Verhnevolzhski philological bulletin

The article is devoted to the analysis of Ivan Bunin’s short story «Birds of Heaven» (1927), which originally appeared in print under the title «Poor is the Devil» (1909). In contrast to earlier research, the article focuses not only on the central character of the narrative, the wandering beggar Luke, the «bird of heaven», but also on the image of the «nameless» character of the student Voronov. The «bird» symbolism of the pair images is traced, explicating the most important aspects of each of the characters in their juxtaposition to one another. It is shown that folklore and religious imagery and symbolism mediate not only the character of the wandering beggar Luke («light»), revealing his spiritual, «heavenly» essence, but also explicate the features of the character and portrait of the young hero-student. The surname Voronov, derived from the lexeme «raven», a fearsome bird and often associated in folklore with evil spirits, actualizes axiological markers in the behavior and perception of the young master’s judgments. The «nameless» hero, often interpreted by researchers as a collective character, in fact turns out to be irrelevant to the story. It is not the first name, but the family name that Bunin chooses for the psychological portrayal of the hero; the surname Voronov turns out to be poetologically significant and semantically (symbolically) accentuated in the narrative. The analysis reveals intertextual connections and allusions that support the semantic context of Bunin’s story, and establishes significant references to the works of L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, M. Gorky. It is demonstrated that Bunin's position is closest to that of Chekhov and decisively antithetical to that of Gorky, with his idea of the «proud man. The article touches upon the issue of two versions of the story «Poor Is the Devil» / «Birds of Heaven». The authors propose an interpretation of both the titles.

Studying J. A. Brodsky's work is among the most acute concerns for contemporary literary criticism. Within the framework of this article the author resort to methods of complex philological text analysis, as well as intertextual analysis and determine the peculiarities of Brodsky's poetics and problem of his early work. The material for the analysis is an early poem «A Speech about spilled milk» (1967) which has not been studied thoroughly enough, and which will be examined in the context of the author's attempt at a specific synthesis of cultural traditions that are seemingly heterogeneous – classical, represented by references to Lucius Anna Seneca, and soviet, expressed in marxist ideology. Other pretexts actualized by Brodsky, such as the works by F. M. Dostoevsky and I. A. Krylov, are also included in the analysis. The analysis proves that Brodsky's poem «A Speech about spilled milk» is a complex stylistic and semantic unity. The writer's actualization of intertextual writing techniques does not turn the work into an incoherent game of various cultural codes; on the contrary, in the writer's idea all the pretexts acquire consistency, and their interaction with each other helps deepen the semantic content of «A Speech about spilled milk». Brodsky's reflections on the soviet era turn into reflections on the contemporary society in general. The poet sees the main problem of the latter as a tendency toward depersonalization and ochlocracy, toward the power of the crowd. The poet does not take revenge on everything Soviet in the poem, but tries to examine the reasons for the destructive nature of soviet ideology. The main one, according to Brodsky, is the distrust of the individual, of the individual's contemplative power rather than that of the community, the mass.

During a period of socio-cultural and political transformation, society often turns to traditional spiritual sources, understanding their importance in the process of forming life guidelines for the younger generation. The article emphasizes the relevance of addressing the problem of interaction between Christianity, Orthodoxy, and literature in contemporary literary criticism. The psalm paraphrases linked European Christian poetry with the divinely inspired Old Testament text, filled with true faith and creativity of the author. For the Russians, the Psalter, with its poetry and reli-gious expressiveness revealing all aspects of the Orthodox soul in its attitude to God and to life, has traditionally been a companion both in joy and in sorrow, hence the continuous creative dialogue between Russian poets and the Psalter. The liberal treatment of the sacred original arose in the Renaissance period, was admired later in the Baroque and Clas-sical aesthetics, and provided an opportunity for a new aesthetic experience and perception of David's poems. The au-thor of this article seeks to determine the place and role of the paraphraser in the subject-object organization of psalm paraphrases from the perspective of Orthodox Christian culture and to understand the dynamics of interaction between the personal and the super-personal. An individual reflection of the inner spiritual world at critical moments in a person's life is particularly evident in confessional and deeply psychological literary paraphrases of the biblical Book of Psalms, the Psalter. The comparative analysis of psalm interpretations by a number of poets of the 18th – early 19th centuries shows that the subject motivated poetic nature of the genre of psalm poetic paraphrases not only possesses the specific characteristics described in the article, but also embodies the principles of universal morality, appeals to justice and social equality. The possibility of using literary interpretations of the Book of Psalms in developing the moral and ethical sphere and spiritual activity of the individual is becoming evident today.

The article describes the possibilities of syntactic phraseological units based on the model « Хоть + Vimper!» to realize the meaning of disapproval and to act as a means of expressing verbal aggression. The material for the study is the data from the National corpus of the russian language, modern russian literary texts and the mass media. The relevance of the study is due to the productivity of syntactic phraseological units in modern Russian, to the importance of multidimensional description of syntactic phraseological units of the model under consideration to determine its status in modern russian. The significance is also caused by the expediency of analyzing the possibility to implement the meaning of disapproval and the ability to express verbal aggression at the syntactic level. The article presents the materials for the complex analysis of syntactic phrases with the conjunction «хоть». The study shows that a syntactic phraseological unit of the type «Хоть + Vimper!» is capable of realizing the whole range of meanings, disapproval being the dominant one among them. The authors describe subjective-modal meanings of disapproval and irony of syntactic phraseological expressions with the conjunction хоть as indicators of verbal aggression. The article focuses on the structural and semantic features of syntactic phenomena, on the way the constant component is expressed and on the role of the lexical content of the variable component in realizing the verbal aggression. The authors prove that the meaning of syntactic phraseological units is determined by the utterance syntactic structureand also depends on the context. It is shown that syntactic phraseological units are formed in the same way as lexical phraseological units. To support the ability of syntactic phraseology to express verbal aggression the authors give certain argumentsshowing that verbal aggression accompanies basic meanings, and in some cases it can be established only by analyzing the context. Verbal aggression in syntactic phraseological units of the type «Хоть + Vimper!» is expressed by lexemes with reduced stylistic coloring and a fixed order of the components.

Despite the fact that quite a lot of research has been devoted to semantic evolution of prepositions, the problem is still relevant. This article presents a cross-cutting synchronic and diachronic statistical description of the dynamic development of prepositions вокруг, около and близ with an initial spatial meaning. The study is conducted on the material of the old russian and main corpora of the Russian national corpus using statistical methods (criteria). The article aims to describe the change in the ratio of spatial and non-spatial meanings of adverbial prepositions во-круг, около and близ. To achieve it, the author first describes the semantic structure of the three prepositions and then discusses the prob-lems of compiling a balanced corpus sampling and applying a statistical apparatus for obtaining data on spatial and non-spatial uses of prepositions that can be considered statistically reliable. The normal distribution of the sample data is estimated by using Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk test. Conclusions: the relative number of spatial uses is declining, the number of non-spatial uses is growing, and in the texts of the second half of the 20th century the numbers are compared. The semantic evolution of the prepositions вокруг and около confirms the statistical hypothesis of a gradual quantitative increase in metaphorical usage. Semantic evolution of the adverbial preposition близ illustrates that the initial large number of meanings does not prove that these meanings become usual in the course of language evolution. The loss of some non-spatial meanings while others survive and appear can be explained by a number of factors:the actualization of some styles and the peripheral position of others, author's individual preferences, competition among prepositions.

The article is devoted to the author of the «Russian grammar for germans» (German: Russische Sprachlehre für Deutsche) J. A. Heym (1759 – 10/28/1821). The relevance of the work is determined by the constant interest that all linguists show in the history of their science. Filling in the lacunae in the life, activity, works, and place of little-known linguists in the scientific paradigm of their time is a very important task. From the standpoint of narrative linguistic history, the paper analyzes the peculiarities of the life, creative activity and scientific heritage of J. A. Heym, a graduate of Göttingen and Helmstedt universities, a teacher, and later dean of the faculty of philology and rector of the Imperial moscow university. Born and educated in Germany, he built a career in the Russian empire – from a tutor in a landowner's estate to a university rector. Being a professor of world history, statistics and geography and having published a significant number of researches on these sciences, he also left a noticeable mark in the history of Russian linguistics. He wrote numerous dictionaries, «Grammar of the russian language for germans», readers in russian and german, manuals on the german language. «Grammar of the russian language for germans» plays a very special role in the history of russian linguistics: its author wrotea grammar of theRussian empire majority language for german students which later was used by other authors, including N. I. Grech. He wrote it after M. V. Lomonosov and practically at the same time as J. M. Rodde, P. I. Sokolovand the St. Petersburg academy, partly relying on the works of these authors.

The article studies the semantics of reflexives at the intersection of two areas of modern linguistics: the theory of everyday linguistics and linguistic axiology. The research has resulted in constructing an axiological taxonomy of reflexives. The author shows that reflexives are divided into groups, depending on certain formal criteria. Reflexives with evaluation semantics include two semantic classes of metalanguage comments: general evaluation and private evaluation reflexives. The semantic standard of the former is implemented within the general assessment scale «good / bad». The latter are characterized by semantic diversity, which fits into the following taxonomic framework: 1) sensory-evaluative reflexives; 2) psychological-evaluative reflexives; 3) pragma-evaluative reflexives. Two main ways of explicating metalanguage evaluation were also described. The first way is to explain the evaluation by pointing out characteristics of the external form of the signs. The second method of explicating evaluative semantics is the verbalization of semantic associations based on the features of the internal form of words. It has also been proved that reflexives with evaluation semantics include two proper semantic classes of metalanguage comments: general evaluation and private evaluation reflexives.

The present article considers different means of linguistic manifestation of gender in contemporary German Internet media with a view to tracing the origin and development of ambisemy meanings. The undertaken analysis relies on a corpus of german internet texts of various genres intended for different target audiences. The analysis is done with a special emphasis on the immediate context which underlies meaning augmentation in general and provides conditions for neutral words to acquire evaluative meanings, in particular. In german internet communication meaning augmentation is triggered by analogy, word composition and generalization. The analysis has shown that neutral lexical items, as well as gender marked ones, can acquire additional evaluative meanings. Employing a gender marked word in context leads to a) emergence of gender asymmetry; b) gender symmetry; c) gender neutralization. All in all, it is the context that converts nomination into interpretation, thus creating ambisemia. Connotation plays a key role in the process of augmenting meanings and the emergence of ambisemy. The latter is actualized as a result ofcolliding the knowledge component, represented in the german language by a certain set of lexical units and fixed by the norms and rules of the german language in codified sources, with individual and generalized ideas about the object of reality among representatives of german linguistic culture. The gender factor, immersed in the context, acts as a stimulus that generates a chain of associations and a corresponding reaction in the mass recipient.