Manifestation of the Author’s Image Category in the Characteristics of the Reign of Peter the Great (based on the material of V.O. Klyuchevsky “Russian History”)

The article analyzes the features of the manifestation of the category of the author’s image in the work of V.O. Klyuchevsky’s “Russian History” on the example of the characteristics of the reign of the outstanding Russian monarch - Peter I, whose reign, which dramatically changed the progressive development of Russian life, had an extremely contradictory influence on the fate of the Russian Empire until its collapse in 1917. The purpose of the work is to prove that the interpretation of the text from the standpoint of the category of the author’s image, as a supercategory serving as the organizing principle and focus of the essence of the text, reveals the internal unity of the text, not only artistic but also scientific, especially as complex and non-trivial as V.O. Klyuchevsky, possessing the highest cognitive, ethical and aesthetic value. In the course of the study, as a result of correlation of the author’s self with the content being introduced and the establishment of the principle of selecting facts exposed in the book by V.O. Klyuchevsky analysis, the scientific method that is not directly formulated in the historian’s work is explicated, which allows reconstructing the author’s image as the image of a researcher. Observation of the features of the linear development of the text makes it possible to discover ways of reinforcing meanings, to assess the degree of their fixation, and therefore, to actualize, derive fixed meanings, establish their general meaningful orientation and, on this basis, reconstruct the value-ethical side of the author’s image. Extrapolation of the concept of the image of the author, developed by V.V. Vinogradov for a systematic analysis of a literary text, designed to establish the features of each conditionally distinguished level of the text and the principle of matching all levels with each other, into scientific texts can significantly expand our understanding of the scope of application of systematic methods of analysis.