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2.4 - The Thick Journal

from History 2 - Mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
William Mills Todd III
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The Russian ‘thick journal’, from its inception in the early 1800s to the present day, is at once a cultural institution, an index of intellectual life, and an important publishing mechanism. During the nineteenth century, the temporal focus of this chapter, Russia’s low literacy rate, poorly developed distribution networks, and virtual absence of inexpensive editions of high-quality literature gave the monthly thick journal a central place in Russian culture. From the 1840s until the 1880s, the thick journals published every subsequently canonical Russian novel except for Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, alongside works of criticism, history, philosophy, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, creating an expanding galaxy of discourses, many of which would migrate into the thematics and styles of the fictions they surrounded. That writers often began serialisation before completely drafting their novels made these fictions more open to such migration.

Keywords

literary journalsserialisationnovelistic discourseRussian criticismliterature and politicsNikolai KaramzinOsip SenkovskiiMikhail KatkovMikhail Saltykov-ShchedrinFedor Dostoevskii
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 277 - 292
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Breininger-Umetayeva, Olga, ‘A scholarly look at “thick journals” today: The crisis of the institution’, Russian Journal of Communication 6.1 (2014), 20–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evgen'ev-Maksimov, V. E. et al. (eds.), Ocherki po istorii russkoi zhurnalistiki i kritiki [Studies in the history of Russian journalism and criticism], 2 vols. (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1950–65).Google Scholar
Frazier, Melissa, Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the ‘Library for Reading’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fusso, Suzanne, Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Kozlov, Denis, The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maguire, Robert A., Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).Google Scholar
Martinsen, Deborah A. (ed.), Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Reitblat, A. I., Ot Bovy k Bal'montu i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury [From Bova to Balmont and other works on the historical sociology of Russian literature] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009).Google Scholar

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