Epistolary communication among philologists as a creative dialogue

INTRODUCTION. Modern Russian studies, due to its anthropocentric orientation, pays great attention to the study of various types of linguistic personality, among which the elite linguistic personality of a scientist stands out. The scientist’s epistolary, and epistolary communication in general, which vividly reveals the author’s personal and individual character, opens up broad prospects for studying the personalities of Russian science, especially the humanities. The aim of the study is to consider the epistolary communication of philologists as an indirect creative dialogue of its participants and, based on the epistolary, to identify the features of the scientist as an elite linguistic personality.

MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material consisted of Professor E.P. Baryshnikov’s letters to his student and colleague N.M. Valeev, and N.M. Valeev’s detailed comments on each of the teacher’s letters, which creates the feeling of a full-fledged dialogue, a kind of epistolary binomial, with exhaustive depth revealing the linguistic personality of an outstanding scientist, talented teacher, wise mentor. The research used general scientific methods (observation, comparison, description); special philological methods (contextual, genre, semantic analysis).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The features of the epistolary of E.P. Baryshnikov as an outstanding linguistic personality are considered. It is proved that the addressee perfectly mastered the genre of friendly writing, which became a means of intellectual, spiritual, and emotional communication. Special attention is paid to the pedagogical aspect of epistolary dialogue, which characterizes the pedagogical gift of E.P. Baryshnikov, who managed to raise a grateful student and heir to his creative and pedagogical ideas.

CONCLUSION. The letters of E.P. Baryshnikov, which are deep in content and perfect in form, testify to the high philological culture of the addressee, who possesses his own idiosyncrasy and a system of expressive linguistic means for its textual realization. The name of E.P. Baryshnikov is a precedent not only for the personosphere of the universities where he worked, but also for the personosphere of Russian philological science as a whole. The obtained results open up prospects for a comprehensive study of epistolary communication of scientists.