Libri di R. Vassena

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning "love story" that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists' research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The third volume of Reading Russia considers more recent (and rapid) changes to reading, and focuses on two profoundly transformative moments: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the digital revolution of the 1990s. This volume investigates how the political transformations of the early twentieth century and the technological ones from the turn of the twenty-first impacted the tastes, habits, and reading practices of the Russian public. It closely observes how Russian readers adapted to and/or resisted their eras' paradigm-shifting crises in communication and interpretation.

"Reader, where are you?", wondered, in the mid-1880s, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the Russian writers that paid the most attention to the readership of his time. Saltykov-Shchedrin's call did not go unanswered. Over the past two centuries, various disciplines - from the social sciences to psychology, literary criticism, semiotics, historiography and bibliography - alternately tried to outline the specific features of the Russian reader and investigate his function in the history of Russian literary civilization. The essays collected in this volume follow in the tradition but, at the same time, present new challenges to the development of the discipline. The contributors, coming from various countries and different cultures (Russia, the US, Italy, France, Britain), discuss the subject of reading in Russia - from the age of Catherine II to the Soviet regime - from various perspectives: from aesthetics to reception, from the analysis of individual or collective practices, to the exploration of the social function of reading, to the spread and evolution of editorial formats. The contributions in this volume return a rich and articulated portrait of a culture made of great readers. CONTRIBUTORS: Rodolphe Baudin (Université de Strasbourg); Edyta Bojanowska (Rutgers University); Jeffrey Brooks (Johns Hopkins University); Evgeny Dobrenko (University of Sheffield); Robin Feuer Miller (Brandeis University); Oleg Lekmanov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow); Anne Lounsbery (New York University); Damiano Rebecchini (Università degli Studi di Milano); Abram Reitblat (RGBI - NLO, Moscow); Laura Rossi (Università degli Studi di Milano); Jon Stone (Franklin & Marshall College); William Mills Todd III (Harvard University); Raffaella Vassena (Università degli Studi di Milano).

Nel novembre del 1884, in una Russia piegata dal dispotismo di Alessandro III, si apre il processo a Rykov e ai suoi complici, imputati di uno scandalo finanziario che travolge la vita e brucia i risparmi di un'intera comunità. A seguirlo come inviato c'è il giovane Anton Cechov, che racconta le menzogne, le reticenze e i silenzi di una galleria di avidi truffatori. Un crack Parmalat nella Russia del XIX secolo, raccontato da un reporter d'eccezione.