Abstract This article revisits the origins of reader-response theory by foregrounding the less-known contributions of Kharkiv literary theorist Aleksandr Beletsky of the 1920s. Challenging the traditional genealogies that trace the discipline’s emergence to postwar Western theory, the article argues that Beletsky developed a robust reader-centered methodology decades earlier. Drawing on psychological aesthetics, historical poetics, and sociological approach, Beletsky’s work articulated a nuanced theory of the reader as an active historical participant in the literary process. The article demonstrates how his typology of readers – especially the figure of the “reader who takes up the pen” – provided Ukrainian literary historians of the 1920s with the tools to interpret the phenomenon of Kotliarevshchyna as both mass literature and a key moment in the emergence of a Ukrainian reading public in the nineteenth century. By situating the problem of the reader within a broader theory of literary history, Beletsky and his students forged a synthetic method that positioned itself between Formalist theory and Marxist criticism. The article also situates the phenomenon of stylization and parody within the framework of Yuri Tynianov’s concept of literary evolution, highlighting the theoretical affinities between his work and Beletsky’s concept of the “reader who takes up the pen”.
Галина Бабак (Tue,) studied this question.