Siberian literary almanacs on the eve of the revolutionary upheavals (1914-1917)

The article is devoted to the Siberian literary collections on the eve of the revolutionary upheavals (1914-1917). It was the period when Siberia showed the rapid development of journalism and literature as well as the dramatic increase in periodicals and collections of various types (one- or multi-authored), many of which were the private initiative. These processes were accompanied by the steady growth of the reader's interest to the emerging Siberian literature of Siberia. The almanac is a kind of serial literary or popular-science publications that can be classified by some feature (theme, genre, ideology, artistic concept, etc.) In term of its target, it can be defined as a kind of an "exhibition" of works related to some intellectual activities. During the First World War, the intellectual debate in the regional literature was triggered by A. Laptev's article "Almanac or Magazine" published in Sibirskaya Zhizn' (Tomsk) on February 4, 1914. The same year gave the first full-length Siberian almanac, Altai Almanac, edited by G. Grebenshchikov. The book was compiled in Barnaul and printed in St. Petersburg. Other regional collections of this period were various modifications of the almanac. Collections of Fakel Publishing House (Tomsk) were originally targeted at the youth and students and reflected the new trends of modernism. There were also benefit almanacs, like To the Victims of War (Omsk), a student collection The First Snowdrops in favor of "poor students" (Irkutsk), a poetic collection Irkutsk in the Evening compiled by Siberian youth, a Siberian literary and journalistic almanac Northern Dawns compiled in Irkutsk and printed in Ivan Sytin's Publishing House in Moscow. The analysis shows that all Siberian almanacs of this period, in spite of their hard-driving ambitions, ceased to exist very quickly. However, it was the door for many Siberian writers, poets and critics to join the central Russian literature. These collections accumulated most talented and advanced literary works in the pre-revolutionary literary and publishing activities in Russia. In their works, the young Siberian authors, on the one hand, clearly demonstrated new features of realistic literature of the epoch. On the other hand, it was an attempt to overcome separatist tendencies of "oblastniki" and join the all-Russian literary stream.

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