Writing the Russian Reader into the Text: Gogol, Turgenev, and their Audiences

The article argues for a generative role of reading in the writing of some of Russia’s famous classics. Drawing upon Gogol’s and Turgenev’s interactions with readers, it analyzes specific textual operations – revisions, additions, or deletions – which authors made to existing texts, or to those in progress, in response to readers’ reactions. Transcending the roles granted to readers in the theoretical paradigms of reception history, book history, and the history of reading, Russian readers influenced the course of Russian literature not merely from birth, but from inception. Texts were burned and altered in response to, or in anticipation of, their reactions. As such, the Russian reader should be seen as part of textuality, not its aftermath

Reading in Russia

“Reader, where are you?”, wondered, in the mid-1880s, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the Russian writers that paid the most attention to the readership of his time. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s call did not go unanswered. Over the past two centuries, various disciplines – from the social sciences to psychology, literary criticism, semiotics, historiography and bibliography – alternately tried to outline the specific features of the Russian reader and investigate his function in the history of Russian literary civilization. The essays collected in this volume follow in the tradition but, at the same time, present new challenges to the development of the discipline. The contributors, coming from various countries and different cultures (Russia, the US, Italy, France, Britain), discuss the subject of reading in Russia – from the age of Catherine II to the Soviet regime – from various perspectives: from aesthetics to reception, from the analysis of individual or collective practices, to the exploration of the social function of reading, to the spread and evolution of editorial formats. The contributions in this volume return a rich and articulated portrait of a culture made of great readers