This chapter traces the rise of secular, non-governmental publishing in Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and argues that a succession of risk-taking entrepreneurs eventually made it possible for authors to become remunerated professionals and to become the entertainers, tribunes, and conscience of the nation. Despite the obstacles of government interference, undercapitalisation, and mass illiteracy, publishers underwent a series of transformations, from printer-artisans to merchant-booksellers to, by the 1840s, intellectuals, becoming a force for shaping imaginative literature, primarily through the medium of the thick journal. Only by the end of this period did they become major print capitalists, but even then, the publisher often remained a creaky mechanism for producing literature, with poorly fitting parts and thin financial lubrication. The influence of these publishers and their enterprises, however, is demonstrated by the fact that the new Soviet regime made closing them down one of its first tasks.

The Russian ‘thick journal’, from its inception in the early 1800s to the present day, is at once a cultural institution, an index of intellectual life, and an important publishing mechanism. During the nineteenth century, the temporal focus of this chapter, Russia’s low literacy rate, poorly developed distribution networks, and virtual absence of inexpensive editions of high-quality literature gave the monthly thick journal a central place in Russian culture. From the 1840s until the 1880s, the thick journals published every subsequently canonical Russian novel except for Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, alongside works of criticism, history, philosophy, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, creating an expanding galaxy of discourses, many of which would migrate into the thematics and styles of the fictions they surrounded. That writers often began serialisation before completely drafting their novels made these fictions more open to such migration.