Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century

By Gabriella Safran

Recording Russia examines scenes of listening to "the people" across a variety of texts by Russian writers and European travelers to Russia. Gabriella Safran challenges readings of these works that essentialize Russia as a singular place where communication between the classes is consistently fraught, arguing instead that, as in the West, the sense of separation or connection between intellectuals and those they interviewed or observed is as much about technology and performance as politics and emotions.

Nineteenth-century writers belonged to a distinctive media generation using new communication technologies—not bells, but mechanically produced paper, cataloguing systems, telegraphy, and stenography. Russian writers and European observers of Russia in this era described themselves and their characters as trying hard to listen to and record the laboring and emerging middle classes. They depicted scenes of listening as contests where one listener bests another; at times the contest is between two sides of the same person. They sometimes described Russia as an ideal testing ground for listening because of its extreme cold and silence. As the mid-century generation witnessed the social changes of the 1860s and 1870s, their listening scenes revealed increasing skepticism about the idea that anyone could accurately identify or record the unadulterated "voice of the people." Bringing together intellectual history and literary analysis and drawing on ideas from linguistic anthropology and sound and media studies, Recording Russia looks at how writers, folklorists, and linguists such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Dahl, as well as foreign visitors, thought about the possibilities and meanings of listening to and repeating other people's words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501766336

Book preview

Cover: Recording Russia, Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century by Gabriella Safran

RECORDING RUSSIA

TRYING TO LISTEN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

GABRIELLA SAFRAN

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To my family of word enthusiasts:

Michael, Eva, and Frieda Kahan, and my parents, William and Marian Safran.

Слово, что воробей, вылетит, не поймаешь.

A word is like a sparrow—it flies away and you can’t catch it.

—Vladimir Dahl, Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language, from the entries on Sparrow and Word

CONTENTS

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction

1. Ringing

2. Singing

3. Nesting

4. Crossing

5. Paper Making

6. Dreaming

7. Insulting

8. Laughing

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

All translations into English are mine unless indicated otherwise. Individual Russian words and short phrases are transliterated into Latin letters; whole sentences and verses are given in Cyrillic. I use a modified version of the Library of Congress transliteration system (without diacritics). In the text (but not the notes), I endeavor to make names easier to read by using Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Dahl, and -sky instead of -skii at the ends.

Introduction

Listening is not easy. This is a book about writers in the mid-nineteenth-century Russian Empire listening attentively to, recording, and repeating the words of people unlike themselves, often Slavic peasants but sometimes nonpeasants or even non-Slavs. They sometimes presented this listening as action toward freedom for the serfs; as a way to inform readers about the empire’s population; as an expression of their faith in Christian unity or their own virtue; as an attempt to preserve an endangered past; or as a step toward better writing in a more vibrant literary language. At the same time, these writers, and their critics, saw their tasks of listening and recording as likely to be done wrong. Writers might get distracted or listen unsympathetically; they might record and circulate something inaccurate, unrepresentative, or defamatory; they might fail to understand the words they hear or not grasp what they mean in context; those they listened to might fear them and not speak frankly; they might appear to be illegitimate vehicles of the words they convey; and they might produce bad writing, in an awkward or unclear language.

This picture is familiar: nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals are famous for feeling that there was something wrong about their relationship to the narod, the people. Generations of commentators have described this anxiety as an expression of writers’ radical beliefs. I conduct a methodological experiment by looking at texts, people, and ideas that specialists in Russian literature and history know, but drawing on ideas from sound and media studies and from linguistic anthropology. I examine a series of autobiographical or fictionalized accounts of listening across social lines by foreign visitors to Russia and by Russian writers. I notice that when they tell stories about listening and recording by themselves or their fictional stand-ins, these writers draw attention to sound and its transmission and to paper and its uses, and they tend to compare one person’s successful listening to another’s less successful listening (though often these rival listeners are two facets of a single person). In these scenes, the technical aspects of listening and recording, their political and ethical significance, and their practical and aesthetic import are interconnected. I draw on these observations to argue that these writers, even as they responded to the circumstances of the Russian Empire, were also members of a global mid-nineteenth-century media generation who competed to display their mastery of modern modes of hearing and recording. They sometimes wrote as though the sounds they heard and recorded were pure objects awaiting capture, like the wild birds some of them hunted for pleasure; I also explore moments when they recognize the spoken words of the people as performances, produced in the moment and meant to draw attention.

Take Ivan Turgenev’s 1847 story The Office (Kontora), part of his cycle Notes of a Hunter (Zapiski okhotnika), which juxtaposes several listeners. The first-person narrator, a landowner, is out hunting when he is caught in the rain. He naps in the office on a neighboring landowner’s estate and awakens to hear, through a crack in the wall, as a clerk, Nikolai Eremeich Khvostov, himself a serf, abuses and manipulates a series of petitioners. The hunter continues listening, but lies back down and pretends to be asleep when anyone comes to check. The final petitioner is a barber-surgeon, a serf who wants to marry another serf, but the clerk spitefully prevents the marriage. Turgenev’s friend, the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky, thought the story was one of Turgenev’s best; he praised Turgenev for approaching the people from a new angle and acquainting us with people of various statuses and ranks. His judgment initiated a tradition of categorizing The Office, like the collection to which it belonged, as a denunciation of arbitrary and corrupt estate management and of serfdom itself.¹ In France, where Turgenev lived much of his adult life, his friends believed the rumor that reading Notes of a Hunter convinced Tsar Alexander II that the serfs needed to be emancipated.² The idea of the power of his writing and the import of the choice of a person such as himself to listen attentively to the people and to write about them fit into their image of Russia as Europe’s last bastion of serfdom, a place where ethical people were censored, but where one person’s brave outcry might reach its target and liberate the oppressed.

Even as it critiques serfdom, this story dwells on listening and recording as skills practiced by clerks. Its writer knew something about offices: Turgenev’s mother had a kontora (a term that entered Russian from German and literally means counting-house) on her estate near Orel, and Turgenev himself had worked in his early twenties in the St. Petersburg office of Vladimir Dahl, an imperial official and lexicographer whose dictionary integrated standard words with dialect terms gathered around the empire.³ When Turgenev’s hunter enters the office, he meets a young clerk who shows off his handwriting in a calligraphed complaint about noise that combines non-standard language with officialese:

You are ordered immediately upon receipt to find out who walked through the Aglish [Aglitskii, an archaic variant of the word for English] garden last night, under the influence of alcohol, with inappropriate songs, and woke up and disturbed the French governess, Mme. Engenie [presumably Eugenie].… You are ordered to investigate the above in full and immediately inform the office.⁴

This document, numbered 209 and bearing an enormous official seal, is signed by the estate-owner herself and addressed to the steward, who, as the clerk explains, is illiterate, which means that it must be read aloud to him. The picture of clerks elaborately documenting drunken nighttime singing makes the kontora and the practices that it fosters of recording sound on paper seem absurd. From that angle, the story appears to be a criticism of the heartless bureaucratic listening of the clerk and his minions, in favor of the empathetic listening of the eavesdropping hunter: if this story stages a moral contest, then the hunter who does not write (at least in our presence) is the winner.⁵

This bifurcation, though, ignores the hunter’s similarity to the clerk. Turgenev uses the same Russian verb to describe their actions, prislushat’sia (or prislushivat’sia), meaning a kind of attentive, self-aware listening by someone who is doing their best to take in everything they hear.⁶ Even as he made fun of the clerk’s exhaustive transformation of sound into words on paper, Turgenev, like the hunter who was his stand-in, was doing something similar. And Turgenev too came in for critique. Although he praised the story in print, Belinsky wrote to a friend that he was worried that Turgenev might get carried away by his enthusiasm for "onomatopoetic [zvukopodrazhatel’noi, literally sound-imitating] poetry." He found Turgenev’s use of regionalisms, especially the term zelenia, distasteful nonsense: "he oversalts (peresalivaet) in using Orel dialect words."⁷ Zelenia, which means the first shoots of a crop, appears when one petitioner says a sentence that I translate, using a Scots term that probably startled the nineteenth-century London ear much as zelenia startled Belinsky’s St. Petersburg ear, "Remarkable braird this year, sir, don’t you say?" (Удивительные, можно сказать, зеленя в нынешнем году-с).⁸ Though he knew the word was spoken in the Orel region, Belinsky thought it should not be used in writing, and especially not in the author’s voice.⁹ In complaining that zelenia made Turgenev’s story taste too salty, Belinsky indicated his preference for a nationally accessible literary language, less adulterated by regional oddities.¹⁰ Turgenev, in Belinsky’s estimation, was at risk of using other people’s language inappropriately, and, like the clerks in the kontora, getting carried away by the desire to show off his abilities at verbatim recording—putting too many words on paper, indiscriminately, to no one’s benefit.

Figure 1: A painting of two rooms, divided by a wall. In the left room, a man leans against the wall to listen to the conversation by two men, in the right room.

FIGURE 1. Petr Sokolov, illustration to Ivan Turgenev, The Office. Zapiski okhotnika I. S. Turgeneva v akvareliakh Petra Sokolova (St. Petersburg: Izd. Fon Bool’, 1891–1892). Scanned from Iu. P. Pishchulin, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Zhizn’. Iskusstvo. Vremia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1988), 150.

The illustration to Turgenev’s story made by Petr Sokolov in 1891–1892 responds to its thematization of office supplies and its presentation of listening as a contest between the hunter and the clerk. The fourth wall of the two rooms is missing; it appears that we are looking at a stage set and the listeners are performers anticipating the audience’s judgment. In a simply furnished room on the right, a thin man speaks as a stout man behind a desk listens impassively; paper and feather pens appear on his desk, and paper fills the cabinets behind him, is piled on top of them, and, following the filing system that was used in Dahl’s office, hangs on hooks on the wall. In a room richly decorated with oil paintings and a glowing samovar on the left, a man whose face we cannot see listens attentively through the wall. The scene conveys dramatic irony, since we know he is listening, but the men he hears do not. The heads of the three men form a line that bisects the image, and the white shirt of the man on the left picks up the color of the paper on the right. For a person like Turgenev himself, informed about the rural paper industry, this could serve as a reminder that paper was the product of rags made from such clothing even as it ties the hunter to users of paper.

In this book, I look closely at such scenes of writers, or people like them, listening to the people. These scenes thematize rivalry with other listeners, the modernity of the subject’s listening skills, communication technology, and at times, as in The Office, all three. In the rest of this introduction, I introduce my cast of characters as a media generation, I explain what I mean by attentive listening as a performance, and I end by listing thirteen ways to identify the winners of the listening contests that these texts stage.

Penitent Noblemen as a Media Generation

The couple of dozen subjects of this book include a selection of famous writers, such as Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky, the collector of epic songs Pavel Rybnikov, and less-well-known belletrists and folklorists, as well as a few foreign visitors such as the Marquis de Custine; they also include some of these writers’ fictional characters. In travel narratives, folkloristics, prose fiction, and popular collections of scenes, these writers (like many others) depicted listening across social lines. They understood that they were attempting something new as they tried to listen attentively to, and use the words of, people unlike themselves. My project is a group biography that focuses on their shared experience of a shift in social attention and media use; it is an ethnography of these ethnographers. My primary subjects are men, but they sometimes delegated the work of recording to women; the reverse occurred more rarely.¹¹ These writers, many of whom knew each other, were members of Turgenev’s generation defined broadly, meaning that they were mostly born in the first third of the century (the foreign travelers were born a bit earlier). They started to publish after the 1825 Decembrist revolt, a failed coup led by military officers agitating for reform or abolition of the monarchy, and before the end of 1861, the year of the imperial edict of emancipation. They came of age under Tsar Nicholas I, when literate people discussed the freeing of the serfs who belonged to the state or to individual landowners and who constituted the majority of the empire’s ethnic Russian population. When emancipation would happen, under what terms, and what the results would be preoccupied Russian society during these writers’ youth, as its aftermath concerned them later.

The idea of a person trying hard but nonetheless listening inadequately to the people evokes the classic image of pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals as tormented by the awareness of their own privilege, and thus it is worth some space to explore why that image was so convincing once, and why it is less so now. Historian Cathy Frierson sees midcentury writers’ fascination with rural people as inspired by a fantasy of redemption through rapprochement with the peasantry that by the late 1880s would end with the abandonment of intellectuals’ hopes of societal reconciliation.¹² Her term, redemption, evokes the Christian notions of unity that animate some of the heroes of this book, and it echoes a phrase that came into use a few decades after Turgenev published The Office, when people began to say penitent nobleman (kaiushchiisia dvorianin) to describe gentry who worried about their own complicity in the abusive system he had described.¹³

This term was popularized by the critic Petr Boborykin in an 1885 article in French, The Cult of the People in Contemporary Russian Literature. He wrote that only in Russia did writers think of the people as "a new source of social renewal for the class of educated people."¹⁴ He attributed this not to the Europe-wide reverberations of Herderian Romanticism, but to the interaction between two specifically Russian intellectual camps of the 1840s: the Westernizers who argued for reform along the lines of the revolutionary regimes in France and the United States, and the Slavophiles who argued that any change needed to be inspired by local history and Orthodox spirituality.¹⁵ The two sides disagreed on many things, but, he argued, Russian intellectuals’ expression of obligation toward the peasants demonstrated the penetration of Slavophile instincts into Westernizing ideology. Boborykin wrote that "the revolutionary youth felt like criminals relative to the masses; a unique type developed, the penitent young nobleman, who arrived at the complete negation of all his rights, all his influence, even just as a simple member of the educated class.¹⁶ In translating a Russian participle that could mean remorseful or repentant as penitent, he made these people seem to be performing a religious ritual, and he decried this trend as a national illness or crisis" that had infected them with mysticism. He described the cult of the people as an unfortunate Russian obsession. Boborykin contributed to a French tendency to critique the Russian Empire as fostering despotism and inequality and thus creating the conditions for communism, and also to a tradition of attacking Russian thinkers for bringing into the political sphere a self-flagellating fervor better confined to religious spaces.¹⁷

The critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky asserted that whatever Boborykin said, he, Mikhailovsky, was the one who had originated the term, in an 1876–1877 set of sketches, whose narrator identifies himself as a penitent nobleman and asks, How can you not repent if your conscience torments you? Perhaps it torments you over nothing, wrongly, it’s still tormenting. This is a fact.¹⁸ Mikhailovsky makes penitence appear to be not an illness but a rational reaction for serf-owners who pause to think about the human cost of their own comfort. He explained that while there had been individual penitent noblemen earlier, such people appeared "en masse in Russia in the 1840s, and by the 1870s their attitude was even more common—and logically so.¹⁹ Boborykin pathologized the penitent noblemen, but Mikhailovsky normalized them, as did his contemporary Alexander Pypin, who saw the increasingly dark depictions of rural life in Russian prose over the nineteenth century as realist and noted that writers were moving, logically, from insisting on the humanity of serfs during the campaign for emancipation to closely examining the newly free majority population of the empire.²⁰ Boborykin’s and Mikhailovsky’s foregrounding of ideology continues in the scholarship on the Russian intelligentsia, who would also be described, throughout the twentieth century, as penitent, as owing a debt to the people from whom they were cut off, and as reflexively opposed to the authorities.²¹ It also continues in the scholarship describing midcentury folklore collectors as seeing the tales and songs they gathered as data about the attitude of the common people" to the authorities, and arguing about whether folklore offered evidence of undying traditions and a harmonious national past, or, rather, of peasants’ admiration for bandits and rebels who challenged the monarchy.²²

Another school of thought, starting in the 1970s, is skeptical about seeing the writings of a few writers as speaking for an entire generation. Michael Confino argues that the people of the 40s were not so much penitent noblemen agonizing about the narod as energetic, optimistic state servants.²³ Later historians have shifted their focus from the ideology of a few people to the ordinary lives of many; they examine the ways that people of all sorts exercised agency over their own identities. They point out that the estate system of categories that formally divided Russian subjects was consolidated only in the early nineteenth century and was never stable; they draw attention to non-Russian ethnicities with their own classification systems and to the raznochintsy, people of diverse origins who did not fit neatly into any estate.²⁴ Reading through provincial files, they find people responding creatively to the imperial rules, such as peasants who change their legal identities and Jews who correct local officials’ mis-spellings of their names (or deliberately introduce new mis-spellings), in both cases often trying to protect their sons from the draft.²⁵ The imperial bureaucracy too emerges in more recent scholarship as savvy officials jockeying for power as they work to bring legislation and administrative practices into line with their ideas.²⁶ These historians show that the thick files in imperial archives consist of papers that people of various statuses used to realize their ambitions. And in opposition to the idea of midcentury writers as proto-dissidents, recent scholarship points out that even in the area where they are imagined as most opposed to the state—the censorship—they in fact cooperated with, and staffed, government offices of information control.²⁷ They were not powerless, like the beaten-down clerk in Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, but rather thoughtful bureaucrats who cared about doing their jobs well.

Even as it takes writers’ doubts about their own interactions with the people seriously, this study reexamines them in the spirit of the more recent historiography. It is alert to writers’ recognition of the people not as a passive, homogeneous collective body, awaiting the rescuer who will give them voice, but as diverse, creative individuals with agency. It follows scholars of literature who, in the past decade, have asked how it matters for mid-nineteenth-century Russian prose that its producers were imperial administrators: Alexander Etkind notices that they wrote and thought about colonial rule, Irina Reyfman notices that they wrote and thought about status and hierarchy, and I notice that they wrote and thought about office supplies.²⁸ That office supplies were tied to status is evident in Sergei Zarudnyi’s satirical Letter from an Experienced Bureaucrat of the 40s to a Young Colleague Entering Service, where he urges his addressee to attend to paper as a material object: "Always take home a briefcase full of papers, and although at home you may work on something else, say that you are working on cases."²⁹

Zarudnyi’s experienced bureaucrat, like Turgenev and his characters, talks about paper because it is something he notices. As the media scholar Göran Bolin explains, media generations take on identities through their collective encounters with new technologies and forms.³⁰ The mid-nineteenth-century writers, then, were members of a media generation that was constituted by new kinds of interactions with paper, as well as with other changing communication technologies and techniques. In the Russian Empire as elsewhere, the mid-nineteenth century saw a decline in the use of bells for urban communication and the beginnings of electromagnetic telegraphy. Other changes—such as mechanically produced and cheaper paper, a faster, mechanized postal system, and stenography—transformed communication and prompted fantasies of its perfectibility, as though humans could attain the ability to speak over any distance and to remember everything.

Because these technological changes occurred across the world, it is worthwhile, in analyzing the Russian situation, to look at how historians of nineteenth-century communication describe their effects elsewhere. They notice that talking about media technology is a way for people to express their dreams about more satisfying interactions with other people, and their frustration when reality does not conform to them. As telegraphy developed in the 1840s, John Durham Peters writes, people began to describe even their face-to-face interactions with each other in technical terms, referencing electric signals along wires.³¹ Lisa Gitelman and Miyako Inoue show in their work on the United States and Japan respectively that the creation of the phonograph and the spread of stenographic systems emerged from and fostered the desire to capture the spoken word completely, accurately, verbatim, a development that people reacted to with both excitement and anxiety.³²

Paper could provide a way to conceptualize both the desire for perfect recording and the fear of too much data: the more paper people encounter, the more they think, and write, about its unreliability. As its production was mechanized, writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville began to figure paper simultaneously as insubstantial and as a flood of material in which one could drown.³³ The demonization of paper is sometimes connected to the idea that it is an instrument of oppression. Indeed, the state was the most important customer for paper factories, and rapid paper production served leaders who wanted to document everything about their subjects; writers’ increased attention to poor people displayed the rise of new kinds of observers who defined themselves as focused professionals, able to discipline their impressions and generate renditions of them to feed the insatiable appetite of the modern state—as well as the market—for human data.³⁴ Ben Kafka argues, though, that to equate paper with power is wrong. Instead, he points out that paperwork is unpredictable, and … this unpredictability is frustrating for administrators and administered alike. Full of surprises, paperwork is what we think about as we attempt to reconcile our theories of the state’s power with our experience of its failure.³⁵ Heavy, subject to misfiling and loss, paper serves the dream that the world is fully knowable and that people fit neatly into categories, but paper also displays the fragility of that fantasy.

Globally, mid-nineteenth-century virtuosic listeners, doctors with their stethoscopes, journalists with their shorthand systems, and government bureaucrats with their filing cabinets, demonstrated their expertise at new practices of hearing, transcribing, and organizing information. During the lead-up to the Civil War in the United States, abolitionists understood themselves as listening carefully to the silence of Southern plantations and grasping that it signaled oppression, even as Southerners diagnosed the hubbub of industrialized Northern cities as disorder.³⁶ Members of the rising middle class in postrevolutionary France defined themselves as careful, restrained listeners, in offices as in opera houses, as opposed to careless ancien régime aristocrats.³⁷ Carlyle showed off the delicacy of his ear when he tried to build a soundproof study to shield himself from the noise of London.³⁸ The novels of Dickens, who had worked as a court stenographer, display what appeared to be (but were not) accurate renditions of the vernacular language of the poor.³⁹

Folklorists’ collection of songs and stories can be understood as prompted by the proliferation of writing, which inspired people to value the oral.⁴⁰ In German-speaking territories, the Brothers Grimm collected folktales and created a dictionary and Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano compiled folksongs; in the British Isles, peasant poets such as Stephen Duck and John Clare attracted patrons and readers, John Jamieson produced a Scots dictionary, and Robert Burns wrote poems with Scottish words; in Finland, Elias Lönnrot compiled the Kalevala epic out of the short heroic songs he gathered. How to do this right, though, was not obvious. Johann Gottfried von Herder urged his readers to follow his example and gather folksongs, but he recognized that transcription to his own standards was difficult. He told his readers that folksongs should be printed as they were voiced, "without being made palatable. They would not be changed so they are acceptable to the judgment of religion or classical taste, but rather remain as they are.…⁴¹ Later, though, he admitted ruefully that at times it was necessary for me … to make certain changes in the structure of verses … in order to make it possible for us to hear and understand them, which according to my approach meant that I mutilated them.⁴² Historians of anthropology point out that when folklorists transcribe songs or tales, they draw attention to their own status and abilities.⁴³ But they cannot impose order definitively: the ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier argues about Colombia that even as philologists draw on local vocalizations selectively to create representations of national language and music as unified, predictable, and more authentic than actually spoken variants, their writing reveals something about the poorer people to whom they listen, whose sounds are a formation and a force" that penetrate into the world of the literate.⁴⁴

In Russia, the collectors of the 1830s, such as Petr Kireevsky and Nikolai Iazykov, struggled as Herder did to decide what it would mean to transcribe accurately. Folklorists of this generation wanted to find authentic texts that they imagined as miraculously preserved relics of an ancient past, evidence not so much of the fluency of their tellers as of the genius of some long-ago creators. In that spirit, they tried to record from illiterate elders in remote villages and were skeptical about stories or songs heard from literate younger people on city streets or fairgrounds. Some twentieth-century Russian and Soviet folklorists, though, moved away from those assumptions. Mark Azadovsky, a member of the Russian Performer School of folkloristics, noted that a performance of a folk tale by a person such as Nataliia Vinokurova, whom he recorded in Siberia, contained multiple layers: not only a plot common to other renditions of that tale, but elements motivated by local conditions and the teller’s own status, profession, gender, experience, and artistic impulses. His analysis suggests that folklorists, as they listened, should attend to their interlocutors’ position and their performative choices. Like Gautier, he held that philological transcriptions contained evidence about the contemporary lives of the common people.⁴⁵ As we will see, some of the nineteenth-century discussions of listening to the people that I examine here anticipate Azadovsky’s ideas.

Midcentury technological shifts such as the mechanization of paper production occurred globally, but their effects could differ from one place to another. I refer to shifts such as these as cultural tectonics, meaning large-scale, far-reaching economic and intellectual changes that are not confined to a single country. These include urbanization and industrialization, the rise of nationalisms and democracy, and the end of chattel slavery; as with geological tectonics, these changes may produce results as varied as earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain ranges.⁴⁶ Thus I do not assume that patterns of listening and media use in Paris, Tokyo, or Bogotá corresponded to those in St. Petersburg, or in the Russian provinces; at the same time, I do not exoticize Russia and assume that it was inevitably different, and I include European travelers in the same study as the Russian writers with whom they socialized. Inspired by Stephen Lovell’s examination of public speaking in Russia, I do my best to draw on the rich historiography of Russian science and technology while offering cross-border comparisons.⁴⁷ Instead of taking Russian difference for granted, I ask how such exceptionalism is constructed and whom it serves: in this case, wondering who benefits from the notion that communication happens in Russia in quiet communal ways, unlike in Western Europe. It is when we look away from such ideologically laden binaries that we notice the everyday experiences midcentury Russians shared with people of their class elsewhere. Thus upper-class midcentury Europeans would have recognized Turgenev, like the hunter in The Office, as a virtuosic modern listener from his style of hunting. In the 1840s in Russia as in Western Europe, people like Turgenev rejected old elite practices, in which servants and dogs flushed out animals. Instead, they relied on—and showed off—their own ability to watch and listen to prey.⁴⁸

Bolin observes that generations are defined through the stories they repeat about their use of media.⁴⁹ Such a story about Russian mid century writers’ use of paper appears in Aleksei Pisemsky’s 1869 novel, People of the 40s, whose hero, the poor nobleman Pavel Vikhrov, observes and writes about peasants.⁵⁰ When his fiction attracts governmental attention, he is punished by being sent to work in an office in a distant province. (Something like this happened to Dahl, Alexander Herzen, and Rybnikov.) When Vikhrov annoys his superior, he is assigned an onerous case that requires going through eight volumes of files, so much paper that the soldier who brings it to him has to carry each tome separately; Vikhrov heroically reads the whole thing and discovers that one more witness must be interviewed.⁵¹ To show how good Vikhrov is at listening and using other people’s words, Pisemsky points out that other people are worse, such as a young man at a party who imitates a drunk department guard too and even a merchant from Shchukin house, but it all turned out terribly untalented, not funny, and you could see it was all borrowed, not his own. Vikhrov is also irritated by a Jewish composer who says proudly that he has "managed to listen attentively (prislushalsia) to some Russian melodies," but does not understand the lyrics.⁵² As we will see, Pisemsky consistently saw writers of non-ethnic-Russian origins as inadequate listeners to Russian voices.⁵³ Pisemsky, who was himself recognized for his ability to convey peasant speech, shows that whether he is working for or irritating the regime, Vikhrov is better than his rivals at listening to and recording other people’s words. By making the hero of People of the 40s both a virtuosic listener and a conscientious interpreter of bureaucratic interviews, Pisemsky shows that modern sound mediation was crucial to how midcentury writers saw themselves.

Listening as Performance

Pisemsky and his characters, like the other real and fictional subjects of this book, evaluated each other’s abilities to hear and reproduce other people’s words completely and convincingly. They experienced attentive listening as a performance, in the sense that the anthropologist Richard Bauman means when he asserts that every community has its own ways for individuals to signal to their audience: This is performance. I’m on! I invite you to watch and listen closely and I will impress you, entertain you, move you. I invite you as well to judge just how skillful, effective, and moving a display I can accomplish.⁵⁴ While Bauman describes the production of the oral word, its reception can be evaluated in the same way. This was apparent to Plutarch, who points out that a hearer … is a participant in the discourse and a fellow-worker with the speaker, and a person listening to a lecture needs to sit upright without any lounging or sprawling … to maintain a pose of active attention.⁵⁵ The performance of listening happens both at the moment of audition and later, when people retrospectively draw attention to it.⁵⁶

Midcentury Russian authors understood their own written language as bearing the traces of moments of successful recycling of spoken words. They were the inheritors of an eighteenth-century project of modernization, when the tsars sponsored the creation of a secular polyfunctional standard (or literary) Russian language that would be usable for artistic, bureaucratic, judicial, and other purposes, in place of the awkward chancellery register and Western languages.⁵⁷ This new language entailed the increasing integration of spoken words into writing. While the mid-eighteenth-century poet Mikhail Lomonosov defined three acceptable writing styles with varied proportions of vernacular elements, at the end of the century, Nikolai Karamzin challenged this doctrine, hoping to create a single style for the written and spoken language, containing carefully selected colloquial expressions that would be appealing but not vulgar. It was then that Russian writers began to distinguish between their own spoken language and what they understood as the speech of the common people (prostorechie).⁵⁸

What this study focuses on is not the changes that people such as Lomonosov and Karamzin introduced, but rather how people talked about what they did—not how language actually evolves, but what linguists call metapragmatics, meaning how people evaluate their own and each others’ communicative practices. As Susan Gal and Judith Irvine explain, in depicting a specific interaction as worth thinking about, language users create a site, a sphere of relevance and action, in which that event can take on meaning.⁵⁹ Scholars use the term language ideology to explain the connections between how people talk about language and what they believe about themselves, other people, and society in general, and linguists explore the ways that observations about a single moment of communication can be scaled up to express feelings of difference and belonging.⁶⁰

The subjects of this book were drawn to the notion that people who share a language feel connected to each other, but they also noticed when speakers’ or writers’ attempts to show that they shared the language of other people instead revealed difference and social distance. The argument that shared language underlies connection was made influentially by the political theorist Benedict Anderson. He asserts that language has, historically, united people—that print-languages laid the bases for national consciousness, because it was only with the circulation of newspapers and books in standardized vernacular languages that people started to understand themselves as belonging to the same national communities as others who read and spoke the same languages.⁶¹ The linguists Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, less certain of the dream of unification, argue that Anderson depicts languages as being more stable than they actually are. Standardized languages do not precede modern national senses of belonging, they note; rather, languages and nations are co-constructed dialectically, meaning that nations endow the dominant language in their territories with a sense of permanence.⁶²

In a spirit that anticipates Anderson, some of the foundational works on the history of literary Russian, written under Stalin by Viktor Vinogradov, make writers’ refinement of that language appear to be the triumphant affirmation of a Russian verbal art that united the nation.⁶³ A couple of generations later, the historical linguist Viktor Zhivov questioned the language ideology that centers on canonical writers’ creation of the literary language; he argued that scholars should write less about that and more about the variety of people who used that language.⁶⁴ In the mid nineteenth century, this increasingly included new readers, often migrants to cities; whereas the writers and readers of the early nineteenth century were mostly gentry, the midcentury witnessed the rise of a middling class of readers of various backgrounds.⁶⁵ In spite of these urban developments, the sense of division between rural spoken registers and the written language was still palpable. Russia’s emancipation proclamation was written in difficult-to-understand high-style language, and when it was read aloud to the serfs, they found it hard to follow.⁶⁶ Lovell opens his study of Russian oratory with this moment, which he calls the last blast of the unmitigated high-to-low discourse of an earlier period.⁶⁷

The subjects of this book, like Makoni and Pennycook, sensed that national identity was built on the shifting ground of a language in flux, and so did the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who celebrated the multiplicity and instability of language. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward.⁶⁸ The linguistic anthropologist Asif Agha explains how fiction can reinforce this sense that different kinds of people speak in different ways, making the multilanguagedness that Bakhtin delighted in a literary phenomenon, a product of the novels that he loved.⁶⁹ Inspired more by Makoni, Pennycock, and Bakhtin than by Anderson, this study focuses on writing that highlights disunification and multilanguagedness and makes a writer’s use of other people’s words seem jarring, as Turgenev’s zelenia was to Belinsky.

Writers made their own and other’s experiences of listening into sites that could take on meaning. Thus Karamzin explained his ideal linguistic style when he urged another writer to use pichuzhechka (little bird) to refer to a bird, because he could tell that this rural vernacular word was suitable for writing; he wrote that when he had "heard it (slykhal) from good villagers, it had awoken in his soul two pleasant ideas: freedom and rural simplicity." He found ptichka (the current Russian diminutive for bird) less appropriate for a poem, because it recalls a cage and thus unfreedom.⁷⁰ Karamzin is claiming here to be a detached observer and a possessor of excellent taste, able to judge others’ words and determine their usefulness, with no difficulty or special effort. If bringing spoken words into the written language is something like capturing songbirds, then Karamzin presents himself as a person who does both well, in a way that evokes