“...To Confess with Each Other in a Letter...ˮ: Family Correspondence in the Understanding of Young I. V. Kireevsky

The article is devoted to the study of the family correspondence of I.V. Kireevsky in 1830, the period of his stay in Germany. As the study showed, at that time he, in contrast to the attitude towards “buffoonery” prevailing in epistolary communication, affirmed the priority of a confessional letter. On the one hand, this was due to the epistolary traditions of his family (established, in particular, in the correspondence of A.P. Elagina with V.A. Zhukovsky), on the other hand, very trusting relationships in his family; finally, thirdly, his personal ideas about correspondence and the needs of the soul. At the same time, Kireevsky did not return to the traditions of sentimental confessional correspondence of the second half of the 18th – early 19th centuries. He rethought these traditions in the context of the current romantic trends of the 1830s. Under his pen, the letter acquired the utmost confidence, with outward restraint. The kinship of the souls of the family members affirmed by the young epistolographer and, consequently, the ultimate convergence, up to the identity of the addresser and the addressee, entailed the ultimate reduction of verbal epistolary outpourings (excessive and helpless to express the innermost meanings known to the participants in the correspondence), the merging of the genre features of the letter and diary; finally, a rethinking of the genre of travel writing.