Abstract
For most of the eighteenth century the central cultural debate in Russia concerned the definition of the literary language. Around the turn of the century this Russian rendition of the Italian Renaissance Questione della lingua and the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes crystallised into a polemic between Karamzinists and Shishkovites. To the Shishkovite insistence on a diachronically conceived emphasis on normative Slavonic-Russian (slavenorossiiskii) language based on traditional written texts, the Karamzinists contrasted a synchronic-functional dynamic view of language as conversational Russian, guided by the usage and taste of educated society, especially its women. Reading gained prestige as a literary activity in the Karamzinist paradigm and the feminised conversational model it espoused.1 The woman reader was especially empowered. Karamzin’s ‘Poslanie k zhenshchinam’ (‘Epistle to Women’, 1796) and his foreword to Aonidy (The Aonides, 1797) lead the way. They define the woman reader, show her signal importance, her beneficial influence on male authors, and the opportunities for rewards that she provides for the Karamzinist pisatel’ dlia dam (writer for women).2 An unsigned letter to the editor (Karamzin) introducing the journal Vestnik Evropy (The Herald of Europe, 1802) addresses the spread of reading, sees reading as the main fashion in Europe, and features women prominently.3 In 1815, Konstantin Batiushkov provided the most succinct rallying cry for the Karamzinists, defining the good feminised author: Kto pishet tak, kak govoriat,/Kogo chitaiut damy! (Who writes as people speak,/Whom ladies read!).4 Foregrounding the conversational model for literature, he forcefully emphasises women’s reading. The importance of reading is also evident from the numerous accounts of how people read.5
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Notes
My definition of the Karamzinist-Shishkovite debate follows B. A. Uspenskii, Iz istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVIII–nachala XIX veka ( Moscow: Izdatel’stvo moskovskogo universiteta, 1985 )
On feminisation, see also Judith Vowles, ‘The “Feminization” of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 35–60
Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Gender Ambivalence and Genre Anomalies in Late 18th- Early 19th-century Russian Literature’, Russian Literature, 52 (2002), 299–326
Carolin Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, ‘Feminisation and Functionalisation: The Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 51–71.
N. M. Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. Iu. M. Lotman, 2nd edn (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966), pp. 169–79 N.
M. Karamzin,Aonidy, ili sobranie raznykh novykh stikhotvorenii, 3 vols (Moscow: V universitetskoi tipografii u Ridigera i Klaudiia, 1796–99), II (1797), v–xi.
K. N. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, ed. L. N. Maikov and V. I. Saitov, 3 vols (St Petersburg: Tipografiia V. S. Balasheva, 1885–1887), I, p.174; my emphasis.
N. D. Kochetkova, Literatura russkogo sentimentalizma (Esteticheskie i khudozhestvennye iskaniia) (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), pp. 156–89 (pp. 158–59)
Olga Glagoleva, ‘Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provincial Noblewomen (1750–1825)’, in Women and Gender, ed. Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 129–46
Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Reading à la Mode: The First Russian Women’s Journals’, in Reflections on Russia in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joachim Klein, Simon Dixon, and Maarten Fraanje (Weimar: Böhlau, 2001), pp. 218–32.
See Wendy Rosslyn, Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women 1763–1825 (Fichtenwalde: Göpfert, 2000), p. 33.
On albums, see L. Petina, ‘Khudozhestvennaia priroda literaturnogo al’boma pervoi poloviny XIX veka’ (Avtoreferat dissertatsii, Tartuskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1988)
Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Flirting with Words: Domestic Albums, 1770–1840’, in Russia. Women. Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U P, 1996), pp. 297–320
Justyna Beinek, ‘The Album in the Age of Russian and Polish Romanticism: Memory, Nation, Authorship’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2001).
See Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Women, Wit, and Wordplay: Bouts-rimés and the Subversive Feminization of Culture’, in Vieldeutiges Nicht-zu-Ende-Sprechen: Thesen und Momentaufnahmen aus der Geschichte russischer Dichterinnen, ed. Arja Rosenholm and Frank Göpfert (Fichtenwalde: Göpfert, 2002 ), pp. 61–77.
Cited in G. Gennadi, ‘Makarov i ego zhurnal “Moskovskii Merkurii”’, Sovremennik 47.10, section 3 (1854), 65–94 (p. 77). Gennadi considers Makarov fair-minded and his critique of Shishkov exemplary.
For example, his review of Nikolai Ostolopov, ‘Evgeniia, ili nyneshnee vospitanie’, MM 1.3 (1803), 29–32.
For the content of Aglaia and attributions of unsigned items, see Svodnyi katalog serial’nykh izdanii, I, pp. 3–27. On women in Aglaia, especially Puchkova, see Iu. V. Zhukova, ‘“Zhenskaia tema” na stranitsakh zhurnala “Aglaia” (1808–1812 gg.) Kn. P. I. Shalikova’, in O blagorodstve i preimushchestve zhenskogo pola. Iz istorii zhenskogo voprosa, ed. R. Sh. Ganelin (St Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia akademiia kul’tury, 1997), pp. 38–50.
On Shalikov’s antics, see Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Karamzin after Karamzin: The Case of Prince Shalikov’, in A Window on Russia, ed. by Maria di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (Rome: La Fenice, 1996), pp. 275–83. On the word milaia and Grace jargon, see Hammarberg, ‘Reading à la Mode’, pp. 227–28 and Heyder and Rosenholm, pp. 51–63.
Jessica R. Feldman, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1993), p. 137–38.
M. G. Al’tshuller, ‘Neizvestnyi episod zhurnal’noi polemiki nachala XIX veka. (“Drug prosveshcheniia” i “Moskovskii zritel’”)’, in XVIII vek, 10 (1975), pp. 98–106.
Iz istorii nashego literaturnogo i obshchestvennogo razvitiia, 2 vols, 2nd edn, (St Petersburg: A. Transhel’, 1888), II, esp. pp. 98–182. Cf. Heyder and Rosenholm, pp. 61, 70
Cf. [N. P. Koliupanov], Biografiia Aleksandra Ivanovicha Kosheleva, I: Molodye gody Aleksandra Ivanovicha, ed. O. F. Kosheleva (Moscow: Tipo-litografiia Kushnereva, 1889), p. 275
M. A. Dmitriev, Melochi iz zapasa moei pamiati (Moscow: Tipografiia Gracheva i Koni, 1869), pp. 78–80.
Women readers were similarly self-assertive at least since 1780, when another woman reader preferred novels to her father’s Cheti Minei, Solomonovy mudrosti, and Feofan Prokopovich’s sermons. V. V. Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkogo romana i povesti (materialy po bibliografii, istorii i teorii russkogo romana), Vol 1, XVIII vek, 2nd edn (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk, 1903), p. 237.
An Improper Profession. Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith (Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2001), pp. 285, 306.
V. P. Stepanov, ‘Makarov, Mikhail Nikolaevich’, in Russkie pisateli 1800–1917, ed. P. A. Nikolaev and others (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1994), III, pp. 468–70 (p. 469).
M. P. Lepekhin, ‘Beznina, Anna Aleksandrovna’, in Russkie pisateli, I, 197–98. See also Carolin Heyder, ‘Vom Journal für die Lieben zur Sache der Frau. Zum Frauenbild in den russischen literarischen Frauenzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Frauenbilder und Weiblichkeitsentwürfe in der russischen Frauenprosa. ed. by Christina Parnell (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 63–74 (pp. 65–66); Hammarberg, ‘Gender Ambivalence’, pp. 311–13
Gitta Hammarberg, ‘Women, Critics, and Women Critics in Early Russian Women’s Journals’, in Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot: Ashgate,2003), pp. 187–207 (pp. 201–02).
See Al’tshuller, p. 98–106; V. E. Vatsuro, ‘I. I. Dmitriev v literaturnykh polemikakh nachala XIX veka’, in Pushkinskaia pora (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), pp. 9–53
V. E. Vatsuro, ‘V preddverii pushkinskoi epokhi’, in Arzamas, ed. V. E. Vatsuro and A. L. Ospovat, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1994), I, pp. 5–27.
Stepanov, ‘Makarov’, pp. 468–69; M. Makarov, ‘O znakomstve moem s Dmitrievym’, in Galateia, zhurnal nauk, iskusstv, literatury, novostei i mod, 1.5 (1839), pp. 359–71.
M. Makarov, ‘Khudaia uchast’ damskikh zhurnalov v Rossii’, in Syn otechestva, 32 (1817), pp. 219–25 (p. 220); cf. [Koliupanov], p. 292.
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Hammarberg, G. (2007). The First Russian Women’s Journals and the Construction of the Reader. In: Rosslyn, W., Tosi, A. (eds) Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589902_6
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