Elements of carnival aesthetics in ''Letters from France'' by D.I. Fonvizin

Despite a regular usage of laughter principle in ''Letters from France'' by D.I. Fonvizin combined with strongly emphasized hostility to France and the French, the text is far from satirical sketches. Laughter in ''Letters'' is rather close to carnival laughter which is ambivalent in its nature. It denounces and ''slaughters'', and at the same time laughter renews and revives. The evident traces of carnival aesthetics in the text of ''Letters'' prove it. Among these may be mentioned semantic vibration of the events and impressions between the sacred and the profane, between the high and the low, which in the carnival was a means of expression of ''the pathos of change and renewal''. Another distinguishing feature of the ''Letters'' is the too laid-back and almost cheeky tone in describing the events, which corresponds exactly to the familiarity of carnival communication between people, which is alien to any hierarchy. Finally, quite sharp and sarcastic, often to tactlessness, a form of expression of their position in the evaluating of the French reality in their function in the text is comparable to invectives to the ''Aging Deity''. Thus, the idea is overcome by the West as a mythological space and axiologically labeled as ''Paradise'' or the ''Hell''. In fact, Fonvizin debunks Paris as an idea in general, depriving it of any of the divine, sacred meaning, bringing it out of the sphere existence in the sphere of everyday life. France in the ''Letters'' is extraordinary material, visible and plastic. This opens up the possibility of its interpretation in the real socio-cultural, historical and geographical coordinates, which actually happens in the next important text - ''Letters of a Russian Traveler'' by N.M. Karamzin. A key step for such a rethink was overcoming of the dual reality resulted from the opposition and, as shown by historical experience, a total mismatch of noumenal and phenomenal realities that were equally real in the minds of Fonvizin's contemporaries. The key to this was the laughter and carnival principle of the ''Letters'' which as a buffer zone allows two antinomy ideas to come into dialogue relations that are not possible in the ''seriousness'' of the official world.

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