Fictional illustrations of official text receptions

Statement of the problem. Among the natural diversity of existing texts, documents emanating from the supreme government and its local representatives naturally stand out. Such texts, as a rule, are designed to intelligently regulate the mood and stimulate the activities of the population in order to achieve certain goals that are correct, from the point of view of the official leadership. However, the perception of the addressees’ intentions does not always turn out to be close to what is desired. Similar situations have been repeatedly presented in Russian fiction. The purpose of the article is to identify general trends in fictional assessments of the psychosocial effectiveness of texts of official documents and their imitations. Methodology. To achieve this goal, the methods of descriptive, semantic, component analysis, and contextual text analysis are applied. Research results. The article provides a number of fictional examples of the reception of official texts by their addressees. These examples are contained in the works of authors from different historical periods. Some uniformity of the audience’s reaction is revealed and possible explanations are offered for the low effectiveness of public communication attempts; the government succeeds in self-discrediting. Conclusions. Thus, generally unsuccessful verbal acts of power are crowned with the result, often opposite to the intentions of the addressee and act as decorative imitations of really effective actions.