Leo Tolstoy helped establish The Mediator in 1884 as a publishing venture for inexpensive popular books.
Known in Russian as Posrednik, The Mediator was created to publish affordable moral, religious, and educational literature for ordinary readers. Tolstoy supported the project as part of his broader effort to make useful reading available beyond the educated elite.
The venture was associated with Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s close friend and later literary supporter. Tolstoy supplied and recommended material, while the project developed a substantial list of inexpensive publications.
The Mediator was not the same as The Russian Messenger, the journal that serialized major works by Tolstoy and other Russian writers. It also differed from The Contemporary, the influential nineteenth-century literary magazine associated with writers including Nikolay Chernyshevsky.