1770s, with a 1783 decree opening up private publication. Still, censorship was
potential: owners of private presses were required to report their publications to
police boards, but the norms for censorship were not systematically defined and
prosecution waxed and waned. In the 1780s, for example, the Church pressured the
state to control private presses: the publications of Novikov, suspicious for his
Masonic activities, were inspected in 1785, but he escaped with a warning.
Meanwhile, reading publics expanded from high-brow patrons of literary journals
to low-brow urban and rural readers in provincial towns.
The penny press thrived and testified to broadening literacy; it took two forms.
Popular illustrated books from twenty to 100 pages adapted European romances
and adventure stories, often bawdy; moderately priced, they appealed to urban
readers. Broadsheets (lubki) were cheap and accessible; they could easily be posted
and read aloud in social groups, or hung in kitchens or family parlors. The genre, as
woodcuts and copper engravings, wasfirst imported through Ukrainian lands to
Moscow in the late seventeenth century and proliferated in the eighteenth; broad-
sheets became a mass phenomenon in the following century. In Russia religious
themes were always predominant in broadsheets, but they also included moralistic
commentary and folk tales depicting everyone from peasants to nobility. Like more
high-brow theater, broadsheets engaged in mild social critique and commentary.
Corrupt judges and cuckolded husbands, drunkenness and immorality were
skewered, the virtues of moderation, hard work, and discipline celebrated.
What the Russian penny press lacked throughout its history in Russia in
comparison to its European equivalent, however, were overtly political imagery
and narratives. In Europe, governments published broadsheets with engravings and
narratives of executions to generate popular support; alternatively, broadsheets and
chapbooks extolled social bandits or criticized politics. In Russia, neither official
nor privately produced literature crossed the bounds into the political. Some
broadsheets might be read allegorically in that way: a much reproduced image of
the mice burying the cat has been called a critique of Peter I, while another of
Alexander the Great defeating Persian Shah Porus is taken as praise for Peter I’s
military victories. But the absence of explicit political images—punishment, revolt,
and rebellion—might be explained by censorship, direct and implicit. Religious
broadsheets were supposed to be approved by church censors in the Synod, secular
by the presses themselves, and although enforcement waxed and waned, everyone
seemed to understand the limits.
AEUROPEANIZEDELITEAND“ADVICE”CULTURE
Russia’s elite, overwhelmingly noble but includingraznochintsyand high clerics,
embraced the European culture to which they were exposed by state-sponsored art
and literature and by their own educational paths. They left a visual record of their
transformation, at least the roughly 18 percent of the nobility in Catherine II’s time
that possessed enough serfs to live a comfortable, if not lavish life. Secular portrait-
ure came to Russia in the 1680s from the Hetmanate in Polish style. Russian nobles
Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life 439