“Libel of literature”: “The world labor” and “Day spring” in the estimates of the satirical weekly magazine “Iskra”

Purpose. The article analyzes editorial and publishing strategies and tactics of the illustrated weekly “Iskra” (“Spark”), aimed at discrediting the fiction department of the journals “Vsemirny Trud” (“World Labor”) and “Day Spring” (“Zarya”). Results. On the basis of feuilleton notes, satirical essays, reviews and assessments of contemporaries, the reputation of publications are investigated, the principles of constructing symbolic capital (and its undermining) by the “Iskra” editorial staff are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the controversy surrounding the novel by Leo Tolstoy “War and Peace”. This situation is not unique. The development of the magazine and newspaper market determines the development of competition. This was equally true for “Iskra”, whose existence in the magazine field of the sixties allows us to compile a fairly complete portrait of the mass reader of the era. In the future, most of the illustrated weeklies will use the same strategy of discrediting related and more complex publications. At the same time, responding to the urgent events of everyday life and reacting to new periodicals, the “Iskra” for a modern researcher becomes a kind of crooked mirror, which most clearly reflects the difficult situation of the history of Russian journalism in the late 60s of the 19th century. Conclusion. Creating an antiworld of Russian life and Russian journalism, “Iskra” paid special attention to discrediting Slavophil periodicals and conservative vector publications. The hypothesis is put forward in the article, according to which, such tactics had not only (and not so much) ideological tasks, but commercial ones. The literal “squeezing” and “survival” of opponents from the literary and journalistic field was not only the principle of the existence of “Iskra”, which did not have any independent ideological platform, but also a way of converting symbolic capital into real, quantifiable, including the number of subscribers and circulation of the publication.