The relevance of this study is determined by the linguists' interest in the language used by the 19th-century Russian poet A. Tolstoy. The semantic and stylistic aspects of the poet's key lexical units and their functioning within his lyrical narrative have not been yet made the subject of a dedicated study. Comparative analysis is the leading method of this study. The original semantics of the lexical unit love occurring throughout the poet's lyrics is being identified against the usual meanings recorded in modern Russian language definition dictionaries and in definition dictionaries reflecting the lexical composition of the Russian language as spoken in the second half of the 19th century. The study identified all the meanings of the word love in A. Tolstoy's lyrics, taking into consideration their possible juxtapositions, semantic expansions, and stylistic gradations. It has been determined that in terms of this study, the word love has a profound, divine and philosophical content attributable to the author's fascination with cosmism that dominated his artistic mindset. The expressive semantic energy contained within the word love creates a push for the transformation of meanings and revelation of additional semantic nuances not only of the adjacent but also of distant words in the context of a poem. The study resulted in a new interpretation of the usage of the lexical unit love in the poet's lyrical narrative used for the relevant entry in the soon-to-be-published A. Tolstoy's Dictionary of Poetic Terms. This material can be used by the researchers of A. Tolstoy's language, philologists, and teachers.