Literary Institutions in Imperial Russia

Kostin in the article "Russian Mid-18th Century Printed Poetry and Consumption: Preliminary Notes" claims that the standard literary and historical narrative describes the culture of Russian poetry in the mid-18th century as developing without conflict to outward appearances. The return of subjectivity to the reader and the view of the history of Russian poetry from the 1720s through the 1750s as a changing social structure allow this narrative to be refined. The article "The Genealogy of School Historicism: Literary Criticism, Historical Scholarship and Literary Curriculum in Russian Highschool of 1860-1900s" by Alexey Vdovin and Kirill Zubkov discusses the origins of the idea of the development of literature prevailing in the modern school. The authors of textbooks consider literature to be simultaneously transcending its time and subject to historical study. This idea was affirmed during the reform of the school program (1903-1904) as a result of the complex interaction between the institutions of literary criticism, the scholarly history of literature and the school. In the article "Literature in the Service of Empire, Empire in the Service of Literature: Towards an Interpretation of the Final Scene of Ivan Goncharov's The Precipice" Alina Bodrova and Sergei Guskov examine the evolution of the artistic intent of The Precipice as a function of Ivan Goncharov's "double identity" and his path in overcoming the conflict between his roles as a literary figure and a bureaucrat, which the writer was dealing with in the second half of the 1850s through the 1860s.