My Confession of Prince P. A. Vyazemsky

My Confession (1829) of P. A. Vyazemsky, one of the most important historical, literary and autobiographical documents of the 19th century, has never been the subject of independent study. Its focus of attention is the period of the Prince’s civil service in Warsaw, which predetermined not only the formation of his ideas of liberalism and constitutionalism, but also the collapse of his career as a civil servant in 1821. The article makes an attempt to identify the main formal-meaningful constants of My Confession. As a result of the study, the immediate motif and reasons for the prince’s resort to confession, his addressee, the main goal and discursive practices are identified. The author of the article states that My Confession does not contain religious connotations; its main content is the consistent presentation of events, facts, thoughts, feelings (in the form in which they appear in the mind of the Prince almost a decade later), as well as the exposure of the libels of ill-wishers and the restoration of a good name. It is noted that the general autobiographical confessional strategy of Vyazemsky determines both the author’s repentance of the political “errors” of liberal youth and the exposition / propaganda of liberal views due to active auto-citation; at the same time, the fundamental attitude towards veracity is combined with the so-called “Political correctness” (allowing conscious silence about certain events, facts, persons in order to avoid knowingly lying).