The chapter contextualizes the literary developments of the second half of the seventeenth century, including the changes in education and print culture. A new vision of court culture, expanding administration, and ecclesiastical reforms provided new contexts for writing, as well as innovations in the theater and in poetry. The spaces represented in Russian literature were, as previously, the monastery and the church. The court moved into the limelight as a center of cultural production. The social reality of the period did not entirely foster the creation of civic spaces or an autonomous literary field, and writing had to adapt to the control of the authorities. Opportunities for the ritual performance of the liturgy and at court expanded considerably during the last decades of the seventeenth under the aegis of Tsar Aleksei. Orthodox proponents of neo-humanist culture who worked in Moscow succeeded in transforming the uses of rhetoric during ceremonial occasions.
