The Brief History of Russian Obituary

Authors

• Kira Onipko Saint Petersburg State University

Abstract

Up to the 1990s, the genre of the obituary was a wide-spread genre of printed media in Russia. From the beginning of the 19th century, the obituary suffered some significant changes and even served as an instrument in different social and political manipulations. Some modern Russian researchers consider that this genre is dying nowadays, but it is not entirely true. Presently, obituaries are still popular in periodicals of small Russian towns and regional centers as well as in designated magazines. This review is aimed at the short description of the history of Russian obituary and its contemporary state. The researcher focuses on the different manners of speaking about the subject of the obituary and his/her characteristics, and on the representation of his/her biography. For this purpose, it is very important to examine the social and historical context of each period when the obituaries have been created. It can be said that the writing of obituaries is a specific practice, the specific social action that puts the death of the most prominent or remarkable person into the public space. Any biographic text is a social utterance and a narrative, designed to conceptualize actual social processes for contemporaries.