Volga - XXI century

A magazine with the name Volga has been published in Saratov since January 1966 . The first editor-in-chief was N. Shundik , author of fiction from the life of the peoples of the Far North . Basically, the magazine printed the Saratov Soviet writers, but the first issue also printed an excerpt from Andrei Platonov 's Chevengur - The Origin of the Master. The magazine also printed translated prose.

More than 10 thousand readers subscribed to the first issue of Volga ^[1] .

From the late 80s and 90s, Sergey Borovikov was the chief editor. At this time, the Volga published works by Boris Zaitsev , Nikolai Berdyaev , Vladimir Nabokov , Alexander Solzhenitsyn , Ivan Shmelyov , in special issues of the magazine “The Son of Man” by Alexander Me ^[2] .

In the late 90s, the magazine began to experience financial difficulties, being left without state support ^[3] . In 2000, in the last 413th issue, the editors announced the termination of the magazine.

Since 2004, instead of the previous Volga magazine in Saratov , the Volga - XXI Century magazine began to appear. The magazine is financed from the budget of the Saratov region ^[4] . The first editor-in-chief was N. Bolkunov, who promised to “preserve the traditions of the very one that had rested on the Volga” ^[5] , and with the release of the first issue said:

This is the most beautiful magazine that can be in the world. We want to confront the spiritual degradation of society. We are interested in the reader of medium and low incomes. The editorial board will be glad to authors who live in the pain of the country and do not call it “this.” Let mother Russia be crooked, but one should not scold her for this, but offer her makeup ^[6] .

One of the editors of the former Volga Roman Arbitman announced a new magazine:

For me, the updated magazine is like the body of a close relative that was taken out of the grave, tinted and offered to be considered a living person! Former subscribers will never read Volga. 21st century ” ^[6] .

Viktor Toporov also expressed dissatisfaction with the new magazine:

The situation with the Saratov magazine looks wild, jumping out of the antediluvian past. And it’s hard to believe that everything will again fall into the swamp of obscurantism, anti-Semitism and mediocrity. But ... The situation is not imagined, so there is a chance. Dinosaurs are not extinct and really want to eat ^[7] .

When Bolkunov left the magazine, the Saratov critic Marta Antonicheva wrote:

... not a single normal person, except as a joke, wanted to publish in a magazine. <...> the magazine’s unambiguous reputation has emerged as a provincial mouthpiece for all moronic graphomaniacs included in various joint ventures ... This publication performed its function perfectly, gathering dust in the stalls at the railway station and libraries of the city, causing surprise and bewilderment for both visitors and stumbled upon this magazine readers. A similar situation persisted long enough until A. Safronova became its editor by a miracle (otherwise you cannot call it). I would not say that I have no complaints about this editor, but all of them are more likely to be applied, less global than Bolkunov. The most important and, in fact, her only obvious achievement was that in the magazine appeared what had not been since the time of Borovikov - literature ^[8] .

According to the reviewer of the Znamya magazine, Elena Seifert :

“Volga - XXI Century” exists as a single text, lives as a single creature. From number to number, the magazine becomes more interesting, richer, better. His freedom-loving, and sometimes risky orientation effectively contradicts the provincial origin. The modernity of “Volga - XXI Century” is clearly manifested in the theme park (a person in a “different” space, a sense of the world as a text, etc.), the faces and faces of a “foreign” word (remake, allusion), a synthesis of arts, the forms of the word's existence. Combining the original and the newest, “Volga - XXI Century” creates a new mythology and contributes to the formation of a new reader ^[9] .

In 2008, the editor A. Safronova came into conflict with the founder of the magazine, the administration of the Saratov region , which was interfered with by the local organization of the Union of Writers of Russia . The reason for the conflict, according to critic M. Budaragin , was the use of obscene expressions in published works, and the real reason was that “Volga allowed itself to neglect the principle for the province to give preference not to good and interesting, but to local art” ^{[10 ]} . As a result, in May 2008 the issue of the next issue of the magazine was stopped by the founders of the publication ^[11] , the editorial board was completely replaced, E. Danilova became the editor-in-chief, about which Marta Antonicheva stated in the pages of Literary Russia newspaper: “In this case, only to grieve ” ^[3] , critic M. Budaragin wrote:

And the editor-appointed Elizaveta Danilova, and the chairman of the local Writers Union V. Masyan, and a significant part of the Saratov writers' party joyfully watching the process - judging by their publications - are quite ordinary provincial graphomaniacs, of which there are a great many in each province. These graphomaniacs publish newspapers and magazines, they themselves read them, themselves praise and do not feel any remorse ^[10] .

The poet and critic Dmitry Kuzmin described the change of power in Volga-XXI Century magazine as a “raider seizure” and spoke about a group of authors who gained control of the magazine:

... there is no such "writing community" whose members could seriously be considered all this semi-literate audience. <...> This panopticon lives its own life, is somehow reproduced, but all this happens in a parallel reality, to which the sane person should not care ^[12] .

The dismissed editorial board (A. Safronova et al.) Began to publish its own magazine with the name “Volga” , with a circulation of 300 copies ^[13] and with the release of 6 issues per year ^[14] . The Internet project " Journal Hall " excluded from its structure the magazine "Volga - XXI Century", replacing it with this magazine ^[15] .

Five years later, in 2013, violations of the amount of 1.2 million rubles were discovered in the activities of Volga-XXI Century magazine ^[4] .

• "Volga - XXI Century" in the " Journal Hall "