Polish literature in Siberian periodicals of the 1880-1910s

Studying the foreign national literary traditions in the pre-revolutionary Siberian periodicals has a rich tradition owing to one of the scientific schools of the TSU Faculty of Philology. Literary translations, reviews on foreign authors’ plays, critics of foreign literature in such periodicals as «Sibirskii listok», «Sibirskaya gazeta», «Sibirskii vestnik» are of scientific interest not only in terms of perception strategies, correlating with the receptive intentions of the Russian Centre, but also as an indicator of the regional cultural identity that has been formed due to the binary opposition of Self-Alien. The paper aims at displaying the most common research methods and strategies of the Polish literature perception in Siberian periodicals of the 1880-1910s. The data for the study is based on frontal review of more than 110 publications. The corpus of texts related to the reception of Polish verbal culture is 95 % composed of flash fiction and poetry translations. The majority of the texts go under the heading «Feuilleton» in «Sibirskaya zhizn» and «Sibirskii vestnik». About fifteen publications represent reviews on staging, critical and biographical features about Polish authors and their works. It is worth mentioning that such preference is specific itself, given the perception of French and German literature in the Siberian periodicals of the same period. The range of Polish authors, selected by Siberian translators and editors, adequately reflects the tendencies in the development of Polish literature at the turn of the century. The bibliography of translations consists of the works written by more than twenty contemporary authors. This research strategy could be named specific, compared with the perception of the German literature with its retrospective dominant. The first of the most popular genres in the local periodicals is flash fiction written by the representatives of Polish realism such as Boleslav Prus (1847-1912), Genrik Senkevich (1846-1916), Mariya Konopnitskaya (1842-1910), the young Stefan Zheromskii (1864-1925), Vladislav Reimont (1867-1925), Vladislav Orkan (1875-1930) etc. The main features of Polish realism legacy, in particular, its educational and didactic («positivism») orientation, expressed in the predominance of the socio-ideological problems, on the one hand, and its genetic cognation with romanticism traditions, on the other hand, correlated with the regional program provided by oblastniki. This program was aimed at the development of subethnic cultural identity by means of enrichment of verbal culture and increasing the level of education of the population. The principal form of Polish literature reception in Siberian periodicals in late 1890s-early 1900s is translations. Hence the issue of the matter deals with the range of translators, among whom there are a few fundamental figures with their own publications. A. O. Stanislavskii (13 translations) and I. I. Pochekas (12 translations) published the largest number of translations from Polish to Russian. The comparison of their translation works allows comprehending the importance of the creative purposes and the personality of the subject of the foreign national regional reception and the reception of literary tendencies. The perception of Polish literature in pre-revolutionary Siberian periodicals is of interest in studying the verbal culture of the area, its subethnic self-consciousness absorbing trends that are alternative to those dictated by the Imperial Center. However, Russian-Polish dialogue, provided by journalists of the Siberian periodicals, deserves close attention itself as a precedent of resonance reception, typical for late 1890s-early 1900s. This period represents the special stage in the history of multicultural communication between two Slavic nations. This stage could be considered as the exceptional one comparing with others, much more thoroughly studied periods of Russian-Polish relations.

Keywords

Authors

References