"A candid confession of my deeds and thoughts" by D. I. Fonvizin: a linguo-stylistic essay (to the 280th anniversary of the birth)

Fonvizin’s last work, "A candid confession of my deeds and thoughts" (published in 1798), summarises the linguo-stylistic experience of his entire oeuvre. The language of the biographical narrative reflects the author’s lexical and stylistic preferences in the choice of words, the use of poeticisms, and the arrangement of units belonging to various stylistic registers. The text includes a substantial number of the author’s formal and semantic innovations; many of them later entered the lexical-semantic system of the Russian literary language. The work contains extremely rare features of the classicism linguistic prescription. Moreover, it is to a greater extent oriented towards a sentimentalist reflection of sensual-emotional content. The syntax and style of "A candid confession…" demonstrate a noticeable Western European influence. We note distinct French loan translations in the memoirs. The work shows Fonvizin’s contribution to the word order standardisation of the Russian sentence, as well as to the ordered use of Church Slavonic vocabulary and vernacular. Euphemistically, it reflects the most striking ironic and satirical devices developed by the author during the previous periods of his work.