Linguopoetics in Works of Leo Tolstoy from the Scientific Perspective in the Early 21st Century

The findings of the study of linguopoetics in Leo Tolstoy’s works are considered from the perspective of three aspects of the fundamental scientific objective: 1) introduction to the philological rotation of understudied texts; 2) review of already studied texts from new perspectives; 3) interpretation of texts with the regard to the modern reader. As a scientific example of the first aspect, the paper refers to the analysis of “Notes on Ill Traits of Russian Soldiers and Officers”. “Notes on…” demonstrate the main trends of lexical shifts typical for the Russian literary language of the mid-19th century. The author refers to an increase in the number of irrelevant vocabularies in the literary language, the fact that many lexical elements have gained the value of moral and ethical categories, the use of scientific terms in the literary language, the introduction of social and political connotations to words, the actualisation of the meaning by making the word more journalistic and rhetorical in the text. As for the second aspect, the paper analyses the lexical and stylistic signature features of Tolstoy’s original works. The author studies Tolstoy’s innovations of lexical, stylistic and structural nature. Such as, there are the examples of occasional word creation: extension of semantics of lexical elements and attribution of new stylistic functions and values, as well as fixing word creation, when the text fixes yet not fully rooted lexical device and attributes it with novel features. The author also reviews how Tolstoy builds the quoted speech of his cha­racters, as well as classifies the types of dialogues used by Tolstoy (psychological, ideological and etiquettical). Regarding the third aspect, the paper focuses on the matter of linguopoetics. It includes the textual efforts to prepare Leo Tolstoy’s works to be published with a number of comments. Lexi­cal comments within the text, outside the text and the independent ones follow an experimental study of gaps in a reader’s perception.