What is the graphosphere? How does it make itself visible, whether (historically) as script on a medieval bell or (now, to us) as an abstract category? Is it already present, but not yet recognized in our conceptual order? Most important, what good is it as an analytic tool? Reading Simon Franklin’s work on the graphosphere written over the last decade, I explore two issues. First, I examine the concept’s value for those of us who work in contemporary culture, including media studies, protest activism, and postmodernist literature, examples chosen because they lie centuries removed from medievalist concerns. Second, I outline four ways in which the graphosphere has robust analytic potential to situate our investigations in a new configuration, allowing connections and resonances across a larger scale of time and space. For the scholar of contemporary culture, the essays included here may serve as examples of medieval research that—through this concept—are in much closer dialogue with our work than we had perhaps earlier understood.

A Muscovite bureaucratic graphosphere, where the administrative word became visible, took shape by the early sixteenth century. The existence of such a sphere cannot be taken for granted. Prior to 1200, Rusʹ princes relied little if at all on written texts as expressions of power or politics. Later rulers and their officials gradually incorporated documents into their administrative toolkit, eventually settling on the standardized form of the scroll. This article tracks the development and limits of Muscovite administrative texts through the visual evidence of miniatures in the late sixteenth-century Litsevoi letopisnyi svod (LLS, or Illustrated Chronicle Compendium), tracking the proliferation of the scroll as a means of communication and a symbol of command. Further, still drawing on the LLS, the article demonstrates that encounters with Siberian signing and oath-taking practices perplexed those schooled in the culture of the scroll and troubled Muscovite assertions of imperial power.

Simon Ushakov wrote his signature on virtually all his extant icons, in stark contrast to most Eastern Orthodox icon painters who remained anonymous. The chronological development of his signature in content and placement parallels the trajectory of his career as Muscovite icon painter and bureaucrat over the second half of the seventeenth century. The representation of written words in visible space, a graphosphere in Simon Franklin’s apt terminology, provided Ushakov the context in which to record his intentional movement and elaboration of name and iconic descriptors ever more deeply into the sacred space of the Orthodox image, thereby elevating his artistry, his bureaucratic authority, and most tellingly, the profession of icon painter itself.

The article surveys the changes Peter the Great (ruled 1682–1725) decreed in the form of bureaucratic documents, particularly the petition. It analyzes the manuscript of an eighteenth-century murder case to demonstrate these changes in practice.

Although Peter I’s reform of the Russian alphabet has long been studied by historians, the fact that it was a reform of print but not of handwriting has rarely been addressed. Handwriting in the eighteenth century remained messy and hard to read, only changing into a modern bureaucratic script around the turn of the nineteenth century. This article examines two factors that led to this delayed moment of change: the technology of engraved propisi and their incorporation into primary education. It also thinks about why this change that is apparent to every historian who works with archival documents from both centuries has been so little recognized in scholarship.

This essay juxtaposes Simon Franklin’s concept of the graphosphere with James Scott’s concept of legibility in the context of a specific time and place: late eighteenth-century Riga. The coming of the French Revolution made Russian authorities anxious to control the space of textual circulation, and Riga was both a major site for book imports and one of the most literate cities in the empire. Under Riga’s head censor Fedor Tumanskii, censorial ambitions far outstripped the physical capacity of the oversight apparatus, and the result was a crisis of censorship that ultimately resulted in Emperor Paul’s total ban on foreign books entering the Russian Empire.

This contribution offers an overview of electoral practice in the Russian Empire up to 1917. The voting procedure that became standard from the 1770s onwards did not involve written ballots. But there was still an extensive graphosphere of electoral documentation, petitions, and protests. By attending to these written traces, we can observe how a pre-modern tradition of voting as community obligation evolved in the late imperial era to incorporate elements of citizenship and representation.

Focusing on the official certification of horses in imperial and Soviet Russia, this article questions the dependability of the graphosphere as a “technology of authority.” While print may have served Russian institutions as “a guarantor of documentary authenticity,” the genuineness of the horses themselves proved more elusive. It was harder to produce reliable identity documents for animals than for humans, and even when accurate pedigrees could be tendered in an industry notorious for unscrupulousness, they might still be open to challenge on ideological grounds.

This article introduces “nullary writing”—or writing whose function is to operate rather than to represent—as a salute to Simon Franklin’s graphospheric analysis of bureaucratic power. With a wave of the proverbial (digital) hand, it argues that contemporary digital systems fulfill operational capacities long embedded in Slavic manuscript traditions. Through handy examples from early tsarist stamps to early computer programming innovations, it demonstrates how handwritten inscriptions and digital writing alike enable modern surveillance continuous with, rather than distinct from, earlier bureaucratic graphospheres.

The succinct definition of a graphosphere as a “space of visible words” risks appearing somewhat static. All visible words are by definition constituents of a graphosphere, but not all analyses of such words automatically reflect a “graphospheric approach” to their study. A graphospheric approach implies an interest not just in words that happen to be parts of spaces (as all visible words must be), but also in the dynamics of relations between the two, both synchronically and diachronically. In the context of the present discussion of bureaucratic graphospheres, this essay explores the relational dynamics in the micro-context of words and spaces on a page: specifically, with reference to the emergence, in Russian imperial administration, of that quintessentially bureaucratic instrument, the printed blank form.

This article examines the Soviet reception of the Latin American Boom through the example of one of its leading figures, Carlos Fuentes, and his landmark novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), the first Boom novel to appear in Russian translation. Published amid heightened Soviet efforts to engage culturally with Latin America, Margarita Bylinkina’s translation (1965/67) reshaped the novel’s modernist experimentation and symbolic treatment of national identity to align with the prevailing conventions of Soviet literature. Drawing on archival sources and close textual analysis, I trace Fuentes’s introduction to Soviet readers through strategically selected excerpts and reportage, then analyze how translators and editors navigated the ideological tensions between the novel’s modernist aesthetics and the political imperatives of Thaw-era socialist internationalism. Fuentes’s case reveals the central contradiction of the Soviet world literature project: the state’s aspiration to global literary leadership often clashed with its need to domesticate revolutionary aesthetics.

Are the underlying sources of Russia’s descent into full-blown authoritarian rule since 2012 to be found in Vladimir Putin’s professional socialization in the KGB and staffing of the state with former military and security officers—the siloviki—as has been widely claimed? The answer depends on whether siloviki actually possess a distinctly illiberal worldview that sets them apart from other members of the ruling elite. In this article, we update and expand upon previous research by using data from the 2020 Survey of Russian Elites to compare the attitudes of siloviki and civilians toward a wide range of abstract principles related to representative government, civil liberties, and criminal justice, as well as toward concrete manifestations of those principles (such as the desired level of government control of the Internet and the justifiability of various forms of protest). Our findings lend uniform support to interpretations that lay the blame for the Putin regime’s ever-higher levels of repression on the authoritarian mindset of its silovik members.

This article contributes to the study of fascist “New Europe” propaganda by initiating a poetological inquiry into literary journalism—more specifically into literary reportage—a widely used yet underexplored genre for disseminating fascist internationalism. It shows how temporally focused analysis can illuminate representational dynamics between the center and east European peripheries by explicating the modernist speed-aesthetics in both German- and domestically focused reporting by Juraj Gajdoš Breza, a reporter of the Slovak State (a satellite of Nazi Germany, 1939–45). The first section introduces the genre of literary reportage in the context of fascist(-affine) propaganda; the second analyzes Breza’s use of montage to convey the modern speed-experience. The third situates his work within alternative modernism by contrasting it with anti-modernism; also typical of east European self-conceptualizations within the fascist international order. The final section explicates Breza’s speed- and adrenaline-mediating devices, which render Slovak-German “friendship” appealing as a path to modernization, in contrast to communist and anti-modernist literary reporting

This article re-examines the origins of Russophobia as a component of nationalist discourse in the late Soviet Union and beyond, pointing to the crucial roles played by Cold War institutions in the west and the Russian diaspora. The article focuses on Radio Liberty (RL), the US-funded broadcaster to the Soviet Union, as an institution where Russian national questions were confronted and then conveyed to the Soviet public. In the late Soviet years, Russian nationalists creating samizdat were dependent on Radio Liberty and the other “voices” but became disillusioned with US détente-era policies and the perception that the US approached Russian nationalism with caution. Employment of mostly Jewish “third wave” émigrés at RL in the 1970s also shaped nationalist discourse, as different cohorts of exiles at the RL Russian Service engaged in furious polemics about Russian national history, antisemitism and World War II. The paper concludes by arguing that the entrenched discourse of Russophobia impeded efforts to formulate post-Soviet Russian nationhood during perestroika.

This paper examines patterns of involvement of the rural population of east central Europe in political movements of the first decades of the twentieth century. It analyzes experiences of Polish peasants and agricultural workers who, in the interwar period or during the Second World War, joined the communist movement. The study focuses on the “personal communisms”: the individual experiences of becoming and being a communist, and considers the choice of communism not only as a choice of a certain ideology, but also a strategy employed by the unprivileged in their search for agency. Three groups of revolutionaries originating from the countryside of central Poland are analyzed in the article: members of the pro-communist peasant parties in the 1920s, radicalized people’s activists of the 1930s, and agrarian workers who joined communist organizations directly. The last section contains reflections of challenges the rural communists faced after 1944–45 when they began taking part in exercising political power.