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Reading Russia, vol. 2

 | 
Damiano Rebecchini
, 
Raffaella Vassena

Part II. The Long Nineteenth Century

What and How Russian Students Read in School, 1840–19171

Roman Leibov et Alexey Vdovin

Texte intégral

1. Purpose, Methods and Material of the Study

  • 1   This study was implemented within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Res (...)
  • 2   In some sections of this chapter, we also take into account the reading of technical school stude (...)

1The main purpose of this chapter is to describe the evolution of the reading practices of students of Russian gymnasiums and technical schools (real’nye uchilishcha) in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since there was no democratic educational system across classes before the reforms of 1915-1918, the students we consider are, first and foremost, boys of noble and petty-bourgeois descent and of eight to seventeen years of age.2 To describe the reading ‘repertoire’ of these students, we will turn to sources of various types. On the one hand, it is necessary to account for normative texts (curricula, textbooks and methodological materials, readers). Yet, on the other hand, we should not lose sight of potential (and fairly frequent) discrepancies between such norms and real social reading practices which implemented such norms to differing degrees. This forces us to turn to another type of source: various kinds of ego-texts. At this point, however, the researcher faces a wide range of challenges. Since diaries and correspondence of children and adolescents were published rarely—only in exceptional cases—the main type of ego-texts available for study is the memoir. To this end, we have compiled and reviewed a small database of Russian memoirs of the nineteenth century which serves as the basis for this part of our study and includes 56 memoir sources, covering the period from the 1810s to the 1910s. Memoirs of the second half of the nineteenth century, which give us a more or less adequate picture of students’ reading, are better represented within this database; unfortunately, the early memoirs are fewer and therefore lead to less conclusive results.

2In addition to the usual complexities in the study of memoirs related to our temporal distance from these texts and, more generally, to the issue of reliability, the researcher of the nineteenth century contends with a special difficulty: a distorted selection. Published largely in the Soviet period, memoirs dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century are clearly oriented to the demands of the Soviet era and are largely distorted (even more so than in other cases) by its language and expectations. In these memoirs, information about reading in Populist and Marxist circles is presented much more extensively than data about reading at home and reading for pleasure.

3To compensate, at least in part, for this bias, we have to refer to another type of source: contemporary studies of gymnasium reading and the reading of adolescents, which are not very numerous, but still notable. Unfortunately, they all belong to the later period and are based on private observations by the authors and governed by limited data from surveys and questionnaires.

4If we try to describe the ‘reader’s menu’ of Russian pupils qualitatively, it becomes obvious that its pragmatics and repertoire are interdependent and vary between periods, between age groups, and between socio-cultural strata.

5Given the relatively high price of books in the nineteenth century, we should consider, first and foremost, the origin of books which fell into the hands of schoolchildren and briefly characterize these various “reading fields.”

6The first possible point of origin was the family home library. Obviously, this source was pertinent only for the children of wealthy families (which corresponds, more or less, to our research field). Here parents displayed various strategies. Some schoolchildren became familiar with books from family libraries before entering gymnasia or other schools, and some used them during their studies: parents could control or direct such reading, or they could leave the child to his own devices. In any case, common practices and censorship served as the only limits of this potential resource.

  • 3   Our approach here follows the so-called “Anthology Studies” in the English and American criticism (...)

7The main “reading field” we will discuss is the curricular one. Here, the sources were textbooks (readers [knigi dlia chteniia], anthologies [khrestomatii], required reading, etc.), organized according to educational programs or other normative guidelines. From the point of view of state control over children’s reading, this segment was compulsory (to varying degrees, of course, at different educational institutions). It formed the core of the literary canon and was the main object of teachers’ attention. Accordingly, this source will be the main object of our study. Of course, such a focus describes normalized expectations more than real practices, but the impact of “required reading” remains undeniable3.

8School libraries were another significant source of books. They allowed for some expansion of students’ reading beyond syllabi, although their content was also monitored (for more details on the use of school libraries, see section 4.1 of this chapter).

9Last but not least, we consider extracurricular reading, which was based on on public libraries of various types (which were accessible to high school students) and the free exchange of books between students. Both practices are often documented by sources.

10Here we should distinguish between two types of reading: recreational and self-educational. Recreational reading is unsystematic, and selection of reading materials is informed, in large part, by genre. The list of popular prose writers and texts of the nineteenth century, which we can draw from contemporary studies of children’s reading or memoirs, is quite obvious. In the 1840s-50s it consisted of novels by Ivan Goncharov, Dmitrii Grigorovich, Lev Tolstoi, Ivan Turgenev, Konstantin Masalskii, Mikhail Zagoskin, Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Elena Gan (E. R-va) and I.I. Lazhechnikov; the ballads of Friedrich Schiller, the prose of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Dumas (the father), Eugène Sue and Paul Féval (see Rebecchini, “Reading Foreign novels,” in the present volume).

11In the 1860s and 1870s, the most mentioned authors include Fedor Dostoevskii, Nikolai Nekrasov, Nikolai Pomialovskii, Innokentii Omulevskii, Fedor Reshetnikov, Gleb Uspenskii, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Among them also rank foreign authors—Jules Verne, Friedrich Spielhagen, Victor Hugo, Gustave Aimard, James F. Cooper, Mayne Reid, Ruffini, Ferry.

12In the 1880s-90s, new names appeared—Émile Zola, Ieronim Iasinskii (under the pseudonym “M. Belinskii”), Vladimir Korolenko, Daniil Mordovtsev, Semen Nadson, Konstantin Staniukovich, Andrei Novodvorskii (“Osipovich”) and Aleksandr Sheller-Mikhailov. At the turn of the century and in the first years to follow, Stevenson and Kipling, Chekhov and Bryusov, Bal’mont and Maupassant began to appear in students’ reading lists.

  • 4   Works of this kind include the following: “O chtenii knig iunkerami voennykh uchilishch i vospita (...)
  • 5   I. A. Aleshintsev, “Chto chitaiut…”

13More accurate, albeit more localized, descriptions of readers’ preferences can be found in the studies of children’s and adolescents’ reading, based on surveys or the observations of teachers and librarians.4 Presented here, for example, is the repertoire of Pskov schoolchildren’s summer reading in 1909.5

Table 1. Summer reading of Pskov schoolchildren in 1909

Authors

Number of readers

Gogol’

289

Pushkin

244

Turgenev

177

L. Tolstoi

129

Lermontov

119

Goncharov

101

Charskaia

94

Mayne Reid

67

Verne

65

Dostoevskii

64

Chekhov

64

Grigorovich

46

Zhelikhovskaia

45

Danilevskii

40

Sienkiewicz

39

Twain

37

Staniukovich

35

S. T. Aksakov

29

Sheller-Mikhailov

29

Nemirovich-Danchenko

25

Gor’kii

24

Dickens

22

Andreev

less than 20

Artsybashev

less than 20

Garshin

less than 20

Griboedov

less than 20

Zhukovskii

less than 20

Zagoskin

less than 20

Ibsen

less than 20

Kuprin

less than 20

Korolenko

less than 20

Kol’tsov

less than 20

Lazhechnikov

less than 20

Leskov

less than 20

Mamin-Sibiriak

less than 20

Nadson

less than 20

Nekrasov

less than 20

Nikitin

less than 20

Ostrovskii

less than 20

Pisemskii

less than 20

Pomialovskii

less than 20

Potapenko

less than 20

Saltykov-Shchedrin

less than 20

Vl. Solov’ev

less than 20

A. K. Tolstoi

less than 20

G. Uspenskii

less than 20

Fonvizin

less than 20

W. Shakespeare

less than 20

G. Hauptmann

a few

H. Heine

a few

M. Maeterlinck

a few

O. Mirbeau

a few

W. Scott

a few

G. Ebers

a few

14Of course, this list is not complete and does not include the ephemeral literature of the tabloids, which was usually anonymous or semi-anonymous. A list of such texts is given in the same article and includes popular serial books about detectives and robbers (Sherlock Holmes, Nat Pinkerton, Nick Carter, Ethel King, Pat Conner, John Wilson, Putilin, Leichtweiß, Van’ka Kain) and “shockers” In a Daze of Love (V chadu liubvi), Pink Letter (Rozovoe pis’mo), Open Grave (Razrytaia mogila), Love of a Villain (Liubov’ zlodeia), Secret of the Heart (Taina serdtsa), Broken Life (Razbitaia zhizn’), First Love (Pervaia liubov’), In the Chains of Love (V okovakh liubvi), Under the Waves of Imatra (Pod volnami Imatry), In the City Fog (V stolichnom tumane)—as well as the adjacent Sanin (Sanin) by M. Artsybashev.

15In the first type of home reading, texts would reach the reader, as a rule, by horizontal social exchange: pupils would share either physical texts or reading recommendations. This kind of collective reflection became a sort of game. The well-known tendency of children and adolescents to confuse reality and fiction could often lead to various kinds of real-life projects, following in the footsteps of, for example, Chekhov’s schoolchildren’s escape to America.

16The second type—self-educational reading—is often based on a more or less rigid canon which emerged in Russia in the era of the Great Reforms and was connected to the alternative culture of the intelligentsia. This kind of reading developed not so much via loose horizontal forms of communication as through political circles. Such circles represented a sort of alternative school, where the students studied texts recommended by a senior circle leader or by a self-education manual. Here we should note that extracurricular reading can be divided into two types, which focus on fiction and nonfiction texts, respectively. It is also notable that novels could appear on the reading lists of local circles, but these were, most frequently, ideological ones (on the reading of What Is to Be Done? [Chto delat’?] see section 4.2.) Otherwise, novels that appeared on reading lists were those which circle members considered ideologically significant. (Thus, Turgenev’s Fathers and Children [Ottsy i deti] was merely an addendum to articles by Antonovich and Pisarev.)

17The texts circulating in revolutionary circles took on an almost sacred aura, which, of course, their prohibition and inaccessibility did much to facilitate. In the memoirs of N. A. Morozov we find an episode describing the author’s first introduction to the world of illegal literature. This introduction was a kind of revolutionary initiation, revealing a new reality to the hero:

For the next time they even promised me banned publications from abroad: an issue of the magazine “Forward!,” edited by Lavrov, and Sokolov’s Renegades.

You can imagine how excited I was as I returned with this bundle! Every time I saw a policeman on the street, I was simultaneously both scared and joyful, and I mentally told him:

“Oh, if only you know, overseer, what I have here in my bundle, what you would say then!”

I pounced upon these brand-new for me publications with the greatest greed and devoured both books in one evening. It was like a whole new world had opened before my eyes, and this new world was so wonderful and unexpected! Renegades—a book full of poetry and enthusiastic romanticism, which I especially liked at that time, a book which exalted self-sacrifice in the name of the ideal—just put me in seventh heaven. In “Forward!,” what I especially liked were not the places where the facts were stated—it seemed to me that the same kind of thing could be found in the newspapers—but the passages of proclamation, appeals to the active struggle for freedom.

  • 6   N. A. Morozov, Povesti moei zhizni. Memuary, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1965), vol. 1, 63.

I reread these pages several times and virtually memorized them. Their bold and direct language, the pouring out of reproaches to earthly kings—all this seemed to me a manifestation of some extraordinary, ideal heroism.6

18The boundaries between curricular and extracurricular reading were quite distinct, although these spheres could intersect. Moreover, books from extracurricular (and not fully approved) lists could enter schools, often through educators themselves. Remarkable and almost emblematic in this respect is a fragment of the memoirs of M.I. Semenov, describing the Samara technical school in the era of Alexander III. Among the teachers who contributed to the boys’ development, Semenov mentions:

  • 7   M. I. Semenov, Revoliutsionnaia Samara 80-90-kh godov (Kuibyshev, 1940), 19.

Pavel Andreevich Ososkov, a teacher of natural science would often read [...] articles by Pisarev, Lavrov (Mirtov) and Mikhailovskii during his classes, accompanied by eloquent, lengthy explanations. After his speeches debates would be held. Just in case the school director appeared, Ososkov would always have the book of some naturalist, like Brehm, Garvig, etc., under the book he was really reading. And if his superiors appeared, he would deftly take out this book and continue reading on a purely curricular topic.7

2. Norms and Techniques of Textual Interpretation in Syllabi, Educational Literature, and Students’ Essays

19The issue of how pupils were taught to read and understand texts in nineteenth-century Russian schools presents an inevitable methodological difficulty. The sources at our disposal (memoirs, diaries, and essays) are clearly insufficient in order to fully reconstruct the situation. In this section, we will try to consider the problem of “how pupils read (and were taught to read)” from three interrelated perspectives, which are based on available sources and verified reconstruction procedures:

1) How did official (ministerial) syllabi define the goals and methods of reading fictional texts? What were the “blind spots” in reading and interpreting them?

2) What standard methods of interpretation developed throughout the nineteenth century and how did they supplant each other or coexist? Can it be said that particular teachers developed their own, individual methods of interpretation?

3) What can students’ surviving essays tell us about standard interpretations of texts and deviations from them?

  • 8   V. P. Ostrogorskii, Iz istorii moego uchitel’stva: Kak ia sdelalsia uchitelem (St. Petersburg, 18 (...)

20The evolution of interpretation methods can be seen as a series seamless transitions from one reading paradigm to another, beginning with the appearance of the first educational literature in the 1830s-40s and continuing up to the emergence of the more scientific principles underlying the Soviet “methodology of teaching literature in schools” in the 1900s. However, the real process was somewhat intermittent; different methods could coexist for decades, since the Ministry of Education regulated only the most general principles of textual analysis. In students’ memoirs we find evidence of the simultaneous existence of both traditional and innovative practices of teaching literature, sometimes in one and the same gymnasium. For example, V.P. Ostrogorskii, who would become a teacher himself, wrote about the 3rd Petersburg Gymnasium of 1853-58, where—alongside lessons in the routine scholastic techniques of the “rhetorical era”—were those of Vladimir Stoiunin, a reformer of literary pedagogy. For students, Stoiunin’s classes were a breath of fresh air.8 We should note that that some methods of outstanding teachers would later become the basis for official ministerial programs (for example, those of A. D Galakhov and F. I Buslaev in the 1847-1860s and V. V. Sipovskii and I. F. Annenskii in 1901-1905).

  • 9   J. Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993), 6-10.
  • 10   I. Hunter, Culture and Government. The Emergence of Literary Education (London, 1988), 3-4.
  • 11   Ibid., 3.
  • 12   Ibid., 4.
  • 13   Ibid., 152.

21Methods of literary interpretation in imperial high schools should be seen as a practice inscribed into three broader institutional frameworks. First, literary education was to obey educational policy and reproduce social order.9 Moreover, since the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of European states recognized literary education as a tool for the education and indoctrination of citizens (or subjects) of emerging nations.10 As Ian Hunter believes, “the reading and criticism of literature lost their function as the aesthetico-ethical practice of a minority caste, and acquired a new deployment and function as an arm of the emergent governmental educational apparatus.”11 Hunter demonstrates how an earlier paradigm of learning Latin and Greek grammar and reading the ancient authors was replaced in Britain with the modern literary education based on special techniques of literary criticism that is now compulsory in schools. The new educational paradigm integrated aesthetics and ethics, a “concern for individual self-expression with new techniques of supervision and discipline operating at the level of the population.”12 According to Hunter, the purpose of teaching literature in schools was to shape moral qualities of the citizenry rather than to institutionalize the authority of literature and its expressive possibilities.13

22Hunter does not distinguish in his analysis between elementary and high schools, despite the obvious differences in students’ ages and, consequently, their response to literature. Still, Hunter’s overall explanation of the internal machinery of schooling sounds convincing and allows for the problematization of similar processes in the Russian Empire.

  • 14   See J. Guillory, “Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines,” in A. Anderson, J. Va (...)
  • 15   Guillory, Cultural Capital, 35.

23The second important context which influenced methods of textual interpretation in school was the conflict or interaction of two disciplinary fields—that of university science and the younger field of pedagogy, both of which tried to dictate their agendas to high schools.14 Finally, the third frame is a much narrower one, which, as per Guillory, can be called the “pedagogic imaginary.” This context entails not only the specific methodological and didactic attitudes of teachers, but also the cultural and political implications of the pedagogical discourse of the time and teachers’ collective views of their closeness to tradition or breaks with it.15

24From the 1830s to the 1900s, the main trend in techniques of textual interpretation was characterized by a gradual shift from a rhetorical (“poetics” and “theory of fine art”) to hermeneutical paradigm, followed by, at the end of the century, another shift to a historicist one. If in the 1820s-50s the literary work was understood primarily as an element of a rhetorical system, a hierarchy of styles and genres, then in the second half of the nineteenth century, school pedagogy began to interpret it as a system which simultaneously contains a certain ethical and aesthetic potential, yet is also inscribed in the historical and cultural context (“artistic movement”).

  • 16   “Uchebnye plany predmetov, prepodavaemykh v muzhskikh gimnaziiakh Ministerstva narodnogo prosvesh (...)

25During the second half of the century, literature was still not an autonomous school subject and was taught as a part of the Russian language course. The subordinate position of literature and the very purpose of its study, as per the ministerial programs of 1852, 1872, 1890, 1905 and 1912, unambiguously indicate its derivation from the program for the study of Russian language. Characteristically, in the gymnasium program of 1872, the purpose of the study of literature in the high school was formulated as such: to study the “Russian language in its stylistic and historical-literary development”.16 The lack of disciplinary independence and the struggle for its autonomy between university academics and the pedagogical elite in the second half of the nineteenth century explain why techniques for textual interpretation were initially underdeveloped and sometimes appeared on the periphery of the educational system (in technical or commercial schools) or as an import from other countries, as was the case with Ludwig Eckardt’s method, promoted by Skopin and Ostrogorskii (see below).

  • 17 On the brief history of German hermeneutics in the nineteenth century, see J. Zimmerman, “F.D.E. (...)
  • 18   V.F. Chertov, Russkaia slovesnost’ v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole. Izdanie 2-e, ispravlennoe i dopoln (...)

26The general disciplinary and social framework of school literature can illuminate the circumstances under which the study of the literary work and its historico-literary contexts gradually migrated to the center of school pedagogy. The first unified ministerial programs regulating the interpretation of texts appeared in Russia in 1852. At that time, the disciplinary framework derived from the university theory of literature and journalistic criticism. If the systematic approach to textual understanding owed much to hermeneutics and the philosophical aesthetic (F. Schlegel, Hegel, Schelling, F. Ast, K. Bachmann and their followers in Russian universities), the principle of contextualization arose, in turn, under the influence of literary criticism (N. Polevoi, I. Kireevskii, V. Belinskii, S. Shevyrev).17 In the 1840s, the “pressure” of criticism was still weak; it manifested itself in full force only in the 1860s. Thus, in the 1840s university theory still dominated, as is made clear by the fact that the authors of the first ministerial textbooks on the theory and history of literature were graduates of Moscow University, among them Mikhail Chistiakov (Course in the Theory of Literature, 1847; Practical Guide to the Gradual Exercise in Composition, 1847) and Konstantin Zelenetskii (Professor at the Richelieu Lyceum in Odessa).18

  • 19 On Buslaev’s role, see Chertov, Russkaia slovesnost’ v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole, 80-89.
  • 20   F. I. Buslaev, O prepodavanii otechestvennogo iazyka [1844] (Moscow, 1867), 115.

27The functions of literary education which were indicated in the new curricula emphasized the subordinate status of literature in the later programs of 1852, 1872, and 1890. The linguistic dominance of the 1852 program appeared under the influence of the university disciplinary field and, in a historico-linguistic key, owed much to the philology of Buslaev, the founder of Russian literary didactics.19 Buslaev called his method of textual analysis “philological explanation.” Modern historians of pedagogy have termed the method logical-stylistic, as students were to move from reading the text sentence by sentence with grammatical commentary to an understanding of the main idea (through retelling and reproduction). Although Buslaev criticized German educators for their overly philosophical approach to analyzing texts, he was himself influenced by German philosophy. He followed Wilhelm von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm’s linguistic philosophy, according to which grammar definitively reflects the aesthetics and philosophy of language.20

  • 21   A.D. Galakhov, F.I. Buslaev, Konspekt russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti dlia rukovodstva v voenno-uch (...)

28Buslaev’s procedures for working with the text would be reproduced in all programs until 1917; they included translation, transcription, compilation of an outline, composition, and so on. After 1852 this framework would acquire more modern methods: literary conversations and “readers’ conversations” (i.e. extracurricular discussions of literature, often with essays on a topic of the student’s choice), comparison of texts, and critical analysis.21

  • 22   See A. Vdovin, Kontsept “glava literatury” v russkoi kritike 1830-60-kh godov (Tartu, 2011), 90-9 (...)
  • 23   Reviewing the methods of teaching literature at the Third Moscow Gymnasium, Petr Vinogradov noted (...)

29Methods of textual understanding in the 1852 program, still under the disciplinary pressure of university philology, were almost independent of standard procedures of literary criticism. By the 1850s, such procedures, owing to Belinskii, had long since departed from the philosophical aesthetic and had adopted a historical method partly imported from Germany.22 It is reasonable to suppose that the demand for a “practical and historical” understanding of texts, according to “the historical course,” appeared in the 1852 program under Galakhov’s influence.23 At the same time, Galakhov and Buslaev warned against the unnecessary historicization of the course, calling for the study only of key authors such as Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, Zhukovskii, and Pushkin. With regard to, for example, the epic genre, Galakhov and Buslaev stipulated that teachers begin with Homer and then proceed to Tasso, followed by Mikhail Kheraskov’s epic “Rossiada” and the historical novels of Walter Scott.

  • 24   A. Galakhov, F. Buslaev, Konspekt russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, 8-9.

30Galakhov and Buslaev suggested Pushkin’s “The Covetous Knight” as a potential text for analysis. The text was chosen in order to explain the differences between prosaic and poetic works. The teacher was meant to draw the students’ attention to a concrete (non-allegorical) figurative expression of the idea of avarice, and then to examine its rendering in the “form” of the work. In fact, without using the term itself, Buslaev and Galakhov also touched upon the notion of literary typification: although Pushkin’s miser may have never existed, the author nonetheless presents greed so plausibly as to align the character with our general understanding of avarice. Thus, basic aesthetic concepts and key terms of drama (action, denouement, character) could be explained on the basis of Pushkin’s short play. The final step of analysis was the comparison of Pushkin’s text with another work on avarice.24

  • 25 Alongside Zelenetskii’s textbook, there existed an older one, authored by Ivan Peninskii, release (...)

31In the 1850s, there were no special manuals or textbooks where teachers and students could find actual samples of textual analysis. Zelenetskii’s four-part gymnasium course “Theory of Literature,” introduced by the Ministry, contained rhetoric, the theory of poetry and prose, and a short essay on the history of Russian literature, but did not explain exactly how to analyze or understand a particular text.25

  • 26   A. Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning: The Study of Literature at Secondar (...)
  • 27   Reut, “Sochineniia gimnazistov”, 35-36.
  • 28   Ibid., 36.

32We might find evidence of students’ methods of working with texts in their essays, but only the topics of such compositions have been saved in archives. As recent research has shown, the main form of teaching reading and hermeneutical skills was the so-called “literary conversations” established in Russian gymnasia in 1844. Until the middle of the 1860s, they allowed teachers to assign essays as homework.26 In his study of 1268 real topics and their evolution over 20 years in four educational districts (Kazan’, Petersburg, Kiev and Odessa), Aleksandr Reut finds that by the end of the 1850s the topics of the essays were increasingly associated with fiction rather than historical literature, and they increasingly demanded from students analysis of specific texts, rather than general arguments such as “the similarity between novel and epic.”27 Finally, if students were free to choose their own topics (as was the case, for example, in the Kazan’ Academic District), they were three times more likely to choose contemporary literature than the literature of the eighteenth century.28 Since literary conversations were of an extracurricular nature, and the topics of essays were not rigidly regulated by a single program, the majority of grammar school students wrote essays on the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov and, less frequently, on the poems of Zhukovskii, Krylov, Kozlov, Kol’tsov, Gogol’s prose, and Griboedov’s drama. There are several cases of essays on Aleksandr Ostrovskii (entitled “Modern Russian comedians”), Vladimir Sologub, Dmitrii Grigorovich, Goncharov, and even an imitation of Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches (as early as 1851!).

  • 29 E. L. Staferova, A.V. Golovnin i liberal’nye reformy v Prosveshchenii (Pervaia polovina 1860-kh g (...)

33The period between 1852 and 1864 is generally considered the most liberal in the history of the Russian imperial system of education. These years witnessed a significant step toward the further instrumentalization of literary education and, as a result, the emergence of a new ethical concept of pedagogy. The institutional preconditions for these developments were provided by the reforms of Aleksandr Golovnin, the minister of education from 1861 until 186629. He initiated and supervised the work on a new statute for high schools, adopted in 1864. The statute was the result of a mass-scale professional mobilization of the pedagogical community encouraged by the minister. The mobilization itself stimulated teachers’ congresses to approve major decisions in the sphere of education, thus recognizing the right of local pedagogical councils to modify the content of school curricula; contributed to the dissemination of modern European pedagogical methods; and promoted special pedagogical periodicals (such as the journal Teacher). The resulting democratization of the school system was reflected in the relative pluralization of the curriculum and easing of disciplinary control over teachers and students, as well as in the proliferation of textbooks for recently emancipated serfs and of anthologies of modern literature.

  • 30 On Stoiunin and Ostrogorskii methodology see Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Lea (...)

34During the 1860s, in parallel to techniques of working with texts that had become routine in the 1850s, the well-known teachers V. P. Skopin, V. Vodovozov, V. Ia. Stoiunin, and later V. P. Ostrogorskii carried out a revolution in the methods of scholastic textual interpretation. They developed the idea of studying literary texts for the sake of personal self-realization and self-improvement—vospitanie (Bildung). Their differences notwithstanding, all of them shared the idea of the exceptional pedagogical potential of a good literary text and its interpretation for the education of adolescents.30

  • 31   V. Ia. Stoiunin, O prepodavanii russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg, 1864), 244–45.
  • 32   Hunter, Culture and Government, 119.

35Stoiunin’s method was based on the discussion of behavioral and moral ideas communicated by a text rather than its aesthetic merits. Students were invited to put themselves in the shoes of literary characters and project their own life choices under the given circumstances (this was called a “conversation about life”).31 This approach is very close to what Hunter describes as the modern paradigm of literary education32. The double meaning of the important category of “character” (as a person’s identity and a book’s protagonist), and the purposeful nondistinction of the fictional world of the text and the real world, facilitated the creation of a pedagogical-rhetorical machine still at work in the Russian school.

  • 33   Stoiunin, O prepodavanii, 247–48.

36This model was most comprehensively presented in Stoiunin’s book On Teaching Russian Literature (1864), which went through eight editions over the next half century. Even a masterpiece of literature was approached in a utilitarian perspective: its aesthetic value was ignored, and the text was instead treated as material for the training of students’ attention, memory, perception, and moral judgment. Stoiunin transformed the traditional procedures of textual analysis, shifting the emphasis from the language of literary characters to their actions. He recommended discussing “the attitude of a person to the outside world,” to find out “in what way he perceives all external facts, in other words, his naive or sentimental, or satirical attitudes; how characters develop under the influence of the environment and life; and what the writer’s goals are and how he achieves these goals, in what ways he expresses his thought.”33

  • 34   V. Stoiunin, Rukovodstvo dlia teoreticheskogo izucheniia literatury po luchshim obraztsam russkim (...)
  • 35   A. Ia. Rotkovich, Voprosy prepodavaniia literatury. Istoriko-metodicheskie ocherki (Moscow, 1959) (...)

37It is easy to find the roots of such a utilitarian approach to text in the tradition of sociological literary criticism—in articles by Belinskii, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Nikolai Chernyshevskii. For example, Stoiunin directly borrows Dobroliubov’s concept of “real criticism” in his interpretation of Gogol’s The Overcoat. The teacher should be concerned only with the ethical component when analyzing the type of “little man” and his relationship with superiors. Stoiunin believed that the death of even such a miserable hero as Akakii Akakievich in Gogol’s short story was capable of awakening moral compassion in the most powerful people of this world, which means that there was hope for the improvement of the whole society34. Stoiunin’s approach did not receive universal acceptance in Russian schools because of its politically subversive potential, and he was fired from the Third Petersburg Gymnasium in 1871 and later from the Moscow Nikolaevskii Institute35. Despite the persecution of Stoiunin, his works were reprinted and, judging by memoirs and reports to the minister of public education, influenced many radical teachers. One can discern a tangible influence of his ideas and methods in the rhetoric of ministerial programs and the writings of authoritative pedagogues.

  • 36   J. Deinhardt, Der Gymnasial-Unterricht nach den wissenschaftlichen Anforderungen der jetzigen Zei (...)
  • 37   Since Ostrogorskii, in his introduction to the Russian translation of Eckardt’s book The Guide to (...)
  • 38   L. Ekkardt, Rukovodstvo k chteniiu poeticheskikh sochinenii s prilozheniem primechanii i kratkogo (...)

38Another innovative take on literary education shared the humanistic goal of Stoiunin’s method but differed from it in its approach to literature. Viktor Skopin and Viktor Ostrogorskii (Stoiunin’s disciple) propagated what can be called an aesthetic-ethical education. Skopin and Ostrogorskii valued reading for its ethical potential, allowing a child’s self-expression; however, they concentrated on aesthetic education through the development of the imagination and emotions. Skopin and Ostrogorskii borrowed this method from the German school of hermeneutics of Ludwig Eckardt, Johann Deinhardt, and August Lüben.36 Popularizing the new methods in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s37, Skopin and Ostrogorskii undermined Stoiunin’s utilitarianism by further developing Eckardt’s method, which was oriented toward “weakening the desire for narrow utilitarianism” through the powerful aesthetic impact of canonical texts.38

  • 39   We have found only one article on Eckardt’s activity (our thanks to professor Jens Herlth for his (...)
  • 40   See A. I. Nezelenov, “Nemetskii sposob prepodavaniia russkoi slovesnosti” [1877], in Istoriia lit (...)
  • 41   For example, one group of questions concerned the historical and literary context (“Do you know t (...)
  • 42   One more German textbook was extremely popular in Russia – Leo Cholevius’ Dispositionen und Mater (...)

39The German school of hermeneutics and its Russian followers operated on two notions: that of “conscious, critical reading” based on Friedrich Schlegel’s “understanding” criticism on the one hand, and university aesthetics on the other. Eckardt was, after all, a disciple of Friedrich Vischer, known as an influential follower of Hegel’s speculative aesthetics, which was tethered to the development of university pedagogy39. Eckardt understood reading as laborious work, akin to the modern technique of close reading. He and his Russian adepts demanded repeated reading of the text, imposing the rule of the hermeneutic circle, and constant checking of the correlation between the parts and the whole. Students’ reading was guided by extensive lists of questions (more than thirty for works of poetry and almost fifty for epics). Although such pedantic “German” methods provoked criticism from Russian teachers and accusations of scholasticism,40 most of these questions look quite meaningful even by the standards of modern-day literary criticism.41 Unlike his teacher Stoiunin, Ostrogorskii postulated the priority of aesthetic qualities of works of literature, which became the main object of analysis, displacing the historical and cultural aspects of the text. Taking the form of conversations about “pure artistry,” this analysis contributed to the sacralization of literary masterpieces included in the school canon as timeless samples of belles lettres, independent of any sociohistorical context. (It’s no wonder that Ostrogorskii’s textbooks and Russian translations of Eckardt’s works were recommended for dissemination in gymnasia under Dmitrii Tolstoi’s 1871 school statute, which focused on the decontextualized reading of texts)..42

40Thus, in the 1860s, at least three approaches to teaching Russian literature in high schools coexisted and competed with one another: Buslaev’s “philological explanation” adopted in the 1840s, the ethical pedagogy of Stoiunin, and the aesthetic hermeneutics of Skopin and Ostrogorskii. Despite their fundamental differences, the two latter methods both contributed to the sacralization of literature: Stoiunin’s by substituting for the Bible with fiction as the source of ethical standards, and Skopin-Ostrogorskii’s by absolutizing literary texts as pure aesthetic forms.

  • 43Glagol budushchego: Pedagogicheskii diskurs Ia.M. Neverova i rechevoe povedenie vospitannikov sta (...)
  • 44S”ezd uchitelei russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti v gimnaziiakh Kazanskogo uchebnogo okruga (Kazan’, (...)

41An echo of a new way of reading and understanding texts can be found in a rare example of a surviving composition of a Stavropol grammar school pupil, Vasilii Novomarievskii, entitled “The Daily Life [byt] of Merchants (based on Aleksandr Ostrovskii’s plays).” While clearly influenced by Nikolai Dobroliubov’s articles, Novomarievskii used the concept of “type” (widespread in criticism) in describing the powerful “tyrants” of Ostrovskii’s early plays (from It’s a Family Affair—We’ll Settle It Ourselves to The Storm). The student concluded his review of Russian merchants’ patriarchal mores in an optimistic key, referring to positive characters such as Kuligin and Liubim Tortsov and noting that education still managed to penetrate into the world of Ostrovskii’s plays.43 Clearly, in the liberal 1860s, before Tolstoi’s reforms, such works could still be valued highly by school authorities. Yet it is also clear that the majority of essays were far more traditional (“The Romantic movement in Vasilii Zhukovskii’s works,” “Distinctive features of Pushkin’s poetry,” “Distinctive features of some of Kol’tsov’s works,” and so on.44

  • 45   On the influence of Tolstoi’s reform on the formation of the literary canon, see: A. Vdovin, “‘Dm (...)

42Thus, the teaching of Russian literature in high schools by the end of the 1860s was characterized by an unprecedented pluralism of the curriculum and growing concern over its standardization. The new gymnasium statute of 1871 and the centralized literary curriculum introduced by the Ministry of Education in 1872 put an end to the former pluralism and inaugurated the first standard single program for studying Russian literature in the entire Russian Empire. Thus the reforms of the new minister, Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, established a model that, with some amendments, survived until 1919 and was called ‘Tolstoi’s classicism’. The new ministerial list of mandatory reading differed from various syllabi of the 1860s. It now included a wide range of Old-Russian texts and eliminated contemporary literature and texts on the history of Russian literature. The modern literature in the syllabus was at least thirty years old—poems by Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842).45

  • 46Uchebnye plany predmetov, prepodavaemykh v muzhskikh gimnaziiakh Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshc (...)
  • 47 This was a sign of the disciplinary influence of the cultural-historical school of Russian litera (...)

43The programs of 1872, 1877 and 1890 (with, however, some discrepancies) preserved traditional methods of working with texts: retelling the content, drawing up an outline, analysis of the characters and the mores of the depicted era, comparison of the text with similar works, analysis of the connections between the parts and the whole, analysis of the language and style, definition of the genre, and brief historical and biographical commentary.46 An important difference between the programs of the 1870s and those of the previous period was the ban on criticism in any form—aesthetic, psychological, or social. The program of 1890 permitted only a discussion of the literary movement to which the author belonged (“scholastic, false-classical, sentimental-romantic, artistic-national, real [real’noe]”).47

44Here are two examples of how real textbooks of 1872 and 1880 proposed to analyze texts. Polevoi’s popular textbook “A Russian Anthology with Analyses. Part 3. Upper Classes” (1872), recommended by the Ministry, offered the simplest method to analyze poems:

1) each text is followed by an explanation of difficult words;

2) analysis of linguistic characteristics;

3) composition of a synopsis (retelling);

4) retelling verses in prose;

5) determining the meter and type of rhyme;

  • 48   P. Polevoi, Uchebnaia russkaia khrestomatiia s tolkovaniiami. Part 3. Starshii vozrast. (St. Pete (...)

6) interpretation of vivid and unexpected metaphors.48

45For geographical contrast, it is worth quoting the principles of text analysis from Morachevskii’s peripheral textbook, which was published in Kremenchug:

1) reading of the text;

2) definition of its parts;

3) search for excerpts which contain material to help characterize the etymological, syntactic, artistic, and logical features of the text;

4) explanation of the development of the text’s main idea;

5) definition of the literary movement to which the text belongs (based on its language and style);

  • 49   G. Morachevskii, Plany razborov sochinenii. (Kremenchug, 1880), 1.

6) definition of the text’s significance in the history of its genre and type.49

  • 50 Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Literature Teacher” (first part – 1899) reflected new trends in (...)

46As we see, from 1872 on, the programs contain only the simplest of hermeneutical and historical-literary procedures for working with the text.50 We might argue that these two methods of interpretation competed throughout the 1880–90s. Although they did not oppose each other, they could conflict in ministerial programs. Thus, in the years of “Tolstoi’s classicism,” historical contextualization was the only officially permitted method of interpretation, and it was meant to protect students from the nihilism which was seen as inherent to any form of criticism.

  • 51   E. Beliavskii, Metod vedeniia sochinenii. (Moscow, 1881), 36, 39; cf. the same types of topics in (...)
  • 52Ispytaniia zrelosti. Spravochnaia kniga, 2nd ed., edited by. V. Al’bitskii. (St. Petersburg, 1884 (...)
  • 53   Sh. I. Ganelin, Ocherki po istorii srednei shkoly v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, Leni (...)

47Such a conservative course of study was undoubtedly echoed in the topics of pupils’ essays, both regular compositions and examinations alike. In his 1881 manual “The Method of Writing School Essays,” E. Beliavski, a popular teacher, stated that topics like “Chatski and Famusov” and “Chichikov and Khlestakov,” popular in the 1860–70s, led students to denounce vices and express “civil grief” in their writing. As an antidote to such “ethicization” and even politicization of teaching, Beliavski proposed to stick to strictly historical and literary topics not related to the present day.51 Examination topics were of precisely this sort, and they look archaic in comparison to the topics of the ‘literary conversations’ of the 1840–60s. Topics offered in various educational districts from 1873 to 1880 can be characterized primarily as general overviews: “Lomonosov and Karamzin as Reformers of the Russian Language”; “Karamzin’s Literary Work,” “Distinctive Features of Zhukovskii and Pushkin,” “The Interest of Studying Krylov’s Fables.” More concrete exam topics were chosen only twice in this period of seven years and only in some districts: “Parallels between Tatiana and Olga in Pushkin” and “Characteristics of Chichikov.”52 It is clear that the majority of these topics—both literary and non-literary ones—were intended to test logic and language skills rather than literary knowledge per se.53

  • 54 On the history of the course “Theory of Literature” in school, see: S. Brailovskii, “Novoe naprav (...)
  • 55   See Brailovskii. “Novoe napravlenie v shkol’noi teorii slovesnosti,” II (1909), 113-115. Byford, (...)

48Another factor that influenced methods of textual interpretation in high school of the last third of the nineteenth century was the course “Theory of Literature,” which was returned to the program in 1872. (Its specifics changed every 10 years: at times the course was taught in the fourth class, and sometimes in the seventh or eighth.)54 The course contributed to the development of materials on theory, and the disciplinary influence of academic literary criticism was reflected in the structuring of these materials. For example, popular textbooks by P.V. Smirnovskii, E. Voskresenskii and A. Shalygin, which were reprinted dozens of times in the 1890s and 1910s, offered a slightly modernized research apparatus for the analysis of literary texts intended for students in the final gymnasium class. For example, A. Shalygin’s textbook (considered eclectic by its reviewers) contained the topics “Means of Linguistic Expression” (highly indebted to Aleksandr Veselovskii’s “historical poetics”) and “versification” in its theoretical section. The second section, in turn, reviewed the main literary genres, providing detailed examples from Russian literature (including Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina). Meanwhile, textbooks with more academic substance, such as D.N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii’s Theory of Poetry and Prose (1908) broke with the hybrid combination of theory of style and theory of poetry, and offered a consistent theory of the poetic image, the classification of poetic and prose genres and forms, and a description of creative techniques.55

  • 56   The 1915 project was not implemented due to the First World War and subsequent revolutions. See I (...)
  • 57   V. Mavritskii, Pravila i programmy klassicheskikh gimnazii i progimnazii vedomstva Ministerstva n (...)

49The two components of the school literature course were reconfigured only in the last ministerial program of 1912.56 Theory of literature became simply a base for the systematic historical study of Russian literature (“the study of oral, written and literary creations in connection with the historical life of the Russian people”). This shift in emphasis was driven by the introduction of a large body of modern literature (1850-60s) into the program of 1905. Declared principles of “systematization” and “historicism,” however, bound these newly introduced texts to a central core—Pushkin and Gogol’.57

  • 58Sistematicheskii sbornik uchenicheskikh perelozhenii i sochinenii. Pis’mennye raboty po russkomu (...)

50Yet both of these principles could obviously fail, leaving “blind spots” in textual interpretation. In its treatment of Gogol’s story “The Old World Landowners,” the composition of a city student, Konstantin Vengrinovskii, provides a striking example of such oversimplification. Although the literature course in his type of school—an urban school—was shorter and much easier than that of gymnasia, it did last six years and included historical aspects of literary studies. Vengrinovskii’s essay is based on an effective antithesis: while noting the good humor and positive traits of the story’s characters, the student criticizes their idleness, laziness, lack of higher interests, gluttony, and contempt for spiritual needs (almost in the style of Dobroliubov against Oblomov).58 Of course, it is apparent that the concept of idyll and the lyrical tone of Gogol’s narrative remained unknown to Vengrinovskii.

  • 59   The person who played a pivotal role in developing the syllabus and teaching methods in 1903-1905 (...)

51The collapse of “Tolstoi’s classicism” between 1898 and 1903 freed schools from severe external pressure. Updates to the program (including the introduction of Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Ostrovskii, Fet, Nekrasov and Polonskii) and methods of textual analysis led to a rapid return of different critical approaches which had been banned under Tolstoi. Topics given in popular exam preparation manuals reflect the viewpoint by which students were meant to read the classics after the program update.59 These included:

The Global Significance of Romanticism

Karamzin as a Writer

Karamzin’s Letters on French False-Classical Drama and Shakespeare’s Tragedy

The Role of the Symbol in Literature

The Essence of the Comic in Gogol’s “Overcoat”

Pushkin on the Calling and Role of the Poet

The Attitude of Society to Outstanding People

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Bazarov

Eugene Onegin in Relation to his Environment

Gogol’s Conception of Two Kinds of Writers

  • 60   M. B. Gurevich, Materialy, plany i obraztsy uchenicheskikh sochinenii (Kiev, 1909).

The Meaning of Laughter in the Works of Gogol’60

  • 61   Ibid., 107-108.

52The liberalization of education, the gradual unification of schools of different types between 1905 and1916, and the increasing role of composition in the assessment of pupils contributed to the emergence of a huge official market of manuals and guides for writing essays [temniki] in the 1900s. As a rule, the manuals were composed of excerpts from critical articles (of authors ranging from Belinskii to Merezhkovskii) or scholarly articles (from Pypin to Ovs’aniko-Kulikovskii). Rarely did they offer specially composed essays. In any case, however, students were asked to interpret the texts and write about them, according to historicist principles. Thus, the essay on the character of Bazarov was meant to begin with a cultural and historical framework in which his image was understood as a cultural-psychological type of the sixties which arose in a strictly defined historical context, at a turning point for nihilism, when the new generation rejected the ideals of “people of the forties.”61

  • 62  Eikhenbaum insightfully noted that “teaching literature in high school is really the popularizatio (...)

53Thus, the 1900s and 1910s were characterized by an eclectic (simultaneously historicist and cultural-psychological) type of textual interpretation, which was criticized in the early works of the Russian formalists Viktor Shklovskii and Boris Eikhenbaum. It is no coincidence that, on the one hand, Eikhenbaum’s early 1915 article “On the Principles of Studying Literature in High School” polemicized with scholastic historicism, which interpreted all texts and the author’s consciousness as a reflection of the epoch and characters as types reduced to “algebraic” formulas (the most striking example being a clichéd interpretation of Akakii Akakievich from Gogol’s “Overcoat” as a “little man”). On the other hand, Eikhenbaum also opposed the naïve psychological approach, according to which literature was reduced to an expression of the author’s experiences.62

  • 63   In 1928-1931, Boris Tomashevskii published his famous textbook Introduction to Poetics, a synthes (...)

54Eikhenbaum considered the methodology of literary study widely—as a general disciplinary issue and, in particular, an issue of the autonomy of literary study. The new object of textual interpretation was not rhetoric, not image, not type, not the dichotomy of form and content, but rather the author’s style (and the style of a concrete text) as an organic system. According to Eikhenbaum, the crucial procedure of analysis was “close study of the text.” All of these programmatic claims, which grew out of the controversy surrounding school literature, became the foundation of a new science of literature, designed by OPOIAZ.63 The OPOIAZ program was even, for a short time, implemented in school textbooks for the unified second labor school (i.e. high school). By the end of the 1930s, however, as literary study in the Soviet Union became rapidly ideologized, these were replaced by a new unified line of textbooks.

3. The Genre Space of Poetry: Galakhov’s Anthology

  • 64   For similar approach to poetry in the British anthologies see Mole, What the Victorians Made of R (...)

55Given the diversity and heterogeneity of materials for gymnasium reading, which stemmed from various causes (the initial absence of unified ministerial programs and later, in the era of the Great Reforms, the liberalization and diversification of education), we must rely on sources with two crucial features for the investigation of transformations of the canon—continuity and variability. In addition, such sources should be sufficiently representative, widely distributed throughout the period, and authoritative64.

56Fortunately, we have books that meet all these requirements—the anthologies edited by Aleksei Dmitrievich Galakhov (1807-1892). They were originally released under slightly different names: The Full Russian Anthology (Polnaia russkaia khrestomatiia) or A Russian Anthology (Russkaia khrestomatiia); the spelling of the word khrestomatiia also fluctuated from publication to publication.

  • 65   A. Galakhov, Polnaia russkaia khrestomatiia, ili obraztsy krasnorechiia i poezii, zaimstvovannye (...)
  • 66   Ibid., V.
  • 67   Ibid., II.

57Galakhov’s anthologies served two main purposes: to give pupils an idea of the theory of literary genres and to present the best examples of them (in full or in fragments), focusing primarily on the Russian literary tradition (but not excluding examples from exemplary foreign authors, ranging from Homer to modern writers translated by Zhukovskii and Lermontov). In the preface to the first edition of A Russian Anthology (hereafter RA), Galakhov clarifies the problem: since Russian literature was very young, exemplary works had to be selected primarily on the basis of stylistic criteria: “the thoughts of exemplary writers decay faster than the language.”65 On the other hand, according to Galakhov, the language itself changes quite quickly as well, so the student should study “samples of an elegant modern language—the language of Karamzin, Krylov (in his fables), Pushkin, Lermontov.”66 Thus, Galakhov’s program was both archaic and innovative: from the very beginning, his anthologies were collections not only of “exemplary texts,” but also of current works. This project, as we show, was exemplified by various publications of RA (which appeared more or less regularly until 1915—new versions of his textbook continued to be published even after the death of its compiler.) At the same time, the principles of genre classification and the body of “elegant examples of eloquence and poetry” also changed.67

58The period from 1843 to 1915 saw thirty-eight editions of RA. Some, according to the remarks on the title pages, received supplements; some were printed “without change.” Analysis of the structure of these books shows two trends which determined the evolving treatment of genre in Galakhov’s anthologies. The first of these is the expansion and refinement of genre terminology, which was already outlined in the reign of Nicholas I and continued in the era of Alexander II. Gradually the repertoire of literary genres expands, and eventually the compiler moves the idyll, fable and, ballad from the section “Lyrical Poetry” into the epics section. One can also note an opposite tendency (though weakly expressed) in the final editions, where classical small lyrical genres (inscription, epitaph, etc.), along with epistles, are not represented in the classification.

59The second tendency is the inclusion of an increasingly extensive (and increasingly classified) corpus of epic and lyrical genres of Russian folklore. Samples of folk songs were already present in the first edition of RA. Then, in the sixties, following the byliny (folklore epics) and historical songs, fairy tales appeared in RA as well. Folk songs, first relegated to a special section in the 1861 RA, were represented by increasingly extensive and generically detailed repertoire. This trend was deeply connected with a broad concurrent interest in ethnography, which united various ideological and social strata of Russian culture (from the Populists to the monarchists) during the second half of the century.

3.1. Diachrony of the Authors’ Repertoire

60Next we will analyze the composition of the “Lyrical Poetry” sections in six editions of RA: 1843 (1st), 1853 (6th), 1859 (8th), 1866 (11th), 1889 (21st) and 1912 (35th). Judging by the titles, all of them were supplemented, with the exception of the 1889 publication (which reproduced the composition of the 15th edition of 1874). In choosing editions for analysis, we were guided by the goal of presenting RA’s history in several different historical contexts (change of monarch, various periods of the institutional history of education). We paid special attention to the transformation at the beginning, middle and end of the era of Alexander II. It seems that the atmosphere of general stagnation which characterized the reign of Alexander III reached RA. (This claim, however, requires further verification. The last edition in our sample takes us beyond the calendrical (but not the “long”) nineteenth century. It appeared in a fundamentally new context of state reforms (and accompanying educational reforms). This sample, in our view, represents the main trends in the movement of “Galakhov’s canon.”

61Let us begin analyzing the content of the lyrical sections in these six anthologies (we also consider the ballad, the idyll, and the fable, which were all excluded from the “lyrical” section in the later editions of RA). We consider only Russian authors, including those whose poetic translations are listed in RA under their own name, but excluding those whose names are listed after the text. We also consider both whole texts and fragments of original works of epic genres (epic poems, novels in verse) of the “first-ranked” Russian authors (Pushkin, Lermontov, Zhukovskii, Kozlov), which essentially functioned for readers of RA as independent works. Excerpts from translated epics are not considered.

62The dynamics of the general repertoire of Russian lyric poetry, presented as “exemplary” to gymnasium students of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looks as follows. The 1843 edition of RA, which includes 43 authors and 301 texts, was obviously oriented towards contemporary literature: authors of the eighteenth century receive only modest representation, while maximum attention is paid to Pushkin (whose death was within the recollection of the anthology’s target audience) and the poets of his generation. It is worth mentioning that A. I. Odoevskii’s poem “To Father” (“Ottsu) (“How the waves of mountains are immovable…,” published 1836), with its unambiguous allusions to the biographical circumstances of the Decembrist poet, was published here anonymously. At the same time, poets of the post-Pushkin generations (Benediktov, Rostopchina, Lermontov, Maikov, Fet, Krasov, Ogarev) were likewise not forgotten. We should note in particular here the beginnings of the previously mentioned trend which would develop in the 1860s: although folklore lyrics are not included in the 1843 RA, there is an obvious interest in the genre of the literary “Russian song” (Merzliakov, Del’vig, Tsyganov, Kol’tsov, Lazhechnikov). Meanwhile, a large part of the fable genre is shared almost equally between Krylov and Dmitriev, although the remaining portion also included texts of different genres and fables by other authors.

63In the 1853 edition of RA, the repertoire is slightly narrowed: lyrical plays or excerpts of 38 authors, for a total of 281 texts, are published here. Ogarev, Krasov, Fet and some poets of the older generations disappear and the contemporary Kliushnikov appears (with a text which would be included in the later editions of RA). The ratio of eighteenth-century texts increases (the number of Derzhavin texts doubles), and among the post-Pushkin generation, Lermontov, also doubling in presence, comes to the fore. These tendencies continue in the 1859 RA, where 38 authors are again represented, but the number of texts (276) is slightly smaller. In general, in the group under consideration, these two editions are the closest to each other (which, of course, is explained by the fact that the temporal distance between them is the least).

64In comparison, the repertoire of poets expands slightly in the 1860s: the 1866 RA features 41 authors and 200 texts. Yet the expansion goes in two directions: on the one hand, Fet reenters the anthology, and other contemporary poets whose work became relevant in the preceding three decades (Nekrasov, Tiutchev, Polonskii, Nikitin, Mei, Shcherbina, I. Aksakov and even Kreshev) likewise appear. No less significant are the “losses”: lyrical poems by Gnedich, Pletnev, Oznobishin, Shevyrev and Shikhmatov are missing from “Galakhov’s canon” for the first time. On the other hand, we notice an attempt to flesh out the repertoire of authors by introducing pre-Pushkin poets and the idyllic alternative to Pushkin’s school. Thus, this edition of RA introduces works by I. Dolgorukii, Izmailov, Marin and V. Panaev.

65However, this expansion of the corpus is altered only partially in the “contemporary” section (Mei, Nekrasov, Nikitin, Tiutchev and Fet) and very insignificantly in the “historical” part (Izmailov’s fables). By the end of the first decade of the reign of Alexander III, the repertoire is narrowed again. Thus, in the edition of 1889, almost as in the 1853 RA, we find yet fewer texts (178) and only 37 authors. The post-Pushkin era is represented only by authors who were already part of the previous editions. The tendency to add additional representatives to the historical section does not continue here; we can note, however, the appearance of Kantemir.

66The final edition under consideration belongs to the new century. In the 1912 edition of RA, 42 authors and 228 texts are represented. These figures are greater, of course, than in previous editions, but remain smaller by both parameters than the 1843 RA (which is easily explained by the inclusion of an increasing number of prose works and folkloric texts since the 1860s). It is also clear that, unlike the first edition of RA, this posthumous edition demonstrates a clear lag in the school canon in relation to contemporary poetry: of the four authors who first appeared in RA between 1889 and 1912, only one (Grand Duke Konstantin, known under the cryptonym K.R.) was alive at the time of the edition’s publication.

  • 68 This is quite a large number, even if we consider that some of these authors had long ceased to b (...)

67Meanwhile, in 1843, when the first edition of RA appeared, 15 out of the 43 poets represented there—more than two thirds—were living contemporaries of the anthology’s readers.68

  • 69   On the lyrics of Pushkin in nineteenth-century century see A. Vdovin, R. Leibov, “Pushkin v shkol (...)

68The following summary table illustrates the placement of the authors in the “moving” and fluctuating canon of RA. The poets are presented here in descending order of the total absolute frequency of their texts. Thus, the table also gives an idea of the trends associated with individual poets. Since Pushkin’s lyrics obviously prevail in all editions,69 we compare the quantities of texts of other authors against the number of Pushkin texts in each edition and present the results of this comparison in the table.

Table 2. Absolute frequency and dynamics of representation of authors in RA. Given in parentheses: ratio of the number of the given author’s texts to the number of texts by Pushkin (in each edition)

1843

1853

1859

1866

1889

1912

All editions

Pushkin

48

45

45

30

27

43

238

Zhukovskii

31 (0.64)

33 (0.73)

33 (0.73)

18 (0.6)

15 (0.55)

19 (0.44)

149 (0.63)

Krylov

23 (0.48)

24 (0.53)

23 (0.51)

19 (0.63)

19 (0.7)

31 (0.72)

139 (0.59)

Dmitriev

22 (0.45)

21 (0.46)

21 (0.46)

9 (0.3)

7 (0.26)

9 (0.21)

89 (0.37)

Lermontov

6 (0.12)

12 (0.27)

12 (0.26)

12 (0.4)

11 (0.4)

20 (0.46)

73 (0.31)

Batiushkov

13 (0.27)

14 (0.31)

14 (0.31)

6 (0.2)

7 (0.26)

7 (0.16)

61 (0.26)

Derzhavin

6 (0.12)

12 (0.27)

10 (0.22)

8 (0.27)

9 (0.33)

7 (0.16)

52 (0.22)

Iazykov

11 (0.23)

9 (0.2)

9 (0.2)

8 (0.27)

6 (0.22)

6 (0.14)

49 (0.21)

Kozlov

13 (0.27)

14 (0.31)

13 (0.29)

3 (0.1)

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

45 (0.19)

Kol’tsov

9 (0.19)

8 (0.18)

8 (0.18)

6 (0.2)

6 (0.22)

8 (0.19)

45 (0.19)

Maikov

8 (0.17)

6 (0.13)

6 (0.13)

7 (0.23)

7 (0.26)

9 (0.21)

43 (0.18)

Baratynskii

12 (0.25)

9 (0.2)

9 (0.2)

3 (0.1)

3 (0.1)

2 (0.05)

38 (0.16)

Viazemskii

10 (0.2)

8 (0.18)

8 (0.18)

4 (0.13)

4 (0.15)

3 (0.07)

37 (0.15)

Del’vig

9 (0.19)

8 (0.18)

8 (0.18)

3 (0.1)

3 (0.1)

3 (0.07)

34 (0.14)

Merzliakov

5 (0.1)

5 (0.11)

5 (0.11)

5 (0.17)

3 (0.1)

3 (0.07)

26 (0.11)

Fet

8 (0.17)

-

-

6 (0.2)

6 (0.22)

6 (0.14)

26 (0.11)

Glinka

8 (0.17)

6 (0.13)

6 (0.13)

3 (0.1)

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

25 (0.1)

Davydov

5 (0.1)

7 (0.15)

6 (0.13)

2 (0.07)

3 (0.1)

2 (0.05)

25 (0.1)

Lomonosov

3 (0.06)

4 (0.09)

4 (0.09)

4 (0.13)

4 (0.15)

4 (0.1)

23 (0.09)

Venevitinov

5 (0.1)

5 (0.11)

6 (0.13)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.05)

22 (0.09)

Khemnitser

4 (0.08)

4 (0.09)

4 (0.09)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.05)

18 (0.08)

Khomiakov

2 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

5 (0.17)

5 (0.18)

3 (0.07)

17 (0.07)

Tiutchev

-

-

-

3 (0.1)

3 (0.1)

8 (0.19)

14 (0.06)

Benediktov

5 (0.1)

2 (0.04)

2 (0.04)

2 (0.07)

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

13 (0.05)

Gnedich

3 (0.06)

5 (0.11)

5 (0.11)

-

-

-

13 (0.05)

Tsyganov

3 (0.06)

2 (0.04)

2 (0.04)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.05)

13 (0.05)

Polonskii

-

-

-

5 (0.17)

4 (0.15)

4 (0.1)

13 (0.05)

Strugovshchi-kov

3 (0.06)

2 (0.04)

2 (0.04)

1 (0.03)

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

10 (0.04)

Pletnev

4 (0.08)

2 (0.04)

2 (0.04)

-

-

-

8 (0.03)

Izmailov

-

-

-

3 (0.1)

3 (0.1)

2 (0.05)

8 (0.03)

Polezhaev

2 (0.04)

2 (0.04)

2 (0.04)

1 (0.03)

-

-

7 (0.03)

Mei

-

-

-

2 (0.07)

2 (0.07)

3 (0.07)

7 (0.03)

Lazhechnikov

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.03)

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

6 (0.02)

Pushkin V.

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.03)

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

6 (0.02)

Aksakov

-

-

-

2 (0.07)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.05)

6 (0.02)

Nekrasov

-

-

-

2 (0.07)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.05)

6 (0.02)

Nikitin

-

-

-

2 (0.07)

2 (0.07)

2 (0.05)

6 (0.02)

Kliushnikov

-

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.03)

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

5 (0.02)

Alekseev

2 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

4 (0.02)

Oznobishin

2 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

4 (0.02)

Shevyrev

2 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

4 (0.02)

Anonimous

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

3 (0.01)

Shikhmatov

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

3 (0.01)

Shcherbina

-

-

-

2 (0.07)

-

1 (0.02)

3 (0.01)

Podolinskii

2 (0.04)

-

-

-

-

-

2 (0.01)

Ogarev

2 (0.04)

-

-

-

-

-

2 (0.01)

Ruban

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

-

2 (0.01)

Rostopchina

-

1 (0.02)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

2 (0.01)

Dmitriev M.

-

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

2 (0.01)

Kreshev

-

-

-

2 (0.07)

-

-

2 (0.01)

Kantemir

-

-

-

-

1 (0.04)

1 (0.02)

2 (0.01)

Apukhtin

-

-

-

-

-

2 (0.05)

2 (0.01)

Voeikov

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.004)

Grot

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.004)

Zagoskin

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.004)

Krasov

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.004)

Odoevskii A.

1 (0.02)

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.004)

Dolgorukii

-

-

-

1 (0.03)

-

-

1 (0.004)

Marin

-

-

-

1 (0.03)

-

-

1 (0.004)

Panaev V.

-

-

-

1 (0.03)

-

-

1 (0.004)

K.R.

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.02)

1 (0.004)

Pleshcheev

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.02)

1 (0.004)

Turgenev I.

-

-

-

-

-

1 (0.02)

1 (0.004)

Total texts

301

281

276

200

177

228

1463

69The core of RA’s canon are those authors whose texts are replicated in the above-mentioned editions more than forty times: Pushkin, Zhukovskii, Krylov, I. Dmitriev, Lermontov, Batiushkov, Derzhavin, Iazykov, Kozlov, Kol’tsov and Maikov. These authors’ texts were reproduced 983 times—more than two-thirds of the total number of published poems. The first three authors listed occupy a special place in this group. It is readily apparent that the Pushkin era, understood widely—from Derzhavin, Dmitriev and Zhukovskii to Kol’tsov and Lermontov, who debuted in 1830—is presented as the “heart” of Russian poetry. In this group, the only representative of the next generation of poets is Apollon Maikov.

70In considering the specifics of RA’s selection process, we can compare the representation of the same group of authors in other school anthologies published between 1846 and 1905 (for clarity, the “Pushkin index” is also given in parentheses):

Table 3. Texts of the authors of RA’s “core”
in other anthologies from 1846 to the 1900s.

Pushkin

295

Krylov

271 (0.92)

Zhukovskii

161 (0.56)

Lermontov

126 (0.43)

Kol’tsov

80 (0.27)

Derzhavin

54 (0.18)

Dmitriev

46 (0.16)

Maikov

40 (0.14)

Iazykov

35 (0.12)

Batiushkov

31 (0.1)

Kozlov

25 (0.08)

71Note that most of the books taken into account here were released after 1860; thus, the data in Table 3 should be compared with the last three editions of RA. Overall, the numbers are quite close, and “Galakhov’s canon” thus appears to be representative, though slightly archaic.

72Comparing the first three editions of Galakhov’s Anthology with editions of RA from the 1860s to 1910s, it is evident that the emphasis on Pushkin-era poets continues to fade. This fact is manifested in the asymmetry of the numbers in the right and left sides of our table. It is especially evident in the case of authors such as Gnedich, Pletnev, Shikhmatov, Shevyrev and Oznobishin, whose names simply disappear from the list. The same fate was shared by the now completely forgotten Fedor Alekseev, the author of a translation of T. Moore (subsequently put to music by Anton Rubinstein). The effect of this quite natural tendency is also noticeable in the cases of I. Dmitriev, Del’vig, Viazemskii, Batiushkov, Baratynskii, Kozlov, Polezhaev and other poets of the first half of the century. Let us note that one particular genre, well suited for school reading and in agreement with “national” tendencies—the national fable—turned out to be much more viable than romantic poetry. (To put it bluntly, Krylov defeated Zhukovskii.)

73The inertia of the school canon did not allow for the total exclusion of authors who had been widely printed in years past, but the radical reduction of a given author’s work was possible. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Pushkin-era authors were not completely unknown to students of the inter-revolutionary period.

74Two exceptions to the first tendency especially stand out: Lermontov and Khomiakov. (The case of Tiutchev and his “second discovery” by Nekrasov’s Sovremennik will be considered separately, but we will point out that Tiutchev’s poems were not included in the 1859 RA, published after the appearance of his first collection in 1854.)

75The second trend—inclusion of contemporary poets—was already evident in the first edition of RA, but it did not receive a clear continuation. Flashes of “modernization” in the reading list in the editions of the 1860s and of 1912 are virtually invisible; the 1912 edition practically did not touch upon contemporary Russian poetry at all.

3.2. The Authors’ Repertoires

76Now we will consider the dynamics of individual authors’ subcorpora in RA. These subcorpora represent various trends in the diachronic transformation of school reading. We confirm our observations against our general database of nineteenth century Russian school anthologies.

3.2.1. Reductions to the Repertoire: Del’vig and Kozlov

77It is quite natural that the number of any given author’s texts should reduce as the date of the author’s death recedes ever further back into the past. One example is the legacy of Del’vig and Kozlov, two authors who had already passed away at the time of publication of the first edition of RA.

  • 70Russkaia stikhotvornaia khrestomatiia sobrannaia Vasil’em Zolotovym (Moscow, 1829).
  • 71Khristomatiia Rossiiskaia Peninskogo (Saint Petersburg, 1834).

78The 1843 edition of RA 1843 includes nine texts by Del’vig—these are the epitaphs “What was His Life?” (“Chto zhizn’ ego byla?”) and “With Earthly Life She Played” (“Zhizn’iu zemnoiu igrala ona”), the epigram “Consolation” (“Uteshenie”) (in the “Additions” section; it has previously been included in Zolotov’s 1829 anthology70), the idyll “Retired Soldier” (“Oststavnoi soldat”) (included in the Peninskii’s 1834 textbook71), the inscription “On the Statue of the Florence Cathedral” (“Na statuiu Florentiiskogo sobora”) (its original title was “The Inscription on the Statue of Florentine Mercury” (“Nadpis’ na statuiu florentinskogo Merkuriia”)—presumably, young readers could have been confused by the presence of a pagan idol in the Catholic cathedral), the sonnet “To N.M. Iazykov” (“N.M. Iazykovu”), the epistle “To A. Pushkin” (“A. Pushkinu”) (“Who is Like the Swan of the Blossoming Ausonia”) and two “Russian songs”—“Sang, Sang a Birdie” (“Pela, pela ptashechka”) and “Oh, the Night, the Night” (“Akh ty noch’ li, nochen’ka”). In the edition of 1853, “The Inscription on the Statue” disappears; no further changes are made in the 1859 RA. However, the initial trend of reduction would grow stronger in the next decade. By 1866, the Del’vig corpus already consists of merely three texts representing the main genres—the Russian song and the Russian idyll. These three works became fixed in the canon and remained there until 1912; meanwhile, no new Del’vig texts were ever added.

79The case of Kozlov differed slightly. The 1850s saw not only cutbacks to his canon, but also additions to it. The radical reduction of the 1860s was accompanied by the simultaneous inclusion of a new text, not included in the first collection—the translation of one of Moore’s “Irish tunes,” widely distributed as a popular song. (The author of the score is unknown.) This text would eventually become the only Kozlov text (along with excerpts from the poem “Natalia Dolgorukaia” [“Natal’ia Dolgorukaia”]) to remain in RA. These changes are represented in the table (not including excerpts from Kozlov’s poems):

Table 4. I. Kozlov’s poetry over six editions of RA

Poem

1843

1853

1859

1866

1889

1912

Alushta at Day (from Mickiewicz) (Alushta dnem)

+

+

View of the Mountains from the Kozlovski Steppes (from Mickiewicz)

(Vid gor iz stepei Kozlovskikh)

+

+

+

Evening bells (Vechernii zvon)

(from Moore)

+

+

+

Hellespont (Gellespont)

+

+

Kikineis Mountain (Gora Kikineis) (from Mickiewicz)

+

+

+

To My Wife (Zhene)

+

+

+

To Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (Imperatritse Aleksandre Fedorovne)

+

+

+

To the Alps (from Jean-François Ducis) (K Al’pam)

+

+

+

Towards Joy (K radosti)

+

+

+

The Burial of Sir John Moore (from Moore) (Na pogrebenie Sira Dzhona Mura)

+

+

+

+

Neither in Reality Nor in a Dream (Ne naiavu i ne vo sne)

+

There is Joy in the Darkness of the Dense Forest (from Byron) (Otrada est’ vo t’me lesov dremuchikh)

+

+

+

Desdemona’s Song (from Shakespeare) (Pesnia Dezdemony)

+

+

Country Orphan (from Alexandre Soumet) (Sel’skaia sirotka)

+

Sonnet by Saint Teresa (Sonet Sviatoi Terezy)

+

3.2.2. Additions to the Repertoire: Lermontov

80As mentioned above, the most notable case of an expanding repertoire in RA is that of Lermontov. The author was already presented in the anthology’s first edition of 1843 with the texts “The Branch of Palestine” (“Vetka Palestiny”), “Airship” (“Vozdushnyi korabl’”), “From Goethe” (“Mountain Peaks”) (“Iz Gete” [“Gornye vershiny”]), “The Cossack Lullaby” (“Kazach’ia kolybel’naia pesnia”), “The Prayer” (“In a Difficult Moment of Life”) (“Molitva” [“V minutu zhizni trudnuiu”]), and “Sail” (“Parus”).

81The 1853 edition preserved all of these texts and also added recently published Lermontov texts (the dates of first publication are provided in parentheses): “I’m Going Out Onto the Road Alone” (“Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu”) (1842), “The Caucasus” (“Kavkaz”) (1845), “The Prophet” (“Prorok”) (1844). The RA of 1853 also included texts published during the poet’s life—“Angel” (“Angel”), “When the yellowing field waves...” (“Kogda volnuetsia zhelteiushchaia niva…”), and “The Dispute” (“Spor”).

  • 72   I. Peninskii, Kniga dlia chteniia i uprazhnenii v iazyke, sostavlennaia dlia uezdnykh uchilishch (...)
  • 73   S. Shafranov, I. Nikolich, Russkaia khrestomatiia dlia upotrebleniia v uchilishchakh
    pribaltiiski
    (...)
  • 74   V. A. Iakovlev, Russkaia khrestomatiia. Sbornik statei, vybrannykh iz proizvedenii russkoi litera (...)
  • 75   S. Z. Burakovskii, Khrestomatiia noveishei russkoi literatury... Kurs VI klassa gimnazii (Saint P (...)
  • 76   A. Filonov. Russkaia khrestomatiia s primechaniiami. Dlia vysshikh klassov srednikh uchebnykh zav (...)
  • 77   M. A. Bublikov, Russkaia literatura... Khrestomatiia (Saint Petersburg, 1907).
  • 78   V. A. Iakovlev, Russkaia khrestomatiia (Saint Petersburg, 1869).
  • 79   P. Polevoi, Uchebnaia russkaia khrestomatiia s tolkovaniiami (part 3) (Saint Petersburg, 1872).

82The same set of texts was preserved in the 1859 edition, but in 1866 a more mature work, the “civic” “Duma” (“Duma”), replaced the youthful piece “The Caucasus.” In 1889, “Branch of Palestine” unexpectedly disappeared from the set. However, in the last edition under consideration here, the Lermontov corpus expanded significantly. The two texts that had previously disappeared now returned, and seven texts that had already gained a foothold in other schoolbooks were added. These were the poems “Borodino” (“Borodino”) (which was frequently included in secondary school textbooks, appearing for the first time in Peninskii’s 1846 anthology72), “In the Wild North…” (“Na Severe dikom stoit odinoko…”) (first appearing in the Reval anthology by Shafranov and Nikolich in 1860,73 and then in Iakovlev’s 1869 anthology74), “The First of January” (“Pervoe ianvaria”) (also published in Burakovskii 187175 and three other anthologies), “Homeland” (“Rodina”) (Filonov 186376), “Death of a Poet” (“Smert’ poeta”) (ibid., then—after a considerable break—in Bublikov’s 1907 reader77), “Clouds” (“Tuchi”) (in Iakovlev’s 1869 anthology78) and “Cliff” (“Utes”) (Polevoi’s anthology of 187279).

83In general, RA here corresponds with common trends: Lermontov’s poetry was valorized by the first generation of readers (and critics, primarily by Belinskii, but also—and not least— by Galakhov himself). In the second half of the century, it became part of an “alternative canon” for readers. Anthologies of the early twentieth century, especially those which appeared after the abolition of preliminary censorship, reflected the hierarchy of texts which had developed in readers’ preferences, merely with some delay.

3.2.3. Disappearing Repertoires

84Let us turn now to the bottom of Table 2. As we have already made clear, not all of the authors who appeared in various editions of RA were entrenched in the school canon. Three groups are noteworthy here:

    • 80   I. I. Paul’son, Kniga dlia chteniia i prakticheskikh uprazhnenii v russkom iazyke. Uchebnoe posob (...)
    • 81   A. Filonov, Russkaia khrestomatiia s primechaniiami. Dlia vysshikh klassov srednikh uchebnykh zav (...)
    • 82   The RA 1864, in which this epistle was re-included, remained outside of our sample.

    Authors included in the first edition but not included in any of the subsequent editions under our consideration. Two of them were represented by two texts. These are Podolinskii and Ogarev (“Nocturno,” “Village Watchman” [“Derevenskii storozh”]). In 1853, when the sixth edition was released, the latter author had not yet emigrated from Russia, but his texts were already inappropriate for school anthologies. Even when it became possible, the compiler made no attempt to return Ogaryov to the school reading repertoire. (The second text, for example, was included in anthologies by Paulson in 186180 and Filonov in 186381; Ogarev’s works appear in other anthologies of the 1860s–1900s.) These same considerations may also explain the exclusion of an anonymously published poem by Odoevskii from the 1853 edition of RA. The tightening of official demands on literature might also account for the rejection of Voeikov’s satirical epistle to Speranskii, “On True Nobility” (“Ob istinnom blagorodstve”), with its anti-aristocratic message.82 As for Zagoskin and his “To Liudmil” (“K Liudmilu”), its exclusion was apparently due not to the mention of civil rights and a “republic of literature,” but rather to the extreme anachronism of the object of invective (the “Bacchic poetry” of the Pushkin circle).

  1. Authors previously represented by a single literary text who were subsequently excluded (Grot with his “Little Siskin” [“Chizhik”], very popular in readers for younger students, and Krasov with “The Night Comrade” [“Nochnoi tovarishch”]) can be explained, it seems, by an adjustment of the concept of the anthology.

  2. Another group of authors, whose names disappear from RA at the turn of the 1850s–60s, is interesting for various reasons. Three cases (Shikhmatov’s inscription on the Alexander column and panegyric epigrams addressed to Peter I) can be clearly attributed to changes in the ideological landscape of the new reign. The rest are connected with the changes in historical and literary paradigms: these are two texts by F. Alekseev, two poems by Shevyrev (“Thought” [“Mysl’”] and “Infinity” [“Bespredel’nost’”], only the second of which remained in the publications of the 1850s) and two texts by Oznobishin—“Aksai Village” (“Aksaiskaia stanitsa”) and “Cuvier” (“Kiuv’e”) (only the second was present in the RA of 1850).

3.2.4. Updating and Consolidation

85Between the 1850s and 1860s, we also observe various attempts to tie up loose ends and diversify the canon with new names. These include E. Rostopchina with “Winter Evening” (“Zimnii vecher”) (RA 1853, 1859), excerpts from Delisle in the translation of M. Dmitriev, the above-mentioned historical and literary innovations of the 1866 RA, and the sporadically appearing poems “The Universe” (“Mir”) (1866) and “Hellas” (“Ellada”) (1866, 1912) by Shcherbina.

86Far more interesting are cases of canonization of new authors who first appeared in RA after 1859. In addition to Fet and his return to RA (well represented in the first edition, he was later excluded from the list), new poets include:

Nekrasov (“Harking the Horrors of the War” [“Vnimaia uzhasam voiny”] and “Vlas” [“Vlas”]);

Aksakov (two excerpts from the long poem “The Tramp” [“Brodiaga”]), Nikitin (“The spade is digging a deep grave in the mould…” [“Vyryta zastupom iama glubokaia…”] and the poem “Grandfather” [“Dedushka”], which in the 1912 edition was replaced by a poem about a grandmother—“Winter Night in the Village” [“Zimniaia noch’ v derevne”]);

Mei, represented mostly by his translations;

Polonskii (in 1866—“Look, what gloom” [“Posmotri, kakaia mgla”], “Road” [“Doroga”], “Evening” [“Vecher”], “Angel” [“Angel”] and a translation of Goethe’s “Fishermen,” later excluded; in the 1912 RA “Night” [“Noch’”] replaces the first text listed).

87However, the most noteworthy case of updating is the introduction of Tiutchev’s lyrics, which enter RA for the first time in 1866, more than thirty years after the publication of his first text. Here Galakhov again follows general trends. Notwithstanding the reviving of Tiutchev’s corpus by Nekrasov’s article “Second-Tier Russian Poets” (“Russkie vtorostepennye poety”) (1851) and appearances of new Tiutchev texts in periodicals, or even after the publication of the poet’s first collection (1854), compilers of school anthologies did not hasten to include Tiutchev’s texts in their publications. As far as we can tell, the compilers of the Reval anthology, Shafranov and Nikolich, were the first to do so in 1860. Then, in 1862, Paulson, Perevlesskii and Ushinskii included some texts in their anthologies. But the true debut of Tiutchev for the school audience was a selection published in A.G. Filonov’s anthology of 1863. This selection gave its readers an overview of the different aspects of Tiutchev’s lyric poetry and described the various periods of its development. It included thirteen texts: “The East was white, the boat was rolling” (“Vostok belel, lad’ia katilas’”), “Thought after thought, wave after wave” (“Duma za dumoi, volna za volnoi…”), “And the coffin is lowered into the grave…” (“I grob opushchen uzh v mogilu…”), “From the Schiller” (“S ozera veet prokhlada i nega…”) “Swan” (“Lebed’”), “Napoleon” (“Napoleon”), “Not cooled from the heat…” (“Ne ostyvshaia ot znoiu…”), “Nature is not what you imagine…” (“Ne to, chto mnite vy, priroda…”), “Not without reason by the merciful God…” (“Nedarom miloserdnym Bogom…”), “Under the breath of bad weather…” (“Pod dykhan’em nepogody…”), “Tears of the people, o tears of the people…” (“Slezy liudskie, o slezy liudskie…”), “At quiet night, in late summer…” (“Tikhoi noch’iu, pozdnim letom…”) and “Why are you bowing over the waters…” (“Chto ty klonish’ nad vodami…”). (For comparison, in the same anthology we find thirty-two Pushkin texts and twelve by Lermontov.)

88Against this backdrop, the conservatism of the 1866 RA is notable: Galakhov chose only three texts (“Grant, Lord, your joy…” [“Poshli, Gospod’, svoiu otradu…”], “Autumn evening” [“Osennii vecher”] and “Nature is not what you imagine…”), and this same selection remained in 1889. Only in 1912, in the posthumous edition of RA, was the anthology’s conservatism amended somewhat. In addition to the three unchanging texts, the anthology also included “Not cooled down from the heat…,” “Tears of the people, o tears of the people…,” “Morning in the Mountains” (“Utro v gorakh”) and, finally, the poem “These poor villages” (“Eti bednye selen’ia”), extremely popular at the time but allowed into school readers only with the greatest reluctance.

3.2.5. “Steadfast Singles”

  • 83   V. Rklitskii, Russkaia khrestomatiia, ili izbrannye mesta iz luchshikh russkikh pisatelei. Kn. 1 (...)
  • 84   S. Shafranov, I. Nikolich, Russkaia khrestomatiia dlia upotrebleniia v uchilishchakh pribaltiiski (...)

89Another product of the conservatism of the later editions was the stable inclusion of texts which, in the early editions, served as the sole representative of their authors’ oeuvres, and retained that lonely status until 1912. Generally speaking, Table 2 makes clear that if an author was represented by fewer texts in the first edition, then that author’s poetry was less likely to be present in the early twentieth-century edition. There were, however, exceptions: Lazhechnikov’s song “Sweetly sang a nightingale…” (“Sladko pel dusha-solovushko…”) was printed continuously throughout all editions of RA (to which fact essentially we owe the appearance of Glier’s song). It is characteristic that in some nineteenth-century anthologies, this text was included with false attributions—to Del’vig83 or to Tsyganov84. Here we might speak of a sort of secondary folklorization of folkloric stylization, which was, in general, characteristic for this category of texts.

  • 85 Polemic replica of the famous Pushkin poem. Let us quote the first stanza of Kliushnikov’s text: (...)

90The same is true about one text which first appeared in the anthology under a pseudonym and only later received an attribution. The name of the poet, however, was far from well-known in 1912, even to connoisseurs of Russian literature. This text was I. Kliushnikov’s “Life” (“Zhizn’”), included in the publications of 1859-1912 (the author was still alive when the penultimate edition in our sample was in print). Undoubtedly, this deliberately naive text85 was selected, first and foremost, in pursuit of didactic goals.

  • 86   As in other cases, in the inclusion of this text in the first edition of RA, Galakhov was guided (...)
  • 87   See V. L. Pushkin, Stikhotvoreniia (Saint Petersburg, 2005), 330 (commentary by S. Panov).

91A similar function can be ascribed to another “steadfast single”—V. Pushkin’s epigram “Some metromaniac (we have enough of them!)” (“Kakoi-to stikhotvor [dovol’no ikh u nas!]”) (under the title “Fifteen-year-old poet” [“Piatnadtsatiletnii stikhotvorets”]).86 However, if even A. Gaevskii and S. Poltoratskii considered this epigram, written at the end of the eighteenth century, to be addressed to the poet’s nephew,87 students could surely have also managed to come to the same conclusion. Thus, the pedagogical meaning of this warning against teenage metromania was somewhat discredited.

3.3. Gymnasium Students’ Reading of Russian Poetry (Memoirs and Contemporary Research)

  • 88   See N. N. Zhitomirova, “Chitatel’skie zaprosy i krug chteniia uchashchikhsia srednei shkoly predr (...)
  • 89Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospominaniiakh. Annotirovannyi ukazatel’ knig i (...)

92No large-scale research of memoirs and diaries of gymnasium pupils (and schoolchildren in general) of the nineteenth century has been carried out.88 This fact prompted us to create the database “The Reading Habits of 19th-Century Schoolchildren” in December 2016—March 2017 with the help of a group of volunteers from the National Research University Higher School of Economics. It is based on diaries and memoirs published in Russian from the end of the 1850s to the 1970s and indexed in P. Zaionchkovskii’s bibliography and, in part, in A. Reitblat’s monograph.89 The database includes 1364 mentions of authors and/or works (novels, short stories, poems, articles, newspaper and magazine titles). It is important to keep in mind that a large percentage of the memoirs are texts written by members of the Populist, Marxist and revolutionary movements in the 1905-1950s, at which time a kind of “memoir boom” occurred in Russia and the Soviet Union. Since emigrant memoirs have not yet been taken into account, any generalizations about the real reading repertoire of schoolchildren of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries may seem premature.

93First of all, the general picture is biased towards clandestine and non-programmatic reading. The participants in the democratic movement were inclined to remember and weave into their biography, first and foremost, anything connected with oppositional thinking and activity. The reading of banned literature appears in memoirs, naturally, as a symbol of initiation and motivated auto-indoctrination.

94Secondly, the 1860–90s chronologically prevail in the representation of assigned reading, while sources about its earlier cases (of the 1810–50s) are represented more scarcely. And, finally, it should be noted that memoirists, who hardly sought to remember everything they had ever read, recorded, for obvious reasons, not so much their curricular reading as those texts (both Russian and foreign) which most influenced them or were most memorable for any reason. Meanwhile, the routine of assigned reading was described mostly by teachers, whose memoirs are also included in the database, although that routine is also mentioned in some students’ memoirs.

95The memoirs quite rarely devote attention to poetry. This observation is not universal, since in certain epochs and for certain social groups the reading of poetry could be significant to one’s personal or group biography (for example, in memoirs of the Russian “Silver Age”). However, as regards descriptions of childhood and adolescence in memoirs, they suggest an interest in poetry that is quite low even for that period. Professional writers and poets (in our case, Polonskii at the beginning of the period, and Paustovskii at the end) devote more attention to assigned reading of poetry in their memoirs, but they are not very well represented in our sample.

96Here are the names of Russian poets that were mentioned in the memoirs of former gymnasium students since the 1840s. Pushkin, who leads in this list as well, is excluded from the calculations; given in parentheses is the number of mentions of the given author (in cases where mentions exceeded one):

1840s–50s: Baratynskii, Batiushkov, Del’vig, Derzhavin (3), Zhukovskii (4), Krylov (4), Lermontov (2), Lomonosov;

1860s–70s: Ershov, Zhukovskii (3), Kol’tsov (2), Krylov (4), Kurochkin, Lermontov (10), Maikov (2), Nekrasov (8), Nikitin, A. K. Tolstoi, Fet;

1880s–1890s: Ershov, Kol’tsov, Lermontov (2), Nadson (2), Nekrasov (5), Nikitin;

1900s–1910s: Bal’mont, Briusov, Krylov, Lermontov (2), Nadson, Nekrasov (5), Nikitin, Ryleev, Tiutchev, Fet.

97For the reason mentioned above, this data adds little to our notion of a change in readers’ preferences. As we can see, only a few of the non-curricular authors are recalled by memoirists as having once been relevant (but the high status of Nekrasov in everyday reading, versus in RA, is obvious and well understood).

  • 90   S. Anan’in, “Detskie idealy,” 201-219.

98Access to interviews conducted during the time period in question allows us to fill in this inexact and generalized picture. Surveys conducted by S. A. Anan’in,90 for example, allow us to judge more accurately the poetic tastes of Russian gymnasium students of the first decade of the twentieth century. Favorite poets include Kol’tsov, A. Tolstoi, Apukhtin, Batiushkov, Fet, Byron, Heine, Verlaine, Słowacki and Mickiewicz (neither “programmatic” Pushkin nor “oppositional” Nekrasov is present on this list).

99The list of “favourite poems” is more interesting: the obvious leader here is Nadson (“Mother” [“Mat’”], “Life” [“Zhizn’”], “The Veil is failed…” [“Zavesa sbroshena…”], “Only the morning of love is good…” [“Tol’ko utro liubvi khorosho…”], “To a Friend” [“K drugu”], “For what?” [“Za chto?”], “Our generation does not know youth...” [“Nashe pokolenie iunosti ne znaet…”], “The Funeral” [“Pokhorony”], “My Muse is dead…” [“Umerla moia muza…”], “Do not tell me he’s dead…” [“Ne govorite mne: on umer…”]), followed by Nekrasov (“Who is Happy in Russia” [“Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho”], “Musings By the Front Door” [“Razmyshleniia u paradnogo pod”ezda”], “Korobeiniki” [“Korobeiniki”], “Grandfather Frost the Red Nose” [“Moroz krasnyi nos”], “A Knight for An Hour” [“Rytsar’ na chas”]) and Lermontov (“Mtsyri” [“Mtsyri”], “Captive” [“Plennik”], “Clouds” [“Tuchi”], “Both boring and sad…” [“I skuchno, i grustno…”], “Waves and people” [“Volny i liudi”]). Two texts of Nikitin are also mentioned (“Burlaks” [“Burlaki”], “The spade is deep digging a grave in the mould…”). Pushkin is named only twice (with “The Prophet” [“Prorok”] and “Whether I Wander Along Noisy Streets” [“Brozhu li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh…”]), followed by solo texts of Solov’ev and Turgenev and “The Song of the Stormy Petrel” (“Pesnia o burevestnike”) by Gor’kii.

100Quite indicatively, “La Marseillaise” closes the list.

4. Fiction In Schoolchildren’s Reading (Curricular and Underground Reading)

4.1. The Reading Repertoire: Center and Periphery

  • 91   Stoiunin, O prepodavanii russkoi literatury, 267.
  • 92 Ibid., 255-256.
  • 93   The history of zemstvo libraries is explored better. Ben Eklof recently showed that the amount an (...)
  • 94   N. A. Rubakin, “Chastnye biblioteki i vneklassnoe chtenie uchashchikhsia,” Zhenskoe obrazovanie, (...)
  • 95   Moscow and Petersburg gymnasia (like Karl Mai’s private one) seem to form a separate type of well (...)
  • 96   Ostrogorskii, Iz istorii moego uchitel’stva, 13, 25, 27.
  • 97   Staferova, A.V. Golovnin i liberal’nye reformy, 340-341. In 1860-80s, the majority of gymnasia su (...)

101Unlike with short poetry, the inclusion of prosaic texts in curricula was primarily a technical challenge for compilers and educators throughout the entire nineteenth century. On the one hand, the volume of textbooks and copyrights allowed for the reprinting of only a certain amount of text.91 On the other hand, leading Russian teachers from Stoiunin to Eikhenbaum repeatedly lamented that reading a story or novel in fragments kills the meaning of the text as a whole and impedes its analysis.92 The idea that the prosaic text should be read by students as a whole and at home emerged in the 1850s and gradually came into practice. It followed that the school should have a well-stocked library from which students could borrow books. The comprehensiveness of gymnasium libraries in different periods of the nineteenth century is little researched,93 but the memoirs of students and the research of N.A. Rubakin94 showed that, in the 1850–60s, far from every gymnasium—even in the capital—had a library and allowed pupils to borrow books.95 For instance, V.P. Ostrogorskii, who was a student of the Third St. Petersburg Gymnasium from 1853 to 1858, recalled that it had no good library, and pupils could not take home Pushkin, Gogol’ or Zhukovskii; only Galakhov’s anthology was available. Ostrogorskii’s favorite teacher, Stoiunin, inspired students to search for “whole” books, but they were expensive.96 In the 1860s, especially under the liberal minister of public education A.V. Golovnin, budgets allocated for school libraries increased significantly.97

  • 98   As Leah Price demonstrated, there is a subtle, indirect correlation between the rise of the novel (...)

102The second challenge regarding the inclusion of Russian prose in school textbooks was that its symbolic status in the first third of the nineteenth century was quite low and was to strengthen only in the 1840s–50s. The genres of the short story, the tale (povest’) and, especially, the novel gradually developed in the literary system (see Rebecchini, The Success of the Russian Novel, in the present volume), and in the 1860s the Russian novel embraced all key genres (Bildungsroman, adultery, historical, ideological, etc.).98 However, the 1872 program excluded all the “latest literature” from the curricula of gymnasia and technical schools.

  • 99   Fragments varied in genre: landscapes, characteristics, discourses (three types of narratives the (...)

103The third issue was related to students’ age and to pedagogical ideas of the time: prosaic forms (especially novels) were not perceived as appropriate material for students’ upbringing and education. Very often, large “non-curricular” works were included in anthologies in fragments, abridged, and without attribution, so that students could never know from which text or story they were taken.99

  • 100S’’ezd uchitelei russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti v gimnaziiakh Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga (Moscow (...)
  • 101   A.I. Georgievskii, K istorii Uchenogo komiteta Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia (St. Peters (...)
  • 102   K. Petrov, “Prakticheskii vzgliad na programmu russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti,” Zhurnal Ministerst (...)

104Now we can turn to the circulation of prose in secondary schools in two different, though mutually overlapping, domains: that of ministerial programs and that of school readers. Prose, of course, was a part of gymnasium reading in the first half of the nineteenth century, but the government did not regulate it at that time. The inclusion of prose within ministerial curricula began in 1852. Table 5 shows the content of ministerial programs for gymnasia and technical schools from 1852 to 1912. The program of 1852 and its compilers Buslaev and Galakhov followed the content of existing reading books but tried to include new pieces (for example, S. T. Aksakov’s Notes of a Rifle Hunter, 1849-1852). The “core” consists of the texts of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Nineteenth-century works, Karamzin and Pushkin, and Old Russian literature appear only in excerpts (as a material for studying the Old Russian language and in a special class; it had only just begun to be recognized as a full-fledged part of Russian literature). In the liberal 1860s, from 1860 to 1866, the Ministry allowed the pedagogical councils to widen the program of 1852 themselves100 so that schoolchildren could read the latest literature—from Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time to the articles of Dobroliubov. Thus, A.I. Georgievskii—the right hand of Dmitrii Tolstoi—lamented in his history of the Academic Committee of the Ministry of Public Education that the freedom of the 1860s led to the fact that even the head of one of the southern educational districts recommended that teachers have at their disposal critical articles not only by Belinskii, but also by Pisarev and Dobroliubov.101 Konstantin Petrov, the author of several course books and readers, nominated recent works by Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevskii, and a minor Slavophile writer, Nadezhda Kokhanovskaia, for inclusion in the syllabus as essential material for “literary conversation.”102

Table 5. Russian Fiction in Ministerial Curricula of Gymnasia and Technical Schools, 1852-1912. with indication of class (1852-1912). Legend: G – gymnasia, RS – real school, number – form; fr stands for “in fragments.”

Author and text

1852

1872

1890

1905 (1906 for RS)

1912 (unified for G and RS)

Sermon on Law and Grace by Hilarion of Kiev

G 5 + RS

G 5 + RS 5

5

The Primary Chronicle

G 6-7 (fr) + RS

G 5 + RS

G 5 + RS 5

5 fr

The Tale of Igor’s Campaign

G 3 fr

G 6-7 + RS

G 5 + RS

G 5 + RS 5

5 fr

The Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel in the Holy Land

G 5 + RS

G 5 + RS 5

5 fr

Lives of the Saints (Boris and Gleb, Aleksandr Nevskii, Sergius of Radonezh, et al.)

G fr

RS

G 5 + RS 5

5 fr

The Instruction of Vladimir Monomakh

G3

G 5 fr

RS 5

5

Praying of Daniel the Immured

G 5 fr

5

The History of the Grand Prince of Moscow by Prince Kurbskii

G 6-7 fr

G 6 fr

6 fr

Life of the Archpriest Avvakum

5 fr

Russia in the Reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich by Grigory Kotoshikhin

G 6 fr

6 fr

The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn

RS 6

5

M. Komarov, Unlucky Nikanor

G 6

M. Chulkov, Bitter Fate

G 6

Karamzin, Poor Liza

n/d fr

G 7 fr

G 6 + RS 6

6

Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller

3-4 fr

G 6-7 fr + RS 7 fr

G 7 fr + RS 6 fr

G 6 + RS 6

6 fr

Karamzin, History of the Russian State

1-2 fr

G 6-7 fr + RS 7 fr

G 7 fr + RS 6

G 6 + RS 6

6 fr

Karamzin, Frol Silin

G 6

Karamzin, Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter.

G 6 + RS 6

Narezhnyi, Bursak

G 6

Zagoskin, Iuri Miloslavskii

extra year

Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter

n/d

G 7 + RS 6

G 7 + RS 6

6

Pushkin, The Moor of Peter the Great

G 7 + RS 6

6

Pushkin, A Journey to Arzrum

G 7

Pushkin, The Tales of Belkin

G 7 + RS 6

6

Pushkin, Dubrovskii

G 7

Gogol’, Tales

Extra year

Gogol’, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

G 7

RS 7

7

Gogol’, Mirgorod

G 7 + RS 7

7

Gogol’, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikoforovich

G 7 + RS 7

7

Gogol’, Old World Landowners

G 6-7

G 7 + RS 6

G 7 + RS 7

7

Gogol’, Taras Bulba

G 6-7 + RS

G 7 + RS 6

G 7

7

Gogol’, Portrait

G 7 + RS 7

7

Gogol’, The Overcoat

G 7 + RS 7

7

Gogol’, Diary of a Madman

G 7

Gogol’, Dead Souls

n/d

G 6-7 + RS

G 7 + RS 6

G 6-7 + RS 7

7

Gogol’, Author’s Confession

G 7

7

Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

G 7 fr + RS 6 fr

G 6 + RS 6

7 fr

Aksakov, Notes of a Rifle Hunter

n/d fr

Goncharov, Oblomov

G 7 + RS 7

7

Turgenev, A Sportsman’s Sketches

G 7 + RS 7

7

Turgenev, Mumu

G 7 + RS 7

Turgenev, Rudin

G 7 + RS 7

7

Turgenev, A Nest of the Gentlefolk

G 7 + RS 7

7

Dostoevskii, Poor People

G 7 (optional)

7

Dostoevskii, The Humiliated and Insulted

G 7

Dostoevskii, Crime and Punishment

G 8

G 8

Lev Tolstoi, Childhood and Adolescence

G 8 + RS 7

7

Lev Tolstoi, Sevastopol Stories

G 7

Lev Tolstoi, War and Peace

G 8 + RS 7

G 8

Goncharov, A Common Story

RS 7

7

Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

7

105The new 1872 and 1890 programs of mandatory reading differed from various syllabi of the 1860s. They now included a wide range of Old Russian texts and eliminated contemporary literature and texts on the history of Russian literature. The modern literature in the syllabus was at least thirty years old—poems by Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). As is clear from Table 5, the program of 1872 imposed a difference in reading lists between gymnasia and technical schools. Thus, conservatism and reproduction of the existing social order manifested not only in the prohibition of technical school graduates from entering universities, but also in the differentiated content of programs. It is well known that Dmitrii Tolstoi saw as the main purpose of a gymnasium education the upbringing of nobility and loyal government officials capable of resisting the subversive influences of radicalism and materialism. For this reason, ministerial syllabi prohibited all of the latest literature after Lermontov and Gogol’, creating a thirty-year lag in the curriculum. At the same time, the program of 1890 substantially expanded the list of Old Russian literature. The 1872 ministry’s list of mandatory reading for classical gymnasia contained more Russian folklore, Old Russian, and eighteenth-century texts than the list for real schools. After 1890, the gap widened even more dramatically, as the reading in real schools included only five Old Russian texts and one eighteenth-century text (by Mikhail Lomonosov), and concentrated predominantly on early nineteenth-century literature, including poetry by Karamzin, Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Kol’tsov. The gymnasium literature course was deliberately “classicalized” by means of its archaization. This was the most conservative moment in the history of Russian syllabi. Between 1872 and 1905, the modern part of the literary syllabus was expanded only once, when, in 1890, the Ministry added the chapters “Bela” and “Maksim Maksimych” from Lermontov’s novel and reintegrated Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter.

  • 103   Zubkov, “Zemskie shkoly, gimnazii i real’nye uchilishcha”, 193-194.

106The dismantling of “Tolstoi’s Classicism” in 1898-1903103 and the significant revision of the program led, firstly, to a substantial (but not complete) synchronization of the program of gymnasia and technical schools, and secondly, to the introduction of some contemporary literature while also preserving the Old Russian component of the program (with some cuts, as is visible in Table 5). Yet “contemporary” meant literature of 1855–1869; the course ended with Lev Tolstoi’s War and Peace. The whole range of titles included: Ivan Goncharov’s A Common Story (for technical schools) and Oblomov, A Sportsman’s Sketches, Mumu, Rudin and A Nest of the Gentlefolk by Turgenev; Dostoevskii’s Poor Folk (optional), The Humiliated and Insulted and Crime and Punishment; Tolstoi’s Childhood and Adolescence. It is important to remember that the 1905 program significantly expanded the collection of Karamzin’s prose (“Frol Silin,” “Natalia the Boyar’s Daughter”), Pushkin (“The Moor of Peter the Great”, The Tales of Belkin, “Journey to Arzrum,” “Dubrovskii”) and Gogol’ (almost all of his stories of the 1830–40s. Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time was, for the first time, to be read in its entirety.

107The new syllabus of 1905 was approved in 1912 in the final imperial program, which was never updated with Ignatiev’s 1915 projections. The 1912 program already unified gymnasium and technical school reading (the only remaining difference was in the eighth gymnasium class), slightly reduced the number of texts by Karamzin, Pushkin and Gogol’, and even expanded the list of literary readings from the 1850–60s. Additions included Tolstoi’s Sevastopol Stories” and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

108Of course, comparison between curricula and the most frequent texts in school anthologies immediately corrects the picture and demonstrates that students in fact had much greater opportunity to read a wide range of texts, even in excerpts (one should remember that in most cases the name of the source work was omitted). As Table 6 demonstrates, the list of novels included in anthologies was much broader than that of the official curriculum.

Table 6. The Most Frequent Fiction Texts and Fragments in Anthologies, 1805-1912 (source: database “Reading of 19th-Century Schoolchildren”).

Author

Text

Amount

of times indexed

Most frequent fragments (“+” means some more fragments)

Year of first inclusion in any anthology

Gogol’

Dead Souls

76

Pliushkin (14+)

Road (8)

Russia-troika (8)

1843

Gogol’

Taras Bul’ba

57

Steppe (20+)

1843

Lermontov

A Hero of Our Time

54

Morning in Piatigorsk (13)

Maksim Maksimych (10+)

1843

Goncharov

The Frigate Pallada

50

Luxury and Comfort (6)

1861

Pushkin

The Captain’s Daughter

47

Meeting with Catherine II (15+)

Belogorskaia Fortress (12+)

Snowstorm (9+)

1843

Lev Tolstoi

Childhood

45

Classroom (12)

1863

Karamzin

Letters of a Russian Traveller

41

Rhine waterfall (7+)

1805

Goncharov

Oblomov

40

Oblomov’s Dream (8+)

Oblomov’s room (7)

1861

Pushkin

A Journey to Arzrum

28

Georgia (5)

1843

Turgenev

Bezhin Meadow

26

Boys (10+)

1862

Gogol’

Old World Landowners

26

Afanasii and Pul’kheriia (7+)

1843

Karamzin

History of the Russian State

25

No data

1830

Lev Tolstoi

War and Peace

24

Rostovy at uncle (6)

Empty Moscow (2)

1868

Aksakov

Notes of a Rifle Hunter

22

Waters (8)

1861

Aksakov

Childhood of the Bagrov Grandson

20

Bobsleigh (5+)

1869

Batiushkov

A Picture of Finland

20

Finland

1830

Aksakov

A Family Chronicle

18

Stepan’s Day (10)

Mill (4)

1861

Pushkin

The Moor of Peter the Great

17

Meeting with Peter (3)

Ibragim (3)

1843

Grigorovich

The Fishermen

16

Spring is coming (4)

1866

Aleksei Tolstoi

Prince Serebrianyi

14

Boyarin’s house (4)

1865

Zagoskin

Iurii Miloslavskii

13

Kuzma Minin (8+)

1843

Goncharov

A Common Story

12

Thunderstorm (8)

1866

Mel’nikov- Pecherskii

In the Forests

11

Fire in a forest (3)

1876

Turgenev

A Nest of Gentlefolk

7

Liza (3)

1866

Turgenev

Rudin

7

Summer rain (4)

1866

Dostoevskii

The Brothers Karamazov

5

At sick man’s bed (2)

1884

Lazhechnikov

Basurman

5

Prologue

1843

Goncharov

The Precipice

4

Grandmother (3)

Marfinka (3)

1883

109The texts which appeared most frequently in anthologies were Gogol’s Dead Souls and Taras Bul’ba, as well as Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, which was included in the program only in 1890. Despite such late inclusion, the popularity of Lermontov’s text in anthologies can be explained by the fact that it was used for grammar exercises and explanatory analysis in the study of narrative types (e.g. “Morning in Piatigorsk” exemplified the genre of description).

  • 104   E.g., in Sosnitskii’s “Theory of Literature” (Moscow, 1880).
  • 105 It should be noted that in Soviet schools the novel was considered as a tale and was assigned for (...)

110Texts of the second most popular trio—Goncharov’s The Frigate Pallada, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and Tolstoi’s Childhood—have a completely different reputation and history of scholastic study. One can assume that The Frigate Pallada, which was not included in the program, never existed in the minds of schoolchildren as an integral work, but always as part of some collection of excerpts from Goncharov. The most popular passage, “Luxury and Comfort” (a comparative description of European and Eastern civilizations from the Chinese chapter of the travelogue), was a perfect fit for teaching the writing of “discourse” (rassuzhdenie).104 Other excerpts from Goncharov often existed as descriptions of exotic natural life in the tropics, marine phenomena (hurricanes, sharks, thunderstorms at sea, etc.). A similar thing happened with Tolstoi’s Childhood, which was included in the program only in 1905, but had been, since 1863, consistently included in anthologies for elementary school and lower classes of gymnasia and technical schools in fragments. Excerpts from Childhood, such as “Classroom,” “Happy Time of Childhood”, “Harvest,” and “Separation” correlated in both theme and content with students’ age and the classroom context. Meanwhile, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, which became part of the program since 1852 (with a hiatus in 1872), is an example of a text which was read in full as an example of the historical novel, discussed in the Theory of Literature course.105

111The last five texts of the top ten (Karamzin, Goncharov, Pushkin, Gogol’ and Turgenev) look very different in their school circulation. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler was included in anthologies (in fragments) and in syllabi since 1805, whereas Goncharov’s Oblomov officially appeared in the syllabus only in 1905, but from 1861-1868 was frequently included in popular anthologies such as those compiled by Ushinskii, Galakhov, Basistov and Polevoi. Moreover, as the semantic core of the novel, “Oblomov’s Dream” had a kind of autonomy.

112If one looks at the long nineteenth century (1805-1912), prose takes a very modest place in comparison with poetry and drama and constitutes only 16.6% of all textual entries in our database. The insignificant role of prose in contrast to poetry is made clear with reference to the specific place of a hybrid lyric-epic work such as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which is represented in our database 170 times (in fragments; compare with 76 entries of the prosaic “leader” of prose works—Dead Souls). Thus, we might wonder whether prose occupied a peripheral place in school reading as a whole. However, we believe that this was not the case. For the reasons mentioned above, the compilers of anthologies could not and did not seek to include long prosaic texts, relying instead on extracurricular reading at home. Thus, the modest role of prose in anthologies does not suggest that it was of an an inferior status in the practice of teaching and individual reading. In the classical and technical gymnasia in the years 1852-1870, many major prosaic texts of the 1820-40s, such as Zagoskin’s Iurii Miloslavskii, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and Gogol’s Dead Souls were compulsory reading (Lermontov’s novel was not among them). Although, beginning in 1872, fragments of Hero of Our Time were added to this list, the 30 years from 1872 to 1903 proved to be the most difficult period for the high school, since at this time the glaring gap between the conservative curriculum and the burgeoning international fame of the great Russian novel had reached a critical point. The exploration of memoirs about official and underground reading allows us to understand how this played out in practice.

4.2. Extracurricular and Underground Reading

113As we have already mentioned in section 3.4, modern scholars can explore the extracurricular and underground reading of students only with the help of memoirs and diaries. In our above-mentioned database “The Reading Habits of 19th-Century Schoolchildren,” prose prevails in this category of reading: in many cases, it was extracurricular or even forbidden. Table 7 presents a list of authors who are most frequently recalled in the memoirs of gymnasium students (and, in part, their teachers). The date of memoirs, grouped by particular decades, is indicated on the right side of the table.

Table 7. Most frequently mentioned authors (fiction and non-fiction) in the memoirs of pupils of all types of schools and in gymnasia (with a frequency of more than 0.8%; by particular decades. Source: the database “The Reading Habits of 19th-Century Schoolchildren”).

Author

Total (abs. and %)

In gymnasia (%)

Decade of Memoir Author’s Time in School

1830-1850s

1860-1870s

1880-1890s

1900-1917

Pushkin

93 (6.8)

Pushkin-prosaic

12 (0.9)

33.3

3

0

7

2

Tolstoi, Lev

57 (4.2)

28.0

4

4

25

21

Gogol’

55 (4.0)

47.2

12

14

19

8

Turgenev

53 (3.9)

45.2

8

8

20

12

Lermontov

38 (2.8)

Lermontov-prosaic

3 (0.2)

66.7

1

1

1

0

Pisarev

28 (2.0)

64.2

0

16

8

4

Dostoevskii

27 (1.9)

40.7

2

5

12

7

Chernyshevskii

27 (1.9)

63.0

-

15

11

1

Dobroliubov

23 (1.7)

70.0

-

15

8

0

Goncharov

18 (1.3)

33.3

2

4

8

4

Belinskii

13 (1.0)

77.0

4

5

3

0

Uspenskii, Gleb

13 (1.0)

38.4

-

4

5

3

Karamzin

12 (0.9)

58.3

5

4

2

0

Mill, J.S.

11 (0.8)

45.4

-

7

4

0

114Comparing this list with that of the most frequent texts in textbooks and curricula, we observe only a partial intersection. If Gogol’, Lermontov and Goncharov dominate the texts printed in excerpt, memoirs designate Lev Tolstoi, Gogol’ and Turgenev as the most frequently read. The lower part of the list has almost no intersections with pedagogical practice (except for Goncharov and Karamzin)—rather, it includes “forbidden” writers like Pisarev, Chernyshevskii, Dobroliubov and Belinskii and foreign philosophers such as J.S. Mill. It was such authors who were most often read and remembered by students, competing in popularity only with the prose writers Lermontov, Karamzin, Gogol’ and Turgenev (in other types of schools the picture was different, as is evident in the table).

  • 106   Our calculations yield conclusions similar to those of Zhitomirova, who, in turn, cites a study c (...)

115If we omit mentions of Pushkin (references to whom, just as with the case described above, far exceeded references to all other writers, despite the fact that his prose only accounted for 0.9% of total mentions), the most frequently recalled author is Lev Tolstoi (4.2% of all mentions of prose writers), who was not included in the ministry’s curriculum until 1905. The next most popular writers are Gogol’ and Turgenev, who, along with the author of War and Peace, form a trio which significantly outpaces the others in popularity. Naturally, Tolstoi’s success is associated by and large with the period of 1880-1917, when the writer became an active public figure and thus predictably accrued the greatest number of mentions.106 On the other hand, Tolstoi is the only one of the most widely read authors who was popular not in classical gymnasia (only 28% in the database), but in technical and public elementary schools. This fact can be partially explained by the writer’s own intention to write for the people (with his Folk Stories and ABC Books). In almost 50% of cases, Gogol’ and Turgenev were read in gymnasia, and the presence of the author of Dead Souls in the curriculum since 1852 provided him with a stable position throughout all of the decades considered (although he received a slight increase in attention in the 1880s). A sharp rise in the number of Turgenev mentions since the 1880s can be explained by his posthumous fame (as was also the case with Dostoevskii).

  • 107Gimnazicheskii sbornik: Raboty vospitannikov Novocherkasskoi gimnazii (Novocherkassk, 1880), 23.
  • 108   See I. Paperno, Semiotika povedeniia: Nikolai Chernyshevskii – chelovek epokhi realizma (Moscow, (...)

116The next most frequent group of authors—Pisarev, Chernyshevskii, Dostoevskii and Dobroliubov (2.0-1.7%)—was read primarily by gymnasia students (in the case of Dobroliubov, 70%), with the exception of Dostoevskii, who, as the statistics demonstrate, was widely read in schools of various kinds (40% of gymnasium students and almost 30% in other types of schools). The influence of radical literary criticism reached even the margins of the Russian Empire. One example of its wide reach was an 1880 collection of essays written by students of the Novocherkassk Gymnasium. This collection consisted almost entirely of abstracts from Belinskii’s articles on a wide range of issues, from artistry to the woman question; meanwhile, the preface of the essay collection called Belinskii himself “the pride and ornament of our native literature.”107 This example points to the well-known phenomenon—the underground canon of the radical intelligentsia, for whom forbidden books and texts immediately became compulsory reading.108

  • 109   V. Sipovskii, ”O rasshirenii kursa russkoi slovesnosti v gimnaziiakh i real’nykh uchilishchakh,” (...)

117In general, this odd foursome—three revolutionary-democratic critics and a religious writer—is far from accidental. It can help explain the reasons for Dostoevskii’s popularity among schoolchildren of the last third of the nineteenth century. In contrast to Dostoevskii, the popularity of the three radical critics peaked, predictably, in the 1860s–70s, and fell off at the end of the century, giving way to new idols (Marxists, Bakunin, N. Mikhailovskii). Dostoevskii and these radical critics are bound up together in our sample, and not only because they were opponents in the early 1860s (Dostoevskii continued to polemicize with them later). The reason for Dostoevskii’s popularity among schoolchildren was, apparently, also based on the social relevance of his novels and their newspaper-pamphlet style (especially Demons) and, in particular, their ability to touch on the most pressing problems of human rights, humanism, and religion. Early twentieth-century teachers recognized this feature of Dostoevskii’s work and used it to promote his novel for inclusion into ministry syllabi.109

118The final part of the ranking comprises the group of authors who lag behind in popularity, but still appear comparatively often in the memoirs of former students. They include Goncharov, Karamzin, Belinskii (read most of all in gymnasia, though he was not included in the curriculum), G.I. Uspenskii and J.S. Mill. Such a motley set can be explained by the low frequency of the authors that make it up (less than 1%). Our database includes many such rarely mentioned but frequently read philosophers, economists and publicists (Mill is the most popular, thanks in large part to Chernyshevskii’s translation and commentary; he is followed by Lavrov, Lassalle, Bakunin, Mikhailovskii, Herzen, Spencer, Marx, Plekhanov, and Bervi-Flerovskii), Russian novelists (Sergei Aksakov, Vsevolod Garshin, Dmitrii Grigorovich, Vladimir Korolenko, Anton Chekhov) and foreign writers (Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas Sr., James F. Cooper, Walter Scott, and Friedrich Spielhagen).

  • 110   See E. I. Shcherbakova, “Roman N.G. Chernyshevskogo «Chto delat’?» v vospriiatii radikal’noi molo (...)

119It is also useful to examine these reading lists from another angle—that of the most frequently mentioned individual works (Table 8). Such a sample reveals a wide range of titles: memoirists name individual works infrequently, but occasionally recall the most sensational works which strongly influenced their worldview. It is unsurprising that the number of mentions received by a particular text in our database is extremely small. Thus, at twelve mentions, Chernyshevskii’s novel What Is To Be Done? becomes the leader, a result which validates not only the most vivid memoirs about the novel (such as Lenin’s memoirs in his Geneva conversations with Valentinov that the novel “plowed me over”), but also scholarly findings.110 Banned immediately after publication, the novel was widely read.

Table 8. The most frequently mentioned prosaic texts (with three or more mentions, 1850-1917, in all types of schools except religious schools. Database includes 1364 records in total)

Author and text

Year of publication in Russian

Frequency (abs.)

Inclusion in curriculum

Chernyshevskii, What Is To Be Done?

1863

12

- (banned)

Lev Tolstoi, War and Peace

1869

7

1905

Gogol’, Taras Bul’ba

1842

7

1872

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

1764

7

-

Turgenev, A Sportsman’s Sketches

1852

6

1905

Pushkin, Captain’s Daughter

1836

6

1852

Aleksei Tolstoi, Prince Serebrianyi

1863

6

-

Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1857

6

-

Goncharov, Oblomov

1859

6

1905

Spielhagen. In Reih’ und Glied

1867-68

6

-

Lev Tolstoi, Anna Karenina

1878

5

-

Karamzin, History of the Russian State

1818

5

1852

Garshin, Signal

1887

4

-

Omulevskii, Step by Step

1870

4

- (banned)

Lavrov, Historical Letters

1868-70

4

-

Lev Tolstoi, The Prisoner of the Caucasus

1872

4

-

Turgenev, Mumu

1854

4

1905

Gogol’, Dead Souls

1842

4

1852

Dostoevskii, The Brothers Karamazov

1881

4

-

Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

1862

4

1912

Dostoevskii, Crime and Punishment

1866

4

1905

Gogol’, Old World Landowners

1835

3

1872

Dumas. Les Trois Mousquetaires

1846

3

-

Zagoskin, Iurii Miloslavskii

1829

3

From 1852 to 1860

Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

1841

3

1890

Lev Tolstoi. Childhood and Adolescence

1852,1856

3

1905

E. Tur, Catacombs

1866

3

-

Mill J.S., Principles of Political Economy

1865

3

-

Pomialovskii, Seminary Sketches

1863

3

-

Erckmann-Chatrian, Histoire d’un paysan

1878

3

-

  • 111   In the 1880s, the Ministry withdrew many books by contemporary authors which were bought for scho (...)
  • 112   N. S. Travushkin, “Kak chitali v Rossii roman Shpil’gagena ‘Odin v pole ne voin’”, in Russkaia li (...)

120This sample data demonstrates the popularity not only of banned novels such as What Is To Be Done? and Innokenti Omulevskii’s Step by Step (1870),111 but also the curricular works of Turgenev (A Sportsman’s Sketches), Pushkin (The Captain’s Daughter), Gogol’ (Taras Bul’ba), and Lermontov. Moreover, students demonstrated a preference for Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Aleksei Tolstoi’s Prince Serebrianyi, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and, of course, foreign fiction (Defoe, Stowe, Spielhagen112). It is clear that nearly 60 percent of these novels were included in the curriculum by 1912.

121The lower part of the list contains both curricular and non-curricular texts in the same proportion, and their equal ratio is also clearly visible. The non-curricular texts listed include both texts included in anthologies in the 1880s and 1990s (The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, The Prisoner of the Caucasus) and texts which were banned (Step by Step by Omulevskii), as well as the widely read Les Trois Mousquetaires by Dumas, E. Tur’s Catacombs, and Erckmann-Chatrian’s Histoire d’un paysan.

  • 113 Archival sources on lending by school libraries would help complete the picture. Due to Timur Guz (...)

122For the period from the 1890s to 1910s, we have at our disposal the first statistical studies of extra-curricular and summer reading, which were conducted in the 1900s and mentioned in the earlier section on lyric poetry. This data overlaps with the memoirs, but also differs significantly, since it contains a “blind spot”: the survey respondents, for various reasons, were unlikely to speak of forbidden books, which were risky to mention. Therefore, the questionnaires contain almost no reference to radical journalism. Table 9 shows the results of two such surveys conducted in 1893 and 1909. One can see that some of the popular authors here coincide with those we described above with reference to former students’ memoirs (Scott, Turgenev, Gogol’, L. Tolstoi, Goncharov, Dostoevskii, Stowe). Another group consists of prose writers who were rarely mentioned in memoirs (less than 1% of mentions) but occupied a very important place in the questionnaires of the same period. These writers include Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard, F. Cooper, Charskaia, Chekhov, Senkevich, Pecherskii, Ibsen, Dickens, and Garin-Mikhailovskii113.

Table 9. Children’s Reading in 1893 and 1909

Demand in library of anonymized school

Survey of Pskov high school students, summer 1909

Author

Frequency of demand

Author

Number of mentions

Jules Verne

14%

Gogol’

289

Cooper

11%

Pushkin

244

Scott

11%

Turgenev

177

Turgenev

8%

Lev Tolstoi

129

Aimard

6%

Lermontov

119

Gogol’

5%

Goncharov

101

Grigorovich

4%

Charskaia

94

Pushkin

3.3%

Dostoevskii

64

Polonskii

3.2%

Chekhov

64

Dickens

2.8%

123Thus, the tendencies of children’s reading in the second half of the nineteenth century demonstrate a slight, though symbolically loaded, prevalence of non-curricular literature. This suggests that some portion of the schoolchildren were not satisfied by the official school curriculum. Memoirs and a few collections of gymnasium compositions provide little material by which to evaluate the scale of out-of-class, non-curricular, and underground reading. But even the striking cases in which non-curricular works of modern literature were read and used in competitive essays (as mentioned above) testify to the extremely differentiated practice of reading, which varied from one gymnasium to another and largely depended on the political position of its director, inspector, the pedagogical council, and the literature teacher, not to mention the type of school (once again, it is important to keep in mind that in private gymnasia and commercial schools the circle of curricular reading was much wider).

124Even taken in its broad form, the list of prosaic texts in the 1870s and 1890s (i.e. when attempts to orient the syllabus along classical and conservative lines were most severe), could, in some schools and with some teachers, be significantly expanded if students began to read non-curricular Russian or foreign prose, journalism, or scientific texts. This gap between curricular and non-curricular reading was partially resolved by the school reform of 1903-1905 and, of course, the Manifesto of October 17, 1905. Therefore, surveys conducted in the final decade of the Russian Empire give a much more balanced picture of reading practices (including classroom reading, out-of-class reading, and reading for fun). As such, school-age reading from 1905-1917 presents a completely different story than in preceding decades.

Conclusion

  • 114   Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning,” 658-659.
  • 115   See G. Freidin. “By the Walls of Church and State: Literature’s Authority in Russia’s Modern Trad (...)

125As we have demonstrated, literature and contemporary belles lettres in Russian school curricula were embedded into the system of modern literary education. Through syllabi, the state regulated the distribution of social and cultural capital. From 1871 to 1905, Russian educational policy aspired to expel the notion of modernity from the classroom and relied on the classics to form the subjectivity of pupils. Although Russian literature (and its history) was not a central subject in the humanities at that time, it gradually underwent a process of emancipation, gaining some autonomy and disciplinary legitimization by 1905 and, in full, in 1912.114 The imbalance between the classics and contemporary literature was serious, due not only to the discriminatory nature of political pressure but also to the high symbolic power of literature in Russia—the so-called “literature-centrism” and literature’s consecrated status—which was fueled by the endeavors of literary criticism.115

  • 116   Guillory, Cultural Capital, 15.

126One of the most difficult problems for teachers and officials throughout the “long” nineteenth century was the modernization of the literature curriculum. Any syllabus naturally tends towards modernization,116 especially during a period of intensive growth of the national imagination, as with the imperial Russia of the 1830-60s. The short but intensive formation period of the school canon and curriculum, launched by Buslaev and Galakhov, quickly ended in 1871 when Count Dmitrii Tolstoi’s Ministry of Education standardized all curricula. From 1871 to 1905, the teaching of contemporary fiction (written less than fifty to sixty years earlier) was prohibited in gymnasia. Such a situation reinforced and perpetuated the cult of Russian literature (from Nestor’s Primary Chronicle to Nikolai Gogol’) and consecrated an emerging literary canon. The ban on the prose of Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Lev Tolstoi, and on modern poetry and drama, combined with a school curriculum that generally promoted an interest in Russian literature, encouraged students to seek modern fiction elsewhere. The resulting proliferation of anthologies of seemingly elite, high-culture texts, as well as the spread of underground publishing, is an important part of this story.

127Towards the end of Dmitrii Tolstoi’s tenure as minister (1880), contemporary Russian literature and its novelists (Turgenev, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi) acquired such symbolic capital and strength, both in Russia and abroad, that the ban on their study increasingly became an outrageous anachronism. However, the more the symbolic capital of the latest Russian literature grew, the more strongly it was blocked from above and the more restrictive measures were placed upon it by the state.

  • 117   On France, see M. Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York, (...)

128From a comparative perspective, the Russian educational policy of the 1860-90s combined Prussian and French models. The pioneer of nationalizing the state education system, Prussia was followed by Russia in the 1860s and France after 1882;117 the United States followed suit in the 1890s, as did Great Britain after 1904. By the time of the 1871 reform, only the Prussian model explicitly pursued the task of forging national cohesion on the basis of ethnocultural nationalism rather than early modern ideals of republicanism and civic duty (which the Russian imperial regime did not want to embrace). From the perspective of modern politics of population control, the classics could be instrumentalized only within the republican paradigm, while Russian literature had the potential to cultivate an ethnocultural Russian identity as a means to ensure the unity of the empire. As he explicitly stated in his speeches and articles, this was the reason that Tolstoi preserved the study of Russian literature in high school, where it was shaped by Ministry-approved school curricula.

129In the final part of our chapter, we demonstrated the influence of such educational policy on the expanding sphere of underground reading. As a result of that policy, high school students experienced particularly large “gaps” in their knowledge of the latest prose and political journalism of the 1850-70s and tried to read it at home, in study circles, and—in the case of forbidden books—even secretly. Reclaiming the right to read, discuss, and teach recent literature, many students and teachers of the second half of the nineteenth century could feel frustrated. Fin-de-siècle literature and memoirs are full of descriptions of personal and collective traumas. It is worth remembering how Russian literature reacted to the educational reforms that aimed to change its status.

  • 118   On the connection between teaching literature and imperial imagination see: L. Pild. “Pushkin v ‘ (...)

130The prohibition on reading and discussing contemporary literature in the classroom was amply thematized in fiction of the time. Writers mocked the conservative system of “school classicism” in a series of famous texts from Garin-Mikhailovskii’s Gymnasium Students to Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Man in a Case” (1898). Precisely at the time when the Special Committee elaborated the project of a new program for the Ministry of Education from 1899 to 1903, the Symbolist Fedor Sologub (a former gymnasium teacher) was writing his famous novel The Little Demon (1905), wherein the main character Ardalion Peredonov was a Russian language and literature teacher in a provincial gymnasium. Depicting Peredonov as a careerist, as an imperialist- and chauvinist-minded person (he argues that Poland should belong to Russia indefinitely118), and as a caricature of the typical small man of Russian prose from Gogol’ to Chekhov, Sologub problematized not only the nationalist atmosphere of provincial Russian schools, but also diagnosed the contiguity between and close proximity of cultural and physical violence, as well as the relationship between aesthetic values and ethical ones. One can argue that Peredonov and peredonovschina symbolically manifest the crisis of cultural production in the educational system from 1866 to the 1890s. No wonder The Little Demon became one of the most read Russian novels in the last years of the Romanov Empire.

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Vdovin A., “’Dmitry Tolstoi’s Classicism’ and the Formation of the Russian Literary Canon in the High School Curriculum”, Ab Imperio 4 (2017), 108-137.

Vdovin A., Leibov R. “Khrestomatiinye teksty: russkaia poeziia i shkol’naia praktika XIX stoletiia” in: Acta Slavica Estonica IV. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii. Literaturovedenie, IX. Khrestomatiinye teksty: russkaia pedagogicheskaia praktika XIX veka i poeticheskii kanon (Tartu, 2013), 7–34.

Zhitomirova N. N., “Chitatel’skie zaprosy i krug chteniia uchashchikhsia srednei shkoly predrevoliutsionnoi Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka“, Istoriia russkogo chitatelia (Leningrad, 1976), 2, 67-82.

Zubkov I. V., “Zemskie shkoly, gimnazii i real’nye uchilishcha (1890-1916 gody)” in: Raspisanie peremen: Ocherki istorii obrazovatel’noi i nauchnoi politiki v Rossiiskoi imperii – SSSR (konets 1880-kh – 1930-e gody) (Moscow, 2012).

Notes

1   This study was implemented within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow) in 2017.

2   In some sections of this chapter, we also take into account the reading of technical school students–boys of the same age who undertook a shorter course of study, lasting six to seven years. Meanwhile, we consider neither girls’ education, nor literature programs in private gymnasia and commercial schools, although these issues, owing to their variability and wider scope, are of no less importance.

3   Our approach here follows the so-called “Anthology Studies” in the English and American criticism. For a recent study, see T. Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism. Material Artefacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton, 2017), in particular Chapters 13-15. See also I. Michael, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge, 1987); B. Korte, Flowers for the Picking: Anthologies of Poetry in (British) Literary and Cultural Studies (Amsterdam, 2000).

4   Works of this kind include the following: “O chtenii knig iunkerami voennykh uchilishch i vospitannikami Pazheskogo i Finliandskogo korpusov”, Pedagogicheskii sbornik, 4 (1869), 284-294; S. P. Nezlobin, “Vneklassnaia shkol’naia literatura,” Russkaia shkola, 1 (1893), 59-73, 2 (1893), 69-81; E. A. Andreeva, “Kakie knigi chitaiutsia v voskresnoi shkole,” in Chastnyi pochin v dele narodnogo obrazovaniia (Moscow, 1894), 319-334; K. Levin, “Chto chitaet i chem interesuetsia uchashchaiasia molodezh’”, Mir bozhii, 11 (1903), 185-198; 12 (1903), 103-123; I. S. Simonov, “Chto chitaiut starshie vospitanniki nashikh kadetskikh korpusov,” Pedagogicheskii Sbornik, 2 (1905), 210-215; 6 (1905), 642-665; 7 (1905), 29-46; 8 (1905), 89-105; 9 (1905), 212-227; K. Sivkov, “Idealy uchashcheisia molodezhi,” Vestnik vospitaniia, 2 (1909), 117-158; I. A. Aleshintsev, “Chto chitaiut uchashchiesia v srednei shkole na kanikulakh,” Vestnik vospitaniia, 2 (1910), 61-86; K. Sivkov, “Idealy gorodskikh shkol’nikov,” Vestnik vospitaniia, 4 (1911), 92-108; S. A. Anan’in, “Detskie idealy,” Russkaia shkola, 7-8 (1911), 201-219; I. Bachaldin, “Uchenik-chitatel’: (Anketa o chtenii v srednei shkole),” Russkaia shkola, 3 (1912), 110-134; 4 (1912), 118-131; V. A. Vodarskii, “Chto i kak chitaiut ucheniki gimnazii: (Po dannym ankety)”, Rodnoi iazyk v shkole, 1(6) (1915-1916), 11-16; N. Mendel’son, “O chtenii uchashchikhsia (po dannym ankety),” Rodnoi iazyk v shkole, 8-10 (1916-1917).

5   I. A. Aleshintsev, “Chto chitaiut…”

6   N. A. Morozov, Povesti moei zhizni. Memuary, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1965), vol. 1, 63.

7   M. I. Semenov, Revoliutsionnaia Samara 80-90-kh godov (Kuibyshev, 1940), 19.

8   V. P. Ostrogorskii, Iz istorii moego uchitel’stva: Kak ia sdelalsia uchitelem (St. Petersburg, 1895), 13, 25-26.

9   J. Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993), 6-10.

10   I. Hunter, Culture and Government. The Emergence of Literary Education (London, 1988), 3-4.

11   Ibid., 3.

12   Ibid., 4.

13   Ibid., 152.

14   See J. Guillory, “Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines,” in A. Anderson, J. Valente (eds.), Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle (Princeton, 2002).

15   Guillory, Cultural Capital, 35.

16   “Uchebnye plany predmetov, prepodavaemykh v muzhskikh gimnaziiakh Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 162, 7 (1872), 35-161.

17 On the brief history of German hermeneutics in the nineteenth century, see J. Zimmerman, “F.D.E. Schleiermacher,” in N. Keane, C. Lawn (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (Malden, MA, 2016), 360-65; G. Scholtz, “Ast and Schleiermacher: Hermeneutics and Critical Philosophy,” in J. Malpas, H.-H. Gander (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics (London, New York, 2015), 62-73.

18   V.F. Chertov, Russkaia slovesnost’ v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole. Izdanie 2-e, ispravlennoe i dopolnennoe (Moscow, 2013), 70-73, 77.

19 On Buslaev’s role, see Chertov, Russkaia slovesnost’ v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole, 80-89.

20   F. I. Buslaev, O prepodavanii otechestvennogo iazyka [1844] (Moscow, 1867), 115.

21   A.D. Galakhov, F.I. Buslaev, Konspekt russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti dlia rukovodstva v voenno-uchebnykh zavedeniiakh. (St. Petersburg, 1852), 12-19; Chertov, Russkaia slovesnost’ v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole, 82.

22   See A. Vdovin, Kontsept “glava literatury” v russkoi kritike 1830-60-kh godov (Tartu, 2011), 90-91.

23   Reviewing the methods of teaching literature at the Third Moscow Gymnasium, Petr Vinogradov noted that up to 1869, teachers practiced the historical reading of texts only in the final (seventh) class (P. Vinogradov, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk piatidesiatiletiia Moskovskoi III gimnazii. (1839-1889 g.) (Moscow, 1889), 123-124).

24   A. Galakhov, F. Buslaev, Konspekt russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, 8-9.

25 Alongside Zelenetskii’s textbook, there existed an older one, authored by Ivan Peninskii, released in 1848 and recommended by the Ministry for primary schools and the first classes of gymnasia. See Sbornik rasporiazhenii po Ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniia, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1867), 79. We lack examples of textual analysis of the 1830-40s; only a few collections of students’ compositions from this period have been published. See, for example, an 1836 book of real essays from Irkutsk gymnasia: the young authors sought to demonstrate how external form and style complemented the art of thought in Ivan Krylov’s fables. See Prozaicheskie sochineniia uchenikov Irkutskoi gimnazii, pisannye pod rukovodstvom starshego uchitelia rossiiskoi slovesnosti Ivana Poliksen’eva (St. Petersburg, 1836), I.

26   A. Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning: The Study of Literature at Secondary School in Late Imperial Russia (1860s-1900s)”, History of Education, 33 (2004), 651-652; A. V. Reut, “Sochineniia gimnazistov dlia literaturnykh besed v 1840-1860-e gg.: analiz tematiki”, Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta. Pedagogicheskie nauki, 8 (2016), 31-32.

27   Reut, “Sochineniia gimnazistov”, 35-36.

28   Ibid., 36.

29 E. L. Staferova, A.V. Golovnin i liberal’nye reformy v Prosveshchenii (Pervaia polovina 1860-kh godov) (Moscow, 2007), 330-341.

30 On Stoiunin and Ostrogorskii methodology see Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning,” 641-644.

31   V. Ia. Stoiunin, O prepodavanii russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg, 1864), 244–45.

32   Hunter, Culture and Government, 119.

33   Stoiunin, O prepodavanii, 247–48.

34   V. Stoiunin, Rukovodstvo dlia teoreticheskogo izucheniia literatury po luchshim obraztsam russkim i inostrannym. (St. Petersburg, 1869), 78.

35   A. Ia. Rotkovich, Voprosy prepodavaniia literatury. Istoriko-metodicheskie ocherki (Moscow, 1959), 134–136.

36   J. Deinhardt, Der Gymnasial-Unterricht nach den wissenschaftlichen Anforderungen der jetzigen Zeit (Hamburg, 1837); A. Lüben, C. Nacke (eds.), Lesebuch für Bürgerschulen (Leipzig, 1851).
Skopin reviewed Eckardt’s and Lüben’s books in a series of articles in the journal Uchitel’ (The Teacher) in 1863-1865.

37   Since Ostrogorskii, in his introduction to the Russian translation of Eckardt’s book The Guide to the Reading of Poetic Works (1875), wrote of the popularity of German methods in Russian schools, we can assume that this methodology became widespread in gymnasia. Moreover, in 1877 the Academic Committee of the Ministry of Public Education recommended this book for use in gymnasia.

38   L. Ekkardt, Rukovodstvo k chteniiu poeticheskikh sochinenii s prilozheniem primechanii i kratkogo uchebnika teorii poezii. Dlia muzhskikh i zhenskikh uchebnykh zavedenii, transl. by N. Maksimov, V. Ostrogorskii (St. Petersburg, 1875), iv.

39   We have found only one article on Eckardt’s activity (our thanks to professor Jens Herlth for his generous help with this research). Eckardt seems to have been a marginal figure in the history of German and Austrian pedagogy. See: Herbert H. Egglmaier, “Der Literat und Ästhetiker Ludwig Eckardt – seine vergeblichen Bemühungen im Jahre 1868 im akademischen Leben Fuß zu fassen. Ein Beitrag zum Selbstverständnis der österreichischen Universitäten zwei Jahrzehnte nach der Reform des Bildungswesens 1848/49,” Mensch. Wissenschaft. Magie: Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 26 (2008), 107–122. On the popularity of Eckardt’s book in Russian, see I. I. Tikhomirova, “Kniga, po kotoroi Rossiia polveka uchilas’ iskusstvu chteniia”, Bibliosfera 3 (2006), 55–58.

40   See A. I. Nezelenov, “Nemetskii sposob prepodavaniia russkoi slovesnosti” [1877], in Istoriia literaturnogo obrazovaniia v rossiiskoi shkole. Khrestomatiia (Moscow, 1999), 188–195.

41   For example, one group of questions concerned the historical and literary context (“Do you know the author’s biography, its trajectory?”). Another explored the structure of the text and the correlation of its parts (“In what kind of meter is the poem written and was the meter successfully chosen?”). The third type of question was related to the genre. Finally, the fourth group of questions is devoted to the perception of the text, based on questions such as “Why does the poem produce such an effect on our soul?” Eckardt also described the right the comfortable infrastructure of reading (search for experienced mentor, reading with pencil, reading aloud, rereading, making notes, etc.).

42   One more German textbook was extremely popular in Russia – Leo Cholevius’ Dispositionen und Materialien zu deutschen Aufsätzen (Leipzig, 1860-1862), translated by M. Beliavskii in 1874 and also recommended by the Ministry. This book prioritized the same approach to reading and interpretation by posing broad sociocultural questions. For instance, Cholevius explained the popularity of “Robinson Crusoe” through the analysis of its religious ideology and exotic plot.

43Glagol budushchego: Pedagogicheskii diskurs Ia.M. Neverova i rechevoe povedenie vospitannikov stavropol’skoi gubernskoi gimnazii serediny 19 veka: V 2 chastiakh (Stavropol’, 2002), Part 1, 362. The composition won the school prize and was acclaimed as the best in 1870.

44S”ezd uchitelei russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti v gimnaziiakh Kazanskogo uchebnogo okruga (Kazan’, 1866), 129.

45   On the influence of Tolstoi’s reform on the formation of the literary canon, see: A. Vdovin, “‘Dmitry Tolstoi’s Classicism’ and the Formation of the Russian Literary Canon in the High School Curriculum,” Ab Imperio 4 (2017), 108-137.

46Uchebnye plany predmetov, prepodavaemykh v muzhskikh gimnaziiakh Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 59-60, 73.

47 This was a sign of the disciplinary influence of the cultural-historical school of Russian literary criticism (Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning,” 653-654).

48   P. Polevoi, Uchebnaia russkaia khrestomatiia s tolkovaniiami. Part 3. Starshii vozrast. (St. Petersburg, 1872).

49   G. Morachevskii, Plany razborov sochinenii. (Kremenchug, 1880), 1.

50 Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Literature Teacher” (first part – 1899) reflected new trends in teaching. In this story, the provincial teacher Nikitin (a graduate of St. Petersburg University) assigns his students an essay on the topic “Pushkin as Psychologist.” The sister of his love interest criticizes him for assigning such a difficult topic, which, for this period, was a fair criticism.

51   E. Beliavskii, Metod vedeniia sochinenii. (Moscow, 1881), 36, 39; cf. the same types of topics in: I. Gavrilov, Temy, raspolozheniia i materialy dlia sochinenii v starshikh klassakh, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1887), 168.

52Ispytaniia zrelosti. Spravochnaia kniga, 2nd ed., edited by. V. Al’bitskii. (St. Petersburg, 1884), 153-157.

53   Sh. I. Ganelin, Ocherki po istorii srednei shkoly v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, Leningrad, 1950) 222-225.

54 On the history of the course “Theory of Literature” in school, see: S. Brailovskii, “Novoe napravlenie v shkol’noi teorii slovesnosti,” Pedagogicheskii vestnik 1 (1909), 21-23; Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning”.

55   See Brailovskii. “Novoe napravlenie v shkol’noi teorii slovesnosti,” II (1909), 113-115. Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning,” 650-651. Another important feature of teaching methods in the 1900s was their orientation towards experimental psychology. For example, one leading teacher, Ts. Baltalon, published an article in 1909 entitled “Experimental Research on Class Reading” based on the answers of 1600 pupils (aged 9-13) about their reading preferences. The majority of students demonstrated more interest in longer stories about adults than in poetry, fables, and fairy tales (Trudy vtorogo Vserossiiskogo s”ezda po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii v Sankt-Peterburge v 1909 godu (St. Petersburg, 1910), 327). On the institutional history of experimental psychology, see A. Byford, “Turning Pedagogy into a Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897-1917),” Osiris 23 (2008), 50-81.

56   The 1915 project was not implemented due to the First World War and subsequent revolutions. See I. V. Zubkov, “Zemskie shkoly, gimnazii i real’nye uchilishcha (1890-1916 gody),” in Raspisanie peremen: Ocherki istorii obrazovatel’noi i nauchnoi politiki v Rossiiskoi imperii – SSSR (konets 1880-kh – 1930-e gody) (Moscow, 2012), 220-222.

57   V. Mavritskii, Pravila i programmy klassicheskikh gimnazii i progimnazii vedomstva Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia. Izdanie 26-e (Moscow, 1912), 146-147.

58Sistematicheskii sbornik uchenicheskikh perelozhenii i sochinenii. Pis’mennye raboty po russkomu iazyku uchenikov i uchenits Kremenetskogo dvuklassnogo gorodskogo uchilishcha za 1901-1902 god, compiled by P.M. Klunnyi (Kremenets, 1902), 103.

59   The person who played a pivotal role in developing the syllabus and teaching methods in 1903-1905 was Vasilii Sipovsky (see Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning”, 653-656).

60   M. B. Gurevich, Materialy, plany i obraztsy uchenicheskikh sochinenii (Kiev, 1909).

61   Ibid., 107-108.

62  Eikhenbaum insightfully noted that “teaching literature in high school is really the popularization of trends dominant in current scholarship” (B. M. Eikhenbaum, “O printsipakh izucheniia literatury v srednei shkole” [1915] in Istoriia literaturnogo obrazovaniia v rossiiskoi shkole. Khrestomatiia (Moscow, 1999), 273).

63   In 1928-1931, Boris Tomashevskii published his famous textbook Introduction to Poetics, a synthesis of traditional theory with a formalist approach, approved by the State Academic Council.

64   For similar approach to poetry in the British anthologies see Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, 195-224.

65   A. Galakhov, Polnaia russkaia khrestomatiia, ili obraztsy krasnorechiia i poezii, zaimstvovannye iz luchshikh otechestvennykh pisatelei, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1843), I, III (1st. pagination).

66   Ibid., V.

67   Ibid., II.

68 This is quite a large number, even if we consider that some of these authors had long ceased to be perceived as contemporaries (Batiushkov died in 1855).

69   On the lyrics of Pushkin in nineteenth-century century see A. Vdovin, R. Leibov, “Pushkin v shkole: curriculum i literaturnyi kanon v XIX veke,” Lotmanovskii sbornik 4 (Moscow, 2014), 247−259.

70Russkaia stikhotvornaia khrestomatiia sobrannaia Vasil’em Zolotovym (Moscow, 1829).

71Khristomatiia Rossiiskaia Peninskogo (Saint Petersburg, 1834).

72   I. Peninskii, Kniga dlia chteniia i uprazhnenii v iazyke, sostavlennaia dlia uezdnykh uchilishch i nizhnikh klassov gimnazii (Saint Petersburg, 1846).

73   S. Shafranov, I. Nikolich, Russkaia khrestomatiia dlia upotrebleniia v uchilishchakh
pribaltiiskikh gubernii
(Reval, 1860).

74   V. A. Iakovlev, Russkaia khrestomatiia. Sbornik statei, vybrannykh iz proizvedenii russkoi literatury, po programme… dlia voennykh uchilishch i gimnazii (Saint Petersburg, 1869).

75   S. Z. Burakovskii, Khrestomatiia noveishei russkoi literatury... Kurs VI klassa gimnazii (Saint Petersburg, 1871).

76   A. Filonov. Russkaia khrestomatiia s primechaniiami. Dlia vysshikh klassov srednikh uchebnykh zavedenii (Saint Petersburg, 1863).

77   M. A. Bublikov, Russkaia literatura... Khrestomatiia (Saint Petersburg, 1907).

78   V. A. Iakovlev, Russkaia khrestomatiia (Saint Petersburg, 1869).

79   P. Polevoi, Uchebnaia russkaia khrestomatiia s tolkovaniiami (part 3) (Saint Petersburg, 1872).

80   I. I. Paul’son, Kniga dlia chteniia i prakticheskikh uprazhnenii v russkom iazyke. Uchebnoe posobie dlia narodnykh uchilishch (Saint Petersburg, 1861).

81   A. Filonov, Russkaia khrestomatiia s primechaniiami. Dlia vysshikh klassov srednikh uchebnykh zavedenii. Part 1 (Saint Petersburg, 1863).

82   The RA 1864, in which this epistle was re-included, remained outside of our sample.

83   V. Rklitskii, Russkaia khrestomatiia, ili izbrannye mesta iz luchshikh russkikh pisatelei. Kn. 1 (Warsaw, 1838).

84   S. Shafranov, I. Nikolich, Russkaia khrestomatiia dlia upotrebleniia v uchilishchakh pribaltiiskikh gubernii (Reval, 1860).

85 Polemic replica of the famous Pushkin poem. Let us quote the first stanza of Kliushnikov’s text: Дар мгновенный, дар прекрасный,/ Жизнь, зачем ты мне дана?/ Ум молчит, а сердцу ясно:/ Жизнь для жизни мне дана (A momentary gift, a beautiful gift, / Life, why were you given to me? / The mind is silent, but the heart is clear: / Life was given to me for life).

86   As in other cases, in the inclusion of this text in the first edition of RA, Galakhov was guided by established tradition: the poem already appeared in Peninskii’s 1834 anthology.

87   See V. L. Pushkin, Stikhotvoreniia (Saint Petersburg, 2005), 330 (commentary by S. Panov).

88   See N. N. Zhitomirova, “Chitatel’skie zaprosy i krug chteniia uchashchikhsia srednei shkoly predrevoliutsionnoi Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka,” Istoriia russkogo chitatelia (Leningrad, 1976), vol. 2, 67-82. M. V. Bulygina, “Chtenie v rossiiskoi dorevoliutsionnoi sisteme obrazovaniia (na primere shkol Zaural’ia),” Homo legens v proshlom i nastoiashchem: Materialy Vserossiiskoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, Nizhnii Tagil, 23-24 maia 2007 goda (Nizhnii Tagil, 2007), 35-45.

89Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospominaniiakh. Annotirovannyi ukazatel’ knig i publikatsii v zhurnalakh, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1976-1989); A. I. Reitblat, “Chtenie v Rossii (1861-1917)”, in Idem, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi litera-
tury
(Moscow, 2009), 211-250. In total, the list contains 180 texts, but only sources with mentions of specific authors and/or works are included in our database. We thank our student volunteers K. Abdukarimova, G. Baroian, A. Borzykh, A. Gagauz, E. Golovkina, E. Danilova, A. Kiseleva, K. Kremneva, E. Kuz’mina, U. Kurianova, A. Marinevich, V. Motyleva, A. Ostrozhkova, S. Pavlova, D. Panova, E. Piskunova, E. Pokhilenko, A. Riabichenkova, S. Svishcheva, M. Tolkacheva.

90   S. Anan’in, “Detskie idealy,” 201-219.

91   Stoiunin, O prepodavanii russkoi literatury, 267.

92 Ibid., 255-256.

93   The history of zemstvo libraries is explored better. Ben Eklof recently showed that the amount and choice of books in this type of libraries were quite adequate to the number of educated population (B. Eklof, “The Archaeology of ‘Backwardness’ in Russia: Assessing the Adequacy of Libraries for Rural Audiences in Late Imperial Russia,” in M. Remnek (ed.), The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination (Toronto, 2011)).

94   N. A. Rubakin, “Chastnye biblioteki i vneklassnoe chtenie uchashchikhsia,” Zhenskoe obrazovanie, 6-7 (1889); N. A. Rubakin, Etiudy o russkoi chitaiushchei publike: Fakty, tsifry i nabliudeniia (St. Petersburg, 1895), 71; N. N. Zhitomirova, “Chitatel’skie zaprosy i krug chteniia uchashchikhsia srednei shkoly predrevoliutsionnoi Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka,” in Istoriia russkogo chitatelia (Leningrad, 1976), vol. 2, 70.

95   Moscow and Petersburg gymnasia (like Karl Mai’s private one) seem to form a separate type of well-equipped schools where students could borrow books of all sorts.

96   Ostrogorskii, Iz istorii moego uchitel’stva, 13, 25, 27.

97   Staferova, A.V. Golovnin i liberal’nye reformy, 340-341. In 1860-80s, the majority of gymnasia subordinated to the Ministry of Public Instruction had very rich libraries, which were open to the public since 1867. See B. V. Bank, Izuchenie chitatelei v Rossii (XIX vek) (Moscow, 1969), 34; V. L. Vinokur, “Gimnazicheskie biblioteki Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia,” Shkol’naia biblioteka, 4 (2007), 74; 5 (2007), 90-92.

98   As Leah Price demonstrated, there is a subtle, indirect correlation between the rise of the novel and the rise of anthologies (L. Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge, 2004), 5-7.

99   Fragments varied in genre: landscapes, characteristics, discourses (three types of narratives theorized in textbooks of the time). The most striking example of the fragmentation of a large prosaic work is that of S.T. Aksakov’s non-curricular stories Family Chronicle and Childhood of the Bagrov Grandson, which were literally broken into excerpts about nature, rural life and descriptions of the gymnasium, thus completely losing touch with the whole. The same fate waited D.V. Grigorovich’s novels.

100S’’ezd uchitelei russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti v gimnaziiakh Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga (Moscow 1866), 1-3.

101   A.I. Georgievskii, K istorii Uchenogo komiteta Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia (St. Petersburg, 1902), 37.

102   K. Petrov, “Prakticheskii vzgliad na programmu russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 113 (1862): 2, 175.

103   Zubkov, “Zemskie shkoly, gimnazii i real’nye uchilishcha”, 193-194.

104   E.g., in Sosnitskii’s “Theory of Literature” (Moscow, 1880).

105 It should be noted that in Soviet schools the novel was considered as a tale and was assigned for secondary school reading.

106   Our calculations yield conclusions similar to those of Zhitomirova, who, in turn, cites a study conducted by G.P. Rokov in 1905. See Zhitomirova “Chitatel’skie zaprosy i krug chteniia uchashchikhsia srednei shkoly,” 72.

107Gimnazicheskii sbornik: Raboty vospitannikov Novocherkasskoi gimnazii (Novocherkassk, 1880), 23.

108   See I. Paperno, Semiotika povedeniia: Nikolai Chernyshevskii – chelovek epokhi realizma (Moscow, 1996); M. Mogil’ner, Mifologiia podpol’nogo cheloveka. Radikal’nyi mikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet semioticheskogo analiza (Moscow, 1999), 19-40.

109   V. Sipovskii, ”O rasshirenii kursa russkoi slovesnosti v gimnaziiakh i real’nykh uchilishchakh,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 8(1905), 116-118.

110   See E. I. Shcherbakova, “Roman N.G. Chernyshevskogo «Chto delat’?» v vospriiatii radikal’noi molodezhi serediny 60-kh godov XIX veka,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia 8. Istoriia, 1(1998), 59-68.

111   In the 1880s, the Ministry withdrew many books by contemporary authors which were bought for school libraries in the 1860 and 70s. The list of prohibited books contained, among others, Spenser, Sechenov, Blagoveshenskii, Dobroliubov, Zasodimskii, Zlatovratskii, Zola, Lassalle, Levitov, Marx, Mikhailovskii, Mill, Pisarev, Proudhon, Chernyshevskii, Shelgunov (Sbornik postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po gimnaziiam i progimnaziiam Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga za 1871-1895 gody (Moscow, 1895), 398-403).

112   N. S. Travushkin, “Kak chitali v Rossii roman Shpil’gagena ‘Odin v pole ne voin’”, in Russkaia literatura i osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie (Kazan’, 1974), vol. 5, 51-71.

113 Archival sources on lending by school libraries would help complete the picture. Due to Timur Guzairov’s generous assistance, we know the most in-demand authors in the Iuriev (now Tartu, Estonia) Gymnasium in 1893: W. Scott (45 times), Nestor Kukol’nik (30), Grigorovich (28), Turgenev (27), Zhukovsky (13), Pushkin (13), Gogol’ (11), and Sergei Maksimov (11) (Estonian Historical Archive [Eesti Ajaloo Arhiiv]. 384.1.1216. Folio 24).

114   Byford, “Between Literary Education and Academic Learning,” 658-659.

115   See G. Freidin. “By the Walls of Church and State: Literature’s Authority in Russia’s Modern Tradition,” The Russian Review, 5 (1993):2, 149-165.

116   Guillory, Cultural Capital, 15.

117   On France, see M. Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York, 2004), 53; on Great Britain, see S. J. Ball, “English for the English Since 1906,” in I. Goodson (ed.), Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum: Subjects in Study (London, Washington, DC, 1985), 53–55.

118   On the connection between teaching literature and imperial imagination see: L. Pild. “Pushkin v ‘Melkom bese’ F. Sologuba,” in Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu. 2: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii 18–20 sent. 1998 g. (Tartu, 2000), 306–321. It is important that the close bind between teacher and violence became a popular topic not only in Russian literature but in German, in Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen (1904). The representation of school in French literature was, on the contrary, rather positive (Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic, 220-221).

Auteurs

Roman Leibov is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Tartu (Estonia). He is the author of “Liricheskii fragment” Tiutcheva: zhankr i kontekst (Tartu, 2000); editor of Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu. 5: Pushkinskaia epokha v russkii literaturnyi kanon (Tartu, 2011) and co-editor of I vremia I mesto: Istoriko-filologicheskii sbornik k shestidesiatiletiiu Aleksandra L’vovicha Ospovata (Moscow, 2008), Con amore: Istoriko-filologicheskii sbornik v chest’ Liubovi Nikolaevni Kiselevoi (Moscow, 2010), Khrestomatiinye teksty: Russkaia pedagogicheskaia praktika i literaturnyi kanon XIX veka (Tartu, 2013). His fields of interests are the history of Russian literature of the Golden Age, Tiutchev and Russian poetry, theory of literary canon, internet studies and digital humanities.

Alexey Vdovin is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Faculty of Humanities, Moscow). He is the author of Nikolai Dobroliubov: raznochinets mezhdu dukhom i plot’iu (Moscow, 2017), Kontsept glava literatury v russkoi kritike 1830–1860 (Tartu, 2011) and co-editor of Khrestomatiinye teksty: Russkaia pedagogicheskaia praktika i literaturnyi kanon XIX veka (Tartu, 2013). His fields of expertise are the history of Russian literature in the Age of Realism, Russian literary criticism, theory of literary canon, history of Russian novel. His current project is a book on the representation of peasants in nineteenth-century Russian novel.

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