Satirical Weekly “Iskra”: Post-Folklore, Post-Irony and Post-Modern

Purpose. The reputation of the satirical weekly Iskra is traditionally determined by the political context of the Russian Empire in 1860s. Despite the fact that in the first years of its existence, the publication attracted writers of various fractions, views, and convictions, Iskra was perceived as a radical magazine, “…another department of Sovremennik”. Moreover, Iskra’s defamations and attacks against provincial and capital officials, and writers have become an inte gral part of the everyday life of the 1860s. Individual articles and whole issues have been banned and censored, though this policy only promoted and strengthened the reputation of weekly. Later, reflecting the importance of the magazine, the Soviet literary criticism established a typological relationship between Iskra by Kurochkines brothers and the left-wing newspaper of the same name published by V. I. Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century. This article attempts to reinterpret Iskra, implying a “weakening” of the sociological and political aspects of interpretation in favor of the aesthetic ones.

Results. The article put forward a hypothesis that publications such as Charivari, Punch, and Iskra can be considered from perspective of modern discursive practices: post-folklore (the phenomenon of variable text and multiple authorship), post-modernity (discrediting the classical heritage or its carnival rethinking) and post-irony (deconstruction of modern leaders of opinion, self-exposure). Based on the study of prosaic and poetic parodies and satire, graphic texts - cartoons and serials (comics), the author analyzes the specificity of the construction and presentation of Russian reality as an anti-world. The article contains fragments of prose and poetic feuilletons by D. D. Minaev, V. P. Burenin, and M. Stopanovsky, many of which are published for the first time.

Conclusion. Iskra as a product of the polemical journalism of the Russian Empire in 1860s displayedan experience of a new aesthetics (a kind of anti-aesthetics), synthesizing schoolchildren (cartoons) and decadent subcultures (Baudelaire translations). Apparently, the 8000 subscribers included not only a radical and democratic reader but also a general audience, equally tired of the official tone of government periodicals and the moralizing of the progressive camp. Demonstrating Russian life as the so-called ‘antiworld’, Iskra proposed a version of “carnival liberation”, which was probably reflected in the poetics of many contemporaries: M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, N. S. Leskov, F. M. Dostoevsky. In this regard, the issue of post-folklore, post-modernism, post-truth, and post-irony on the pages of Iskra rather remained unresolved. However, the change in perspective, it seems to us, enables reinterpretation of the previously collected data, allowing us to give a new interpretation. 

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