Reading Russia : A History of Reading in Modern Russia. 1

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.