Sentimentality today : idyllic, elegiac and comic

Since the late 1980’s literary critics have noticed a renaissance of sentimental trends in Russian literature. The so-called "new sentimentality" or "new sincerity" seems to be one of the most essential phenomena in contemporary literature in Russia and at the same time one of the less investigated, as the concept of sentimentality itself is not well-defined. In this paper I attempt to present actual possibilities of conceptualizing the sentimentality beyond the framework of historical sentimentalism and develop my own idea, based on the theory of aesthetic modes: idyllic, elegiac and comic ones.