Vol 25, No 1 (2025)

The article examines the specific features of how the genre of autobiographical story functions in dialect and literary-colloquial speech. The study is conducted on the material of Saratov Dialectological Corpus and dictaphone recordings of native speakers of the literary language of the corresponding age group. The characteristics of the autobiographical story common to dialect and literary-colloquial discourse were determined, and the factors influencing the functioning of this genre were identified – the level of communicative competence, correlation with the genre of autobiography in business communication, interviewer’s questions structuring the story. In conversations with native speakers of the literary language, a successful implementation of the communicative task was observed – to build an autobiographical story in chronological order. In the autobiographical stories of dialect speakers, the chronological principle was often violated, the narration was chaotic: a story about childhood or youth was suddenly interrupted by memories of adulthood, an assessment of the current situation, and again returned to the past. A chronologically and event-consistent narrative in dialect discourse is most often determined by certain features of the informant’s linguistic personality, for example, the experience of publicly telling about one’s life. A typical autobiographical narrative of a dialect speaker is characterized by subjectivity (in accordance with the principle of egocentricity of dialect narration) and fragmentation, reflecting not all biographical stages, but the most important biographical points for the informant. In the text corpus, one can trace the repeated reproduction of such key moments with minor variations in the records of one informant of different years. The retrospective nature of the autobiographical story often contributes to the actualization of the strategy of self-presentation and self-identification. It was revealed that the strategy of self-presentation of speakers of the two speech cultures has a similar nature; in self-identification, the professional principle is the leading one for speakers of the literary language, and the local and generic ones – for dialect speakers. Thus, the variability of the genre of the autobiographical story is determined by both idiolectic, personal factors, and functioning in different types of discourse – literary-colloquial and dialect ones.

The study deals with the synchronous-diachronic analysis of the thematic group “Supernatural beings in religious cultures”, formed on the basis of Semantic dictionary edited by N. Y. Shvedova and including lexical units denoting the names of God and the Mother of God; angels and saints; persons with magical abilities performing occult actions; evil forces hostile to man; animal characters in religious cultures. The work examines the structure of the group, the vocabulary representation of the lexemes of the group, as well as the functioning of its units in texts of various periods of the history of the Russian language in different time periods from the 11th century to the present. Russian historical dictionaries, etymological dictionaries, modern explanatory dictionaries of Russian, as well as texts of the Russian National Corpus (Old East Slavic, Church Slavonic, Main Corpus) served as the material for the study. In the course of the research the group was analyzed within the allocated time intervals, and then the results of the synchronous statistics for each of them were compared. Based on the data obtained during the analysis, conclusions were drawn about the state of the thematic group at different stages of the historical development of the Russian language: the first lexicographic records of units at specified time intervals were identified; lexemes that underwent semantic changes over time were notedlexical units that make up the core of the group, as well as its near-nuclear zone and periphery were singled out. The etymological analysis made it possible to establish ways of forming new words of the thematic group under consideration, as well as to determine the nature of borrowings.

The premiere of the world-famous Russian ballet “The Sleeping Beauty”, composed by P. I. Tchaikovsky, I. A. Vsevolozhsky and M. Petipa, took place on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre on January 3, 1890, and became a significant event in the cultural life of Petersburg. Since then, the ballet has been performed on stages around the world, undergoing various revisions and updates, but the original author’s libretto has sometimes been neglected and replaced with adaptations and reinterpretations of the story during subsequent productions. In this article, we will focus on the text of the libretto that was published immediately before the premiere of the play. According to its authors, the content of the libretto is “based on Perrault’s fairy tales”. We will analyze how the key literary basis of this fairy tale – the famous French tale by Charles Perrault “Sleeping Beauty” (“La Belle au bois dormant”, 1697) – is transformed in the ballet narrative. The study of various functional, semantic, and stylistic aspects of the libretto’s narrative, as well as a comparative analysis of similarities and differences between the fairy tale and the libretto, allows us to identify several features associated with the transformation of the folklore and mythological story of “Sleeping Beauty” (Aarne-Thompson classification No. 410) from literature into the art of ballet. It also helps us answer the question of whether the text of a libretto is simply a “translation” from literature into synthetic art, or whether it is a qualitatively different work that endows the original tale with new features and meanings.

Analyzed in the study is the symbolic meaning of the images of a cicada/grasshopper in the prose and poetry by Boris Poplavsky in the context of classical antiquity and of the Silver Age art. These insects are often understood as one image, which is the poet’s homage to the antique tradition; the image of a cicada/grasshopper is liminal, implying mediation between the two worlds and connection between the past and the present, which allows one to experience the condition of harmonic unity with the Universe and the feeling of natural primeval being. Both the cicada and the grasshopper are related to music, but the cicada is to a greater extent an Apollonian and sacral creature, a votary of the muses, whose singing is heard against the background of a bucolic summer landscape. Whereas the image of the cicada is closer to the pole of the Apollonian, the image of the grasshopper, in the case when they diff er, tends to the pole of the Dionysian, the exuberant creative element and the energy of inspiration. The grasshopper turns into a fantastic chimeric creature, the visible personification of other living (a grasshopper among gnomes and elves, the horse-automobile-grasshopper and the grasshopper-train associations). A special case is the symbolization of sounds produced by a cicada and a grasshopper as a force of its own: this chirr/rattle represents certain natural buzz, the thundering proto music of inspiration over which the poet has no power. While the holistic image of these insects in the spirit of antiquity was the sign of experiencing the integrity of being and their chirr was enchanting, here the exponentially intensified startling sounds contribute to the description of the Poet’s “muse” as having the appalling features of a giant insect, and his poetic oeuvre becomes not only the blessing but also a curse, in which B. Poplavsky shows his affinity to A. Blok.

The Dungans are descendants of Hui immigrants from northwestern China during the late Qing Dynasty. Their number has grown to 100,000 people, they are located on the territory of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. In Russia they were called “Dungans”. After penetrating Central Asia, they adopted the local culture and the culture of the home country – Russia. Dungan satirical prose was also strongly influenced by the Russian tradition and absorbed certain themes and artistic techniques (poetics) of Russian satirical prose. The influence of the theme of Russian satirical prose on the theme of Dungan satirical prose is reflected in two aspects: political satire and social satire. The fi rst was dominated by the criticism of the authoritarian system and bureaucracy, the second by denunciation of social and moral vices. The political satire plays an important role in the expression of a huge social confl ict and can use it to combat social evil. Social satire reveals social vices. Compared to political satirical prose, social satire pays more attention to thoughts about human nature and culture. As for the artistic techniques of Dungan satirical prose under the influence of Russian satirical prose, three main techniques can be distinguished: self-exposure of the hero, contrast and “uncultured” speech of the hero. The flourishing of Dungan satirical prose is associated not only with the influence of the Russian literary tradition, but also with the national cultural identity of Dungan writers. The influence of traditional culture is reflected in three aspects: the tradition of Russian satirical prose contributes to the development of Dungan satirical prose; the Thaw in the USSR in the 1950s created the ground for Dungan satirical prose; the internal motivation for the thriving of Dungan satirical prose is the cultural consciousness of the Dungan writers.