The article considers the debut novels by A. F. Pisemsky and Ye. E. Driansky, which defined the development direction for the prose department of Moskvityanin journal during the ‘young editorial board’ time under the supervision of A. N. Ostrovskiy. Specific features of the individual styles of both writers and the closeness of their aesthetic positions to the program of the journal have been defined.
The article contains a first time comprehensive analysis of A. F. Pisemsky’s major epistolary addressed to the editor of the journal Otechestvenniye Zapiski A. A. Krayevsky. This literary work exhaustively features the writer’s point of view on the issues of contemporary literature, literary censorship, and free thought in Russia. The letter is regarded as one of the unregistered acts within the framework of Russian writers’ public campaign of 1861 for the ease of censorship.
The article presents a consecutive chronological analysis of three program articles by P. V. Annenkov dedicated to A. F. Pisemsky’s works from the perspective of the individual and poetic, topical, but, in the first place, the most important for the critic, genre analysis.
The article contains an overall systematic and comparative analysis of the critical reviews on A. F. Pisemsky’s novel A Thousand Souls in the contemporaneous printed media. The analysis is done from the following points: journal discussion of the type of Pisemsky’s talent, innovations in the image of the main character, and the novel problem range and its relation to the «accusatory literature» of the 1850s.
The article considers A. F. Pisemsky’s continuing classicist tradition represented by P. A. Katenin and overcoming it in the course of developing his unique writer’s and playwright’s poetic language on the model of a specific drama technique (deus ex machina). It has been established that Pisemsky reconsidered the key figure of classicist theatre from different perspectives: gender, age, space and time, but first and foremost from moral and didactic point of view.
