“Literature is an Industrial World”. Book Review: Vdovin A. V., Zubkov K. Yu. (comp. and resp. eds.). Institutes of Literature in the Russian Empire. Moscow, Higher School of Economics Press, 2023, 496 p.

Abstract

The review is devoted to the collective monograph “Institutes of Literature in the Russian Empire” (2023). The book, written by researchers from the National Research University Higher School of Economics, IRLI RAS and Lomonosov Moscow State University, presents various methods and approaches for analysing the literary field of the 18th and 19th centuries as an institution. By synthesising the concepts of Russian formalists, semioticians and the classics of Russian literary sociology with the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and Jurgen Habermas, the authors demonstrate the differentiation of the social field of literature.

In spite of the unity of method and approach, as described in the preface by the authors and scientific editors Kirill Zubkov and Alexey Vdovin, the language of the researchers' descriptions and the chosen perspective remain individual, which gives a clear idea of the diversity of the objects and subjects of research. At the same time, the plurality of points of view makes the book readable as a “project for the future”, allowing us to speak of the creation of a fundamental work on the classification of the main institutions of literature in nineteenth-century Russia. The review also points out methodological problems that arise in translating Bourdieu’s concept into the language of analysing social and literary institutions.