Book Review: Kholikov, A.A. & Orlova, E.I. (eds) (2021) Russkaya literatura i zhurnalistika v predrevoliutsionnuyu epokhu: formy vzaimodeistviya i metodologiya analiza: kollektivnaya monografiya [Russian literature and journalism in the pre-revolutionary era: Forms of interaction and methodol

The review offers a detailed analysis of a collective monograph on the interaction between literature and journalism in Russia in the pre-revolutionary period. According to the reviewers, the main merit of the book lies in the fact that it offers a new interpretation of literature and journalism at the turn of the century as a whole and provides new approaches that have broadened the problem field and added to the circle of writers’ names and newspaper and magazine titles. The authors show that journalism of this time both created and destroyed writers’ reputations, explained to the reader the underlying meanings of literary works, and acted as an intermediary between the creative elite and the mass audience. The complex, multidimensional, “diffuse” (as the monograph editor, Professor A. Kholikov, formulates it) state of the literary process of the pre-revolutionary era required the authors of the monograph to implement an interdisciplinary approach. As a result, the history of Russian literature and the theory and history of journalism were integrated with the political and social history of Russia, which, in turn, was accompanied by the search for new methods and techniques, including those oriented towards Western experience of working with media texts of various levels and content. Accordingly, the book successfully combines the approaches and methods of traditional academic humanities and innovative technologies, above all in the digitalization of archival material. In the course of the analysis, the newspaper and magazine text, thus acquiring a new spatial and temporal dimension, was transformed into a metatext, the presentation of which made it possible to reconstruct a qualitatively new picture of the state of literary and journal life in Russia in the pre-revolutionary era. The monograph was not limited to the “writer in a newspaper - magazine - almanac” plot and tried to show as convincingly as possible the relationship between author and publication in all its complexity and contradiction, above all as a projection of a kind of dialogue between literature and journalism at a particular historical stage, in the conditions of a perennial political, ideological, social and cultural crisis. Thus, magazines and newspapers reflect the whole spectrum of problems of literature and literary life, literary reputations, the psychology of writerly creation, on the one hand, and the mechanisms of writer’s subordination/contradiction to the conveyor belt of newspaper-magazine work, on the other. As the reviewers point out, the reliability and representativeness of the conclusions in the analytical part of the monograph are ensured by the extensive use of material from metropolitan and provincial newspapers and magazines (Russkoye Slovo, Narodnaya Gazeta, Novoe Vremya, Ogonyok, Finlyandskaya Gazeta, Il’men’, Yuzhnyy Krai, etc.), writers’ archives, editorial correspondence and documents. Of undoubted value is the publication in the second and third sections of the book of materials of correspondence between A. Izmailov and I. Yasinsky, D. Filosofov and K. Chukovsky, a selection of texts by I. Babel in the newspaper Novaya Zhizn ’, a bibliographical list of the magazine Bohema, newspaper Nov ’ and others. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.