Modification of a Siberian almanac-type literary collection and the image of the reader in the early Soviet years

The paper focuses on a form of a literary collection developing in the context of the history of Siberian literature, book culture, and a variety of publishing and reading practices. Summarizing previous research, particularly the works of M. M. Bakhtin and philologists of the «formal school», modern literature studies pay close attention to everything that can affect the reader, including a variety of time signs found on the pages of some collections. The author analyses a number of Siberian literary collections, many of which have not been classified yet. The period under research covers the early Soviet years (1917-1924) when almanac-type literary collections become the space where the main modernist trends, mostly futurism, are formed. It is of fundamental importance to consider the reviews about these almanacs in the local press because the reviewers are treated as a special type of a professional reader. Another type is represented by the almanac-type literary collections demonstrating the features of «proletarian literature» that anticipated socialist realism and were targeted at a new type of proletarian-reader. This trend became mostly apparent in the collections from Novonikolaevsk, a young Siberian city. The research shows that almanac-type collections resembling songbooks were very popular in the period concerned, as they were supposed to oust and replace the pre-revolutionary «intimate» lyrics. The aforesaid period brings about the modification of the charity literary collection, a special type of almanac according to its historical and typological model. However, now this collection gets connected with socio-economic rather than military events, mainly with Povolzhye famine. The turning point in the country's political life was Lenin’s death, which eventually affected the general state of the Siberian publishing industry and its ideology and led to the publication of numerous clichéd one-day collections in the memory of the leader. Thus, the formation of a new «proletarian literature» in the early Soviet years anticipated the unifying tendency of socialist realism, which led to the transition of the literary and historical consciousness - of both writers and readers - from individualistic to monistic.

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