And the word about him, and the fame of a gloomy philosopher was heard from everywhere": Friedrich Nietzsche in the mirror of Siberian prerevolutionary periodicals

The heritage of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) still attracts a great interest of humanities and remains largely unexplored, being a blessed field for interpretations and research of philosophers, linguists and literary critics. Nietzsche's ideas became the subject of lively discussions in Russia in the 1890s, when the first translations and critical essays were published, being either Nietzschean or anti-Nietzschean. The fast increase of Nietzsche's popularity in Russia started after his death in 1900. It is associated with the release of the first Russian collected works of him in 9 volumes, and also with appreciating his philosophy that promoted the development of Russian new idealism. This paper presents the first attempt of determining the perception specifics of Nietzsche by Siberian intelligentsia of the 1890s-1900s echoed in periodicals of that time. In 1894-1907, Siberian periodicals (Sibirskiy vestnik, Sibirskaya zhizn', Sibirskie otgoloski) hold a lively discussion about Nietzsche and his ideas. The participants were prominent public figures of Tomsk: Pyotr Ivanovich Makushin; the founder of the Siberian regionalism legal principles Raphael Lvovich Weisman; the great-grandson of N. Lobachevsky, poet and translator Vasily Eduardovich Dembovetsky; the respected literary critic Pyotr Lvovich Chernevich and others. P. Chernevich, on the one hand, determines the resonance characteristics in the spirit of religious idealism, on the other hand, he consciously does not accept the pessimistic, shocking, nihilist ideas of Nietzsche. This position reflects in Siberian periodicals in his further notes that show the original receptive strategy and eliminate the possibility of the provincial neophytism. Chernevich unfolds the image of a mad philosopher in his subsequent detailed article "Sermon of the Madman" (1895). A year after Chernevich's article, Sibirskiy vestnik publishes a work of an author under the pseudonym of Raphael Lem'blan, "Elegy in Prose". One of the two parts of this work, "Philosopher II (About Nietzsche)" is an original variation of the image of a repentant thinker. Elegy provides Nietzsche's image, clear to the author and reader, through the prism of his biographical myth, elements of which were in the preceding article by Chernevich. Lem'blan continues the theme of madness that Chernevich stated, directing Nietzsche's life story in the Christian mainstream. Suffering, disease, understanding of errors and misconceptions, repentance before death turn the hero of this elegy into a saint. In the year of the philosopher's death a voluminous work of R.L. Weisman, a famous human rights activist and a Russian public figure, appears in Siberian periodicals. It reveals the basic concepts of the German thinker's legal philosophy, such as ethics, "morality of the manor" and "morality of a slave", "punishment" and "improvement", "race discipline", "criminal" and "pathology". The author, however, while presenting and commenting the theses of his works, does not always agree with them, so there is an original analytical and critical side of this work. Translations of the prolegomena to The Gay Science, which appeared on the pages of Sibirskie otgoloski in 1907, represent a new stage in the creative reception of Nietzsche's heritage that also assimilated metropolitan interpretations.

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