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How did the reading material enjoyed by Nicholas I differ from that of one of his stokers? This article focuses on the novels enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers at the court of Nicholas I, from the tsar himself and the members of the imperial family to their servants, shedding new light on certain mechanisms of court culture. Based on archival sources such as the loan registers and the correspondence of the tsar's and the palace staff's libraries, this paper shows how, despite social and cultural differences, these two communities of readers actually often ended up reading the same authors and novels. What distinguished them was less their consumption of different texts than the way in which they read and interpreted the same books and, more generally, the different purpose that they attributed to reading. Based on their position at court and what they experienced in the Winter Palace—a political cabinet in which state ideology was discussed, a place in which courtiers felt suffocated by hierarchies and etiquette, or a place where servants could find otherwise unobtainable books—reading novels could constitute either a form of social control, escapism, or a school of good taste and proper behavior.

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning "love story" that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists' research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The third volume of Reading Russia considers more recent (and rapid) changes to reading, and focuses on two profoundly transformative moments: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the digital revolution of the 1990s. This volume investigates how the political transformations of the early twentieth century and the technological ones from the turn of the twenty-first impacted the tastes, habits, and reading practices of the Russian public. It closely observes how Russian readers adapted to and/or resisted their eras' paradigm-shifting crises in communication and interpretation.