The first Russian obituaries: heroes and contexts

The article is concerned with the problem of interpretation of obituaries as biographical texts. We are considering the author’s strategies depicting characters of the first obituaries of the Russian Empire (I. F. Bogdanovich, A. N. Radishchev). Moreover, the article raises the problem of correlation between personal destinies of obituary texts’ characters and behavioral patterns, articulated by the community and conditioned by the historical period. Particular attention is paid to the discursive mechanisms allowing reconstruction of “biographical personalities” of Bogdanovich and Radishchev. One of them was a poet and the other was a philosopher. The article raises the issue of cultural and social prerequisites necessary for the obituary genre development in Russia: a humanistic ideal of sentimentalism, ideas of the Enlightenment, Masonic ethics, literary salon practices, development of the secular life forms, and readers’ expectations at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition, the article touches upon the topic of the secular nature of Russian obituaries of the time