Historical changes to the practices and meanings of attention are at the heart of this ambitious, richly documented, and methodologically creative book. Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals tried to distinguish themselves from earlier generations listening better, particularly to the voice of the Russian peasantry. The familiar story about the chasm separating the elite from the people is reframed here by the focus on global changes to the technologies of communication. The writers, thinkers, and ethnographers who flourished around 1840 emerge in this new perspective as a “media generation” that extends beyond Russia (5). Their listening and recording practices were shaped by the growing availability of paper, the spread of telegraphy, and by the increasing efficiency of postal systems. What is often told as a peculiarly Russian story about “penitent noblemen” and their compensatory longing for contact with the people seems less exceptional when examined in this larger technological context (6).
In Gabriella Safran's account, Russian realist literature emerged during a shift in the predominant mode of perception, which occurred in imperial Russia at the same time as in the west. This international perspective is founded on the premise that “the human ear actually works in similar ways globally at a given period” (43). As a demonstration of this, “acousmatic listening,” that is, “listening when the source of sound is not visible,” a term that Safran borrows from the cinema scholar Michel Chion, turns out to be especially important (21). Both autobiographical accounts by writers like Aleksandr Herzen and fictional descriptions of listening, like in Ivan Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter, associate this kind of listening, often occurring at night, with startling discoveries and a more profound access to aesthetic, and moral, experience. The same was true of Parisian operagoers, who began to pay closer attention to the music in darkened halls in the late 1830s (136).
Changing modes of communication encouraged a new concern for preserving speech from oblivion, which in turn fueled interest in stenography, lexicography, ethnography, and spiritualism (Vladimir Dal΄ was both lexicographer and spiritualist), as well as works of literature that sought to capture the authentic voice of the people. Writers differed on how to do this well and engaged in “listening contests,” vying with each other both to hear what the people were saying and to capture it with the written word. Some, like the half-French Dmitrii Grigorovich, were attacked for their alleged foreignness, which, their critics maintained, made them inherently unable to hear what really mattered. There were debates about what, exactly, to preserve: the regional specificity of Russia's peasant dialects or the collective voice of the nation, internally unified and distinct from its neighbors. Russian intellectuals regarded “adequate listening and recording across social lines as a problem with both technical and moral aspects, which were tied to each other” (217).
Safran emphasizes the materiality of these practices of listening and recording. Many writers were mocked for their real or imagined habit of carrying around a notebook to record characteristic bits of speech, which they would incorporate into their fictions. Fedor Dostoevskii kept such a notebook during his years of imprisonment, but later criticized his fellow writer Nikolai Leskov for allegedly doing the same thing. Writers could write down more words and print more thanks to the expansion of paper production, and the history of papermaking occupies an important place in Safran's account. Paper could be evidence of a writer's inability to capture unmediated speech, but it could also signal the proximity of the literary work to its source in the people. The prominence of paper in Notes of a Hunter suggest both these meanings. As Safran strikingly observes, the paper Turgenev wrote on could well have come from rags that had once clothed the bodies of the peasants he recorded (130).
The title of Recording Russia is somewhat misleading; this book is about the Russian intelligentsia, its aspirations and methods, and how both of these were conditioned by changes in the media environment. Other contemporaneous kinds of listening, such as the state's listening to unreliable intellectuals, are not addressed. However, the book's core argument is persuasive and important. Safran has demonstrated how a methodologically novel approach to literary studies, augmented by concepts from sound and media studies, anthropology, and linguistics, can transform the familiar topic of Russian intellectuals’ struggles to know the people. Her book also reveals how the story of Russian realism becomes productively comparable to developments in other arts and other countries when examined through the framework of the history of the senses.
