ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the principal institutional contexts in which methodological introductions to literary history emerged, contexts which in many respects determined their rhetoric and concerns. Vital to the institutionalization of academic literary studies in late Imperial Russia was the production of discourse that explicitly defined the stakes and structures of the discipline as a sub-field of humanities scholarship. Such texts were commonly dubbed 'methodological introductions' and their titles usually emphasized that their subject was history of literature as a science. In defining literary scholarship, methodological introductions also consistently highlighted the importance of the discipline's methodological self-reflection itself. The principal genre that negotiated the 'scholarliness' of the historical study of Russian literature was not the inaugural lecture but the academic or semi-academic book review of systematic historical surveys of Russian literature. The network of 'adjacent sciences' thus corresponded roughly to the existing network of concrete institutions that structured the field of Russian humanities scholarship.
