French literature in the critical reception of Tomsk periodicals in the late 19th - early 20th centuries (A case study of Sibirsky Vestnik and Sibirskaya Zhizn)

The article analyses the critical reception of French literature in the original and translated reviews published by Tomsk journalists in the local newspapers in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. French literature as a synthesis of modern complex philosophical and aesthetic tendencies (decadence, symbolism, impressionism, naturalism) encourages critics to discuss and analyze these mainstream movements. The articles about French literature in Tomsk newspapers appear in different genres and rubrics. The leading genre of literary criticism is a review presented by its three main types -information, thematic, and feuilletonistic. The translation from an Italian sociologist G. Ferrero can serve as a model of the information review introducing foreign journalism to the local readers. The article was published in Sibirsky Vestnik (1893). It analyzed an urgent question of neurosis and pessimism that engulfed the European society in the late 19th century. Three publications in Sibirsky Vestnik (1893) provide an example of a thematic review. They introduce the reader to the works of the Symbolists such as P. Verlaine, S. Mallarme, J. Moreas, and A. Rimbaud. New trends in French literature are presented as a phenomenon directly determined by the changes in the public consciousness. The series of articles entitled "Literary essays" and published in Sibirskaya Zhizn (1910) can serve as an example of a feuilletonistic review. In these essays Tomsk journalist A.S. Kachorovskaya gives a professional analysis of the style and content of C. Baudelaire's poetry. The critical reception of French literature in Tomsk periodicals in the late 19th - early 20th centuries focuses primarily on contemporary writers such as E. Zola, G. de Maupassant, A. France, A. Daudet, P. Bourget, and C. Baudelaire. The type of reception and critical interpretation of the modern trends in French literature is dialectical. In the 1890s Tomsk critics tend to deny the literature of fin de siecle exalted by the Symbolists, and in the 1910s, still denying the modernist art, local journalists start to perceive extensively the latest trends of French literature. In general, publication of the theoretically significant articles in local newspapers demonstrates high rate of development of Tomsk literary and critical thought in the late 19th -early 20 th centuries.

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