Publishing in Tsarist Russia: A History of Print Media from Enlightenment to Revolution ed. by Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi (review)

In Publishing in Tsarist Russia's concluding comments, the editor and contributor Taro Tsurumi discusses publishing as part of imperial Russia's "soft infrastructure." It is an instructive lens through which to view the publishing enterprise, which indeed facilitated a host of public interactions and operations. However, this reader ultimately found it too benign a construct to account for the more targeted theme and related set of charged questions that echo across the collection's readings. From the first essay, Publishing in Tsarist Russia interrogates how publishing participated in the imperial project of forging subjects – in both senses of the term "subjects". Who is authorized to publish? What kinds of perspectives and content are authorized? How does the language in which an outfit publishes inflect the discourse? What are these regulations' influences on the imperial subject's sense of identity? Or, since these studies frequently foreground minority groups, how do identities peripheral to the dominant one negotiate the system to find expression and how might they be shaped in the process?

The volume's organization charts a course for just such a reading. Part 1 features essays describing how, early in its Russian history, publishing was deployed to help codify an official language and culture. Yusuke Toriyama, for instance, examines how in the eighteenth century Catherine the Great used print media to articulate Russia's unique cultural orientation, at once a part of and apart from enlightened Europe. Through her Society Striving for the Translation of Foreign Books, Catherine strategically inserted into Russian intellectual life those French and English works that promoted the empire's own Age of Reason, while using the same translations to craft a Russian language encrypted with the nation's profound spiritual sensibilities.

The following two studies, by Abram I. Reinblat and Hajime Kaizawa, expose the various apparatuses, all supported by publishing, that through the nineteenth century gradually cemented the Russian literary canon. As Reinblat plainly states, the "making of a classic" means the "normativization" of certain modes of expression by select "authorities." In this case, those authorities included the publishers of popular anthologies, along with school readers for Russia's expanding secondary-education system. State-sponsored recognition of sanctioned writers, in the forms of celebrations and statues, for instance, reinforced the effort. Literary critics in the era's celebrated "thick journals" played perhaps the most central role. And while it becomes clear that an entitled minority decided what and how the nation would read, the essays' authors might also have done well to identify how some among that elite pushed against dominant values. Take the case of the nineteenth century's most influential critic, Vissarion Belinsky, about whose claim to authority Reinblat makes no comment. A raznochinets (non-noble) and a Westernizer, expelled from university for political activism, Belinsky in significant ways embodied perspectives unpopular with the state. His opinions were made printable by Catherine's allowance of independent publishing.

Part 2's thematic turn might be encapsulated in the title of its fourth and final essay, "Ethnic Minorities Speak Up." From the European migrant entrepreneurs who were important actors in a publishing scene otherwise meant to solidify a Russian national culture (Yukiko Tatsumi) to baptized Tatars who added their unique perspectives as ethnic non-Russians to a Russian-language Orthodox journal (Akira Sakurama), part 2's studies examine how peripheral populations participated in or navigated around the prevailing cultural discourse. Two essays emerge as standouts.

Takehiko Inoue's piece details how Kalmyk Buddhists exploited a Russian boom in Oriental studies to both regain traditions and assert their modern sense of identity as imperial subjects. Kalmyks contributed to and colored the Russian-language scholarship of which they were the object, using the attention and access it granted to preserve their manuscript culture and to restart a long...