Type o f publication, periodical for pupils, Siberian pre-revolutionary journalism

What is it about?

The purpose o f this article is to identify the typological specifics o f the amateur pre-revolutionary magazine Tovarishch[Comrade] published by pupils of the First Siberian Commercial School in Tomsk in the 1911/1912 academic year. This unexplored edition is first given a research reflection. The article presents a brief history o f research o f pupil publications, discusses the reasons why student periodicals o f Tomsk rarely become the subject of research. The initial description o f the con­tent and design o f the magazine Tovarishchis made, the features o f the magazine cover are specified, the topics and blocks of publications are analyzed. The study o f the materials makes it possible to identify the main functions that the magazine performed: informative, recreational, educational, but mostly it was the function o f personality’s creative self-realization. The comparative analysis o f the Tomsk magazine and pupil publications that appeared in the Rus­sian capitals and cities o f European Russia identified both common, characteristic of all Russian pupil magazines, and distinctive features that the Tomsk Tovarishchhad. The magazine had typological features of pupil publications that researchers found: it was published by the pupils o f senior classes of the First Siberian Commercial School in Tomsk, it was intended for a narrow audience interested in information related to the education and leisure o f pupils. The magazine was called to implement the functions o f informing, teaching, creative realization o f pupils. Tovarishch combined the features of a literary almanac, an illustrated magazine and an academic publication, contained literary, journalistic, entertaining, educational and scientific genres. Like other pupil magazines, it reflected both the aca­demic and the extracurricular lives o f young people. The magazine was similar to the all-Russian edi­tions not only in the genre and typology, but also in topics. A specific feature o f the magazine is the lack o f information on the participation of teachers in Tovarishch, while joint activities o f pupils and teachers were characteristic o f the early 20th-century editions. The magazine had no publication program, no editorial article, which would make it possible to determine its goals and objectives more precisely. The analysis o f the features o f the content and design o f the magazine allows concluding that the publishers had done some work on the determination of the concept o f the publication, its typological model. This model fit organically into the typological set o f numerous publications for pupils existing in Russia, but for Tomsk it was pioneering and somewhat experimental: a school first published its own pupil magazine that did not repeat magazine models existing in Tomsk. The magazine allowed pupils, a new social stratum, to express themselves as publishers and authors.

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