Essays of Sofia Rusova: Factors Influencing the Choice of Genre Form of Publications

Abstract

Introduction. During the entire period of her creative activity, S. Rusova published about 500 publications, which are quite diverse in their genre embodiment – from scientific monographs, educational and methodological textbooks and manuals to literary and critical reviews, reviews, notes, articles, biographical, historicalethnographic and travel essays, etc.
Relevance of research. Analyzing the life and creative path of the educator, it can be seen that the author’s choice of genre form for her own publications often depended on several important factors that significantly influenced this choice: the specific historical period of S. Rusova’s life, the publishing platforms with the financial support of which the works were published, the audience
for which the publishing product was intended; a topic that the author sought to raise in her publications. The purpose of scientific research is to find out how the factors outlined above influenced S.
Rusova’s choice of the genre form of the essay for her own publications. The object of the study was the journalistic heritage of S. Rusova, in particular, the works that corresponded to the essay genre in their form.
Research methods. The main method is comparative-historical, which is used to examine social and cultural phenomena in the context of the era (mid-19th – early 20th centuries), their
relationships with the history of the people, socio-political and economic life. The discursive method helped to determine the connections between a specific publication by S. Rusova and the socio-political situation in the country in a certain historical period. The methods of information selection and its classification were used to select from the entire array of S. Rusova’s journalistic
heritage publications written in the essay genre and classify them according to intra-genre varieties – biographical (portrait), historical-ethnographic (problematic) and travel. A problem-thematic analysis of their content was also carried out. The methods of synthesis and generalization made it possible to draw conclusions and outline the prospects for research on a similar topic.
Conclusions. Having analyzed the creative heritage of S. Rusova, we can state that the author’s journalistic, and even more so, publishing activity is often directly related to the historical
and economic conditions of the time, the state of public opinion, the level of democratization of society, etc. If journalism can be influenced by emotional moments, mental state, appropriate mood, then mostly economic factors contribute to or hinder the implementation of a publishing project. Under the conditions of strict censorship, which prevailed in Right-Bank Ukraine at that time, the young, inexperienced author had to maneuver, searching for and choosing the optimal forms of presenting information. Such an “optimal form in the literary process of the 19th-20th centuries. became essays.