Damiano Rebecchini is Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at the University of Milan. He has been working for some years on the history of reading in nineteenth-century Russia. In particular, he has studied the literary canon and reading practices in different social environments, from the court of the tsars to the lower classes. He has published papers on how they read at the court of Tsar Nicholas I and on the reception of nineteenth-century authors like Gogol and Tolstoy in the peasant world. In recent years, his research has been focusing on the education of Tsar Alexander II.