For some reason, they believe that the ancient Greeks invented the epistolary genre of writing. Examples of this ancient art were created three hundred years before our era by Epicurus, although, most likely, cuneiform writing is the first. The Athenian was not a speaker; his beliefs read: "Live in solitude." The attitude of Epicurus to the surrounding society was friendly, but restrained. The sage stated philosophical and scientific ideas in letters, sharing them with Herodotus, Menekey. Another ancient Greek, the tutor of Alexander the Great, philosopher Aristotle, highly appreciated the features of the epistolary genre - to allow the author to write on his own behalf, that is, to remain himself. The Roman Horace, whom Pushkin was fond of, composed amazing sonorous letters in verse.
In the Middle Ages, this genre firmly entered the practice of government. An example is the “Correspondence of Ivan the Terrible with the Prince of Kurbs” (XVI century). It was believed that the
epistolary genre is an art that creates letters that are accumulated and then combined into books (N. Karamzin, “Letters of a Russian Traveler”). Speaking of Western literature, it would be fair to mention Goethe's brilliant book The Suffering of Young Werther, the work of the French thinker J.-J. Rousseau "New Eloise" and the English classic S. Richardson "Pamela, or the awarded virtue."
This genre did not remain without the attention of classics in the 19th century. From the pen of A. Pushkin come out “Novel in Letters”, “Captain's Daughter”, F. Dostoevsky creates the novel “Poor People”. Its contents are letters from Makar Devushkin to Varenka Dobroselova. The classic achieved in his work an unprecedented reflection of the states of the souls of ordinary people. The unsurpassed psychologist believed that the epistolary genre is the possibility of the shortest path to the souls of readers, because in it the presentation comes from the first person!
The rapid development of computer technology and telephony, the creation of man-made intellectual elements - the Internet - gave rise to new forms of the epistolary genre, personal messages: SMS and e-mails (emails). Letters “addressed to everyone” also did not go unnoticed; they are posted by bloggers on their web pages. Unheard of earlier volumes of correspondence serve hundreds of thousands of World Wide Web servers. Today's groundbreaking epistolary genre is the new words generated by the STR. English spoken abbreviations are used: EA (E-mail alert) - “go to the email”; AYT (are you there) - "Are you here?", B (bye) - "bye." Letters enliven graphic means (for example, avatars), as well as iconic icons (for example, emoticons). A new type of word formation is curious when the root of the word uses the Latin alphabet, for example: AVI files, PTP server. Persons who have gained access to a specific network resource use an individual name on it - nickname (derived from nickname).
Hundreds of millions of users of the World Wide Web receive personal and business correspondence on individual software mailboxes. The latter involves a wide range of different letters: arbitration, guarantee, instructive, informational, notification letters, reminder letters, confirmation letters, request letters, claim, advertising, accompanying letters .
The modern epistolary genre is obvious prospects for the further development of creative imaginative thought. After all, he, like no other kind of literature, is closely connected with the personality of the writer. New linguistic opportunities are opening up before him, it is associated with emotionality and reflection, a bizarre interweaving of literary and colloquial speech, new phraseological units, metaphors that have “grown” into everyday vocabulary.