Ranchin Andrey Mikhailovich – DS in Philology, Leading Researcher at the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The book under review examines Russian literature of the eighteenth – early twentieth centuries as a social institution. The focus of the authors of the collective monograph edited by A.V. Vdovin and K.Yu. Zubkov has a variety of problems: a number of establishing the status of poetry and the formation of the category of fiction in the first half of the eighteenth century, the role of literary societies, circles and magazines in the evolution of literature, the activities of dramatic censorship, dramaturgy and the formation of private theater in the nineteenth century, principles of teaching literature, the formation of literary bohemia, institute of readings for the people. The combination of the social roles of a writer and an official is also considered using the example of I.A. Goncharov and social strategies of L.N. Tolstoy – writer and publicist in the 1850s–1860s. The research included in the book is largely innovative, both from the factual and partly from the methodological side. Most works fruitfully apply the approach to literature as a social institution, associated with the name of J. Habermas, as well as the methodology of P. Bourdieu and A. Greif.
Russian literature of the eighteenth – early twentieth centuries; social institutions; social field of literature; I.A. Goncharov; L.N. Tolstoy