Texts of postcards from the family archive: stereotypical and individual

Abstract

The article examines the texts of greeting postcards from the family archive of the Soviet time, reflecting a special kind of epistolary communications popular in the recent past. Mostly concise, standard messages, they are designed as an expression of positive feelings towards an addressee (love, respect, gratitude). The stylistic design of the texts of greeting cards consists in the use of formulas aimed at enhancing positive emotions of an addressee (individual nature of communication and the special stylistic manner of a writer). The dialogical nature of texts is clearly expressed, which is provided by the use of a variety of linguistic means (interrogative and negative constructions, motivational forms, personal pronouns, emotional and metaphorical vocabulary) which enhance the psychological rapprochement of communication participants. An author’s aspiration to model natural communication is manifested in the use of various
microgenres (greeting / farewell, apology, request). The texts, in addition to congratulations, designed as a greeting on the occasion of a joyful event, contain detailed fragments that are not directly related to the holiday date, being quite informative, which brings the texts of postcards closer to a personal letter genre. The analysis of the semantics of the postcard texts shows that they are devoid of attention to the ideologemes of the Soviet past. Value orientations verbalized in wellwishes and narrative texts represent the idea of peace and tranquility as the foundations of life and human relations. The texts of postcards of the Soviet era are a valuable linguistic material that allows us to discover the relationship between the stereotypical and individual in folk epistolary creativity, reveal the style of relationships between people of the recent era, which is associated with trust and the absence of disunity.