Emissaries' accounts of the 17th century: variety of genres, linguistic richness of content

The 17th century in Russian history is the period of geographical discoveries, territorial expansion and foreign diplomatic contacts development. Active state business life caused the appearance of "prikaz" language, within which the special diplomatic sort of language was formed from the mixing of church-literary, documentary and popular speech elements. This type of language is presented in numerous emissaries' accounts about their travels to different countries. In these texts, the commonplace standardization is organically combined with individual features. The emissaries' reports continued the secular tradition of chronicles and greatly influenced the genre repertoire, the general development of secular literature in Russia, that is why they are an attractive material for research. At first, historians paid attention to these materials, then specialists in the study of literature and art. Linguists recognized them as the information origin for the study of the documentary style, Russian literary language basis and diplomatic vocabulary history. These materials allow to extend this list of linguistic problems essentially, as there are two facts that seriously raise the linguistic richness of the content of emissaries' accounts. First, the reports are similar texts of different genres; secondly, there are some versions of one genre. Thus, the first fact allows to reveal the genre features of the documents validly, the second one to study the nominative variations and the linguistic expression of the author's intentions, as variants of reports were created in different time and in different circumstances: during the travel or after returning home or to Moscow, there inevitably were corrections of the trip event account. The author thinks that the study of the origin from the linguopersonology point is the most interesting one, as emissary's individuality, his world-view, vocabulary, his skills and habits to make a connected narration become apparent through his perception of the strange world events which were unfamiliar to him before the trip. The naive-pragmatic way of world apprehension, characteristic of that period of Russian aesthetic thought history, is fully displayed in these texts. All the above-stated allows to affirm that the emissaries' accounts are the valuable linguistic material and their study has great perspectives based on the richness and diversity of the linguistic data and facts about their bearers during the most interesting period of Russian history.

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