Epistolary heritage: source-critical and historiographical analysis

The article examines the epistolary heritage of the 19th and early 20th centuries as a significant body of historical sources that combine documentary accuracy with the author’s subjective perception. It demonstrates that letters make it possible to reconstruct both individual and collective views of events, everyday practices, emotional states, and cultural norms of society. Unlike official documents or memoirs, epistolary sources reflect the living pulse of the era and the diversity of human experience. The study highlights source-critical aspects of working with letters, including issues of authenticity, textual accuracy, reconstruction of entire correspondence complexes, and the need to detect editorial or censorship interventions. Special attention is paid to the historiographical evolution of attitudes toward correspondence: from its role as an auxiliary source in pre-revolutionary and Soviet scholarship to its recognition as an independent object of study in the post-Soviet period, linked to cultural history, everyday life studies, gender research, and the history of emotions. Using the examples of the correspondence of Herzen and Ogaryov, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Korolenko, as well as women’s and family letters, the article illustrates the richness and multifaceted nature of these sources. The significance of letters for biographical reconstruction, the history of emotions, and everyday practices is emphasized. A separate section focuses on modern digital humanities methods - electronic archives, corpus linguistics, and network analysis - which open new perspectives for studying epistolary complexes. The article concludes that epistolary heritage is a unique source essential for a comprehensive understanding of historical processes and Russian culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.