In Soviet culture, the reader was never a "consumer of books" in
the Western sense. According to the aesthetic doctrine at the heart
of Socialist Realism, the reader was a subject of education, to be
reforged and molded. Because of this, Soviet culture cannot be
examined properly without taking into account the reading masses.
This book is a history of the shaping of the reader of Soviet
literature, a history of the "State appropriation of the reader."
The entire history of the formation and transformation of the
institution of literature in the revolutionary and Soviet eras
bears witness to the fact that literature was called upon to
perform substantive political and ideological functions in the
authorities' overall system (which included the publishing
business, the book trade, libraries, and schools) aimed at
ultimately creating a new Soviet person. This book shows how people
from various social classes, in a dynamic unknown in pre-Soviet
history, not only consumed the products of a new culture but in
fact created that culture.
On its own, the sociology of reading is scarcely capable of
uncovering the variety, dynamism, and multilayered structure of the
process of reading, for the reader is a composite figure. Soviet
society in the Stalin era was not only a State-hierarchy system,
but also a mosaic that was always divided into definite cultural
strata, each of which consumed its own culture, which performed a
host of familiar functions--escapist, socializing, compensating,
informative, recreational, prestige-enhancing, aesthetic, and
emotional--in addition to the specifically Soviet tastes connected
with propaganda and mobilization.
If we superimpose on this spectrum the diverse characteristics of
individual readers, the resulting picture is extraordinarily
variegated. At the same time, there is a certain cultural space in
which these factors intersect--the space the author defines as the
"situation of reading." In this book, he focuses on the basic lines
of force that were at work in the Soviet reading space.
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