Addressing the Public in Eighteenth-Century Russian Printed Letter Collections

Abstract:This article offers the first scholarly overview of original and translated letter collections printed in eighteenth-century Russia. Through a close reading of the publication history, structure and paratexts of correspondence editions, it argues that the proliferation of such collections under Catherine the Great (1762–96) reflects an expanding definition of publicness and a related eagerness on the part of editors and translators to reconfigure relationships within the public. Editors widened state- and church-centred concepts of publicness to encompass an array of letter writers from cultural figures to ordinary citizens. Simultaneously, horizontal relationships of exchange between writers, editors, texts and readers came to rival vertical hierarchies in motivating and shaping epistolary publicity. A previously overlooked element in Catherinian print culture, letter collections provide unique insights into late eighteenth-century Russian thinking about what it meant to be (a) public.