Authors

Discussion

This paper investigates how post-Emancipation Russia (after the liberation of Russian serfs) constructed the figure of the narodnyi chitatel’ (common reader) through the editorial strategies of poetry anthologies and state-sponsored public reading initiatives. Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the ‘implied reader’ (Iser 1974), I argue that the peasant reader was not merely addressed but discursively produced through a network of ideological, pedagogical, and emotional expectations embedded in literary form and content.

Focusing on three representative case studies – (1) the first anthology for the peasantry edited by a state official Petr Alabin in 1862, (2) those approved by the Standing Commission of Public Readings (1883–1884), and the Russian Poets collection published by the Society for the Distribution of Useful Books (1879–1880) – the paper explores how literature for the common reader functioned less as education and more as a tool for emotional discipline. These anthologies used familiar poetic forms, vernacular language, and sentimental imagery to promote loyalty, piety, and moral resignation, thus shaping what Pierre Bourdieu would call a literary habitus. By embedding religious motifs, moral examples, and patriotic devotion into poetry, editors and state institutions functioned as, in Louis Althusser’s terms, performative acts of ‘ideological interpellation’ (Althusser 1971), ‘hailing’ the peasantry into perceiving themselves within the identity and attributes (moral patriots and loyal subjects) that were rehearsed and reproduced through literature.

Rather than responding to popular demand, these collections reflect the desires of their compilers and sponsors to shape an ideal subject – humble, obedient, and loyal to Tsar and state. Through a close textual and contextual analysis of selected poems and publication histories, this paper shows how reading was imagined not as intellectual liberation but as emotional conditioning, as well as how literature participated in the formation of national identity in late imperial Russia.