Zemlya almanacs as a Moscow variation on the Petersburg-based Shipovnik
The article tells the story of a rivalry between two remarkable nonperiodicals of the Russian Silver Age: the literary and artistic almanacs printed by Shipovnik [Wild rose] publishers (Petersburg, 1907–1917) and the Zemlya collections published in Moscow (1908–1917). Using the memoirs (including unpublished) left by employees of the two publishing houses and critical reviews from the early 20th c., the article pinpoints the reasons why readers perceived Zemlya as an analogue of Shipovnik. In the period from 1910 to 1917, the editor-cum-proprietors S. Kopelman (Shipovnik) and G. Blumenberg (Zemlya), neither with significant previous experience in the publishing business, made sure that their respective almanacs boasted stellar authors, a unique composition and cover design; however, Zemlya was consistently labelled as a cousin of Shipovnik. Such a description was caused by Zemlya directly copying the Petersburg-printed collections in its first issues (1908–1909), the special characteristics of the almanac as a publication type, and critical reviews of Soviet literary scholars.