Commercial Periodicals and Their Readers under Nicholas I: Unsung Pioneers of an Expanding Cultural Space

Yelizaveta Raykhlina, “Commercial Periodicals and their Readers Under Nicholas I: Unsung Pioneers of an Expanding Cultural Space.” Although the explosion of commercial and popular publications in Russia is rightly associated with the expansion of literacy and the reading publics of the latter decades of the nineteenth century, significant precursors had appeared under Nicholas I. Raykhlina will discuss the mainstream commercial press of mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Its audience consisted of a heterogeneous “middle stratum,” largely merchants, government officials, and the occasional cleric; neither the highly educated elite nor the barely or rarely literate peasants. The intelligentsia of the time disdained both the publications and their readers, and the journals were considered unworthy of study for most of the Soviet period. These commercial periodicals are in fact crucial sources for understanding the values and identities of Imperial Russia’s expanding middle classes and their contributions to the increasing pressures on the boundaries of social stratification.