V.S. Solovyov’s “Sunday Letters”: Aspects of the Author’s Dialogue with the Reader

The article is devoted to the analysis of V.S. Solovyov's “Sunday Letters”. Aspects of the author's dialogue with the reader within the framework of this publicist cycle are considered. The relevance of the topic is based on the importance of this work for understanding the writer’s last work, “Three Conversations” and the general direction of the development of his publicist writing. The “Sunday Letters” have relatively recently come to the attention of Solovyov scholars and remain little studied. On the basis of the main premises of M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of speech genres, the article examines the works included in the Solovyov cycle from a communicative perspective, highlighting several perspectives: author – addressee, author – text, addressee – text. This approach is new for Solovyov studies and productive due to the combination of literary and linguistic methods of scientific research. As a result, the general scheme of the way Solovyov the publicist constructs a communicative act with the reader established and some features of his dialogue with the audience are characterized. The article concludes that 1) Solovyov's main goal in publishing “Sunday Letters” was to organize a regular and direct dialogue with the Russian reading public on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, religious and moral issues (reflecting the influence of the tradition of F.M. Dostoevsky’s “Writer’s Diary”); 2) the author of the cycle primarily implemented an educational and prophetic creative strategy; 3) during 1897–1898 Solovyov distinguished between various sections of the reading public, corrected his position regarding the addressee; 4) the choice of the genre form of the work (letter-sermon) was not accidental, it was justified by the nature of the speech situation, participants of dialogue, specifics of communication sphere, subject of speech and determined the uniqueness of his style; 5) the style of the Solovyov cycle is characterized by heterogeneity, unevenness, excitement. These conclusions clarify the specifics of the author's position in the works of Solovyov the publicist, the character of his implementation of creative strategies.