“Elena married Insarov on the eve of his death”: Literature about “new people” and reading practices of the generation of the 1870s

Abstract. The focus of the article is on consuming literature on “new people”, which constituted significant part of the book repertoire by the readers from the 1870s generation. Even though it has long been accepted in historiography that these texts had a significant impact on the development of the narodism movement, scholars typically looked to specific works, mentions of which in the populists’ autobiographical writings demonstrated their “influence”. The researchers analyzed the content of novels and stories about “new people”, suggesting that the described characters would design life-building models for their readers to help them, at first, transforming their lives, and then the social and political order of the Russian Empire. The paper proposes discarding the simplistic notion that writings have a direct impact on readers. Through the examination of two reader diaries and correspondences from young people in the first half of the 1870s, a broad range of books read and the guidelines for interpreting them were traced. The author concludes that readers of the 1870s recreated a specific model of reading, the concepts of which were most clearly expressed in Dmitry Pisarev’s article “Our University Science”. It expected autonomous intellectual activity to grasp what was read, and the content of literature was subordinate to interpretation. The paradigm put forth by the critic was supported by a large number of bildungsroman novels that flooded the Russian book market: their heroes read by similar principles and became “real people” after avoiding a fall. The emphasis on independent intellectual labor resulted in a sense of what was read that went well beyond traditional interpretation of important books, such as the novels of Innokenty Omulevsky or Daniil Mordovtsev, and “new people” were criticized. The fundamental thing that 1870s readers learned from sophisticated literature was reading itself.

Keywords: history of reading, “new people”, life-building models, the eve, reading diary, narodism, generation of the 1870s, theological seminary.