Laurence Sterne and his Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans

At first glance, Laurence Sterne’s writings might seem an unlikely object of sustained interest in early Soviet Russia. An eighteenth-century Anglican clergyman who preferred ambivalence and paradox to rationalizing schemes and solutions, Sterne was ironic about the radical materialism of some of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, his writings found a surprisingly wide audience in Soviet Russia during the first two decades after the October Revolution. In the 1920s, Viktor Shklovsky praised Sterne as an “extreme revolutionary of form,” turning the neologism sternianstvo into a critical shorthand for self-conscious narration and play with narrative time. Counterintuitively, with the anti-modernist turn of the Stalinist 1930s, wider readerly interest in Sterne did not decline but intensified, as he was increasingly read as the author of philosophical and psychological prose. The lecture situates early Soviet encounters with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey within the institutional frameworks of early Soviet publishing and literary criticism and traces networks of readers ranging from secondary-school pupils to learned philosophers and translators. Drawing on previously unpublished materials—illustrations, translations, private letters, and marginalia—it treats Sterne as a microhistorical case for the wider history of intellectual autonomy in the early Soviet period.

Peter Budrin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and an incoming Assistant Professor in Russian Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2021 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University from 2021 to 2022. His book, Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans, was published by Oxford University Press in April 2026.