The Seminarskaya Zarya Student Magazine: An Experience of Typological Analysis by Indirect Data

The aim of the article is the reconstruction of the typological features of Seminarskaya Zarya, a student magazine of the beginning of the 20th century, according to indirect data. An attempt is made to identify the main type-forming features (the publisher, the aim of the edition and its readership), the dependent secondary features (the list of the authors, the internal structure of the edition, the genres of articles, the methods of design) and the formal typological features (frequency, volume and circulation). Publications about Seminarskaya Zarya in newspapers Sibirskaya Zhizn' and Russkoe Slovo were used as sources for the research. Archive materials were also studied to reconstruct the censorship department's investigation on the magazine. The main method used in the article is a typological analysis of the press. Publications about Seminarskaya Zarya were identified, information characterizing the typological features of the magazine was selected from the texts. To analyze the reports about the student magazine in periodicals and archive materials, a set of source study methods was also used. As a result of the research, the history of Seminarskaya Zarya was reconstructed. It was established that a number of typological features of the magazine can be identified by indirect data: the approximate composition of the publishers and the readership was described; a short quote from an editorial article published in Sibirskaya Zhizn' allows judging about the aim of the magazine: to educate. The secondary type-forming features can also be identified by indirect data, but there is no sufficient information for their detailed description. Thus, it is possible to characterize the list of the authors as a whole (students of the fourth and fifth grades of the seminary), but it is not possible to specify their names, with the exception of the “seminary's astronomer”. The internal structure of the magazine was described in Sibirskaya Zhizn', but there is no way to trace how consistent it was throughout the magazine's life. The genres and the design can also be judged about only partially, based on the description of the first issue. With regard to the formal typological features (frequency, volume and circulation), it is possible to establish the frequency and the circulation of the periodical, while volumes can only be reconstructed hypothetically. Thus, the sources used give us only limited information about the magazine under study. However, with all the limitation of this information, it still allows attributing Seminarskaya Zarya to the other student magazines of the late 19th -early 20th centuries.

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