Русская классика XIX века и проблема лингвистического комментария (на примере Героя нашего времени Лермонтова)

This article discusses the language of world-famous nineteenth-century Russian texts from the perspective of a linguist. The main source material is ‘Fatalist’, the final part of the novel A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. ‘Fatalist’ is analyzed in a broader context of data provided by the Russian National Corpus, which spans the whole period of the development of Russian literary language and is not limited to one writer. It is shown that the Russian language of the early nineteenth century, usually regarded as comprehensible and rather “modern”, has become so distant from contemporary Russian that in many cases linguistic commentaries are required. The article illustrates this issue with four fragments of ‘Fatalist’ that might not be lucid enough for speakers of twenty-first-century Russian and are therefore likely to be misinterpreted. It is not merely a matter of lost realities of the past, but of fundamental changes within the language – word formation, syntax, lexicon, and constructions. These linguistic shifts are gradually alienating nineteenth-century literature from new generations of readers.