Mathematical theorems are supposed to be provable in all cases. In the humanities, neat formulations tend to be, at best, convenient fictions, useful approximations. They legitimately invite nitpicking. The definition of a graphosphere as a “space of the visible word” is potentially misleading in at least three ways. In each case the crudity of a concise definition of the object can be nuanced with reference to a “graphospheric approach” to its study.Footnote ¹

In the first place, the notion of a space of words might be taken to imply that the space is merely the location, a kind of receptacle, so that the study of a graphosphere is really about the words themselves, the objects, the texts. To be sure, any study of visible words is potentially relevant to the study of the graphosphere in which they are located; but only potentially. If the focus is exclusively on the visible words themselves, then there are adequate thematic and disciplinary labels for such study—such as the history of material texts—without resorting to such neologisms or near-neologisms as the “graphosphere.”

An analogy: many years ago, when my institution was planning a new library, discussions with the architect became quite tense. My learned colleagues wanted to quiz him on what the building would look like. The architect really did not want to engage with this. For him, to focus on the building in itself was a vulgar oversimplification. The building would not and could not exist in itself. The architect wanted to talk about creating spaces. Likewise, visible words do not only exist in spaces, they create spaces, spatial relationships, relationships with spaces; that is, relationships with sites of their own absence. A graphosphere needs visible words, but not every study of visible words is thereby graphospheric in its approach—rather as ecology needs biology, but not every biologist is an ecologist. A graphospheric approach implies something relational, systemic, an interest in how the visible word relates to the ecology (technological, visual, semantic) of the space that it is a constituent part of.

A second possible flaw in defining a graphosphere as a “space of the visible word” is that it risks implying a simplistic and over-generalized notion of a space. Spaces are rarely singular. They, too, exist in combinations and hierarchies. A space can both contain and be contained by other spaces. Such configurations are also relevant to a graphospheric approach to the spaces as well as the words. Another analogy, again from Cambridge: to wander for part of an afternoon through the historic courts and gardens of a city-center college is to experience spaces that are deliberately kept wordless—with the possible exception of some discreet and low-key (one hopes) internal signage. Minimal graphosphere here, one supposes; unless, that is, the lines around the space are re-drawn so that the court is not the space but one zone within the larger city-center graphosphere. In the adjacent zone are the compact, busy, and densely commercial streets. Cross the zonal border in either direction (often through a tiny gate), and the wordlessness of the court becomes not just a fact in itself, but a graphospherically significant fact that is semantically marked through spatial contrast.

The third feasible defect in the definition is that it can appear static. It refers to space but ignores the crucial dimension of time. Of course, graphospheres can usefully be studied synchronically, as if frozen in a moment. However, as implied by the ecological analogy, they are dynamic systems. Internally and externally, the spaces are in flux. A graphospheric approach is sensitive to changing configurations. In more prosaic terms, a graphospheric approach is historical.

The analogy of zones in the city center, like the cautionary tale of the architect and his building, relates to quite large spaces: public spaces, macro-spaces. The principles apply equally, however, to micro-spaces: for example, to the study of words on a page. A page is a small object, but the study of words and spaces on pages is not a small theme. Its scope ranges from, for example, writing practices that do or do not use spaces to differentiate words and/or letters, to the use of graphic markers of ellipsis, to concrete poetry. Blank space has been highlighted as a semantically loaded device in the production of literature in the English Renaissance.Footnote ² In his novel Flesh, the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, David Szalai, leaves additional blank pages, apparently to suggest the unspeakable: shock and grief.Footnote ³ Spaces on a page may reflect aesthetic preferences or production and marketing values (wide margins are sometimes termed “generous”), but they can also be semantically loaded in their relationship to the words themselves.

In the context of the present discussion of bureaucratic graphospheres, I focus, like some of the other contributors, on a case study of such micro-spaces; on the primary production of words on a page. In the documentary practices of bureaucracy, a microcosm and emblem of the relationship of word to space is that quintessential marker of officialdom, the printed blank form. The printed form is also particularly rich because it is graphospherically dynamic by design: the relationship between word and space is intended to change through an act of intervention into the relationship that transforms the function and status of the document itself. A graphospheric approach to the printed blank thus addresses all three of my concerns above regarding how to define a graphosphere.

Throughout the eighteenth century the overwhelming majority of Russian official documents were handwritten, as they had always been. Printed forms in civil type were introduced in the mid-1710s, and for the first few decades they were used for a fairly stable and limited set of purposes.Footnote ⁴ Print, in an official document, was a kind of security device. Since printing in Russia before the 1780s was monopolized by a small number of licensed institutions, it was a technological guarantor of authenticity, by contrast with the almost uncontrollable diffusion of access to handwriting. Certificates of military and civilian rank (patenty na chin) were normally printed on parchment, as prestigious documents that were likely to be retained by those to whom they were issued. Mostly, however, printed forms were single-use documents on paper. Until at least the mid-1750s they were generally produced in order to enable or monitor various kinds of mobility. This could involve the movement of people, regulated through the requirement for foreign or internal passports, or for permits to return home after military muster, or for simple podorozhnye: documents authorizing access to the network of post horses and carriages. Other printed forms prescribed and monitored the movement of documents themselves, certifying, for example, how many copies of which edict had been dispatched to which central or provincial administrative office.Footnote ⁵

The default relationship of word to space on a printed form is straightforward. The printed section is the fixed template, the blank sections are to be filled in by hand. The unfilled form is inert potential, the handwriting activates it. The spaces exist to be written on. They are graphospherically marked by their visual and functional relationship to the printed template, even before they are obliterated by writing. In a sense, the purpose of the blank form is to undermine itself, to cease to be blank (like the blank canvas on an easel in the artist’s studio). At the same time, however, the handwriting in the filled spaces—because it is technologically contrasted with the printed template—still contains a kind of reminder of the space beneath.

This default relationship is not the only possible one of word to space on the printed form, whether at the point of production or over time and in use. Here we can look briefly at three types of variants in the relevant period: (i) forms that reflect a process of genre-formation when the templates were not yet stabilized; (ii) the paradoxical phenomenon of printed blanks, the spaces of which were not meant to be filled but nevertheless sometimes were; and (iii) the power of the unfilled form. Documents that seem to reflect processes of genre-formation—of getting used to the relationship of word to space—can seem odd, illogical. Their oddity can be illustrated in two contrasting examples: one certificate of rank, and one extensive text of a decree.

The template verbal formulae of certificates of rank were conspicuously stable.Footnote ⁶ Normal practice was to print them, allowing spaces to be filled with individual details (the name of the recipient, his previous rank, the merits of his service, and his new rank). An alternative and more expensive option was to print a fully individualized document, with no blank spaces except perhaps to allow for adding a date and a signature. Anomalies occur. On January 30, 1722, Peter I (1682–1725) signed a patent appointing his trusted administrator, Aleksei Makarov, to be his tainyi kabinet-sekretarʹ (Privy Cabinet Secretary). The document lists Makarov’s many qualities and achievements, all in print. Because the personal biographical details are printed, this ought logically to fall into the category of an individually printed document rather than a blank. The oddity is that gaps are left for filling in Makarov’s name.Footnote ⁷ This makes no practical sense. Why not print the name, since all the individually identifying biographical details are printed as well? It is as if, at this early stage in the history of Russian secular printed forms, some wordless space gave the document a certain formal dignity even when functionally redundant.

Very different, as an example of early uncertainty in the use of the genre, is a lengthy decree of April 1727 detailing rules and procedures for the appointment of provincial voevody. In the monumental nineteenth-century compendium of Russian legislative acts, this is printed as a continuous text.Footnote ⁸ In the original, however, halfway down the third page, the document suddenly switches to the second person singular (this is what you will do on your appointment), and leaves spaces for the names of the person thus addressed and of the town to which he is appointed (see Fig. 1).Footnote ⁹

Figure 1.

Genre-formation: a blank form integrated into the text of a decree; April 1727.

Figure 1 Long description

The document appears to be a formal decree from April 1727, written in Russian Cyrillic. It discusses procedures for appointing provincial officials, mentioning specific roles and instructions. The text is organized in a single dense paragraph block, with no visible headings or section breaks. Key phrases include references to ′appointment′ and ′instructions.′ The document is printed in a formal style, typical of government notices from the era.

Figure 2.

Printed blank templates for handwritten forms, but with handwritten indications in some of the spaces; January 1739.

The nineteenth-century editors apparently judged the second-person section to be incongruous, and they omitted it. This rather odd hybrid document, where elements of a personalized blank form are inserted into a long impersonal decree, is also perhaps a product of the early period of somewhat inconsistent genre-formation.

A second type of printed form that differs from the default is provided by printed templates for handwritten documents. The central authorities were continually vexed both by lax procedure and by inconsistent scribal habits. Legislation (which from March 1714 was always printed) often included specimen documents, in an attempt to ensure standard practice among scribes. This was done in one of two ways: either by concocting imaginary completed documents, or by specifying only the fixed formulae without personal details, in which case the template was visually indistinguishable from a printed blank.

An example of the first method is the major statute on the use of promissory notes (Ustav vekselʹnyi), issued in May 1729,Footnote ¹⁰ in Russian and German, which included annotated variants of fifteen different varieties of vekselʹ. The specimens are presented as if they were copies of real documents, complete with individual names and sums of money. An example of the other method is an edict issued by the empress Anna Ioannovna (1730–40) in January 1739 addressing the problem of sloppy reporting by local government offices. The edict laid down procedures for reporting back to the Senate and included an appendix with five template forms to be used for the purpose. The templates are described as formy, and all are printed in the manner of blanks (see Fig. 2).Footnote ¹¹

On one level, this is an illusion. The printed forms were never intended to be issued separately as such. They just look like blanks. However, the relations of word and space are variable. In some places the spaces for the individual details are filled by printed indications of the type of information required, set in square brackets: ot [takogo] chisla (“from [such] a date”), pod numerom [takim] (“under [such] a number”), and the like. In other places, the spaces are left blank. But blank spaces seem to create their own force-fields. Even in this dry context they invite intervention. In the copy illustrated here, in three places where a wordless space has been left before kantseliarii (“chancellary”), a scribe (perhaps the “Iakov” whose name appears in the margin) adds by hand either istakoita or vtakoita (that is, iz takoi-to, or v takoi-to) (“from such-and-such” or “in such-and-such” a chancellary). Thus, the printed templates, though not intended as functional blank forms, become such through a scribe’s response to the spaces. Even here the wordlessness of the space is not merely a neutral fact; it is semantically marked as a space of potential words, a space that invites words.

This leads into the third type of relationship between word and space. I remarked above that the default is that the unfilled form is inert, and that it becomes active, acquires instrumental force, only when the spaces are filled, so when it ceases to be a blank (except to the extent that it retains a kind of echo of its former blankness in the contrast between the printed template and the handwritten particulars). However, the power dynamics can also operate in reverse. The filled blank is of value to the person to whom it is issued; the unfilled blank is of potential value to anybody. The value to the intended recipient is in the filled spaces; the potential value to unintended recipients is in the unfilled spaces. This posed a security issue. There are stories of unfilled blanks being corruptly removed from printing houses for illicit sale. Imperial edicts strictly forbade an equally blatant abuse: the distribution of semi-blank podorozhnye; signed, but with unfilled spaces for the personal details. If a practice had to be legislated against, one can reasonably assume that it did in fact occur; and indeed, there are extant specimens of just such signed but unfilled podorozhnye.Footnote ¹²

These micro-examples are taken from the period when blank forms were produced for a rather narrow range of governmental purposes. From the later eighteenth century, they became far more diverse and more numerous. Nevertheless, these specimens from the early period of genre-formation can highlight wider issues in a graphospheric approach. They reveal aspects of the fluid relationship between visible words and empty (or temporarily or previously empty) spaces, and some of the ways in which areas of wordlessness can themselves be semantically marked—and have real-world potency—in the spatial hierarchy of a graphosphere. They also underscore the need to pry open the cracks in neat definitions, especially when proposed by oneself.