ИСТИНА

T.Venediktova Becoming a “Bourgeois Reader” in the Post-Soviet Culture “Bourgeois reader” is easily recognized as a cliché implying cultural incompetence, vulgarity and lack of depth - deep seated prejudice dating back to the proud defensiveness 19th century boheme. Looking back to the same period, however, we see clearly that the establishment of bourgeois public sphere in Europe was closely inter-related with the formation of literature as a modern social institution. In the framework of this institution the new mode of (literary) imagination (shared by writers and readers alike) offered the playful, dream-like, hedonistic space of possibility - allowing for virtual interactions, multiple re-definitions of self, probing of individual motivations and desires and thus engaging social energies. Recognition of the individual as a subject of creative and interested reflective self-relation has been the source of ferment and powerful dynamism of bourgeois culture where literature would be taken less as a reservoir of communal norms and sacred meanings, - and rather as a realm of new experience and exchange, an open laboratory, testing ground to explore new structures of feeling, to confirm or extend, destroy and recreate one’s social identity. It is in this way that literary reading would be both pleasurable and usable - serving, according to J. Habermas, as an “active social force… transforming an individual reader into citizen”. Literature has been looked at for some time as a field of readers’ active experimentation and empowerment. Not only authors but, even more importantly, middle-class audiences, contributed to the invention of new ways of literary reading (that older cultural elite tended to be suspicious of) and helped generate the currently operative idea of literariness. Rather than self-referentiality, proud intransitivity of the artful Word, secluded safely in a quasi-sacred realm of its own, literariness depended on the exercise and performance of the reader’s “cooperative power” (W. Wordsworth), imaginative experience accompanied by keen pleasure, experimental self-making through active ascription and constitution, rather than pious recognition of the poetic function. The current Russian situation is complex in that part of being a Russian “bobo” means balancing between the role of the consumer (enjoying the process of imaginative consumption of ready-made literary products) and cultural innovator - active investor in the performance of literature, - all the more difficult since neither of these attitudes seems to be supported by established school and critical practices. So it’s a case of institutional inertia and unsupported, therefore vulnerable free-lance initiative. Some deplore literature as dying – others experiment with strange possibilities well beyond the literary field. Transitional moment – challenge to literary and cultural theory.