'Siberian notes’ journal as a metatext: the system of ideological implications (1916-1917)

The article attempts to reconstruct the system of ideological implications of the Siberian Notes journal published from 1916 to 1919 in Krasnoyarsk by Vl. M. Krutovsky, a follower of the ‘senior’ regionalists. One of Krutovsky’s main goals was to consolidate the local intelligentsia to solve social and political issues of the Siberian region. Unlike most other Siberian publications of that time, the first issue of Siberian Notes did not contain a program manifesto. That is why the study involves the entire corpus of the journal’s materials, considered as a metatext, to reconstruct ideological subtexts. At the beginning of the first issue was published the anonymous poem Yet frost holds mountains in his diamond chains..., which can be considered a metaphorical ‘replacement’ for a program article. The last stanza of the poem opens with the image of a sower, referring the reader to two classical pretexts: Pushkin’s poem As freedom’s sower in the wasteland and Nekrasov’s To Sowers. However, while Pushkin’s sower is unambiguously pessimistic and Nekrasov’s dismal picture of the present gives way to an optimistic forecast not localized in a specific time, the work of the author from Siberian Notes expresses confidence that the ‘crops’ of enlightenment will ‘sprout’ as soon as in the ‘coming spring’. The expectation of imminent socio-cultural changes determines the exploitation of ‘spring’-related metaphors - this corpus of images is regularly found in fictional texts. Journal authors believed in the inevitability of reforms, which were expected to improve the life of the region in the near future, but, from the beginning of 1918, significant changes are noted in the opinions expressed in the journal.