Epistolary didactics of Vasily Zhukovsky (based on correspondence with members of the royal family)
Authors:   Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russian Federation), Ayzikova Irina A. 
Published: February 2023

Today it is obvious that the texts created by Zhukovsky, including personal letters, are mostly “saturated” with ideas of educative instruction, expressed directly or in subtext. These ideas are organically part of the romantic concepts of life-creation and self-building, and lead the poet to specific socio-cultural practices, in particular, pedagogical ones. The article deals with Zhukovsky's letters to the royal children (Grand Dukes Alexander Nikolayevich, Konstantin Nikolayevich, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna) and their parents, Nicholas I and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, of the 1820s - early 1850s, as well as response letters from these addressees. The aim of the article is to study this part of Zhukovsky's epistolary works from the perspective of its didactic dominant, which researchers have not yet explored. The article models a holistic concept of Zhukovsky's didactics as educative instruction, analyses different strategies for its presentation in letters to royal persons, depending on the addressee, and also considers Zhukovsky's use of epistolary practices for didactic purposes. The author refers to the methodology of research in the field of “court pedagogy”, epistolary practices of the first third of the 19th century, life-building and life-creation, and works about Zhukovsky as a writer-educator. The historical and cultural method of research is also used, which makes it possible to see the place of Zhukovsky's epistolary didactics in the pedagogical tradition. The analysis carried out led to the following conclusions. Most of Zhukovsky's letters of a didactic nature are addressed to his pupil and student, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich. They highlight two of the most common meanings of statements. The first and dominant determines the educational pathos of the text; the second, actually didactic, is the main one in later messages addressed to the Grand Duke about the education of his children. In the letters, as a rule, Zhukovsky focuses on the representation of events from the life of the state through the prism of history as a moral process filled with behavioural models that give the reader the vector of their perception, experience and comprehension. Zhukovsky's letters to Maria Nikolaevna, which develop her figurative thinking, ability to see the world based on the romantic principle of universalism, perceive and create texts based on romantic philosophy, are distinguished by a special style, defined by Zhukovsky as “chatter”, which obviously intersects with Pushkin's storytelling strategies. Zhukovsky's epistolary didactics in relation to Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich is characterised primarily by the range of discussed issues of a philosophical, moral, ethical and aesthetic nature, focused on the idea of life-creation. Zhukovsky adopted his own features of epistolary didactics in relation to the parents of his students. In general, the most significant achievements of Zhukovsky's romantic philosophy, aesthetics and poetics are involved in his epistolary didactics. Created according to the general laws of romantic epistolary literature, the letters of the writer-educator completed his multifaceted creative system as a holistic one.