Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904

4. Birth Pangs Full of Promise: The Literary Engine of Success

Russia’s Journal Culture The culture of thick journals was not unique to Russia in the nineteenth century . Studies of British literature and journalism have examined how temporal features of serialization created a Victorian ideological tendency towards conceptions of sequential and progressive development.1 The publication format and the responses of contemporary reviewers contributed to the “anti-closural” Victorian conception of human institutions, such as marriage and politics. The reader’s sense of “long middles” in serialized novels favored “processual” thinking over termination.2 Works published in installments, be they literary, critical, or scientific, created a special interpretive space that gave readers a greater sense of writing as a process and lessened the distance between the ongoing experiences of their lives and the fictional processes that they witnessed on the journals’ pages. While the conventional novel conjured up images of the solitary reader absorbed in a book, magazine novels were frequently read aloud, while serialization meant that at any given time readers were at the same point in the novel. In Europe and the United States, the serialized novel engaged in, rather than retreated from, the great civic questions of the day.3 Russian journals fulfilled a similar role, but the absence of a political sphere magnified their influence. After Nicholas I died in  and the Buturlin Censorship Committee ceased to exist, Russian literary journals proliferated. The newspaper business also flourished. Between  and , only thirty new periodicals appeared, but between  and , the number increased five-fold.4 When Stasiulevich’s Herald of Europe appeared in , it was a newcomer among equally promising beginners and several well-established veterans. The literary giants were the highly popular Contemporary and Notes   ‫ﱟﱞﱝ‬ Birth Pangs Full of Promise The Literary Engine of Success of the Fatherland both under Andrei Kraevskii’s direction. In , the Russian Herald started out as a moderate publication, but within a decade became the quintessential “establishment” journal under the guidance of its conservative and nationalist editor Mikhail Katkov. Because of his ties to officialdom , Katkov enjoyed protection and could outbid his competitors for the leading literary talents of the age: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ivan Turgenev, Aleksei Pisemskii, and Nikolai Leskov, among others. Katkov’s journal stood on the right of the political spectrum, while Kraevskii’s Contemporary and Notes of the Fatherland appealed to the left and also boasted great literary talents such as Tolstoy, Turgenev, Afanasii Fet, Fyodor Tiutchev, and Apollon Maikov. In London, Aleksandr Herzen was still publishing the Bell in which he defined his own strain of liberalism. His correspondence with Nikolai Ogarev, however, demonstrates that they had subscriptions to the Herald of Europe and followed the articles closely, although they disagreed with the journal’s overly moderate tone.5 New specialized journals also appeared in the wake of the Great Reforms. While Pyotr Bartenev’s Russian Archive (Russkii arkhiv, –) reflected the “establishment” approach in selecting and interpreting historical documents , Mikhail Semevskii founded Russian Antiquity (Russkaia starina, – ) to compete with Archive by publishing ‘unsanctioned’ literary materials from the eighteenth century on, especially works that never saw the light of day due to censorship restrictions. In , Grigorii Blagosvetlov, former editor of the radical Russian Word (Russkoe slovo, –), founded The Cause (Delo, –), which became the most notable platform for radical Populism after Dmitrii Pisarev’s death. It published writer Gleb Uspenskii and radical social critics Pyotr Tkachev and Pyotr Lavrov, among others. The field was full of wrecks and hopeful newcomers when Stasiulevich decided to try his hand at publishing. His attempt, however, proved to be no ordinary undertaking. The result was a new gravitational force in Russia’s intellectual field. It was a testament to its founder that in a crowded field of journals, the Herald of Europe became Russian liberalism’s flagship and a nucleus around which a dense constellation of intellectuals revolved, from the eminent writers of the Golden Age to provincial statisticians. However, the road to prominence was not easy. Filling the Liberal Niche The s was a difficult time for the Utin family. As soon as Nikolai emigrated for his safety, the police began monitoring his correspondence with  The Herald of Europe as the Flagship of Russian Liberalism Stasiulevich, causing the latter to write presciently amid the euphoria of the Great Reform era: “I will try to arrange my affairs in such a way that I am ready for anything...