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Abstract:

The study aims to examine the rhetoric of sincerity, the sincere subject and the semantics of sincere speech in the space of Russian literature of several centuries: from Sentimentalism to Metamodernism. The contexts of sincerity are identified in the works of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, which sometimes equate sincerity and truthfulness, connecting sincerity and virtue. The sincere hero of the era of Sentimentalism, attentive to the inner world of a person and relying on ego-textuality, in one way or another influences the set of properties of the characters of the Russian 19^th-century writers. At the same time, the development of lyric poetry in the 18^th‒20^th centuries allows to establish the types of statements that are recognized as sincere in the poetic text and even to form a gallery of “sincere poets.” The 20^th century, with its diversity of philosophical trends, concepts of personality, and especially Postmodernism, carry out a revision of sincerity as a multidimensional phenomenon, however, already in the depths of postmodernity, the rehabilitation of the subject is taking place and the era of “new sincerity” is predicted. It is the “new sincerity” formulated by D.A. Prigov, but conceptually redesigned in the humanitarian thought of the 2000s, that determined the semantics and rhetoric of a number of literary phenomena: from Post-Conceptualism to “new Realism” and documentary theater. It is also important to trace the transformation of the “new sincerity” into the “newest sincerity” as the conceptually underdeveloped post-postmodernity in the 2010s‒2020s is replaced by metamodernity coupled with “new sensitivity” and “new ethics.”

Keywords: sincerity, “new sincerity”, the “newest sincerity”, Sentimentalism, Postmodernism, “new sensitivity”, Metamodernism.