Letters and notes by M. P. Pogodin about the Crimean war: political or confessional prose?

Historical and political letters and notes by M. P. Pogodin of the Crimean War period are considered in the article as an example of political prose and taking into account the historical and cultural context. Estimates of the various works of the famous historian and publicist were ambiguous, and even the Slavophile circle close to him was far from everyone who took Pogodin into life. However, the events of the Crimean War and the preceding ones gave rise to a situation, if not national unity, then a certain cohesion of Russian society, and Pogodin’s Letters played a significant role in this. By the will of fate, which, by his own admission, turned out to be “in the field of political events”, Pogodin is considering not only the content, but also the construction, stylistic structure of his texts, trying to achieve maximum impact on contemporaries. Political letters of Konstantin Aksakov, the diary of Vera Aksakova and her private correspondence with M. G. Kartashevskaya, letters from the militia of Ivan Aksakov, fragments from the diary of Ivan Kireevsky are involved in comparison. Consideration of all these materials, which capture the inseparability of social and personal in the minds of people of that time, allows us to raise the question of the confessional beginning in political prose of the Crimean War period.