Epistolary genre is both history and dynamics

Some people believe that the ancient Greeks invented the epistolary genre of writing. Examples of this ancient art were created even three hundred years before our era by Epicurus, although, most likely, the primacy belongs to the cuneiform script. The Athenian was not an orator, his convictions were: "Live alone." The attitude of Epicurus to the surrounding society was friendly, but restrained. The sage penned philosophical and scientific ideas in letters, sharing them with Herodotus, Menekee. Another ancient Greek, educator of Alexander the Great, philosopher Aristotle, highly valued the peculiarities of the epistolary genre - to allow the author to write on his own behalf, ie, to remain himself. The Horatius Roman, who was fascinated by Pushkin, composed amazing, sonorous letters in verse.

In the Middle Ages, this genre has firmly entered the practice of government. An example is the "Correspondence of John the Terrible with Prince Kurbsky" (XVI century). It was believed that the epistolary genre is an art that creates letters that are accumulated and then combined into books (N. Karamzin, "Letters of a Russian traveler"). Speaking of Western literature, it would be fair to mention Goethe's brilliant book The Sorrows of the Young Werther, the works of the French thinker J.-J. Rousseau "New Eloise" and the English classic S. Richardson "Pamela, or Awarded Virtue."

This genre was not left without attention of the classics even in the 19th century. From the pen of A. Pushkin leave "The novel in letters", "The Captain's Daughter", F. Dostoevsky creates the novel "Poor People". Its content is letters from Makar Devushkin to Varenka Dobroselova. The classic achieved by his work an unprecedented reflection of the states of the souls of ordinary people. Unsurpassed psychologist believed that the epistolary genre is the possibility of the shortest way to the souls of readers, because in it the presentation is from the first person!

The rapid development of computer technology and telephony, the creation of man-made intellectual elements - the Internet - gave birth to new forms of the epistolary genre, personal messages: SMS and e-mails (e-mails). Letters, "addressed to all", also did not go unheeded, they are posted by bloggers on their Internet pages. Unprecedented volumes of correspondence serve hundreds of thousands of servers of the World Wide Web. Today's innovative epistolary genre is the new words generated by the scientific and technological revolution. English colloquial abbreviations are used: EA (E-mail alert) - "go to an email"; AYT (are you there) - "Are you here?", B (bye) - "bye." Letters are animated by graphical tools (for example, avatars), as well as iconic icons (for example, emoticons). A new type of word formation is interesting, when the root part of the word uses the Latin alphabet, for example: AVI files, PTP-server. Persons who have access to a particular network resource use an individual name on it - nick (derived from nickname).

Hundreds of millions of users of the World Wide Web receive personal and business correspondence on individual software mailboxes. The latter assumes a wide range of various letters: arbitration, guarantee, instructive, informational, letter-notices, letters of reminder, letters of confirmation, letters of request, claim, advertising, accompanying.

The modern epistolary genre is an obvious prospect for the further development of creative figurative thought. After all, he, like no other kind of literature, is closely connected with the personality of the writer. Before him new linguistic possibilities are opening up, he is associated with emotionality and reflections, a bizarre intertwining of literary and colloquial speech, "ingrown" into everyday vocabulary by new phraseologicalisms, metaphors.