Making the Symbolist Book / Fashioning the Symbolist Reader: the Case of Aleksandr Dobroliubov’s Collected Verses

The study of book history in the modernist era offers a direct glimpse into the conflicts at the heart of the new art. By affording attention to turn-of-the-century material culture and the recontextualization of the market forces that impacted modernism’s institutionalization and scripted its interaction with the public, this article affirms the centrality of the making the physical book itself as a component of understanding Russian Symbolism and its readership. An examination of the first book of Russian poetry issued by the Symbolist publishing house Skorpion reveals the intricacies of Russian modernism’s attempts to fashion its readers through the production of its tangible products. Aleksandr Dobroliubov’s Collected Verses, as shaped by Valerii Briusov, represents many of the key shifts in both aesthetic and material terms that were undertaken by the Symbolists