Lexico-stylistic features of first Russian popular scientific article on opera (1738)

The history of the Russian opera dates back to the January of 1736. The first attempt to comprehend opera’s evolution was made in Russia by Jacob Staehlin in 1738 on pages of one popular scientific magazine “Notes to the St.-Petersburg Bulletin”. In the article, available to the Russian reader of average education and written by Staehlin, the main stages of the opera evolution in Italy and Europe were described. It also said when the first Russian opera was staged. The main lexico-stylistic features of the culturally focused Staehlin's text are saturation of the article with the “opera toponymy” (in a broad and narrow sense), references to multiple names of the most outstanding opera figures and the best opera compositions, plentiful use of epithets facilitative in characterization of multiple aspects of the opera art. The text contains a significant amount of theatrical terminology, which is partly supplied with the intra text interpretations for easier understanding. The in depth study of theatrical lexicon used by Stehlin, in some cases, allows specification of the time of the entry of such words into the Russian literary language and refraction definition of some semantic words in a theatrical way. Besides, it is possible to ascertain that such active entry of theatrical terminology into the Russian literary language and subsequent familiarity with this terminology by the wide circles of the Russian society, which began during Anna Ioannovna's ruling, could have happened on pages of the “Notes”.