Space of the Book

Miranda Remnek is the head of Slavic & East European Collections at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• List of Figures and TablesIntroduction: The Space of the Book: Print Culture in Russia’s Social Imagination / by Miranda Remnek (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)1. Russian Eighteenth-Century Popular Enlightenment Literature on Commerce / by Lina Bernstein (Franklin & Marshall College)2. Dinner at Smirdan’s: Forces in Russian Print Culture in the Early Reign of Nicholas I / by George Gutsche (University of Arizona)3. The Proliferation of Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics in Pushkin and Baratynskii (1820s-1830s) / by Joseph Peschio (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee) and Igor Pil’shchikov (Moscow State University)4. The Archaeology of "Backwardness" in Russia: Assessing the Adequacy of Libraries for Rural Audiences in Late Imperial Russia / by Ben Eklof (Indiana University)5. The Reading Culture of Russian Workers in the Early Twentieth Century (Evidence from Public Library Records) / by Leonid Borodkin (Moscow State University) and Evgeny Chugunov (Kostroma Department for Culture and Tourism)6. Reading Between the (Confessional) Lines: The Intersection of Old Believer Manuscript Books and Images with Print Cultures of Late Imperial Russia / by Kevin M. Kain (University of Wisconsin – Green Bay)7. The Moral Self in Russia’s Literary and Visual Cultures: The Late Imperial Era and Beyond / by Jeffrey P. Brooks (Johns Hopkins University)8. Books and Their Readers in Twentieth-Century Russia / by Stephen Lovell (King’s College, London)9. Adapting Paratextual Theory to the Soviet Context: Publishing Practices and the Readers of Il’f and Petrov’s Ostap Bender Novels / by Anne O. Fisher10. Closing and Opening and Closing: Reflections on the Russian Media / by Marianna Tax Choldin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)Appendix: The Internet on the State of Mass Media in Russia / by Svetlana StulovaContributorsIndex

‘This collection breaks important new ground in study of print culture in Russia and Soviet Union. In addition to the generally high quality of essays, the book seeks to “strike the imagination of a new generation of scholars” that has grown up with the internet and is often more comfortable with a website than the hard copy…. The essays have many insightful tidbits to offer a broad spectrum of readers.’ - Lousie McReynolds (The Russian Review vol 71:01:2012) ‘The Space of the Book provides rich insight into the role print culture plays in the social imagination of Russian readers. A broader understanding and critical investigation of this field are becoming increasingly topical today, when the space of print culture is being increasingly contested by the emerging network culture.’ - Olga Kim (Slavic and East European Journal vol 56:03:2012) ‘The book provides a welcome and in-depth scholarship on Russian print history that reflects the still untapped resources in this field.’- Rhonda Clark (Modern Greek Studies Yearbook vol 30/31:2014/2015)