Через штиль и шторм: история чтения в России XVIII столетия

Damiano Revecchini and Raffaella Vassena, eds. Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, vol. 1. Milan: Ledizioni, 2020, 295 p. ISBN 9788855261920.

Introduction

Beginning with the moment in Robinson Crusoe when the castaway rescues a cache of books before the ship goes down, this introduction situates the history of nineteenth-century reading in the intimate connection that is made between itinerant readers and their books. Crusoe is the culmination of a historic tradition and does much to define later perceptions of the place of reading and the formation of later assumptions about the ability of books to provide consolation for readers under strange skies. This introduction goes on to account for scholarly assumptions about the place of texts in the British empire and some of the fundamental approaches to the history of reading that have occupied scholars over recent decades.

Teaching Literacy in the West from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century

Who should teach reading? To whom? How? And in order to read what? Literacy has had such a far-reaching impact on society that many historians have taken an interest in these four questions, which concern teachers (Who selects, pays, and oversees teachers?), students (age, sex, origin, qualification), schooling (language used, organization, materials, methods), and competency to be attained (curriculum implemented, reference texts, exams, degrees). Their approaches have varied over time. As early as the 19th century, educational historians described the ways pedagogical innovators such as Comenius, Melanchton, Locke, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel challenged traditional teaching methods, with Montessori, Decroly, Dewey, Freinet, and Freire taking up that torch in the 20th century and endeavoring teachers to take into account how a child is learning. Yet these world-renowned figures have changed more so what we expect of an educator than the teaching practices of a given country. Other historians examine how education institutions evolved within their national contexts. Although initially provided for by the church (Protestant or Catholic, depending on the state), literacy was taught primarily to learn the catechism and participate in worship. Later, passing into the hands of the state in one way or another, literacy teaching served to impart basic, secular knowledge. The calendars vary from state to state, but every country in the West had made education mandatory and free by 1880, following centuries of efforts to ensure all people knew the 3 Rs (reading, writing, reckoning). The dream of eliminating illiteracy, however, would be shattered, as reading failure—far from being eradicated—would rise after 1950, even as the number of years spent in school was growing around the world. Since a lack of schools was not the issue, this failure was initially attributed to causes outside school (the child, the family, the social environment). At a time of violent splintering among literacy educators, linguists, and psychologists (phonics vs. whole-language methods), historians discovered that the act of reading, considered unalterable, had transformed over the centuries as various aspects of reading media changed, such as materials, layout, writing, language, and so on. Since the scroll (volumen) was abandoned for the book (codex) in the early Christian era, five major innovations have marked the history of reading and teaching literacy: the invention of punctuation (from the 7th and 11th centuries) made silent reading possible; Gutenberg’s press (1454) expanded the number of readers, but only on printed text; cellulose paper and metal pens (ca. 1850) allowed reading and writing to be taught simultaneously, thereby accelerating early literacy; audiovisual media (mid-20th century) changed the importance of reading and schools as purveyors of cultural values; and the advent of digital in schools (21st century) transformed both reading materials and devices used for writing (screen/keyboard). Alongside an ideological history of theories, a political history of education institutions and a pedagogical history of literacy methods, we must also apprehend a history of reading technology, as it has affected literacy-teaching practices everywhere, regardless of national language and culture, political regime, and level of economic development.

Genealogies of the Study of Material Texts

This essay is devoted to the different branches of the French material textual tree. Analytical bibliography was not one of them. The decisive elements were the attention paid by H.-J. Martin to the lay-out of the texts as a fundamental source for the history of reading, the reception of McKenzie’s sociology of texts and motto “forms effect meaning”, and the appropriation of Petrucci’s association between morphological description and social history of the written objects.

Books for use and books for show

We may believe that books should be bought to be read and studied, but there is plentiful evidence, through human history, of people being mocked for owning books more for display and self-image. This chapter looks seriously and systematically at motivations for book ownership in the seventeenth century, recognizing that there is a range of attitudes between textual utility and the valuing of books for their aesthetic or luxurious qualities. Bookbindings, bookplates, heraldic markings, wills, and other kinds of evidence are drawn on, through various case studies, to show that for most people a mixture of approaches was probably involved—that we should think more in terms of a matrix than a linear spectrum. Book historians may define the history of reading as the key interface to be explored between books and people, but this is too narrow a focus if we really want to understand why people owned books.

In the Library

This chapter argues that the natural habitat of most books is not as solitary objects of contemplation and study, but as “social animals” on bookshelves, in store windows, and in the library. In seeking out this unfinished story about the character of books, we are led to consider their roles in human relationships. Turning to one of the most intimate moments in the ancient history of reading, where, in the opening of Cicero’s Topica, the author invites his friend Trebatius into his library, what unfolds is a story about the complex use of books in the negotiation of elite sociality at a moment of extreme political crisis following the death of Caesar. Like the best of books, Cicero’s text shows its reader what is unfinished about all of them: pointing her back to her fellow readers, to civic dialogue and learned friendship, and ultimately out of the library.