Established in 1899 and in continuous print until 1918, Ogonek first came on the scene as a weekly illustrated supplement to the influential St.Petersburg-based newspaper Birzhevye Vedomosti. Having posted impressive growth in readership, in 1902 Ogonek would chart an independent course, becoming a separate entity and attracting period’s most notable journalists, photographers, literati and critics. In short, this was the period of the formation of magazine’s foundational aesthetic sensibilities, for which it would become famous until its unceremonious closure by the Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918 for propagating anti-Soviet views.
Although the magazine has the same name as the popular Soviet era weekly magazine Ogonek, their differences could not be more pronounced. Born in two different cities, (St. Petersburg vs Moscow), and in two different political and social realities, the only similarity between the two publications was their common name. These differences, more than their nominal similarity, dictated the two Ogoneks’ different, and oftentimes antithetical, ideological and aesthetic idioms, norms, and values.
This database covers issues published from 1899-1918. For earlier issues, search the Ogonek Digital Archive (Moscow, 1923+) database.
NOTE: While the user interface is in English, you must search the database in Russian using either Cyrillic script or latinized text.
