The problem of placing Benjamin Bergmann's letters into a genre category

Travel prose as a literary genre has undergone certain changes over the centuries. Each era enriched this genre with its own narration forms, its specific means of describing travels. This genre evolution was somewhat paralleled to the historical development of society. The late 18th and early 19th centuries witnessed the shaping of another form of travel prose - epistolary journeys. The purpose of this article is to characterize the letters of Benjamin Bergman from the point of view of genre, to identify the criteria for their assignment to the genres of travel prose. The article provides plot / compositional and linguistic insights into letters of the famous traveler, writer and translator, Lutheran pastor B. Bergmann that had been included into the latter's fundamental German-language work titled “Nomadische Streifereien unter den Kalmuken in den Jahren 1802 und 1803” (Nomadic Wanderings among Kalmyks in the Years 1802 and 1803) and published in Riga in 1804-1805. This work was considered by many researchers as a historical and ethnographic source, but there are no works that would consider this work as a literary work, which determines the relevance of studying B. Bergman's letters in the literary aspect. The composition of the letters, the subjectivity of the author's position are considered in detail. The results of the study allow us to conclude that the synthesis of different genres of travel prose, and the letters have features of both the epistolary genre, and the travel diary, and the travel essay, make them unique in terms of genre.