(De)constructing letters to leaders: analysis of students' appeals to the authorities in the 1920s

The article examines students' appeals to the authorities as a specific type of epistolary narrative discourse. The author focuses on the creation of an epistolary text as a part of socio-discursive communication practice. The aim of the research is to identify the narrative structure of student letters and the ways of their argumentation. The study is complicated by the fact that it presents a complex of small disparate narratives that are not related to each other. A structural approach is used for the narrative analysis of student letter texts. The letters of students to the authorities are compositionally divided into two groups - simple, consisting of one or two semantic parts, and complex, consisting of three, four or more semantic parts. The studied letters help identify both general patterns of the narrative structure of appeals to the authorities and particular cases of plotting. The compositional structure of the students' narrative was determined by the problem of treatment, the genre of writing, social origin, gender, and level of "language personality" of the authors. The texts of selected letters are analyzed separately according to the structural parts of the composition: the initial part, the main part, and the final part. The applicants' arguments were both rational and emotional, including threats to commit suicide in case of default request. The narratives are presented as “small” stories of “small” people who constructed their stories in accordance with the social norms of the period. The story of each author of the letter was individual, but the experiences of difficulties were collective. Students could not share their stories with each other, which, along with generational habitus, probably determined semantic similarities in the epistolary narrative.