Confession as a literary form: the origins of emergence

Being an integral part of the culture, literary confession adapts to the changes occurring in a particular era, which means that its theoretical consideration should consider the historical context in which it functions. Thanks to its “pervasiveness”, religious, judicious, and verbal-artistic ones. While referring to the origins of the emergence of the literal form of confession, it is crucial to study its further specifics and artistic transformations. Literally confession “genetically” and “structurally” inherits the religious one. Moreover, this continuity can also be seen from the lingua-cultural analysis: the lexeme “confession” comes into the Russian language by calculating the Greek word-formation model, and the meaning of the concept behind it implies not a formal enumeration of sins but their inner awareness and introspection. “Penance”, in Orthodoxy, especially in the clergy, historically has a therapeutic and healing nature and finds the most vivid artistic reflection in the confessions of the heroes of F.M. Dostoevsky, in whose works a great variety of religious themes are preserved. The transformation of confession in Catholicism and later in Protestantism also affects the emergence of its new forms, including secular ones, which are distinguished by the penitent's appeal not to the divine but to human judgment and concentration on his inner world. Concurrently, secular confession is a very wide concept that is realized both literary (artistic) form, “live”, and pseudo-confessional texts. But while in the sacrament of repentance, the believer confesses his sins and receives absolution from the priest and forgiveness from God, in the art, the “confessing” author or hero tells about his or her sins, describes the state of the soul, making the reader (listener) a full participant of the communication. Despite the “genetic” continuity and the general psychological basis, the identification of religious and literary confession is erroneous, and the main criterion for their differentiation is the value attitude of the “confessing” to the other / Other.