Introduction
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia appeared to foreign travellers as a country marked by profound contradictions. On the one hand, the process of modernization initiated in the previous century by Catherine II was steadily consolidating. The intensification of translation practices and publishing activity enabled the cultural elite to gain access to the works of Russian and Western writers and philosophers, to absorb their ideas, and to participate in the heated debates conducted in literary salons and on the pages of journals. On the other hand, extensive pockets of economic and cultural disadvantage persisted, with almost the entire population of rural areas being illiterate. With few exceptions, the only reading practices in these contexts were confined to the religious sphere, particularly the mechanical memorization and recitation of psalms in Church Slavonic.Footnote 1
This does not mean, however, that in the countryside no other forms of knowledge circulated beyond the religious one. From as early as the seventeenth century, popular prints – the so-called lubki (singular lubok) – had become widespread. These were hand-coloured drawings on paper, mounted on wooden or metal supports, and they came to represent a secular version of the ancient religious tradition of icons. Sold for a few kopecks at fairs and markets, lubki enjoyed wide circulation in the nineteenth century, becoming one of the principal means of mass communication among the lowest strata of Russian society. With the introduction of chromolithography in Russia in the 1870s, lubki began to be reproduced serially, losing their traditional character and becoming subject to the techniques of book production. In any case, despite censorship controls aimed at preventing the circulation of illegal content, the lubok continued to represent one of the most widespread forms of popular cultural production until the end of the century. With its vivid colours and simple images, often accompanied by brief captions, the lubok reflected traditional customs, practices, and beliefs. Alongside religious subjects, themes drawn from folklore, epic traditions, history, and everyday life contributed to shaping the body of knowledge of thousands of people who had only limited access to written forms of communication. The coexistence of religious and secular subjects in the lubok gradually blurred the boundary between the sacred and the profane, rendering viewers’ conceptualization of reality more complex and nuanced. The lower social strata thus not only developed a new representation of the world but also learned to associate images with brief captions, thereby cultivating a reading practice that combined text and image.
The present article investigates this practice against the backdrop of the evolution of readership and publishing in late nineteenth-century Russia. In particular, it focuses on illustrated weeklies which, beginning in the 1870s, came to represent something like a modern version of the lubok. In several studies, Jeffrey Brooks has highlighted the relationship between illustrated magazines and the visual culture of the lubok, an aspect of his broader analysis of the Russian cultural ecosystem of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was characterized by the circulation of forms, symbols, and images across the boundaries between high and low culture.Footnote 2 The article builds on Brooks’s observation of the continuity between the visual culture of the lubok and illustrated weeklies by examining a specific case in which this continuity took the form of a deliberate editorial strategy. Conceived as an intermediary form between popular visual culture and more demanding printed media, illustrated magazines played a preparatory role for readers with limited literacy, fostering the development of reading skills while also strengthening their cultural and civic awareness.
The social composition of this readership was highly heterogeneous. Similar diversity characterized the emerging working class, which by the end of the nineteenth century included both recently urbanized first-generation workers who retained strong ties with their home villages and skilled workers with relatively high levels of education.Footnote 3 Although contemporary evidence clearly indicates that workers formed part of the readership of illustrated magazines, it is difficult to establish precisely their numerical weight within this broader audience or to reconstruct their reading practices on the basis of quantitative evidence alone. For this reason, the present article adopts a different methodological approach. As Roger Chartier has suggested, the study of reading practices proves more fruitful when analysis is oriented towards the material objects of reading – namely, the texts and their editorial forms – and their concrete uses, rather than seeking to classify readers based on social affiliation.Footnote 4 Such a perspective allows us to grasp more precisely how content is actually used and interpreted by readers, which may sometimes diverge from the intentions of the author or publisher.
Against this background, my analysis will focus on one of the cheapest illustrated magazines in late nineteenth-century Russia, The Motherland (Rodina, 1879–1917; see Figure 1), a periodical that has never before been the subject of an in-depth scholarly study. Drawing on a wide range of sources – including issues of the magazine itself, as well as memoirs, first-hand statistical data, and late nineteenth-century surveys and observational studies of Russian readership – this article examines the publishing history of The Motherland, with specific attention to its first two decades, situating it within the broader context of the rise of mass illustrated periodicals, a new phenomenon emblematic of the profound social and cultural transformations that were reshaping post-reform imperial Russia. From this perspective, illustrated periodicals should be understood not only as vehicles of intellectual formation but also as sites where reading practices were negotiated across social groups, mediating between print and oral cultures and facilitating access to texts for semi-literate segments of the population.
Cover of Rodina, 10 (1891).
Figure 1 Long description
The cover of The Motherland magazine, issue number 10, dated 3 March 1891, is shown. The title “Rodina” is prominently displayed at the top in stylized lettering. Below the title, the magazine is described as a weekly illustrated journal. The issue number and date are mentioned, along with the price of 4 roubles and 59 kopecks. Editorial details are provided, including the editor′s name and address. The lower section features an illustration of a large bird flying over a Russian cityscape with ornate buildings and domes. The text on the right, dated 2 March 1891, includes a poetic passage about flying to a new market, describing the beauty of the city and the journey. The text is in Russian and has been translated into English for clarity.
As conventional systems of signs bearing ideological meaning, images presuppose an interpretive act and should therefore be regarded as texts in their own right. As Donald McKenzie has emphasized, the material aspect is equally important for images, whether they be maps, photographs, or illustrations.Footnote 5 My analysis will therefore concentrate on the principal material component of The Motherland: its iconographic apparatus, which the editorial team used to mobilize readers’ familiarity with lubok visual culture. The publication history of The Motherland constitutes an emblematic case for understanding the dynamics through which the nineteenth-century Russian publishing industry sought to reach ever-broader segments of the reading public, modulating forms and content in accordance with evolving horizons of expectation and reading practices. By adapting to the tastes and habits of new communities of readers, The Motherland underwent a series of editorial transformations that, over the course of the nineteenth century, contributed to the making of a new reading public.
The Era of the Great Reforms: Schools, Libraries, and Publishing
A decisive impetus for the spread of literacy in Russia coincided with the reign of Alexander II. His accession in 1855 marked a turning point in tsarist policy, following the exposure of imperial weaknesses during the Crimean War (1853–1856). The reform agenda of the early 1860s – most notably the abolition of serfdom in 1861, alongside judicial, military, and administrative reforms – initiated a series of structural transformations that facilitated the expansion of elementary education among previously excluded social groups. While initially driven by the state and the Orthodox Church, these efforts increasingly involved private associations, educators, and activists pursuing broader cultural and ideological objectives. Yet these developments unfolded against the backdrop of persistently low literacy rates: according to the 1897 census, only 21 per cent (26,569,585) of a population of 125,640,021 was literate, with 80 per cent of that subset residing in European Russia. Of the literate population, the largest cohort consisted of young people aged 10 to 29 (58 per cent), of whom 68.5 per cent were male and 31.5 per cent female.Footnote 6 Nevertheless, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, it is important to emphasize that literacy did not necessarily determine access to print culture.Footnote 7 Even those unable to read participated in the circulation of texts through collective practices of reading aloud, whereby literate individuals shared newspapers, books, and other printed materials with family members, neighbours, and fellow workers. These practices significantly broadened the reach of the written word and, within a relatively short time, led to a substantial expansion of the reading public, a process that would reach its full extent only in the Soviet era. Reading thus gradually ceased to be the “private hunting reserve”Footnote 8 of a narrow elite and became a key instrument of social adaptation within an evolving institutional landscape. This shift was underpinned by the interaction between expanding demand and a diversifying print market, mediated through schools, libraries, and new forms of print circulation.
The 1864 educational reform fostered the gradual development of a nationwide, though uneven, system of elementary schooling. Local administrations run by zemstva (district assemblies, singular zemstvo) played a central role in extending access to basic education, despite persistent structural constraints, including limited resources, uneven geographical coverage, and irregular attendance. Complementary initiatives – such as Sunday schools, factory schools, and other forms of education – further broadened access, particularly among adult and working-class populations, reflecting the growing involvement of non-state actors in literacy promotion.
Parallel to the expansion of the school system, an extensive network of libraries also began to develop. From the late 1860s onward, libraries attached to zemstvo schools were partially opened to the public, while the 1890s saw the rapid growth of public libraries independent of the school system.Footnote 9 Despite their uneven distribution and limited holdings, these institutions provided new points of access to printed materials for a socially heterogeneous readership. Difficulties nevertheless persisted, in part owing to the limited use of libraries, particularly in provincial areas. For example, in the town of Ivanovo – a small industrial centre of about 55,000 inhabitants located some 300 kilometres from Moscow – at the end of the century the public library, despite holding more than 10,000 volumes, counted only 205 subscribers, none of whom were industrial workers.Footnote 10 From the late 1880s onward, free public reading rooms also began to spread. These were libraries that permitted on-site reading but not home lending, and they proliferated through the initiatives of zemstva, municipal councils, cultural and educational associations, and individual social activists. The composition of their readership was fairly diverse: according to the Russian bibliographer Nikolay Rubakin, in addition to workers, peasants, and artisans, these reading rooms attracted large numbers of children and adolescents, who sought in them a way to compensate for the reading restrictions imposed by the rigid school system.Footnote 11 However, with the advent of the twentieth century, free reading rooms experienced a decline in attendance, due both to the limited range of books they could offer and to the emergence of new reading spaces. In particular, the reading activity of many workers underwent a qualitative shift, increasingly concentrating in the libraries of factories and workers’ associations, where both legal and illegal texts could be accessed. Library records show that religious works, the classics of Russian literature, and historical and adventure novels ranked first among the texts most frequently requested by workers.Footnote 12
These developments were reinforced by significant changes in the publishing sector. Advances in printing technology, the influx of foreign capital, and the expansion of commercial networks led to a sharp increase in output and circulation. Within the span of little more than a decade, book production rose dramatically, from 18.5 million copies in 1887 to 56.3 million in 1901.Footnote 13 In the 1880s, progressive publishing houses such as that of Ivan Sytin began to mass-produce inexpensive editions for popular audiences, giving rise to what became known as “lubok literature”. These publications consisted largely of works by minor authors, printed on low-quality paper and sold at fairs and rural markets, as well as at urban kiosks frequented by peasants who had migrated to the cities. Lubok literature catered to the tastes of a semi-literate readership and encompassed genres such as chivalric romances, swashbuckling adventures, historical novels, stories derived from folklore, and adaptations of Russian classics. The periodical press likewise expanded rapidly, benefiting from the partial relaxation of censorship and contributing to the formation of a more diversified and accessible print culture.Footnote 14 Alongside the “thick journals”, which had animated Russian literary life and ideological debate since the 1840s, there was a marked increase in the publication of newspapers, as well as illustrated weekly magazines aimed at a newly emerging readership.
Even this brief overview reveals a variegated and still internally contradictory picture of post-reform Russia: the country’s modernization proceeded unevenly, marked by advances, slowdowns, and abrupt reversals caused both by bureaucratic inertia and the persistence of a still rigid system of control, while the enduring ties that many peasants who had relocated to urban centres maintained with their village communities often slowed the pace of change.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, the process was by then irreversibly under way. By the end of the nineteenth century, the first clear signs of a Russian “public sphere” had begun to emerge.Footnote 16
Illustrated Magazines: Circulation, Commercial Strategies, and Reading Practices
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, technological advances, the growing number of well-equipped printing houses, and the consequent reduction in production costs fostered the rise of illustrated weeklies. Imported from western Europe, the illustrated periodical experienced unprecedented expansion. This development was also driven by the entrepreneurial initiative of several European publishers who came to post-reform Russia in search of opportunity, seeking to adapt the successful formulas of west European magazines such as the Illustrated London News (1842–2003), L’Illustration (1843–1944), and the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung (1843–1944) to the tastes and expectations of the local audience. The first Russian periodical of this type, Universal Illustration (Vsemirnaya illiustratsiya), began publication in 1869. Within a few years, a number of analogous magazines appeared in rapid succession – The Picturesque Review (Zhivopisnoe obozrenie), The Illustrated Week (Illyustrirovannaya nedelya), The Horizon (Krugozor), The Grainfield (Niva), The Bee (Pchela), The Motherland, The Northern Star (Severnaya zvezda), and others. Published predominantly in St Petersburg, by the late 1870s these magazines had reached a combined circulation of approximately 100,000 subscribers; by the end of the century, this figure had increased fivefold.Footnote 17
Illustrated weeklies played a dual role in late nineteenth-century Russian cultural life. On the one hand, by appealing to established moral and religious values, they sought to promote cultural stability and to mitigate the social tensions that marked Russian society towards the end of the century. These periodicals were predominantly conservative in orientation and tended to frame national and linguistic minorities within an imperial discourse that assigned a dominant role to Russian culture and language.Footnote 18 On the other hand, they provided readers with new points of reference in the fields of science, history, and culture, introducing simplified forms of knowledge and visual materials inspired by contemporary scientific and cultural developments as well as by Russian literature and art.Footnote 19 Broadly speaking, the typical subscriber to weekly illustrated magazines was someone for whom the “thick” literary journals were too demanding, yet whose interests extended beyond those of the traditional consumers of lubok literature.Footnote 20 Lower- and mid-level officials, rural parish priests, merchants, junior military personnel, primary school teachers, first-generation workers, and, more generally, individuals with limited education were thus granted access to a previously unattainable cultural world, through which they could acquire a particular vision of history, science, art, and literature. The textual component – serialized novels and popular fiction, biographies of notable figures, travel accounts, and articles on scientific, technical, artistic, and ethnographic subjects – was complemented by a rich array of illustrations, including landscapes, portraits, reproductions of works of art, and scenes derived from literary works.
As Abram Reytblat has suggested, a closer examination of the prices of these magazines provides insight into their intended readership. Universal Illustration (twelve roubles for an annual subscription) and The Picturesque Review (eight roubles) were aimed at readers with greater financial means. The Grainfield, costing around six roubles per year (5.50 in St Petersburg, where it was published, and 7.10 in the rest of the empire), occupied an intermediate position and was read primarily by the petty bourgeoisie and the provincial intelligentsia. The Motherland, one of the least expensive weeklies (at four roubles annually), was intended for readers with more limited means and a lower level of formal education.Footnote 21 If we consider that in Russia in the 1880s and 1890s the average annual income of a factory worker or rural schoolteacher amounted to just under 150 roubles, that of a provincial low-level civil servant (tenth to fourteenth classes in the “Table of Ranks”)Footnote 22 to around 300–500 roubles, and that of a provincial hospital physician to as much as 1,300 roubles, we can get some sense of what impact the cost of a subscription to an illustrated periodical might have had on the household budgets of different social classes.Footnote 23 The inclusion of all the aforementioned magazines in the catalogue of books approved for free public reading rooms made their contents accessible to a broad range of readers who could not afford a subscription.Footnote 24
The reasons for such wide circulation must also be sought in the promotional techniques that many of these magazines adopted from the early 1870s onward, notably the so-called premiums. To encourage subscriptions, publishers enclosed additional materials free of charge – most often oleographs – which were advertised so heavily that they nearly eclipsed the magazines’ actual contents. By the early 1880s, oleographs had gradually been replaced by a wide variety of supplements tailored to diverse tastes – from travel and fashion to economics and art – which subscribers could collect in special bindings offered by the editorial offices at the end of the year.Footnote 25 The practice of including supplementary materials in the subscription price spread rapidly, leading to a sharp increase in print runs but also to an overcrowding of the publishing market. Satirical journals of the 1880s frequently criticized the commercial aims of this new strategy, noting that editorial offices promoted the premiums rather than the contents of the magazines themselves.Footnote 26 In reality, given the high circulation figures and low cost of these periodicals, the practice of supplements played a decisive role in the dissemination of literature and print culture in Russia. This became especially evident from the 1890s onward, when the expiration of copyright on the works of certain authors facilitated their proliferation on the market and some illustrated magazines began to include complete editions as supplements. While this new format had negative repercussions for small publishers, who lacked the means to compete with mass publishing, it simultaneously became an important channel for the diffusion of classic works among less educated social groups.Footnote 27
What reading practices were adopted by subscribers to these magazines? No single, unequivocal answer can be given to this question. Reading practices varied according to social background, level of education, and the setting in which reading took place.
Unlike newspapers, which readers consulted primarily for current affairs and political news and which could be difficult for less educated workers,Footnote 28 illustrated weeklies and their supplements were read primarily as leisure literature.Footnote 29 For non-subscribers, they were available in free reading rooms and various commercial establishments – such as restaurants and inns – where individual copies circulated from hand to hand among different patrons.Footnote 30 The experience of reading in libraries or other public venues differed significantly from that of subscribers, who usually encountered these publications at home or in other private settings.
In the countryside and in factories, practices of collective reading remained widespread.Footnote 31 In communities where literacy was unevenly distributed, reading typically functioned as a communal rather than an individual practice: one person would read aloud while others listened and collectively commented on the subjects discussed.Footnote 32 Within some households, the father assumed the role of reader. Workers’ memoirs recount how families would gather on winter evenings after the working day had ended while the father read aloud expressively, “lingering over every full stop and comma”.Footnote 33 More often, the role of reading guide was taken on by the younger generation, whose level of education frequently surpassed that of their elders. Maxim Gorky recalled that, in the early 1880s, he would spend his evenings reading aloud to his hosts the second-rate novels included as supplements to illustrated magazines, while at night, once alone, he devoted himself to works of greater literary merit.Footnote 34
Finally, one particularly noteworthy custom was that of displaying the prints and maps enclosed with the magazines on domestic walls. Contemporary sources locate this practice both in rural households and among industrial workers. Illustrated magazines circulated not only in villages but also in factories, where special subscriptions provided copies that were then lent to workers. As the Russian ethnographer Alexander Prugavin observed in 1895: “Workers are particularly keen to subscribe to illustrated magazines that offer oleographs as premiums, with which they decorate the walls of their modest dwellings.”Footnote 35 In lower-class households – where sacred images such as icons had long predominated – secular images gradually began to appear, stimulating both the imagination and a desire to escape into different worlds. Many readers, accustomed to acquiring knowledge primarily through images, limited themselves to collecting and displaying the illustrations without engaging with the written contents of the magazines themselves.Footnote 36
The Illustrated Magazine The Motherland (1879–1917)
Published in St Petersburg from 1879 onward, The Motherland was initially conceived by its founder, V.A. Zakharov, as a monthly supplement to the Herald of Public Aid: Weekly Journal of the Russian Red Cross Society (Vestnik narodnoy pomoshchi: Ezhenedel’nyy zhurnal rossiyskogo obshchestva krasnogo kresta). The latter served as the official organ of the St Petersburg association of the same name, operating under the patronage of Empress Alexandra and devoted to the medical care and assistance of wounded and disabled servicemen.
Key elements of The Motherland’s editorial project were already evident in its designation as a “people’s journal” (narodnyy zhurnal) and in its title, which, according to contemporary observers, was one of the principal factors guiding readers’ choice of reading matter.Footnote 37 The title itself positioned the publication within the educational programmes promoted by the tsarist government and the Orthodox Church, both of which sought to foster conservative models of civic coexistence and confessional belonging. Through this explicit reference, the magazine aimed to subsume the diverse components of society under a shared conception of the Russian Empire, defined by loyalty to the tsar and reverence for tradition.
This programme was explicitly articulated in the very first issue, where an editorial note underscored the need for institutions capable of guiding both mature and younger generations within the new order inaugurated by the reforms of Alexander II. Founded in response to this perceived need, The Motherland’s mission gave central place to the “little brethren” (men’shaya brat’ya) – a term commonly used in educated circles to designate the common people: “The main task of such institutions is to open before our little brethren galleries of examples of moral conduct – social, civic, and familial – along which our little brethren have not yet walked.”Footnote 38 This concern with the lower social strata was reflected not only in the magazine’s price (two roubles per year, including postage, or twenty-five kopecks per issue), which was significantly lower than that of comparable periodicals, but also in its contents. Within two years of its founding, the magazine had come to focus almost exclusively on agricultural economics and other practical subjects.Footnote 39
Despite the subtitle Monthly People’s Journal with Illustrations (Ezhemesyachnyy narodnyy zhurnal s kartinami), the early volumes of The Motherland – which by 1880 had passed into the hands of the publisher A. Transhel’ – contained only a limited number of lithographs. These virtually disappeared following the arrival of a new publisher, I.N. Ponomarev, who in August 1883 reset the numbering and relaunched the periodical with the subtitle Weekly Social and Literary Newspaper (Ezhenedel’naya gazeta obshchestvennaya i literaturnaya). As an editorial note in the first issue of that year makes clear, the change in format and publication frequency responded both to ongoing social transformations – rendering a more agile and rapid information system increasingly necessary – and to commercial considerations, notably the need to accustom subscribers to regular reading.Footnote 40 In its new configuration, inspired by the model of British weeklies, The Motherland proposed to exclusively publish original and serious articles on diverse aspects of contemporary life, aspiring to become an indispensable household periodical for readers across different social strata. Archival data for the years 1883–1885, however, indicate that the magazine’s readership consisted predominantly of minor provincial officials, rural clergy, low-ranking military personnel, primary school teachers, and some literate peasants – that is, social groups that were only partially educated and therefore little accustomed to lengthy and complex texts.Footnote 41 For this reason, the decision to reduce illustrations to a minimum and to raise the subscription price (from two roubles annually to four roubles with postage outside St Petersburg) proved, in all likelihood, a fatal miscalculation. The publisher went bankrupt and in 1886 was compelled to sell.
The new owner, Alvin Kaspari, embodied a quintessential “self-made man” of the post-reform era.Footnote 42 Of German origin, Kaspari had arrived in Russia in the early 1860s. He began his career in small printing houses before becoming a layout editor for the literary journal The Contemporary (Sovremennik), published by Nikolay Nekrasov.Footnote 43 By the time he took over The Motherland, he had mastered every aspect of the trade. While retaining the conservative orientation of his predecessor (the first issue under his direction explicitly affirmed that The Motherland placed “the interests of Russia above all else”),Footnote 44 Kaspari immediately initiated a far-reaching transformation that, within five years, increased subscriptions from 200 to 40,000.Footnote 45 Thanks to his remarkable commercial acumen, he proved able to discern the tastes and practices of his intended readership. His understanding of the audience was notably precise. He recognized the existence of different types of readers of Russian periodicals, each corresponding to a different level of education. He therefore resolved to address a particular segment, namely that of the partially educated reader, whom he sought to “prepare” for more advanced stages:
There are different Russian publics. There is a Russian public for The Grainfield – that is, [those educated to the level of] the first, second, and even, let us say, the third class of a secondary school; there is a public of the fourth and subsequent classes up to the seventh – and it reads The Notes of the Fatherland, Russian Wealth, The Herald of Europe. A Russian public that might be said to be in need of a university does not yet exist; the Russian public has not yet matured to the university level. Of course, even if I could publish for such [university-level readers], I would not do so, for I am a commercial man. One cannot publish a journal for a handful of people. But I realized that in Russia there is also no preparatory journal from which the Russian public might proceed to The Grainfield, to Russian Wealth, and to other journals of the secondary level. And so I created The Motherland.Footnote 46
Kaspari thus conceived The Motherland as an intermediary publication, intended to accompany readers from the visual and simplified forms of popular print culture towards more sustained engagement with books and periodicals. His ambition to address a “preparatory” readership was reflected in the social composition of the magazine’s audience. Besides a small number of literate peasants, The Motherland attracted workers, provincial clergymen, merchants, artisans, and low-ranking officials, groups that likewise had only limited experience of sustained reading.Footnote 47 Judging from the domestic themes of many illustrations, women also appear to have constituted a significant proportion of the readership. While they could identify with the familiar roles of mothers and wives, the magazine also introduced them to new models of female education and employment through illustrations depicting schools and women teachers. At the same time, the supplements introduced in 1887 catered to readers’ interest in fashion and personal appearance.
The “preparatory” function of The Motherland emerged gradually, after an initial phase in which Kaspari experimented with a range of typographical and commercial strategies. In the first issue of 1886, an editorial notice informed subscribers that the magazine would include supplements. These, however, would no longer consist of drawings or prints – a practice by then deemed overused – but of an unpublished novel by an anonymous author entitled To Each His Own (Vsyakomu svoe), focused on the lives of landowners and on provincial and peasant customs.Footnote 48 Despite the commercial and popular character of the appended novel, The Motherland’s decision – which from the following year gave rise to the supplementary series “Collected Novels”Footnote 49 – signalled an intention to raise the intellectual level of its readership by providing material to be read rather than simply viewed. Even so, the initiative proved only moderately profitable in terms of subscriptions, since just two years later The Motherland underwent another transformation, substantially revising and expanding its format and content.
The reasons are again elucidated by Kaspari, who attentively “listened” to the expectations of the specific audience he sought to address. Particularly significant was his determination not to alienate subscribers with overly complex texts, while nevertheless offering materials from which they might derive civic and moral instruction:
The most unlettered segment of the Russian public flocked to me, and I began to give them lubok prints, fully aware […] that this “preparatory” reader does not understand artistically executed wood engravings or collotypes. At times I selected poor and scarcely literate tales in the most old-fashioned style, imbued with petty-bourgeois tastes and conventional morality, so as not to frighten away an undeveloped public, which takes offence when it sees or reads something insufficiently comprehensible to it – something inaccessible, new, and overly intellectual.Footnote 50
The most consequential innovation was the introduction of a substantial visual programme. In 1887, this development prompted a change in The Motherland’s subtitle to Weekly Illustrated Newspaper: Political, Social, and Literary (Rodina: Ezhenedel’naya illyustrirovannaya gazeta, politicheskaya, obshchestvennaya i literaturnaya). In both style and subject matter, these largely anonymous images reflected the familiar tastes of a broad readership. They included genre scenes, portraits of members of the imperial family, battle scenes, literary subjects, themes drawn from folk songs, and landscapes.Footnote 51 At the same time, The Motherland frequently featured scenes of bourgeois domestic life that were clearly far removed from the everyday experience of most of its subscribers. Yet it was precisely this distance that constituted their principal appeal, for such images evoked, in semi-literate readers, an idealized world perceived as a symbolic horizon to which they might aspire.Footnote 52 Many images portrayed scenes of domestic happiness: a mother putting her child to bed or families enjoying quiet moments together.Footnote 53 Other images depicted leisure activities associated with upper-middle-class or aristocratic life – a girl washing her doll, a boy playing with his dog, an elegantly dressed girl gazing at a sparrow, or hunting parties.Footnote 54 Nor were scenes of suffering absent. These invited readers to identify emotionally with the protagonists: a despairing mother standing before an empty cradle (see Figure 2), or a woman waiting anxiously at the post office in the hope of receiving a letter, presumably from a husband or son serving at the front.Footnote 55
“The Now-Empty Cradle”, Rodina, 3 (1887).
At the end of each issue there appeared a section entitled “Description of the Illustrations”, which provided brief commentaries on selected images included in the fascicle. These were not mere captions. Rather, the accompanying texts guided readers towards empathetic identification with the depicted scene, enabling them to grasp its background and even the thoughts and emotions of the figures portrayed. For example, the previously mentioned illustration entitled “The Now-Empty Cradle” (see note 55), depicting a young mother in anguish before an empty cradle, served as the starting point for a brief narrative with a distinctly melodramatic tone:
The poor mother has just returned from the cemetery and, casting her gaze upon the now-empty cradle in which her little baby had rested until so recently, leaned against the stove and burst into bitter tears. How many memories were bound up with that cradle, how many joys and how much sorrow – only she, of course, could know; yet none of those memories could bring back her beloved child, who had been her entire life and consolation. And each time she looked at the place where the cradle of her delight once stood, she would weep bitter tears, for he was her only little firstborn. Poor mother!Footnote 56
Images and texts thus functioned as complementary components of a single pedagogical strategy: the illustrations captured readers’ attention, while the accompanying descriptive texts shaped their interpretation and reinforced the magazine’s educational aims.
Beginning in 1888, the publication underwent a further significant change. The newspaper – now published without illustrations under the title The Motherland: Weekly Newspaper: Political, Social, and Literary – was accompanied by a magazine entitled The Motherland: Weekly Illustrated Magazine for Family Reading (Rodina: Ezhenedel’nyy illiustrirovannyy zhurnal dlya semeynogo chteniya). Thanks to this dual format, a single publication was able to satisfy two distinct readerships each Sunday. On the one hand, there were readers who aspired to improve and broaden their knowledge of current affairs through articles written in accessible language, yet offering an overview of political, social, and economic issues of general interest. On the other hand, there were readers primarily interested in visual content. The subtitle of the weekly magazine is itself revealing of the reading practices it sought to encourage – “family reading”, a mode that readily lent itself to collective consumption within the domestic sphere, particularly on Sundays, the customary day of rest and leisure. In this way, The Motherland was able to reach not only literate readers but also those with little or no reading ability, who could engage with its visual content while listening to family members or other literate individuals read aloud the literary sections, articles, and captions accompanying the illustrations.
This orientation towards a broad and socially diverse readership is further demonstrated by the wide array of supplements included in the subscription price beginning as early as 1887. A subscription for that year entitled readers to receive monthly, at no additional cost, the series “Collected Novels” as well as the supplements “For Children: Tales and Stories”, “The World Traveller”, “Agriculture and Household Management”, and “Fashions and Handicrafts”.Footnote 57 From 1890, these were joined by fashion patterns accompanying the supplement “Fashions and Handicrafts”; moreover, the supplement “Sheet Music for Singing and Instruments” was added.Footnote 58 As their titles suggest, these supplements sought to appeal to the tastes of men and women of different ages, including children. They also provided a practical solution to the chronic scarcity of books in the provinces and, especially, to the problem of their cost – an expense that a typical Motherland subscriber could scarcely afford. Around 1900 the price of a book (five or more roubles)Footnote 59 stood in stark contrast to the average monthly wage of an unskilled provincial worker, which hovered around fifteen roubles, while skilled workers might earn up to 100 roubles per month.Footnote 60 Thanks to the supplements, The Motherland’s readership, at the modest annual cost of four roubles (five with postage outside St Petersburg), secured access to a quantity of textual and visual material that had previously been difficult to obtain. For non-subscribers, a viable alternative was provided by the free public reading rooms, where The Motherland and other illustrated periodicals were made accessible.
Kaspari’s editorial strategy soon bore fruit, producing a further rise in circulation to 120,000 copies and a corresponding expansion of the audience.Footnote 61 It is not, however, possible to quantify precisely the social composition of The Motherland’s subscribers, nor to determine exactly what proportion was constituted by the working class. Only cautious hypotheses are possible, balancing the rapid growth of the industrial workforce in late nineteenth-century Russia – which, in the large-scale industrial sector of European Russia, expanded from 706,000 in 1865 to 1,432,000 in 1890Footnote 62 – with the precarious labour conditions that left workers little leisure time for reading. Nevertheless, memoirs indicate that at the end of the nineteenth century there were workers among The Motherland’s readers who found in its supplements one of the few available opportunities to engage in reading: “The worker found it difficult to extricate himself from the condition of ignorance in which he lived. As a rule, libraries did not contain good-quality books. At times, we read works of belles lettres, the supplements to The Grainfield and The Motherland and other publications of this kind.”Footnote 63 In family environments still permeated by popular superstition, where reading was often regarded as a largely useless activity, the supplements of The Motherland formed the nucleus of the first private home libraries. As can be read in the memoirs of another worker from the Narvskaya Zastava district:
My father’s entire library occupied half of a small shelf and consisted of issues of The Motherland from 1904, together with their supplements […]. In one of the supplements to The Motherland, “The Universe and Humanity”, I read an article on the solar system that greatly impressed me. From that moment, I first learned about the planets, comets, and the Milky Way.Footnote 64
The Motherland was also one of the most widely requested periodicals in the free reading rooms of major industrial centres such as the aforementioned Ivanovo. Its supplements, above all, ensured the circulation of popular genres such as adventure, crime, historical, and melodramatic fiction.Footnote 65
As regards the magazine’s contents, these were divided into three categories: fiction, poetry, and illustrations. In line with Kaspari’s editorial strategy, the literary materials were drawn largely from third-rate authors – historical writers (A.V. Arsenyev, P.N. Polevoy, A.A. Sokolov), crime writers (K.V. Nazaryeva, A.I. Krasnitsky, I.N. Ponomarev), and authors of melodramatic romantic fiction (E.O. Dubrovina, E.I. Zarina, F.V. Dombrovsky) – and included serialized novels, novellas, short stories, poems, and reportage. Despite this, like other illustrated periodicals, The Motherland also published works by aspiring writers who would only later achieve fame (the indexes of several annual volumes prominently feature the name of a very young Ivan Bunin).
The iconographic section had by this point become the most extensive and significant component of each issue. No longer limited to anonymous drawings, it included lithographs and illustrations of classics of Russian literature (for example, M.P. Klodt’s illustrations of M.Yu. Lermontov’s poem “The Boyar Orsha”),Footnote 66 alongside reproductions of well-known paintings – particularly by the group of artists known as “the Itinerants” (Peredvizhniki), whose members included V.E. Makovsky, V.D. Polenov, P.P. Chistyakov, M.P. Botkin, and P.G. Perov.
Among the iconographic subjects, genre scenes continued to predominate, now extending beyond the bourgeois milieu to include representations of peasant life. In particular, reproductions of works by the Itinerants offered readers environments and landscapes familiar to them, albeit filtered through an idealizing and romanticizing lens. Illustrations devoted to family relationships were especially prominent, often captured at moments of heightened dramatic tension: for example, a mother keeping vigil beside her sick daughter before two icons, or a seduced and abandoned woman with her newborn child.Footnote 67
In most cases, these images did not serve to illustrate texts. On the contrary, the relationship between word and image was effectively inverted: brief accompanying texts were designed to guide the reader’s interpretation of the images. Over time, such texts increasingly assumed the explicit function of “telling a story” on the basis of the visual material. More precisely, the textual component intervened above all to ensure that the images fulfilled their educational and moralizing purpose. On the one hand, institutions were celebrated and values such as reverence for religion, civic propriety, and loyalty to the motherland were promoted, thereby constructing an image of Russia that would reinforce a sense of belonging and national identity. Numerous images depicting symbols of tsarist authority – the imperial crown, the double-headed eagle, the cathedrals of the Kremlin – were accompanied by verses in an overtly patriotic tone. A comparable function was performed by illustrations and accompanying captions intended to extol the efficiency of state institutions, celebrate the multiethnic character of the empire’s population, or, conversely, stigmatize national minorities such as the Tartars (see Figure 3).Footnote 68
V. Polyakov, “The Raid”, Rodina, 26 (1891).
On the other hand, readers were cautioned against deceptive illusions or practices deemed illicit. Three illustrations from different years may serve as examples. The first, “Village Beggars” (see Figure 4), depicted two beggars praying in a small parish cemetery. The accompanying description urged readers not to feel excessive compassion for the impoverished pilgrims, suggesting instead that the practice of almsgiving enabled such individuals to derive greater economic benefit than honest peasants.Footnote 69 The second illustration, entitled “A Ruined Talent” (see Figure 5), portrayed a poorly clad woman with a melancholy expression, holding a violin in her hand. The associated descriptive text reconstructed her story: lured by the dream of a theatrical career, she had ultimately been left alone and reduced to playing in courtyards to earn a few kopecks.Footnote 70 The third illustration, entitled “A Free Moment” (see Figure 6), depicted three adolescents from a lower social background at play, imitating adult behaviour by smoking and gesturing while surrounded by work tools. The accompanying description emphasized that these “poor children”, lacking adult supervision, engaged in dangerous forms of play.Footnote 71 Incidentally, all these images could fully perform their function as “admonitions” only when placed in close conjunction with their descriptive texts, which were at times explicitly addressed to specific categories of readers – for example, women or children. In this respect, the practice of familial and collective reading, encouraged by the magazine’s subtitle, proved instrumental in ensuring the effective transmission of socially and morally salient messages.
“Village Beggars”, Rodina, 1 (1890).
“A Ruined Talent”, Rodina, 43 (1890).
“A Free Moment”, Rodina, 3 (1899).
Over time, The Motherland’s ambitions became increasingly pronounced. Beginning with the 1893 volume, the magazine started to include photogravures after paintings and drawings by established artists, as well as photographs, often devoted to sites of education. Students of Sunday schools or women’s vocational schools were presented to readers as visual models of a possible trajectory: through their gaze directed towards the camera, these subjects seemed to look back at The Motherland’s readers and invite them to join their ranks.Footnote 72
Even more significant was the year 1894, when the number of free supplements was further expanded. As promised in an editorial notice published in the second issue, by the end of the year these would reach ninety-six, including the complete works of the celebrated writer and fabulist Ivan Krylov. The same notice also informed subscribers that the magazine would feature illustrations of the works of Nikolay Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky.Footnote 73 In both cases, The Motherland adopted the practice of accompanying the illustrations with brief explanatory texts, continuing this approach for several years, until it had covered almost the entire narrative output of the two authors.
For The Motherland’s readers, the opportunity to acquire a complete edition of the works of a classic author such as Krylov – or even to approach Dostoevsky, if only through illustrations – represented a significant step forward culturally. At the same time, the commercial significance of the initiative should not be underestimated: at precisely the same time Kaspari launched the illustrated cycle based on Dostoevsky’s works, one of his principal competitors, Adolf Marx, was preparing to append the complete edition of the writer’s works to the illustrated journal The Grainfield.Footnote 74 Following Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, his works had experienced a marked increase in circulation thanks to the editorial acumen of his wife, Anna Dostoevskaya, and so reached well beyond the educated readership for which they had originally been intended.Footnote 75 Lacking the rights to publish Dostoevsky’s works, Kaspari circumvented the obstacle by focusing entirely on illustrations of them. The illustrations were entrusted to two artists, Alexey Skirgello and Vladimir Polyakov.Footnote 76
These differing editorial approaches to Dostoevsky’s oeuvre raise important questions regarding the distinct modes of appropriation by their respective readerships – questions that merit more detailed exploration elsewhere. For example, what representations of the author and his work might have emerged for the readers of the two magazines? To what extent did The Motherland’s decision to privilege the image at the expense of the original text shape the reading experience and the understanding of the literary work? Despite the scarcity of direct sources documenting readers’ responses, it is possible to advance some speculations based on the reading practices that The Motherland itself encouraged through its editorial design.
First, the decision to publish only illustrations rather than the narrative text allowed the publisher and the artist to focus the reader’s attention on specific scenes – typically those in which contrasts and conflicts between characters were most vividly apparent. Examples include the death scene of Nelly’s mother from Humiliated and Insulted (1861), depicting Nelly’s mother lying on her deathbed with Nelly weeping beside her, both their faces contorted by grief and despair; and, from The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the enraged Mitya Karamazov standing at his father’s window, pestle in hand.Footnote 77
Second, the aim of these illustrations was to reach as broad an audience as possible by eliciting readily recognizable emotional responses and imprinting them upon the reader’s memory, even at the expense of fidelity to the original text. A tendency particularly evident in Polyakov’s illustrations is his representation of Dostoevsky’s characters in a style reminiscent of the genres and visual conventions typical of lubok literature, especially crime and romance.Footnote 78 For instance, among the illustrations of Crime and Punishment is one portraying Dunya fiercely threatening Svidrigaylov with a pistol, while another – more restrained in tone – captures the intense “silent dialogue” between Sonya and Raskolnikov on the riverbank in Siberia.Footnote 79 Such illustrations introduced The Motherland’s readers to key scenes from Dostoevsky’s works, while potentially leaving them free to exercise their imagination by envisioning alternative scenarios and narrative developments, perhaps even encouraging them to engage with the original texts at a later stage.Footnote 80
Conclusions
The case of The Motherland highlights the central role of illustrations in shaping the reading practices of new categories of readers, including the emerging working class, in late nineteenth-century Russia. While fostering forms of visual reading and collective appropriation, the magazine adapted forms and contents to the competencies of its audience, thereby functioning as a preparatory medium. Through the combination of written texts and images, it gradually guided semi-literate readers towards more developed forms of literary awareness. At the same time, The Motherland retained a pronounced didactic function, aimed at strengthening its readers’ civic and national consciousness while promoting patterns of behaviour consistent with the prevailing social order. The texts accompanying illustrations depicting members of the lower social classes and groups regarded as particularly vulnerable – peasants and workers, women, and children – continued, even in the early twentieth century, to serve a clear pedagogical purpose, often taking the form of admonitions intended to discourage behaviour deemed deviant or socially inappropriate. In this respect, The Motherland emerges as a considerably more conservative periodical than The Grainfield, which during the same years, not least thanks to the contributions of authors such as Leo Tolstoy, helped promote a more inclusive representation of Russia, grounded in the dignity of ordinary people and a conception of national belonging that extended beyond the authority of the state.Footnote 81 This contrast can also be explained by the different readerships targeted by the two publications. The Motherland was addressed to a broader audience, prompting its editors to adopt an editorial approach that channelled readers’ imaginative engagement and critical reflection in favour of a predominantly didactic and moralizing message.
In the early twentieth century, Kaspari’s editorial project still sought to place this readership at its centre. After 1905, however, the social and political landscape changed rapidly. As readers became increasingly interested in current affairs and reading gradually ceased to function primarily as an instrument of moral education, becoming instead a means of political participation and civic engagement, The Motherland’s format and editorial profile appeared ever more out of step with the times. Those social groups for whom the magazine had served as an intermediary stage increasingly turned to more demanding forms of literary and political reading.Footnote 82 As their expectations changed, the didactic and paternalistic model embodied by The Motherland gradually lost its relevance. Various strategies were adopted to preserve the magazine’s appeal, especially after Kaspari’s death in 1913. New supplements were introduced in an effort to cater to the tastes of an increasingly heterogeneous readership, while the iconographic apparatus also underwent significant changes: photographs appeared more frequently, and genre scenes and bourgeois interiors gradually gave way to historical subjects and scenes of war.Footnote 83 Nevertheless, these adjustments did not fundamentally alter the magazine’s editorial identity. On the eve of the October Revolution, The Motherland was no longer capable of responding to the demands of a new historical era – one in which it would soon find no place. Paradoxically, this very decline may be regarded as evidence of the success of Kaspari’s original editorial project. Conceived as a preparatory medium, The Motherland contributed to the formation of a new generation of readers who, by the beginning of the twentieth century, had largely outgrown the cultural model it had originally been designed to provide.
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