Posrednik (Publisher)
Posrednik ( Russian Посредник "mediator") was a Russian publisher .
It was founded in 1884 by Vladimir Grigoryevich Tschertkow , the editor of Tolstoy's works , which were also published by Posrednik . The aim of the publishing house was to be able to counter the mass distribution of trivial literature, the circulation of which rose rapidly in Russia at the end of the 19th century, mainly as a result of increasing literacy, in the direction of “popular education” in the Tolstoy sense. For this reason, editions of Russian classics as well as Tolstoy's stories that Tolstoy had written especially for the purpose appeared first, for example How the peasant's little devil won bread or Where there is love, there is God .
The publishing concerns were placed in the hands of Ivan Dmitrijewitsch Sytin (1851–1934), who already had experience in the printing and distribution of cheap folk books and colportage booklets. Chertkow was to act as editor.
The first three fonts were distributed free of charge, the following were sold at a very low price (1 to 1 ½ kopecks ). So the editions could reach astronomical heights. In the first four months already 400,000 booklets were distributed and in the first four years of the publishing house a total of 12 million were brought to the people by Sytin's peddlers. Of the 256 titles published between 1884 and 1892, 44 came from the pen of Tolstoy. The program was subsidized by a donation from Chertkov's mother of 20,000 rubles a year.
From the mid-1890s, however, the circulation sank again, as in a rapidly modernizing and industrializing Russia neither farmers nor workers found any taste for the didactic character of the Tolstoic stories with their persistent idealization of the old Russian peasant as a paragon of pious simplicity and down-to-earth authenticity .
Chertkow and Tolstoy largely withdrew from the company in 1893. However, Sytin went on to provide the people with an increasingly broad range of inexpensive literature, including translations of the adventure novels by Jules Verne and HG Wells , as well as textbooks and even encyclopedias.
From 1895 Iwan Iwanowitsch Gorbunow-Possadow (1864-1940) was editor of Posrednik and remained so for the next 25 years, in which the focus of the program shifted from literary and edifying to informative. Both he and his wife, his right-hand man in the publishing house, were Tolstoyans with body and soul, which is why the moral principles and an educational claim remained characteristics of Posrednik compared to other similarly structured series of publications, especially from 1905 onwards.
After the establishment of the Soviet Union , the publishing house was nationalized, and in 1925 it ceased to exist.
swell
- Exchange of letters between Tolstoy and Chertkov. In: Tolstoi: Polnoje sobranije sotschineni (Complete Edition of the Works, Russian), Moscow & Leningrad 1928–1958, Vol. 85 (1883–1886) and 86 (1887-1889)
literature
- Orlando Figes : Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. Berlin-Verl., Berlin 2003, p. 284
- Thais S. Lindstrom: From Chapbooks to Classics. The Story of the Intermediary. In: American Slavic and East European Review. Vol. 16, No. 2 (April 1957), pp. 190-201
- Charles A. Ruud: Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851-1934. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal 1990, ISBN 0-7735-0773-6 .
- Ulrich Schmid : Lev Tolstoy. Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-58793-1 , p. 86