Digital Anthropology of Emotions: A Sentiment Analysis of Diaries and Letters of Russian State Leaders in the 18th-19th Centuries

This research is situated at the intersection of digital humanities, the history of emotions, and computational linguistics. The article presents the results of the sentiment analysis of the epistolary heritage and diary entries of three key figures of the Russian monarchy: Catherine II, Alexander I, and Nicholas I. The total corpus of analyzed texts amounted to over 2 million word usages. Using models of deep learning BERT (XLMRoBERTaLarge and Conversational RuBERT) adapted for historical texts, the authors reconstruct the emotional dynamics of communication throughout a turbulent century—from Enlightened absolutism to the crisis of the Nicholas system. The study confirms the hypothesis of a stable correlation between the genre of the document (official letter vs. private diary) and the degree of emotional expressiveness, as well as identifies specific lexical markers of anxiety during periods of political instability (on the eve of the Decembrist revolt and during the Crimean War). Methodologically, the research is based on three conceptual foundations. Firstly, it is the theory of emotional communities by B. Rosenwein, according to which emotions are constructed within social groups with shared values and norms of expression. Secondly, it adopts the semiotic approach of Yu. M. Lotman in studying the everyday behavior of the Russian nobility. Thirdly, it employs methodologies of computational text analysis. The hypothesis of this study is as follows: the emotional tone of the personal correspondence and diaries of Russian monarchs is not so much a spontaneous expression of an individual psychological state, but rather a ritualized social action, subject to the cultural codes of the era and genre canon. The aim of the study is to conduct a comprehensive historical-linguistic analysis of the emotional tone of the epistolary and diary heritage of Russian statesmen of the 18th-19th centuries using digital text processing methods, to identify stable emotional patterns and their connection with historical-biographical context. It has been established that the sentimentalist tradition of the late 18th century paradoxically combined with hypertrophied emotional restraint in official communication, creating an effect of "emotional dissonance," which was resolved in the literature and journalism of the 19th century. This work contributes to the methodology of analyzing historical texts, demonstrating the possibilities and limitations of NLP tools when working with archaic vocabulary and bilingual corpora (Russian-French linguistic dualism).