Reading and Publishing: Nikolai Novikov

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 French Enlightenment philosophy. The situation was disastrous:

An unexpected and sad vision emerged: the new ideas of Enlightenment philosophy became a justification and support for old native ignorance and moral stagnation. Voltaire-inspired denunciatory laughter helped to hide chronic Russian ulcers without healing them. […] In a word, this laughter became for our freethinker what a papal indulgence used to be for the Western European, removing from a person every sin, every moral responsibility …

Catherine II began to fight this situation, emphasizing the necessity of education. And Novikov — who, it seems to Kliuchevsky, practically came out of nowhere — stepped up to help, energetically beginning his printing and publishing enterprise and becoming the first “non-serving Russian nobleman … who set out to serve his fatherland with his pen and book as his ancestors had done with horse and shield.” 

Kliuchevsky and Novikov

In all, Novikov printed over 900 books in 30 years of publishing activity. He also spent 15 years of his life in the Shlisselberg Fortress, incarcerated for too much “freethinking.” Nonetheless, according to Kliuchevsky Novikov was a vital part of the shift in Russian attitudes toward reading and education and had a lasting impact on Moscow University. 

And he is important for the history of Russian biography: it was Novikov who began the business of “writing about writers,” publishing his Attempt at a historical dictionary of Russian writers in St. Petersburg in 1772. 

Novikov is famous for his satirical journals — and for his jousting with Catherine, that led at times to the banning of his journals — but Kliuchevsky celebrates his fearless publishing activity. “In a time,” as Novikov joked in his journal Zhivopisets, when “even the title of writer was shameful,” Novikov not only wrote, but himself stood at the printing press to get his books out. Novikov motivated a whole group of people — his “Moscow circle,” which included

Novikov (portrait by D.G. Levitsky)

Bolkhovitinov — to band together in efforts to increase the number and quality of books available to Russian readers and to create smart, readable, educational works. “In just three years,” Kliuchevsky writes, “Novikov printed more books at the university printing plant than had come out in its previous 24 years of existence.”

**Quotes above all taken from: Vospominaniia o N. I. Novikove i ego vremeni, doklad, prochitannyi na zasedanii Obshchestva liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti 13 noiabria 1894 g. [Recollections of N.I. Novikov and his time, a talk given at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature on 13 November, 1894]. Reprinted in V.O. Kliuchevskii, “Literaturnye portrety” (Moscow, Sovremennik, 1991) 52-77.