1A paradox of reading is that as an inner, subjective experience it may be perceived in an intensely personal and unique way, while when seen from an external perspective it may appear overly determined (or even predetermined) by a myriad of social, political, cultural and other factors. As part of a reading public readers make up a special type of “imagined community,” Benedict Anderson’s well-known concept of the nation.¹ According to Anderson, imagined communities owe their existence to “print capitalism” (another term he coined), which in turn is predicated on the standardization of the vernacular tongue that both created a common discourse and maximized its spread.

2In his The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau dramatically describes the ways in which these two aspects of reading clash as the social context (“modern society”) turns reading into a tool (“weapon”) of social conformity:

The fiction of the ‘treasury’ hidden in the work, a sort of strong-box full of meaning, is obviously not based on the productivity [understanding] of the reader, but on the social institution that overdetermines his relation with the text. Reading is as it were overprinted by a relationship of forces (between teachers and pupils, or between producers and consumers) whose instrument it becomes. The use made of the book by privileged readers constitutes it as a secret of which they are the “true” interpreters. It interposes a frontier between the text and its readers that can be crossed only if one has a passport delivered by these official interpreters, who transform their own reading (which is also a legitimate one) into an orthodox ‘literality’ that makes other (equally legitimate) readings either heretical (not ‘in conformity’ with the meaning of the text) or insignificant (to be forgotten). From this point of view, ‘literal’ meaning is the index and the result of a social power, that of an elite. By its very nature available to a plural reading, the text becomes a cultural weapon, a private hunting reserve, the pretext for a law that legitimizes as ‘literal’ the interpretation given by socially authorized professionals and intellectuals.²

3The institution of the ‘national poet’ represents a powerful example of this process of turning reading into “an orthodox literality,” “the result of a social power, that of an elite.” As a hermeneutic move, employing de Certeau’s harsh rhetoric of “power” and “weapons” serves to help counterbalance the romantic rhetoric that very often accompanies discussions of ‘the national spirit,’ allowing us to better understand the forces that shape both a modern reading public and modern national identity, entities that more or less dovetail.

4Abram Reitblat entitled his essay about the realization of what he considered a fully functioning modern Russian literary system in the 1820’s-40’s “How Pushkin Came to be Considered a Genius (Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii).” The question of Pushkin’s genius per se was not at stake. Rather, as Reitblat wrote, “in this study Pushkin interests us not in and of himself as an outstanding writer and unique personality, but as a literary figure in whose works were reflected many tendencies and aspects of Russian literature of the time.”³ In other words, Reitblat focused on how Pushkin’s reputation was shaped by early nineteenth-century literary institutions. In this chapter, my aim is to apply a somewhat similar approach to the second half of the century, and to focus on the question “how Pushkin came to be considered a national poet.” How in particular did the practices of publishing Pushkin in the second half of the nineteenth century both shape and reflect his role as national poet and help to create a national reading public?

5Many things have to come together for the creation of a national poet: a well-developed literary culture; a poet whose work is amenable (written on appropriate themes and in appropriate genres, most often but not only: national epics, historical works, dramas); critics and nation-building intellectuals to advance his candidacy, those whom Itamar Even-Zohar has dubbed “socio-semiotic entrepreneurs;”⁴ a reading public of sufficient size and social-political-cultural consciousness; and a commercially viable publishing industry producing print matter of sufficient quantity and affordability to supply readers with the appropriate materials. In the case of Russia, by 1855, just under two decades after Pushkin’s death, these elements were beginning to coalesce. I have chosen 1855 as the starting point both because it was the beginning of a new era, the great reforms of Alexander II, that with the Emancipation of the serfs opened the way for a potentially immense new reading public; and also because of the appearance of Pavel Annenkov’s works.

6Annenkov’s Materials for a Biography of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (Materialy dlia biografii Aleksandra Sergeevicha Pushkina) was the first complete biography of Pushkin and his seven-volume edition (of which Materials formed the first) was the first critical “full works” of the poet.⁵ Annenkov’s edition and biography set the stage for the ‘Pushkin Question’ in the Emancipation era and put in motion the efforts that led to his triumphant canonization in the Pushkin Celebration of 1880. Among other things, it established Pushkin’s oeuvre, more or less, making available many previously unknown and censored works; it gave a jump start to the scholarly and academic science of textology in Russia; it generated interest in Pushkin’s controversial biography and in his works; and, most famously (or notoriously), it sparked intense debate among the critics over Pushkin in which Pushkin’s candidacy for national poet was famously rejected.⁶

7Pushkin had been nominated as national poet even during his lifetime. Gogol’s “Some Words on Pushkin” (Neskol’ko slov o Pushkine)” of 1832, which appeared in the first volume of his Arabesques (Arabeski) in 1835, was one of the first declarations that Pushkin was Russia’s “national poet,” and at a moment when critical opinion had turned against him.⁷ It began: “The name of Pushkin immediately inspires (oseniaet mysl’) the idea of a national poet.” The phrase oseniaet mysl’, which in Romantic discourse, borrowing from the Biblical, meant “sudden mystical revelation” (ozarenie) and often referred to poetic inspiration,⁸ suggests the mystical meaning of ‘national poet’ for Gogol. Gogol’s piece, together with Belinskii’s famous series of eleven articles on Pushkin (1843-46), became basic texts for Pushkinism, and retain their influence today. The problem for Belinskii⁹ and for many critics in the nineteenth century was the gap between “national” as natsional’nyi and as narodnyi, the latter in the sense of obshchedostupnyi, known and valued by the people, as opposed to simply embodying the national spirit. The task facing these socio-semiotic entrepreneurs was priokhotit’ publiku k chteniiu (a phrase Karamzin used to describe Novikov’s efforts), to instill an appreciation for reading, and validating Pushkin became a major instrument and impetus for doing so. As Reitblat has written, the Emancipation transformed the peasantry into a potentially mighty political force, and “revolutionary democrats, liberals, conservatives, the church and even the government all became convinced that to control it on the basis of violence was extremely difficult. Hence in order to create a reading public, there was an intensive effort to teach the peasantry to read.”¹⁰ To some of Pushkin’s critics, he was not a proper role model for this (an aristocrat; a gambler and womanizer; possibly an atheist; a man who died in a duel);¹¹ but for others, especially true believers in him, Pushkin represented an attractive, supremely inspiring national poet and hence a catalyst to Russian literacy.

8The population boom of the later nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, together with industrialization, caused a large-scale emigration to urban centers, and increasingly made literacy a necessity,¹² but even while many scholars of Russian readership, starting with the pioneering N. A. Rubakin, have expressed their frustration with what they have felt was the slow pace of progress, especially when seen in terms relative to Western Europe, in absolute terms the gains on all fronts were significant.¹³ Between 1855 and the end of the century the size of the reading public; the number of peasant and working-class readers; the number and press runs of journals and newspapers; the quantity of books produced, of book stores and commercial chains, libraries, reading rooms and lending libraries; the number of village and other schools and their students, of universities and university graduates—all made major gains. Still, for all of these advancements, there always remained a certain sense of unease and uncertainty on the part of Russian intellectuals, sensitive to what they perceived as Russia’s slow pace of cultural and political change. The poorly acculturated mass readership also gave rise to doubts about the nature and cohesion of the ‘reading public,’ which remained somewhat of an enigma.

9The history of readers necessarily begins with texts, and with many national poets, the publication and distribution of their works obviously played a central role. Furthermore, as in the cases of Shakespeare and Goethe, their canon became the arena for the development of native literary scholarship and academic literary institutions. These in turn had fundamental influence on schools. Annenkov’s edition-plus-biography helped spawn the tribe of socio-semiotic entrepreneurs who are still known as pushkinisty and their trade as pushkinistika or pushkinovedenie (in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century also pushkinizm and pushkinianstvo). The early cohort of pushkinisty included P. I. Bartenev, V. P. Gaevskii, P. A. Efremov, M. N. Longinov, and E. I. Iakushkin. They spent their time mostly in establishing Pushkin’s texts, searching out new ones and rejecting false attributions, and in painstaking biographical study. There was also a concerted effort by Pushkin’s friends, relations and contemporaries to collect both written and oral memoirs about him.¹⁴ Annenkov’s Materials for a Biography, despite the fact that it had to soft-pedal or ignore key episodes in Pushkin’s life due to censorship,¹⁵ as noted, was the first comprehensive biography and made use of Pushkin’s manuscripts. Pushkin’s widow N. N. Lanskaia had given Annenkov full access to Pushkin’s papers when she asked him to undertake the edition. After Pushkin’s property was split up among his children a few years later, his oldest son, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, who had received all but his father’s letters to his mother, kept scholars from examining the archive until 1880.¹⁶ Furthermore, until 1887, Pushkin’s works were still under copyright. The initial limit had been twenty-five years, that is, until 1862, but Lanskaia successfully petitioned to have it extended another quarter century.¹⁷

10In the twenty-five years between Annenkov’s full works and 1880, there were two further collected works produced by Ia. A. Isakov, the publisher of the Annenkov edition who had acquired the copyright.¹⁸ They were edited by the well-known bibliographer G. N. Gennadi and appeared in 1859-60 and 1869-71, but were markedly unsuccessful, perhaps because of Pushkin’s earlier bad press, and certainly because of poor editing.¹⁹ Pushkin’s friend S. A. Sobolevskii quipped:

Oh, unfortunate victim of two spawn of perdition,
Killed by Dantes’ bullet and Gennadi’s edition. ²⁰

11Publication of Pushkin’s individual works was sluggish during this period; not including journal or newspaper publications, I count 86 separate book editions, based on Mezhov’s admittedly incomplete but still only bibliography for the period, which makes about 3.6 titles per year.²¹ More than forty percent (35 editions) were individual editions of Pushkin’s tales (skazki), plus there were seven copies each of Poltava and The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka), five each of Evgenii Onegin and Boris Godunov.²² More than half (about sixty-four percent) of this corpus was published by Isakov, and almost forty percent of these were in the series “Classroom Library (Klassnaia biblioteka),” cheap annotated booklets meant for use in high schools (srednie uchebnye zavedeniia) that were harshly criticized in the press.²³ At the same time, Russian composers helped keep Pushkin in the public eye with regular dramatizations based on his works, many of them made newly available by Annenkov’s and Gennadi’s editions. These included dramas, skazki, ballets, operas, and vaudevilles. To name just the operas that premiered between 1855-1880, these included: Dargomyzhskii’s Rusalka (1856) and The Stone Guest (Kamennyi gost’) (1872), Cui’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazskii plennik) (1858), Mussorgskii’s Boris Godunov (1874) and Chaikovskii’s Evgenii Onegin (1879).²⁴

12A prime example of the collective efforts of socio-semiotic cultural entrepreneurs to promote Pushkin was the one-volume edition of Pushkin published by the writer and journalist M. M. Stasiulevich in March, 1874. The publication, which launched the new “Russian Library” (Russkaia biblioteka) series, had the twin goals of spreading cultural literacy and to provide aid to victims of the famine in Samara of 1873-74. Copyright holder Isakov gave permission to use all of the prose and ten of eighty-five listy (printer’s sheets) of poetry from the “full works” of 1869-71. N. A. Nekrasov, P. A. Efremov, V. P. Gaevskii and Stasiulevich collectively undertook the editing (korrektura), with additional help from A. N. Pypin; P. N. Polevoi contributed a reworked version of his short biography of the poet. The typography (Stasiulevich’s) gave its services for free, A. I. Vargunin’s paper factory gave a five percent discount, and publisher A. F. Marks granted a fifty percent discount on Bristol paper (presumably for the frontispiece, Thomas Wright’s gravure of Pushkin of 1837); Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti (St. Petersburg News), Golos (Voice), Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) and Vestnik Evropy (The Herald of Europe), all printed advertisements for the edition gratis. The paperback volume cost 75 kopecks, as opposed to the 7 rubles 50 kopecks for Gennadi’s full works of 1869 (in contrast, the “Classroom Library” booklets cost from 20 to 50 kopecks), and had a press run of 10,000 copies.

13The goal of the “Russian Library” series was “to make accessible to the public the works of our best and greatest writers with selections from their works that best constitute their fame and which collectively can have the greatest enlightening effect (samoe prosvetitel’skoe vliianie) on readers’ minds.”²⁵ The series may thus be seen as specifically meant to construct a national canon, and this, the maiden volume in the series, explicitly sponsored Pushkin as the Russian national poet. The principle of choosing works for inclusion was explicit:

If one wanted to limit oneself only to those works in which Pushkin’s genius displayed itself wholly independently, drawing strength from within itself and from its people (narod), with no admixture of foreign influence (for instance, of Byronism) - in a word, in which Pushkin himself could thus serve as the model - then there would hardly be many gaps in the selection of works we have chosen. And this was the very principle that served as basis for chosing material for this volume dedicated to Pushkin. Here he appears in the highest sense of the word the national poet, a poet of his people, of his age, subservient to his genius alone.²⁶

14A central aspect of Pushkin’s elevation to the status of national poet emphasized here was that he proved Russia’s cultural independence, a response to the crisis of cultural identity that had erupted during his lifetime.²⁷ Stasiulevich’s volume also testifies to Pushkin’s works that were to be foregrounded as the basic canon.²⁸ The edition also illustrates Philip Lejeune’s idea that the “fringe of the printed text”—what Gérard Genette named the “paratext,”—everything that frames a text, from cover, to title page, the name of the editor and publisher, forewords, prefaces, illustrations, appendices and so on—“in reality commands the entire reading.”²⁹ In addition to Wright’s portrait and Polevoi’s biography, Stasiulevich’s volume also included Gogol’s and Belinskii’s remarks on Pushkin. It thus could be seen as a prototypical primer on Pushkin as national poet.³⁰

15Furthermore, Stasiulevich offered a very clear description of the readers to whom his edition was addressed. Full works, he wrote in the foreword, were accessible only to the few, and put their emphasis on maximum fullness; in lieu of this there were only school anthologies, of limited interest for a general audience. A collection of easily accessible, well selected works was the answer, as long it was inexpensive. The target audience was

that significant part of our society that is forced to be satisfied with present-day literature, those who, after leaving school, lose all connection with native writing, and with those works which, if they were right there at hand could have educational influence and further the development of literary taste. Without question, everyone agrees that Pushkin should be put at the head of such a project […]. Such an edition, together with the advantages of low price and accessibility, can also have the advantage of being a guide to the extensive full works, where the main thing is completeness, so that together with the best works there are others from the same pen without distinction.³¹

16At this transitional moment—between the attacks on Pushkin of the sixties and his public triumph in the eighties—the principal aim of the publication was to promote and enhance appreciation of Pushkin rather than to introduce new readers to him. It was aimed at what we might call cultural literacy, addressed both to intelligentsia readers and those who had finished school but had an otherwise limited cultural background and sophistication.

17Paul Debreczeny has described the kind of reader Stasiulevich was addressing—arguably the main contingent of Pushkin’s readers in the nineteenth century—as the “middle segment of society” or “middlebrow” readers. In Pushkin’s day this had been composed “mainly of the lower echelons of the tsarist bureaucracy but also of other groups, such as merchants, craftsmen, and the lesser gentry” as well as “people with cultural aspirations, capable of embracing new asthetic norms”; after the middle of the century and the Emancipation this segment “grew in number and complexity.” Debreczeny suggests that by the end of the century

the most crucial group, upon whose interaction with both the elite and the masses all cultural communication depended, was the white-collar working class with its ideology of “service to the people.” If the middle-brow culture of Pushkin’s time had been engendered by a trend in imaginative literature—the romantic movement—its equivalent at the turn of the century was the child of a branch of literary criticism.³²

18The branch of literary criticism refered to is that of Belinskii and the so-called ‘radical critics’ of the sixties, and, significantly, their view of Pushkin during the period in question was rather ambiguous. If, on the one hand, Pushkin’s nomination for national poet had been rejected, on the other hand, other critics, especially N. V. Chernyshevskii, acknowledged and even embraced Pushkin’s usefulness for pedagogical purposes.³³ Hence B. S. Meilakh, seconded by Debreczeny, could conjecture that during the seventies “propagandists of the populist era” probably played a role in bringing Pushkin to the peasantry despite their admiration of Pisarev.³⁴

19The various organizational scandals leading up to the Pushkin Celebration in June, 1880, followed by its huge success, produced a flood of publicity, especially in newspapers, which covered it intensely.³⁵ The Russian telegraph agencies that had come into their own during the Russo-Turkish War of the late 1870’s helped spread the news of the celebration to the far corners of the empire. At the same time, publication of Pushkin’s works continued to be mostly limited to the handful of works published for school use and to reprints of individual texts in newspapers and thick journals that had been newly published in the various full works. In September, 1879, the well-known pedagogue and publicist Viktor Ostrogorskii, already looking ahead to the opening of the Moscow monument, complained that it was a “national disgrace” that “it has now been about a year that it is impossible to buy Pushkin at any price in Petersburg or Moscow.”³⁶ The situation did not substantially change until the copyright ran out in 1887, at which time it became abundantly clear what a tremendous pent-up demand had been built up.³⁷

20In the early 1860’s, in conversation with the book publisher M. O. Vol’f, the young journalist A. S. Suvorin had told him that “Had I the capital, I would flood the book market with a huge quantity of books. It is strange that capital in Russia is so indifferent to publishing; indeed, now, after the liberation of the peasants, a huge field has opened up for Russian books.”³⁸ By the end of the 1870’s, with the acquisition of the newspaper Novoe vremia (New Times), Suvorin was able to realize his plans, and when the copyright ran out on Pushkin he was ready—perhaps not ready enough, because on the day after the copyright ended—January 30, 1887, there were something close to a riot in the Novoe vremia bookstore on Nevskii Prospect, which was cleaned out and left in total disarray. As I have written elsewhere,

In the fifty years after Pushkin’s death, the total number of copies of his works sold had not exceeded 50- or 60,000; of these only an estimated 20- or 30,000 remained in private hands; the rest were in libraries or had not survived. This one day, asserts I. Ia. Aizenshtok, did more for Pushkin’s fame than all of the monuments erected in Moscow, Petersburg and Odessa put together. In Petersburg alone, 10,000 copies of Pushkin’s “complete works” [in Suvorin’s edition]—100,000 in all—were sold. During the next two to three days, five new editions came out, each of about 40,000 copies; the next ones were published in even bigger numbers. These figures refer only to the various “complete works”; the publisher L. N. Pavlenkov, writing in 1888, counted up 163 different Pushkin titles in the previous year, totaling 1,481,275 copies; and my own calculations, based on a Soviet bibliography published in 1949,³⁹ indicate that Pavlenkov may have been short by as much as a million. Spearheaded by the surging demand for Pushkin’s works, Russian publishing by absolute or relative standards expanded at a rate fantastic for any country.⁴⁰

21The years 1887-1917 became the age of “mass-published” Pushkin.⁴¹ Freed from copyright restrictions,

the specialization of editions began. With the development of new typographical capabilities the appearance of books changed and artistic editions began to appear. Publishers and booksellers faced the responsibility and challenge of having to print more copies, lowering prices, and finding new ways of distributing books of Pushkin.⁴²

22Publishing Pushkin became a major undertaking by the Russian printing houses as well as by a throng of socio-semiotic cultural entrepreneurs, and makes clear the connection between the distribution of Pushkin’s works and his canonization as national poet. All of the major publishers got in on the Pushkin boom as did bookshops, newspapers, journals and philanthropic societies. The latter included the Society for Spreading Literacy, established by Turgenev with Annenkov’s participation; the Society of Lovers of Russian Letters, that had organized the 1880 celebration; Committees for Spreading Literacy in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kharkiv (Khar’kov); and the Literary Fund (the Society to Support Needy Literary Men and Scholars, established in 1859). With the profits from its 1887 publications (including 10,000 volumes of a seven-volume edition edited by P. O. Morozov and printed by Suvorin) and other jubilee activities, the “Litfond” created a “Pushkin fund” (kapital imeni A. S. Pushkina) to fund further undertakings.⁴³ Jeffrey Brooks has noted the importance of non-commercial publishing ventures in the publishing and promotion of the ‘classics’ during this period: “Russian educators, intellectuals, and activists of various perspectives sought to bring Russian literature to the people either by publishing their own inexpensive editions of works they favored or [as in the case of the 1887 Morozov edition –M. L.] by purchasing this material from enterprising commercial publishers.”⁴⁴

23Pushkin’s works, especially full and collected editions, often featured copious illustrations—portraits of Pushkin, especially the 1827 portrait by V. A, Tropinin and the engraving by Wright; pictures of Opekushin’s Pushkin monument and of the 1880 Jubilee; images of Natal’ia Nikolaevna (Pushkin’s wife); of the duel; of Pushkin’s grave; facsimiles of Pushkin’s letters, drawings and manuscripts; as well as illustrations of his works. One typical hefty paperback one-volume “full works” put out in 1887 by the “bookseller-publisher” S. I. Leukhin advertises itself on the title page as “An edition intended for the entire Russian people” and cost 2 rubles. It includes a series of color lithographs (khromolito-grafirovannye kartiny) illustrating Pushkin’s works and a sepia copy of Kiprenskii’s portrait on the cover framed with garlands. The back cover features images of Pushkin’s grave, the Moscow monument, a depiction of the duel, and in the center an illustration of “Lady Into Lassie” (“Baryshnia-krest’ianka”). Two of its twelve parts may be labeled paratext. The opening section includes a lengthy biography (treating Pushkin’s “childhood, residence at the Lycée, poetic activity, duel and death”) plus eyewitness accounts and documents concerning his last days. The final section contains extensive material concerning the Pushkin Celebration of 1880⁴⁵ as well as on the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of his death; this section includes lengthy excerpts from the press, speeches (including Dostoevskii’s famous oration), historical materials, and a large number of poems on Pushkin, his death, and on the commemorations themselves. These materials literally frame Pushkin’s works and constitute almost ten percent of the 1000-page edition.

24Suvorin, like the other major publishers of the day, used a variety of means to reach the broadest possible public.

He published some of his books in two editions: in a large press run for the mass reader and in a small run meant for bibliophiles that were souvenir [podarochnye] editions, beautifully produced and on deluxe paper. This is also how he published Pushkin’s full works, which in the mass edition cost 1.5 rubles, and in the deluxe edition, on various kinds of paper (rag, “elephant,” Holland, Whatman paper), from 20 to 100 rubles.⁴⁶

25At the high end of the market, there began to appear luxury illustrated “bibliophile” editions as well as novelty miniature ones.⁴⁷ At the low end, following the example of the “Classroom Library” series mentioned earlier, book production in 1887 (and through the end of the century) included a large variety of inexpensive “popular” (obshchedostupnye) editions: editions “for family and school”; “for popular and school libraries”; for soldiers; as well as for youth, preschoolers, elementary, middle school and older students. Series included the “Illustrated Pushkin Library” (Illiustrirovannaia Pushkinskaia biblioteka) (Pavlenkov), “Parish Library” (Prikhodskaia biblioteka), “Little Ones’ Library” (Biblioteka kroshki) (F. Ioganson, in Kiev), “Completely Accessible Library of Russian Writers” (Obshchedostupnaia biblioteka russkikh pisatelei) (E. Fesenko, in Odessa), “Universal Library” (Vseobshchaia biblioteka) (Ia. S. Samoilov), and the “Inexpensive Library” (Deshevaia biblioteka) (Suvorin). However, here and later in the century there was often a lack of distinction between editions for schoolchildren, editions for peasants (the narod) and children’s books.

26In response to Dostoevskii’s speech at the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, Ivan Aksakov had declared that “Even yesterday it could have seemed to be a question whether Pushkin is a narodnyi poet or not; even yesterday the doubt was expressed here whether it was possible to give him the name of natsional’nyi poet; now, thank God, that question is irrelevant, finished forever…”⁴⁸ If in 1880 the question of Pushkin’s status as national poet had been in some sense definitively resolved, which the boom in publishing confirmed, various parties still vied to make use of his high prestige in order to turn reading Pushkin into what de Certeau called “an orthodox literality,” that is, to shape and control the growing mass reading public and Russian national identity. These groups and institutions included the school establishment, which played a major role in associating literacy with Pushkin.⁴⁹ “In the capacity of an ‘official’ classic, who loved the people and at the same time was faithful to tsar and Orthodox faith, he [Pushkin] was [after 1887] represented in gimnazia textbooks and in courses at higher educational establishments.”⁵⁰ The official church, at first skeptical, played an ever-greater role in espousing Pushkin, as did the tsarist government whose censors continued to try and regulate Pushkin’s image.⁵¹ The state, of course, controlled both the Orthodox Church and the educational establishment, and sponsored the official 1899 Pushkin Jubilee, which was of unprecedented empire-wide scope.⁵² Intelligentsia socio-semiotic entrepreneurs, including the growing ranks of Pushkinisty as well as poets, artists, composers, sculptors and playwrights, also continued to create and debate, and there were sporadic attempts to erode the state-sponsored image of the poet.⁵³

27The doubt Aksakov referred to concerning “whether it was possible to give [Pushkin] the title of national poet” had been expressed by Turgenev, who in his speech at the Pushkin Celebration had recalled the problem that Belinskii had posed—the gap between Pushkin as embodiment of the national spirit and the fact that he remained largely unknown to the nation (the narod).⁵⁴ Notably, if by the 1897 census the Russian literacy rate had reached 30 percent, ⁵⁵ that means that almost 39 million people remained illiterate. If, on the one hand, V. E. Iakushkin could write that “on the fiftieth anniversary of Pushkin’s death [1887] his works became public property (obshchestvennoe dostoianie)” ⁵⁶—and not only in the sense of the lapse in copyright—; on the other hand, an investigative committee from Iaroslavl’ in 1899 could declare that despite the fact that one could find “enthusiastic fans [of Pushkin] in the folk milieu,” the Russian people as a whole “hardly knows Pushkin, and does not value him, primarily due to illiteracy, the cost of books, the lack of village libraries or the lack of Pushkin’s works in those libraries.”⁵⁷ As the educator K. A. Koz’min, the editor of a three-volume graded school edition of Pushkin, wrote in 1882, “What’s the purpose of the recently erected monument-built-by-hands in Moscow when the narod has no idea whatsoever of [Pushkin’s] monument ‘not-built-by-hands’?”⁵⁸

28The ‘mass reader’ of Pushkin during the period in question remained and remains diffuse and puzzling, difficult to describe as an “imagined community.” This is understandable insofar as attempts to comprehend newly literate readers came from without and almost inevitably reflected the biases of the (literate, cultured) researcher.⁵⁹ Becoming literate meant to enter Pushkin’s world, to assume a modern Russian national identity.⁶⁰ The problem as stated by a radical critic of the 1860’s was that “Our people cannot understand our poetic propaganda because we speak two different languages, we live in two different spheres, and in our mental interests we do not have one—yes, not even one—point of contact.”⁶¹ Opinions were divided among critics and early investigators of the question “What Should be Read to the People?” (Chto chitat’ narodu?), and the issue was only conclusively decided by force in favor of Pushkin and the Russian classics after the Revolution.⁶² The question “Chto chitat’ narodu?” that might be interpreted as “what the people should read,” almost always meant what should be read to them, suggesting how the still mostly non-literate population should be ^directed.63 Opinions were divided between those who believed that this population required a new kind of literature “for the people,” adapted to its special needs (for example, the type Tolstoi wrote and advocated), and those socio-semiotic Pushkin entrepreneurs like Stasiulevich who believed that intelligentsia values should be transmitted to the masses via the structures associated with the national poet—including celebrations, monuments, artworks, press exposure, and, perhaps most of all, widespread publication of his works.

29What conclusions may we draw concerning the question how the institution of national poet as reflected in the publication of Pushkin’s works influenced reading in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century? On the one hand, publishing Pushkin as national poet functioned as a tool, a means to create and shape a readership and its identity as a “reading public”; on the other, Pushkin’s elevation to national poet may be seen as a result of the increasing demand for his works on the part of a reading public whose identity at the same time was being shaped by them. This feedback loop was created by a complex interaction of factors and forces. As a tool, an instrument of power, the publication and propagation of Pushkin’s works became an arena of contention among several groups. First were the “semiotic entrepreneurs” like Turgenev, Stasiulevich, and many of the Pushkinisty, whose goals we may characterize as liberal humanist; this was the group that was largely responsible for the Pushkin Celebration of 1880. Second we may consider the intelligentsia in its oppositional aspect, and in particular the devotees of the radical critics of the 1860’s, who despite some reservations, recognized Pushkin’s pedagogical, enlightenment, value; an important subgroup of this category were Russian schoolteachers.⁶⁴ By the end of the century the tsarist state (which had long concerned itself with policing Pushkin’s public image by means of censorship), recognized the ideological value of promoting Pushkin as an imperial national poet; this led to a new emphasis on him as a patriotic and Orthodox figure. These efforts clearly furthered the great expansion of readership, but to what extent they resulted in a reading public that represented, at least in embryonic form, a national public sphere, was and is open to serious question. Through the end of the century, and beyond, the Russian reading public (and nascent public opinion) remained amorphous and disunified, segregated into factions each of which had “its” own Pushkin.⁶⁵ While there may have been sporadic attempts to shake Pushkin’s authority (e.g. note 53), his position as national poet became so strongly rooted that, as Aksakov stated, the question was “finished forever.”⁶⁶