Epistolary Style as an Object of a Linguoculturological Research

The article highlights some peculiarities of epistolary colloquial speech, registered in a business-and-friendly written dialogue of the Russian creative intelligentsia in the late 20 th century. The material for this scientific consideration were some letters of A.V. Makedonov, a Smolensk-born literary historian, critic and publicist addressed to Yu. V. Pashkov, a Smolensk poet, whose literary talent A.V. Makedonov always wished to support; the letters, which have never been under study, are available at Smolensk University Literary Museum Archive. A complex analysis of the epistolary style in the letters by A.V. Makedonov was based on the communicative-and-pragmatic and linguoculturological approaches and directed at reconstruction of a speech portrait with regard to the several levels of speech personality, in particular, the semantic level, which characterizes the epistolary style as a written form of colloquial speech, the linguo-cognitive level, that singles out epistolary concepts conductive to informational and assessment aspects of the letters, and the motivation level, which implies analysis of speech acts and speech-etiquette standards in the letters, makes it possible to single out several peculiarities of the communicants' inter-relations on a par with their personal characteristics. In conclusion the article sums up epistolary stylistic peculiarities of A.V. Makedonov's creative personality and speech culture.