Эпиграфы в русских мемуарных текстах второй половины XVIII – начала XIX века

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the study of the corpus of texts of Russian memoiristics belonging to the second half of the XVIII century – the early XIX century in the aspect of fictionalization. The epigraph is understood as one of the obvious and potential reader – oriented signs of the author’s awareness not only in relation to the content of memories (selection of facts for description, ways of expressing a point of view, etc.), but also to the literary form of memoirs. The aim of the research is to identify the metatext function of epigraphs in the Russian memoir texts of the second half of the XVIII century – the early XIX century. The paper outlines the corpus of memoir texts of the specified period with epigraphs, analyzes the literary and cultural genesis of memoir epigraphs, determines the place of the epigraph in the meta-textual frame of a memoir work. Special attention is paid to the correlation of epigraphs with the original cultural and literary context. The scientific novelty lies in identifying the functional repertoire of the memoir epigraph as a reader-oriented author’s sign, as well as in studying works that have not been previously considered in the aspect of the poetics of a memoir text (T. P. Kalashnikov, I. O. Ostrozhsky-Lokhvitsky, A. de Palmier). As a result, it has been proved that the appearance of epigraphs in Russian memoiristics in the second half of the XVIII century – the early XIX century is a marker of the general process of fictionalization of the memoir narrative.