The article details I. A. Goncharov's involvement in the working of the committee that dis­tributed the Uvarov Awards for playwrights, in the context of the activities of the other mem­bers of the Committee and Goncharov himself as censor. I argue that the establishment of the Award and the invitation of such authors as Goncharov to be the reviewers, contributed to the institutionalization of the new strategies of reading, while at the same time increasing the num­ber of authoritative bodies that playwrights could refer to in their attempts to get their works published and staged.