Readers and Literature

Disputes about readers have been going on since time immemorial. They began as soon as a permanent circle of readers and viewers had appeared. At the very least, Aristophanes's Frogs was performed in a theater almost two thousand years before Gutenberg invented the printing press. And this comedy, after all, was a parody on various kinds of creators and consumers of art, for the most part about the "drones" of Athens. This topic, naturally, has not lost its currency even today, when the readership has expanded to an extraordinary degree and readers have come to be distinguished from one another by both their motives for reading and their very "skill at reading." Nowadays, the study of readers has acquired great social significance; in all countries, including our own, numerous works on this topic are being published. The authors of these works utilize statistics from libraries and publishing houses and employ special mathematical methods.