To the History of the Formation of the Obituary Genre in Russian Literature: Obituaries by Nikolay Karamzin

The article analyzes the first Russian obituaries by writers published in Russian periodicals at the beginning of the 19th century. Due to the fact that the emotional culture of this time is closely connected with sentimentalism, this study examines how the new era and the contemplation of death are reflected in the first obituaries. The influence of sentimental poetics on the description of the deceased is worth noting separately: biographical information presented as a perception of a writer's "heart" rather than mind, inclusion of private stories in the obituary, emphasis on the sensitive understanding of nature. In the course of the study, the author turns to the first practices of writing posthumous texts. In Russia, the first obituary by a writer was published in 1803 in the magazine Vestnik Evropy [Herald/Messenger of Europe]. The writer is Nikolay Karamzin, and the text is dedicated to the death of another sentimentalist Ippolit Bogdanovich. Karamzin puts writer's individuality above his merits and creative talent, thereby defining the genre as he sees it. Yu.M. Lotman's and A. L. Zorina's works on the history of culture, as well as O.B. Lebedeva's and N. D. Kochetkova's works on the history of Russian literature of the 18th - early 19th centuries, were chosen as the methodological basis of the study. Obituaries for the death of Bogdanovich were used for analysis. Modern literary studies do not offer an integrated approach to the study of obituaries. In this regard, the urgent tasks of the study are to create a comprehensive vision of the problem and identify the factors that led to the formation of the genre of an obituary by a writer in Russia and indicated its ambivalence. In this study, the author is more interested in the obituary for the death of writers. Its analysis is associated with current interdisciplinary areas of modern humanities (studies of historical memory and personal history, memorial culture, cultural canon), on the one hand, and with important issues of the history of Russian literature taken both in its aesthetic dimension and in the institutional aspect, on the other. This article makes only the first steps in understanding this set of problems using local material - the first obituaries by Karamzin to the death of Bogdanovich. In the following 25 years, it was Karamzin's models that conditioned the formation of the genre in an institutional way (friendly communities increasingly became the initiator agent of the obituary) and in an aesthetic aspect (a change in the enlightening-classicist concept of a sentimentalist person, which defined new poetics). The author makes the conclusion that sentimentalism accentuated the human "self" in culture, and death began to be perceived as an event worthy of a multi-way reflection.