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.

The purpose of this article is to reveal the linguistic and stylistic features of E. Krotky’s humorous idiostyle in the aphorism genre. That includes different types of the lexical dominants, which are the organizing centers of the punning aphorisms: polysemic, homonymic, paronymic, pseudo-antonymous, and pseudo-synonymous. This paper studies various ways of the authorial punning transformation of phraseological units and precedent statements. Having established the paradigmatic relations between the lexical units, the author of this article uses the classification and statistical methods and the method of transformation as the means of systematizing the linguistic material.

The aim of the research was to actualize the interdisciplinary connections of the Russian native language, Russian native literature and Russian native history studies. The article discusses various types of obsolete words, as well as provides recommendations to a literature teacher, in which areas the study of obsolete vocabulary can be organized in school. The authors use the methods of educational and scientific literature analysis. On the basis of practical experience, techniques of working on the linguistic archaic during lessons are proposed. These techniques take interdisciplinary links of the Russian language and Russian literature subjects into account. The article concludes that classroom work on obsolete words or expressions and the stylistic functions performed by them should be carried out gradually, i.e., by taking a traditional step-by-step and from-simple-to-complex approach.

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The article aims to identify the linguistic means (first of all those which can be considered as marking the writer’s individual style) employed in N. A. Teffi’s short stories to convey ironic comicality. The research was performed with the use of the descriptive, linguostylistic, semantic methods, componential analysis, and elements of statistical analysis. As a result, the undertaken study made it possible to identify a wide range of linguistic units belonging to different linguistic levels. The combination of these units and various stylistic devices which were revealed while analysing the expressive speech structure of humorous texts results in the maximal humorous effect. The paper concludes that subtle irony viewed as the dominant expressive colouring of the text in humorous stories by N. Teffi and the device that marks her individual style is created with the help of various linguistic means. These means can be roughly divided into two groups: the basic humour-building and background ones. The latter group facilitates a more obvious manifestation of ironic comicality. The first group includes pun and non-pun means of conveying ironic expressivity. As for non-pun linguistic means, elements of the stylistics of the absurd, paradox, oxymoron, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, chiasmus, periphrasis, allusion, ellipsis, parallelism, simile, refrain, radical transformation of phraseological units are characteristic of Teffi’s individual style. With regard to the means of expressing irony build on pun, Teffi employs units of language and speech with identical and similar expression planes. Polysemy, usual and occasional homonymy in combination with such lexical and lexical-phonetic means of explication of phonetized puns as usual and occasional paronomasia and – more rarely – homophony form the lexical basis of semanticised puns. The author often uses amphibology and the literalization of phraseological units to produce ironic punning effect. The second group includes auxiliary means of creating ironic effect: imitation of children’s speech, the technique of speech self-disclosure, citation, macaronic language, spoken colloquial phraseology, colloquialisms and obsolescent grammatical orthoepic variants, charactonyms and parodic surnames.