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Русская классика XIX века и проблема лингвистического комментария (на примере "Героя нашего времени" Лермонтова")
The paper discusses the language of the world-famous texts from Russian 19th century. These classic texts are considered from the perspective of a linguist. The source material is “Fatalist”, the last novel of “Hero of our time” by Mikhail Lermontov. However, this text is considered in a broader context of data provided by Russian National Corpus: throughout the whole period of the development of Russian literary language and not limited to one writer. It is shown that the Russian language of the early 19th century, usually regarded as comprehensible and rather “modern”, became so different from contemporary Russian that in many cases linguistic commentaries are required. It is not merely a matter of lost realities of the past but of changes within the language — the word formation, syntax, lexicon and constructions. It is the language shifts that are gradually alienating the 19th century literature from the new generations of Russian readers. In the present paper it is illustrated with four fragments of the “Fatalist” that might not be lucid enough for the speakers of 21th century Russian and are therefore likely to lead to misinterpretation.