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"CONTEMPORARY"

April 23, 1836 saw the light of the first issue of the journal "Contemporary". A small publication founded by Alexander Pushkin and initially unsuccessful, over the years of its existence, has become one of the biggest phenomena in Russian journalism and literature. The magazine raised a whole generation of Russian writers and became the ideological center and platform of the revolutionary-democratic direction of social thought.

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From Pushkin and Pletnyov
to Nekrasov and Panaev

Initially, the magazine was published four times a year. Being one of the first serious periodicals in which actual problems were camouflaged by allegories and hints, Sovremennik did not bring either money or glory. The magazine had about 600 subscribers, but initially there were no problems with the authors.

The magazine published Nikolai Gogol, who had become famous for his time “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka”, founder of Russian romanticism Vasily Zhukovsky, historian and statesman Alexander Turgenev, poets Yevgeny Boratynsky, Nikolai Yazykov, Alexey Koltsov and many others.

However, financial problems still made themselves felt, and more than half of the last, lifetime volumes of the journal Pushkin had to be filled with his own works. In these episodes, the light was seen by "Feast of Peter I" and "The Miserly Knight", "The Captain's Daughter" and "Roslavlev", "From A. Chénier", "Journey to Arzrum", "My Hero's Pedigree", "The Shoemaker" and "John Tenner.

After the death of the poet in 1837, his friends struggled to maintain life in a journal. Initially, this was done by a group of writers headed by Vyazemsky, and then critic Peter Pletnev took up the task.

 

Since 1843, the magazine has even become monthly, but things still did not matter, and in 1846 Pletnev sold Sovremennik to Nikolai Nekrasov and Ivan Panayev.

The young poet and writer (Nekrasov at the time of the deal with Pletnev was only 25 years old) had already had successful publishing experience and enthusiastically set about reviving the magazine, where most of the literary youth, who formed the main force of “Domestic Notes” published by Andrei Kraevsky, passed. Contributed to this Vissarion Belinsky, who went to the "Contemporary

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