ABSTRACT
Academic institutionalization in the Russian Empire dates back to the eighteenth century, when establishments such as the Academy of Sciences and Moscow University were founded. Scholars in literature taught at the humanities faculty and were tied to chairs in the History of Russian Language and Literature, Slavic Philology, and World Literature. In the early nineteenth century, universities served mainly as regional centres organizing the lower tiers of the education system. Sergei Uvarov saw in the university network the most suitable framework for development of Russia's home-grown scholarly community, and he implemented measures for the training of young native scholars, hoping gradually to eliminate the need for foreign professors. Scholarly associations that were supposed to embody science in its more 'pure' form, untainted by teaching requirements and hierarchical distinctions between professors and students, were learned societies. The rise of humanities scholarship in general and literary studies in particular was directly linked to their role in Russia's evolution into a modern nation-state.
