A provincial woman in pre-revolutionary Russia: speech portrait

This article represents an attempt to reconstruct a historical linguistic persona of the resident of the Solikamsk town Alexandra Vasilievna Mal'tseva on the basis of three of her letters to her parents written in 1909-1911. The purpose and objectives of the description are determined by the linguistic personology approach to the research object, being a representative of a lower type of speech culture than the elite one. The gender component of the research, which is a reconstruction of the image of a woman's linguistic persona, is actualized by the fact that in regional manuscript archives of the 19th - early 20th centuries the total amount of female speech products is much less compared with male ones. The subject of the analysis embraces thematic preferences, peculiarities of the style and manner of narration, speech competence of the addresser reflected in text, as well as external characteristics of the letters. It allows for revealing the constitutive features of the given historical linguistic persona - a representative of provincial petty bourgeoisie, ordinary language consciousness and the type of traditional culture which largely determined the social face of the Ural region. The results obtained fill the gap in linguistic studies concerning reconstruction of a speech portrait of a woman from pre-revolutionary Russia.