Lexical, stylistic and cultural characteristics of Alexander Pushkin's personal correspondence.

Although the study of Pushkin's letters began in Russia quite early--in the second half of the 19th century--we still do not have a truly comprehensive analysis of all their lexical, structural, stylistic, historical and cultural aspects. During the first fifty years of study of Pushkin's correspondence, scholars mainly viewed the letters as a source for the writer's biography. It took decades to realize that the letters constitute an autonomous component of Pushkin's creative output, requiring a special approach. Some scholars assumed that Pushkin's letter writing was a form of creative workshop for the poet. However, as I demonstrate in my thesis, this is not corroborated by a comparative analysis. Pushkin's letters were a separate genre for him and letter writing was a workshop for that genre exclusively. In the first and second parts of my thesis, I examine cultural and historic aspects of Pushkin's epistolary output as they compare to and differ from those of his literary contemporaries. We know that Pushkin made a clear distinction between a letter to a friend as a genre, and a letter as a literary device in prose fiction (for example, in a novel in letters, where stylistic attributes of correspondence are utilized). I devote the third part of my thesis to a detailed stylistic analysis of Pushkin's letters, comparing them with examples of letter writing by Russian authors and educated people of the 18th-19th centuries. Pushkin developed a completely independent style of letter writing, in many respects, archaic lexically and stylistically, somewhat close to the manner of writing of the eighteenth century. Pushkin's letter writing underwent a significant change in this respect, passing through the Karamzinist period towards effortless adoption of the stylistic coordinates of the addressee, on the one hand, and ironic reworking, on the other. Rather than creating a novel in letters, Pushkin built up a collection of different, exemplary letters, a pis'movnik, with representative types in multiple variants.Ph.D.BiographiesComparative literatureEuropean historyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSlavic literatureSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129372/2/9501002.pd