In a great speech about Nikolai Novikov — given on the 150th anniversary of Novikov’s birth — the famous Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevsky noted: In ancient Rus’ they read a lot, but not much and not many. What he meant by this was that traditionally a few people read a few texts, and they read them all the time. “Master readers” knew their holy texts, and they read or recited them aloud, instilling a “fear of the book” in their listeners. Then came Peter I, Peter the Great. In Peter’s time Russians learned to read secular, often dry, educational texts and lost that “ancient fear,” while in Elizaveta Petrovna’s time Russians discovered songs of all kinds, then bourgeois tragedies and sentimentalist novels. This led, in Kliuchevsky’s opinion, to a separation of “serious” secular literature from “heartfelt” secular literature, and the two branches became enemies. Russians swallowed the 18th century English novel whole, and followed it with dessert carts of poorly understood F
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