Towards the problem of describing the confession as a key verbal concept of culture. Book review: Lutsevich L.F. Autobiographic confessions in literature: pretexts, texts, contexts. Moscow, Nauka Publ., 2020. 490 p. (in Russian)

This article examines a successful study in describing and analyzing the genre of autobiographical confession, conducted in L. Lutsevich’s monograph “Auto biographic Confessions in Literature: Pretexts. Texts. Contexts” (2020). The history of confessions by European authors and their reception in Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th century are studied against a wider backdrop of the formation of autobiographical confession in the 18th and 19th centuries, as writers were striving to find a way to express their personality. The author pays close attention to the emergence of autobiographical confession as a genre, remarks on the features of literary confession and focuses on the phenomenon of confessionalism typical of Russian literature. The analysis covers widely known works as well as obscure texts, which substantially expands the modern perception of autobiographical confession. In the concluding section, not only does the author summarize the main tenets of the book but also outlines directions of further research of the genre, emphasizing correspondences between the genre in question and autobiography, letter, memoirs and diaries, justification, confession and petition. A significant finding of the research is the claim concerning a crisis nature of the autobiographical confession, which becomes a turning point in the development of personality. It is followed by a new spiritual stage, with a new “self” emerging as the result of the writer’s evolution and moral growth. L. Lutsevich’s monograph makes an important contribution to the research on the autobiographical confession genre and associated literary phenomena.