Reflection of the verbal culture of Siberia in the regional publishing products of the turn of the 20th century

Every region has a unique local history, an original literary process, its authors, reader's preferences and its own publishing strategy. At the end of the 19th century, Tomsk became one of the most active publishing centers in Siberia. Along with the scientific book, periodicals and separate editions published literary works including Russian classics. Classical texts were easily recognisable and often quoted, intertwined in written and spoken language, became a norm of it. Leo Tolstoy was the first among the Russian classics whose works were printed in separate editions. In 1895, his story "Master and Man" was published in Tomsk, so was his novel Resurrection in 1900. A frensied demand for the works of Tolstoy was noted after his death in 1910. His books were quickly sold out, and the newspaper Sibirskaya zhizn' [Siberian Life] published his unreleased works. For a long time the name of Fyodor Dostoevsky was a subject of debate. The reading public of Tomsk also showed an ambiguous attitude towards the mystical works of Gogol. But, if notes about Dostoevsky, being on penal servitude in Siberia, were printed instead of his literary works, the early works of Nikolay Gogol were extremely popular. Emerging parodies by Mikhail Znamensky on such novels as The Cliff by Ivan Goncharov and Oblomov's Morning by Innokentiy Kuznetsov-Krasnoyarsky showed irrelevance of the problem of a nobleman character in Siberia. This problem could only arouse a grin, and became an object for parody. The process of shaping the body of local texts, most read and quoted, and also reputable for the local intelligentsia and the reading public, was very active at the turn of the 20th century. The "pantheon" of Siberian classics was created, which traditionally included writers of the Narodnik movement and provincials like Grigory Potanin and Nikolay Yadrintsev, as well as Russian writers who lived and worked in Siberia and Tomsk at that time. However, in addition to the high concentration of the educated intelligentsia, provincial Tomsk was also a student city. Young people have always stepped in vanguard of progressive ideas and fashionable trends, they were not afraid of learning new artistic forms. In the last decade before the October Revolution, a whole pleiad of local young writers, called "Young Siberia", appeared in Tomsk. A youth publishing house "Fakel" appears to publish poetic collections in the Art Nouveau style. Despite the prevalence of the Narodnik movement and regional literature both in fiction and in journalism, Tomsk publishing practice lacks uniformity. The Siberian province did not confine itself to its narrow regional themes and plots and, absorbing the world experience, tried to reach the all-Russian level, replicating the most acceptable samples for it.

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