Publishing in Tsarist Russia

A History of Print Media from Enlightenment to Revolution

Yukiko Tatsumi, Taro Tsurumi, Yukiko Tatsumi, Taro Tsurumi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350246768
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350109353
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

According to Benedict Anderson, the rapid expansion of print media during the late-1700s popularised national history and standardised national languages, thus helping create nation-states and national identities at the expense of the old empires. Publishing in Tsarist Russia challenges this theory and, by examining the history of Russian publishing through a transnational lens, reveals how the popular press played an important and complex Imperial role, while providing a "soft infrastructure" which the subjects could access to change Imperial order.

As this volume convincingly argues, this is because the Russian language at this time was a lingua franca; it crossed borders and boundaries, reaching speakers of varying nationalities. Russian publications, then, were able to effectively operate within the structure of Imperialism but as a public space, they went beyond the control of the Tsar and ethnic Russians.

This exciting international team of scholars provide a much-needed, fresh take on the history of Russian publishing and contribute significantly to our understanding of print media, language and empire from the 18th to 20th centuries. Publishing in Tsarist Russia is therefore a vital resource for scholars of Russian history, comparative nationalism, and publishing studies.

Part One

1

The Russian language as a vehicle for the enlightenment: Catherine II’s translation projects and the society striving for the translation of foreign books

Yusuke Toriyama

The reign of Catherine II (1762–96) was a time of Russian enlightenment. Promoting Russia’s modernization in general, as Peter I did, the Empress actively encouraged the proliferation of art and letters in the empire, often through her own patronage. Moreover, this modernization practically meant Europeanization – a process based on cultural import from the West, in which the role of the medium, which enabled communication between different cultural spheres, was crucially important. In this respect, the significance of the role of translation and publication was certain. Note that the 1760s heralded the sudden growth of publication in Russia: 262 Russian books were published in 1756–60, 805 in 1761–5, 767 in 1766–70, and 958 in 1771–5.¹

From this viewpoint, the creation of the Society Striving for the Translation of Foreign Books (in Russian, Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode inostrannykh knig, hereafter referred to as the Society) in 1768 had a symbolic meaning. This organization, established by Catherine, was focused on the translation by intellectuals of important foreign books into Russian, an endeavour she supported with an annual subsidy of 5,000 rubles from her own pocket. The Empress also influenced the choice of work for translation. For fifteen years until 1783, the Society published 112 translations including many representative works of the age of Enlightenment, for example, selections from the Encyclopédie, Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois and works by Corneille, Racine, Voltaire and J. J. Rousseau, among others. Gary Maker defined the Society as ‘probably the leading Russian voice for the French Enlightenment’ in its day.²

At the same time, the Society faced many problems. Isabel de Madariaga wrote, ‘the numbers and the titles published far outpaced the capacity of the reading public to absorb them, and the problem of marketing translations became crucial. It must be remembered that most cultured nobles and non-nobles could read the classics of the French and German Enlightenment in the original languages.’³ The Society faced challenges in selling and circulating their publications to the extent that the Empress ordered that the books be peddled around the city to ensure their distribution.⁴ Moreover, the cluster of most educated Russians at this time capable of understanding the contents of the Society’s books likely did not need translation, although the majority of Russians remained monolingual (and many were uneducated and illiterate).⁵

Another crucial fact regarding the history of Russian-language publishing is that many Russian intellectuals considered the Russian literary language of this time as still developing. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was perceived as ‘unfinished’, ‘unrefined’ and not fit for purpose as a literary language for scholarship – although the notion of an ‘unsuitable’ or ‘unfinished’ language is untenable from a linguist’s viewpoint.⁶ Through the activities of the Society, the Empress tried to use Russian as a vehicle for the ideas of the Enlightenment. However, bearing in mind that her contemporaries considered the language ‘incomplete’, we cannot take her decision as a matter of course

What motivated Catherine to establish the Society and what made her choose Russian as a vehicle for the Enlightenment despite its disadvantages? Searching for an answer to these questions, in this chapter we discuss the expectations for the roles and functions of Russian-language publishing and the Russian language in the first half of Catherine’s reign. For this purpose, we examine the discourse of those who engaged in the activities of the Society and other translation projects she initiated, focusing on linguistic issues. Furthermore, like the authors of the above-cited article, we adopt the theoretical basis suggested by social scientists since the ‘linguistic turn’. We conceive language not as being a purely referential tool for describing objects, but also a constructive force.⁷ This viewpoint benefits the discussion on the eighteenth century in Russia, which was marked by the evolution of the Russian language and the development of a new worldview by many Russians. Illustrating the standardization of vernacular languages in Europe in the early modern period, partly for pragmatic (to facilitate communication between regions) and partly for honorific (to give them some of the prestige or dignity associated with Latin) reasons, Peter Burke stated that ‘civilization implied following a code of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour’.⁸ It is reasonable to assume that Catherine, motivated to make her empire civilized after European models, likewise sought to create a code for the empire’s lingua franca based on the vernacular language, in this case, Russian.

Vladimir Semennikov’s monograph, which was published in 1913, along with the complete list of books published and planned for publication by the Society, provides an insight into the history and legacy of this organization.⁹ Aside from this comprehensive work, there are few studies of this subject, although the research of Marker and de Madariaga includes concise overviews of the Society as a promoter of the Russian Enlightenment in the cultural context of that time.¹⁰ Jones’ account of the Society is short, but includes important remarks. Significant is his suggestion that Diderot’s view that a civilized nation needs to have a perfected language might have influenced Catherine to establish the Society.¹¹ Our aim is to discuss the significance of the Society and other translation projects in the cultural context of the early reign of Catherine, focusing on the role and function of the Russian language. After outlining the activities of the Society and linguistic background of the time in the first section, the next two sections will describe the Empress’s thoughts on the potential of the Russian language. In the second section, based on the discussion by Victor Zhivov and Marcus C. Levitt about the functions of the Russian and Church Slavonic languages, we examine the notion that using Russian was beneficial for integrating the European Enlightenment within Russia’s indigenous ecclesiastical culture.¹² In the third section, we show that publishing in Russian was justified by the ideas of the Enlightenment and required standardization of the language. Following this, in the fourth section, we examine the text of the Society’s publications written by translators (for example, the translator’s preface), clarifying their mission to enrich Russian and create a new norm corresponding to the policy of the Empress, a goal which they shared. This approach clarifies the role and function of the Russian literary language of this time and the factors that motivated Catherine to choose Russian as the empi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: The entangled history of publishing in Russian Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi
• Part One
• 1 The Russian language as a vehicle for the enlightenment: Catherine II’s translation projects and the society striving for the translation of foreign books Yusuke Toriyama
• 2 The making of the Russian classic Abram I. Reitblat
• 3 ‘The period of stagnation’ fostered by publishing: The popularization, nationalization and internationalization of Russian literature in the 1880s Hajime Kaizawa
• Part Two
• 4 Transnational architects of the imagined community: Publishers and the Russian press in the late nineteenth century Yukiko Tatsumi
• 5 The evolution of a Buddhist culture through Russian media: Kalmyks, orientalists and pilgrimages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Takehiko Inoue
• 6 A collateral cultural revolution: Russia’s state-driven papermaking and publishing efforts and their effects on Volga–Ural Muslim book vulture, 1780s–1905 Danielle Ross
• 7 Ethnic minorities speak up: Non-Russian clergy and a Russian Orthodox journal in the middle Volga region in the late imperial period Akira Sakurama
• Part Three
• 8 ‘News from the War’: Print culture and the nation in First World War Russia Melissa K. Stockdale
• 9 Jewish nationalism in the Russian language: The imagined provinciality among Siberian and far eastern Zionists at the time of the imperial collapse Taro Tsurumi
• 10 Conclusion: A history of a soft infrastructure Taro Tsurumi
• Further reading
• Index
• Copyright