Reading Russia. A History of Reading in Modern Russia

We’ve just published the third and last volume of Reading Russia. A History of Reading in Modern Russia, edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena.
It’s the first comprehensive work on the subject, with many international contributors.

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.

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 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.