Incredible facts
Of course, most of the letters were personal in nature, so it is not surprising that they open us when we look into them.
10. Letter from Fidel Castro to US President Franklin Roosevelt
Fidel Castro “survived” ten presidents in the United States, most of whom wanted to end him. Some even tried. But, Castro's first contact with the US President was very peaceful.
In 1940, a young student at Dolores School in Santiago, Cuba wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt. A 12-year-old boy began his letter like this: "My good friend Roosevelt."
He then greeted the President and told him that he was delighted to hear on the radio that Roosevelt had been reelected. The child also asked for a $ 10 bill because he had never seen it.
Castro wrote that despite his poor English, he is very intelligent. As Fidel put it, "I'm a boy, but I think a lot." The letter arrived at the State Department on November 27, 1940, but Roosevelt never saw it. Franklin died without knowing who Fidel Castro was.
9. Letter from Queen Elizabeth II to American President Eisenhower
In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first President of the United States to entertain the Queen of England. The Queen enjoyed her stay and decided to pay back in kind by inviting the President and his wife to Balmoral, Scotland, two years later.
During the visit, it seemed that the President could not recover from the unsurpassed taste of the royal cakes. Five months after the visit, the queen wrote him a letter in which she told about her own recipe for making these cakes.
The Queen was inspired to write the letter, sent on January 24, 1960, by a photo of the president with a barbecue, which she saw in the newspaper. The recipe also included helpful information on how to prepare food to feed 16 people.
The Queen noted that when fewer than 16 people are seated at the table, then the amount of flour and milk should be reduced when making cakes. She ended the letter with a comment about how much she and her family enjoyed spending time with the president and his wife.
8. Hitler's letter of vacation
On March 1, 1932, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to the state of Brunswick requesting a leave of absence and to be allowed to campaign in the upcoming elections for President of the Reich.
The letter was written 4 days after he officially became a German citizen. Initially, Hitler was an Austrian citizen, and became a German citizen after he was recruited by the state.
Hitler lost the election to incumbent President Paul von Hindenburg. However, a year later, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.
There are many mistakes in the letter. The main content of the letter is Hitler's request for "leave" until the next presidential elections in the Reich. The letter was only discovered a few years ago and was expected to be auctioned for more than £ 5,000.
7. Letter from Albert Einstein to American President Franklin Roosevelt
Albert Einstein's 1939 letter to Roosevelt is spoken of as one of the most significant letters in modern history. In the letter, Albert warned the president that the Germans can create the most powerful weapons.
Einstein himself later said that this letter was one of the biggest mistakes in his life. Some historians believe that the letter was written by Leo Szilard and Einstein only signed it.
Little is known about the other three letters sent by Albert Roosevelt. While the first two letters were of an advisory nature and contained specific suggestions, the last letter contained a request for a favor.
The last letter was not delivered to the president until his death. It may have also been written by Szilard, and it said that it was Szilard was the first to develop the concept of nuclear weapons.
The letter contained a request for a personal meeting between Szilard and his fellow scientists with the President in order to discuss this issue.
Hitler's letters
6. Letter from Gandhi to Adolf Hitler
In 1939-1940, Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler. The more popular of the two letters, Dear Friend, was written in July 1939. Gandhi wrote then that World War II can only be prevented by Adolf Hitler.
He asked the Fuehrer to follow his example of non-violence, and told how much he had achieved with this method. The famous Indian philosopher finished the letter by apologizing to Hitler in case it caused him any discomfort.
The second letter, however, began with a reminder that referring to Hitler as a "friend" was a mere formality. In this letter, written after December 1940, Gandhi compared Hitler's Nazism to British imperialism, which India was trying to resist.
He also warned Hitler that the world of another power will allow him to improve his methods and defeat the enemy with his own weapons.
In conclusion, Gandhi noted that everything he said applies to Mussolini.
5. Job search for Leonardo da Vinci
Long before Leonardo da Vinci became famous for his paintings, he was an ordinary Italian with some skill set. In 1482, at the age of 30, the relatively unknown da Vinci was looking for work.
He wrote directly to the Duke of Milan asking the latter to find him a job.... Da Vinci listed his skills in a long letter, stating what he could do weapons for ships, armored cars, catapults.
Leonardo also noted that he can teach the Duke several very effective methods of attacking and defending himself. Among other things, to show himself not only as a person interested in war, he added that knows how to build bridges and buildings, make sculptures from clay, bronze and marble.
Da Vinci ended the letter, asking the Duke to invite him for a test if he had doubts about Leonardo's specific skills.
Historical letters
4. Letter from Malcolm X to Martin Luther King Jr.
Despite the fact that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King fought for the same idea, they could hardly be called friends. While Martin used non-violent methods in his struggle, Malcolm decided to go the opposite way.
The boiling point between them happened when Malcolm X allegedly named King "Reverend Doctor Chicken Wing". X sent two letters to King, in 1963 and in 1964.
Malcolm X
The first letter was X asking for King's presence and support in the open rally. Malcolm stressed that if the president John F. Kennedy, capitalist, and the Russian leader Khrushchev, communist, could find something in common, then maybe they can.
X also suggested to King that if the latter cannot come himself, then he has the right to send his representative.
Martin Luther King
The second letter, dated June 30, 1964, read "hard sentence"... In this letter he informed King of the plight of the people of St. Augustine. He threatened that if the government did not intervene soon, he would be forced to send some of his brothers from Kuklusklan to "use their own medicines."
3. Letter from Oscar Wilde "De Profundis"
The tense relationship between the Marquis of Queensberry and his son Lord Alfred Douglas is blamed on the latter's relationship with Oscar Wilde, who subsequently spent two years in prison after being convicted of gross seduction.
While in prison, Oscar wrote a letter to Douglas. The letter was published as an essay entitled "De Profundis" (From the Deep). It was a reflection of Douglas' betrayal and Wilde's regrets.
Wilde wrote that he felt abandoned after Douglas publicized the personal letters and poems that Oscar wrote for him. The writer also said that Douglas pushed him into doom by exploiting his weakness.
Why didn't Kubrick respond to the admiration letter from Kurosawa?
Stanley Kubrick was notable for his scrupulousness in directing and always demanded to shoot a large number of takes of one scene. His assistant, Anthony Fruin, spoke of a letter of admiration he received from Akira Kurosawa in the late 1990s. Kubrick himself was a great fan and follower of the Japanese, so he thought for a very long time over the correct answer, having covered many drafts. And when the letter was finally ready, the news came that Kurosawa had died.
Where did Ilf and Petrov get the phrase “The Countess with a changed face is running to the pond”?
In November 1910, Lev Tolstoy decided to once again go on a trip to Russia, but caught a cold on the train and was forced to get off at Astapovo station, where a week later he died of pneumonia. While at the station, Tolstoy sent a letter to his wife - this and all other details of the last days of the count were recognized by the journalists who had arrived here. One of them, Nikolai Efros, sent a report by telegraph to the Rech newspaper about how the countess in Yasnaya Polyana received a letter and decided to drown herself. Among other things, the reportage included the following lines: “without having finished reading the letter, stunned, she threw herself into the garden to the pond; the chef who saw the house ran to say: the countess is running to the pond with her unfaithful face. " The last phrase in the book "Death of Tolstoy" was read by Ilya Ilf and used as the text of one of the telegrams for Koreiko from Ostap Bender.
By what indicator does the Russian postal service take one of the last places in the world?
In 2012, one of the most cited economists in the world, American Andrei Shleifer, presented the results of an experimental study of the work of postal services in various countries. Shleifer, together with his colleagues, sent 2 letters to 5 major cities in each of the 159 countries that have signed international postal agreements, which oblige to deliver letters with addresses in the Latin alphabet and return them to the sender if delivery failed. There were deliberate mistakes in the addresses on the envelopes, so ideally all letters should have come back. As a result, a 100% return rate was recorded by the postal services of 10 countries, including the USA, Canada, Finland, Norway, and the Czech Republic. And Russia, along with countries such as Nigeria, Tajikistan and Cambodia, fell into the group of outsiders - not a single letter was returned from these states.
In which country is the oak tree, which has its own mailing address?
At the end of the 19th century, a German forester forbade his daughter to see her boyfriend. The couple began to exchange love notes through the hollow of an oak tree, and soon the forester, seeing the futility of his prohibition, allowed the young people to get married, and the wedding was celebrated under this tree. Over time, popular rumor spread news about the oak tree, into which people who wanted to find their soul mate began to send letters, first from Germany, and then from other countries of the world. The tree even acquired an official postal address: Bräutigamseiche, Dodauer Forst, 23701 Eutin, and anyone can read all the messages that the postman brings to it and then answer them. Over the entire existence of this dating service, more than 100 marriages have been concluded.
Why did they write letters in England in the 19th century, writing a piece of paper up and down?
In 19th century England, the postage rate was calculated from the number of sheets of paper. Therefore, for the sake of economy, letters were often sent without envelopes - the recipient's address was written on a folded sheet. And in order to fit more text, they often resorted to the so-called crossed writing, when when they reached the end of the page, they turned it 90 ° and wrote new lines across the written ones.
Why did Churchill once mistake Roosevelt's letter for a typographical document?
Typically, typewriters have a monospaced font (when all characters are the same width). In 1944, IBM released a proportional typewriter called Executive and presented the first copy to President Roosevelt. People accustomed to monospaced typewritten text mistook what was printed on the Executive for typewritten documents. Churchill, having received the first such letter from Roosevelt, replied: "Although our correspondence is important, there is no need to print it in the printing house."
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Combining the two most important inventions of mankind - speech and writing - turned out to be not so easy. After all, writing is not only a certain number of signs expressing a certain thought. The letter should contain both the content of the message and the opportunity for another to read, pronounce it. However, people of the time when the first drawings appeared (10-20 thousand years ago) were still unable to divide speech into phrases, sentences into words, words into sounds. While human language expresses grammar, vocabulary, syntactic connections of words, attempts to reflect something in pictures could only express the meaning of the event itself.
That is why the main task of a person has become to combine the symbols depicted with oral speech. Before people learned to do this, "writing" was actually just a set of mnemonic symbols - they allowed the reader to understand what was going on, but did not reflect the actual speech, the peculiarities of the language. So far, every artist who has depicted a hunting scene on the wall with a piece of coal has drawn a tree, an animal, and a grass in his own way. However, gradually the community developed its own norms for reflecting well-known objects: for example, the sun could be depicted as a circle with a dot in the middle, and all members of the tribe knew that it was a heavenly body. This symbol was fixed as an image of the concept of "sun". A similar fixation of symbols gradually occurs with such concepts that are most important for prehistoric man as "man", "woman", "water", "fire", "run", etc. This is how the first writing system appeared - pictographic, or drawing, writing.
1. Pictographic writing.
Some American Indian tribes, up to the 19th century, wrote using pictograms: complex, carefully traced symbols depicted concepts and entire stories through simple visual similarities. For example, here are some of these pictograms, written by the Delaware tribe, in the "reading" that the authors themselves had in mind: 
1. "Some were eaten by many large fish."
2. "The woman moon with the boat helped." Come! "She came, she came and helped everyone."
3. "Nanabush, great-grandfather of all, great-grandfather of people, ancestor of the Turtle tribe."
Obviously, many ancient civilizations used pictograms for writing - this is the simplest form for the necessary economic or monumental records. The pictograms are always clear, even to a relatively illiterate reader, and easy to depict. In this connection, scientists believe that pictography originated independently in several regions of the world at approximately the same time. The first known pictographic systems were created ca. 3000 BC by the Egyptians in northwestern Africa and the Sumerians in the southern Mesopotamia.
Already in the earliest Egyptian inscriptions dating from 2900-2800. BC. the principles of the writing system are clearly visible. Each symbol is a small image, the necessary property of which was similarity with the depicted object. The principle of the Sumerian pictograms, the predecessors of the famous Mesopotamia cuneiform, is practically analogous.
However, the shortcomings of pictographic writing became immediately visible to a person. First of all, depicting even a short story took a long time, since each symbol had to be carefully drawn. Moreover, if pictograms could depict objects, then how to depict colors, abstract concepts, pronouns, personal names? The verbs could still be sorted out with a squeak: the Egyptians drew a man with a plow to indicate the action of "plowing" or eyes with tears for "crying". But how do you draw words like "big", "north", "anger", "stand"? 
And it was at this stage that a person for the first time in history was forced to combine oral and written speech into a single system. In ancient Egyptian, the words "swallow" and "big" sound the same: wr
... With no other way to draw the word "big," the Egyptians began to draw the swallow icon instead. A way out was found: soon the scribes were able to write down many abstract concepts. The letter took on real meaning.
At the same time, another revolution is taking place in the history of writing. Now that scribes could write down coherent texts, it took too long for them to do so. A tendency to simplify symbols has appeared and has become more and more intensified in order to make their writing more convenient and easy, as well as to adapt pictograms to the material on which they were depicted. Such simplified pictograms, having become common, were understandable to both scribes and readers of documents. And at that moment, when the shape of the symbol completely ceased to resemble a drawing, having turned only into a combination of features, human writing entered a new stage.
2. Hieroglyphic writing.
Hieroglyphs represent words. Ancient hieroglyphic systems are built on the same principles - be they ancient Egyptian, Chinese or Mayan hieroglyphs in America. The sources of origin of hieroglyphs are also of the same type - everywhere they are the result of the development of pictograms. The most important differences in the more progressive hieroglyphic writing are the simplified, stylized form of symbols and their smaller number.
Hieroglyphs are usually classified into three groups. The first group is logograms, or ideograms, i.e. signs denoting concepts, whether it be an object or an action: "head", "walk", "sword", etc.
The second includes symbols based on a phonetic principle: as, for example, the already mentioned sign "swallow" for the adjective "big". Such phonograms existed in ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese writing. Abstract concepts, many verbs, adjectives, geographical and proper names are always indicated by phonograms.
The third group of symbols are determinatives: signs that help the reader to determine the meaning of the next or previous word even before reading it soundly. For example, in Sumerian cuneiform, male names were always preceded by a determinative in the form of a vertical bar. Separate determinants were used before the names of kings, queens, names of cities, countries, rivers, etc. Today's Chinese characters have a similar phenomenon: the symbol with the meaning "tree" is present in the composition of many hieroglyphs denoting wooden objects or types of trees; the sign "water" is in many hieroglyphs, which has a "water" theme - for example, "stream", "ice". In ancient Egyptian writing, determinatives were also numerous and followed the word.
Hieroglyphics makes people memorize hundreds and even thousands of signs: there were more than 50 thousand of them in ancient China. It is quite natural that people tried, firstly, to reduce their number, and secondly, to simplify the styles. In conditions when more and more people became literate, logograms gradually lost their need, and phonetic signs, on the contrary, multiplied. For example, in late Assyrian cuneiform, the heiress of the Sumerian cuneiform, the name of the city of Arbela was written as (city) Arba "ilu , in the composition of this word were the determinative "city", the sign "four" (read arbau ) and sign ilu "God". The writing system "one symbol - one word" was gradually transformed into the system "one symbol - one syllable".
3. Syllabic writing.
Writing, consisting of syllabic signs, has become an important step forward for humanity in comparison with hieroglyphics. First of all, there are much fewer characters in the letter - usually from 30 to 100 (there are 182 in the Ethiopian syllabary alphabet). None of them reflect objects, and therefore their writing is quite simple and consists of simple lines and dots.
Classic examples of syllabic writing include the Cypriot syllabary (1200-400 BC), the Old Persian cuneiform script (500-300 BC). Most of the modern alphabets of India and Southeast Asia also have a syllabic character. Typically, syllabic characters consist of a combination of "consonant + vowel" or of one vowel, i.e. only open syllables can be written. The phonetics of some Asian languages are very well suited for this kind of writing - for example, Japanese, in which words are almost always composed of open syllables. On the other hand, many languages are completely inconsistent with this principle, as, for example, the languages of the Indo-European family. The Mycenaean Greek texts use Linear B and show well how the language is deformed by syllabic writing. Greek word anthropos could only be written as a-to-ro-po-se .
4. The alphabet.
In search of a more convenient way of expressing the peculiarities of their language, people went further in the development of writing. The next, last revolution in the history of writing occurred with the invention around 1100 BC. in Palestine of the West Semitic alphabet. Its most characteristic variety is the Phoenician alphabet, the ancestor of all types of writing that exist in Europe today: the Latin script, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Greek alphabet.
The principle of the alphabet is so simple that it seems surprising why people did not think of this before: each sign corresponds to one sound. Thus, writing began to convey pronunciation absolutely clearly. True, in the Phoenician alphabet itself, only consonants were indicated in writing, and vowels were omitted. But all the same - it is much more for a person to read texts with a set of 22 characters than to learn a collection of 2000 hieroglyphs. It turned out that no determinants were needed either.
Each letter of the Phoenician alphabet had its own name: alef, bet, gimel, dalet, zayin etc. The order of the letters in the alphabet was strictly fixed. Modern alphabets have added little to this system. The Greeks added letters for vowel sounds and thus made the alphabet almost perfect. The later writing system - Latin, Cyrillic, runic - simply repeated the idea of the alphabet, without adding anything new to it.
Is the alphabet the best and most successful writing system for humanity? In any case, from a historical point of view, it seems to be the most progressive type of writing. All over the world (with the exception of conservative China), hieroglyphic systems have gradually been replaced by syllabic or alphabetical types of writing. Attempts by mankind to come up with new types of writing only repeat the main stages described here.
It is interesting that today the development of writing is going in an interesting direction. In the case when it is necessary to express a certain idea for representatives of any language, we again return to pictograms. What else are road signs, badges on clothing labels ("do not iron", "wash at 30 degrees", etc.) or signs at an international airport? The need for international communication dictates the need to return to ideographic writing. But thank God, still not always to the picturesque. We all know what the $ sign stands for. This is an ideogram, a symbol, not a direct image of the dollar.
There is no doubt that the development of human writing will go further. There is no doubt that this story is not over - it will still present to our attention many interesting phenomena.
Information from the site "Linguistics".
Website address: http://language.babaev.net/index.html
Origin of writing
Information from the site dedicated to the Russian letter.
Site author: Sergey Vladimirovich Kuznetsov.
Website address:
The history of letters: interesting facts THE FLOWER OF THE EPISTOLAR GENRE For many centuries, letters remained the only connection between people at a distance. People entrusted their innermost feelings and thoughts to a piece of paper. It was the correspondence that became an inexhaustible storehouse of information for historians. Good style and style were highly valued in those days. No wonder many initially wrote a draft of the letter, and only then rewrote it completely - without blots and with corrections. N.I. Grech "Educational book of Russian literature": "Letters in the exact meaning of the word, the essence of conversations or conversations with the absent. They take the place of oral conversation, but include the speech of only one person. When writing letters, you must follow the rule: write as you would in this case, but speak correctly, coherently and pleasantly. " It is not surprising that in the literature of the 17th-19th centuries the epistolary genre was used with might and main, when the plot of a novel was based solely on the correspondence of characters or a character. Jean Honore Fragonard "Love Letter" This includes the famous novel by C. de Laclos "Dangerous Liaisons" (1782), built on the correspondence of two inveterate intriguers, libertines and cynics - de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil. By the way, in the preface, the writer tries to convince the reader that the letters are genuine, and he only edited them. JV Goethe did not claim the authenticity of his "The Suffering of Young Werther". Nevertheless, this novel, in letters about the tragic love of a hero who eventually commits suicide, had very real consequences. Wanting to imitate the romantic hero, many young readers of "Werther" began ... to voluntarily part with their lives. Fyodor Dostoevsky's first novel Poor People (1845) was also written in the epistolary genre. Indeed, what is better than correspondence can depict the psychological nuances of the characters that Fyodor Mikhailovich loved to explore so much ... AS Pushkin "Novel in Letters": "Liza - Yours ... Write to me as as often as possible and as much as possible - you cannot imagine what it means to wait for the post day in the village. The expectation of the ball cannot be equal to it. " LETTERS ACCORDING TO A PATTERN For those who lacked their own thoughts and style, special "letters" were issued - books with samples of a wide variety of written messages - from requests and complaints to the authorities to love explanations and congratulations. Here are just some of the particularly funny types of letters mentioned in "Writers": "Letters of exhortation", "Letters of imperative", "Letters containing simple courtesy", "Letters, which contain the search for friendship or affection", "Letters when needed writing to someone for the first time "and even" Witty Letters ". .. However, today's postcards with already printed congratulations look even worse, and have always seemed bad form to me. Jan Vermeer "Lady in blue reading a letter". LETTERS ARE NOT ONLY VALUABLE TEXT ... Sometimes words seemed few and to enhance the emotional effect, letters were decorated with monograms, fastened with kisses, strangled with perfumery, written on paper of different colors. In England at the end of the 19th century, there was even such a funny fashionable belief: on a certain day of the week, letters were written on paper of a certain color. So the color of sea green was assigned to Monday, pale pink for Tuesday, gray for Wednesday, light blue for Thursday, silver for Friday, yellow for Saturday, and only on Sunday they wrote on traditional white paper. "BLACK OFFICE" "I don't like it when they read letters, looking over my shoulder ..." - Vladimir Vysotsky sang once. But no matter what the senders sealed their letters, there were always those who wanted to violate the secrecy of correspondence. First of all, this, of course, concerned the rulers who wanted to figure out - is not anyone writing something seditious? Richelieu, Napoleon, and even Alexander the Great sinned similarly. They say that the latter deliberately forced his soldiers to write letters home in order to read them afterwards and determine the state of mind and the degree of loyalty of subordinates. As for Napoleon, he went further - he created a whole department of control over correspondence, which was called the "black office". A certain Nogeler was made postmaster general by the emperor - solely for his talent for unnoticed printing of other people's letters. Here you can also recall a case from the life of Anna Akhmatova. When one letter from abroad went to the Soviet poetess for two whole months, someone joked that it probably went on foot. To which Akhmatova immediately added: "And it is still unknown with whom under the arm." ALONG and FAST The cost of mailing a letter depended on its weight. Therefore, in the old days (up to the end of the 19th century), many people tried to save on the amount of paper. When they had finished writing the paper to the end, they turned it 90 degrees and continued to write - perpendicular to the existing text. The more thrifty ones managed to add text also at an angle of 45 degrees, and the most inventive used other ink at each turn to make the lines more legible. Up and down It is this bad habit that the author of "Alice in Wonderland" and a fan of the epistolary genre, Lewis Carroll, condemned. In his treatise "Eight or Nine Wise Words on How to Write Letters," he wrote: ". ..if you have covered the entire sheet of paper to the end and you have something else to say, take another sheet, a whole one, or a piece - as needed, but do not write across what has already been written! ". ADDRESSES Remember the textbook little boy Vanka Zhukov from the story of A. Chekhov, who ingenuously wrote the address "To the village to grandfather" on the envelope of the letter? T. Gaponenko Illustration for A. Chekhov's story Vanka So in the old days strange addresses were far from literary fiction. Before the appearance of house numbering, postmen (and even senders) had a hard time. In order for the letter to fall into the right hands, the address had to be indicated with all the details - such and such a floor, a turn to the right, etc. N. Gogol "The Inspector General": "Korobkin (reads the address). To his honor, gracious sir, Ivan Vasilyevich Tryapichkin, in St. Petersburg, in Pochtamskaya street, in the house at number ninety-seventh, turns to the courtyard, on the third floor to the right. Well, not an address, but some kind of "reprimant"! " There were even worse addresses. For example, "Deliver to the street facing the church wing at the end of Lombard Street." Or "Give this letter to the lawyer Bogdan Neyolov in Moscow at the Novgorodskoye courtyard of Safesky, and give him back, without detaining Fedot Tikhanovich." WHY WRITE LETTERS TODAY I understand perfectly well that progress cannot be stopped. Phones, email, and social media have long supplanted paper letters from mainstream use. It would seem, what's the difference - is the letter typed on a computer or written on a sheet? But email still loses the subtle sense of authenticity and warmth that handwritten writing has. Indeed, even in the old days, it was considered indecent to type personal letters on a typewriter. A. Laktionov Letter from the Front In addition, letters did not reach immediately before the appearance of e-mail. Therefore, they wrote them more thoughtfully and in detail, learned to somehow express their thoughts, and therefore, to organize these thoughts in the head. From old correspondence, it was easy to restore many events and even feel the spirit of the times. However, e-mails could also be an acceptable substitute, if more convenient conversational methods of communication did not appear - like a mobile phone and Skype, where you can easily chat about anything. Nevertheless, the paper letter still has an indisputable argument - its material essence. Critical messages are still considered authentic if they have an ink signature or a wet seal.
Letters long centuries remained the only connection between people at a distance. People entrusted their innermost feelings and thoughts to a piece of paper. Exactly correspondence became inexhaustible a treasure trove of information for historians.
Good style and style were highly valued in those days. No wonder many initially wrote a draft of the letter, and only then rewrote it completely - without blots and with corrections.
N.I. Grech "Educational book of Russian literature":
« Letters in the exact meaning of the word, the essence of conversations or conversations with the absent. They take the place of oral conversation, but include the speech of only one person. When writing letters, you must follow the rule: write as you would in this case, but speak correctly, coherently and pleasantly. "
It is not surprising that in the literature of the 17th-19th centuries, epistolary genre, when the plot of a novel was based solely on the correspondence of characters or a character.
This includes the famous novel by C. de Laclos "Dangerous Liaisons" (1782), built on the correspondence of two inveterate intriguers, libertines and cynics - de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil. By the way, in the preface, the writer tries to convince the reader that the letters are genuine, and he only edited them.
JV Goethe did not claim the authenticity of his "The Suffering of Young Werther". Nevertheless, this novel, in letters about the tragic love of a hero who eventually commits suicide, had very real consequences. Wanting to imitate the romantic hero, many young readers of "Werther" began ... to voluntarily part with their lives.
V epistolary genre F. Dostoevsky's first novel Poor People (1845) was also written. Indeed, what is better than correspondence can depict the psychological nuances of the characters that Fyodor Mikhailovich loved to explore so much ...
A. Pushkin "Novel in Letters":
"L and z a - S a w e
... Write to me as often and as much as possible - you cannot imagine what it means to wait for the postal day in the village. The anticipation of the ball cannot be equal to it. "
LETTERS BY PATTERN
For those who lacked their own thoughts and style, special "letters" were issued - books with samples of various written messages- from requests and complaints to the authorities to loving explanations and congratulations. Here are just some of the particularly funny types of letters mentioned in "Writers": "Letters of exhortation", "Letters of imperative", "Letters containing simple courtesy", "Letters, which contain the search for friendship or affection", "Letters when needed writing to someone for the first time "and even" Witty Letters "...
However, today's postcards with already printed congratulations look even worse, and have always seemed bad form to me.
LETTERS ARE NOT ONLY VALUABLE TEXT ...
Sometimes words seemed to be few and to strengthen the emotional effect of writing decorated with monograms, fastened with kisses, strangled with perfumery, wrote on paper of different colors.
In England at the end of the 19th century there was even such a funny fashionable belief: on a certain day of the week letters wrote on paper of a certain color. So the color of sea green was assigned to Monday, pale pink for Tuesday, gray for Wednesday, light blue for Thursday, silver for Friday, yellow for Saturday, and only on Sunday they wrote on traditional white paper.
"BLACK OFFICE"
"I do not like it when they read letters, looking over my shoulder ... "- Vladimir Vysotsky sang once.
But no matter what the senders sealed their letters, there were always those who wanted to violate the secrecy of correspondence. First of all, this, of course, concerned the rulers who wanted to figure out - is not anyone writing something seditious?
Richelieu, Napoleon, and even Alexander the Great sinned similarly. They say that the latter deliberately forced his soldiers to write letters home in order to read them afterwards and determine the state of mind and the degree of loyalty of subordinates.
As for Napoleon, he went further - he created a whole department of control over correspondence, which was called the "black office". A certain Nogeler was made postmaster general by the emperor - solely for his talent for unnoticed printing of other people's letters.
Here you can also recall a case from the life of Anna Akhmatova. When one letter from abroad went to the Soviet poetess for two whole months, someone joked that it probably went on foot. To which Akhmatova immediately added: "And it is still unknown with whom under the arm."
ALONG and POPEROK
Price postage the letter depended on its weight. Therefore, in the old days (up to the end of the 19th century), many people tried to save on the amount of paper. When they had finished writing the paper to the end, they turned it 90 degrees and continued to write - perpendicular to the existing text. The more thrifty ones managed to add text also at an angle of 45 degrees, and the most inventive used other ink at each turn to make the lines more legible.
It is this bad habit that the author of "Alice in Wonderland" and a fan of the epistolary genre, Lewis Carroll, condemned. In his treatise Eight or Nine Wise Words on How to Write Letters, he wrote: "... if you have covered the entire sheet of paper to the end and you have something else to say, take another sheet, a whole one, or a scrap - as needed, but do not write across what has already been written!".
ADDRESSES
Do you remember the textbook boy Vanka Zhukov from the story of A. Chekhov, who artlessly wrote the address "To the village to grandfather" on the envelope of the letter?
So in the old days, strange addresses were far from literary fiction. Before the appearance of house numbering, postmen (and even senders) had a hard time. In order for the letter to fall into the right hands, the address had to be indicated with all the details - such and such a floor, a turn to the right, etc.
N. Gogol "The Inspector General":
“K about r about b kin (reads the address). To his honor, gracious sir, Ivan Vasilyevich Tryapichkin, in St. Petersburg, in Pochtamskaya street, in the house at number ninety-seventh, turns to the courtyard, on the third floor to the right. Well, not an address, but some kind of "reprimant"! "
There were even worse addresses. For instance, Deliver to the street facing the church wing at the end of Lombard Street... Or "Give this letter to the solicitor Bogdan Neyolov in Moscow at the Novgorodskoye courtyard of Safesky, and you are welcome to give it to Fedot Tikhanovich without detaining him.".
WHY WRITE LETTERS TODAY
I understand perfectly well that progress cannot be stopped. Phones, Email and social networks have long supplanted paper letters from mainstream use.
It would seem, what's the difference - is the letter typed on a computer or written on a sheet? But email all the same, it loses that elusive sense of authenticity and warmth that handwritten has. Indeed, even in the old days, it was considered indecent to type personal letters on a typewriter.
Also, before the appearance Email the letters did not reach instantly. Therefore, they wrote them more thoughtfully and in detail, learned to somehow express their thoughts, and therefore, to organize these thoughts in the head. From old correspondence, it was easy to restore many events and even feel the spirit of the times. However, and emails could be an acceptable replacement if more convenient conversational methods of communication did not appear - like a cell phone and Skype, where you can easily chat about anything.
Nevertheless, the paper letter still has an indisputable argument - its material essence. Critical messages are still considered authentic if they have an ink signature or a wet seal.