Recording Russia

Winner of the AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Recording Russia examines scenes of listening to "the people" across a variety of texts by Russian writers and European travelers to Russia. Gabriella Safran challenges readings of these works that essentialize Russia as a singular place where communication between the classes is consistently fraught, arguing instead that, as in the West, the sense of separation or connection between intellectuals and those they interviewed or observed is as much about technology and performance as politics and emotions.

Nineteenth-century writers belonged to a distinctive media generation using new communication technologies—not bells, but mechanically produced paper, cataloguing systems, telegraphy, and stenography. Russian writers and European observers of Russia in this era described themselves and their characters as trying hard to listen to and record the laboring and emerging middle classes. They depicted scenes of listening as contests where one listener bests another; at times the contest is between two sides of the same person. They sometimes described Russia as an ideal testing ground for listening because of its extreme cold and silence. As the mid-century generation witnessed the social changes of the 1860s and 1870s, their listening scenes revealed increasing skepticism about the idea that anyone could accurately identify or record the unadulterated "voice of the people." Bringing together intellectual history and literary analysis and drawing on ideas from linguistic anthropology and sound and media studies, Recording Russia looks at how writers, folklorists, and linguists such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Dahl, as well as foreign visitors, thought about the possibilities and meanings of listening to and repeating other people's words.

Gabriella Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies, teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. Her books include The Worlds of S. An-sky, Wandering Soul and The Whole World in a Book.

Safran's excellent research and analyses on topics ranging from the significance of ringing bells, the impact of affordable paper, and the act of listening as performance art result in a fascinating look at how media, technology, and human imagination worked together to move the educated elites and the common people of 19th-century Russia toward greater understanding of each other. The book helps to reframe and clarify understanding of social change in the period

Recording Russia is original in several respects.

In Recording Russia, Gabriella Safran tells a story about tools that made written records of oral speech, and about the listeners who used them.

Stephen Lovell, King's College London, author of Summerfolk:

Compelling and original, Recording Russia provides a fresh and insightful perspective on one of the classic questions of Russian cultural history—the relationship of the educated elite to 'the people.' Drawing on a wide range of examples, Safran shows that nineteenth-century Russian writers were engaged in a partly competitive exercise to define 'authentic' listening and thereby to bolster their claims to speak on behalf of the narod. There is nothing quite like this book.

Bruce Grant, New York University, author of The Captive and the Gift:

This is a wonderfully uncommon book that substantially reframes how we view the Russian nineteenth century. Gabriella Safran offers us a window onto a generation of writers who saw in the changing world around them the chance to use the written word to rethink and advance communication across an entire land.