Publisher of Intellectual Literature as a Maker of Culture

Abstract

How do we cognize the intellectual culture of different eras? We turn to books, magazines, newspapers, in which ideas, signs, symbols, emotions and other signs of the times are imprinted in various forms. We discover authors whose reasoning makes us look at our modernity in a new way. We even pay attention to the illustrators who created the unique face of paper products. But often we do not pay attention to the one who made possible our acquaintance with this historical world of life and thought. The figure of the publisher has a very modest place in our perception of culture. Only “stars”-authors remain in the public mind (who today will remember the publisher Dostoevsky or Jules Verne), and historians of book publishing, as a rule, limit themselves to retelling published books and biographies of authors, and yet it is the figure of the publisher that is especially relevant today. They not only “cultivated” the intellectual space of the era, but, as entrepreneurs, they programmed new forms of activity. If we recall the term of J. Schumpeter, they created by destroying... This feature of the publisher of intellectual literature manifests especially in times of crisis. To comprehend the historical experience of the publisher of intellectual literature, we turn to the epistolary heritage of the Russian emigres in the 1930s, when Nazism was just beginning its march across Europe. The archive of the philosopher, musician Yevsey Davidovich Schor preserved correspondence with the founder of publishing house Vita Nova (Vita Nova Verlag), German cultural figure Rudolf Rössler. Their letters reveal to us both the dynamics of the publishing process and the role of the Publisher as a cultural maker.