On the question of the time of the creation of the Message of M.N. Muravyov to I.P. Turgenev

The article attempts to resolve the contradiction between the dating of M.N. Muravyov's message to I.P. Turgenev and the official naming of the addressee: "His Excellency". The date adopted since the first publication of the message (1774) and the date clarified in the twentieth century (1780s) do not coincide with the address for the rank of general. This contradiction can be resolved by studying the text of the message, using the methods of contextual, discursive and semantic analysis. Since the genre of Muravyov's epistle can be defined not only as a "friendly", but also as a "comforting message", the examples given in it should reflect the specific circumstances of the addressee's life. These examples, in exact accordance with the genre, are taken from ancient history and literature. These are the "elder" described by Horace, the consul of Ancient Rome Aemilius Paulus and the Spartan commander Pedaret. The research method is a semantic analysis of the text of Muravyov's poem, combined with a comparative analysis of the semantics of the poem and the semantics of literary and historical sources on which the author relied when writing his work. The result of the study is the understanding that the three examples given by the author indicate a number of difficult circumstances in the life of I.P. Turgenev, which occurred in the second half of 1803. At that time, the old comrades worked closely together in the restructuring of the management of Moscow University: Turgenev, as the director of the university, who was completing his activities, and Muravyov, as the incoming trustee of the university. This collaboration created an emotional background for the final part of the message dedicated to Moscow University and those people who led it in the years when M.N. Muravyov and I.P. Turgenev studied there. In this regard, the most likely dating of this poem is the second half of 1803 or the very beginning of 1804.

Eighteenth century Russia, Russian literature, Muravyov, Turgenev, University of Moscow, message genre, Seneka, Derzhavin, Sumarokov, Bogdanovich