On the interpretation of book speech constructions in the notes of sailor Vereshchagin

The article examines the use of book speech constructions in the Notes of Sailor Vereshchagin, a handwritten text of the 19th century, which was found in one of the handwritten collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic and introduced into scientific circulation by M. V. Melikhov. The notes of a hardly literate peasant-sailor, which have an objective folk-colloquial basis, are interesting in terms of book speech structures used in them. From a sample text (or several texts), the author borrowed words and constructions typical of book texts and appropriate to the genre chosen by him, including words and structures characteristic of business speech. In many cases, the reproduced words and combinations were not clear for the author, so he transformed them. The functional purpose of such constructions was most likely dictated by the author’s desire to write the text according to certain rules corresponding to the chosen genre and presented in the sample text (texts) known to him. The analysis of book elements in the sailor’s notes reveals the functioning of certain lexemes in a particular period in the history of the Russian language, to trace their dynamics. Research into the linguistic features of works of folk literature, to which the sailor’s notes belong, is certainly significant since such works reflect the Russian speech of a certain period. The study of the Notes makes it possible to trace the history of individual words and the functioning of speech elements of different styles, and contributes to the reconstruction of a true portrait of both the time and the heroes of that time.