“Writing the Russian Reader into the Text: Gogol, Turgenev, and their Audiences,” chapter in Reading in Russia. Practices of Reading and Literary Communication, 1760-1930, edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena (2014)
“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.