Russian illustrated magazines 1880s-1890s

[Edyta Bojanowska]

Dear SEELANGers,

I post below a query from an Americanist colleague who has questions 
about turn-of-the-century Russian illustrated journals.
Please reply directly to him: Brad Evans <bevans at rci.rutgers.edu>

Best regards to the list,
Edyta Bojanowska

***********************
Over the last few years, I have been trying to uncover the over-looked 
history of a late nineteenth-century craze for proto-modernist, 
fin-de-siècle, magazines, known variously in English as “chapbooks,” 
“fadzines,” “toy magazines,” and “ephemeral bibelots.” These seem to 
have been in some vague way the forerunners of the more famous little 
magazines of the next decade, but without the latter’s bluster, artistic 
manifestoes, or oversized personalities—and also without, or so it would 
seem from the critical record, noteworthy or lasting contributions to 
art and literature. The bibelots are beautifully illustrated in an 
Aubrey Beardsley-esque, Aesthetic Arts style. The writing is generally 
light and witty, often bitingly parodic, and almost uniformly opposed to 
the stylistics of Realism and Naturalism. The bibelots scored scant 
mention in Frank Luther Mott’s magisterial history of American magazines 
and were dismissed outright by Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich, who wrote in 
The Little Magazine (1957) that they “were not very inspiring.” And yet 
their numbers are quite astounding—over two-hundred were published from 
1894 to 1902 in the United States, and, if I am not mistaken, there were 
hundreds more worldwide. I suspect that these included most of the 
cosmopolitan centers of Eastern and Western Europe, South America, 
Japan, and India.

I have made a small gallery of some of these magazines that I have 
identified to date, which might help give you the feel of what I am 
looking for: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/64548927@N03/sets/72157627060259556.

I write with two questions:

1. First, a broad query: I am interested in charting the vogue for these 
little magazines around the world, and I would be grateful for help 
identifying these "ephemeral bibelots" in other national traditions.

2. More specifically, I would appreciate any information about a group 
of these magazines published in Russia in the 1880s and 1890s with which 
Anton Chekhov had some involvement. These include:

a. Cricket (Sverchok). Described by Anton Chekhov’s brother, Mikhail, as 
having been “modeled on the French magazines of the day” (83). Evgeny 
and Mikhail Verner, who lived abroad for a long time, had founded the 
magazine. They also published Around the World, which introduced the 
Russian reading public to the writings of Louis Henri Boussenard, Robert 
Louis Stevenson, and Henry Rider Haggard. Cricket was “a very engaging 
magazine for its time, every student subscribed to it” (83). It 
apparently had stenciled watercolors on the cover.

b. Alarm Clock (Budil’nik) (1865-1915) The Moscow rival to Fragments.

c. Light and Dark (Sv︠i︡et i t︠i︡eni : zhurnal khudozhestvennyĭ i 
karrikaturnyĭ)

d. Fragments (“Oskolki”) (Miles translates it as “Splinters” and calls 
it “the best comic sheet in the country” (Miles, 20).). (located in St. 
Petersburg) (1881-1916). Editor = Leikin from 1882-1896. Leikin 
established Chekhov’s career by having him publish in Fragments, for 
which he was fairly well-paid, and inviting him all expenses paid for 
the first time to St. Petersburg, but he was temperamentally different 
from Chekhov in terms of his literary aspirations. Pushed even more for 
ephemeral entertainment. Chekhov wrote under pseudonyms “Ruver” and 
“Ulysses” – column “Fragments/Splinters of Moscow Life.” Durkin 
characterizes the column as “randomly observed incidents, often trivial 
and interchangeable but noteworthy for their typicality; for instance 
Chekhov describes a squabble over a winning lottery ticket or a flood in 
the Eliseev wine shop caused by a broken water pipe” (234). Stories: 
“Chameleon”; He mostly stops writing for the journal by 1887. He 
published 73 pieces in the journal in 1883 (Miles 20). “The Death of a 
Government Clerk” (2 July 1883); “The Daughter of Albion” (13 August 
1883); “Minds in Ferment” (16 June 1884). He also wrote captions for 
cartoons. Bartlett suggests that it was due to the way that Chekhov was 
becoming more serious as a writer that he ended up parting ways with 
Leikin’s comic journal: “He was an elegist as much as a comic, with a 
poetic temperament, and he found it increasingly difficult to write to 
order,” but Leikin wanted stories that were short, funny, and cranked 
out without too much deliberation. The standard length for a story was a 
hundred lines—up to a thousand words.

Thanks for any help!

Brad

Brad Evans
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

-- 
Edyta Bojanowska
Assistant Professor of Russian Literature
Dept. of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures
Rutgers University, 195 College Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08901
ph: (732)932-7201, fax: (732) 932-1111
http://german.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/bojanowska.htm

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