It is not about the rhetorical literature defined by S. Averintsev as reflective traditionalism or by A. Mikhailov as the culture of the „pre-made“ word that we are going to talk about below, but rather about one historical and national segment, and a segment, moreover, that is not the most representative aesthetically, namely, the Russian literature of the 18th and the early 19th centuries. This extreme limitation of the literary horizon is justified, at least in part, by the following three circumstances. The first (and the most obvious) lies in the impossibility of discussing rhetorical culture in its entirety within...