Tomsk in Russian literature: problems and prospects of research

The article analyses the state of research of Tomsk as the centre of literary life. It identifies the main methodological tendencies of modern Siberian studies (a description of the Siberian text of Russian literature and the study of regional literary identity) and raises the question of their possible application to the Tomsk material. An attempt was made to outline and describe the key components of the Tomsk local text, which began to take shape by the end of the 19th century and was mainly developed in the Soviet period. First of all, these are central mythologems which represent the modernising and traditionalist image of the city (the university myth of the "Siberian Athens" and the mystery of the elder Fyodor Kuzmich), as well as images of the Tomsk prison, penal servitude and exile. Further, it is the landscape and topography of Tomsk which turned out to be able to generate detailed literary images (Tomskie trushchoby [Tomsk Slums] by V.V. Kuritsyn) already in the beginning of the 20th century and have accumulated rich literary semantics over the century. Finally, this is a specific artistic anthropology which experienced the strongest influence of the ideological attitudes of this or that epoch: topical events and social types which demonstrate the city's modernising possibilities in the literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the characters of the old merchant-bureaucratic and new proletarian-university Tomsk in Soviet literature, the Pochvennich-estvo human world of the late-Soviet Tomsk literature. The second subject of the article is Tomsk literary identity. The study of its genesis, status and dynamics in certain historical periods has not yet emerged into an independent sphere being part of either Siberian studies in general or research on individual participants in the local literary process. In this regard, there is an obvious delay in methodology because research operates with the traditional regional studies apparatus, which is proved, among other things, by having only one comprehensive review of the Tomsk literary life of the 19th and 20th centuries (Vekhi literaturnoy zhizni Tomska [Milestones of the literary life of Tomsk] by A.P. Kazarkin). The most successful aspects being developed so far are biographical, but the conceptualised and detailed history of Tomsk literature can be formed only under coordinated studies of artistic and biographical material and literary institutions. The article offers a brief overview of the institutional history of Tomsk literature: journal communications and editorial groups at the end of the 19th century, the friendly society of G.N. Potanin and the professional literary association Molodaya Sibir' [Young Siberia] in the early 20th century, the levels of non-professional (literary circles) and professional (Tomsk branch of the Writers' Union) communications of the Soviet period, the experience of using modern literary institutions in the 1990s-2010s.

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