The St. Petersburg Censorship Committee and the Early Bureaucratization of Russian Censorship

FAIN: FT-249220-16

Joseph D. Peschio
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (Milwaukee, WI 53211-3153)

Archival research towards a book-length study on the 19th-century St. Petersburg Censorship Committee.

The state censorship apparatus was the single most significant literary institution in early-nineteenth-century Russia, yet we know very little about how it functioned and how it impacted the development of literary form. The reason for this is simple: Soviet-era scholars were not able to access the necessary archival materials, and publishing on the history of censorship was discouraged. My project seeks to remedy this lacuna through careful and systematic analysis of the archive of the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee, which was charged with regulating most of the nation's literary output in the key period between the Censorship Statutes of 1804 and 1826. The NEH Summer Stipend would support my return to the Petersburg archives and the next stages in my history of literary censorship in Russia. The "deliverables" of this project include journal articles and publications of archival materials in free-access digital venues, and, eventually, a monograph on the subject.