Activities of the Censor-Editor in Tomskie Gubernskie Vedomosti in 1907-1908
The article is devoted to the problem of studying the censorship of provincial pre-revolutionary periodicals (the official newspaper Tomskie Gubernskie Vedomosti [Tomsk Provincial Sheets] in particular). Usually, a reader or a researcher of periodicals deals with the issue of the newspaper that has been distributed, all the work on its preparation, editing, proofreading, and censorship remains "behind the scenes". In this case, a special typographic print intended for editing and admission for publication by the editor of the unofficial part of Tomskie Gubernskie Vedomosti that was preserved in the State Archive of Tomsk Oblast allows examining the specific forms and features of the work of the editor and the censor. A complex of textual methods was used to study the considered archival material, including semantic analysis of newspaper text, syntactic and contextual analysis, and also a historical reconstruction method. The synthesis of linguistic methods and historical analysis methods is due to the complexity of the material, which requires an integrated interdisciplinary approach. Like most documents related to the implementation of censorship in pre-revolutionary Russian journalism, this print as an object of study is at the intersection of textual criticism, archival research, history, and journalism. During the study, the handwritten notes in the margins and in the very texts of the publications were deciphered; the contents of two versions of the same issue (the preliminary version with corrections, and the final printed version) were compared; the most significant corrections were analyzed from the semantic and linguistic point of view; assumptions about the reasons for the edits were made and justified. The following conclusions were drawn as a result of the study. V.A. Meyer, responsible for the unofficial part, was not a writing editor (with his own column or editorials), but an administrator with the functions of an editor, censor, and proofreader of the special typographic print, which N.G. Guselnikov, the head of the newspaper office, prepared for him. The edited publications covered all-Russian political events, political events in Tomsk and Tomsk Governorate, as well as non-political events. The edits can be grouped into the following categories: delenda (deletion of certain "extra" words, phrases, sentences, as well as whole paragraphs and entire publications); replacement certain words, sentences, and publications; correction of forms of words and their inflections; correction of typos; rearrangement of the order of publications; indication or change of the source of borrowing or the author of the publication. The censor-editor edited both articles on local topics and reprints from other newspapers despite the fact that the reprints had already been accepted for publication by other periodicals.