The Birth of the Genre and Rhetorical Strategies of the Writer’s Diary of 1873

Abstract

The article studies the role of Dostoevsky’s editorial activity in the newspaper-magazine “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”) in the formation of genre features and rhetorical strategies of the Writer’s Diary of 1873. The author of the article believes that the new form, which arose at the intersection of journalism and fiction, was mainly due to the prospeech attitudes of editorial policy, which simultaneously persuaded the highest strata of the Russian bureaucracy to put an end to the liberal reforms of Alexander II and at the same time tries to expand the circle of readers who adhere to a different social orientation.Creating a new form of Diary as a literary work, Dostoevsky actively used the resources of rhetoric, while also preserving the achievements in the field of poetic peculiar means such as the paradoxical enthymeme, the reception of implied word? The use of metalanguage and metatext procedures, irony, and parody techniques.The author of the writer’s Diary actively used non-traditional motives for previous works – false oblivion, masks, obsessions. A number of changes can also be found in such traditional genres of rhetoric as preaching and confession. Having left the post of editor of “The Citizen” at the beginning of 1874, Dostoevsky continued genre and rhetorical experiments, but he was no longer bound by the position of the magazine, which created greater creative freedom in the development of new forms.