Russian administrative culture through the prism of humor by S.I. Zarudnyj

The paper offers an analysis of the “Letter of an experienced official of the 40s to a younger colleague entering the service” written by S.I. Zarudny. This small work was published by the author's son in the journal “Russkaya Starina” only in 1899 and did not arouse the interest of literary critics. On the other hand, this text, created at the crossroads of epistolary and satirical genres, is a vivid denunciation in the first person, as it was written by a prominent statesman who began his service in Russia under the reign of Nicholas I in the 1840s and made a brilliant career in the era of reforms. With this in mind, the paper proposes to study the text of the “Letter” not so much from a literary perspective as from a semiotic one, in accordance with the concept put forward by Klaus Schwind (Schwind 1988). The linguistic means used to achieve the comic effect will be analyzed with reference to the general theory of verbal humor proposed in the works of Salvatore Attardo (Attardo 2001).