Reading in the Times of Catherine II

Introduction The last third of the eighteenth century, which corresponds roughly to the reign of Catherine II (1762-1796), saw significant developments in Russia’s reading practices and changes to the Russian readership itself. This phenomenon arose within a larger context: the development of elite secondary education in Russia in the 1750s and 1760s, which gave birth to a whole generation of readers, quantitatively much larger than Russia had ever known, and hungry for new forms of engagemen...