Tomsk Amateur Student Magazines as a Source for the Reconstruction of Reader Activity Organizational Forms: To the Statement of the Problem

Amateur student magazines have recently attracted researchers’ attention. It seems that the potential of such sources can be used to study the problems of reading reception and reader behavior. These problems have been little studied in principle, including due to the lack of a sufficient body of relevant sources and poorly developed research methods. One of the questions here is what the organizational forms of reader activity were. The aim of the article is to reveal the source study capabilities of amateur student magazines in Tomsk in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and to analyze how they can be used to reconstruct the reader community’s forms of activity. Eight amateur student magazines published in Tomsk in the late 19th and early 20th centuries centuries were examined: Seminarskiy Listok, Robkie Golosa, Seminarskaya Zarya, Soyuz, Tovarishch, Mysli Uchashchikhsya Sredney Shkoly, Les, and Rodnaya Sibir. Some magazines are available de visu, some are known only from archival sources and publications. The research methodology is based on the classification of literary associations by Manfred Shruba. It is proposed to use the available classifications to study forms of reader activity. The most significant for the chosen topic are definitions of societies, circles, salons, and pseudo-groups. Their attributes were structured and applied to the sources listed above. The sources were classified according to the presence of purpose, regularity of meetings and breadth of connections. The types of publishing associations were revealed: societies, circles, pseudo-groups. The analysis leads to a conclusion that the toolkit proposed by researches for the study of professional literary societies allows us to study amateur societies as well. It becomes possible to identify various forms of reading behavior and the formation of various types of activity, including those that were very typologically similar to organizational forms that existed in the professional literary environment. Amateur associations could not be as stable and typologically diverse as those of professional writers. That is why the most common form was a circle that did not imply a formal structure. The narrow composition of the participants predetermined the existence of pseudo-groups that issued amateur magazines; they could include one or two members.

Keywords

Authors

References