“City of Siby", “Chinatowns”, Ordinary People and Officials, or “New America”:
Novosibirsk on the Eve of the Great Breakthrough

The article is devoted to the image of Novosibirsk in travel notes of G. Gontsov, which were
published on the pages of the Prague Socialist Revolutionary magazine Volya Rossiya. This is the
most detailed representation of the city in the periodicals of the Russian Diaspora of the 1920s
and 1930s. Gleb Gontsov's notes are fictionalized, and their author demonstrates the skills of
modernist writing (the structure of the text is fragmented, the style is expressive, the position
of the narrator is close to the modernist).

The main problem posed in the article is connected with the determination of the true author
of these notes. It is proved that the main authors of the Will of Russia (Vladimir Lebedev, Vladi-
mir Zenzinov), most likely, are not related to this series of essays. With Zenzinov, the author of
the essay has biographical intersections (the birth of a Siberian in the family, pre-revolutionary
emigration to Switzerland, the experience of Siberian exile, participation in the Omsk "Directo-
ry"), and Lebedev has some characteristics of the letter. In addition, Vladimir Lebedev had the
experience of illegal visits to Russia. The date set under the Novosibirsk essay, “November
1928”, is verified. This is confirmed by the event outline of the essay, which describes in detail the newest Novosibirsk building – the GOMH Profitable House, and also mentioned the death of
M. Lashevich. The narrator confidently calls Novosibirsk “the provincial capital”, “the capital
of Siberia”, “the new capital of Siberia”, without questioning such a status of the city. From his
point of view, a young city requires thinking and getting into it, getting inside and studying the
processes, and not the careless, sliding glance of the flaner. In the image of Novosibirsk, the con-
cept of the “third capital” is important, important for the culture of the Russian Diaspora, and its
mythology is built around the idea of Siberia as a space in which anarchic “free-folk” colonization
constantly collides with the regulating state. According to Gleb Gontsov, the area around the
Kamenka River, where the Novosibirsk Nakhalovka is located, becomes such a “place of power”
in Novosibirsk. In perseverance of the inhabitants of this area, Gontsov sees the possibility of
a “revolution from below,” a transformation of the system and the embodiment of the Social Rev-
olutionary ideal of people's self-government. The literary context attracted by Gontsov begins to
play a significant role. At the end of the essay, the lines of “New America” by A. Blok are heard,
with the text of Blok being re-read. New America is not becoming the image of all of Russia, but
is localized in a small, ambitious city. Moreover, the image of Siberian America is associated not
so much with the idea of technical progress, but with the ideas of free life and self-organization.