Authors

Po-yi Chen¹;  ¹ University of Texas, Austin, United States

Discussion

Journals played a crucial role in the formation of mid-nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history. In Europe, scientific specialization transformed the perception of knowledge, and journals on specific subjects were founded. For instance, several prestigious medical journals were published during this period, including The New England Journal of Medicine in 1812, The Lancet in 1823, and the British Medical Journal in 1840. However, it is thick journals (толстые журналы) rather than specialized ones that prospered in Imperial Russia. I will probe this difference through the history of science and the case of Современник, discussing how scientific specialization influenced Russian intellectual history. I will approach this probe through Alexander Vucinich’s discussion of the aristocratic privilege of university education, Vladimir Ikonnikov’s assertion of the aristocratization of science, and the published contents of Современник. In doing this, I contend that every thick journal not merely instills a specific aspect of ideology through multifaceted contents from literary works to ethnographical study in their educated readers, as Tatyana Singireva suggested, but provides a different perspective in comprehending mid-nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history, that is, regarding a thick journal as an independent academic space and analyzing how their contents impacted and interacted with Russian intellectuals.