False morality in the collections of aphorisms

The main subject of this article is characteristic features of morality and false morality representation in the modern Russian collections of aphorisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The problem is to conduct cognitive and communicative analysis of such aphorisms. Relevance of our research is conditioned by the fact that in these collections under the heading “morality” one can come across the aphorisms having explicit or implicit opposite meaning, especially taking into account the fact that the problem hasn’t been identified by the linguists, so the linguistic analysis hasn’t been carried out so far. The purpose of this article is identification of such phenomena and enabling the effective study of them, which has not only theoretical but also practical importance. The authors express major concern about the fact that publishing of some recent collections of aphorisms have stopped including headings devoted to morality into them. Due to this exclusion, first of all, a modern reader has considerable difficulties understanding whether morality is necessary in general, whether it has to be a part of his consciousness and shape him as a person, including his social and communicative skills; secondly, in attempt to create proper comprehension of morality, its criteria, properties, and not to confuse it with the false understanding of morality or even immorality in the behavior and speech communication that can happen in the current situation quite easily.The result of the research is the conclusion that morality as the measure of the good and evil mustn’t have dual or indistinct interpretation, must be presented in collections of aphorisms and, as a result, in minds of readers as a synonym of the concept “conscience not causing harm”.