“Inscrutable are Your Destinies, O Russian Censorship!”Unarrested Development of Literary Journalism in the Empire
Year: 2022

This chapter details how Russian literary journalism negotiated censorship laws despite their problematic nature. It begins with Ivan Turgenev’s Записки охотника (A Sportsman’s Sketches, 1852), a collection of sketches and short stories dealing with the infamous “peasant question,” a topic subjected to censorship in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia. To have his book published, Turgenev exploited the fact that the system was overly personalized: he curried favor with a censor he kne