfavitnyi ukazatel’ vsekh knizhnykh magazinov, bibliotek dlia chteniia i muzykal’nykh magazinov, nakhodiashchikhsia v guberniiakh Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow, 1882); Adres-kalendar’ raznykh uchrezhdenii g. Moskvy na 1880 god (Moscow, 1880), 1006-1008; Peterburgskaia pamiatnaia knizhka (Sankt- Peterburg, 1881), 77.

32   Calculated by: Goroda Rossii v 1910 godu (St. Petersburg, 1914).

33   See: A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1811-1913) (Moscow, 1956), 88.

34   See: E. N. Medynskii, Vneshkol’noe obrazovanie, ego znachenie, organizatsiia i tekhnika (Moscow, 1919), 132.

35   M. D. Afanas’ev, Problemy rasprostranennosti chteniia v sel’skoi srede: Dissertatsiia na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata pedagogicheskih nauk (Moscow, 1979), 44

36   See: M. Iu. Matveev, Rossiiskie biblioteki vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX veka (St. Petersburg, 2014), 276. The monograph by M. Iu. Matveev contains a detailed description of different types of Russian libraries: public, popular, scientific, military, spiritual, etc. For library readers, see also: L. V. Glukhova, O. S. Libova, Biblioteki i chitateli St. Petersburgskoi gubernii na rubezhe XIX – nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg, 2015); A. E. Perebeinos, V. S. Tolstikov, “Obshchestvennye biblioteki v povsednevnoi zhizni gorodskogo naseleniia Urala (vtoraia polovina XIX - nachalo XX veka),” Vestnik Cheliabinskoi Gosudarstvennoi akademii kul’tury i iskusstv, 4 (2011), 15-18.

37   Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 17-18.

38   N. V. Shelgunov, “Vospominaniia,” in N. V. Shelgunov, L. P. Shelgunova, M. L. Mikhailov, 2 vols. Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1967), vol. 1, 113.

39   V. A. Krylov, Prozaicheskie sochineniia, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1908), vol. 1, xiv.

40   “Ot redaktsii,” Russkaia mysl’, 1 (1885), annex after page 170.

41   About thick journals in the second half of the XIX century see also: D. A. Martinsen (Ed.), Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, 1997), 91-116, 171-196.

42   O. M-skii [Mil’chevskii], “Nasha zhurnalistika i publika,” Knizhnyi vestnik, 3 (1864), 254.

43   See also: V. V. Karpova, “Chtenie tolstykh zhurnalov v Rossii v kontse XIX veka,” Tsarskosel’skie chteniia, 16 (2012), v. 3, 26-30.

44   Rich material about the reading of the raznochinnyi (raznochinets—an educated person of non-aristocratic descent in Russia) youth of the second half of the 1850s and early 1860’s is summarized in a series of articles by I. E. Barenbaum: “‘Kruzhkovoe’ chtenie raznochinnoi molodezhi vtoroi poloviny 50-kh—nachala 60-kh godov XIX v.,” Istoriia russkogo chitatelia, 1 (1973), 77-92; “Iz istorii chteniia raznochinno-demokraticheskoi molodezhi vtoroi poloviny 50-kh-nachala 60-kh gg. XIX v.,” Istoriia russkogo chitatelia, 2 (1976), 29-44; “Raznochinno-demokraticheskii chitatel’ v gody demokraticheskogo pod”ema (vtoraia polovina 50-kh-nachalo 60-kh godov XIX v.): (K kharakteristike individual’nogo chteniia),” Istoriia russkogo chitatelia, 3 (1979), 23-35.

45   S. L. Chudnovskii, Iz davnikh let (Moskow, 1934), 8.

46   I. I. Arkhangel’skii, “Vospominaniia studenta,” Trudy Vladimirskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii, 5 (1903), 175.

47   V. Ostrogorskii, Iz istorii moego uchitel’stva (St. Petersburg, 1914), 99.

48   About readers of Otechestvennye zapiski see: R. J. Ware, “A Russian journal and its public: Otechestvennye zapiski, 1868-1884,” Oxford Slavonic papers. New series, 14 (1981), 121-146.

49   On reading the publications of A. I. Herzen in Russia see: B. S. Ginzburg, “Rasprostranenie izdanii Vol’noi russkoi tipografii v kontse 1850-kh-nachale 1860-kh gg.” in Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia v Rossii v 1859-1861 gg. (Moscow, 1962), 336-360; B. S. Ginzburg, “Otnoshenie chitatel’skikh krugov Rossii k stat’iam ‘Kolokola’ (1857-1861 gg.),” in Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia v Rossii, 1859-1861 gg. (Moscow, 1963), 306-337.

50   A. Egorov, Stranitsy iz prozhitogo, 2 vols. (Odessa, 1913), vol. 1, 91.

51   N. Popov. “Epokha uvlechenii,” Nabliudatel’, 1 (1895), 357.

52   V. P. Meshcherskii, Moi vospominaniia, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1897), vol. 1, 21.

53   See: M. Iu. Ashenbrenner, Voennaia organizatsiia Narodnoi voli (Moscow, 1924), 5-6.

54   N. K. Bukh, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1928), 52.

55   N. Kotliarevskii, Kanun osvobozhdeniia (Petrograd, 1916), 455, 459.

56   A. Skaftymov, “Prepodavanie literatury v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole: (Sorokovye i shestidesiatye gody),” Uchenye zapiski Saratovskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, 3 (1938), 229.

57   A. S. Suvorin, Dnevnik (Moscow; Petrograd, 1923), 336.

58   S. Mikhno [V. Farmakovskii], “Pis’mo iz Viatki,” Russkii dnevnik, 99 (1859).

59   A. S. Voronkevich, “Russkie illiustrirovannye ezhenedel’niki v XIX veke,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Ser. 10. Zhurnalistika, 1 (1984), 33.

60   “Lubochnye ili narodnye kartinki,” Knizhnyi vestnik, 6/7 (1891), 266.

61   Department of manuscripts of the Russian state library (Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennoi Biblioteki -- OR RGB), f. 358, k. 5, d. 21, l. 94 ob.

62   Ibid., d. 18, l. 23 ob., 25.

63   Institute of Russian literature (Institut russkoi literatury – IRLI), f. 583, d. 56, 58.

64   OR RGB, f. 358, k. 5, d. 21, l. 95.

65   Ibid., d. 15, l. 9 ob.

66   L. Lichkov, “Kak i chto chitaet narod v vostochnoi Sibiri,” Russkaia mysl’, 2 (1896), 36.

67   Calculated by: I. Voronov, Materialy po narodnomu obrazovaniiu v voronezhskoi gubernii (Voronezh, 1899), 103.

68   OR RGB, f. 358, k. 5, d. 18, l. 23 ob.

69   Ibid., d. 13, l. 38 ob., 39.

70   See: Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po nachal’nomu obrazovaniiu v Orlovskoi gubernii za 1900-1901 uchebnyi god (Orel, 1902), 109; Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Poltavskogo gubernskogo zemstva na 1903 god (Poltava, 1903), 127; E. A. Dinershtein, “Fabrikant” chitatelei: A. F. Marks (Moscow, 1986), 42-43.

71   Dinershtein, “Fabrikant” chitatelei, 50.

72   IRLI, f. 583, d. 58, l. 169.

73   See Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii za 400 let (Moscow, 1973), 80.

74   Quoted from Voskresnoe chtenie, 10 (1861/62), 270-271.

75   See Pamiatnaia knizhka Ufimskoi gubernii 1889 goda (Ufa, 1889), 76-78.

76   See: B. I. Esin, Russkaia dorevoliutsionnaia gazeta (Moscow, 1971), 74.

77   M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols. (Moscow, 1972), vol. 13, 628.

78   S. S. Okreits, “Literaturnye vstrechi i znakomstva,” Istoricheskii vestnik, 6 (1916), 630.

79   B. A. Shchetinin, “Khoziain Moskvy,” Istoricheskii vestnik, 5/6 (1917), 455.

80   M. Gor’kii, Detstvo. V liudiakh. Moi universitety (Moscow, 1975), 285.

81   S. Reshetov, K novoi zhizni (Moscow; Leningrad, 1926), 8.

82   S. Leningradskii, Ot zemli na zavod i s zavoda na zemliu (Moscow, Leningrad, 1927), 10.

83   A. P. Chudakov, Mir Chekhova (Moscow, 1986), 55. On the genres of small press, see ibid., 69-94.

84   See: S. Reiser, “Vol’naia russkaia poeziia vtoroi poloviny XIX veka” in Vol’naia russkaia poeziia vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Leningrad, 1959), 5-41; A. Reitblat, “Pis’mennaia literatura v Rossii v XIX veke, ee sotsiokul’turnye funktsii i chitateli” in D. Rebecchini, R. Vassena (eds.) Reading in Russia: Practices of Reading and Literary Communication, 1760-1930 (Milano, 2014), 79-98.

85   “Zapiska o pis’mennoi literature,” Golosa iz Rossii (London, 1856), 38, 40, 42.

86   P. D. Boborykin, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1965), vol. 1, 182.

87   See: N. Sapov [S. I. Panov], “ ‘Barkov dovolen budet mnoi!’: O massovoi barkoviane XIX veka” in N. S. Sapov (Ed.) Pod imenem Barkova: eroticheskaia poeziia XVIII–nachala XX veka (Moscow, 1994), 5-20; A. M. Ranchin, N. S. Sapov (Ed.) Stikhi ne dlia dam: russkaia netsenzurnaia poeziia vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 1994).

88   V. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, To, chto proshlo (Moscow, 2009), vol. 1, 168.

89   See: Svodnyi katalog russkoi nelegal’noi i zapreshchennoi pechati XIX veka: knigi i periodicheskie izdaniia, III vols. (Moscow, 1981—1982).

90   V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55 vols. (Moscow, 1967), vol. 3, 498.

91   See: R. E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: the Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (Leicester, 1979).

92   P. P. Aleksandrov, Za Narvskoi zastavoi: Vospominaniia starogo rabochego (Leningrad, 1963), 18.

93   M. Zhabko, Iz dalekogo proshlogo: Vospominaniia starogo rabochego (Moscow; Leningrad, 1930), 29.

94   Rasschitano po: P. M. Shestakov, Rabochie na manufakture t-va “Emil’ Tsindel’” v Moskve (Moscow, 1900), 61—71.

95   See: V. Dadonov, “Russkii Manchester,” Russkoe bogatstvo, 12 (1900), 50-52.

96   About these differences, see: J. Brooks, “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era” in W. M. Todd (Ed.) Literature and Society in Imperial Russia (Stanford, 1978), 140-149.

97   Rubakin. Etiudy o russkoi chitayushchei publike, 193.

98   For example, in the library for the workers at the Ramenskoe factory in 1901, fiction was preferred by 54.8% of workers, and religious literature—only 12%. See Narodnaia biblioteka pri Ramenskoi manufakture. Katalog knig i obzor deiatel’nosti biblioteki po 1 ianvaria 1902 goda (Bronnitsy, 1902), 14.

99   See: S. An-skii [Sh. A. Rappoport], Narod i kniga (Moscow, 1913).

100   See the memoirs of workers: A. Frolov, Probuzhdenie: Vospominaniia riadovogo rabochego, 2 vols. (Khar’kov, 1923), vol. 1, 25, 29-31, 55; A. M. Buyko, Put’ rabochego (Moscow, 1934), 16; F. N. Samoilov, Po sledam minuvshego (Moscow, 1940), 32; P. P. Aleksandrov, Za Kirovskoi zastavoi, 22; D. I. Grazkin, Za temnoi noch’iu den’ vstaval (Moscow, 1975), 74; see also: V. Dadonov, “Russkii Manchester,” 53; M. i O., “Fakty i tsifry iz perepisi S.-Peterburga v 1900 godu,” Russkaia mysl’, 2 (1902), 76, 83-84.

101   See: S. Reshetov, K novoi zhizni, 7-10

102   Ia. Mikhailov, Iz zhizni rabochego (Leningrad, 1925), 6.

103   D. I. Grazkin, Za temnoi noch’iu den’ vstaval, 16.

104   Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 192.

105   F. P. Pavlov, Za desiat’ let praktiki: (Otryvki vospominanii, vpechatlenii i nablyudenii iz fabrichnoi zhizni) (Moscow, 1901), 76.

106   See: O. D. Sokolov, Na zare rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1978), 74-142.

107   P. Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskoi rabochii (St. Petersburg, 1906), 6.

108   A. V. Muratov, Knizhnoe delo v Rossii v XIX i XX vekakh, 201, 203.

109   Rubakin. Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike, 85.

110   Ibid., 84.

Auteur

Abram Reitblat is a sociologist of literature. MA in Philosophy (Moscow State University, 1972), PhD in Pedagogy (1982, with a dissertation on Methods of Readers’ Interests Dynamics Studies). In 1977–2002 he worked as a leading researcher (Department for Sociology of Reading) at the Russian State Library, since 1994 – as a member of the editorial board of the Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie journal (Moscow). He is the author of Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii (Moscow: NLO, 2001), Ot Bovy k Bal’montu i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: NLO, 2009) and other works in historical sociology of Russian literature.

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