The article provides an overview of economic problems through the prism of biography, sociology and history of ideas, and through literary works that examine ideological debates and personal relationships between economists and writers, as well as the spread of ideas about economics or the role of economic activity and entrepreneurship. In the central part of the analysis, the author identifies significant tension that can be observed between alternative approaches to considering man’s actions in literature and economics as they develop in modern culture. Acquaintance with economic thought and literature of the XVIII–XIX centuries makes it possible to show the evolution and convergence of metaphors and images. The themes of finance, money, crises, bankruptcies, and wealth and poverty were given consideration in literary works while a number of literary images, such as Robinson Crusoe or King Lear, began to live their lives in the pages of economic texts. Specific attention in the article is given to primary sources — primarily of the XIX century, and also the most interesting relevant literature on the issues discussed. The comparison of economics and literature, conducted from different points of view, provides a rich field for research that is especially valuable for the historian of economics who is interested in the origin of ideas, their sources and relationship with various areas of knowledge. It provides an opportunity to understand in what historical context and social environment representatives of both directions work, as well as see what intellectual and emotional streams intersect different cultural spaces, involving both writers and readers.

The conversation with the famous French sociologist and historian of political thought, Christian Laval, is dedicated to how and on the basis of what principles the division occurred between economic rationality and the symbolic power of literature, which determines the culture of the New Age. His main theses are formulated in the following manner. It is necessary to define literature to or in relation to the economic world, but this does not interfere in taking the claim of literature seriously to fulfill a specific social function in modern societies, this function differs from the function of economics and opposes the latter. In other words, writers who defined themselves as irreconcilable enemies of economic society, those who often displayed the most radical contempt for modern civilization, did this not only with the goal of creating an autonomous social field with its own rules, but they also had their own idea of man and society. They contrasted economic value with a different value — aesthetic, and claimed that aesthetic value requires a different world, a different man, and a new people. Literature has been the dominant form of the sacred in modern societies beginning from the 19th century, but it may not have occupied this position forever, and it will have to part with this symbolic force which makes a writer similar to a sorcerer, magician, shaman, and priest. However, can this policy of literature, which deals with the sacred and strives to create another community “beyond usefulness,” be expressed differently than in the register of magic, religion, sovereignty, and aristocracy? Should not the policies of literature today change over to the side of the forces of the imagination, openness, and to the possibilities of another life and, ultimately, an ideal, which through fiction, would become the basis for a new understanding of the commune?

The complex and ambiguous relationship between literature, economics, and law is the focus of the current work. In rejecting the humanities (jurisprudence and economics to be more precise) in the uninhibited use of literature when the later remains in the position of a victim (since for scientists, literature oft  turns out either to be a convenient tool for illustrating the course of one’s thoughts or an opportunity to display individual cultural baggage), the author insists on the epistemological subversive character of literary experience. Comparing the concepts of Honoré de Balzac and Thomas Piketty as well as Charles Agustin de Sainte-Beuve and Marcel Proust, the author depicts how literature and, in particular, literary characters produce conceptual inversion, projecting economic values onto literature and literary values onto economics. Such an inversion, multiplied by the subjective inversion of characters, allows a writer to criticize existing economic concepts. For example, Proust refutes Sainte-Beuve who claimed that “industrial literature” is the literature that inverts values produced by material economic interests. In turn, Marquis de Norpois’ veiled sexual inversion In Search of Lost Time complicates the difference between good and evil, which is very important for Sainte-Beuve in his criticism of industrial literature. In such a manner, Proust demonstrates how unfounded Sainte-Beuve’s fears were. He also shows that this literary critic attached too much importance to economics while simultaneously underestimating the cognitive abilities and intellectual tricks of literature, which, being in a state of competition with trade, was forced to be evasive, deforming values and institutions of economics and law.

At the center of the current work are two parallel processes that took place in the 18th century. On the one hand, this is a statement of the literary genre of a novel in which an important place is given to fundamental economic concepts: labor, needs, and financial or real wealth. On the other hand, this is the birth of economic theories, in which reasoning about economics takes the form of political economy or positive science aimed at the legislator when wealth becomes a political issue and states aim to increase, even maximize, people’s and sovereigns’ wealth. Based on specific works by Georges Perec, Svetlana Aleksievich, and Edouard Louis, the author attempts to show that literary works, since they excite or revive readers’ emotions, possess a certain power that lacks economic thinking in order to inform the reader about their own expectations or anxiety in regard to economic processes and demonstrate how interesting it is. As a result of the analysis, the author arrives at the following two theses. Firstly, economics strives to show the organizational conditions of society in which economic actors best meet their own needs. Secondly, by being involved specifically with this, science moves away from the ideas that economic actors have about wealth, from happiness which they hope for, and from painful experiences they encounter. Literature leads its reader to his own inner state and illustrates what is at stake in this endeavor for wealth.

This article focuses on an attempt to understand how Western European literary fiction and economic literature of the 16th-early 20th centuries articulated the figure of the entrepreneur and his role, and how economic definitions and doubts concerning the figure of the entrepreneur make it possible to perceive this specific economic actor. In the Marxist tradition, this actor was often confused with capitalist figures of accumulation and monopolization of various kinds of resources. Moreover, literary fiction is not just a simple illustration of different economic concepts of entrepreneurship from Richard Cantillon through Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say to Joseph Schumpeter. The study of how literary fiction perceives the creation of wealth through the figure of the entrepreneur allows one to reconstruct the anthropology of economic action, built around understanding capitalist risks, projections, and the nature of temporality. Significant attention in the article is given to the transformation of the entrepreneur’s role— from images of the Shakespearean early trader-entrepreneur or risk-taking merchant, which dominated over the course of the 16th-18th centuries, to consideration of the “entrepreneur in industry” image that was created in the 19th century. Regardless of the entrepreneur’s degree of success, he inevitably is an unstable and transitional figure according to the corresponding finite space-time novel system. The entrepreneur, overcome by passionate impatience and unstable mobility, clearly differs from the neo-classical rational “manager” who does not play any independent role in the general equilibrium theory. In describing this romantic entrepreneurial figure, literary fiction offers an aesthetic conception of economic activity that combines activity and risk theory and Schumpeter’s conception of creative destruction, transforming it into a certain practical theory

At the center of the article is the hypothesis, which boils down to the fact that Balzac develops the concept of the novel as a genre that is capable of representing the diversity of the world in all its entirety. The article also examines Balzac’s works of art and his correspondence as well as journalistic texts and metatexts (prefaces and conclusions), in which it is possible to find his own reflection on the developed method of working with material (primarily quantitative and static indicators that claim to express the rational truth about life). Balzac’s chosen strategy involves the creation of text that emphasizes the expressive potential of numbers. This hypothesis is clarified in the course of analyzing a number of the writer’s different texts taking the form of a conclusion according to which Balzac’s realism develops in the direction of interest in details and immanence. In this regard, Balzac’s poetics can be described in its development in two directions. The first is associated with the need for an image, based on the study of man’s mysterious inner world. The second is connected with the need to perceive and convey in writing any experience, regardless of its social or cultural status. Such a significant shift in the paradigm of storytelling leads to the creation of texts in which numbers become an independent actor. At the same time, numbers regulate the mimetic accuracy of the story and are arranged in mathematical forms, which ultimately occupy the main space of prose, quantitatively measuring the breadth of the range of human life and talking about the movement of money and life’s vicissitudes.

The article focuses on several richly illustrated Russian history publications that appeared in the first half of the 19th century. These publications are considered as new for their time and a mixed product of verbal and visual economics. Several observations and assumptions are proposed regarding the specifics of Russian production and the market of illustrated historical publications. It is also demonstrated how signs of “conservative” and “liberal” culture in one publishing project can be revealed and combined in different ways depending on how it is interpreted — from an economic, ideological, aesthetic, verbal, or visual standpoint. Particular attention is paid to Nikolai Polevoy’s once popular book The History of the Prince of Italy, Count Suvorov-Rymnik, The Generalissimo of the Russian Troops (1843), which was illustrated with 100 wood-engraved drawings by Taras Shevchenko, Alexander Kotzebue, and Rudolf Zhukovsky. The author of the article claims that this book represents the closest analog, in Russia of the first half of the 19th century, to the famous books in Europe The Stories of Napoleon (1839) by Paul-Mathieu Laurent and The Stories of Fredrich the Great (1840) by Franz Kugler, each of which contains 500 woodcuts based on drawings by Horace Vernet and Adolph Menzel. It can be said that Polevoy’s History of Suvorov establishes a connection between the innovative aesthetics of engraved illustrations, popularizing narrative that is impacted by democratic ideology, and the specifics of the entire publishing project as an outstanding product of the modern liberal visual and verbal economy, the success of which is confirmed by market demand.

This article focuses on the material aspect of the Savoyard philosopher’s life in the period of his emigration. Numerous biographers note the radicalization of Joseph de Maistre’s ideas following the French Revolution and the need to leave Savoy. A clue has been sought to the reasons for his vivid and radical conservatism for approximately two hundred years, giving de Maistre vibrant definitions of a “prophet of the past” or a harbinger of totalitarian regimes of the XX century. The author has chosen a different approach to this problem. His goal lies in coherently tracing the connection between changes in the views of the philosopher and his financial situation. The goal of the study is to describe the main points in de Maistre’s biography, examining it from an economic (more accurately, financial) point of view and taking into account the political, confessional, and ideological contexts within which it unfolded. The author comes to a conclusion consisting of the following. De Maistre’s new personality as a writer and diplomat in the service of the monarchy, developed in emigration, appeared from the fragments of pre-revolutionary life, using its potential in a new environment, putting it into circulation and trying to extract from it a necessary income. It is unclear how the intellectual fate of de Maistre would have turned out if not for the French Revolution and all the subsequent social cataclysms that left an imprint on his life. The French Revolution itself gave the history of philosophy and literature a bright and polemically charged figure, interest in which does not decrease to this day.

Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), editor to Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, Stendhal and other prominent French writers, was interested in publishing translations of foreign authors in addition to distributing books from his own publishing company on the international market. In 1861, Hetzel published Ivan Turgenev’s Nobel Nest in France, and by 1868 he became the Russian writer’s main French publisher. From the beginning of their acquaintance, Turgenev and Hetzel corresponded regularly regarding the publishing of Turgenev’s works translated into French and the adaptation of his texts for the French reader. Recent studies of their correspondence preserved at the National Library of France and archives of the publishing house Hachette, which was acquired from Hetzel heirs in 1914, as well as documents from the National Archives, shed light on the stages of collaboration between the author and publisher. The fragments of unpublished correspondence and documents presented in the article clearly illustrate that Turgenev’s French editions had a small print run and were not significantly profitable. From 1861–1886, ten of Turgenev’s books were published by Hetzel’s publishing house, but even circulation of the most successful novel did not exceed ten thousand copies. At the same time, Turgenev did not participate in the process, giving the publisher freedom to act and being constantly in search of translators. The agreement between Turgenev and Hetzel remained the same throughout the entire period of their collaboration.

The article presents an interview with Andrei Zorin, which is dedicated to his academic biography. Zorin recalls his family (in particular, his father who was a famous writer and playwright) and childhood as well as his studies at Moscow State University in the 1970s and work on his Ph.D. thesis (“Literary Direction as an Interethnic Community: English and Russian Sentimentalism,” 1983). The circle of Moscow conceptualists is separately mentioned, especially Dmitry Prigov, who played a key role in Zorin’s intellectual development. The scientist describes a period of his life in the 1980s, which can be called precarious, and shares his impressions about teaching in Russian and foreign universities. At the end, the hero of the interview summarizes his academic trajectory and professional achievements. Zorin characterizes the late Soviet intellectual and political atmosphere, and he recalls the moment when he became acquainted with Yuri Lotman, whom he calls the “most important individual that existed in science” for novice researchers of that time. In addition, he talks about the academic opportunities that appeared in the 1990s and his own teaching experience in English and American universities. Zorin details the stages of his career as a scholar and teacher, outlining the structure of the Oxford educational model. The interview makes it possible to fit the scientist’s biography into the late and post-Soviet landscape, including the social and epistemological shift  of the last 30 years.