Reflexion of literariness (literary style) in a Russian sentimental story

The paper examines one of important peculiarities of Russian sentimental stories of the 18th century – emphasized «literariness» of their appeals and images. Such an architecture of a text was determined by the specificity of the historical and cultural conditions under which new narrative forms were in the making and the Russian senti-mentalists were forming their own semantic memory, or “literary vocabulary”. This process of reflexion over the aesthetic nature of a literary text was reiterated and kept on in the prose of the Russian writers of the 1st half of the 19th century (A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol’, M.Yu. Lermontov, A. Pogorelskiy, M.V. Zhukova etc.), and that represented a common trend of artistic thinking of the time.