LAUSR

The central argument of Alessandro Stanziani’s article “European Statistics, Russian Numbers and Social Dynamics, 1861–1914”—that statistical data is socially constructed, and that the ways in which it is socially constructed should be an object of historical inquiry—helps to answer the question of why an archival researcher with literary inclinations should take note of the mass of statistical material produced throughout the nineteenth century and especially in its final decades. Statistical reports were regularly published in overtly literary publications such as Faddei Bulgarin’s Northern Bee (Северная пчела) from the 1820s onward. Vissarion Belinskii, one of the preeminent Russian literary critics of the 1830s–1840s, reviewed statistical works alongside literary fiction, poetry, and theater. In a review of a theory of statistics, he weighed in on the importance of the discipline and its place among other sciences