Russian anthems in the terms of the theory of discursive genres

The linguistic interest to national anthem is triggered by the topical social discussion about patriotism. One of the significant symbols of the patriotic education is a national anthem. Solemn music with overemotional words can awake national identity, love and pride for country in citizens, because main historical events and symbolic cultural values are reflected in an anthem. In this work, specifics of the «national anthem» genre are revealed. This genre has not yet been described in modern linguistics in this aspect. Our work is based on the theory of discursive genres. We use the conception of the Russian linguist Shmelyova, who proposes a scheme for description of discursive genres. In this scheme, there are 7 items: 1. Communicative goal; 2. Image of an author; 3. Image of an addressee; 4. Dictum; 5. Image of the past; 6. Image of the future; 7. Formal structure of the text. The purpose of our research is to reveal and to describe characteristics of the «national anthem» genre. As a data for study we used the national Russian anthems of different epochs: «Let the thunder of victory sound» by Derzhavin, «The prayer of Russians» and «God Save the Tsar!» by Vasily Zhukovsky, «The Internationale» by Kots, three versions of the Soviet and Russian national anthem by Mikhalkov. The analysis of the texts' genre for Russian anthems convincingly proves that all the anthems correspond to the genre's canon, despite several essential distinctions of Russian anthems of certain historical periods. The main conclusions of our work are: 1. The main communicative goal of the majority of the national anthems we analyzed is patriotic glorification of the motherland. In the image of an author, two main points must be distinguished. On the one part, an author of a discursive genre. On the other part, the concrete author of the concrete text. We also consider the image of an addressee as a double category: an addressee of the «national anthem» discursive genre and an addressee of the concrete text. We determine dictum as an event-trigger base of a proposition. Here we can also distinguish two main points. On the one hand, it is necessary to have a certain event in preposition and in postposition for a performance of a national anthem. On the other hand, dictum is a content of a text, that is a reflection of key historical and political events and also changes of an ideology that took place in a country in a certain period. 5. The image of the past are the events which precede the «national anthem» discursive genre. The image of the future is a perlocutive effect that has an influence on feelings and thoughts of an audience. Different expressive means of language like exclamatory sentences with predicates work for the image of the future. For description of the formal structure of the text we picked out the most important linguistic characteristics of the «national anthem» genre: combination of lyrical, epical and dramatic basis, high degree of imagery, plenty of overemotional, lofty metaphors, epithets, comparisons, addressing an object of praising, emotionality of the text, exclamatory intonations, eurhythmy of verses. Apart from these characteristics we have added our own ones, which are: presence of text parallels and ease of text memorization. In conclusion, we have adopted Shmelyova's scheme for description of a discursive genre for the «national anthem» genre, and with its help we have defined the most important characteristics of this genre through the example of Russian national anthems.