“Reader, Where Are You?” An Introduction

1. “Reader, where are you?”, wondered, in the mid-1880s, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the Russian writers that paid the most attention to the readership of his time. His question arose from the difficulty he experienced in grasping the key features of the contemporary reader, especially in the last decades of the 19th century. In that period, the Russian reading audience was characterised by great cultural fragmentation, with few new books, a defective distribution network, a small numb..