Professor Lidiya V. Savelyeva: strokes to the portrait of a scholar (celebrating her 85th anniversary)

The article summarizes for the first time the most important scholarly results of a famous historian of the Russian language and thereby revives one of the important aspects of Russian linguistics associated with periodic reviews of special literature and analyses of selected research works designed to stimulate scholarly development (the works of N. K. Grunsky, S. K. Bulich, V. V. Vinogradov, etc.). The systematization of specific personal scholarly results is dwelled upon a broad background of domestic and European science, thereby convincingly revealing the researcher’s personal contribution to Russian and Slavic studies. This primarily determines the relevance of the topic under consideration. The original scholarly achievements of the researcher include her deep understanding of the essence of ancient paratactic combinations; the first-of-its-kind detailed and versatile description of such combinations based on the material of the Old Russian language, formulation of patterns in their history and transformation into hypotactic constructions; the first-of-its-kind fundamental description of the processes of formation of mononegative and polynegative constructions in the Russian syntax based on the material of original and translated ancient Russian written monuments through a chronological comparison of the corresponding linguistic data with ancient Greek texts; description of the processes of development of negative impersonal sentences in the Russian syntax; description of the formation of words expressing negation in northern Russian dialects and in the Russian vocabulary as a whole; deciphering of the Slavic alphabet symbolic names as a text and its comprehensive study; revealing the role of the Byzantine-Old Russian cultural communication in the process of creating the ancient Eastern Slavic Orthodox culture; formulating for the first time the meaning and tasks of the language ecology as a new academic discipline and the exemplary solution of these tasks using the extensive material of the modern Russian language. The article also traces the spheres of the scholar’s work in the field of general philology, including the analysis of artistic and poetic speech. Some strokes to the personal portrait of the scholar are also given, indicating her high ethical, moral, socio-cultural, pedagogical, civic and other requirements to herself. It is clearly established that the thoroughness of her scholarly research and the convincing results obtained in the study of the history of the Russian language and Russian verbal and literary culture rightly give Professor Lidiya V. Savelyeva a special place among the Russian scholars of the Russian language and in the Slavic studies in general.