Reading Novels at the Winter Palace under Nicholas I: From the Tsar to the Stokers

How did the reading matter enjoyed by Nicholas I differ from that of one of his stokers? This article focuses on the novels enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers living at the court of Nicholas I, from the tsar himself and the members of the imperial family to their servants. Based on archival sources such as the loan registers and the correspondence of the Tsar’s and the Palace staff’s libraries, we have investigated two cultural worlds, very different but nonetheless with the same passion for novels. This paper shows how, despite social and cultural differences, these two communities of readers actually often ended up reading the same authors and the same novels. What really distinguished them was not so much their consumption of different texts, but rather the way in which they read and interpreted the same books and, more generally, the different purpose that they attributed to reading. According to the position of the readers at court, and what they saw in the Winter Palace, whether that was a political cabinet in which state ideology was discussed, a place in which the courtiers felt suffocated by hierarchies and etichette, or a place where the servants could find books otherwise unobtainable, reading novels could constitute either a form of social control, or a form of escapism, or a school of good taste and proper behaviour.