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This review examines the book Cultural History of Russia published in 2020 by the publishing house of Charles University, Prague. This inquiry into the main areas of interest in both past and contemporary history of Russia has long been expected not only by students, specialists in Russian studies and in cultural studies, but also by a broad audience of those is interested in Russian cultural history. The authors seek to arrange the book according to the conceptual model; this innovative approach aims at underlining such cultural concepts that are basic and constitutive of the modern Russian culture. For these ends, facts, achievements and problems of the Russian cultural history are interpreted. The authors introduce students and readers to modern Russia, endowed with centurieslong heritage, multinationalism, large territory, but also with cultural contradictions and clashes. The book resolves a hard issue of presenting the real amalgam of views of the Russians on such disputes, and pays special attention to the Russian mass media and Runet. Therefore, suggests the book, modern Russians are in search of cultural identity, which is proved by heated discussions. The nine chapters help readers to get rid of the usual stereotypes in the image of Russians, invites the public to reflect on the achievements and contradictions of the cultural history of Russia. Discussion questions and tasks are what helps students that would read the book engage with the Russian realities and with each other. What is also beneficial for the use of this book in classes is that it is written according to the standards allowing a non-native speaker who has an A2-B1 level of Russian to understand all the information efficiently. To adapt the book to the needs and mental realities of European students, it is published in both print and digital format — the latter includes extra video and audio tapes. In the context of integrating the students with the material the authors should also be given the credit. They entangle the history and culture of medieval, modern and 21th century Russia with European history and the global cultural space. Overall, the book serves as an example in both fields: the cultural research and the textbook initiating and enhancing lingual and cultural understanding of Russian realities. The publication will remain a landmark among the educational achievements not only of the Charles University, but also of the community of European scholars specializing in Russian studies.

The concept of ‘Holy Rus’ [‘Svyataya Rus’] starts to play a pivotal role in the processes of national self-identification that occupy Russian intellectuals in the first half of the 19th c. It gains a special kind of multidimensionality in the literature of the day, with the motif of personal responsibility for proximity to God and adherence to the ideal of holiness coming to the foreground. The core of the English concept of ‘Holy Russia,’ in use by the British since the 1870s, finds itself in stark opposition to contemporary meaning of the ‘Holy Rus’ concept. Its original meaning was largely defined by the specifics of Anglo-Russian political relations. At the same time, its core is consistent with peripheral meanings of the contemporary Russian concept: the image of an aggressive militaristic empire it creates and promotes shows clear parallels with public speeches of A. Herzen and M. Bakunin. By the end of the 19th c., the concept of ‘Holy Russia’ develops a new semantic layer that incorporates elements corresponding to both liberal and conservative meanings of the original concept in its contemporary form.

This article analyzes the artistic experience of Osip E. Mandelstam (1891–1938) in the context of the aesthetic and ideological transformations of Russian and European culture during the first half...

The author contrasts the values of classical humanism with the current globalist neoliberal values that dominate the ideology of the West today, where there is a conscious ‘cocktail’ of races, religions, nations, and national cultures. All of this comes into conflict with the personal culture, sovereignty and national culture of European states. The threat loomed over the viability of the entire European civilization, where a disdainful attitude to history, multiculturalism, the so-called gender neutrality (the theory of social construction), juvenile justice, etc. are deliberately implanted. Russia, having its own model of power that is distinctive from the West, as it was under Catherine the Great European Power, remained so. She is a supporter of traditional classical European values; globalism and neoliberalism do not suit her. For Russians, marriage is a union of a man and a woman. Does Russian culture have its own specificity that distinguishes it from both the European and the entire Western? The author is sure he has. This article is a Russian translation of an excerpt from the voluminous 30 printed sheets of the author’s Estonian-language book “West and Russia”, which is in print and is due to be published in March 2021.

The article deals with the American period in the life of Bishop Nickolay (Ziorov) when he was the head of the Aleutian and Alaska dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church (1891-1898). Based on little known documents of the Holy Synod (Russian State Historical Archive) and Russian diplomatic missions in the USA (Archive of Foreign Police of the Russian Empire) the authors survey his activities to build-up the stagnant diocese and to expand Eastern Orthodoxy in the United States which prepared the ground for its renewal under his successor Bishop Tikhon (Belavin). Special attention is being paid to how American realities of the Gilded Age were perceived by a well-educated Russian priest as reflected in his diaries and travel notes that until now have avoided historians’ attention. Of special interest are Nickolay’s travel notes made during his trips around the country including his long visit to the Chicago World Fair of 1893. The Bishop’s literary talent and lively curiosity lend special flavor to these impressions creating a sense of presence. It is demonstrated that his perception was shaped both by his clergy experience and a more general framework of Russian culture. Hence an admiration of American economic and technological progress went hand in hand with a total rejection of American materialism, individualism and political values. Bishop Nickolay’s impressions of the United States constitute a revealing case study in how image of America as a constituent “the other”, the juxtaposition of the “Russian Idea” and the “American Dream” fitted into the Russian mentality.

This article provides an overview of the most expressive facts and forms of creative reception of German literature in Russia in the 19th century. Based on research in the field of the theory of cultural transfer, the author of the article proceeds from the conviction that the condition and result of the movement of ideas and images across the border of the original cultural-historical context is their morphosemantic transformation in a new evolutionary paradigm. None of the Russian writers was only an obedient performer of the suggestions of their “German genius”; an intense dialogue took place between them, bordering on a break, and therefore precisely creatively productive. In this case, special attention is paid to two factors: the functions of intermediary authorities (travelers, translators, magazines, salon groups, universities, literary areas)and the tightness of interdiscursive links between literature, philosophy and social thought — a characteristic feature of perceiving Russian culture. The article consists of several fragments, covering in aggregate the main episodes of the selected plot. The section “Zhukovsky and Russian Schillerism” gives a generalized picture of the work written by German poets from the first translation experiments “Monument to Schiller” (1974), emphasizing the civic pathos of Schiller’s work. The section “Romantic poetry of thought — under the sign of Schelling” reveals the nature of rethinking German classics in the poetry of “Wisdom lovers”, Lermontov and Tyutchev. The section “Goethe and Schiller in the сontext of Russian Hegelianism” reveal the role of the Russian-German dialogue in shaping the philosophical worldview of Belinsky and Herzen, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. The section “Russian Hoffmann and Russian Heine” is an attempt to answer the question of why they, along with Goethe and Schiller, became the most visible and influential participants in the literary process in Russia.

The project presents an original perception of human history, based on Christian values as vital coordinates system. I hope this project will revive the interest to the Russian school of thoughts and to humanism in general.

Private art museums and foundations are on the rise – worldwide. Since the 1990s, their number and impact on global art and museums have dramatically increased. In the Russian Federation, however, this development lagged behind. Only after the millennium, in the wake of the privatization of the economy, did Russia’s newly formed economic elite follow suit. Notably the second decade of the 21st century witnessed a sharp increase in ‘oligarch’ art philanthropy, foundations and museums – covering a broad range of genres: from contemporary to religious art, from modernism to the avant-garde, from Socialist realism to the Soviet ‘severe’ style, from Imperial Russian heritage to ethnic or foreign legacies. Some philanthropists have launched museum or institutional initiatives. Others have invested in urban gentrification projects for mixed commercial-cultural use; still others have funded museum projects, awards or donations. A characteristic feature has been their growing involve­ment abroad: Russia’s tycoons financed biennials, co-operated with leading foreign institutions and private foundations, acted as donors and trustees on international museum boards. In addition, some bought into auction houses or took over prestigious pub­lishing networks in the West. For years, their contribution to the (inter-)national museum world had been of increasing relevance. Yet contrary to the rising influence of Russian private art museums and foundations, international museum research has long neglected this subject. This widely uncharted, multilayered terrain has been the subject of a comprehensive research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund, FWF. The results are now available open-access. The innovative study is based on representative case studies and rare empirical data, drawn from mainly Russian primary and secondary source material. It relies on a broad comparative theoretical framework, elaborated largely by contemporary museum and philanthropy studies. The work spans three decades, from perestroika to the outbreak of the health crisis in 2020; the latter considerably impacted both philanthropic ventures and on-site research., Creative commons license CC BY NC ND

When Tolstoi made public his spiritual conversion at the beginning of the 1890s, he offered the world an unprecedented point of view on his person. In the following years, the crack that Tolstoi himself had opened gradually expanded: the audacity of the issues addressed in his new narrative and journalistic production, his involvement in charitable social activities, his public renunciation of the copyrights on his works published after 1881, his close criticism of governmental institutions a...

It is very difficult to give a general description of the readers who lived in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, owing to the heterogeneous composition of the readership at that time. A significant part of it consisted of so-called new readers, i.e. representatives of the working class and peasantry, whom the Soviet state was striving to educate and elevate. However, there was still a fair amount of skilled readers, including intellectual readers and former nobles, present in the country. And we ca...

In the early part of the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), the emperor sought to reform Russia through the creation of new European-style institutions. The aim was to ensure that Russia’s great-power status would be retained through updating its institutions, in line with a reform impulse dating back to Peter the Great and before. Among the new institutions formed in the first few years of the nineteenth century were ministries, such as of education, based on the centralized French system, as...

Introduction The last third of the eighteenth century, which corresponds roughly to the reign of Catherine II (1762-1796), saw significant developments in Russia’s reading practices and changes to the Russian readership itself. This phenomenon arose within a larger context: the development of elite secondary education in Russia in the 1750s and 1760s, which gave birth to a whole generation of readers, quantitatively much larger than Russia had ever known, and hungry for new forms of engagemen...

1. These volumes originate in two gatherings convened at Milan State University in 2013 and 2017 which brought together an international group of scholars of the history of literature, publishing history, and social history, with a view to exploring the phenomenon of reading in Russia from a broad and multidisciplinary perspective. The first occasion was a conference entitled ‘Reading Russia. Places and Manners of Reading, 1760-1930’, which was followed by the publication, in 2014, of Reading...

Introduction In the past three decades, reading in Russia has undergone fundamental changes. If Russians once appeared as “the most reading people of the world,” today almost half of the adult population has turned away from reading books altogether. The loss of books as a cultural value is a general trend which cannot be separated from accelerating digitalization and global commercialization; indeed, the effects of such developments in Russia are comparable to those seen in similar industria...

In Soviet schools children were encouraged to become avid readers, but what they read and more importantly, how they read literature was not left to chance. Jeffrey Brooks aptly underscores that under high Stalinism the emphasis was not only on inculcating ‘what’ to think, but also and more so on ‘how’ to think and what should be considered significant. The study of the normative material for teaching literature (programmes and methodological aids) has much to reveal in this respect. This ess...

What can the interdisciplinary field of Russian imperial cultural studies learn from the periodicals produced roughly between 1769 and 1839? To be sure, the answers to this question are many. This chapter takes as its point of departure the rather straightforward notion that these periodicals can tell us something about the meanings that accrued to reading as a cultural practice in imperial Russia. The pages that follow are devoted mainly to an interpretive survey of the depiction of readers ...

Over the thirty years that separated his debut novel Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846) from his last masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1879-1880), Dostoevskii repeatedly had the chance to reflect on the role of the reader. While at the beginning of his career he tended to distrust the public (who “has an instinct, but lacks education”), in the 1860s his orientation toward the reader became a fundamental element of his creative method. This does not mean that Dostoevskii wro...

The history of reading in Russia is mainly considered in relation to books, journals and newspapers, or, latterly, electronic media. Rather little attention has been paid to a very different kind of text, in a very different kind of communicative context. By the late nineteenth century, as Jeffrey Brooks has noted: The city with its shop signs and street names, window displays and price tags, newspapers and kiosks, announcements and bookstalls exhibited the written word to all who walked its ...

A paradox of reading is that as an inner, subjective experience it may be perceived in an intensely personal and unique way, while when seen from an external perspective it may appear overly determined (or even predetermined) by a myriad of social, political, cultural and other factors. As part of a reading public readers make up a special type of “imagined community,” Benedict Anderson’s well-known concept of the nation. According to Anderson, imagined communities owe their existence to “pri...

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent spanning “love story” that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The first volume of Reading Russia describes the slow evolution of reading between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the reign of Peter the Great, the changes initially concerned a limited number of readers from court circles, the ecclesiastical world, the higher aristocracy and the Academy of Sciences, that considered reading as a potent way of regulating the conduct of the people. It was only under the modernisation programme inaugurated by Catherine the Great that transformations began to gain pace: the birth of private publishers and the widening currency of translations soon led to the formation of an initial limited public of readers from the nobility, characterised by an increasing responsiveness to European models and by its gradual emancipation from the cultural practices typical of the ecclesiastical world and of the court.

1. Purpose, Methods and Material of the Study The 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 ye...

Introduction: Social Reading as a Global and Russian Phenomenon For the last decade, Russian social reading sites, based on social media technology and specializing in books and interactive exchange between readers, have been on the rise. The online reading practices of such Russian sites’ users are part of an ongoing globalization of digital reading and the debate surrounding it. Technological developments of the late 2000s and the worldwide spread of tablets and other portable mini computer...

Let me start with a comment regarding the expression “Golden Age” as used in the text and the title of this chapter. Some epochs are remembered by dates; others, by names. As a name for an epoch, the phrase “the Golden Age” and the image harbored therein sounds almost too intuitive to call for a rigorous definition. This must be one of the reasons why literary scholars often seem hesitant to use such tags as “Golden Age” to define literary periods—and not of Russian literature alone. Another ...

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of changes took place in the way that Russia consumed literature. The readers, the type of texts that were read, and, of course, the way people read—all of these things changed. In a society still rigidly divided into estates, these changes took place reasonably slowly, but by the middle of the century, they were already clearly visible to contemporary observers. In this chapter I will first analyze the role that foreign novels played in s...

Over the last several decades, historical scholarship has investigated the manifold material, cultural, and political implications of reading in early modern Europe. A rediscovery of the material aspects of the print and book trade has led to new assessments of the role of reading in general cultural and political developments since the Renaissance and, in particular, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period which witnessed dynastic crises, civil wars and restorations across Europ...

Peasants comprised the overwhelming majority of the population in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century—more than three quarters according to the census of 1897—and the extent of the spread and impact of the printed word in the country depended on their attitude to reading. In order to understand what the reading habits of the peasants were determined by, it is necessary to examine how writing in Russia originally arose and spread. It was during this initial period that many att...

Introduction Samizdat, that is, the publication of texts without the involvement of the state publishing houses and the censor’s office, was a mass phenomenon in the later decades of the Soviet Union. It is impossible to give a reliable figure of how many people were involved on all levels, from merely reading to creating and disseminating texts. Moreover, this figure varied widely depending on the decade we consider. Overall estimates range from hundreds of thousands to several million peopl...

1 The readership of the first post-revolutionary years largely consisted of those who belonged to the Russian reading public at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By this time, literacy and, accordingly, reading had become strong features of the urban lifestyle, but had only begun to take root in the countryside, where oral transmission of cultural traditions and work experience prevailed. Such an attitude to the book and reading was well entrenched and changed slowly. However, the post...

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning “love story” that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The second volume of Reading Russia considers the evolution of reading during the long nineteenth century (1800-1917), particularly in relation to the emergence of new narrative and current affairs publications: novels, on the one hand, and daily newspapers, weekly magazines and thick journals, on the other. The volume examines how economic and social transformations, technological progress and the development of the publishing industry taking place in Russia gradually led to a significant expansion of the reading public. At the same time, in part due to the influence of new literature reading policies in schools, there was a greater cultural standardisation of Russian society, which was partially opposed by new forms of poetic reading.

Filmmakers are among the most influential readers of literary texts. But are they good ones? Are these ‘readings’ like any others, or ones with a particular, perhaps seditious, influence and authority? How precisely does the ‘reading’ process work when a text is relocated from the domain of verbal signs to visual signs? In the “long century” since cinema began, these questions have preoccupied authors, cinematographers, critics, viewers, and more recently, dozens of cultural theorists and his...

There are many ways of defining and analyzing the reading audiences of the post-World War II Soviet Union. Because by that point the country had reached nearly universal adult literacy, a comprehensive analysis would have to encompass the multimillion readership of a monumental number and variety of books and periodicals: popular and specialized, in Russian and other languages, of nationwide, republican, regional, or local appeal. Such an objective is clearly beyond the scope of a chapter or ...

“To write is to produce the text; to read is to receive it from someone else without putting one’s own mark on it, without remaking it.” (Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, 169)“Reading is as it were overprinted by a relationship of forces (between teachers and pupils, or between consumers and producers) whose instrument it becomes.” (Ibid., 171)“…reading has no place… [the reader’s] place is not here or there, one or the other… simultaneously inside and outside… associating t...

This chapter is based on documents from the 1830s taken from an estate archive. These are letters, diaries, and notebooks of Kovrov district landowners in Vladimir province: Andrei Ivanovich Chikhachev (1798–1868); his wife Natalia Ivanovna Chikhacheva, Chernavina by birth (1799–1866); their son Aleksei (1826–after 1874); and Natalia’s brother Iakov Ivanovich Chernavin (1804–1845). The estates of the two noblemen lay at the heart of European Russia. Dorozhaevo, which belonged to Chikhachev, w...

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning “love story” that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The third volume of Reading Russia considers more recent (and rapid) changes to reading, and focuses on two profoundly transformative moments: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the digital revolution of the 1990s. This volume investigates how the political transformations of the early twentieth century and the technological ones from the turn of the twenty-first impacted the tastes, habits, and reading practices of the Russian public. It closely observes how Russian readers adapted to and/or resisted their eras’ paradigm-shifting crises in communication and interpretation.

Thirty years ago in his deservedly famous The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton challenged the traditional idea that eighteenth-century reading practices constitute the turning point from the so- called “intensive reading” characteristic of the Early Modern period to the “extensive reading” typical of modern book consumption. According to the traditional point of view, readers of the earlier period concentrated on rereading the same specially chosen, authoritative, and usually holy texts, me...

Compared to other European countries, the production of original novels in Russia during the eighteenth century remained low: just slightly more than 100 such titles were published. In the same period, translations of European novels into Russian numbered eight times as many. The ratio between original and translated novels did not change significantly for the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1801 and 1829, only 46 Russian-language novels were published, as opposed to 48...

In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small part of Russia’s population was able to read, and for every reader there were at least twenty non-readers. In fact, readers represented only a very narrow section of the population. The social process that most factored into the growth of reading was the population’s gradual transition from a traditional, rural way of life to a modern, urban one. Historical experience shows that in Russia (as in other countries), books and reading were...

I wish to avoid the truism that the history of literature consists of the history of readers as much as the history of writers does; or, in other words, that the history of literature consists of the history of a past dialogue between speakers and listeners. If this is a paradox, then, at least in the Russian tradition, this paradox is already a century old, and we should thus proceed directly to the question of how to study the historical reader, that is, the one to whom writers once address...

The end of 1903 finds me in Moscow. I am in my second year of studying literature at university… The journals World of Art and New Path were my paths to a new world. I am becoming a ‘Decadent.’ I arrive for morning tea with a book and sit for a while, oblivious, as the tea grows cold. My aunt worriedly watches the clock. “Isn’t it time for you to go to class?”I get up, ride to the Ilinskii Gates, and from there head on foot to Mokhovaia street. Not to the University, but a little farther: to ...

Everything started with the hunger for books.Maksim Moshkov 1. Wreaders, Prosumers, Indies and Other Hybrid Beings of Reading in the Digital Age If in the 1960s post-structuralism proclaimed “the death of the author,” then in the 1990s and with the digital ‘revolution’ we seemed to witness the ‘death of the reader,’ at least as far as we knew her (since women read more than men—across the globe and in Russia—I will maintain throughout this article use of the feminine pronoun, which is meant t...

1. Difficulties in reconstructing the clergy’s reading What did the Orthodox clergy read in eighteenth-century Russia? To make even a rough approximation is difficult. The first obstacle is the fact that, during the eighteenth century, the Orthodox clergy was undergoing serious social and cultural transformations instigated by Peter the Great’s internal policies, the process of westernization, and new state models of clerical education. We also need to consider two different clerical groups: ...