| This dissertation sketches the history of the genre known as the friendly epistle, which thrived in Russia between 1790 and 1825. This genre, which can be defined most simply as a letter written in a friendly tone to a friend in verse, is something of a cross between familiar prose letters and elegies. As such, friendly epistles bridged the gap between everyday and poetic lexicon, and between spontaneously composed letters and polished, organized verse. The friendly epistle was one of the most popular and important Golden Age genres, serving as the literary corollary to the sociocultural phenomenon of the cult of friendship, and as a venue for metageneric discussion and friendly literary criticism, the development of dialogic devices, and the "prosaicizing" of the Russian poetic language. The conversational style, metaliterary asides and mix of high and low that characterize Pushkin's poetry of the 1820's are all borrowings from friendly epistles. Further, friendly epistles brought the Russian language down from the heights of neoclassical Parnassus to torn tablecloths, puddles, and similarly concrete lexicon that paved the way for Russian realist prose.; In writing this genre's history, a computer database was used to organize information about each text, such as author, length, and year of composition. This allowed the generation of graphs tracking the friendly epistle's popularity, and to elucidate more complicated aspects of the genre and its evolution, such as formal characteristics (rhymes, meters) and publication patterns (the percentage of texts published and favored venues). The dissertation also correlates formal textual data with biographical and cultural evidence, allowing the evaluation of individual poets' contributions to the genre and the reasons production increased or decreased in particular years. This dissertation represents an addition to current scholarship in that it covers the genre's entire history (rather that focusing on the most typical epistles or on those written by Pushkin) in chronological detail (year-by-year, as opposed to decades). It also represents a contribution to poetics methodology generally, both in its discussion of genre and its application of computer-assisted statistical methods, a promising tool for future research on poetry of other genres and traditions. |
