Poetry in terms of verbs of motion: experience of thesaurus analysis

The article is an experiment of diachronic analysis of the 18th century Russian poetry in terms of one of its key verbs - the verb of rapid movement “to ride”. Opposition “riding on horseback / without a horse” is chosen as the main semantic axis of the study. Historical and semantic analysis of the texts by V. Trediakovsky, A. Cantemir, A. Sumarokov, G. Derzhavin, I. Dmitriev, D. Khvostov, A. Pushkin even on the basis of this single verb provided many valuable poetological observations and once again proved the applicability of the thesaurus approach. A close diachronic analysis of 18 - 21th centuries Russian poetry seems to be very promising in terms of verbs of motion.