The literary content of pre-revolutionary Russian periodicals as a tool for shaping regional cultural identity: A case study of the Caucasian newspaper Kars (1883–1917)

This article presents a pioneering analysis of the literary publications in Kars, the sole periodical in its region of the Caucasus, published from 1883 to 1917. Through a frontal review of 1,730 issues, a corpus of over 300 literary texts was assembled and classified by genre, theme, and authorship. The analysis reveals a corpus dominated by local-color prose, folklore motifs, and military narratives, with landscape and calendar poetry playing a foundational role. The findings of this research validate the initial hypothesis, which posited the strategically model-building, imagological significance of the literary content published in the Russian-language newspaper Kars for the formation of a distinct cultural identity within the newly integrated Kars region of the Caucasus. The Kars region presents a unique case study. A territory now part of Turkey, it has experienced repeated shifts in governance, state sovereignty, and the ethnic and religious composition of its population, resulting in a fluid and complex cultural identity. This context makes its press history particularly noteworthy. Unlike other administrative centers within the Caucasian Viceroyalty -where both staterun and private periodicals were published in Russian and local languages - the Kars region was an exception. From 1883 to 1917, the newspaper Kars stood alone as the region's sole periodical for 34 years, a fact that underscores its strategic importance in this geopolitically sensitive area. Based on a frontal review of all 1,730 issues, the scholars have assembled a bibliography of more than 300 literary texts. The analysis reveals two distinctive features of this corpus. Firstly, unlike periodicals in other regions of pre-revolutionary Russia, the feuilleton section of Kars published very few translations. Accounting for only one-sixth of the total literary content, and with most of these being reprints, this minimal use of translations highlights the primacy of original, Russian-language material in the newspaper's literary sections. Secondly, the corpus is notably defined by the prevalence of calendar-spiritual literature, a genre which occupies a special place in terms of both its quantity and thematic diversity. In general, the prose and poetry published in Kars are characterized by short landscape, everyday life, and biographical sketches. The vast majority of these texts were confined to a single issue and were imbued with a patriotic tone, glorifying Russian statehood through depictions of either the Caucasian landscape or the region's military glory. While the publication of such occasional literature - works tied to specific events in regional, national, or personal life - is typical for periodicals, its specific repertoire, typology, and functions within a regional newspaper like Kars present a distinct and compelling object of study. Therefore, the literary content of Kars possessed a distinct socio-humanitarian significance, functioning as a tool for shaping the cultural landscape in a transnational and transconfessional region. This study demonstrates that the newspaper's religious and spiritual themes fulfilled an imagological and ideological-modeling role comparable to that of European translations in other provincial presses. Just as those translations helped forge regional identities, the religious and spiritual fiction and non-fiction publications in Kars worked to construct a specific cultural identity for the region. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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